Chapter 16
CONNER
My heart hasn’t stopped racing. Possibly because there are no identifying markers of these men in blank No Face masks.
Jude has my hand, and I’m hanging on tightly, just to make sure he doesn’t blend into the crowd and I lose track of him.
I’m fairly confident Arek is to my right somewhere.
It was his voice when he crouched beside me.
The hall we walk down is dark, but not nearly as pitch black as the one I’d been down previously before stepping out from behind the portrait. A detail that can’t be overlooked is the fact that the corridor we travel now isn’t covered in dust. It’s used often.
Our footsteps, mixed with the sound of shuffling cloaks, are the only noise that surrounds us. There’s no more screaming. Not as we travel through halls or pass through rooms.
Not until we turn down a darker passage, and hear a voice. A constant stream of words, though at first I can’t make them out. It’s the tone that touches me. Fear.
We catch up to the three who left us previously, before the one stating they were going to see Matty. One turns, and I get the distinct impression that they’re frowning, though the mask remains blank as always.
The masked figure, who I think is Arek, wraps an arm around my waist and tugs me to his side. Jude yanks me back.
“Hands off, Van Doren,” Jude says.
Arek’s laughter is low. The kind that you imagine hearing through dark shadows. The kind that haunts nightmares. Arek has always had a frightening aura surrounding him. It’s the thing that kept me from hanging around him much at school.
Which makes me feel like an ass now. If I’m remembering the order of masked faces who came toward me, Arek was the first to come to my defense with Jude. Maybe I owe him an apology.
Thoughts of Arek drift away as the rambling, fear-filled voice becomes clearer.
“No, no, no. Please don’t. Don’t tell anyone. Leave the bodies there. Leave them. No, no. No, please.”
We come around the corner, and our group joins another.
I feel almost as if we’re looking at the set of a play.
One side of the entire room is open to the stone tunnel, but the room itself is set up just like a bedroom.
There’s a window with lights behind it, as if I’m looking out at a city.
A small table and chairs. An electric fireplace. A large, sturdy four-poster bed.
A man is on the floor with his back to us, knees bent to his chest. He looks like he’s trying to get away from something. Staring at nothing as he shakes his head.
“No. No one can know about the bodies. They’re bad. They’re rotting. No!”
He stops abruptly and twists to look at us. Terror fills his eyes, and he screams. The familiar scream I’ve heard echoing through the underground. Apparently, this entire tunnel system has great acoustics. Sound—screams—travels far.
One of the men in the front moves forward when the man starts screaming. Bile rises in my stomach. What did they do to him that makes him so afraid of their masks?
The man approaching pushes the mask up and off his head, tossing it aside as he drops to his knees beside the screaming man. Liam. He takes the man’s face in his hands and attempts to calm him down.
“Look at me, Matty. Look at me. It’s okay, baby. No one is here to hurt you. No one will ever hurt you. I promise. Look at me, sweetheart. There you go.”
“Liam,” Matty says, and he bursts into tears. “They’re going to tell on us. They’re going to show everyone where the bodies are.”
“No, baby,” Liam says. He drops onto his ass and brings Matty into his lap. “The bodies are gone. You’re safe. I promise.”
Matty shakes his head. “They know where you moved them, Liam. They know.”
Chills race along my body, making every single hair stand on end. He’s talking about murder. Multiple. Bodies. I swallow, not daring to look anywhere else but at Matty and Liam.
I jump slightly when Liam looks up and meets my eyes as he gently rocks Matty in his arms, still reassuring him in a quiet, calming tone. Is his stare a warning? This could be you.
Matty stops rambling, but Liam continues to assure him until Matty sighs. “Liam,” he whispers, and his tone changes entirely.
“Hey, baby,” Liam answers, running his hands through Matty’s curls.
“You came back.”
Liam flinches. “Yes, of course, I did.”
Matty sighs. “Can we go home now?”
“Soon, baby,” Liam says. I hear the lie in his voice, even if Matty doesn’t.
“Are you going to stay the night, Liam?” Matty asks. “It’s frightening down here all alone.”
Liam nods. “Yes. I’m staying with you for a while.”
Matty smiles and rests his head on Liam’s shoulders. “Will you tell the ghosts to go away?” he murmurs.
Liam looks at us. “Go. Please.”
Matty looks in our direction, his shoulders tensing. Then his eyes meet mine—the only one without a mask and cloak. He stares. “Who are you? Are you a ghost?”
I swallow the lump in my throat.
“He’s a friend,” Liam says.
“A friend,” Matty repeats. A beat passes before he sits up, picking up his head to look more fully at me. “Will you come and visit me, friend?” There’s a hint of a teasing smile. His eyes shimmer.
“Uh…” I look at Jude.
“We can visit Matty,” Jude murmurs.
I look at Matty and nod.
Matty turns his head, as if there’s someone sitting immediately to his right.
His eyes come back to mine. “They say you haven’t killed anyone.
You’re the only one without blood on your hands,” Matty says.
Unlike his rambling terror, this is conversational.
Matter of fact. The air comes whooshing from my lungs when he adds, “They say they almost killed you, too. Just like me.”
Another wave of chills races along my body. I stare at Matty, unsure what to make of this statement. He’s right. How did he know that? He was raving out of his mind when we got here. Who could have told him that?
Matty smirks. “The ghosts of their victims talk to me,” he says and then leans back into Liam’s shoulder. “Come visit me, friend.” He closes his eyes, and I think we’re dismissed. Right up until he says, “Conner?”
I freeze in my tracks. “Yeah?”
He grins. “Just proving to you that the ghosts are real, Conner. Come back later.”
His eyes remain closed as I stare. Ghosts? He can’t be serious. I look at Liam, who’s still watching me. As if he’s wearing his mask still, his expression is blank. So much different from when we met, when he introduced himself to me in the hall during a confrontation with Reynold.
Jude tugs my hand, and I follow, feeling almost as if I’m floating outside of my body. What just happened? What the hell did I just witness?
This entire afternoon must be a dream. None of this happened. It’s far too… surreal to be real.
Silently, we weave our way through tunnels and rooms until the wall opens through a hidden door and we’re deposited into a closet. The cloaks and the masks are left behind, hung up on pegs. The group of us exits the closet into a bedroom.
Now I see faces. Jude, Arek, Orev, Paisley, Zephyr, and Darwin. I’m guessing the man who dragged Reynold off must be the remaining Van Doren—Axl.
Paisley smiles. She leans up on her toes and kisses my cheek. Her hand pats my chest, right over my heart, and then she leaves the room. Everyone follows without a word.
Jude’s hand flexes around mine. “Let’s go,” he says quietly.
I’m feeling a little numb, so I don’t say anything. I’m not sure which moment in the past couple of hours has been the most startling. Frightening. Fascinating?
He brings me to the room we share and shuts the door, flicking the lock behind us. I stare at the lock before meeting his eyes. “Should I be afraid?”
Jude kisses me, bringing me into his arms, his hand on the back of my head in a single gesture of possession that makes my chest warm. “No,” he says in a tone that leaves no room for doubt. “You’re mine.”
“Are you going to tell me what just happened, or are we going to pretend that a group of masked men weren’t about to murder me?”
He sighs. “It’d be best if you pretended none of that happened.”
“Right.”
“Conner…”
“Who told Matty my name?”
Jude leans back enough to meet my eyes. “Okay, we’ll talk.” He drags me to the couch and pushes me down, but he doesn’t join me. “Matty first? No.” He stops pacing to look at me. “Tell me what happened between you and Reynold.”
“I admit that I was asking about the tattoos in a roundabout way. I was sure they meant something more than just a random element taken from the architecture of the castle adopted as the mascot of the boat club.”
“Conner,” he says, weariness on his face.
“But I wasn’t snooping. Arek and Zephyr echoed the same thing about theirs as you did.
I accepted that. I wasn’t looking for something to disprove those claims. I was wandering around the castle, though.
I ended up in a room—the door was wide open—and standing in front of a fireplace when Reynold came in.
I wasn’t in drawers or poking around. I hadn’t even taken books from the shelves or anything.
I was standing there, tracing over the carvings in the wood with my finger. ”
“And the dickwad had an issue with that,” Jude guesses.
“Of course. He ran his mouth. It’s clear he’s not used to actual physical confrontations.
He came at me, and I moved out of the way as he threw his punch, so he slammed his fist into the mantle.
However, I was done with his bullshit, and I intended to let him land his next hit so I could beat his ass and be done with it.
He shoved me, and I fell through the damn bookshelf.
The shock on his face convinces me it wasn’t actually intentional.
He didn’t shut the wall; I did. He tried to open it again.
I heard him screaming and yelling at me, banging on the shelves.
Then… he stopped, and I was left in the dark. ”
“Why didn’t you go back through the door?”
“When I stood, the space between the walls became lined with torches lighting themselves like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t a thin space where you need to shimmy sideways to get through, but a wide hall with floor-to-ceiling shelves lining both sides.
No one had been there in ages, based on the spiderwebs and the thick layer of undisturbed dust. But to answer your question, I couldn’t find any indication of where I’d actually gone through the wall, so I couldn’t very well go back. ”
“You followed the hall until you reached the ceremony room.”
“Basically, yeah.”
Jude nods. He takes a seat beside me. “Liam’s family has been members of the Society of the No Face for two generations prior to him.
Both parents. They shared everything, including this secret.
Liam wanted the same for him and Matty. However, Matty couldn’t get through the initiation, and…
it kind of broke him. He knows things that he can’t repeat.
The rules are simple—if you know our secrets and you’re not a member, you must be silenced.
Liam begged us to spare Matty, so we did.
But Matty knows things, and he’s not always in the right frame of mind to keep those things to himself, so he stays here.
Where his ramblings are only heard by us and the walls. ”
“And the ghosts.”
He snorts. “And the ghosts. Which none of us have seen or heard, but fuck, the things Matty knows! It’s difficult not to believe that he talks to ghosts.”
“He knew my name.”
“None of us said your name. Including Liam. So yeah, the process of elimination suggests the ghosts told him who you are and why you were there.”
“That’s… unsettling.” I glance around. Are there ghosts here?
“It truly is,” Jude agrees.
“The society—”
Jude shakes his head. “No, Conner. You need to forget it and never, ever speak of it again. You can’t know more. Promise me you’ll never ask again.”
Sighing, I nod. “Yeah. I promise.”