by E. E. Holmes
10
HAZING
FOR A MOMENT, I WAS A FLAILING MESS OF SHEER ANIMAL PANIC. Then, my brain seemed to switch into a detached state, and started trying to identify details that would help me figure out what the hell was going on.
The hands that were binding my wrists together were small and soft. Long hair was brushing against my leg. Several voices were hissing sharply to each other; they were definitely female voices. Young female voices.
“You’re tying it too tight!” one of them muttered.
“No, I’m not!” snapped another, and I felt a sharp tug on the fabric now twisted around my wrists. “We don’t want her to get out of them, do we?”
The one nearest my face was laughing and breathing cheap wine on me. I would know that smell anywhere; I associated it with a twisted sort of childhood nostalgia that normal people attached to campfire smoke or Christmas cookies. I inhaled it like a calming substance, and I composed myself enough to realize what was happening. We weren’t being kidnapped or murdered by random lunatics. These were some of the other Apprentices and we were being hazed —hazed like pledges in the most disturbing sorority of all time, and worst of all, we didn’t even want to join it. Even as hatred for all of them coursed through my veins, I had to admit they had flair; I had no idea what twisted traditions Fairhaven had for this kind of thing, but I could pretty much guarantee that the night was not going to include a keg stand or streaking across the sprawling lawns.
I could hear Hannah struggling and whimpering beside me. I tried to make some sort of reassuring sound for her, but it was all I could do not to gag on the wad of fabric in my mouth, which was very rough and tasted like cardboard.
Then hands were all over me, grasping me under the armpits, and around the legs. I tried to kick out, but one of them lay across my legs while another tied my ankles together. My feet immediately started to tingle from the restricted blood flow. I twisted back and forth at the waist, trying to throw them off, but there were too many of them.
“Just stop struggling,” one of them breathed in my ear. “We’re going to do it anyway, and you’ll just hurt yourself.”
If she was trying to reassure me, whoever she was, she was doing a terrible job. I was filled with a renewed flutter of panic as I contemplated all the horrors that “we’re going to do it anyway” might possibly refer to.
Someone pulled me right off the edge of the bed and I landed hard on the floor.
“Shit, ouch! I thought you said you had her?”
“I do have her! You’re the one that dropped her. Get her arm!”
Our captors lifted me clean off the rug and began, with difficulty, to half-carry, half drag me out of the room and down the hallway. I kept struggling in earnest until we reached the stairs, and then stopped, afraid that one wrong move would throw us off balance and send us all toppling down to the stone floor below. Our pack of kidnappers continued out the front doors and across the lawns. The night air carried no residual warmth from the damp, clammy day; it had drained from the world with the sunlight, and I shivered violently in my thin t-shirt and shorts as we made our awkward, painful way across the lawns. I had little sense of direction in the best of circumstances, but trussed up and hauled around like this, I had no idea which way we were going until the footsteps took on a muffled, shuffling quality, and I knew we must be trudging through the fallen leaf mulch that covered the forest floor.
Finally, amidst a flurry of whispering, we came to a halt. I heard a crackling, and the almost sweet smell of smoke found its way to my nose. I was lowered to the ground, and came down hard on a rock. Ignoring my cry of pain, the captors pulled me up off my back into a kneeling position. Then all hands fell away, and all around me I heard retreating footsteps and then, nothing. For one long moment there was no sound but my own ragged breathing and Hannah’s whimpering beside me. Then the bag was whipped off of my head and the fabric pulled from my mouth. I stared around me.
We were in the woods on the grounds, but in a sunken sort of clearing. All around us were a number of stone structures, a ruin of what might once have been a walled enclosure, or maybe even a small building. Around the outskirts of the clearing stood a dozen figures, clad in long, dark hooded robes and carrying torches. Each face was hidden behind an identical mask; pale and doll-like, with wide staring eyes, rosy cheeks, and the perfect pouting lips of a porcelain figurine.
If I hadn’t already suspected who was behind those masks, I might have died of fright right then and there. Hannah was so pale and still in her terror, she might already have died.
I swallowed hard and spoke, hoping my voice would sound steadier than my nerves felt. “What the hell is this, Valley of the Dolls? Congratulations, you scared the crap out of us, and you are officially the creepiest fucking things I’ve ever seen. Now enough already, okay? Joke’s over.”
All around us, the ghostly white faces shook back and forth in silence. I could actually feel a lifelong phobia of dolls formulating in my psyche.
For what felt like an eternity, the figures just stared down at us, firelight playing on their fixed, waxen features. Then a voice rang out from a masked figure to our right.
“You find yourselves, sisters of the gift, within the walls of the ancient Fairhaven príosún. You have been brought to this place because it has been determined that you must answer for the transgressions of your clan.”
“We don’t need to answer for anything! Untie us now!” I said.
“You have not been granted permission to speak,” the same voice said.
“We don’t need permission to speak!” I shouted. “Let us out of here now. This isn’t funny!”
The figures did not move, but from somewhere to our left, two of them were sniggering. The same one spoke again.
“Your clan has shirked its duties. You have shamed the Durupinen and abandoned the spirit world. As your peers, we invoke the ancient right to call judgment down upon you and sentence you to retribution on behalf of the many souls that suffered at the hands of your negligence.”
“We haven’t done anything!” Hannah called out in a cracked voice. “It wasn’t our decision; our mother was the one who —”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said to her. “They know all of this, and they don’t care. This is just their sick little way of keeping the upper hand.”
The same voice went on as though we had not spoken. The more she said, the more I was pretty damn sure who the ringleader of this stunt actually was. “Because your clan has hidden in such shame, it’s probable that you don’t know what this place is for. The Fairhaven príosún was the site of trial and punishment for the northern clans for many centuries. Within these walls many prisoners, Durupinen and enemies alike, have faced terrible fates at the hands of the Elemental.”
An expectant silence followed these words. Hannah and I looked blankly at each other.
“Did you hear what I said?” the voice demanded.
“Oh, are we allowed to talk now?” I asked. “Are we supposed to be reacting to this? We don’t know what an Elemental is.”
“The Elemental is an ancient being, older than mankind itself,” another voice chimed in from behind us. She sounded like she was reciting something from a textbook. “It is fear and horror and anger. It is beast and spirit and creature. It dwells within those very walls, and what it may do to you, none of us can tell.”
A few more scattered peals of laughter. One of the figures stumbled, snorting and giggling. “Shh! Shut up!” the girl beside her hissed.
“If you survive the night,” the first voice said, “Your penance will be paid and you will be released at dawn. If not…well, your penance is still paid.”
More titters met these words. A few of them attempted a spooky “Woooooo!” but the effect was spoiled by their inability to stop laughing.
By this point all my fear had transformed completely into anger. It was obvious that no one here actually thought this so-called Elemental thing was real, and that th
e real intention was to leave us both to freeze our asses off in the woods for the night.
“A casting has been placed around the borders of this place. You cannot leave it until the sun comes up,” the second voice said. She raised her hands above her head. “So it is decreed.”
“So it shall be,” the others responded, slightly out of sync.
I looked around. In the wavering light from the torches, I could just make out the runes, drawn in some kind of white powder, all along the outside of the stone enclosure. I recognized a few of them from class, and my heart sank as I realized we probably really would be stuck out here all night. Well played, sorority sisters from hell. Well played.
There was renewed laughter. Several of them called out to us.
“Nighty-night!”
“Sweet dreams, girls!”
The circle around us started to break up into groups of two and three, chatting quietly to each other. A few had actually turned to leave when the first voice rang out again.
“I will now complete the casting to call forth the Elemental,” she said, pulling a small leather book and pouch from the folds of her robe.
Everyone stopped. All of the figures turned to look at her.
“Peyton, what are you doing?” one of them said, every trace of amusement gone from her voice. Peyton said nothing, but began rummaging in the pouch for her chalk. All around her, the other girls’ voices were rising in panic.
“Wait, what is she doing?”
“She’s not serious, is she?”
“Okay, Peyton, very funny, now let’s go.”
Peyton pulled a black candle from her pouch and lit it with the flame of the nearest torch. “We said they needed to be taught a lesson.”
“Yeah, and we all agreed it would be funny to leave them here,” another girl said. As she turned away from us to face Peyton, her hood fell away and I recognized Róisín’s raven-colored hair. “We never said anything about trying to call the Elemental.”
“I’m improvising,” Peyton said, flipping open her book of castings and searching for the right page.
The tension around the circle was palpable now. The girls who had been laughing and stumbling around a moment ago were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, or else standing frozen, eyes on Peyton.
“Peyton, we shouldn’t mess with the Elemental,” Róisín said, her voice rising in panic. “Seriously, no one has called it in a really long time. We don’t know what will happen.”
Peyton began chanting quietly, dropping small stones to the ground around her as she did.
Róisín turned tail and fled from the circle. Her retreat sparked a panic, like a fire that starts as a tiny smolder and builds into a raging inferno. The other girls called out to one another.
“She’s not really doing it, is she?”
“It’s not going to do anything, is it? It’s a myth, right?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t really want to find out.”
“Someone stop her!”
“I’m getting out of here.”
“Me too, let’s go!”
One by one, the other girls fled from the clearing, swallowed immediately by the darkness between the trees as Peyton continued to chant. Only one figure remained; Olivia tore off her mask and scampered over to stand beside Peyton, dancing on the spot, evidently torn between escaping and witnessing what, if anything, would actually happen. I looked over at Hannah, who was working her feet and hands desperately against the fabric, trying in vain to loosen her bonds. The sight of her expression spurred me into action. I scooted on my knees over to her and positioned myself so that we were back to back. I found her hands with my own scrabbling fingers and squeezed them.
“Stop moving,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Let me try to untie them.”
She instantly went as still as a rabbit who’d spotted a predator. I began to work blindly at the knots.
“What’s happening?” Hannah asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said, tugging at a loose loop of fabric. “Maybe nothing. Maybe something really bad.”
Peyton’s voice suddenly rose to a wail and then stopped. She raised the candle and circled it over her head three times, and then blew it out. We all froze, waiting.
The torches flickered. The breeze rustled the trees. Nothing else whatsoever happened.
Peyton dropped her hands to her sides, looking for a strange moment like a depressed inhabitant of an abandoned dollhouse. Then she gathered up her stones and turned to Olivia.
“It was worth a try,” she said. “I just wanted to scare them anyway.”
“I did too, but that’s no reason to mess with stuff like the —”
“Oh shut up, Olivia. It was just a joke,” Peyton said dismissively. She turned back to us, and her voice was twisted with a hidden smile. “Sleep tight ladies. We’ll try to remember to come back for you in the morning.”
The two of them turned and walked away. The wind carried snatches of their laughter back to us for several minutes after they vanished.
I let out a low, long sigh and turned my efforts back to Hannah’s bonds. I had broken out in a cold sweat, which made it that much harder to work at the knots. Luckily, the other Apprentices were no boy scouts, and after a few more minutes I felt the fabric fall loose.
Hannah let out a cry of relief and sniffled loudly. She untied her own legs quickly, and as she turned to help me, I saw her face was glazed with tears.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I hate her,” she replied.
“So do I. But every school has someone like Peyton. She’s just a jumped up little queen bee who can’t —”
“I’m not talking about Peyton.”
“Oh. Who are you talking about?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
I opened my mouth to press the question, but at that moment my hands came free, and so I let the subject drop and got to work on untying my ankles.
“Do you think we’re really trapped in here until morning?” Hannah asked, standing up and starting to walk the perimeter of the circle.
“It’s definitely possible, as long as they did it right. This is probably one of the protective castings we read about last week for Keira.”
I stood up unsteadily. My legs felt like they were crawling with countless tiny, burrowing insects as the blood began to circulate again. I joined Hannah, who was examining the nearest rune by torchlight. I recognized it as the one Finn used during our first communication circle. I was pretty sure it symbolized a lock, having just recorded it on a set of flashcards a few nights ago, along with about a hundred other runes we were supposed to have memorized by the end of the next week.
“What do you think would happen if we tried to walk out?” Hannah asked.
“Only one way to find out,” I said. I picked my way along the border of rocks until I found a gap. I took a deep breath and tried to step across it.
All sense of where I was and what I was doing melted away. My vision spun and my ears were filled with a deafening rushing sound. The very air I was trying to breath turned solid around me, crushing down upon me from all angles. I was filled with a fear so absolute that I could not master it: terrible, terrible things would happen if I left this space. I could not go on. I could not face whatever was out there. I wrenched my foot away from the gap and fell backward.
“Jess! Are you okay? What happened?” Hannah cried, coming to kneel beside me.
“I don’t know,” I said. I shook my head to clear it, but the moment I had stepped back, it had all stopped. “That was really weird. I think it’s a psychic barrier, not a physical one. It felt like it was my own fear keeping me in.”
Hannah stared at the spot I’d try to cross. “Do you think I should try it? Maybe on the other side?” She half-rose, but I grabbed her arm.
“No,” I said. “No, that was…you really don’t want to experience that, trust me. I think we are stuck here until morning, like they said. Unless,�
� I said, on sudden inspiration, “can you call Milo? He could go for help!”
Hannah bit her lip. “I don’t think I can. I was trying to call him when we first got here, and I can’t find him. Everything is really fuzzy and unfocused. I think it might be part of that psychic barrier. I’m sorry, I should have called him while they were dragging us out here, but I was just too panicked. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Don’t be stupid, this isn’t your fault. I was panicking too,” I said, but my heart sank. “So, no chance of calling any other ghosts either?”
I held my breath as Hannah closed her eyes and went perfectly still with concentration. Thirty seconds later her eyes fluttered open and she shook her head. “I can’t pick up on a single one. It’s all a big haze.”
Hannah seemed to deflate. She sunk back onto the ground and pulled her knees up under her chin like a small child. The moonlight highlighted the many scars on her wrists and forearms as she wrapped them around her legs, hugging them to her chest.
We sat together in the dark and the cold. It was probably good we were stuck here, because if we could make it back to the castle now, I might just kill someone. When was it going to end? Were we ever going to be accepted here? Would we ever stop being punished for transgressions we didn’t even understand? It was probably too much to hope for that all would be forgiven once we came out on the other side of this sick little ritual. I couldn’t even imagine any of them getting in trouble for this. They’d just hide behind the skirts of the older Council members and claim it was a harmless joke, just a nod to an ancient, twisted precedent of tradition. The more I thought about the injustice of it, the more I seethed.
I didn’t say any of this to Hannah. There was no point in bothering to articulate what I knew we were both feeling: anger and despair and sadness and helplessness. It was… absolutely delicious.
I sat bolt upright. The thought had not been mine. I had no idea where it came from.
