“My god,” Melody whispered, her face going ashen as she stared at the whimpering animal in Sofia’s hands. “What are you doing?”
Sofia stood up and turned to face Melody, whose own eyes weren’t even looking at her, but were fixed instead on the panicked and broken rabbit in her hands. As Melody watched, Sofia gripped one of the bunny’s broken rear legs and twisted it hard.
The baby rabbit screamed again, and Melody recoiled from what she was seeing. But then she took a deep breath, and before Sofia could do anything else, she snatched it out of her hands and sank onto her own chair, cradling the rabbit as gently as she could.
An instant later their door opened and they both heard Sister Mary David’s voice. “What’s going on in here?”
“Look,” Melody said, holding out her hands with the grotesquely twisted baby rabbit.
Sister Mary David crossed herself as if to ward off whatever evil had befallen the rabbit. “Where did that come from?”
Before Melody could speak a single word, Sofia spread her hands helplessly. “I just got back from the library,” she said. “Melody was torturing it.”
“What?” Melody stared up at her roommate, whose face revealed nothing — no shame, no remorse, nothing. “I can’t believe you said that,” she breathed, then turned back to the nun. “Sister, I came in to get my laundry, and she was the one who had it.”
“Give me that poor thing,” Sister Mary David said, and took the barely breathing, twitching little body. “You stay right here. Both of you!” She whirled and swept out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
“What’s the matter with you?” Melody demanded, turning on Sofia. “Why would you even do that? It was just a baby! A sweet little harmless bunny!”
Sofia said nothing, and for several long minutes a terrible silence hung in the room until the door opened again and Sister Mary David reappeared.
The nun took Melody’s arm and drew her to her feet. “Father Sebastian wants to see you immediately.”
“Me?” Melody protested. “But all I was trying to do was rescue the rabbit. Sofia was the one who—”
“Lying only compounds your sin,” the nun said, and began steering her toward the door.
“I’m not lying!” Melody cried, turning toward Sofia. “Tell her, Sofia! Tell her the truth!”
Sofia only looked at her impassively. “I only know what I saw,” she said softly.
With Melody still insisting she’d done nothing, Sister Mary David marched her out of the room, leaving Sofia alone once more. As the door closed behind Melody and the nun, she lay down on her bed and gazed up at the ceiling. Her fingers twitched slightly as the thing inside her remembered the feeling of the rabbit’s bones breaking beneath their pressure.
The feeling was good.
† † †
Sister Mary David guided Melody down a series of stairs into the labyrinth that was the school’s basement.
“Isn’t Father Sebastian in his office?” Melody asked, her throat dry.
“No,” the nun replied, walking so quickly through the darkened tunnels that Melody had to trot to keep up. “He told me to bring you to the chapel.”
“This is stupid. I didn’t do anything — it was Sofia!”
“Hush!” Sister Mary David stopped in front of an old wooden door, and a sudden surge of panic gripped Melody as she remembered what Sofia had told her about going to confession in the basement chapel.
A chapel where she’d been forced to pray on her knees for hours on end.
Was she herself going to have to do that now?
She did not want to go inside, and took a step back, away from the door.
Sister Mary David pulled the door open, and in spite of herself, Melody looked in.
An enormous, hideous crucifix, with a hollow-eyed, dying Christ loomed over the candlelit altar.
“No,” she said, backing away. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“It’s all right, Melody,” Father Sebastian said softly as he stepped through the doorway from the vestry.
“It wasn’t me, Father,” Melody cried as tears of frustration and fear began to choke her. “It was Sofia. I came back to get my laundry, and she had that little thing, and—”
Father Sebastian beckoned to her, inviting her inside. “Come in and let’s talk about it.”
Melody felt her anxiety begin to melt slightly as she heard the priest’s soothing voice. “I–I don’t—” she began, but the priest held up a quieting hand.
“Please, Melody,” Father Sebastian said. “Talk with me.”
Melody swallowed. Something still told her not to go into the strange chapel, but surely Father Sebastian would never hurt her. And he was offering her an opportunity to explain what had just gone on in her room. “All right,” she breathed.
Father Sebastian held out his hand. She took it, and stepped across the threshold into the chapel.
CHAPTER 37
JEFFREY HOLMES OPENED his eyes and looked around, but the darkness was so deep that he had to put his fingers to his face to make certain that his eyes were open at all. He winced as he felt the sticky filth that covered him, and he tried to shy away from the fetid odor of his cell.
Why was he here? What had he done?
It had to be some kind of prison, but he couldn’t remember — couldn’t remember anything, really, except the strange sensation of flickering in and out of consciousness in the blackness, as if something else — some other being — had somehow taken over his body.
Suddenly Jeffrey felt a white-hot fury begin in his solar plexus and boil up through his chest.
It was starting again!
It was as if he was being pushed aside by something deep within himself, and in a moment the wrath burning inside him would consume not just his body, but his mind and soul as well.
“Please, no,” he whispered, the words emerging from his lips as nothing but a faint squeal. But he knew it was useless to plead in the face of the rampaging fury, and a moment later the rage erupted in his mind.
Jeffrey Holmes disappeared.
The evil that had conquered the boy’s body experimented with it, causing each limb to twitch spasmodically, each finger to clench so hard that its nail sank deep into the flesh of the palms. Relishing the pain, the evil squatted on its haunches and found the powers deep in the body’s brain that let it reach far from the cramped cell to probe the grounds of the buildings above the prison.
It detected a change. Something was happening.
It sent out thin tendrils of exploration, creeping through the building above, the grounds, the ancillary buildings, looking for something, something that had changed…
There! The place where the girls lived!
A new presence.
A kindred spark.
But wait. He had felt this spark before. But it was stronger now, much stronger. Though it was lying almost dormant at the moment, it was gathering strength, gathering momentum.
If somehow they could meet and their energies merge…
They would combine into a force so strong that it could never be conquered.
Yet this was not the spark of change the evil had detected, though it was pleased with this one’s progress.
