CHAPTER 33
T ick. Tick. Tick.
I hawked the clock, until at precisely ten-oh-eight, I headed out for Mel’s dorm room.
The hallways were never quiet, always bustling with late night study sessions.
The commons room at the end of the hallway buzzed with the same physics students cramming for another exam, just as they had the week before.
Each of them made obvious because they plastered the chalkboard with their equations and often yelled ‘ bazinga! ’ from The Big Bang Theory whenever they solved it correctly.
It was the only time the entire corridor smelled like weed, too.
When I reached Mel’s room, I only had to knock once before the door swung open, and she peered out into the hallway, looking left and right. A hard yank of my arm had me tumbling forward into the room.
“Hey, a simple come in would’ve worked.” I scowled, rubbing the raw spot where her nails had dug into my skin, and glanced around her room, significantly bigger than mine, with a small living room and a hallway that I presumed led to a bedroom.
Ignoring my complaint, she jerked her head for me to follow, and led me down the small hallway to a door she swung open on a bedroom, as I’d suspected.
What I hadn’t expected was for her to lead me to another door, a closet, where at its rear stood yet another small door.
“What in the wannabe Narnia is this?” I asked, staring at the frame which appeared to be half the size of a normal door.
“Decades ago, when the dorm was first built, it housed children, like an orphanage. The settlers were terrified of the savage monsters ,” she said in air quotes, “coming and taking the children in the middle of the night. So they built these little doorways leading to the cellars to hide them in the event of a raid.”
“I’m guessing the raids never happened.”
“You guessed right.” Hinges groaned as she opened the door on a creepy stone stairwell, and from the shelf of her closet, she nabbed an LED lamp. “C’mon. Gang’s waiting to meet you.”
“Gang?” Hopefully that wasn’t crazy talk for a pile of dead bodies.
I followed her down the staircase, where the air grew thicker and colder.
Rubbing my shoulders failed to keep the chill off my skin, and when we finally reached the bottom of the stairs, shivers wracked my bones.
“Jesus, you should’ve given me a heads up to wear a sweatshirt. ”
“Don’t be a wimp.” Tiny bells on her bohemian skirt clinked as she led me down a narrow corridor off the staircase that curved to the left.
I couldn’t help but think how freaking creepy it would’ve been to stumble upon something while wandering the passage alone. “What made you want to explore down here? I feel like this is the perfect place to hide dead bodies.”
An impish curve of her lips told me Mel definitely had a dark side as she glanced over her shoulder, leaving me to wonder if I was stupid for having followed after her. “The dead have stories,” she said. “Have you had any encounters yet?”
“What? Like, ghosts?” Of course I had–a man in a bird mask, though I hadn’t yet worked out if he was the result of too-little sleep, or real. Either way, I had no intentions of mentioning him.
“Yes. The whole campus is plagued with hauntings, but this building? It’s the worst.”
“Why is that? The Crixson Study?”
“In part, yes.” She kept on down the dark hallway, while my gaze wandered the ancient stone walls that seemed to close in on us, the deeper we ventured.
Again, I couldn’t imagine her exploring down there by herself.
“In addition to the experiments, it’s also where exorcisms were conducted on kids, back when the place was a monastery.
Apparently, some of the builders who worked on the university were superstitious about all that, so about a third of the crew left, and others refused to venture into these little passages, so they were never properly investigated and got sealed. ”
“The exorcisms …. Is that during the time of Dr. Stirling?”
“You’ve read about him?”
“Yes.” The memory of my readings and the tortures he inflicted certainly didn’t put me at ease, as we walked through the tunnels.
“So, in the mid-to-late seventeen-hundreds, the place was sort of a dumping ground for heretics and those accused of witchcraft. They sent anyone with mental illness here, as well, thinking they were possessed. In the early eighteen-hundreds, an asylum opened. That’s when things got really disturbing. ”
“How so?”
“They began torturing the patients, and discarded them in mass graves on what is now Bone Bay. These hideout tunnels became solitary confinement for a number of patients. Where they were starved and left to die.”
“Jesus. That’s messed up. How do you know all of this?”
She shrugged, running her hands over a stretch of wall that, when I looked closer, appeared to bear scratch marks in the stone.
“I spend way too much time reading. But also, there was an investigator back in the eighteen-hundreds, who disguised himself as a patient. Before he mysteriously disappeared, he apparently sent one of his friends encrypted journal entries that detailed the tortures he’d witnessed.
They’re part of the no access journals in the library. ”
“So, how did you get access? I work in that department and can’t get my hands on them.”
“My father is a massive donor for the library and chairman of the Board of Overseers. Administration and board members have access to just about anything. And Kelvin, but there’s no bargaining with him. He’s too much of a straight shooter.”
The corridor finally opened up on a moderately-sized circular room with no windows or doors.
A shiver spiraled down my spine as I imagined being trapped there, like the patients she’d mentioned.
Candles lit the space where three others sat on large, multi-colored cushions–an Asian guy with pink hair, a young woman with short black pixie hair and tawny skin, and a collection of piercings in her ears, nose, lip and eyebrow.
And Briceson, who tipped back a fifth of what I recognized as Jack Daniels.
“Lilia!” he said in a more spirited tone than the last time I’d seen him.
With a slight smile, I waved. “Hey.”
The pink-haired guy crossed his arms, eyeing me up and down. “So, you brought fresh blood, Mel?”
“This is Lilia. Lilia? This is Ken.”
Pink Hair waved a hand over himself, then lit up what I guessed to be a joint, given the way he held it between thumb and forefinger and took a puff.
“Seems you already know Briceson. And this is Catalina, who we call Cat, for short.” In response to her unenthusiastic wave, I gave a curt nod, and the dark-haired girl went back to reading the book in her hands. Squinting, I could just make out The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche on its cover.
A bottle of Patron sat in the middle of the circle, which Mel swiped up and poured into a shot glass.
She kicked back the mouthful, filled the glass again, and handed it off to me.
With a shake of my head, I declined, and she shrugged, tipping back a second shot.
Scattered about the room sat beaten up boxes filled with manila folders, and two laptops. Other equipment lay about that I didn’t recognize–electronics of some sort that Briceson tinkered with, between stealing sips of whiskey.
“What is this?” I asked, gaze wandering their secret little gathering space.
“Welcome to Anon Amos.” Mel slumped onto one of the open cushions and flicked her fingers toward Ken, who passed the joint to her.
“Wait. What? That’s you?”
“Yeah, we’re kind of the underground version of Snopes, here at the university.” Voice hoarse, she blew off the smoke and passed the joint to me. Again, I declined, and she shrugged, handing it to Cat instead. “If it’s true, we dig up facts. If it’s false, we find proof to back that.”
“So, when I asked you about the Crixson Project?”
Never taking her eyes of mine, Mel stretched toward Briceson that time and flicked her fingers.
From one of the banker’s boxes, he grabbed a stack of folders and handed them over.
“These files were stolen by two computer science majors back in two-thousand-five. They hid the files down here, never speaking of them. Both were expelled the following year, but since then, this has become a dumping ground for inaccessible information.”
“Hasn’t the school caught on to that?”
“Not yet.” Pushing up from the cushions, she crossed the room, flipping through the files.
“So, I suggest whatever facts you’re looking for, now’s the time to dig.
And when you’re done, you’ll tell me what you supposedly know about one of the participants.
” She shoved the folders against my chest and sat back down beside Cat, who still didn’t bother to put her book down.
Strange that she didn’t require me to offer up my end of the deal first.
I took a seat on the floor beside one of the candles at the opposite end of the room, and laid the folders out in front of me.
No idea why the hell I was so nervous, like opening a vault of dead bodies.
Oddly enough, it was when I cracked open the first folder that a cold dread brush the back of my neck.
Rubbing my hand over it failed to settle the disturbing feeling, especially when I flipped the first enclosed paper over to reveal a slightly familiar face.
“Warren Bramwell,” Briceson said from beside me, alerting me that he’d moved from across the room. “Doctor Death’s–”
“Father. Yes, I can tell.” The eyes may have been a different color, his hair lighter and peppered in gray that hadn’t yet touched his son’s, but their relation was undeniable.
His eyes held the same striking intensity, as if he were peering into the soul.
Handsome was an understatement, but perhaps that made up his sinister charm.
“The university’s very own Dr. Stirling.”