None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1)

by Laura Giebfried

  His eyes were much too still, and I stood to leave before the conversation could go further. For all I knew, Cabail was acting on some plot of Julian’s to extract information on me, and I wouldn’t give him any more opportunities to do so. I started down the path out of the garden.

  “I know you want to know who killed Miss Mercier.”

  As the statement struck the air, so close that it sounded as though he was still speaking into my ear, I slowly turned back to him. My expression was carefully neutral.

  “Who told you that? Porter?” I anxiously pushed back the sleeves of my jacket despite it being so cold. There was no telling what Thomas could do if he had pieced together the conversation with Jack in the woods. “Well, it’s not true.”

  Cabail bypassed the blatant lie.

  “You’re missing something.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I – I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know how Miss Mercier was killed.”

  “So does everyone; it was in the paper.”

  “You know how she was killed, but you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

  “I don’t –”

  Before I could get the words out, someone brushed past me on the path and I moved back to let him by. When I turned back to where Cabail had been sitting, I found the bench was empty. Though I stared through the mess of dead foliage for any sign of him, he was gone.

  Still hesitant that I was being tricked, I returned to the dorm room and pulled out the folder on Miss Mercier and the dead girls. Cabail had no way of knowing what we were up to or what we knew about the murders, and his advice would undoubtedly prove to be useless. Regardless, I opened the folder and turned to the photographs of the crime scene, ignoring the clenching in my stomach as I did so. Dictionary watched me steadily from the bed.

  The pictures were no-less gruesome than they had been the first time that I had seen them. Miss Mercier was lying on the dirt floor of the forest, her brown hair darkened and matted with blood and splayed out around her, and her body was hacked to pieces.

  I shut my eyes towards the wall, ready to berate myself for letting Cabail toy with me. The smell of blood seemed to fill the air, and the sight of her lying there, arms and legs detached from the torso, was too horrifying to comprehend. My mind fumbled as it tried to find an alternate explanation as to why there were blank stretches of ground between where her waist ended and her legs began.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jack had entered the room and moved to stand behind me, peering over my shoulder curiously. As soon as he caught sight of what he was looking at, he pulled away again.

  “Why’re you looking at those?”

  “I don’t know, I thought –” I was careful not to mention anything of the conversation with Cabail, nor my concerns that Porter might know what we were up to. “I was just thinking that maybe we missed something in how Miss Mercier was killed.”

  “Missed something? That’s the only part that’s clear, Nim: she was hacked to pieces.”

  He shrugged off his bag and set it beside the bed. As he took a seat on the mattress to pull off his shoes, Dictionary sidled over to sit on his lap.

  I made to put the photos away again when one of them caught my attention. It had been taken from afar to include her whole form: her torso lay in the middle and her limbs were spread out around her. In the following shots, the camera had taken the individual pieces separately, and the final ones were of sections of the surrounding forest that held fragments of clothing or places where footprints had been found. My eyes traced the outline of a leg and then the other, and then went up to do the same for both the arms. She looked like a doll whose parts had been snapped from the sockets.

  “But she wasn’t hacked,” I said, my eyes narrowing beneath a frown. “She was cut up.”

  “Same thing.”

  “But is it?” I turned to him as the thoughts began to filter through my head, and my heart pounded more quickly against my chest. “I mean, ‘hacked’ kind of implies that it was messy –”

  “And you think that looks neat?”

  “No, well – sort of. I mean, look at her arms and legs: they look like they were just broken off from the rest. If someone had axed her, it would be jagged or uneven, or something, wouldn’t it?”

  Jack stood back up to look at the photos. His knuckles were white as he clutched the edge of the desk. “Nim, you’re right.”

  “But who would cut her up carefully?”

  “Who could cut her up carefully, more importantly?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Nim. It’s not like anyone could do something so ... meticulous. I mean, you remember doing dissections – how many people were actually good at them?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “No, neither was I. My sheep’s eye exploded all over my favorite sweatshirt, and don’t even get me started on the cat – that was a nightmare.”

  “But was anyone good at it? One student in particular?”

  “Not that I remember,” he said with a frown. “But what about in your class? You were in the advanced ones. Was there someone good at it?”

  “No. We were so awful that the teacher wouldn’t even let us participate in the cat dissection – he just had us watch.”

  Jack ran his hand through his hair as he thought.

  “Alright, so maybe it’s not a student after all. I mean, disarticulating a person is a bit different from finding the stomach in a frog, isn’t it? This had to have been someone who knows their anatomy.”

  “One of the science teachers, you think?” I said. “There’s only a dozen or so of them – it shouldn’t be hard to check out. Who teaches anatomy?”

  “Something-ski. Almunski or Crusunski ...”

  “Right. Something Polish.”

  “All right,” Jack said, grabbing up a pen to begin jotting things down. “Or it could be someone in a science club. Is there a dissection club?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “Good point. We can look at the event board in the department later, but first –” He ripped the page he had been scribbling on from the notebook and shoved it into his pocket. “—let’s check out the science teachers to see if any of them look suspicious.”

  We turned out of the room and started down the hall, neither of us daring to get too excited. Halfway down the stairs, though, Jack paused.

  “I forgot my keys,” he said. “Do you have yours?”

  “I left them on the desk,” I said, patting down my jacket as I spoke. “Why?”

  “Labs are locked after class.”

  “Right.”

  We turned and hurried back up the stairs. As we approached the dorm room again, I could see that the door was open several inches, though I was certain that I had closed it behind us. Jack took a step forward and pushed it open. The room was empty apart for Dictionary, who was hovering beneath the bed.

  “That’s weird. Didn’t you close it?”

  “Yes ...”

  We had barely stepped into the room when we realized our mistake. It was midway through dining hours and I had not yet gone to dinner; Sanders must have come into the room to get me. It was clear why he had chosen not to stay: the file folder was still open on the desk, and the photos of Miss Mercier’s dismembered body were scattered everywhere.

  “Fuck.”

  Jack had barely gotten the word out when something sounded behind us. We turned simultaneously to the door in time to see Sanders leading his roommate into the room. He was spluttering something incoherent as he tried to explain what his upset was about, but halted upon finding us standing there.

  “Hadler – Lund.”

  “Sanders.”

  Jack sucked in his cheeks as he eyed the building monitor; both were at a loss for what to say. Sanders’ roommate looked between them carefully before he moved into the room.

  “What’s all the fuss about?” he said.

  “Not
hing.” Jack moved to block his path. The other student eyed him impatiently.

  “Get out of the way, Hadler.”

  “Sorry, Britten. Can’t do that.”

  “You can and you will. Matt says you’ve got something incriminating in here – something to do with Miss Mercier.”

  “Well, he’s mistaken.”

  “I’m not,” Sanders said firmly, finally taking a step into the room. “He’s got something – something sick, right there!”

  He pointed to the desk behind Jack, and Jack made another move to block their line of sight. As Britten looked between us to decide how to proceed, another set of footsteps sounded in the hall and an intrigued voice entered the room.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  Julian peered into the room; his eyes were alight at the thought of a spectacle.

  “Nothing,” Jack said.

  “Hadler’s hiding something about Miss Mercier.”

  “Really?” Julian’s eyes flickered even brighter. “Don’t want to share, Jack?”

  “He won’t get out of the way,” Britten said.

  Julian smirked.

  “I can help with that,” he said. He took a step back and ducked his head into the hallway. “Hey, Kyle – come over here.”

  Trask was in the room so quickly it was as though he had been waiting for the invitation. He eyed the room hungrily as though deciding who to threaten first.

  “Matt and Tristan are having some trouble getting Jack to move,” Julian told him easily. “I thought you could help.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Hold on –” Sanders said, flinging out an arm as Trask advanced on Jack. “We can’t go getting into a fight. There’s something more serious going on here.”

  “Well, tell us what it is, then, Matt – because you’ve been blubbering for the past ten minutes.”

  “I – I really think that I should go get the administrators. They need to hear this.”

  “Hear what?” Britten asked. “What’s on that desk?”

  He moved to shove past Jack, but Jack blocked him once again.

  “I wasn’t aware that my room was some sort of forum open for discussion.”

  “No, talking things out isn’t really how you do things, is it, Hadler?” Trask said. “You’d rather just solve your problems through force?”

  “Is that an invitation?” Jack asked. He glared at the other students in the room with such animosity that everyone but Trask took a step back.

  “You think you can get all of us, do you?” he said. “Is that your plan? Is that what you do when you’re holed up in here? Think up the best way to do away with anyone who bothers you?”

  “It’s crossed my mind a few times.”

  Sanders made another movement by the door as his attention was torn away by someone in the hallway.

  “Oh, good, Jacobson,” he said, waving the huge lacrosse player into the room. “I need you to go downstairs and call in some administrators. We’ve got a situation here. Better yet, have Brody do it: he knows the protocol –”

  “Chris, just in time,” Trask cut in. “I was just about to teach Jack a little lesson ... care to join?”

  The lacrosse player looked around the room with a frown, and Sanders quickly attempted to divert his attention back to his set of rules.

  “That’s certainly not necessary,” he said. “This is not some opportunity for your childish revenge, Trask – this is much bigger than that –”

  “I’d like to know what’s so big, exactly,” Julian interrupted. “Since you’re so concerned, Matt, it’s only right that we all know, right?”

  Sanders blubbered in response. In the momentary distraction, Trask seized Jack and shoved him out of the way. Though he quickly scrambled up again, Trask had already reached the desk and seized the folder.

  “What the fuck ...?” He lifted the photos in front of his face in pure shock, and Julian pushed through the others to see what they were of. Jack made a move as though to rip it out of their hands, but the damage was already done. He threw me a panicky look that I could only mirror in response.

  “Is this ...?” Julian looked up from the photos after a long moment. “Is this ... Miss Mercier?”

  He gaped at Jack in sickened revulsion before looking at me.

  “Did you know about this?” he asked.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  “So you’re both in on it?” He bore his eyes into me with such intent that I thought a hole might burrow through my skin. I slowly turned so that I was half-hidden by Jack. “Fuck. I mean – fuck.”

  The others were at a further loss for words than he was, and he shook his head for several moments of silence as he looked between us.

  “I mean, I guess I should have known,” he said at last. “After that whole thing with lighting the opossum on fire ... We thought that was all Jack’s idea, but I guess it really was both of you. You’re both fucked.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said again. “I mean, it’s nothing bad – we’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Julian said flatly. “Come on, Enim. You seriously can’t mean that.”

  “No, he does,” Trask said. “I told you, Julian. One’s as bad as the other. You can’t have expected him to live in the same room and not know about all this.”

  “Just get out,” Jack snapped, unable to contain his resentment of the other two any longer. “Go on – get out. Before I make you.”

  “I think that we should all leave,” Sanders said. “Wynne, hand over the folder. I’ll get it to the administrators, and they’ll sort this whole thing out –”

  “No,” Trask said angrily. “What’re they going to do? Everyone knows.”

  “Exactly,” Sanders said. “So let’s just get out of here and let them take care of it –”

  “I think we should take care of it – properly,” Trask said. “We’ve all seen what type of stuff they get away with. They killed Miss Mercier, and all they might get is a slap on the wrist –!”

  “We didn’t kill her!”

  “It certainly looks like you did.”

  “Why?” Jack said furiously. “Why would we do that?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Julian said. “You were always obsessed with her – everyone knew it. You’d wait for her after class, follow her around, walk her home ...”

  “That’s called liking someone, Julian,” I said. “He wouldn’t kill someone he actually liked!”

  “Course he would. She probably got tired of it ... told him to back off. Or maybe he just got jealous. Either way, he snapped and ...”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. A collective shiver ran over the group, but Jack remained very still. His expression was hard and set. I couldn’t read what was going on behind his eyes: they were so dark that the irises were indistinguishable from the pupils.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said quietly.

  “Maybe ... maybe you didn’t mean to, Hadler,” Sanders said as he took a step back. “Maybe it was a mistake, or it went too far ...”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Julian said. “We all know Jack’s violent – we’ve always known. I know tons of people who could attest to that. Me included.”

  “Getting into fights isn’t the same as killing someone,” I said. “And having the file doesn’t prove anything, either!”

  “But you know what does, Enim?” Julian said. “The fact that everyone knows you two were sneaking about looking for something. Porter told me how you two went into the woods a few weeks back, and he heard you talking about it, too.”

  “Porter’s a joke. He’d say anything to get back at me –”

  “Funny, it seems like a lot of people feel that way,” Julian said. “Is that how you two were planning to get out of this? Having everyone too afraid to say anything? I can see how you’d think that would work. You’re each as unstable as the next.”

  An impenetrable silence came o
ver the room, and the last of the hope that I had been holding onto drained from me as the disbelieving expressions became definite. Jack’s cheeks slowly sucked in as he bit down on the insides of them, and I shut my eyes in incredulity of what they were all so eager to believe.

  “Hadler,” Sanders said after a long moment. “Do you ... want to say anything?”

  Jack slowly lowered his eyes away from Julian’s face. They gazed at a blank spot on the floor instead.

  “Get out,” he said quietly.

  “Excuse me?” Sanders said.

  “Get out of my room.” His eyes snapped back up to the building monitor’s face. “Get out. Now.”

  His voice broke the quiet with a shattering speed. Several of the students jumped, but no one moved away from the door. Trask took a step forward and looked down at Jack, his nose an inch away from Jack’s hairline, as he continued to stare at him with contempt.

  “I say we don’t wait for the police,” Trask said lowly. “I say we take care of this right now.”

  Sanders put his hands between them and tried to break them apart.

  “No, Trask – we’re not going to do anything. We need to contact the administrators, and they’ll need to search the premise –”

  “Let’s search it ourselves,” Trask said, throwing off Sanders’ arm. “I bet there’s tons more proof right here in this room – starting with the murder weapon!”

  He shoved Jack out of the way and started further into the room. Jack reacted immediately: grabbing Trask by the forearms, he swung him back in the direction of the door where he collided with Julian. Sanders cowered back as the two of them stumbled back into the wall.

  “So you are hiding something!” Trask said, a malicious glint in his eyes as he straightened back up. “Where is it, Hadler? Where’s the knife?”

  He shoved through us and went to my bed, a look of deranged hunger on his face. His hands pulled out the drawers to my bedside table and dresser and overturned the contents, sending the neatly organized books and clothing to the floor in a stream of movements. Finding nothing, he stared down at the neatly made bed for a good few seconds before reaching down and overturning it. The mattress gave way and smacked against the wall, sending a stream of orange medication bottles to the floor as it went. Several of the bottles broke and pills cascaded to the floor, and my stomach plummeted as I pressed myself up against the opposite wall to get away from them.