Harbinger (25 page)

28

WHEN I CAME TO,
it was still night. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, but through the gap in the door I could see low lights bordering the path back to the Compass Rose. Wind swirled around in mini-cyclones. I felt its agitation.

My hands shook as I touched the door. It’d been split in two. One half was held up by the hinges, the other by the lock. I tested the remaining wood. It was solid. The door was exactly as it’d been before, except for the two missing slats in the middle. I squeezed through and smiled.

Flexing my hands, a prickle of power shivered through my fingers.
This is what my life has been leading to. Tonight.

I needed to find Kel. To stop whatever he was going to do. But first, I had to go back to the library.

I knew the cryptic warnings from the tarot cards were coming true. My stained hands. The red tide. The autumn equinox. And something about an eclipse. Maybe if I completely understood what was going on, I could find a way to stop it.

The campus was deserted, with everyone locked away in their rooms. A gust sent the trees shivering against the black sky.
Hurry. Hurry.

But so far, there was no “pregnant” full moon peeking through the branches. I still had time.

Rushing through the woods, I paralleled the path to the Compass Rose. I clung close to the trees, pine boughs hiding me in their shadows. Their roots intertwined beneath my feet, and I could feel the water and sap pulsing through them all. Like one giant, magnificent creature.

The same pulse flowed through me, and I felt strong. I wouldn’t let Kel kill my world. I would stop him.

More Takers were on patrol tonight outside the Compass Rose, but the shadows seemed to cling to me. Hiding me from sight. I waited for the right moment, slipped past the Takers, and shimmied up the tree. The branches under my hands spoke, sending memories whispering through me.

A sapling, weak and skinny, taken from the forest and planted in the ground outside a half-built Compass Rose.

A girl, my age, patting down the dirt around young roots.

An eerie silence around the Compass Rose, broken by the steady chanting of monks.

Then spotlights and harsh voices, the constant presence of people and fear and rage.

There was something else there too. Just a trace of the void that swallowed me when I’d touched the dead seal on the beach. A poison deep within the tree that left me queasy and weak. It was a relief to climb through Dr. Mordoch’s office window and leave it behind.

My senses were magnified. Even the quiet of the Compass Rose sounded loud. A Taker paced the wooden porch outside the front door. Another patrolled the forest outside. But the house itself was empty.

By the weak light illuminating Dr. Mordoch’s diplomas, I unlocked the filing cabinet and rifled through the folders. On a hunch, I grabbed the last file of psychiatric evaluations and took them with me. Then I crept out of Dr. Mordoch’s office, down the stairs, and through the secret door in the sitting room. The arrows on the walls screamed at me now.

Hurry! Hurry!

I ran down the twisting passageway, careful not to touch the tortured walls. Up the spiral stairs. Banging my shins against the steps. Bursting into the library. I closed the door behind me, finally shutting out the screeching voices.

Like Dr. Mordoch’s office, the library was already dimly lit by a little brass light hanging over the old black-and-white photograph of the Compass Rose. Dark swaths of books covered the walls. But in the half-light, I saw that some of them were leaning, crooked on their shelves.
Has Kel been here? Or did they just fall over on their own?

Then I saw the book spread open on the desk near the window.
Tides and Waters of New England.
Kel had beat me to it, and he didn’t care if I knew. And lying on top, weighing down the page, was a talisman. Touching the cold iron, I knew it wasn’t one of the ones we’d dug up the other night. Those had been dirty and coated with rust. But they’d also been saturated with power. Practically alive.

No. This talisman was the one Kel and I had found in the secret compartment. The one M. H. had found. Even though her talisman still gleamed softly in the low light, it was used up and empty. A metal shell.

I moved the talisman, checking the page Kel had marked. He’d left it blatantly open to a map filled with overlapping ovals and shadowed spheres. The one I’d come here looking for.

“Lunar Cycles and Tides” showed a diagram of the orbits of the moon, the Earth, and the sun.

“The highest tides occur when the moon and sun are both in line with the Earth, increasing the gravitational pull on the oceans.”
There was a diagram of the three spheres, lined up in a row. The moon was on one side of the Earth and the sun on the other, each pulling at the blue planet.

With the sun as midwife.

A small note was scrawled beneath the picture in M. H.’s now familiar handwriting. “This alignment can occur during a lunar eclipse.”

I went back to the text, trying to put it all together. “If the moon is at its proxigee, its closest point to the Earth, during this alignment, then the tide may be particularly high and can cause flooding. The moon’s orbit is a fixed cycle, spinning close to the Earth and then away from it. Because of this, high tides technically can be predicted with accuracy.”

There was a table of dates, starting in 1905, listing when the moon would be closest to the Earth. I scanned down the list, my finger stopping at an unnervingly familiar date. Tomorrow—or, since it was probably after midnight already—today. Right now, the moon was as close to the Earth as it would ever be.

Flipping to the index, I found another table listed, titled “Lunar Eclipses.” I turned to it, already knowing what I’d find. Today, the autumnal equinox, was listed on this table as well. September 21 at 6:09 a.m.—total lunar eclipse.

I pulled Dr. Mordoch’s interview papers out of the folder, playing my hunch. The interview with my parents said that I’d changed after they took me to the beach on the evening of April 3. My finger slid down the chart eleven years, looking for the date. That year there was a total lunar eclipse on April 4, just after midnight. Meaning it had started on the night of April 3. My parents must have taken me out to the beach to see the beginning of it.

There was a second total lunar eclipse that year early in the morning of September 27. I checked the transcript of Dr. Mordoch’s hypnotism session, September 26. The night I’d almost drowned on the beach.

More clues. More crumbs leading me to
what
? Kel was just taunting me. He had auspicious prophecies written about him, and what did I have? A lunar calendar, a rusty doll, and an affinity for trees? I chucked the talisman against the wall, slammed the book shut, and shoved it back onto the shelf.

The book next to it caught my eye.
Ancient Maine Burial Sites
, by Professor B. Warren. That’s who M. H. had written to about the talisman.

I grabbed the tattered book off the shelf, paging through it with shaky hands. Searching for anything that looked like the talisman. There were photographs of a carved bird. A spearhead. A stone dagger like I’d found the other night. But none of them had the arrow marking.

The Compass Rose creaked and strained. I froze, barely daring to breathe. Had Kel come back for the book? For me? A gust of air smacked against the window and the house trembled.

Just wind.
I forced my shoulders to relax and went back to the book.

I found it at the start of the third chapter. M. H. was right. It was the same symbol, carved into a long stone pendant. Beneath the photo was a section called “Ancient Burial Practices of Maine.”

The State of Maine was once home to a forgotten and mystifying race. Thousands and thousands of years ago, these highly skilled people lived along this coast, hunting swordfish from the ocean, creating intricate carvings, and trading goods up and down the Gulf of Maine. Our knowledge of them is extremely limited. But the glimpse we’ve had into their culture has been stunning and not a little perplexing. These are the few facts science has uncovered.

That they were an ancient people.

That their artisanship illustrates a sophistication far beyond any other Stone Age peoples.

That they buried their dead with red ochre, a metallic powder made from oxidized iron, as well as with ritualized talismans and tools.

That they had a profound belief in life beyond death.

That they vanished from this earth, without a trace of what had befallen them.

Things fit into place. Hands pouring red powder into a fresh grave. Placing the talismans on each still corpse. This was what Professor Warren was describing.

I rushed on, looking for answers in the archaic text.

Archaeological digs have excavated grave sites dating from as far back as 3000 BC. But by 1800 BC, not even a remnant of this distinctive culture remains. Compounding this disappearance is the fact that over time, this coast has slowly sunk into the sea. Their villages, their shell middens, all the little signs of day-to-day life have been submerged. Lost forever. This is a profound loss to the archaeological community. The meager information we do have about these people’s day-to-day lives has left us with unanswerable questions. Who were they? How did their art and culture transcend the limitations of their primitive time? Why did they perform such elaborate burials? And most important, what happened to them?

They did not migrate north or south. They did not slowly fade into another people to the east or west. They simply vanished, leaving archaeologists with a fierce debate. What destroyed this lost civilization?

“Do they live happily ever after?” A voice spoke from the shadows.

I suddenly had déjà vu. That voice had spoken to me from the darkness before.

I’d been six years old, wet and shaking in the grip of Dr. Mordoch.

“You should’ve let her go,”
the voice had said.

Then, and now, the speaker stepped out of the darkness and the face was the same.

Rita. I remembered now. She was dressed in the same white dress. Her braid hanging down her back. Looking exactly the same.

“How?” It was the only question I could force out of my dry mouth.

“Once upon a time . . .” Rita’s soft voice drifted eerily through the room. In the dim light, shadows settled on her face, making it look caved-in and old. “That’s how it starts, right? Because we really should start at the beginning. My mother used to read me stories . . . I’d almost forgotten. That’s how it starts, right?”

She tilted her head toward me, like a kid waiting for encouragement. I gave her the tiniest of nods, barely daring to move.

Rita smiled. “Okay. Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived by the sea. Life was dull, but most of the time, it was good. Then one day she found a small metal doll. A talisman.

“But you already know all this, don’t you?” Confusion clouded her face and she stared around the room, as if trying to remember how she’d gotten there. She seemed to be struggling to keep her mind clear. “You read the diary?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Rita repeated, her voice more forceful now, and she moved closer. “After she touched the talisman, everything changed for the girl. She saw things that weren’t there, heard music where there was only silence, remembered things that’d never happened. And her parents, who already thought she was strong-headed and stubborn, now thought she was insane.”

As Rita spoke, the change was shocking. Her eyes became brighter, like her words were scraping away the grime that had muddied them. She stood taller and her vagueness was replaced by a sharp-edged bitterness.

Scared, I stepped away from her, but Rita followed. Getting between me and the rolltop desk. The lights from the photograph on the wall backlit her with an eerie glow.

“And maybe she was insane. Once she found the talisman, it was like she had another person in her mind. Because she did. She had another set of memories and desires from long, long ago. And power. She had power too.”

With her head skewed to the side, staring with wide-awake eyes, Rita echoed the sepia-toned photograph behind her. The grainy print showed a tall girl, about my age, posed in front of the Compass Rose, the building still under construction. The turrets were only skeletons of wood, and the front porch hadn’t been built yet.

“They wanted to lock her away as the new memories, the new life, overtook the old one. But the girl realized she couldn’t let them. She was here for a purpose.”

The girl in the photograph gripped the trunk of a sapling at the side of the house, as if sharing its strength. The old-fashioned dress made her look different, but the face was the same. Same haunted look. Same long braid. Same disdainful tilt to her head. It was Rita.

“The girl was waiting for the Harbinger. Faye, she was waiting for you.”