Chapter 16
“It’s a doll. It’s a doll. It’s a doll,” Theo promises me.
He displays the head in his hands, waving the plastic ball that connects it to the missing body in my face.
“It’s not real, Amity.”
I’ve managed to stop screaming—mostly because my throat feels like it’s been scoured with sandpaper and knives—but my heart hasn’t quite caught up. I suck in a few slow, steady breaths. They don’t help much, though. Everything still feels like it’s spinning.
Theo is crouched in front of me. I snatch the doll head out of his hands and toss it across the room. The thwack it makes as it hits something is incredibly satisfying. “Can we get out of here, please?”
He throws a longing gaze over his shoulder. I suddenly want to find more cobwebs and mush them into his hair, because I know what this look means. He found more “evidence.”
“It was cold over there too,” he says.
“Because it’s a drafty old house.” Grabbing my flashlight, I pull my foot to me and inspect my ankle. “What the hell grabbed me?”
“That extremely terrifying piece of rope.” Theo trains his light on it so I can see a coil of dirt-stained cord in the middle of the floor.
I slap his arm gently. “It felt like a hand in the dark.” Just like cold spots probably feel like so much more when the vibes are right. For once, I keep my thoughts to myself, though. I’m not sure why, but this doesn’t seem like the moment for it.
Theo flops down beside me. He scoots closer. “Are you hurt?” He examines my ankle and arm, then uses his knuckles to brush a few errant pieces of cobweb off my elbow.
“A little sore, but I’ll be fine.” I lift my flashlight and pan it slowly over the room. I will not be caught off guard by any other unexpected treasures down here.
In the corner, not far from where Theo was checking for cold spots, I see what looks like a bunch of papers stuffed in a gap between the stones in the wall. “What’s that?” Slowly, I push myself to my feet.
After a thorough check for rope, decapitated dolls, and any other unpleasant surprises, I kneel down and drag the bundle out. Angling the light over them, I flip through the documents.
The top sheets look relatively recent: mailer ads, pieces of newspaper, a page from a book. (Forget ghosts—what monster is ripping apart books?!) As I move them around, cotton stuffing tumbles out. “This is some kind of nest.”
“I love that you don’t care about the cold spots, but you’re fascinated by a pile of garbage,” Theo quips. He’s across from me in the only corner of the basement we haven’t explored yet, his thermometer aimed and ready.
“Because some creature nesting in the house could be an actual danger.” Beneath the next layer—this one a handful of blank notebook paper—is a bunch of acorns. “Dale,” I mumble.
“Your imaginary squirrel buddy?”
“He is not imaginary.”
“True. He’s more like five different squirrels.”
I open my mouth to describe Dale’s very distinct battle scars for a second time, but my jaw snaps shut as I scan the last few pages.
The paper is old. Really old. Thank god for the damp air in here or it would have disintegrated a long time ago.
The writing on it has faded, but it is still legible.
I shove my glasses higher up on my nose and hold the first leaf of it close to my face so I can read it more easily in the dark.
Harmony was the first to speak from the book. Her voice trembled as a sinner’s might at mass. She was the nonbeliever, but she was so afraid.
The rest of the diary entry is missing, half the words bisected by tiny teeth marks.
There are other pages, though. And each one makes me more and more certain of what I’m looking at.
“Theo, these are from Mercy’s diary.”
Rehoboth College’s library is open late on Fridays.
As soon as I confirm this online, Theo is clocking out on his phone, and I’m yelling to my mother that I’m going to check out the campus with him.
She calls out a question, but I let the door slam behind me so she knows I’m gone.
The last thing I need is her making more insinuations about Theo and me. I swear, she’s worse than Taylor.
At the thought of my best friend, I swipe open the message app on my phone. Since July hit, one of us texts a countdown every day in anticipation of her arrival in August. It’s my turn today.
Amity: 28 DAYS!
She replies immediately with a fireworks emoji, and I feel my limbs and lungs loosen a little.
Meeting Arden and Theo has definitely helped me feel less lonely here, but no one else can be Taylor.
After seeing her pretty much daily for most of my life, her absence is like a phantom ache in my bones.
Always there. Always lingering. I can’t wait to have her here, in the same place, with me again.
I sneak a glance at Theo as I tuck my phone into my pocket.
He’s backing his truck out of my driveway, his brow furrowed in concentration.
His dark hair dances in his green eyes and he keeps swatting the strands away like they’re mosquitoes.
That urge to brush it away for him flares in my insides and I shove my hands under my legs before they can betray me.
He shoots me a goofy smile as if he can feel my stare.
“Do you think these are from the same diary as the one at the library?” I grabbed a folder from my room before we left to try to protect the pages. (I am, after all, an aspiring archivist.)
He eases the truck to a stop at a light and cuts his eyes to me. “The handwriting is definitely the same. And there are a ton of pages missing from the journal. Mostly at the end.”
As far as I can tell, they are from six separate entries. None of them are whole, thanks to Dale. Imagine if they’re the missing ones. That would be so cool. Like we’ve unearthed the missing pieces of a puzzle.
“What do you think this book is Mercy keeps mentioning?” Theo asks. It comes up in almost all the pages we found in the basement.
I bite my lip, thinking for a second. “We’re talking late 1600s, right?”
He nods.
I rack my brain for historical facts about that era. Then it hits me, and I slap a hand to my forehead before I can think about how weird that will look to him. This is Massachusetts. “I wonder if it’s witchcraft related.”
Mercy never mentions the words magic or spells or witchcraft, but she talks about power and making things happen. By this time, the impact of the Salem Witch Trials likely had spread to the southern parts of Massachusetts, so Mercy may have omitted those words on purpose. “Listen to this.”
Harmony’s trepidation astounded me. If I am to be honest, it summoned a blaze of anger in me as well.
We had been reading from the book for weeks to no avail, and finally it had worked.
Why did she look so uncertain? This was what we wanted.
I spoke my heart’s desire to the well—that my brother Levi be punished for eating my maple sugar candy—and three of his teeth fell out.
I believe that he will not seek out sweets that aren’t his again.
“The well,” Theo pipes in.
I snort. “I bet Levi had cavities from the candy. They didn’t exactly have dentists back then.
” I flip carefully through the other pieces of paper.
“Every entry is about something the girls asked for. And they are always ‘reading from the book.’ ” I add some air quotes around the phrase.
“It seems only logical that they were trying to cast spells. In fact—” I tap one of my hands against my leg.
The rhythm helps me get my thoughts in order when they’re running a little wild.
It’s normally something I try not to do in public because I know how odd it must look, but as usual, I forget to care around Theo.
Though I’m starting to wonder if it is less that I don’t care, and more that I don’t feel like I need to with him.
I don’t let myself dwell on the difference as I continue. “It’s quite possible Harmony and Mercy thought the well contained the devil.” Carousing with the devil was one of the major accusations made at most witch trials. My cheeks warm at the touch of Theo’s gaze. “What?” I demand.
I look over to find him positively beaming. “You seem excited.”
“This is history.”
“And the supernatural.”
“Only if you believe any of it happened for real. Which I don’t.” I close the folder and run my hand over the smooth card stock. “But this is the actual handwriting of a person who actually lived here in the 1600s. It’s as close as we can get to being there.”
Theo doesn’t seem to hear my rebuttal. He’s too busy grinning. The apples of his cheeks have gone rosy, and there’s a little color at the tips of his ears. “What?” I ask again.
“You’re such a nerd.” He says it like it’s the best thing I could ever be.
I hate how gooey and warm that makes me feel. He’s just eased the truck into Rehoboth College’s guest parking lot, so I immediately throw open the door and slide out.
“Better a nerd than a superstitious ghost boy,” I declare. Then I shut the door before he can respond.
I did a lot of reading about Rehoboth College online, but it’s a whole different experience seeing it in person.
If most of Harlow’s Rest embraces its colonial roots, RC strives to look as quintessentially collegiate as possible.
The buildings are brick with white trim and columns, spread out among green grassy sitting areas.
The library sits at the northern point of a quad with a bubbling fountain at its center, and purple-and-gray banners displaying the school’s crest wave from poles and lamps that line the concrete walkways.
The library looks like a castle, with archways framing the entrance and the upper stories sliced up by turrets.
An extension juts out at its right side.
Though it is also made of brick with rust-colored shale roof tiles, this part of the library is iced with glass, large windows marching around most of the perimeter.