be helped. None of them was more terrified of the Red Room than Shirley, even though she was the only one never to have spent time there.
“Oh,” Shirley yelped, clutching herself in fear. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to wait for Anne,” Mary said. “She’ll need us when she emerges from that horrible place.”
“What if the Headmistress comes back?”
“You know she has to guard the door,” Daphne said. “She can’t leave until she’s finished with Anne. We have a few hours.”
Shirley clamped her thumbnail between her teeth and looked around the room, as if expecting a monster to break through the walls. She gnawed on the nail and clutched her chest with the other arm.
“Should we play?” Mary whispered sheepishly.
“You mean the bones?” asked Daphne. “It is the perfect time, with the Headmistress occupied.”
A gust of wind blew through the broken window. The paper map clicked against the wall.
“We can’t,” Shirley said quickly. “Anne isn’t here.”
“True enough,” Daphne agreed. “But she just won the game. She’s already told a story, and it’s unlikely she’d get another chance so soon. It couldn’t hurt anything to play once more.”
“I don’t think it’s fair to her,” Shirley said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Well, what would you like to do?” Mary asked. “Should we count raindrops or motes of dust?”
“Aren’t there other games we could play? The stories we tell are just so awful. Why can’t we play a game that isn’t
“You know this game has a purpose,” Daphne said, “and a real reward should we truly win.”
“But how do you know?” Shirley asked, her voice very near tears. Her sullen face lowered. She removed her thumb from her teeth and set her hands on the desk. “How do you know we won’t be here forever?”
Daphne stepped forward and leaned down to put her arm over the seated girl’s shoulders. “You saw what happened to Sylvia. She was with us for a very long time until the night she told that story—
Mary came forward to stand next to them. Thinking of Sylvia, she recalled bits of a poem by Byron, a poem of beauty, of light and of music. Under less somber circumstances she might have quoted from it. Instead, she put her lips very near Shirley’s ear and said softly, “Don’t you remember how beautiful it was? Don’t you remember how she smiled so,
“But we don’t know where she went,” Shirley argued, sniffling.
“Perhaps,” Mary whispered, “but we know she moved on. I have to believe heaven finally made a place for her.”
“Anne will be angry with us,” Shirley said.
“Anne is always angry with us,” Daphne replied, giving Shirley’s shoulders a tight squeeze, knowing she was about to agree to the game. “Next time, we’ll let her roll first, and she can take three turns if she wants.”
“Maybe we just shouldn’t tell her,” Shirley suggested.
“A capital idea,” Daphne said with a laugh. “So, you’re in?”
Shirley let a smile creep over her tear-stained face. “Why? Are you writing a book?”
The girls laughed. Quickly Daphne pulled away and spun one of the desk chairs to face Shirley’s. Mary turned and gently brought another chair forward until the three desks formed a blunt triangle. She set the Clutch on the desk before her and waited. The familiar excitement of playing the game flooded her.
“Shall I?” Mary asked, indicating the vermillion bag.
“Well, Anne opened it last,” Daphne said, “so it is your turn.”
“But we won’t tell Anne,” Shirley insisted.
“We won’t say a word,” Mary promised.
With trembling fingers, Mary touched the smooth fabric. She stroked the velvet material, let her fingertips pause on the hard lumps made by the bones. She parted its mouth and upturned the Clutch. Bones, coppery with age, spilled into her palm. She felt the smooth side of the skull and the sharp points of claws. They tingled, as if eager to be rolled.
With a gentle shake she let the bones fall on the desk, and knew instantly that she had not won.
“My turn,” Daphne said. But she too failed to roll the winning combination.
And so it went, one turn after another. Mary. Daphne. Shirley. Then Mary again. Excitement and disappointment mixed in the girls as each turn produced no winner.
“Maybe we can’t play with just three,” Shirley said, dejected after her last failed roll. “Maybe it has to be all four of us.”
“We’ve rolled a lot longer than this with no winner,” Daphne said. “Let’s keep at it. Mary?”
And again the bones were in her hand: at turns soft and smooth, jagged and rough. Mary studied the tiny symbols etched into the bones. She concentrated on the one symbol that meant the most: the symbol that must appear on three of the bones for her to succeed.
She rolled.
“You did it,” Shirley gasped, as if it were a genuine miracle.
The room around her grew very quiet, and Mary held her breath, waiting for the story. No sound of rain or thunder touched her now. Something was coming.
A great whooshing, like a hurricane wind, filled her head. There were faces and voices and odd machines…
Then there was music.
1
The band’s intro by club owner Allen Bates was short and sweet. The thirtysomething entrepreneur grabbed the mike at the center of the small stage, brought it to his lips, and screamed “Torn!” like it was four syllables long. Then he stepped back, slamming his hands together wildly, nodding for the crowd to do the same. As the applause rose, blue lights came up on the five figures on Tunnel Vision’s stage. Showtime.
Devin slammed an easy E on his refurbished Fender. Cheryl ripped along the drum kit, her hair flailing back and forth across her face like a long blond whip. Ben doubled Devin on the keyboard, and even the bassist, Karston, came in almost on time for a change. The sound rode the cheering, revving the crowd.
As the tempo built, square-jawed Cody, his bed-head spiky hair bleached white, leaped into a spotlight with a spanking new Les Paul hanging from his neck. His insanely deep, raspy voice flooded the room:
It was an easy number, Devin thought as he watched and played. He could sleepwalk through the changes.
Cheryl, her strong but feminine arms flashing from her sleeves as she confidently crashed out the beat, stopped swinging her head long enough to give Devin a wide, sexy smile. “Face” was his song, the one that got them the gig. He smiled back, almost missing his harmony on the chorus:
