Diary of the Gone (12 page)

She stopped sipping her tea then
knotted her brows and looked into her cup as if she’d found
something disgusting there. “Are you high? First, why would I want
to go anywhere with you? Second, did you forget why we are in this
hole?” She pointed emphatically with her index at the table. “And
last but not least, ever since we ended up here, all kind of crap
keeps happening, and Terry says it’s your fault.”

Not that I really cared what Terry
thought or said, but it piqued me. I leaned against the back of my
chair, rolling my eyes. “Terry says. I see. Forget it then.” Then I
slid back in my chair that scraped against the floor, and grabbed
my bag. “Consider I never existed then. From now on you have no
brother!” I shouted, bitterness stinging my eyes.

“
Consider it done,” she
replied, then raised her cup as if proposing a toast.

I looked into her eyes one last time,
then turned to leave.

“
Take your jacket. It’s
cold outside,” she called, but I slammed the door.

***

After a few minutes of being outside I
felt sorry I hadn’t listened to Bev. The wind bit my skin fiercely;
it seemed it got to the very bone of my unimpressive
frame.

Snow crunched under my feet. I enjoyed
crushing thin crusts of ice filmed over shallow pools of water.
Speeding my pace, I breathed in the freezing air through my nose
and exhaled through my mouth, emitting clouds of fog like a steam
engine.

Schoolmates eyed me with
suspicion—smaller ones pointed their fingers at me—but I’d pretty
much got used to it, ignoring their attitude.

When I glanced at my watch I realized
it was twenty minutes till the beginning of the first class, so
despite the cold, I decided to drop in at the Underground. I made
sure no one was watching as I swerved around the corner and entered
the forest.

In the absolute silence around me, the
sound of twigs snapping under my feet echoed in my brain. When I
got close enough to the hideout I heard voices bubbling excitedly
down there. With light footfalls I shortened the distance between
me and the cellar.

“
What if it’s Callum?”
someone asked, a girlie voice. “What if Stan’s right?”

“
Don’t you dare mention
that jerk’s name ever again,” Wayne nearly snarled, then paused.
“Anyway, Callum has nothing to do with this.”

“
What is your plan then?
How are we going to find out who’s taken your friends?” another
girl said.

I faintly remembered this voice, but
couldn’t put a finger on where I’d heard it.

“
We need to talk to
Callum,” Wayne said.

I cleared my throat and the voices
stopped like I’d suddenly gone deaf. I could almost feel the
electric tension down there as I descended the crumbling stairs and
faced the company.

“
Hi,” I said, eyeing
everyone from left to right. Some stood like wax figures in a
museum, others sat on a wooden bench or chairs.

“
Hi,” said the girl Wayne
and I had met in Mrs. Palmer’s library.

“
Vivian?
What are
you
doing here?” I asked.

“
She came here on her
own,” Wayne said.

“
Yes, I followed the
guys,” she added. “I think I know what we need to do to catch the
one who’s guilty of what’s been happening here.”

“
Hmm, and you think that
I’m the one.” I looked at the group. Some lowered their eyes to
study the grimy floor instead of looking at me.

“
How come you always end
up in places where something icky happens?” one of the boys said
accusingly.

“
I’ve no idea,” I nearly
shouted, “but believe me, it’s not like I choose to be there. It’s
not like I enjoy this stuff.”

“
I believe you, Callum,”
Vivian said with confidence that surprised me. “Aunt Gloria said
it’s not you.”

“
Still Mrs. Palmer kept
something from us,” Wayne added. He gave me a newspaper as faded
and old as the ones I’d seen in the library’s hidden
room.

“
What’s this?” I
asked.

“
It’s one of the papers
that Aunt Gloria didn’t show to you,” Vivian said.

“
How do you know she
didn’t show it to us? And how do you know about the whole thing?” I
asked.

“
I found this room ages
ago. Fortunately, Aunt never caught me while I was there. Well,
anyway, after you guys left the library that day I returned and
looked through the pile Aunt hadn’t touched. This is what I found.”
She pointed at the paper in my hands, then tucked her hands in the
back pockets of her jeans and stood watching me, a stray lock of
her hair tickling her cheek.

I looked down at the page where one of
the articles was circled. Another one about a mysterious
disappearance, but the name of the one gone missing made me go into
a cold sweat.

“
Aiden Blackwell reported
missing for a week,” I mumbled. “It’s true then. He’s not dead. And
he’s back.”

I looked through the article, but
there was nothing except the mention of Cynthia being found dead a
few months previously.

At first I thought I imagined it—a
faint sound in the distance—but then it grew stronger, more
intense. By the look on the guys’ faces I knew they heard it as
well.

“
School,” Wayne said and
bolted up the steps. Vivian, me, and the others sprang up the
stairs.

I didn’t feel cold anymore, just
scared that this nightmare would never end. I tripped a few times,
but managed to keep my balance and kept moving. When Vivian started
to lose pace I grabbed her by the hand, something I’d never done.
Still it felt right when she gripped my hand.

A black pillar of
smoke swirled upwards into the dead skies. Soon we could see the
flames engorging the wooden structure, roaring through the windows.
Teachers and students poured out of the poisonous blackness,
clutching their necks and coughing. And then
he
stepped out.

Unshaven, his hair disheveled and
reaching his shoulders. I could barely recognize the boy from
Cynthia’s memory in him. Dressed in washed-out jeans and a long
black coat with a cowl, Aiden looked right at me, the black of his
eyes boring into me from under his curved eyebrows. He had a
baseball bat in his right hand, stained with what looked like
blood.

As students were running through the
entrance doors, he swung it and struck a boy my age right into the
solar plexus. I shuddered when the boy crumbled to the ground like
a lifeless puppet and didn’t move again.

“
No!” I screamed, and ran
at him. “No!”

Aiden waited for me with a smile on
his face.

I just ran towards him, not really
sure what to do next. In one swift motion he took a step aside and
struck me with his bat like I were a baseball. The end of the bat
grazed my hand and shoulder as I ducked, shielding my face. The
sound of bones breaking was followed by lightning pain shooting
through me. Vision blackened as I crumpled on the ground beside the
boy who was still lying unconscious.

More screams followed, the
never-ending nightmare getting only worse. The heat of the roiling
flames reached me where I lay on my back.

Clutching the
burning hand, I forced myself to stay conscious as I watched
everything like a movie turned upside down. Wayne and Terry Haubert
attacked Aiden from different sides, but the ferocity of his
counterattack was hard to compete with. Aiden—
Father? No, I couldn’t call him that
—took the bat in his left hand and punched Wayne real hard. I
closed my eyes to let some of the pain go away, but it lingered. In
the dark I heard Terry screaming. I was scared to open my eyes and
see what Aiden had done to Bev’s boyfriend. When I did, Aiden
gripped him by the hair as a grimace of intolerable pain distorted
Terry’s face.

“
I’m coming for you next,”
Aiden said, pointing his bat at me.

It was the first time I’d heard my
father’s voice. He sounded so smug I wanted to make him suffer, to
cause him as much pain as he’d inflicted on others.

He dropped the bat aside; it landed
with a hollow sound beside me. Then he gripped Wayne by the hair as
well, pulling both boys towards the forest.

As I tried to stand up, another bolt
of lightning shot through me, stars flecking my vision. I gave up,
and darkness took me away.

Chapter 11

Previously I’d thought darkness was
supposed to give people oblivion and relief. It didn’t give me
either.

As I was floating through the dark,
people screamed around me, their cries saturating my body with
fear. Though they were there, on the other side, I could hear them
too well.

Aiden stepped out of the dark, looking
at me with grim satisfaction. Blood was dripping down his baseball
bat. Lightning flashed behind him, peals of thunder rolling over
the ominous skies.

Darkness consumed
him, and my right hand flared. Though I couldn’t see it I knew they
were taking me somewhere to tend to the burning in my hand.
Make it go away. Please.

The dark kept me blind but not deaf.
To my relief, after a while the pain did go away, replaced by a
pleasant coolness.

Mom’s teary face loomed out, her skin
shining like a full moon in the night sky. As if a stage light
illuminated her like an actress in a play. She apologized to me in
sentences that made no sense to me, then the dark took her, despite
my pleas for her to stay.

Stan and Nathan appeared instead,
laughing at me. Stan was reading aloud bits of my diary notes. Then
he started tearing out its pages, Nathan roaring with laughter. A
blood line trickled down the side of his face and when Nathan
turned to me, I saw a deep dent in his skull. I recoiled in horror
as he opened his mouth and the static sound escaped his lips.
“You’ve betrayed me, jerk,” he said. “Why didn’t you come with me
to the Swamps?”

I squeezed my eyes, pleading for them
all to leave me, for the screams beside me to stop. After a while
they were gone. No one came out of the dark anymore.

***

I came around to someone’s frantic
voices whispering next to me. Whoever it was, they were trying to
speak quietly. Instead, their whispering in high pitches made me
wince.

I opened my eyes just a crack, bright
light burning my corneas. I moaned and turned away from it. When I
tried to lift my hand to shield my face from the brightness,
millions of electric currents shot through my wrist.
“Ouch!”

“
Don’t move, Cal,” Bev’s
voice echoed in my head. “You need to be careful with your
hand.”

I squinted at her. “Cal? You called me
Cal? Where’s your ‘sissy-pants’?” I asked, then heard a soft
chuckle nearby. I raised my head to see Vivian sitting next to Bev
in an armchair. A shade of a smile tugged at the corner of her
lips, but her eyes were filled with concern. The strand of hair was
still falling down her cheek.

“
What happened?” I asked.
I knew I had to stop leering at Vivian and look anywhere else, but
I couldn’t. My heart thumped so hard I was afraid she might hear
it.

I was sprawled over the couch in our
living room. My arm in plaster, a splitting headache, girls
watching over me. It couldn’t be right. Unless something terrible
had happened.

Screams. Fire. Black pillars of smoke.
The meeting with Aiden Blackwell.

I remembered it all at once. What was
I thinking running at him like that? Blinding rage I’d never felt
before had surged through me. I wanted that man to suffer. How come
I had his blood in me?

Bev’s eyes glistened with tears. I
suddenly remembered why.

“
Wayne and Terry,” I
gasped. “Where are they?”

Beverly cupped her face, her hair
streaming down her shoulders as she bent her head to hide her
feelings. Vivian put a comforting hand over my sister’s shoulder,
then tucked the loose strand behind her ear with the
other.

“
He took them to the
Swamps,” Vivian said. “The chief and his crew are looking for
them.”

“
Why would that man do
it?” Bev asked. “Who can do such terrible things?”

I sat up straight, ignoring the
nagging feeling in my wrist. “That man? Don’t you know it yet?” I
asked in disbelief, glancing at Vivian then back at my
sister.

“
Know what?” Bev
said.

Vivian shook her head. “That might not
be a good idea,” she said.

“
Why? She has to know,” I
insisted.

“
Hey, can anyone tell me
what the hell’s going on?” Bev stormed. The look in her eyes told
me she was desperate, and I suspected Terry was the
reason.

“
Our father’s not dead,” I
said. “I don’t know why, but Mom kept feeding us that lie all these
years. It was our father—Aiden Blackwell—there. I’m pretty much
sure it was he who had taken Greg, Nathan and Audrey.”