Madeleine Roux - Sanctum

“It sounds to me like he’s still haunted by what he did. You heard what Dan said—Felix wanted forgiveness. Even if he’s still … Even if he’s not better, it does sound like part of him is sorry.” She yawned, leaning closer to her camera, just close enough to show the dark smudges under her eyes. “Be cynical if you want, Jordan, but it’s not like you’re getting much sleep either.”

“Nope, but my calc grades are ridiculous. Who knew insomnia could be so great for your work ethic?” He forced a laugh. “Listen, Dan, I’m taking a look at these numbers for you, but I’m not promising much. It sounds to me like Felix has gone way, way off the deep end. Probably best just to forget we ever met the guy and move on. We can burn these pictures and never think about him again.”

“You didn’t see him,” Dan insisted. “He wasn’t just urgent … He was … possessed, almost.”

What we did to you … Awful. Terrible. I don’t know if it can be undone …

An icy stone settled in Dan’s stomach. Felix didn’t know if what could be undone?

“Not a word I like to think about in conjunction with that creep,” Jordan muttered. The camera caught a head full of hair while he looked down toward his lap. Over the microphone, Dan heard the scratch of a pen on paper.

“Jeez, I have got to get some sleep. These stupid numbers keep turning into blobs,” Jordan said with a sigh. “I swear the pattern looks familiar, though. It’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue … Freaking frustrating.”

“You can do it, Jordan,” Abby said, perking up in her video window. “If anyone can figure them out, you can.”

“I don’t know,” he replied. He really did sound exhausted.

“Let’s start from the top,” Dan suggested. “You said it’s probably a code of some kind, right? This is Felix we’re talking about. He was a wackjob, sure, but he was smart. A genius. We have to assume he gave me the code knowing it was something we could figure out.”

“I’m not even sure it’s a code anymore,” Jordan said. “They’re groupings, but there are so few of them. The way they’re spaced looks intentional, but …”

Dan had been so sure Jordan would know what to do with the numbers. The kid could solve a master sudoku puzzle in his sleep, or ace the kind of calc test that made Dan sick with stress. If Jordan couldn’t crack this puzzle, they’d be left with nothing.

“But what?” Abby prompted. She squinted into her webcam. Dan had emailed them both a copy of the numbers on the back of Felix’s photo, along with the image on the front.

“But I don’t know. Sometimes these things are crazy complex. Not like A equals one, B equals two,” he explained. “Maybe it can’t be solved on its own. We might need the cipher—”

“Did you guys hear that?” Abby suddenly whispered, glancing over her shoulder and into the dark bedroom behind her.

“Hear what?” Jordan asked absently.

“That voice .” Her eyes grew wide and she shrank back in her chair. “You really didn’t hear it?” she whispered.

Dan leaned closer to the computer screen, brows knitted with concern. “Hear what? Abby, I mean, are you okay ? I didn’t hear anything.” He hadn’t. “Did you, Jordan?”

“No …”

Abby’s head flew to the side. “There it is again!”

Dan was beginning to worry. He didn’t hear anything but the impatient tapping of Jordan’s pen on his desk. “I really don’t hear it, Abs.”

She blinked, hard, trembling a little in the window on Dan’s screen. “It sounded like … Never mind.”

“Like what?” Dan prompted.

“No, it’s idiotic,” she said, sighing. “Forget it.”

“Abby. What did it sound like?”

She looked away from the camera. “My aunt. Lucy.”

All three of them went quiet for a moment. Four months ago, when they first met, Dan might have been tempted to crack a joke to fill the silence. But hearing voices wasn’t a joke to them anymore, not after the summer they’d shared, and Abby wasn’t the kind of girl who got scared easily.

“Has this happened before?” Dan asked.

“Maybe once or twice,” Abby said, looking down at her lap. “Maybe more than that. Ever since we left … I don’t know. I just hear her sometimes. Whispering.”

“Abby,” he started to say, his stomach tying itself in knots, “that’s not—”

“I’ve got it!”

Both he and Abby jumped a little at Jordan’s sudden shout.

“I’ve got it,” he cried again. “I mean, I don’t got it got it, but I think I know what we need to do.”

Dan wasn’t ready to leave behind the possibility that Abby might be hallucinating mysterious voices. This was probably the point when a real boyfriend would give her a hug, or at least sit with her until she calmed down. Stupid distance. Stupid webcam.

“Go on,” Dan said, tearing his focus away from Abby. “What do we need to do?”

“He said to follow, right?” Jordan said, speaking quickly, excitedly. Tip-tap-tip-tap. Jordan typed so noisily Dan almost couldn’t hear his voice. “I didn’t see it at first because of what’s missing. Look at the photos again, all three of them—mine, then yours, Dan, then Abby’s.”

Dan slipped the picture off his desk and steadied it in front of the monitor, comparing it to the photos his friends had received. They made a complete panorama, one wide carnival tent and a bizarre group of people, posed in a vacant tableau. What did a weird old carnival have to do with this code?

“See?” Jordan cried. “Right there, behind the tent and the Ferris wheel. Do you see it?”

“See what?” Abby said flatly. “A blurry smudge and, I don’t know, a roof maybe? I can’t make it out …”

Dan had already pored over the photos a dozen or so times since returning to his house, but now he tried to study the panorama with fresh eyes. Abby was right—it looked like a roof, a tall, slanted roof. “A steeple?”

“Nope,” Jordan replied. “Here. Look at this picture I’m sending.”

The messenger window below the videos flashed, and Dan scrolled to check out the image Jordan had found. It was almost impossible to describe the hard jab of excitement and dread that hit him like a punch to the throat. It felt like he might choke on his next breath.

Sloped, white with dark trim, falling to pieces …

“Brookline,” he whispered, his eyes mere centimeters from the screen. “That’s the campus. That carnival—it’s on the green in front of Wilfurd Commons.”

“I thought it looked familiar, so I checked the college’s website and voilà! It’s hard to see at this resolution, but it’s definitely Brookline,” Jordan explained.

“Nice catch,” Abby said.

“Thank you, thank you very much. I’m here all week.”

“Okay,” Dan said, leaning back in his chair. He stuck his thumbnail in his mouth and worried it, his eyes shifting from the color photo on his screen to the black-and-white one on his desk. “Okay, so that’s Brookline. That’s the campus. What are the numbers then?”

“They’re coordinates,” Jordan said, his voice punctuated by the staccato of his speedy typing. “They don’t make any sense without the cardinal indications, but I looked up Camford’s coordinates and they’re close. Really close. If you substitute in the right letters, you’ll see what I mean.”

“Slow down, Jordan, we can’t all be misunderstood geniuses,” Dan teased.

“No, I see what he means!” Now Abby sounded just as caught up, just as thrilled as Jordan. Dan couldn’t match their enthusiasm, not yet.

“Like this,” Jordan said, and a new message appeared.

43°12′24″N 71°32′17″W