Ominous (4 page)

“Okay, if there are no
other
new points of business,” I said, “then I’d say we’re adjourned!”

The convivial chatter started up as soon as the words were out of my mouth, and my friends began to gather up their things. Noelle clasped Vienna’s hands and hoisted her off the floor, while Amberly practically jumped Lorna Gross and Astrid, asking them to join her committee.

“You ready?” Ivy asked, lifting her long black hair out of her red coat and letting it fall down her back.

“Actually, I think I’m going to hang back for a little while,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder in what I hoped was a casual way. I had a plan for the evening, and it did not involve going back to campus.

Noelle paused near the door and cocked an eyebrow. I glanced away nervously. Maybe my gesture hadn’t hit the mark. “I don’t want to leave all these crumbs. We could attract mice.”

“Oh. Then I’ll help,” Ivy said.

She started to put her bag down again and I panicked. “No!” I blurted.

Both Ivy and Noelle were staring at me now with matching expressions of concern and confusion. Which was interesting, considering how much they hated each other. Noelle crossed her arms over her chest.

“It’s just … I kind of want to be alone,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to think about and I … I guess I’ve never told you guys this, but I like to clean while I think. It helps me relax.”

Ivy’s brow crease deepened, and for a moment I thought she would
put up a fight, but then Noelle turned, gently knocking Ivy with her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s leave the freak to her cleaning therapy.”

If anyone knew I really
did
have a lot to think about, it was Noelle. Apparently she was taking pity on me. Which kind of made me feel guilty about all the lying. Bad Reed.

“Okay,” Ivy said slowly. “But I don’t
love
the idea of you being out here alone.”

“I’ll be fine,” I promised her. “I’ve got my phone if I need anything.”

The two of them finally capitulated and followed after the others outside, everyone waving and shouting their good-byes as they slipped out into the night. When their voices had finally died away on the wind, I took a deep breath and looked around. Except for the few flickering candles, the chapel was dark. Some of the stained glass windows had been broken long ago, leaving behind jagged, incomplete mosaics, the stars winking outside their busted panes. The pews were polished and buffed—thanks to the members of my secret society—and the wood floors were swept clean, but high in the rafters there were still some heavy cobwebs and a stray bird’s nest.

Quickly blowing out all but one candle, I slipped my arms into Noelle’s white coat to guard against the chill of the basement, grabbed my messenger bag and the last candle, and walked to the office at the back of the building.

I placed my candle in the holder on the dust-covered desk, then walked to the bookcase on the west wall. Using both hands, I pried the bookcase away from the plaster. It swung open, letting out a
silence-splitting creak of protest. Behind it was the smaller, white paneled door with its brass knob and an old-fashioned keyhole. I tugged the key on its purple cord out of the pocket of my jeans. As I slid the key into the hole, I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure none of my friends had returned. Then I turned the key with a click, and the ice-cold doorknob turned easily in my grasp.

Frigid air rushed up from the basement, along with a musty yet somehow cozy smell that made me think of the basement of the Croton library. The dank room housed all the historical books, and older kids were always getting caught making out down there. I reached back for my candle and held it high in front of me as I descended the stairs, feeling a rush of excitement. I’d been looking forward to this moment all day long.

When my foot hit the concrete floor, I paused. My throat was dry as I looked around. The basement room was a perfect circle. Eleven chairs were set up to face the center, and at that center was the podium, plain and sturdy and made of wood. I walked around the room until I was positioned against the wall directly behind the rostrum. Then I whipped the skirt of Noelle’s coat into my lap to keep from soiling it, and sat.

Inhaling a bit of the musty air, I looked slowly around the room and smiled. Elizabeth Williams had hung out here. She’d been in this very room with Theresa Billings and Catherine White and all the other girls mentioned in the BLS book. I wished I knew what they looked like, and wondered why I’d never thought to try to dig up photographs of them before. They’d had cameras in 1915, hadn’t they? Tomorrow
I would have to check the Easton archives and see if I could find any photographs.

I tugged out the BLS book first and opened it to the second page, where each of the members of the first Billings Literary Society had signed their names. Then I slowly opened the book of spells. Near the front was a list of basic spells, and next to each was a little tick, as if someone had checked them off after completing them. Next to some items there were notes, written in a few different hands:

Third attempt successful
, or
Must be done with two sisters, holding hands
.

Some of these notes were in the same slanting script as the BLS book—there was the curled-down tail on the
y
’s and the flourish on the
s
’s. That small scroll to the
w
’s,
m
’s, and
n
’s. The handwriting belonged to Elizabeth Williams.

Carefully, I studied some of the other notes, my eyes flicking back and forth from the signature page in the BLS book to the book of spells. Suddenly, my heart caught. Some of the other notes had been written by Catherine White, Elizabeth’s best friend. Her lowercase
a
’s and
o
’s were perfectly rounded, almost like a child’s handwriting.

A shiver of satisfaction went through me, like when I figured out a calculus problem. I paged through the book of spells, glancing at some of the titles. The Forgetfulness Spell. The Swelling Tongue. Spell to Mend a Broken Heart. Then something caught my eye as I whipped past, and I slowly paged back. Written across the top of the page were the words
The Presence in Mind Spell
.

That handwriting was not Elizabeth’s, but it looked familiar. I glanced back at the list of signatures and picked it out right away. The strokes were thick and confident, the uppercase letters overly large. The spell had been written out by Theresa Billings.

“This is so freaking cool,” I whispered.

I looked around the room again, hugging myself against the cold. I imagined Theresa, Elizabeth, and Catherine at the podium, jotting down notes in the book. Had they really cast spells in this room? Had any of them worked? Was that even possible? Or was it a game to occupy their time?

Biting my lip, I flipped to the incantation near the front of the book of spells—the one that could supposedly turn a group of eleven regular girls into witches. I’d found it that afternoon at lunch, when I’d spent the period holed up in a study carrel at the back of the library. The directions were explicit. Eleven girls dressed in white were required. They were to stand in a circle, each holding a candle, and recite the incantation. A thrill of silly excitement went through me. If it required eleven girls in white to work, then it couldn’t do any harm for me to say it on my own, could it?

“Like it could do any harm anyway, loser,” I whispered to myself. “This stuff isn’t real.”

I took a deep breath and held it, squelching an embarrassed giggle. Then I moved my candle over the page and read.

“We come together to form this blessed circle, pure of heart, free of mind. From this night on we are bonded, we are sisters.” My voice shook with giddy mirth at my own childishness, but whatever. This
was fun. “We swear to honor this bond above all else. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister, we make this sacred vow.”

I heard a creak that stopped my heart, and suddenly a gust of wind shot through the circular room, swirling my hair up off my shoulders and extinguishing my candle. Heart in my throat, I scrambled to my feet, the books tumbling to the floor at my toes. The acrid, birthday-party smell of the candle’s smoke curled through my nostrils as heavy footsteps clomped down the stairs, every groan of the ancient planks like an arrow to my heart, every crack heightening my terror. I pressed my back against the wall, wondering if there was any way to use my candle as a weapon. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the candle flickered to life again. I stared at the flame, transfixed, my heart seized with fear.

How could that have possibly happened?

Just then, Noelle arrived at the foot of the stairs. Her hands braced the walls, level with her ears, and she looked at me with a wry expression.

“I knew it!”

“Noelle! You scared the crap out of me!” I blurted.

“Which you deserve!” she said, tromping across the room. “What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not really taking this stuff seriously.”

She wrested the BLS book from my hands and looked at it. “What are you, writing a term paper now?”

I grabbed the book back and, with a trembling hand, shoved the freaky candle at her. As I crouched on the floor, cramming the
books into my messenger bag, I took a few breaths to steady myself. Obviously the wind had gusted down the stairs when Noelle had opened the door. And as for the candle … it was just a faulty wick. Or one of those trick candles that could relight itself.

Except I’d never seen one of those that wasn’t birthday-cake-candle size.

“I was just messing around,” I improvised, shouldering my bag as I stood. “I was trying to figure out whether those Billings Literary Society girls really believed in this witchcraft crap.”

Noelle, to my surprise, looked interested. “And? Did they?”

“Some of them, I think,” I said, lifting my shoulders. For some reason, I didn’t want to name names. I felt like I’d be betraying the BLS girls somehow. Opening them up to Noelle’s ridicule. Which was, of course, ludicrous, since all of them had been dead for probably thirty years.

“Yeah, well, people were a lot more gullible back then,” Noelle said, turning and heading for the open doorway. “Come on. There’s still a mess upstairs and I am
not
hanging out here again if it’s infested with mice.”

“I’m right behind you,” I told her, keeping an eye on the candle, which she held up in front of her. She started up the steps, but I paused at the bottom, glancing around the room one last time.

It’s just a room
, I told myself.
Just like every other room at Easton
.

I lifted my foot and placed it on the first stair, and as I did I felt a light breeze against my face. I looked around. There were no openings in the stone wall. No windows anywhere, being that I was belowground.
Shrugging it off, I kept walking, but at the third step, I felt it again. And by the fifth it was stronger. By the seventh it was stronger still, the wind right in my face, slowing my progress. By the tenth step, the flame of the candle in Noelle’s hands had died, and by the twelfth, I had to squint my eyes to see. When I got to the top, I slammed the door behind me, breathless.

“Since when is that staircase a wind tunnel?” I asked.

Noelle’s carefully brushed hair stuck out from behind her ears, and some of her bangs stood up straight on her forehead.

“Must be that window,” Noelle said, gesturing at the pane behind the desk. The top was completely bare, as if someone had broken it, removed all the shards, and never replaced it. My insides squirmed as I stared at the bending and swaying branches of the trees outside.

“I don’t remember that being broken before,” I said.

“Well, it is now,” she replied casually. “Come on. Let’s clean up and get back to Pemberly. We need to talk guest list for your party.”

“Okay.”

I tried to sound as excited as she did, but as we walked out I took one last trembling look at the window, half expecting to see Elizabeth Williams’s ghost reaching out to me. I closed the door firmly behind me and jogged to catch up with Noelle.

If I really wanted a life with no drama, maybe it was time I stopped walking around in the middle of the night looking for it.

“Billings will only live on in you, Reed. You’re the only one who can set things right.”

My breath was a white cloud in front of my face. Stars twinkled merrily through the tangle of branches overhead. I stood in the center of a small clearing in the Easton woods, wearing nothing but my Penn State T-shirt and mesh Easton Soccer shorts.

“Billings must live on, Reed. The book of spells is real.”

Someone was speaking, but no one was there. The voice sent a warm, familiar tingle down my spine, but not from fear. It was almost as if I recognized the delicate tones. Like I’d heard them somewhere before.

“It’s real, and I can show you proof.”

A sudden movement in the corner of my vision stopped my heart. A young girl, about my age, stepped out of the trees. It was as if she’d materialized out of nowhere, out of the ether, but she wasn’t a ghost.
She looked solid and real and three-dimensional as she slowly, deliberately crossed the forest floor. She wore an old-fashioned dress with a blue plaid skirt and a darker blue wool jacket, the hood pulled up to cover her dark brown hair. Her eyes were green, kind of like my mother’s, and as she approached I realized she was almost my height, though far slimmer. I could have placed my hands around her tiny waist and I was sure my fingertips would have touched. She came within two feet of me, but I didn’t flinch. There was nothing threatening in her.