by Maaja Wentz
Tonya stooped to speak through the window in Donna’s Plexiglas box. “We’re here to visit my Aunt Helen.”
Donna typed a few words into her computer and pronounced Aunt Helen discharged.
Lynette nudged Tonya aside. “What about Roberto Alvarez?”
“Not here either.” She didn’t check.
“Are you sure?”
Lynette spelled his name and provided information as Donna checked her computer.
“He was never admitted.”
Tonya stooped to speak through the window. “What about Professor Rudolph? I know he was here.”
“Full name?” Donna’s voice was chipper.
“Professor Frank Rudolph and I know he was here. My friends and I called him an ambulance because he sleepwalked off campus, all the way through the cemetery, and then lay down at the base of the Three-Century Ash.” Tonya gave her a significant look.
Donna’s kohled eyes widened. “Did your aunt know about that?” Donna tented red, manicured fingers.
“I haven’t been able to reach my aunt or parents for days.”
“That is a problem.” Donna stroked her chin. “What are you going to do?”
“I have to see the professor. Are you sure you can’t find him?”
“I probably shouldn’t tell you, since you’re not family, but he checked out this morning.” She beckoned Tonya to lean in closer and whispered, “Against doctor’s orders.” She shook her head. “His color was terrible, and he walked like a robot. He had the nerve to steal the cookie tin off my desk!”
Tonya inhaled sharply.
Lynnette asked, “Know where he was headed?”
“No idea. He just walked out.”
“I’m finding him,” said Tonya.
“We still have to find Roberto,” said Lynette.
“Try his phone again. He might be home by now.”
Tonya checked her phone while Lynette checked hers. She had sent a text to Priya, reminding her she had promised to cancel or move the show. Still no reply.
Tonya followed Lynette back to the car. “We should go back to campus. Somebody must have seen him.”
“I hope so.”
During the drive back, Lynette was quiet. Tonya tried to distract her with chit chat, but the conversation died every time.
“At least you know Roberto is okay.”
“He’s been acting funny.”
“Maybe he lost his phone in the fire. I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he can.” Tonya tried to sound hopeful but suspected a darker reason for his silence. What if he spent too much time in the cemetery and wound up like Professor Rudolph?
They drove west, then south over the bridge, and back east. As they entered campus, Tonya noticed a telephone pole papered with flyers for Priya’s installation. Thinking she might have missed stripping one pole, Tonya didn’t worry until a few poles farther on she saw more. Priya’s flyers fluttered on lampposts lining the drive and the walkways between buildings.
“Let me out in front of the dorm. You’re going to have to keep looking for Roberto on your own.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“No matter what happens, don’t go into the cemetery tonight.”
“I’ll be too busy looking for Roberto.” Lynette pulled up outside the dorm.
“I know you’ll find him.” Tonya leaped out.
In the front foyer, on the bulletin board, Tonya saw shiny posters advertising Man vs. Nature. Flyers covered the first-floor doors. Tonight, the cemetery would be full of innocent students expecting a party. Whether the eating disease spread person-to-person like an infection, or whether it was a curse cast on the cemetery, Priya’s installation would put people at risk. She’d seen what this affliction did to Marta. Nobody could save a crowd, compelled to eat until they choked.
She had to stop Priya. Tonya took the elevator to her friend’s room, but Priya wasn’t there. She didn’t have mobile numbers for the rest of the Ninjas, but she guessed where to look. She rushed down the stairs and ran for the cemetery.
She had slowed to an out-of-breath jog as she reached the path leading off campus, but didn’t dare go slower. Only she could stop this catastrophe. The bonfire would draw a big crowd, so she had to convince her new friends to move it far away from the cemetery.
Her feet pounded the path and her labored breaths turned to cloud in the chilly air. Hitting a patch of ice, her legs flew up from under her and she slid along on her backside. When she came to a stop, Tonya sat for a moment, waiting for the pain to ease. What made her think she could convince them of anything, especially without demonstrating magic? If only her aunt were here. She could charm the hair off an orangutan.
Tonya got up and jogged on, despite a stitch in her side. It was a small campus with few Halloween parties advertised. Most of the student body would have heard of the bonfire. How could she, one lowly freshman, stop the majority?
She crossed the street dividing campus from the cemetery. As she passed through the wrought iron gates, Tonya saw hairy things, up in the trees. Priya had shown Tonya sketches, but in person her monsters were hyper realistic.
Priya was a macabre genius, with a theme-park mentality. From now on, every time she walked this path, Tonya would expect to get ambushed by Toyota-sized tarantulas.
Tonya was so impressed with the giant rabbit with sad eyes and blood on its chin, that she wanted to forget why she was there. She had to keep everyone from seeing this masterpiece. Somehow. Her confidence collapsed. To stop mass infection, she was going to need more than circumstantial evidence. She needed proof the cemetery could kill.
Marta’s near-miss could be explained away as an eating contest gone wrong. Tonya believed the feeding frenzy was caused by magic, and suspected the curse was related to the unnatural explosion at her aunt’s shop. A nasty magic user was at work here, one who had probably hurt her parents or forced them into hiding. She suspected their spells caused irrational binge eating, and the mindless stagger of Professor Rudolph, but how to prove it?
And what was so bad about a little binge eating? If a victim didn’t choke on their food, would the need to pig out wear off? How did she know Professor Rudolph wasn’t home right now, doing a crossword and drinking tea? Just in case, Tonya pulled her turtleneck up over her mouth and nose to keep out airborne contaminants. She feared it wasn’t only Egyptian Pharaohs’ tombs that could inflict airborne curses.
Tonya followed a meandering path through the cemetery. At the southwest end, in the oldest section, where time and rain had eroded the names off the marble headstones, she approached the Three-Century Ash. She slowed, walking with dignity in this holy place.
The Ash was revered by the Old Families who had buried ancestors there for hundreds of years, the source of their power. The longer the family had been settled here, the more powerful the magic of the descendants.
They would all be angry if they could see this. Priya had turned the tree into a monster, with slits for eyes and a mouth that looked like a slash in the bark, with fangs. At its base, the clean-picked skeletons of manufactured prey were piled in a jumble, as if the tree had devoured them and spit out the pellets like a giant owl. She did a double take. Priya hadn’t actually cut into the Ash, had she?
She rushed up to take a closer look but there were no cuts in the bark. Priya had applied a mask to the tree trunk that blended so perfectly, it looked like it was part of it. In any other place, her handiwork would be beautiful but here it was an abomination. She was surprised someone from the Old Families hadn’t discovered it and punished her already. If they discovered Priya’s blasphemy and found out Priya knew about magic, there would be a heavy price to pay.
It was a price she had paid herself. Tonya had defaced the Ash in childhood when she nailed slats of wood like rungs to help her climb up the back. Her parents had been livid when they caught her, and her aunt could hardly look at her. That was so many years ago that the Ash had long since started to grow around the rungs, but her g
uilt still stung.
Tonya went around the back of the tree to look for traces of her forbidden ladder. Lying on a bed of yellow leaves at its base, lay Professor Rudolph. Up through the ground, hair-like roots were growing into the unconscious man’s ears, nose, and mouth. A few more were growing upward and around the side of his face, preparing to enter through his eyeballs.
“Professor!” Tonya tugged at his arms, poked him with her toe. She slapped his cheek, but nothing would rouse him. Slowly, being careful not to disturb or touch any of the white tendrils, she put a hand on his chest. He was cold. His chest was still, without a heartbeat. His wrist lacked a pulse. He was dead.
Tonya, have you done your homework? His voice demanded inside her head. His unseeing eyes opened. She ran.
WHISPERS
Tonya ran up the path that skirted the west side of the cemetery then, eventually, slowed to a walk. Her chest heaved, and her mouth escaped her turtleneck. Listening to her breathing she wondered if she had already inhaled the contagion that killed Professor Rudolph. Would she die too? How much time before the infection took effect? His voice in her head reminded her of a gravedigger fungus she’d once stumbled upon as a child, in a dark corner of the cemetery.
She still remembered how it sent wordless whispers through her mind. In a panic, she had rushed to the shop to ask Aunt Helen about it.
“Gravediggers grow into the brains of the dead. Their telepathic whispers frighten outsiders away.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s harmless.”
“You planted it, didn’t you?”
Her aunt looked away, but not fast enough to hide her smile. “Of course not. Everybody knows I avoid death magic.”
The Professor’s voice in her head had sounded ten times more powerful than the telepathic fungus of her childhood memory. She stretched the neck of her sweater over her nose and went back to look for telltale signs of fungus. Normally, a gravedigger just gave you that cemetery feeling, like raised hairs on the back of your neck, or rustling sounds in the bushes. It was a harmless guardian but the way it propagated itself creeped Tonya out. It sent up one kind of shoot to sense movement, and another to spread spores. Tonya didn’t like to think of it spying on her, then releasing a cloud of spores as she passed by.
Tonya wished her aunt had explained how to destroy the fungus. She suspected Aunt Helen knew more about it than she would admit. Her aunt claimed to create folk cures from natural elements like herbs and minerals, but there was another kind of spell, cast purely through the will of the caster. Such spells required dark energies, the kind it would take to boost the powers of a mindless, mildly telepathic fungus into something more sinister . . .
Tonya tried to swallow the lump that rose in her throat. Her parents were mixed up in this with Aunt Helen. They never spoke of the danger, but the warning, delivered by the entranced woman at City Hall, confirmed it. Whoever was behind this must have defeated Aunt Helen and done something to her parents. Helen wanted to fight this battle alone, but there had been some kind of magical showdown at the store which sent Helen to the hospital. She had checked herself out but still hadn’t contacted Tonya, leaving her niece alone and surrounded by unknown enemies.
Even in daylight, this forested patch on the edge of the cemetery was half-dark. She shivered and zipped her coat up to her chin, scrunching her face into her collar in case of spores. What if they didn’t only grow in the brains of the dead? What if they could grow inside her living brain? The wind blew through her hair, whipping it around and making the trees hiss and sway, lending life to the artificial creatures Priya had hidden there. Tonya closed her eyes and stood still, wondering how far the Dead Professor’s mind reached. Did the link work in two directions, allowing him to overhear her thoughts, and broadcast his? Could he feel her shivering right now?
Tonya sped up. As she passed through the Eastern Gate and crossed the road back to campus, she had a new theory which would explain Professor Rudolph and Marta. It had to be the gravedigger plant, enhanced by dark magic. This gravedigger couldn’t just broadcast whispers into people’s minds, but implant ideas as well. Ideas like the compulsion to eat.
She had to stop tonight’s gathering at all costs. Tonya started jogging toward campus.
She yearned to leave this to the authorities, but the Provincial Police would laugh at her. And campus administration? She’d never find somebody to talk to her on a Saturday. Besides, they’d think she was crazy.
With no other choice, Tonya pulled out her phone and called.
“Loon Lake police.” The chipper voice didn’t sound familiar to Tonya. Was the receptionist mundane or Old Family?
“Miss, are you still there?”
“Uh, I want to report a death.” Tonya didn’t risk saying more.
“Where are you?”
“Loon Lake Cemetery.”
“Young Lady, we don’t tolerate pranks! I should warn you this call is being recorded.”
“Something terrible is happening to my Professor Rudolph. I just found his body, laid out at the base of the Ash Tree.”
“Now aren’t you smart, to know the kind of tree. What’s your name, Miss?”
“Tonya.”
“I guess that makes you Helen’s . . .”
“Her niece.”
“Hm. Well, don’t trouble yourself about Rudolph.”
“You’ll take care of it, then?”
“In a way. Some things have a way of taking care of themselves.”
“Should I stay with the body?”
“Leave him to us. I’m sure you’ve done enough.”
Tonya hesitated. “Warn your personnel to wear masks. I think he’s contagious.” She emphasized the word, hoping the woman would understand this was a special, magical kind of contagion.
“You sure know a lot for someone who just found the body.”
“Yeah, well, send the right people and they’ll understand.” She hung up but, in her mind, Tonya saw him again, white shoots snaking up from underground to invade his lifeless body.
She didn’t trust the police. The lady on the phone had recognized her and acted like she’d been expecting her call. The receptionist sounded like she was working for the Old Families but if so, why hadn’t she seemed more concerned? Professor Rudolph had died under suspicious circumstances. Were the Old Families and the police working together to cover it up?
At City Hall, the lady with the flowery dress had brushed her off. It made Tonya want to march into City Hall and complain to the Mayor—if that would do any good. Tonya wondered if the councilors actively opposed Helen. They were mostly Trads, and some were Pures, which didn’t help her aunt’s case. Tonya wasn’t supposed to know, but when Helen’s hair turned white overnight in her late teens, she had been accused of using death magic. The mayor had exiled Aunt Helen for ten years right around the time Tonya was born.
Since she couldn’t count on the police or the Old Families, Tonya had few places to turn for help. She had shown Priya magic. Maybe together they could convince the Ninjas to move the festivities out of the cemetery.
She phoned and sent Priya urgent texts, but she didn’t answer. Time to make house calls.
DRAKE
When she reached the Hub Pub, Tonya double-timed down the stairs almost colliding with Drake who was walking up, carrying a box full of cables and equipment.
“Am I glad to see you!” Tonya let him pass.
“Me too. You want to tag along? One more run and I’m finished.” He hefted the box.
Tonya joined him at the top of the stairs. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. The cemetery is too dangerous.”
“We already talked about that. Priya’s concept is to scare people.” Drake walked to his car at the curb. He arranged the box in the trunk and shut it.
“Wait! Let me explain.”
“Okay.” Drake smiled at her like she was a piece of chocolate cake.
“Professor R
udolph is dead,”
“What?” His smile vanished. “Wasn’t he your favorite prof? Are you okay?” Drake took Tonya’s hand and led her to sit on the bumper of his car.
“What happened?”
“Bad magic made him sick, in the woods by the cemetery.”
“What do you mean magic? They took him away to the hospital.” Drake sat on the bumper beside her.
“He checked himself out and went back to the cemetery and lay down at the foot of the Three-Century Ash to die.”
“Did they figure out what was wrong with him?”
“He was eating all the way. Donna, at reception, said he swiped the cookies off her desk.”
“That’s terrible.” Drake knit his brows. “So, heart attack?”
“That tree is supposed to protect the town. It has for hundreds of years, but now I don’t know. Somebody is using its power to do terrible things.”
“Tree power?” Drake quirked an eyebrow at her.
Tonya shifted her feet. “I know it’s hard to believe, but my family knows things.” Uncomfortable under his stare, she shoved her hands into her coat pockets until her right hand encountered the jar and she snatched it back as if burned.
Drake pulled out his phone. “Did you call someone to deal with the Professor’s body?”
“Yeah. I wish I could show it to you before they collect it.”
“No thanks.”
“I know it sounds crazy but Priya’s installation is wrong. The cemetery is a sacred place and the Ash Tree—”
“Has spiritual value, and your professor’s dead, and Priya built a nasty monster on it.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “He won’t be the only one to die if I can’t stop her show.”
“You still believe that?” He stood, and the bumper lifted beneath her as she stood too.
“Sounds crazy, until you believe in magic.”
“Priya told me about the thing you did with the tree branch. She called it sleight of hand and swore you wouldn’t be able to do it in daylight.”
“Why won’t she just believe me!”
