PETRA
Daphne is not your typical Mean Girl; she doesn’t bully openly or oppress people in ways that can be directly traced back to her. No, she likes to play with her prey and make them second-guess her intentions till the last moment.
I’m no exception, it seems.
“I am not sick,” I correct her furiously before turning to Sin. “And you can’t be in here.”
Behind him, a gaggle of girls loiter near the door of the washroom, some looking interested and enraptured by the whole debacle, while others look uncertain and uncomfortable at Sin’s presence.
Perhaps all the eyes boring into him do leave a mark because Sin straightens up and looks around, and I can see him put on one of his disarming smiles.
“Sorry ladies, just checking up on a friend!” he says gallantly. “I’ll be out of your lair pretty soon.”
“The expression is ‘out of your hair,’ Sin,” I mutter slyly.
He gives me a dazzling smile and a wink.
Then he finally acknowledges Daphne’s existence. “I need you to leave, Daphne darling,” he tells her.
At this turn of events, the group near the restroom door starts murmuring. Daphne looks like she wants to punch someone in the neck.
“I’m not done, Sin,” she says with a pout.
“Yes, you are,” Sin replies firmly. And that’s that.
Daphne throws me a vile look and saunters out of the restroom.
In a few more moments, the small group near the door has also melted away, and I am alone once more with Sin.
The relief of not having the cover blown off my secret is short-lived because Sin is saying something. I force myself to pay attention and hear.
“. . . really sorry about everything. Look, can we have a do-over?”
He’s almost pleading now.
“Please, Petra. I know I’ve been a lot to handle, but I can do better. I want to be a good partner to you.” My head snaps up at those last words, so he hurries to add, “A good project partner to you. I know I have been delaying our work on Ms. Matthews’s assignment—”
“A do-over?” I finally manage to get some words in. “Sin, after everything—”
“Please,” he says again, his expression quite earnest. “I know of a place where we can conduct research. It’s quiet, secluded, and it honestly might help us get an outright A+. Do you know how rarely Ms. Matthews gives those out?”
“What place? What are you talking about?”
“The crypt of St. Anselm Hall.” Sin’s eyes glitter with real delight, as if he has pulled the cover off the most original magic trick.
“The crypt,” I repeat in a scoffing tone. “Like the crypt where the infamous Ouroboros Society used to meet underneath the school? You expect me to fall for that?”
“I know everyone says it’s just a rumor, but the place is real! It dates back to the late 1800s.”
Sin’s face is as animated now as it had been cold when he warned the entire school against bullying me.
“It’s mostly sealed off, but there are ways inside for those who know the Ouroboros Society’s true history.”
“True history?” I snap back in complete disbelief. “That would apply to an actual cult or secret society.”
Sin doesn’t say anything in return but just smiles at me.
“No way!” I exclaim. Sin nods excitedly, so I say, “No way the Society is real. Fuck off, Sin!”
“Now, the crypt I’m talking about,” Sin continues, as if I did not just express my utter refusal to accept this tall tale, “it’s got a secret entry.
Well, not really secret because it’s splat in the middle of the east wing, in plain sight, actually.
But anyways, I stumbled upon it during freshman year.
It’s an amazing place, Petra. There are old paintings on the walls, all kinds of spooky stuff we could use for our project. ”
Now, I know that St. Anselm Hall is filled with the children of very wealthy and very immoral people. The campus has been around forever, and there could be secret rooms, walls, and entire floors of the building that have now been sealed off to the general public.
Despite my reservations about the whole thing, I feel a surge of curiosity.
“Okay, Sin. Let’s do this,” I say, biting my lip. “Show me this crypt.”
Sin’s tense posture relaxes slightly, and a wider smile breaks through.
“Great. We’ll need to go after classes. Don’t want to be seen by too many people. Let’s meet by the eastern wing at dusk. Do you know the willow tree in the middle of that courtyard?”
“Of course I do!”
“Perfect,” Sin says. “Trust me, Petra. This will be worth it.”
After I’m done with classes, I head for the willow tree. I haven’t spent much time in that part of the campus, so I’m genuinely curious about Sin’s plan. Yet as I reach the thick canopy of the willow, I can’t help wondering whether a part of me also wants to spend more time with Sin.
He’s already standing under the thickest part of the arboreal canopy.
“I love this tree,” he says, looking up and taking a deep breath. “It’s got a very calming presence.”
“Right, Sin, where is this crypt you were talking about?” I’m impatient to either get to this secret place or force Sin to confess that he has made up the whole thing.
“Come this way,” Sin replies, beckoning me to the spot he’s standing on. He looks down, and so do I. “See it yet?” he asks after a couple of minutes.
At first, I don’t know what I’m looking for, but then one of the last departing sun rays of the day falls on the ground where we stand, and I catch a faint glint of something under the loose soil near the willow’s roots.
“What’s that?” I bend down at the same time as Sin.
“Ta da!” He swipes the dirt off the spot to reveal a chipped granite block embedded in the soil.
What had caught my eye was a polished onyx arrow etched into this grey block.
“And when we follow the arrow . . .” Sin says next to me, nudging my gaze along the length of his outstretched arm. I follow his pointing finger to see a small corridor branching off the back of the classroom that opens into this courtyard.
“I thought that corridor ended in a broom closet,” I say as we move through the classroom and enter the dusty hallway.
“Yeah, me too,” Sin replies with a glimmer of amusement in his eyes.
Soon, he takes me through a series of passages connected through decrepit stairs that have always looked like they lead nowhere.
Yet here we are, turning and climbing down, deeper into the bowels of St. Anselm Hall. After around five such flights of stairs, we finally reach a very unassuming wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been touched in decades.
Sin produces a key, and soon the metal scrapes against the lock’s ancient mechanisms until it finally clicks open.
“Here we go,” he says quietly, pushing the door open.
The air is cooler here, and the scent of damp stone and earth makes it seem like we are underwater. This place looks like a set straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
The walls are made of rough-hewn stone, all of them covered in a thin layer of moisture. It is dark enough that we have to switch on our phone lights. I realize that the space is vast, with alcoves branching off into the shadows.
“This is not real,” I whisper in awe at one point. “It can’t be.”
“Almost there,” Sin replies with a delighted voice that sounds strangely out of place in this somber setting.
After a couple more steps, we reach a section of the crypt where the walls look even older. Splashes of color catch my eye, and soon, the faded outlines of intricate scenes start taking shape.
I step closer, squinting to make out the details in the dim light.
“What do you think?” Sin asks, his voice a soft echo.
“It’s incredible,” I breathe, moving along the wall.
The lines are simple yet disproportionate, while the brush strokes can only be described as frenzied. At first, it looks like the various scenes on the crypt’s walls depict events from medieval life.
But when I step closer, and when I look more attentively, I see something else—something very unsettling.
As my eyes adjust to the lighting in the crypt, I notice that certain drawings depict horrendous events. One of them freezes me on the spot: On the wall, the sinister lines curve and straighten to depict a human figure with its chest torn open and the resultant cavity filled with rats.
I gasp and shout, “Sin, look at this!” before I can stop myself.
“What is it?” he asks, stepping closer.
“Look at this! Don’t you see? It’s exactly like how they found . . . Edwin’s body.”
“Fuck!” Sin exclaims as his eyes widen in recognition. “Fuck, you’re right!”
“What does this mean, Sin? This isn’t one of your pranks, right? Or so help me God, Sin, if it’s some kind of joke—”
I’m stepping away from him, and I’m rambling because my life has gone topsy-turvy of late, and now I’m in an underground room and there are murderous paintings on the wall.
“Petra, no!” Sin cries out, his face pale and his body shaking. “What are you even saying? I never even looked at the paintings properly before today. This . . . I don’t know what the fuck this is!”
“Then tell me what you do know!” I demand in a surprisingly firm tone.
“Just that the Ouroboros Society was formed in the 1800s, and that they were initially a theological society searching for answers beyond what the Bible taught,” Sin replies hurriedly. “Petra, please, believe me! I just thought these are cool ancient paintings of harvest festivals or something.”
“Then why would someone paint something like this?” I ask again. “What are you not telling me?”
Sin takes a deep breath. “Petra, I only know what my family and other adults told me growing up. St. Anselm Hall University—it was a university back then—had one of the most prestigious departments of theology in the country. But at some point, their study veered toward the . . . unorthodox. It’s said that a group of professors and students made a deal with a demon. ”
As he speaks, we continue walking along the dank walls, the meager light from our phones weakly illuminating cloaked figures on the wall. Despite a part of me that’s not convinced by even one word uttered by Sin so far, my heart is pounding, and my hands feel cold.
University. Rituals. Department of Theology.
Why is this so similar to my dreams?
“They performed sacrifices,” Sin continues, his voice barely more than a whisper, “because they believed—or read somewhere—that it would please the demon they were . . . summoning. It’s said that every few decades, these rituals have to be repeated.”
“So, what we’re seeing on these walls,” I begin nervously, “are depictions of those rituals?”
“I suppose so. That’s the only explanation. And it fits the timeline. This year would mark the 150th anniversary of the society, right?”
When I glance back at the painting of the hollowed-out figure filled with rats, the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach intensifies. “Edwin . . . he was part of it, then. A sacrifice?”
“Looks that way,” Sin replies grimly. “But the question is—who’s continuing these rituals now?”
“But why would anyone even want to continue doing stuff like this?” I ask, my voice trembling. “Aren’t we past that kind of superstition?”
“Power, Petra,” Sin whispers softly—and is there the slightest hint of longing in his voice?
“Even if the demon wasn’t real, some of the people involved with the University did end up becoming quite wealthy. And even now, they are some of the richest, most influential people in Radcliffe.”
We have turned a corner to arrive at the left arm of the room’s semicircle expanse. Sin stops beside another ebony-rich, Goyaesque painting whose palette of deep blacks and rusty reds suggests a kind of barbarism I can’t even imagine but that I can sense quite vividly.
The weak beams of our phone lights fall on a scene of robed figures standing in a circle around a shadowy, spectral form at the center.
I’m halted in my tracks at the ghostly figure’s face: a smooth orb of a head with large black eyes and a bloody gash for a smile.
A smile that will eat into my already thinning sleep and latch on to even more of my dreams now.
“Tha-that’s the demon?”
I don’t need to look at Sin to know that he’s nodding or that he looks spooked out of his brains.
“According to what I heard, the first murder spree began sometime in the 1890s, and although some people were accused of those crimes, people suspect that some got away with it or were never accused in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” I frown.
“There were people who were said to be directly involved who disappeared and were never brought to justice. But there were also people who were on the Board of Trustees of the University who, soon after it closed, became extremely rich.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” I say, the skeptic in me rising to the surface. “It could all be a coincidence. There could have simply been some deranged serial killer who decided to put a Biblical spin on his murders. Maybe a lunatic like Jack the Ripper.”
“Perhaps.” He shrugs. “But a lot of the people in this town don’t believe that. In fact, they think the people who got away with it are still doing it.”
“By doing it, you mean—” I gulp down. “The sacrifices?” I still can’t tear my eyes away from the perfectly circular black-eyed face of the abomination.
“While the first sacrifice was meant to summon the demon, once the hellion granted their wishes, they had to keep the . . . tradition alive.”
“Wha-what do you mean?”
My eyes shift to the robed and hooded figures surrounding the fiendish form.
“Every couple of decades, those descendants must sacrifice a number of people to appease the demon and keep their wealth,” Sin continues.