Modern Rituals (23 page)

James knelt and touched the line. Its groove ran center of the rectangle representing the stage and connected to a vertigo-inducing multitude of rooms and hallways—the gym’s outline enclosed them.

“I wonder…” James said. He stood and positioned himself on the stage where the line originated in the diagram.

An awkward pause followed.

“Whatcha doing, James?” Olivia said.

“Not sure yet,” he said. “Come here.” She did. “Okay, now stand right there and jump on my count. One…two…three…” he said.

Their feet left the ground and landed within a split second of each other. James met the floor with a hollow echo that bounced around the stage. Olivia touched down solid and quiet.

“Maybe you are just lighter than me—here let’s switch and try again,” James said.

They exchanged places and their leaps broadcasted the opposite effect: Olivia echoed, James landed like a mouse. To inspect the phenomena further, they hopped and jumped at random locations until exhausting the stage’s untested areas. Only the stage’s epicenter emitted the suspicious echo.
 

“Well, my bet is that there’s more than meets the eye, here,” James said.

“You think?” Olivia said.

“Aren’t you the sarcastic one.”

“The question is, what’s beneath the stage?” she said. “And how do we get down there?”

“Up for an adventure?”
 

“This girl’s had enough adventure for one day. I just want to figure out how to get out of here, and maybe the answer is down there. Let’s bring Trevor back into this, shall we?”

“By all means.”

A scream.
Colette.
James froze and stared through the open curtain into the gym’s bleak chamber. Silence tingled his skin—an intolerable stillness immobilized him. Olivia stood next to him, also stock-still.

Colette was in trouble—a sense of duty ripped through James’ veins.

“Shit! Let’s move!” James said and ran off the stage into the darkness.

Trevor burst through the gym doors, flashlight drawn and beaming.
 

“Who was that?” Trevor said.

“Colette—check the room to your left,” James said.

Trevor did as James commanded and pulled open the door. James smashed Trevor sideways in his hurry to get into the closet. Barren shelves lined an empty maintenance closet—a river of fresh blood pooled into a tributary on the floor, dammed by the far wall.

“Watch it!” Trevor said.

“Sorry,” James said. “Light?”

Trevor swung the flashlight back into the closet.

“Shit—where are they?” James said.

“You got me,” Trevor said. “I was outside.”

Olivia joined them.

“Dear God! That’s a lot of blood. Whoever lost it won’t be conscious much longer,” Olivia said.

“You always provide the most reassuring facts, Olivia,” James said, swallowing. “Thank you.”
 

The scene absorbed Olivia—James’ comment seemed to bounce off her like a crumpled paper.

“See the brush stroke pattern—like someone was dragged?” she said, pointing. “It looks like a limb was cut off. I wonder where they could be. They can’t have gone far.”

James grabbed the flashlight from Trevor.

“Hey!” Trevor said.

James ignored him and swept the area. The drag marks originated from a shiny, maroon pool and abruptly ended at the wall, as if the wall had dropped down upon them.

“There’s no blood anywhere else. What the hell? Did they walk through the wall?” James said and moved deeper into the closet. He pushed against the far wall.
 

“It’s solid as a rock,” he said. “I think it’s cinder or concrete.”

“Maybe there’s a switch somewhere, like in the classroom?” Olivia said.

James nodded, and the three searched the room for suspicious mechanisms, but unlike the classroom, the closet offered little to inspect. Smooth walls of cinder held shelves made of grated, black metal. A few fluorescent lights, set in standard casing, cast a greenish hue. These comprised the room’s obvious (and only) components.

“These shelves don’t budge—they’re anchored to the wall,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, I’m not seeing anything,” Olivia said.

“They couldn’t have just disappeared!” James said.

“It appears that way,” Trevor said.

James sighed and closed his eyes.
 

Deep in the recesses of his subconscious there existed a place James traveled to in dire times, and he offered to it the bloody conundrum before them. Difficult problems dissolved into this special place, and with time, often resurfaced solved. He hoped today would be one of those days.

“James?” Olivia said.

He held up a single finger, eyes closed.

“At least give me the flashlight,” Olivia said and took the light out of his hands.

Blood. Blocked. Gym. Oak tree. Scrawlings—SEEK THE GYM. Map. Tunnel.
 

“Tunnel?” James said.

“What’s that?” Trevor said.
 

“Oh—nothing,” James said and returned to his inner sanctuary.

Map. Tunnel. Hollow. Trap. Star. Star trap.

“That’s it!” James said.

Olivia and Trevor stared expectantly, probably awaiting an explanation for James’ outburst, but he gave them no such satisfaction. Instead, he tore the flashlight from Olivia’s hands and hastened to the stage.
 

James had a thing for actresses. He knew full well—based on more painful experiences than he cared to admit—that they often made terrible girlfriends, but something about starlets turned him into a helpless pile of goo. As a byproduct of this fascination, he had come to understand a thing or two about theater and its structure—its nuances. One evening, while in pursuit of a particularly beguiling, brunette method actress—James later decided that method actresses were to be avoided at all costs—he attended a play at a small playhouse in the South Village of New York City. Local actors badmouthed the venue for its refusal to remove its “star trap,” a dangerous trap door infamous for causing injuries and shutting down productions.
 

James jumped onto the stage and extended the curtains to the edge of the proscenium. He stomped on the ground, listening for the hollow spot, locating the star trap.

“Someone come here and hold the light on me,” James said.

Trevor vaulted onto he stage and took the light. James examined the wooden stage—as expected, the trap door blended into the floor, though James’ fingernail detected a near-imperceptible seam.
 

“I knew it!”
 

He lowered his face to the floor and asked Trevor to reposition the light so that it would catch the seam’s groove, which outlined a square hatch and a spiderweb of lines in the shape of a star.
 

“There’s a trap door here,” he said. “I bet it leads to whatever it is we need to find next. Quick, spread out and look for a lever or something.”
 

Trevor disappeared with the flashlight, returning Olivia and James to the soft, glimmering quiet of the stage. Trevor’s footsteps informed James of his location, and Trevor moved from the front of the stage to the rear, followed by sharp clings of shattered glass and a grunt. A beam of light bobbed in the distance and headed toward James.

Trevor knelt beside James. “Excuse me,” he said, and James moved. Trevor slammed an emergency axe into the floor, repeating the action until a hole formed. He reached down, gripped the edge of the hole and yanked open the hatch.

“There’s your lever,” Trevor said.

File that under “don’t fuck with Trevor.”

James stuck his head into the hatch.
 

“There’s a ladder,” he said. “It’s a long way down—I can’t see the end.”
 

“You first,” Trevor said handing James the flashlight.

“Right…” James said and hesitated as he pictured shadowy hands grasping for his legs from within the ominous hole.

James’ nostrils curled with a damp, pungent mildew odor. He shoved the flashlight under his armpit and worked his way down. Slick, moldy railing kept his movements methodical—he agonized over his every step.

“Get a move on,” Trevor said from above him. “We don’t have all day.”

“Trying! The steps are wet,” James said. “I don’t think this passage has anything to do with the stage, it’s like a sewer. Disgusting.”

Halfway down the ladder, a greasy film began to form on James’ skin, clinging to him like a warm, wet blanket. He struggled to breathe and miscalculated a step, nearly falling. The flashlight broke free of his grip and dropped, splashing in a filthy, shallow stream of water. It cast a sharp beam of light that contorted as the water flowed over it.

“Shit!” he said.

“What was that?” Olivia said.

“Dropped the flashlight—looks okay.” James said. “Well, at least we know where this thing ends.”

James continued until his foot encountered air where the next step should be. He hopped down. Trevor came next, offering to catch Olivia, who declined and landed like a cat.

“What the hell is this place?” James said.

“Kinda reminds me of the sewers under London,” Olivia said, looking around at the soiled stone walls. “I’ve seen photos—don’t think I’ve faffed about in sewers,” she added.

“It doesn’t look like this goes for long,” James said. “Let’s move.”

After a few hundred feet, they encountered a rusty metal gate that creaked as it swung open. Beyond it, a hallway split in two.

“Let’s go right,” James said.

“Why?” Trevor said.

“Call it a hunch,” James said. He was pretty sure the bloody supply closet was in that direction.

They went right. After a short distance, the passage turned a sharp left into a long, dark corridor lined with barred prison cells on both sides.

“Goddamn,” James said. “It’s like a medieval dungeon.”

“You think the school was built on top of this?” Olivia said.

“Who would build a school on top of something like this?” James said.

“Who would build this
under
a school?” Olivia said.
 

They came to a holding cell on the right whose door leaned crooked against its entry, unhinged, its padlock deteriorated and bored through. Inside, a pair of manacles hung from the wall. One pair’s unlocked cuffs hung splintered apart and the other looked caked with dried blood.

“Lovely,” James said.

The trickle of streaming water faded, replaced by an awful, sawing din. And whimpering.

“Oh my God,” Olivia whispered. “I think that’s Colette.”
 

“It’s coming from the end of the hall,” Trevor said.

They bent low and scuttled to a pair of wooden doors down the hallway, opposite the cells. A slight crack between the doors allowed them to see into the room.
 

“Dear God,” a woman’s voice said between sobs. “Please stop. No more, he can’t take it.”

A sick, copper odor emanated from the room, and James’ stomach roiled.

“I smell blood—a lot of it,” Olivia said.

James peered in, his view limited to a sliver. Torchlight flickered. Colette crouched in a corner, curled in a ball and shivering. She alternated between glancing at something and burying her head in her arms.
 

“Damn, she’s in serious trouble,” James said. “But I can’t see from who—or what.”

“What should we do?” Olivia said.

“I say we bust in…Trevor, what do—Trevor?” James said, his gaze now fixed on Trevor.

Trevor’s nostrils flared and the muscles surrounding his temples rippled as his jaw clenched. Veins protruded from his neck and his breathing came in methodical huffs.

“Hey…are you okay?” James said. Trevor seemed a whole lot less like Trevor—he exuded a distinctly threatening aura. James scooted back a few inches.

Trevor’s eyes watered as he ground his teeth and forced his breath to steady. He had participated in dozens of rituals from the refuge of Purgatory 8. Each flooded back into his mind. He was now a participant. Experiencing a ritual from this side was too much to bear. He saw James, Olivia and Colette for what they were—people, not participants.

“Fuck it,” Trevor said and kicked open the doors.

Colette shrieked, threw her arms over her head, and coiled into a fetal position. Trevor paused, his brain struggling against the bizarre tableau, then caught himself as his knees wobbled and his neck hairs cringed. Keto groaned. He hung like a limp slab of meat, sharpened dowels pinning his body to a large circular table propped on its side. His jaw fell slack and his head lolled. Trevor struggled with the lopsided nature of Keto’s body: he was missing his left leg at the knee and his right arm, which had been severed at the elbow. Blood pooled at the foot of the table, makeshift tourniquets cinching the flow from his wounds.

Beside him stood Horace, who—like a child—laughed, bouncing and clapping.

6

“Oh, how I love company! Do you like my work? Colette here can’t get enough. She’s next in line to experience my genius, you know,” Horace said.

James stood mute. Olivia and Trevor were silent as well.
 

“Speechless? I fully understand!” Horace said. “My work often has that effect on people.”

“How—why—what are you doing?” James stammered.

“Oh, that’s right,” Horace said. “You never did get an answer.”

“An answer?” James said.

“To what I was doing before I arrived here.”

“Look, that doesn’t matter—” James said.

“Oh, but it does,” Horace insisted. “I was ‘reconfiguring’ my latest boy toy from Brazil. Thiago had a delectable body, save for a few unsavory traits. I corrected those, but unfortunately I found myself here before my work was complete. That left me unsatisfied. It’s been absolute torture acting in pain, like a weepy girl, awaiting the moment I could pick you off one by one. If only I’d had more time with Anthony—he was so…appetizing,” Horace said.

“Anthony?” James said. “
You
killed Anthony?” He launched himself at Horace.

“Ah-ah-ah!” Horace said, taking hold of one of Keto’s tourniquets. “Careful James, you wouldn’t want me loosening these, would you? Keto will bleed out in less than a minute—trust me, he doesn’t have much left—the poor thing.”