The Gathering

by Dan Poblocki

  Then, as suddenly as the pounding started, it stopped—the scratching too. The hallway was filled with a quiet that seemed to ring in their eardrums like a long and steady hum. No one dared to breathe. Which was strange because, all of a sudden, the echo of a stifled inhalation interrupted the silence like a knife.

  “Marcus,” Dylan whispered, his eyes round with terror. “Someone is standing behind you.”

  EVERYONE TURNED TO LOOK.

  Down the wide hallway, several yards past the door with the nails, a boy was staring back at them. Or at least he appeared to be staring—it was difficult to tell because of his mask. This one was shaped like a dog’s head, its lips drawn all the way back to the boy’s ears. He had shaggy blondish hair and was dressed similarly to the others they had seen that day: stiff flannel pants, a white shirt, and a gray sweater.

  “Who are you?” Marcus yelled. “What do you want?”

  The boy in the dog mask stepped closer to Marcus, nodding, as if taunting him. He was clutching a broken violin, holding the jagged body of the instrument in one hand. The neck dangled by the strings, swaying against the boy’s leg like a metronome.

  “He’s just trying to scare us,” said Dylan, stepping toward the boy. Dash reached out to pull him back, but Dylan shook off his grip. “Not a good idea, kid. Back up!”

  “Dylan, shut your mouth,” Dash pleaded through clenched teeth.

  “Marcus,” Poppy whispered. “You’re too close!”

  The boy in the mask slowly turned his head as if to acknowledge everyone’s presence. Then, all at once, he swung the body of the violin forward. It smacked Marcus in the face so hard that he fell to the floor. Before anyone else could move, the masked boy hurled himself forward and pounced on Marcus, straddling his chest and stretching the strings of the broken violin across his neck to cut off his breath. Marcus’s eyes went wide and he let out a strangled scream.

  “Stop that!” Dash shouted. “Get off him!” He bolted forward, barreling into the attacker’s side. The boy in the dog mask barely flinched, and Dash fell to the floor.

  “Whoa,” said Dylan. “You are so done.” He charged, but he was too slow. With a slight feint, the boy twisted his body out of the way. He lifted his knee like a piston and brought it down on Dash’s neck, pinning him beside Marcus. Dylan was too shocked to move.

  “Dylan!” Dash wheezed.

  “Leave them alone,” shouted Poppy, throwing off her shock and flying into the fray. She yanked at the strings that were cutting into Marcus’s throat. Dylan tried to kick out the boy’s knee, but the boy swiveled out of the way.

  “Dylan, watch it!” yelled Poppy.

  The boy hissed at Dylan, flinching as Dylan swung his fist toward his head. Poppy shoved hard at the masked boy’s shoulder, and Dash managed to twist his torso and then scramble out from under him.

  Marcus reached up from where he was flailing on the floor. “Get … off … of us!” he gurgled, attempting to clutch at the boy’s clothing to drag him off-balance.

  Dylan came forward again, fists raised. He reached out and tried to grab the boy’s sweater, but his hand seemed to slip right through it. The boy looked up, and the dog mask seemed to change, the eyes growing wider, the upper lip curling back in a snarl, revealing yellow plastic teeth. He bolted to his feet and then cringed, as if he were startled by Dylan’s attempt to touch him.

  There was a great booming sound followed by a resounding crack. The building shook, and from somewhere far away came a noise like a roar. The boy scuttled from the group, rolling toward the door with the nails, dragging his broken violin across the rug, cowering. Marcus sat up, gasping and choking.

  The four kids retreated to the center of the hallway. They watched the boy in horror, their muscles coiled like springs. But the boy was fixated on the wall behind them. Turning, they discovered a wide, jagged opening staring back. It hadn’t been there moments earlier. The booming sound, the cracking noise, the roar … The house had changed shape around them again.

  At the far end of this dark and dusty passageway, a light blinked on. A small chandelier globe in the ceiling of a brass elevator cage.

  The boy in the dog mask groaned and shifted against the far wall. He clutched his broken violin close to his chest and was watching them intently now, as if he’d forgotten the fear that had distracted him from his anger. Deep in his esophagus, his voice rattled wordlessly: Ehrrrrr.

  Dash jumped to his feet, clutching at his throat. “We need … ” He struggled to catch his breath. “We need to get away from here.” He pulled at Marcus’s shirt collar and yanked at Poppy’s shoulder. They kept their eyes on the boy as they backed through the new opening in the wall. Moving swiftly into the dank space, the group put about a dozen feet between themselves and their attacker. “Come on.”

  The boy in the mask rose to his feet, his knees slightly bent as though he were about to pounce again.

  “This way,” Marcus whispered, turning to face the dim light in the elevator car. His vocal cords were raw.

  “Everyone run!” said Dash. “Now!”

  Dash and Poppy raced ahead of Marcus and Dylan. Dylan supported Marcus with his shoulder and helped him down the new corridor.

  “Thank you,” said Marcus.

  “Just move!” said Dylan.

  Marcus could hear the dog boy catching up quickly, but he kept the elevator’s glow in the center of his vision. If there were walls around him, they were made of shadow. The house seemed to shiver, the floor rattling, the ceiling creaking, as if the passage were stretching longer and longer behind him. He hoped that whatever was happening would buy them a few extra seconds to get farther ahead of the kid in the dog mask.

  Something flew from the darkness to the left of the elevator and collided with the group. Dash and Marcus shouted in surprise as Poppy and Dylan were spun around to face the direction from which they’d just come. Dazed, Marcus noticed that the boy in the dog mask was only several yards away, limping toward them determinedly.

  “Poppy!” said an excited, high-pitched voice. “Oh my goodness!”

  The thing that had barreled into them was Azumi. The glow from the elevator’s lamp lit her panicked expression.

  “Please help me!” Azumi glanced over her shoulder, looking back from where she’d come. “There’s this crazy girl chasing me—”

  “In here!” said Poppy, sliding the cage door open with a crash before stepping inside. “Quickly.” The others followed. The space, which had seemed tight at first, expanded to fit everyone. The others huddled by the rear wall as Poppy shoved the handle. Accordion-like springs squealed their resistance, and the cage door closed.

  A body smashed into the car from outside, rattling the brass gates. The old, cracking plastic of the dog mask pressed through the diamond-shaped holes in the cage. The boy reached inside, swinging his hands like claws in an arcade game, hoping to catch a prize.

  Poppy knew it was only a matter of time before the boy grabbed the latch and swung the door open. Her mouth was dry. Her head felt like it was screwed on loosely. She understood she had to focus or she’d collapse. Staying to the side of the car, she looked for a panel of buttons that would send the elevator up or down. But there were no buttons. Instead, there was a circular apparatus marked with the word OTIS across the front, a small black knob sticking out of its top. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered to herself. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Get back or you’re going to lose an arm when this thing moves,” Dylan shouted, taunting the boy. Dash clung to his shoulder, shaking.

  Azumi shouldered past them, pushing at the attacker’s hands while dodging his violent swings. “Azumi, what are you doing?” Poppy asked. “Be careful!”

  Marcus stayed pressed against the wall, rubbing his neck, wiping at his eyes, and clearing his throat. “Poppy! Make this thing move!”

  “Okay, okay!” Poppy grabbed the black knob, sliding it to the right. To Poppy’s surprise, the car lurched, its gears squ
ealing sharply, and then the elevator began to rise.

  The dog boy yanked his arms out of the cage and howled—a monstrous, inhuman sound coming from behind his mask—before disappearing into the shadows.

  WHEN THE FIRST floor was no longer in sight, Poppy swung the black knob back to the middle, and the car came to a screeching halt. They’d stopped between floors. For some reason, the walls of the elevator shaft weren’t visible. Absolute darkness surrounded them, as if they were a vessel lost in outer space. The kids stumbled breathlessly into the center of the elevator, as if a hand might slip inside again and grab hold of them. Somehow, the car seemed even larger than it had been only seconds earlier.

  At least they were away from danger. And even if they weren’t, the new quiet felt like a balm for their bruises. They spent the next few seconds just breathing, checking their injuries. Each of them felt lucky to be alive.

  Dylan was shattered. He was certain that if he hadn’t mouthed off to the boy in the dog mask, none of his new friends would have been hurt. Even after all the conversations, after all the stories that the others had shared, he’d still half expected Del Larkspur to walk out from behind some curtain and tell them that it had all been a game. There would be cameras and lights and food and a comfortable place to read the rest of the film script, because that was how jobs always worked. People took care of you. No one is coming, he realized. It’s just you and Dash. They’d been tricked.

  He’d tried to push down the sense of terror he’d felt all day, starting with the white-hot panic after the strange flash on the stairs, and then again in the hallway with the boy in the bear mask. His mind whirled. If he was being honest, he’d had flashes of that same terror for weeks now, though he couldn’t remember when it started, or why. Had it been in a dream? When he thought about the recent past, he couldn’t place events into a simple time line. There were so many missing pieces, so many gaps. Deep down, he knew that Dash and his nightmares were spot on. It had taken something like this trip to open Dylan’s eyes.

  “Dylan, are you all right?” Dash put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  Dylan felt so foolish he could only turn his head and try to hide his tears.

  “Marcus, your neck,” said Azumi, “let me take a look at it.” Marcus shifted and everybody winced. There were several long ridges where the violin strings had bit into Marcus’s skin. One of the marks was raw, oozing blood.

  “I might have a Band-Aid,” said Poppy, digging through her satchel. She pulled out a paperback—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—and flipped through a few pages, revealing several items that were placed inside. And just like that, she handed Marcus a Band-Aid. “You never know,” she added. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, and this might help too.” She reached again into her bag and grabbed something near the bottom. Opening her hand, she showed him a wrapped cherry cough drop.

  “Thanks,” Marcus whispered.

  “Can I have one?” asked Dash, his own voice sounding raw. “That dog kid got me good too.” Poppy nodded, and reached into her bag again. She frowned, pulled out the folder labeled SPECIALS, and laid it on the floor in the middle of the kids before reaching into her bag again for Dash’s cough drop.

  “Are you all right?” Dylan asked Azumi, who’d been watching them all with concern. “That girl who was chasing you—”

  “She didn’t hurt me,” said Azumi. The others waited for her to go on. “I heard a voice calling to me, so I went to check it out. I got lost. Then … I thought I saw my sister—”

  Marcus interrupted. “But isn’t your sister—”

  “Gone,” said Azumi. “Yes, just like I told you, Marcus. I went after her anyway. When I got close, I saw that it wasn’t Moriko. It was a girl wearing a chimpanzee mask. She growled at me!” Azumi flicked her long hair behind her shoulders, as if trying to compose herself. “She came at me, so I ran.” She squinted at the file Poppy had placed on the floor before glancing at the group again. After a moment, she added, “So what do we do now?”

  DASH BENT DOWN and touched the folder. “What is this, Poppy?”

  Poppy shook her head. “I grabbed it from the office before it … well, before it burned. I forgot I had it in my bag.”

  “Specials?” Dylan knelt beside his brother and flipped open the cover. “Whoa.”

  Inside, bundles of pages were divided into five groups, a large rubber band holding each group together.

  Her heart skipping like mad, Poppy knelt by the twins. She spread the five bundles of paper out across the elevator’s rug. A small black-and-white photograph was glued to the upper left side of each: portraits like mug shots of three boys and two girls. Poppy gasped. “I’ve seen these kids before,” she said. “They were in the charcoal sketch I saw by the office door.” She shot a self-conscious glance at Marcus. “Weeks ago, my Girl in the mirrors also gave me a sketch with them in it. They were standing in front of a stone wall, like the one near Larkspur’s gate, wearing masks. Exactly like the masks we’ve seen in this house. I knew the Girl’s drawing was a message when I first saw it, but I had no idea what it meant.”

  “This is too much.” Azumi stood up and went over to the OTIS device. She placed her hand on the knob and said, “Up or down?”

  The others stared at her, shocked.

  Poppy shifted toward her. “I don’t think we should be going anywhere right now.”

  “Marcus and Dash are hurt,” said Azumi. “Shouldn’t we, like, find a way out?”

  “What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” asked Poppy. “For right now, we’re safer in here than we were out there.”

  “We don’t even know what out there is,” said Azumi. She furrowed her brow and squeezed the knob tighter. Finally, she released an exaggerated sigh and joined the group again. “Fine.”

  Everyone focused on the folder again.

  “So these have to be the kids who’ve been chasing us,” said Dash. “Right?”

  Poppy read the names in the files aloud. “Matilda Ribaldi, Randolph Hanson, Esme Alonso, Irving Wells, and Aloysius Mears.”

  “Aloysius! Poppy, that’s the name we saw on the rabbit mask!”

  “None of them look particularly special,” said Dylan. “In fact, they all look pretty worn out.”

  He was right. Their eyes lacked the kind of spark or energy you usually saw in kids. Poppy had noticed the same in the sketch she’d found earlier hanging in the office. She’d noticed it in some of the kids at Thursday’s Hope, especially when they first came in. And though something twisted inside her to admit it, she worried that she saw some of that same blankness in herself.

  In the file photos, dark hollows marked the children’s eyes, their mouths were downturned, and their postures were stiff, as if they were tensing against something awful to come. It’s like they’re facing a firing squad, she thought, then pushed the morbid thought away.

  She removed the rubber band from the stack that belonged to the girl named Matilda and began sifting through it, reading bits and pieces of her life. “It says, ‘Matilda is fond of story time, books, dolls, and singing nursery rhymes to herself. She is often shy and has to be coaxed to participate in any other group activities.’ ”

  “We should read through the rest of these,” said Dylan.

  “There’s no time!” said Azumi.

  Dash scoffed. “We have nothing but time.”

  “Dylan’s right,” said Marcus. “If we can learn a little more about this house and the people who live—or lived—here, maybe we can figure a way out of this place.”

  “There are dozens of pages,” said Azumi. “How are we supposed to get through all of this?”

  Something echoed off in the distance—the sound of some small object hitting the ground from a great height. Everyone held their breath, waiting to hear another noise. But none came.

  Poppy released a slow breath. “We have to try,” she said, and then divided the stack and handed everyone a piece. “Five of them. Five of us. We
work better when we work together.”

  WHILE THE GROUP read, that same noise pinged out from the darkness every few minutes. It startled them each time. Thankfully, it didn’t sound like it was getting any closer.

  “Can I see your pages?” Dylan asked Dash, and he passed them over. After a moment, Dylan said, “Someone blacked out a whole bunch of the personal history sections in both the Irving and Aloysius files.” The others nodded, showing him their files too. The papers were covered in thick markings.

  “Maybe it was that Caldwell guy,” said Dash. “The orphanage director.” He glanced at his brother. Poppy noticed he was always looking over at Dylan, checking in with him. She envied such a close connection.

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Poppy said.

  Dash went on, scanning the sheets. “For some reason, the director didn’t want anyone to know where the kids came from, or who they were before they got here.”

  “But there is a little bit about their personalities,” said Marcus. “I think this whole folder was a small part of something larger. Look, there are notes throughout this one that show Cyrus must have kept more information about these kids … ” As Marcus read more, his eyes grew wide. “And what he did to them,” he added.

  “What do you mean?” asked Poppy. “What did he do to them?”

  “This kid, Randolph, was a musician.” Marcus looked up at the others. “Just like me,” he said slowly, pausing as if to absorb what that meant. “It says that Cyrus refused to let Randolph play his instruments. The boy in the dog mask attacked me with a broken violin. I think he was Randolph.”

  “Oh my goodness,” said Poppy, holding her hand to her mouth as she read. “The director made Matilda destroy all of her dolls. They must have been the same dolls she tried to show me in the burning office.”