I looked up at Ryan, meeting his unsure eyes.
“It’s just guilt, okay?” I tried to smile reassuringly.
I pushed the hair out of my eyes and glanced at my watch.
“I don’t see anything that looks like a journal,” I sputtered disappointedly. I looked up at Ryan. He was looking around uneasily, rubbing his palms up and down his arms. Then I noticed my breath filling the air before my eyes. Ryan was shivering and I could see his breath too, as if we were standing outside in the chill. The temperature had plummeted a good ten degrees in a matter of seconds and a gray pallor had tinged the lamp-glow in the office.
The cold I was now feeling was nothing like before. It was nothing like when a guardian was corrupted and taken from its human charge. This was deeper. I was internally cold, as if something were creeping its way inside my skin. Invading me.
“Let’s call it a night, alright? I can’t stand being here any longer,” I admitted and began walking toward the door. My sneaker crunched lightly beneath me, stopping me in my tracks. Kneeling down, I traced my finger over the glossy hardwood floor and rubbed it against my thumb. Black grit coarsely scraped my skin.
Ryan crossed the room to where I sat kneeling. “Guess the housekeeper missed a spot.”
“It’s sand.”
At that very moment, the chill went deeper. Something felt horribly wrong. It was as if the walls had eyes and they were all focused on me and Ryan.
As we opened the door to the hallway, Ryan came to a screeching halt. “Someone’s in the house,” he whispered.
I stood staring down the long, narrow hallway, knowing it was our only way out, but my feet wouldn’t budge. I was frozen with fear.
“In here!” Ryan tugged at my arm, pulling me into a coat closet, and quickly shut the door. “We’ll wait it out in here, then we’ll leave.”
I could feel the darkness closing in around me like a living, breathing organism, filling the air with an unnatural pulsating thickness.
Ryan’s boyish face was inches from my own and I looked at him now, wondering if he was going as crazy as I was. This tiny closet we had ourselves crammed into was playing tricks on my mind. But we couldn’t move. Not yet.
“Do you think it’s the housekeeper?” I asked quietly.
“I dunno. Why would she be cleaning this time of night?”
I had an awful feeling. “What if it’s Brynn?”
Ryan just looked at me without answering. We both knew it wasn’t Brynn. Something strange was happening in this house. Something … unnatural.
Ryan’s face was illuminated by the flashlight I was holding in my unsteady hand and the light wobbled in various directions like a strobe light. The sensation of feeling seasick washed over me. A glimpse of jeans. My coat pocket. His knee. The wall. At last the light settled on his face. His skin looked pale and sickly in the yellow light. It reminded me of the night Claire took me to the rave.
Oh God, what an awful impression I had of Ryan then.
We listened to the silence, which is really a strange thought. If there’s silence, then what exactly are you listening to? I suppose it was more a question of what we were listening for.
Ryan broke the hush, his voice gravelly, croaking like a wheeze. “Before my mom died, she told me heaven wasn’t really a place. It’s in our minds. We make our own happiness.”
Garreth had told me the same thing. I wondered why Ryan’s mom would tell him something like that. Maybe it was her escape from an abusive relationship?
“What if … what if hell was there too? What if it was all in our heads?”
We sat thinking.
Ryan rubbed his hands together. I imagined a tiny spark igniting between his palms. I imagined warmth and safety, but it seemed so far away right now. It was so cold here, but we had to stay. Just stay and wait. Wait for this terrifying feeling we were both experiencing to subside, or wait for Dr.
Nathaniel Dean to return home to his strange, cold house. Neither one sounded like a good option.
I pictured a flame in Ryan’s hands.
Hell.
Garreth once told me of a living hell, but that had been Hadrian’s warped idea. Things were different now.
But still …
Lucifer’s hell.
A personal hell created in each person’s mind.
All it would take is just one tiny spark.
If heaven and hell were what each one of us envisioned, could the two co-exist? There would have to be a constant struggle between what was right and what was wrong. We all struggled with that every day; over what was good and what was … evil.
I looked at Ryan rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, shivering.
He had a point.
And if that were true, then how could we ever escape it?
With bated breath we waited out minutes that seemed to stretch forever. Sitting crouched in a closet in still silence was pure torture. Finally, Ryan gave me a look that more or less signaled now or never and we made a quick and, hopefully quiet, break for the kitchen door.
Once we were out of the house, we ran without stopping to the corner of Claymont and Church. By the time we had reached the end of the cul-de-sac my lungs were burning.
“Holy crap,” Ryan breathed heavily into the cold night. “I never thought we would get out of there.”
My own heart was beating against the inside of my chest as I drew long breaths of air into my lungs. I was still cold, but not like before. Now I was shaky from feeling so afraid. It was a horrible after-effect. My house was a few yards down from where we stood and I was anxious to get home, to the quiet safety of my room.
I looked at Ryan. He was looking back at me.
“Should we try and guess what just happened back there?” he finally said out loud.
I shook my head. “No, I need some time to think about it.”
And then in silence, he walked me home.
The entire weekend passed by like a bad dream. I sequestered myself to my room, catching up on calculus homework and only coming out into the light of day to fill up on Skittles and frozen waffles. My excursion with Ryan on Friday had left me shaky and unsure about a million things and the best way to deal with it all was to be alone.
When Monday arrived, I was fully prepared to face the week as a strong, stable individual.
I should have stayed in my room.