The Gathering

by Dan Poblocki

  The girl in the cat mask followed Poppy’s gaze down to the pile of dolls for a moment before whipping her head back toward Poppy.

  “I’m sorry,” said Poppy, horrified that some of her revulsion might have shown on her face. She knew better than most what strange things could become treasures. “I—”

  But then the girl stood and Poppy retreated into silence. The girl bent down, gathered up her dolls, then stepped toward Poppy, her eyeholes black and empty. “You came,” said the girl, her muffled voice the perfect combination of Gretel and the witch. “You actually came.”

  “Wait! Are you the one who invited me?” Poppy asked, her voice barely a whisper, her heart pounding.

  The girl emitted a low laugh that went on for a long time. Then, suddenly, she shrieked. The noise was so unexpected that it startled Poppy into a strangled scream too. The girl kicked the high-backed chair away with startling force. It fell to the floor with a hard whack. Then she stepped toward Poppy again.

  Poppy backed around the corner. She was enveloped by a strong smell of smoke, and for a moment she imagined that it had followed her out of the girl’s story, as if heat from the witch’s oven had become magically real. But then hot air breezed against her back. A moment later, bright, flickering flame burst to light behind her.

  Poppy screamed in earnest now. The office was ablaze.

  ALL OF THE desks and cabinets, the folders and files that Poppy had just searched, erupted into flame. The fire climbed the walls, turning the wallpaper black and the paintings crisp and crackling. In the furious heat, the black cloth that had covered the tallest frame rose up in a hot gust and then slid to the floor, where the fire devoured it, revealing an enormous mirror. Poppy briefly thought of the Girl right before the mirror’s glass fractured with a crack as loud as a gunshot, creating a spiderweb of breaks that stretched across its tarnished surface.

  For a moment, Poppy knew she had to be imagining everything. There is no fire, she thought. There is no cat girl. This is all in your head. You really are crazy. They’re going to lock you in a dark room forever and ever. No friends. No family. No mirrors or books. Just you and your stupid, crazy brain.

  Then something grabbed hold of her hair and yanked. Poppy fell backward with a scream and landed on the floor. The cat-faced girl stared down at her. Above the crackling of the flames, it sounded as if she was laughing.

  This was real.

  Poppy scrambled away and leapt to her feet.

  The blaze was closing in on the two of them. “What are you DOING?!” Poppy yelled at the cat-faced girl. Poppy ran across the room, leaping over small licks of flame. But when she yanked on the knob, the door wouldn’t budge.

  “NO!” she screamed. “Help!”

  Smoke obscured the room behind her, shrouding the cat-faced girl in swirling gray. Fire swelled into the room and the heat grew stronger.

  Poppy struggled to inhale, but the heat seared her throat and she choked. Out of nowhere, Ms. Tate blinked into her head, standing before the girls in the common area at Thursday’s Hope, instructing them on what to do in case of a fire. Get low to the ground to avoid the smoke. Poppy dropped to her knees, covering her mouth. Know your closest exits.

  Exits. Poppy forced herself to think.

  There was a window next to the broken mirror! The red velvet curtain was roaring with flames, but the glass was clear.

  Poppy grabbed the metal chair at the desk. It was hot to the touch, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. She raised it above her head and threw it as hard as she could at the window. A perfect shot. But to her horror, the chair simply bounced away.

  “Dylan!” she screamed, coughing, sweat running down her face and neck, drenching her T-shirt. “Marcus! Azumi! Help me!” The fire was so loud now, the blood pounding so hard in her eardrums, that even if any of them answered, she wouldn’t hear them.

  The smoke across the room seemed to part like a veil. A figure stepped into the flames—the girl in the cat mask. Poppy froze, unsure again if her eyes were playing tricks. The fire seemed to dance around the cat girl. The girl walked slowly forward, clutching her collection of monstrous dolls and staring at Poppy with malice.

  “You don’t scare me!” Poppy shouted. She hated that her voice sounded so trembling and weak.

  The girl tilted her head as if to ask, Don’t I? She glided slowly through the growing flames toward the spot where Poppy crouched.

  You came. You actually came.

  The wallpaper beneath the sketch of the masked five was bubbling. Smoke and steam billowed out from the seams, and Poppy gagged at the fumes. The fire was inside the wall now. Soon, it would rush to the upper and lower floors. Poppy knew the entire structure could collapse.

  Know your closest exits.

  A fierce anger filled her, the same anger that had made her search for her file in Ms. Tate’s office. If there’s no way out, make one.

  Poppy stared into the shattered mirror. Her reflection was a fractured, frightening mess, but it wasn’t her reflection she was looking for. “You were trying to warn me not to come here,” she yelled to the Girl, her Girl, Poppy’s voice barely audible over the roar of the fire. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen. But please, please, if you can hear me, help me!”

  The cat girl was now only a few steps away. She held out her dolls, as if to taunt Poppy with what was about to happen.

  If there’s no way out, make one.

  A slight flicker moved inside the broken mirror.

  The Girl! She’d come!

  The mirror fractured again. A horizontal line broke through the web pattern over Poppy’s reflection. Then two more cracks formed on either side of Poppy’s face. Turning around, Poppy saw the fissures cracking through the wall she was huddled against. The cracks in the mirror were duplicating themselves on the wall behind her.

  The girl in the cat mask howled as Poppy slammed her weight against the wall. When Poppy drew back and hit it with her shoulder again, the wall swung open like a gate.

  A moment later, Poppy had collapsed out into the hallway. Inside the burning room, the mirror exploded, shards of broken glass hurtling into the fire. The passage through the wall disappeared with a blink, and Poppy found herself staring at an unblemished hallway.

  Poppy leaned back, gasping for breath. She closed her eyes, then opened them and looked again. Nothing. And no burns on her, no hint of smoke.

  Craazzy Poppy.

  Slamming her palms against the wall behind her, Poppy shoved the taunting voices away. But that only left her with her own voice ringing in her head, and she didn’t know if she liked that any better.

  This is all a lie. The letter. The invitation. Great-Aunt Delphinia.

  Something had wanted Poppy to come to Larkspur, but it hadn’t been some long-lost family member. This place wasn’t going to be her home. No one here was going to accept her, love her, adopt her.

  She fought against the rising flood of tears, her eyes red and prickling. Poppy felt like one of the dolls that the girl in the cat mask had been telling a story to, the one that had been gutted, its stuffing removed. She struggled to stay on her feet and angrily wiped her face clean.

  Then Poppy heard the sound of footsteps racing toward her.

  POPPY FACED THE footsteps, swinging her satchel from her shoulder and holding it hard in her hands like a weapon—until she saw the face of the person rushing toward her. She was so relieved, she nearly dropped her bag.

  “Dylan!” she cried out.

  “Nope,” said the boy. “But close.” His eyes were wide, and his chest was heaving.

  “Dash? What are you doing up here?”

  “Where’s my brother?” Dash looked almost as scared as she felt.

  “We decided to split up.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the office door. “We need to find the others and then get out of here.”

  “You saw something too?”

  Nodding, Poppy fought tears.

  This is all a lie.

 
; “I was waiting in the foyer,” said Dash, “just like Dylan told me to. But I heard a noise. When I turned, I saw that kid in the rabbit mask watching me from the top of the stairs. He ran off, so I followed him up here—”

  “I don’t know what’s going on.” Poppy couldn’t hold back. “I was in an office. There was a fire. A girl in a cat mask attacked me. I thought she was going to kill me. I ran, but the door was locked. And the window wouldn’t break. But the wall … The fire went out, which makes no sense … And … And we have to go.” She shifted past him, waving for him to follow. “We have to find the others AND GO.”

  “Not that way,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” She heard her voice rising. “The stairs are just down the hall.”

  Dash turned his head to show her the nasty welt on his cheek. Poppy hissed in shock and sympathy. “The kid I followed attacked me too. I managed to pull off his mask.” Dash trembled and briefly closed his eyes. “There was black goo spilling out of his mouth and down his neck. He was soaked with it.” He swallowed. “I don’t want—I don’t think we should go back that way.”

  Poppy met his eyes gravely. “The stairs are back that way. I haven’t seen another way out.”

  Dash peered past her into the darkness stretching down the hallway behind her. “Fine. But if we come across another one of those kids wearing masks, I hope you know how to fight.”

  “I’m learning,” said Poppy, leading the way, relieved to finally put some distance between herself and that office.

  Moments later, not far down the hall, they came upon the rabbit mask lying on the floor, lit by sunlight from an open doorway.

  It wasn’t anything elaborate, just a thin sheet of plastic that had been pressed by a mold at a factory somewhere. But the eyes were wide and dark, their edges marked with deep laugh lines. In the pale light from the nearby doorway, they looked hollow, black. The mouth was stretched in a wide and grotesque smile, with a tiny slit cut in the plastic so its wearer could breathe. There were dried black flecks spattered around this small hole.

  “You sure you want to touch that?” Poppy asked as Dash reached for it.

  Dash glanced at her. “We can’t just leave it here. The others won’t believe my story.” Poppy understood what he’d meant: Dylan won’t believe my story. Dash turned the mask over. The bottom half was dripping with black goo.

  Poppy gasped and covered her mouth. “Ugh. Nasty!”

  “Never mind,” Dash said, and dropped it, wiping his hands on his shorts.

  Poppy noticed red markings on the inside of the mask, higher up, closer to the rabbit’s left ear. Block letters in red marker spelled out ALOYSIUS. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to,” Dash said. “I just want to get out of here.”

  They continued on toward the staircase. “Dylan?” Dash called out. His voice echoed back at him, but no one answered.

  As they went around the next corner, Poppy yelped. Just ahead, lying on the floor in a sunbeam, was the same rabbit mask, still looking up with its blank eyeholes. “What’s going on?” she asked. Craazzy Poppy. “Dash, you see that too, right?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dash slowly. He looked close to tears. “Dylan!” He called out again. He gathered himself together and quietly said, as if to himself, “It’s got to be one of Dylan’s tricks. He’s messing with us.”

  “After everything we’ve just seen, you think your brother is responsible for this?”

  “I don’t know what to think!” Dash yelled. “I don’t even know which direction to take.”

  “Let’s just keep going?” said Poppy, but her feet felt unsteady.

  They walked on for a few minutes—far longer than it should have taken to find the staircase—and suddenly they were back in the same spot. Panic gripped Poppy’s lungs, and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. Dash rushed up and stomped on the rabbit mask until the plastic was smashed flat.

  The hallway shuddered and groaned. Dash grabbed Poppy’s hands and brought her low to the floor, as if they were bracing for an earthquake.

  “It’s not happy you did that,” Poppy whispered.

  “What’s not happy?”

  Poppy didn’t want to say it out loud. “I don’t know … The house?”

  Inches away, the flattened rabbit mask popped back into shape.

  Poppy and Dash leapt to their feet and bolted around the corner and past the rabbit mask. There, they found a new hallway, one they hadn’t seen before. They ran and ran, looking for new doorways, new rooms, new details they hadn’t yet encountered—anything to get them out of this strange loop.

  Poppy yanked Dash to a halt. “You hear that?” she asked, her chest heaving.

  “Music!”

  “Someone’s playing a piano.”

  “Let’s follow it.”

  “But what if it’s—”

  “Just go!”

  Poppy and Dash raced around a bend, and the landing at the top of the stairs finally appeared. “Yes!” she shouted, feeling like she’d just won a marathon.

  Dash bolted past her, down the steps toward the foyer. “Hurry!” he shouted. Poppy didn’t need him to tell her twice.

  When the two of them finally made it to the bottom of the stairs, a voice called out from up above, “Dash! Wait!” Turning, they found Dylan standing on the landing, wide-eyed and unsteady. He looked like he was about to faint.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Poppy, shaking her head, confused. “I totally forgot Dylan was there too!”

  “Help me!” said Dash. Together, Poppy and Dash raced back up the stairs toward his brother.

  MARCUS WAS LOST in an ocean of sound. The piano melody swelled as he danced his fingers across the keys and pressed his feet against the pedals. Marcus could hear the Musician’s tune a millisecond before he brought it to life. It felt as if they were playing a duet. The ballroom where he sat was a hazy memory. His head was filled with pictures of home, of kind friends and family, of the scent of Duke’s wet fur after a walk in the rain, of the sound of the calliope during the county fairs on Labor Day weekends, of his mother and his siblings sitting in the darkness of the auditoriums’ first rows—memories that were now so entangled with the Musician’s tunes that Marcus couldn’t distinguish one sense from the other.

  That serenity was shattered when a group burst through the ballroom doorway, shouting for his attention. Marcus lifted his hands from the keys and opened his eyes, feeling as if he’d been bumped out of a dream.

  Poppy and Dash were struggling to carry Dylan between them. His arms were stretched between their shoulders, his feet practically dragging.

  Marcus stood up, shocked, pushing the bench back with a squeal that mixed with the reverberation left over from his shattered melody. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “We don’t know!” said Dash, his eyes huge with worry. “He practically fainted on the stairs again. This is all my fault!”

  Dylan fell to his knees, holding his head. As the last of the echo seeped into the woodwork and faded away, he finally looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said, with no trace of his former cockiness. “I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “I told you to come find me if you felt strange!” Dash said, crouching beside him.

  Dylan winced. “I didn’t feel strange until I found you, so please … stop shouting at me.”

  “Where were you guys?” Marcus asked.

  “Upstairs,” said Poppy. “The music led us down to you.”

  “There are other people here,” said Dylan. “Kids wearing masks. I think they’re messing with us. Playing tricks.” He glanced at Dash.

  “You saw another one too?” asked Dash. Dylan nodded, swallowing hard, as if he were fighting nausea. Dash’s mouth flattened. “The rabbit-faced boy we saw earlier attacked me. And Poppy said a cat girl came after her. We need to get out of here.”

  Poppy jumped in, “Upstairs, I found an old office filled with files. I think t
his building was an orphanage once. All the paperwork, for decades, was signed by its director. He has the same last name as me—Caldwell!”

  “One more reason to just run,” said Dash, edging toward the row of windows on the other side of the room. “Come on!”

  “That is weird,” said Marcus, crossing his arms. Kind of unbelievably weird. He wished they would leave him alone so he could sit down again at the piano and play. He wanted that warm feeling back, the pleasant memories, the safety of it all. “Maybe everyone should just calm down and talk this out. It sounds very confusing.”

  “But that wasn’t even the weirdest part!” said Dash. “There was a fire, and Poppy got locked in the room, and then—”

  “Wait,” said Dylan. “There’s a fire upstairs?”

  “Not anymore,” said Poppy. “It went out.”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow.

  “And then,” Dash went on, “when we were trying to find our way back to the foyer, the hallways kept moving.”

  “The hallways—” Marcus crossed his arms. “I’m sorry. That’s not possible.”

  Dash looked at Poppy. “Am I lying?”

  Poppy shook her head, blushing. She followed Dash to the line of windows.

  “Do you think all of this could be part of the horror movie?” Dylan asked. His voice was low and strained.

  “No!” said Dash. “And you don’t either! There’s something seriously wrong with this place.” Dash made a beeline toward the French doors. “I am seriously creeped out. It’s time to leave. I don’t care what we all came here for.”

  “Agreed.” Poppy exhaled on a shaky breath. “There’s nothing here for any of us. My great-aunt. Marcus’s school. The film shoot. It’s all just … ” She hesitated, glancing around the ballroom. “Where is Azumi?”

  Marcus looked behind him. “She was just here. Wasn’t she?”

  “Not when we came in,” Dash said. “When did you last see her?”

  “I’m not sure.” Marcus walked to the doorway and peered into the hall, glancing in both directions. “I was caught up playing the piano. I thought she was listening to me.”