Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  While they unpacked the car, Dan could feel Jordan’s eyes boring holes into the back of his head. He owed them both an explanation, he knew, but where to start? He hated to scare them any more tonight, especially before they went to sleep in a tent.

  He wasn’t even sure if his friends would believe what he had to say. He had never been completely up front with them about his ability to see things. There’d been a time last year when the stress had left them all seeing and hearing things that weren’t quite there, but that was nothing like what Dan had come to think of as his power. He hadn’t just seen echoes of the past as visions—Dan had lived them, even interacted with them.

  And if Dan didn’t come clean to his friends during this trip, he might never get another chance.

  Under the glow of floodlights from the parking lot, they set to work putting up their tent, a job that Abby delegated expertly. Dan hammered the stakes into the moist ground a little harder than was strictly necessary, but it felt good to hit something. In just over half an hour, the tent was as finished as it was ever going to be.

  “Are you okay?” Abby asked, watching Dan unroll his sleeping bag. “You were hammering pretty hard there.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, shrugging off the question.

  “You’re obviously not.”

  He didn’t know what to say, and he hesitated just a bit too long.

  “Fine, you know what? Don’t tell me.”

  Abby climbed into her sleeping bag, still in her clothes. Last night she’d used one of the campground port-a-potties to change into pajamas, but tonight Dan suspected her anger was at least partly to mask her fear.

  “I know you’re ticked, Abby,” Dan said, lighting one of their Coleman lamps and sitting cross-legged on his bedding. A light gust of wind rattled the tent fabric, and distant campers laughed, one of them howling loudly at the moon.

  “It’s not even a full moon,” Abby grumbled, turning onto her side and away from Dan. Jordan gave him an encouraging look, though of course he knew only a small piece of what he was encouraging.

  “Just let me explain, okay?” Dan sighed and closed his eyes, trying to figure out the best way to put this. “You’re right. I’m not fine. There’s . . . Look, I want this trip to be fun, okay? I really do, and I wouldn’t spoil it for no reason. It’s been amazing so far. Being with you two is . . . Well, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had. I didn’t want to bring anything up that would ruin the mood.”

  “So don’t,” she said woodenly.

  “Hear him out,” Jordan said.

  With a big, huffing sigh, Abby turned over, just her eyes and hair visible above the lip of the forest-green sleeping bag. “Fine. I’m hearing you out. Explain.”

  Dan twisted and reached for his backpack, removing the thin, faded folder that held basically all he knew about his parents.

  “Okay, well, part one is—I found something,” he said, pulling out the pile of papers with shaking fingers. He handed it across to Jordan, and Abby wriggled out of her sleeping bag enough to read over his shoulder. “That was all in Professor Reyes’s files. I went over everything in there with a fine-tooth comb, obviously, but there wasn’t much.”

  Abby pushed her dark, feathery hair away from her face, squinting to read the police report on Dan’s dad. She froze.

  “Is this . . . is this your father? God. I had no idea, Dan.”

  “Neither did Jordan until I mentioned something at dinner,” Dan murmured. Abby had taken the papers from him and began reading everything carefully. Jordan didn’t try to stop her.

  Abby picked up the postcard, the brief contents of which Dan had memorized months ago. The sepia-toned picture showed a looming brick building—one that wouldn’t have been out of place on New Hampshire College’s campus. The only parts of the address left were “HIGH STREET” and a city that looked like ingt n or lington, and there was a message written in pencil that had been mostly worn away, too.

  love you very

  risk, but there is always

  Dan’s fingers clamped down hard on the postcard as he pulled it carefully out of Abby’s hands. He wanted to believe that this was his mother’s handwriting, and that maybe this postcard had been meant for him—that his parents had had to go. That he wasn’t an accident or an afterthought.

  A tight, cold feeling settled over his chest. Nine months after finding all this, Dan still wanted to know more. He looked at the front of the postcard again, running his fingertips lightly over the image. Someone had scribbled across the picture, but it was gibberish.

  Abby had moved on to the heavily creased and stained map—a foldout road map of the United States, printed in 1990. A thin black line had been drawn in pen from New Orleans to Alabama, then Missouri, then up to Chicago, and finally to Pittsburgh.

  The site of that little dot where the line ended jarred him. His town. His city. The year, 1990, wasn’t so far off from when he was born in 1996. In the story he’d constructed based on the evidence, his parents had been criminals on the run. That’s why they’d left him. Dan tensed, closing his eyes and wishing he had never found the folder in the first place.

  “Dan . . .”

  The tone in her voice was one of discovery, but right at this moment, he didn’t care if Abby had noticed something he hadn’t, he just wanted to be quiet and forget—to find a way to let go of his frustration before it sabotaged the trip.

  “What?” he forced out.

  “There’s something on the back of this map,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Dan watched as they both looked at the message, handwritten in black marker and double-underlined.

  FIND THEM

  “So you think Professor Reyes wrote this? I still don’t understand what she wanted with your parents,” Jordan said, frowning and studying the map.

  “She didn’t want them, necessarily. She just wanted a living member of the warden’s bloodline,” he said. “I guess I was easier to find. Hell, I practically fell into her lap last summer.”

  He watched his friends share a look, and he answered before the questions started pouring out.

  “So that’s part two. I know we’ve joked about it in the past—how the weird connection between me and the warden went a little beyond your usual great-uncle–great-nephew relationship. But what I never told you guys is that Professor Reyes was after me because she thought I could see things from the past. Like, things related to the warden.”

  Silence.

  Then, finally, Jordan asked, “And . . . can you?”

  “Sometimes, yes.” There was really no sugarcoating it. “I don’t know what brings it on; it’s not something I can control. Last summer I would get these waking dreams, almost like I was seeing things from the past through the warden’s eyes. At the time I thought it was part of my disorder somehow. But then at Halloween, I saw things the warden couldn’t possibly have seen.”

  Abby drummed her fingers on top of the family tree, looking as if she was thinking very carefully about how to respond. When she spoke, it was not the reaction Dan was expecting. “Is this why you applied to NHCP to begin with? To find out about your family? It’s not like I can throw stones—I was there looking for my aunt. But since we’re being honest, I have to say, ever since you told us about being related to the warden, I’ve wondered if you didn’t go looking for him last summer—if these visions you’re talking about weren’t part of some plan to bring him back.”

  “What? No! I swear to both of you, I didn’t know anything about the warden or my parents when I first got to NHC,” Dan insisted. “I don’t know if it was coincidence or fate that brought me to Brookline last summer, but I was there, and I just . . . I don’t want to get to a place ever again where I’m keeping secrets from you guys because I’m scared, okay? So there’s something else I need to tell you. The third and final part.”

  He pulled out his phone and quickly brought up the message, shuddering when he found it was still there in his inbox. A part of him had
been convinced it would be gone the next time he went looking.

  “Here,” he said. “Look at this.”

  “Holy shit,” Jordan whispered, almost dropping Dan’s phone when he glimpsed the message. “That’s messed up.”

  “I think I saw Micah, too, just before we left NHC. It was so quick; I hoped it was my mind playing tricks. I hoped it was over.”

  Abby leaned across to make use of the lamp, taking the phone from Jordan and gasping. “But how is this possible? I thought they locked down accounts of . . . of those who have passed.”

  Dan could tell she was about to say “of dead people” but felt it was too harsh. Harsh or not, it was the truth.

  Abby hugged her knees to her chest. “Unless you’re saying you think this has something to do with your visions? But then how could we see it, too?”

  “Exactly. It has to be a prank, right?” Dan asked, maybe emphasizing that desperate little right too much.

  “It certainly could be,” Abby said sternly. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the phone. “Someone’s sick idea of a joke.”

  “It’s like the cloud or whatever,” Jordan chimed in, nodding. “You can hack anything these days.”

  “God, Dan, this is a lot to handle.” Abby pushed the phone away, finally looking up to meet his eyes. “Part of me can’t believe this is really happening.”

  He gave them a wobbly smile. “Business as usual, I guess.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Jordan replied, clapping him on the back. “I think you should message that person back and tell them to knock it off. Or report it! There has to be a way to get it taken care of.”

  He wasn’t even touching the rest of what Dan had said, and Dan knew that was Jordan’s way of saying it was fine. He’d moved on to solutions, always the problem solver.

  “Jordan is right,” Abby said, matching Dan’s flimsy smile. “Report it. Then I bet the messages will stop.”

  “Yeah, obviously,” Dan echoed. “I’ll just report it.” He picked up his phone, stowing it in his backpack before reaching to turn out the light. “Then the messages will stop.”

  The monotony of the Alabama countryside was almost a welcome departure from the previous night’s excitement. Dan stared out at the green and yellow pastures that unfolded around them, split up only occasionally by sudden strips of forest. Tiny farms dotted the horizon here and there, small enough to look like little Monopoly houses, too distant to look like real homes.

  None of them had much to say this morning. Dan opened a Wi-Fi hotspot with his phone, and Abby propped Jordan’s laptop open on her legs, humming along to Jordan’s electronica while checking the route for where they were stopping next. The sound of her typing was soothing, almost like raindrops on a window, and Dan cuddled up to the side of the car, ready for a nap even though he’d hardly been awake two hours. Sleeping on the ground for two nights in a row hadn’t exactly done great things for his back.

  He was just about to drift off when Abby’s voice broke in from up front.

  “Check it out,” she called, pointing at the laptop screen. “I think I’ve found something.”

  “I can’t exactly look right now,” Jordan said. “Describe it for me?”

  Abby propped the laptop up on the center console and swiveled it to face Dan.

  “Look familiar?” she asked, clearly pleased with herself. Okay, but she had a reason to be, Dan thought, blinking in shock at the image on the screen. It was the now-very-familiar building from the postcard, only in color this time.

  “That’s . . . How did you do that?”

  “It wasn’t that hard, really,” she explained, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “The building in that photo was obviously either a hospital or a school, and I figured it had to be at least a little famous to be on a postcard. The letter in the caption looked more like an l than an h, so I figured it had to be Arlington and not Washington. At first I thought maybe it was an old hospital in Arlington, Virginia. But that wasn’t leading to any matches, so finally I tried searching for ‘Arlington school,’ and this was on the first page of results. It’s in Bessemer. Right near Birmingham.”

  “Wait—you’re telling me that school is in Alabama?” Dan felt a chill running up his arm. He could hardly believe it. He scrolled down past the picture to the caption underneath. Arlington School. Built in 1908, abandoned in the 1980s.

  “It’s not even that far,” Abby said. “We’d have to backtrack a little, but only two hours or so.”

  “Are you absolutely sure that’s a good idea?” Jordan said. “I mean, no offense, Dan, but we don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to digging around in the past. And I for one find this coincidence a little freaky.”

  Dan tried to keep the urgency out of his voice as he said, “I mean, I would like to head back and see this place, yeah. But only if that’s okay with you . . .”

  Jordan looked at him in the rearview mirror, then looked over at Abby, who was one step shy of batting her eyelashes.

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like Uncle Steve is too concerned about when we get there,” Jordan said. “Heck, the only person who misses me is my guild leader, Elanora, who keeps texting wanting to know when I’ll be back for the raids. . . . All right, fine.”

  “Awesome, thank you,” Dan said, no longer even the least bit sleepy. This was a break. This was a clue. He had given up thinking he would find anything new on his father and now this. . . . “It must have meant something to my parents, right? Why else would they have a postcard of some dinky old school? I want to see this place in person.”

  “Uh-oh—looks like there’s one small problem.” Abby grimaced, rubbing the back of her neck and reading farther down the page. “They’ve started demolishing the building this summer. There might not be much of it left to see.”

  “Then I guess Jordan better step on it.”

  The school stood empty and watchful, a chain-link fence doing little to keep out the vandals that had ransacked the place. The vacant windows were streaked with bird droppings and graffiti. It was hard to imagine the place had ever been filled with students.

  A wide brick staircase led up to the main entrance, and a tumble of broken furniture and junk formed a landslide down to the street level. All three of them leaned against the car, staring up at the school.

  Dan held up the postcard, comparing the school in its prime to its now-dilapidated state.

  “I can see why they’re going to demolish it,” Abby said softly. “I’m just glad we managed to get here with daylight to burn.”

  “It doesn’t look safe to go inside.” Jordan stared down the block, studying the various approaches to the doors. No matter what route they took, it would involve trespassing. “I’m not sure where we’d even begin.”

  But now Jordan was back in problem-solving mode. He pushed away from the car and drifted up the sidewalk. “Maybe there’s a caretaker we can talk to. I’d really rather not go exploring and get shanked by hobos.”

  Up the hill, standing on the overgrown, weed-choked walkway, was a tall man, dressed in a rugged canvas jacket and jeans. “Like him,” Dan said, picking his way over to a gap in the fence.

  “Like who?” Jordan asked.

  “Hey!” Dan shouted. The man seemed not to hear him, continuing across the school’s littered courtyard and then disappearing around a corner. “Hey, do you take care of this place?”

  Dan ran to keep up, stumbling over tumbled stones and the broken-up desks and chairs mounded in a sharp, nail-studded obstacle course that led all the way to the boarded-up door. Dan glimpsed the man again, this time slipping around the left corner of the school. The man wasn’t running, and Dan easily caught up, flying around the corner and colliding with the stranger.

  Or he would have collided with him, if he hadn’t skidded right through him. Dan froze, feeling a cold wave of fright shiver down to his toes, a cold that persisted as the man backtracked and passed one more time through Dan’s physical form. Keeping p
ace with the vision, Dan looked up into the man’s face, seeing traces of his own nose, mouth, chin. . . . Was it possible? Was he really looking at . . .

  “Dad?”

  Dan really didn’t want this to be his father. In all his previous visions, he’d only ever seen people who were already dead.

  Not that he’d really held out hope of finding Marcus alive, but to have it confirmed like this nearly paralyzed him with terror all over again. Still, he followed as the ghostly man led him to a maintenance door around the back of the building. His father passed right through, leaving Dan to duck and weave through a few poorly nailed boards covering the doorway.

  His shirt snagged on one of the jagged edges of the four-by-fours, but he ignored it, hurrying to follow his father deeper into the school. Marcus’s clothes were out of fashion, or at least shabby, and Dan wondered when he was seeing—what time in his father’s life this imprint belonged to. The inside of the school was a bigger mess than the outside, but that seemed to have been the case in Marcus’s time, too, as he carefully dodged pieces of wall that had caved in and blocked certain corridors. He led Dan through to the moldering front entrance hall, where a pigeon dive-bombed for Dan’s head and made him shout in alarm.

  “You okay? Dan! Where did you go?” Abby’s shout echoed through the collapsed innards of the school.

  “I’m fine! I’ll be out in a minute,” he called back. At least he hoped that would be the case. The mold and bird droppings mingled to make an overpowering smell, and he grabbed his shirt and lifted the collar, burying his nose in the fabric to keep from gagging.

  Blistering paint peeled in long coils from the walls and ceiling. Dan’s father ducked through a sagging doorway and into what looked like a classroom beyond. Inside, he opened a closet door covered in graffiti.

  “We can’t stay,” Marcus said to nobody. “Just leave it. This place is such a disaster, and we don’t have time to pack everything. Do you really want to get caught here, Evie? Let’s go.”