Sanctum (19 page)

“Almost there,” Micah said as they crossed the intersection. He pulled up the neck of his coat, ducking down against the wind. “Still up for this?”

“It was my idea, wasn’t it?” Dan caught up, striding next to him. He noticed a mint-green house across the street with a giant copper statue in the yard. “I take it that’s the Art House?”

“How’d you guess?” Micah chuckled. “Looks like there aren’t any cars in the driveway. Let’s cross here.”

Dan waited just a second or two before crossing, hanging back to check on Abby and Jordan. He wasn’t exactly surprised by the scowl Abby had waiting for him.

“So what do you want to do if we find something?” she whispered, eyes locked on Micah.

“I don’t know,” Dan said. It was, sadly, the truth. “I hadn’t considered that part.”

“We don’t know if Micah is one of them! He could have been right alongside Cal in that maze!”

“He’s not like that. I think we might actually be able to trust him. He did warn us about Cal, remember?” And he had been the one to cover for Dan at the party, coming up with that smooth line for Abby. He wasn’t an Ivy League wannabe like Cal—not at all the type to get caught up in a secret society. “Sometimes you have to adjust. This is adjusting.”

“I’m stating for the record that this is a bad idea,” Abby replied crisply.

“Noted . . .”

“And that you’re being naive to trust anyone on this campus.”

“He’s already seen us,” Dan mumbled. “We just won’t clue him in on what we’re looking for.”

“You guys coming or what?” Micah gestured to them from the sidewalk. Behind him, a moldering two-story house waited in the shadows. Brown and dingy, it looked like a gingerbread house that had gotten damp. The roof sagged. The white house numbers near the front door were crooked. One had come unhinged except for the bottom screw and hung upside down.

“It certainly
looks
haunted,” Jordan said, grimacing. “Are we really going inside that?”

“Yup,” Dan replied.

“Too late to board the Nope Train to Screwthatsville?”

“Correct.”

“So what now?” Micah asked, turning to them. “You bring a Ouija board or what?”

This was the moment of truth, Dan decided, in more ways than one. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. If Micah said no—if he returned to campus and reported them for trespassing or, worse, called the police—then their weekend would end badly and abruptly.

“Now we’re going to break in and look around.”

Micah’s eyes narrowed dangerously and for a moment Dan was certain they were busted. He rubbed at the goatee on his chin and flicked his eyes to Jordan and then Abby. “I told you . . . I’ve gotten in trouble before. I don’t want to get in trouble again, Dan.”

“Does it look like anybody has lived there for years?” he replied. “No car in the drive. No lights. It’s practically falling apart. We just want to look around inside.”

“Yeah, and if anyone sees us go in, the cops get called and at the very least, I lose my job with the admissions office.” Micah frowned, turning his gaze to the house. “Then again, I s’pose I didn’t lead you all here thinking we were just gonna admire the view.”

“That’s the spirit,” Jordan said drily. “Can we get off the sidewalk now? We’re not exactly being subtle here.”

Jordan didn’t wait for consensus. He took off down the side of the driveway, sticking to the edge of the pavement where the overgrown grass encroached. This block in general looked more run-down than the last, with fewer cheerful houses and more old, dilapidated Victorian homes that didn’t have pumpkins
or
lights. Nothing about these houses felt welcoming. Even with cider still warming his blood and the comforting scent of burning leaves in the air, he couldn’t shake a sense that whatever was wrong with this house had spread, poisoning more than just its own crumbling clapboards.

They snaked along the drive to the garage and, next to it, a chain-link fence and a gate. It was one of those simple closures where you could just reach over and pull the latch, the kind that could only keep in small children and dogs. Jordan pulled the latch and the gate swung open with a piercing screech.

“That sliding door doesn’t look secure,” he whispered, holding the gate for them. “I’ll try it—otherwise we’ll have to use a window.”

Micah hesitated at the gate, looking Jordan over with a snort. “You three do this kind of thing often?”

“My parents don’t like me leaving the house unannounced,” Jordan replied coolly. “I learned to circumvent their rules.”

“Hey, man,” Micah said with a laugh that was either defensive or amused, Dan couldn’t tell. “Circumvent away. I just didn’t know you were some kind of Houdini fan.”

“Not much Houdini to this.” With just a short tug on the handle, the sliding door jerked open. Jordan gestured inside, grinning. “Abracadabra?”

“Keep it down,” Abby cautioned. “The neighbors could still be up.”

Dan led them into the house, relieved to find his suspicions were correct; nobody was home, and nobody had been home in quite some time. About thirty years, judging by the brown shag carpeting and retro furniture. They crowded inside and Jordan closed the door behind them, leaving them standing in a dining area that transitioned into a kitchenette.

“All the pictures are missing,” Abby said, going to a low, decorative table. She grabbed a dusty picture frame, the white backing showing through the glass. “And look . . .” She put down the frame and crept through an archway to the mudroom and then the living room beyond. “Everything is packed up. These look like moving boxes.”

Dan followed. Dust flickered on the air. White sheets had been drawn over the couches and chairs. Even without the signs of abandonment, Dan
felt
the solitude of the place. Houses were meant to feel lived in, cozy. This one just felt . . .

“Cold,” he whispered, watching his breath billow out. “It’s freezing in here.”

“I’m going to check out the bedrooms,” Jordan said, passing by and disappearing down a dark hallway. Dan saw the bouncing light of his mobile as he went.

“I’ll take the upstairs,” Dan said, eager to make a quick round and then leave. He didn’t know if he should trust his instincts, but if he did, those instincts were telling him to flee.

“What exactly are we looking for?” he heard Micah asking as he rounded the corner and found the stairs.

“Pictures, scrapbooks,” Abby said, her voice fading as Dan left it behind. “You know, something spooky to commemorate the evening.”

Their voices died away entirely, replaced by the sound of his own breathing and the soft tread of his shoes on the stairs. He could see the years of foot traffic worn into the wood. At the top, the landing was cramped, the ceiling low. There was a bathroom immediately in front of him, empty except for a heavily rusted claw-foot tub. He shined his mobile around, using the light app to illuminate the white and blue tiles and the porcelain sink with its ornate tap and handles. He moved on down the hall. The ceiling slanted and then cut away, a narrow hall opening up on his left. There he found a bedroom, or what remained of one, which was just a big bed frame and a collapsing mattress. Much like downstairs, a few picture frames still hung on the wall, clinging for dear life at skewed angles. There were no photos in them.

Dan retreated back down the hall, dodging left to check the last room. The floor creaked under his weight. The last door was small, hardly tall enough for an adult human to fit through. He had to stoop to get inside. His little light bounced like a glow bug around the room, showing him two sets of cramped bunk beds and a child-sized table hand painted with fire trucks and baseballs. Dan stood completely still in the center of the attic room. The ceiling sloped to a point like a barn’s roof; the trunks and beds and leftover junk made the space feel utterly claustrophobic.

He went to the grimy window between the bunks and looked out at the house directly across the way. The houses were so close together there wasn’t much of anything to see but wall. Sighing, he turned and made for the door. This house was a bust. Unless the others had found something downstairs, this was just an abandoned, empty time capsule, with no photos, no letters, no clues of any kind.

Swearing, Dan stopped, catching his breath as his shoe dragged across a loop-stitched rug. After regaining his balance, he realized he’d kicked the rug just enough to slide it over, and underneath where it had been, the scuffed boards had been decorated with paint. He knelt, his pulse coming quicker as he ran his fingers over the newer, shinier wood. The rug had preserved the spot well, and the figure there, too. Some small, meticulous hand had painted the outline of a little boy. A boy Dan recognized from the stripes on his sweater. The pads of Dan’s fingers touched something slightly cool, and he squinted into the low light, noticing a tiny catch.

Dan pulled on the hook, revealing a small rectangular hole. Dust came up from the darkness and choked him, and when he directed his phone inside, he found a tiny hiding space, just big enough for the cloth-wrapped metal box within. An old candy tin, perhaps, roughly the size of a shoe box, the stripes still bright and perfect. Dan cracked the lid carefully, revealing a child’s journal, a satchel of marbles, a few playing cards, chewing gum wrappers. . . .

There was also a collection of old photographs, tied together with string. Judging by the photo on top, of a costumed little boy shoving a sword down his throat, Dan wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see the rest. But his curiosity won out, and he untied the string with trembling fingers.

Whoever had collected these photos seemed to have been drawn to acts of the macabre. Pictures showed a woman who had thrown axes and daggers at a performing partner; a woman who stood balancing a series of torches on her body; and then, near the end, the creepiest combination of a fortune-teller and a clown that Dan had ever seen.

Shaking, Dan replaced the photos and set down the box, keeping the journal. It made perfect sense that he would be the one to find it, as if it had called to him, had known he would come for it.