“A pattern?”
“Yes! It means something. This is all happening for a reason. And not only do we get three killings every generation, but they all take place in late March or late September. Do you know why that is?”
“There’s a lot of fog?” I ventured.
“It’s the equinox.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. The vernal equinox is March 20 and the autumnal is tonight. September 22. Those are the two times of the year when day and night are equal, and all the killings have taken place on or within a day or two of these dates. That can’t be a coincidence.”
I was beyond baffled. “So you think these deaths are connected—both to each other and to a specific celestial event? But why?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I mean, it’s a whole century of murder, but because it’s been happening over such a long period of time, no one cares. Except me.”
“So why do you care?”
His voice hardened. “Are you saying you don’t?”
“No, but you want me to believe in a killer who strikes every twenty-five years or so, exactly three times, only on these dates, and that he’s been around for over a hundred years?”
“That’s right.”
“How could that be?”
“I’ve thought about that.” Hollis licked his lips. “A lot. Because the killings being random would be the most obvious explanation. Dover has crime. Hell, we’ve had our fair share of murders around here; it’s no wonder not everything is front-page news. Did you know that during the seventies, there were at least three active serial killers in this general part of California?”
I nodded because I did know. Dover, for all its gated excess and idyllic seaside beauty, was known for its drifting population and increasing drug trade. Loose morals and New Age fetishism. Beneath our summer tans and salt-spray ease, darker urges lingered. Violence. Racism. Cultish ideologies. Utter greed and dirt-cheap pleasures. “But that doesn’t answer the question about how he could be around for such a long period of time.”
“Well, what if the killer’s not a he?”
I cocked my head. “You mean, what if the killer’s a woman?”
“No, I mean, what if the reason the killings have been happening for so long is because the killer’s not a who, but a what?”
* * *
I gaped at Hollis, but before I could respond, the roar of an approaching car engine made me jump. We’d reached the junction where the wooded trail joined with the main drive leading up to the school, and I whipped around in time to see a pair of headlights careening out of a hairpin turn and rocketing up the hillside.
I stumbled back at the sight, reaching to pull Hollis with me, only to find him not reacting to the vehicle at all—he just stood there, staring at me in that strange way of his. It was creepy, really, so I hissed: “What do you mean, the killer’s a what? Like a tree?”
“No, not like a tree,” he snapped peevishly. “You’re an idiot.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
But Hollis refused to answer. Instead, he folded his arms and set his jaw, like I’d offended him in some way. I didn’t get a chance to ask more questions because the approaching vehicle—which turned out to be a silver pickup, its bed filled with a crowd of shouting students—blared its horn and came to a screeching stop beside us. The air reeked of burned rubber.
“Hollis English!” The driver of the truck leaned out of the window. “Holy shit. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Hollis said nothing, but I stepped forward, put on my friendliest smile. “We were just heading back to campus. Want to give us a ride?”
“Who are you?” a girl from the back asked me. She wore a Giants hat and knelt on the wheel well. “I’ve never seen you before.”
A guy seated beside her shone a flashlight at me—the reflective piping on my vest lit up in an embarrassing way—and he hooted. “Look at that! He’s a safety escort, Z. Hollis needs a grown-up to walk around with him.”
The girl clapped her hands. “That makes total sense.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She looked at me again. “So how long have you been working here?”
“Huh?”
“You’re one of the new hires for the grounds staff, right? That’s why you got stuck doing this?”
Her friend rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Z. He’s a student. Probably doing work-study or something.”
I nodded.
“Come on,” the driver said impatiently. “I don’t give a fuck who the kid is so long as he doesn’t jack us. Get in the back already. Let’s go.”
We scrambled into the truck bed, where I promptly thanked everyone and introduced myself. Hollis, on the other hand, remained a sullen heap, pulling his knees to his chest and refusing to say anything, despite the fact everyone appeared to know who he was.
“You coming to the after-party?” The girl with the Giants hat squeezed between us. She seemed to want to make things up with me. “Or are safety escorts not allowed to have any fun?”
“What after-party?” I asked.
“At Pike house. Hollis knows about it. He’s supposed to be helping host the damn thing, but you know how he is.”
“Not really. We just met tonight.”
The girl grinned. “He hasn’t tried to convince you to go ghost hunting with him, has he?”
“Uh, that hasn’t come up.”
Her eyes sparkled. “But he told you about the ghosts, didn’t he?”
I glanced at Hollis, who looked more miserable than ever. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, he told you,” the girl said brightly. “I can tell. And look, we all think he’s nuts, but who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe we’re all being haunted.”
“Haunted?” I echoed.
She pinched my arm. “He’s not going to puke, is he? He looks like he’s going to puke.”
“He might. He’s had a lot to drink. More than he should’ve, that’s for sure.”
Hollis lifted his head, just enough to glare at me. “You know, I can hear you, Perez.”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
He kept up with the glaring long enough to pull his whiskey bottle from his pocket and drink more.
The girl whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry about him. He’s always like this. He’s been strange ever since . . .”
“Ever since what?” I asked.
“Never mind. He just needs to have fun. And you know, after that shitty thing I said to you earlier, maybe you do too.”
I hesitated. “Yeah, maybe.”
The truck rocked through a pothole, sending the girl bouncing against me. She laughed at my startled expression. “Well, in that case,” she said. “There’s no excuse. You have to come to our party.”
* * *
The truck paused briefly at the security gate before finally rolling on to campus. The ground fog beneath us had grown so dense the road had all but vanished. Everything else still twinkled with beauty, with seclusion; the Dover Springs property was a lush woodland oasis consisting of almost two hundred acres of tree-lined trails, quaint classrooms speckled among the redwoods, and swinging footbridges that stretched across burbling creeks.
Clustered on the east side of campus, a row of stately frat houses sat far from the freshman dorms, close to the trees, and after we’d parked in the nearby student lot and were walking up toward Pike house, the girl with the Giants hat pulled a pair of devil horns from her purse. I watched as she slipped them on over her baseball hat before digging around for a glittery silver halo that she gently placed on top of my head.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“You’re going to need it where we’re going.”
“I am? What kind of party is this?”
“You still don’t know?”
“No.”
The girl grinned as she trotted up the front porch steps ahead of me. “Heaven and hell.”
&nb
sp; Part—all right, most—of me longed to follow her, but when I turned to look for Hollis, I felt a twinge of guilt. Or shame, really, for having abandoned him. While everyone else from the truck was flooding into the frat house, he remained standing off to the side, in the shadows, with his broad shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.
“Nice halo,” he muttered as I walked over to him.
“I bet I can find you one.”
He shook his head. “Go get laid if you want. You don’t need to take care of me.”
“I don’t want to get laid.”
“Everyone wants to get laid.”
“Well, I don’t,” I insisted.
He pouted. “I’m not hunting ghosts, by the way. Zoe hears what she wants.”
“Yeah, well, you were the one who said we were all in danger from a killer who wasn’t a person. What’re people supposed to think?”
“We are in danger!” he cried. “All of us! Right now. Well, technically, you aren’t. But the rest of us are.”
“Why not me?”
His eyes flashed. “You really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Then I’ll show you. Come on.” Hollis turned and beckoned for me to follow, leading me up onto the porch, through the frat house front door, and straight into hell.
Once inside, I stopped and stared. Then I couldn’t stop staring. It was impressive, really, to see how quickly the party had moved from beach to home. Unlike Hollis and me, everyone else apparently must’ve driven back to campus after the eleven p.m. bonfire cutoff. The entire downstairs of Pike house was currently decorated in flames and pitchforks while a black light lit the living room with swirls of neon and the crush of painted bodies. Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” thundered over the speakers, set on hellish repeat, and the line for the keg stretched from the kitchen, winding down a long hallway.
I probably would’ve kept standing there for all eternity except Hollis tapped my shoulder and pointed to a staircase. Spell broken, I nodded and trailed after him, departing hell and ascending into a world bright and glittering—the second floor of the frat house had been transformed into a cloudy fog machine–generated sort of paradise. Every surface was covered in aluminum foil and flickered with candlelight. Glitter and angel wings fluttered from the ceiling while Sia sang passionately.
The party’s theme, it dawned on me, was a direct nod to the Feast of Avalon—that other celebration of light and dark, good and evil, those warring forces of our world. But there was no time for any deeper theological musing; dragging me down a confusing twist of corridors, Hollis quickly pulled me into a filthy bedroom and shut the door behind us. Then locked it. I looked around. The place was disgusting. It resembled a rat’s nest more than anything else—papers were tacked to the wall, clothes strewn everywhere, dishes piled in a corner, including dirty ones crusted with bits of food.
“Nasty.” I pointed at a small cloud of fruit flies. “Don’t you eat in the dining hall ever?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Now look at this.”
“At what?”
“Right here.” Shoving a bunch of crap onto the floor, he switched on a desk lamp and flipped open his laptop. Huddled beside him, I watched as he got online and pulled up the Dover Springs website, navigating to the page titled “Our History.” “Tell me what you see.”
I squinted at the screen. The page described information I already knew: how the site of Dover Springs had originally housed a private mental asylum that had been in operation from 1886 to 1907, at which point the hospital had tragically burned down. Rather than rebuild, the doctors who had operated the asylum decided it would be better and more charitable for the Dover community to start a private university instead.
“Okay,” I said when I was done reading. “So what?”
“Did you look at the picture?”
I hadn’t, but on the page was an old black-and-white photograph of a group of stuffy-looking old white guys—the school’s founders. They were standing on the main campus’s lawn, flanking a large sign with the Dover Springs crest carved into it.
“How many people are in that photo?” Hollis asked.
I quickly counted. “Thirteen.”
“Do you consider that a good number or a bad one?”
I paused. “An unlucky one.”
“Fair enough,” Hollis said. “Well, I’ve been curious about the real history behind this place, so I did some digging into who these guys were and especially the asylum that was here before. The one that burned. And despite all that charitable talk, it was a pretty fucking awful place. There were reports of abuse. Neglect. People claimed they were wrongfully held for years on end. Families were broken up. Spouses couldn’t get their loved ones out, even when they wanted to leave.”
I frowned. “But that’s just how it was back then, right? People with mental illnesses weren’t treated fairly. Or humanely. I mean, it’s shitty, but I don’t know that it means the Dover Springs Asylum was any more cruel than any other place.”
“Maybe not. But they were definitely more corrupt. Did you know that the town of Dover used to have a special committee that had the power to determine if someone needed to be institutionalized? And their decisions were legally binding. There were no hearings or means of recourse; they had complete discretion. This committee called themselves the Commission of Lunacy.”
“No way,” I said. “That can’t be a real thing.”
“It was. And from the records I found, those same thirteen doctors who ran that hellhole, who got subsidies from the state for every patient they housed, were the exact same doctors who made up the commission.”
I pointed at the photo. “These guys?”
He nodded. “It’s all on record, if you know where to look. With the commission’s power, they were able to have Dover citizens committed for the most ridiculous reasons: being distraught over a breakup, losing faith in their religion. Even for getting fired from a job or protesting unfair work practices. Usually, it was poor people. Or women.”
“Jesus.”
“The worst of it is, when the hospital caught fire, all the staff and doctors got out safely, but they didn’t go back for a lot of the patients. And you know how long it must’ve taken the fire department to get up that hill. By the time they arrived, nineteen patients had died, locked in their rooms; some in restraints, waiting for help that never came. Can you imagine? Being shut in there for no reason in the first place—or because someone wanted you locked up and out of the way—and then dying like that, completely helpless?”
“I really can’t,” I said, although I wondered if he knew anything at all about our country’s current issue with mass incarceration. “It’s disgusting. But, Hollis, these doctors, the school founders . . . When you said the killer wasn’t a who but a what, what did you mean?”
“I meant, what if the killer’s not a person at all, but a whole group of people?”
My mind spun. Thirteen. He’d said there’d been thirteen doctors.
“What kind of group?” I asked cautiously.
“What else?” Hollis said. “A coven.”
* * *
A coven. I stepped back from his desk. “You can’t actually believe that.”
His face colored. “Sure I can! It makes sense, doesn’t it? They were the Commission of Lunacy, for God’s sake. They essentially murdered nineteen innocent people who they wrongly locked up, and as a result, they were rewarded with this school, where they profited even more. If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is. And so maybe that coven is still around. Maybe those same thirteen men weren’t men at all, and they have to keep killing every so often, in order to . . .”
I stared at him. “In order to what?”
“Stay alive,” he whispered.
I blew air through my cheeks. “That still doesn’t explain the time period. I haven’t seen any hundred-and-fifty-year-old men wandering around Dover recently.”
“But what if they don’t look
old? What if that’s the point? Think about it: If you needed a constant stream of young people to sacrifice for your own eternal youth, and you couldn’t run your asylum scam anymore, what better plan could you have than building your own elite university and inviting those young people to pay you for the privilege of coming here?”
I was speechless. This wasn’t just drunken rambling. This poor guy really believed what he was saying, that those same thirteen men still lived up here, still walked among the students, in some youthful form or another.
He kept going. “It’s the equinox. That’s the key. I thought it was ghosts at first; you know, some sort of specter. But that was wrong. The celestial event is definitely part of the ritual, which means there’s a good chance someone here on campus is going to die tonight. Before sunrise. Although you don’t have to worry about being targeted.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You’re too old. Everyone who’s been killed so far has been nineteen.”
“Nineteen?”
“The same number as those who died in the fire.”
“Ah.” Then it hit me. “Wait. How old are you, Hollis?”
The smile he gave was a grim one. “I’ll be twenty next week.”
* * *
There was no talking sense to him after that. Hollis really and truly believed what he was saying, and nothing I said changed his mind. Apparently, a coven of witches was running the school and sacrificing its own students on the nights of the equinox in some black magic blood rite so that they could live forever. It was a terrifying thought, sure. But not one I could bring myself to believe.
At all.
“So what’re you going to do?” I asked after we’d gone back and forth for a bit. It was clear our opinions on the matter were deadlocked. It was also clear he resented my skepticism.
Hollis paced the room. “I told you. Tonight’s the best shot I’ll ever have, so I’m going to find the Phantom and I’m going to stop him.”
“Him?”
“Them!”
“How?”
“I don’t know!”
I went for the opening. “See! That’s just it. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, which means you won’t find it and you won’t disprove it, and that means you’ll just keep—”