Sanctum (26 page)

“Professor Reyes,” he said. Dan shrugged, not finding any real significance in the picture. “So she was in a sorority, so what?”

Abby chewed her lip, brows furrowed as she stared down at the paper, deep in thought.

“What?” Dan pressed. “What is it?”

“Just a hunch, I guess. I mean . . . We know the warden was controlling Harry Cartwright, and we know he was implicated in the disappearances of those women in town. Remember that letter we found in his house? Caroline’s? She was in the Scarlets, she hated it, wanted to leave . . .”

“
Caroline
.” Dan’s eyes grew wide with sudden curiosity. “You think Caroline Martin is the professor?” He skimmed the tiny print under the newspaper photo. There it was, in black-and-white—the first name on the left:
C. Martin
.

“Reyes must be her married name,” Abby suggested. “Or maybe she just chose it herself after the warden brainwashed her. Maybe
he
chose it. It makes sense, right? If she figured out what the warden was up to with the Scarlets and wanted to leave, he would do whatever he could to keep her from spreading it around.”

“So he silenced Caroline by making her one of his experiments, and now she does it to her own followers,” Dan said, nodding. “And the other women, the other disappearances . . . They might have been the same. They were going to expose him.”

“Just like Micah . . .” Abby said sadly. “And Lara, too, if they find out she’s helping us.”

“It’s a cycle. Professor Reyes is just doing what the warden programmed her to do.”

“That’s so depressing.” She touched the professor’s name under the sorority photo. “Do you really think he hypnotized her? Can something like that even last this long? I wonder how you, you know, break her out of it. The warden would have done this to her thirty years ago.”

“Which means maybe the Scarlets are really her thralls or whatever and they don’t even know it,” Dan said, and now that he saw the scope of the warden’s work laid before him, more and more pieces began to slide, terribly, into place. “Maybe Cal has been totally brainwashed. Or maybe your aunt Lucy. I mean, she did seem totally different this time. And Felix . . . Maybe this is what happened to him, too!”

At that, Abby sat up straighter. “Felix? But he gave you the addresses to figure all this out. . . .”

“Which proves he really is fighting back. This summer, it seemed like there were moments when he was himself, and moments when he was the Sculptor. So maybe the brainwashing didn’t completely take. Maybe Professor Reyes doesn’t have the warden’s skill. She has the stone and probably his drug cocktail, but his notes were still in the frat. Maybe she never saw them. . . .” That little spark of hope flared again, but only weakly.

“So maybe it can be reversed,” Abby said brightly.

He thought of his meeting with Maudire, or his ghost, or Warden Crawford’s vision, or whatever the heck it was.

You can’t do over what’s already been done, but you sure can undo it. Not easy, but you can undo it.

If the warden’s brainwashing really could be undone, then maybe the fail-safe Maudire had talked about was hidden somewhere in the journals. Dan nodded, closing the newspaper, grimly determined. “I hope it can be reversed. Because as soon as we help the others, we’re going to do whatever it takes to reverse it on me.”

“Wait, you think—”

“I do think. And I’m ready to have my mind back to myself.”

Chapter 27

T
he old hypnotist had teeth like daggers nestled in the wiry tangle of his beard. He looked clean from far away, but up close you could see dirt in the deep crags of his face.

Old meant frail. Old meant even a little boy could beat him.

Inside the tent it smelled like weird berries, berries that had been soaked in a fancy woman’s perfume. He knew the smell would stay in his clothes for days, and Mother would yell at him about it. Where have you been? Why do you smell like that? You’ll upset the baby! He would make up a lie later when he walked back home with Patrick and Bernard.

But right now he needed the stone on the chain. If he ever wanted Patrick to go up to the roof, he would need the stone. Inside the tent there were all kinds of strange things—a bird with red feathers and one eye that hopped back and forth on its perch shrieking, “Turk! Turk!” and big heavy candlesticks bubbling with purple wax.

He was the old man’s favorite and that meant his guard would be down.

“Do you know where I acquired this particular gem?” The hypnotist laughed all the time. He laughed after every sentence, sometimes every word. “Old Maudire pulled it from a grave, my boy, what do you think of that? Ha ha!”

“Turk! Turk!”

Daniel glared at the bird. He wondered if the bird would tell on him, since it could talk. It didn’t matter. He needed the gem if he ever wanted Patrick to shut up.

“She was a cold old widow, never wanted her children to do anything but what they were told, boy, drove them crazy, ha ha! Proud. Puffed up. Some call me puffed up, but they’re wrong. I took the stone from the widow’s grave, from her plantation, Arnaud Plantation, a white house, pretty, with trees and a little river. One of her boys drowned in that river. Her girl cracked her skull on the tree. Ha ha! I whispered sweet to her when I dug her up, whispered, ‘Wake up, chérie, wake up!’ They buried that cursed widow in secret, boy, and nobody would have the guts to take her jewels but me! See? Me, Old Maudire . . .”

“Turk!”

“Can I see it again?” Daniel asked. He wasn’t listening to the story. He didn’t care. Maybe the stone was magic or maybe it was ordinary. Either way he knew it hypnotized people in a special way. It had worked on him, hadn’t it? And tricks never worked on him.

“One more time, boy, one more time, and then you must be off home!” The hypnotist pulled the red gleaming slice of agate from his vest pocket and dangled it in front of Daniel’s eyes. It looked like earth’s blood, like something cruel and primal that had come up from the bottom of the world.

It was warm in his palm, though it looked like it should have been cold.

“Turk! Turk!”

Daniel looked at the stone for a long time, and waited until the hypnotist turned around to pour a cup of tea from the little smoking stove in the corner. Then he put the stone in his pocket, took up one of the heavy candlesticks in both hands, and swung it as hard as he could. Purple wax scalded his palm, but he hardly felt it. There was more blood than he expected, and it came out of his smashed melon head so fast, so thick . . .

The candlestick was too heavy for his little hands. He dropped it and climbed on Maudire’s back and wrapped his hands around the old hypnotist’s neck. It was good he was so old and frail; his neck was just a warm, pulsing pipe under Daniel’s hands, no bigger around than one of Mother’s milk bottles.

The purple wax on his wrist cooled and cracked off, and under his hands Maudire stopped moving.

“Turk!”

Daniel hated that bird. He took another candlestick and tipped it over, pouring hot wax all over the bird. His wings were clipped, and he couldn’t fly, but he could shriek as the wax scalded and burned. Then he hit the bird, too, because he hated it, because he didn’t want to hear that stupid word anymore.

What was a Turk anyway?

Daniel wiped his hands on the tattered, striped carpet and left the tent.

He smiled as he walked through the carnival; he had the stone now and tomorrow Patrick would shut up for good.

Chapter 28

D
an never seemed to slide gracefully out of sleep these days. He shot up, feeling a hand clutch at his arm. For a second he was sure it was the Scarlets coming for him, or that bearded old man from his dreams, but instead it was Abby.

She shook him lightly, her phone vibrating its alarm in her palm.

“What time is it?” he asked, groggy.

“Eight,” Abby mumbled, “in the morning. I . . . uh, might have fallen asleep, too. But it looks like nobody found us. So . . . hooray?”

Jordan was missing, but he soon arrived from around the corner, a bounty of junk food heaped high in his arms. Dan’s stomach rumbled in anticipation.

“Soup’s up,” Jordan said, smiling despite the dark smudges under his eyes. He tossed Dan a bottle of orange juice and a frosted cinnamon bun in a plastic wrapper. “You look rough. Bad dreams?”

“Aren’t they always?” Dan replied, cracking open the orange juice and guzzling.

“Mine were bad, too,” Abby said softly. She leaned forward from the wall and started to gather her hair into a ponytail. “Lucy and Lara were chasing me, but they didn’t have faces. I only knew it was them because they kept laughing.” She shivered. “It was awful.”

“So what do we do now?” Jordan leaned against the wall opposite from them and turned on his phone. He stared at it glumly while he chewed a disintegrating powdered doughnut. “Just wait for Lara to call? What happens if she doesn’t?”

“She will. She has to.”

Dan wasn’t so sure. He
hoped
Abby was right, but after seeing Micah’s fate, he refused to underestimate Professor Reyes and what she would do to keep control of her followers—what she would do to find him.

He sighed and choked down a bite of cinnamon roll. It wasn’t smart to take his meds on an empty stomach. He was just glad he carried them everywhere, or going back to pick the lock on Micah’s room would have been a necessity. How was he ever going to get his stuff back? What if they never saw Micah again? “Maybe Lara can tell us who we can actually trust around here. She’s a Scarlet, so she must know who
isn’t
one. There might still be a chance that the police aren’t mixed up in all of this.”

“What I wanna know is why they didn’t just leave when the weird shit started happening,” Jordan said, flipping his phone around in his palm idly. “You’d think after the first ice pick lobotomy someone would’ve spoken up.”

“Right, just like we left the second things got hairy this summer?” Abby snorted drily.

“Touché.”

Abby scooted closer, picking up Dan’s notes and glancing over them while Jordan took a seat and browsed the newspaper from the archive.

“It’s strange to look at her like this,” Jordan said. He opened to the picture of the sorority girls lined up. “She looks . . . normal. You think she was already mixed up with the warden?”

“I think so, yeah,” Dan replied. His teeth felt furry. He hadn’t been able to wash his face or brush his teeth since the morning before. “The timelines match up.”

“So even then, she was . . .” And here Jordan stopped himself, twinkling his fingertips in front of his eyes. “Bedazzled or whatever.”

“What’s this?” A fast reader, Abby was already done skimming through most of the packet. “‘Sanctum, a holy or sacred place,’” she read
.
“‘What could be more sacred than possessing the power of your own true thoughts? Sanctum. It is both lock and key.’” With a puzzled
hmm
sound she lowered the pages. “Do you think the house we found was this sanctum? If that was his house, it would make sense.”

“Probably,” Dan said, “or it could be Brookline. Hell, it could be that stupid rock of his.”

He thought of his dream and the young Daniel Crawford bludgeoning the hypnotist like it was nothing at all. Instructing his older brother to leap to his death because he was a bully. Of course the only sacred thing to such a person would be his own thoughts.

“It’s such an odd way to phrase it,” Abby continued. “And he seems so obsessed with logic and science and knowledge. All this junk about holiness and it being sacred seems out of place.”

“At this point I wouldn’t write anything off,” Jordan said, then paused, starting a little as his phone buzzed its way across the carpet. “Do I answer?”

“Let me,” Abby said, snatching up the phone. She tucked a piece of dark hair behind her ear three times even though it stayed put the first time.

The cinnamon roll in Dan’s stomach turned sour. He half expected Professor Reyes to be on the other end when Abby picked up.

“Hello? Lara? Oh, thank God you’re safe. Sure . . . Is everything . . . Yeah, yeah we can meet you there. Oh . . . Just me? I . . . I don’t know. I mean, yeah, sure, I’ll come alone.” Dan shook his head urgently at her but Abby ignored him. “No problem. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Abby hung up, breathing heavily. Her knuckles were bluish white around the phone. “She sounded frightened.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Jordan muttered.

“She wants just me to go. . . . You two will have to hang behind. Maybe I can talk her down.”

“You should’ve asked if she was alone,” Dan said.
Especially if she sounded afraid
. “Where are you meeting her?”

“At her studio in the art building,” Abby replied, gathering up her coat and mittens and standing. “Where I went to see her installation. It’s out of the way, and I don’t think anyone will be there this early on a Sunday. . . . Maybe just a janitor or two.”