Christine Johnson - Grim anthology

They passed around a bottle of vodka while they waited for midnight. “We don’t go out till then,” Paige informed Liv. Liv’s mouth grew numb from the liquor, and she wondered if she was going to be drunk before the party even started, but then Harley put the bottle away, and it was time.

“These are the rules,” Harley said to Liv as the girls stood up. “We have to return by three in the morning. No exceptions. And nobody brings anything back with them.”

Liv nodded, and then Harley did something very strange: she pushed her bed aside along well-worn grooves on the wooden floor, revealing a trapdoor. Harley lifted the door’s black iron ring and pulled it up, and Liv saw a flight of stairs descending into the dark. Liv wondered if she was seeing things because of the vodka. They were on the third floor of Castle Hall. Did those stairs go to the second floor?

Nobody questioned it, so Liv didn’t, either. As the girls began to troop down the stairs, Harley caught her eye and said, “Don’t forget what you agreed to, Liv.”

Warmth suffused her skin. “I won’t,” Liv said, and she stepped into the hole in the floor beneath Harley’s bed.

The stairs seemed to go on forever—well past the point where they should have struck the first floor. Liv gripped the metal railing as she followed the girls ahead of her, listening to them chatter about where they were going, who would be there, whether the music would be good. “It’s always good,” said one of them, and the others laughed in agreement, their voices throaty in the dim stairway.

Finally the stairs ended in a steel door like an emergency exit, and Paige pushed the bar to open it. They spilled out into a rain-slicked alley that smelled faintly of gasoline. As Liv looked around, the world seemed to spin. She didn’t understand how they could have climbed all the way down those stairs from beneath Harley’s bed to emerge in this alley in a city that was clearly not Middlebury.

“Where are we?” she asked, feeling dizzy.

Harley grabbed her arm, steadying her. “This way,” she said, and led Liv down the alley to another door. There was a flyer taped to it that depicted a stylized girl’s face with spiky hair and a big, full mouth. Across the place where her eyes should be were four letters: AARU. Harley reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open. Music blasted into the alley.

Liv and the other girls followed her inside. In front of a velvet curtain, a bouncer waited with a flashlight. Harley pulled Liv forward and said, “She’s new. The twelfth girl.”

The bouncer swept his flashlight over Harley’s hand, and her ring glowed. Then he turned the light on Liv’s face, and she winced at the brightness.

“All right,” the bouncer said, flicking the light away.

Harley grabbed her arm again. “Come on,” she said, and pulled her through the velvet curtain.

It was like stepping into another world. The music was overpowering, the bass so heavy it seemed to snake up her body from the floor to shake her from the inside out. The lights that strobed over the crowd obscured as much as they revealed: dancers in glitter and vinyl and fur, their bodies glinting with metal in places she would never think to pierce, their hair caught up in crowns and headdresses that looked like antlers. Instead of mirrored disco balls, there were trees made of glass rising from the floor, reflecting the lights. Crystal leaves hung from the clear branches overhead, making it seem as if the ceiling was heaving in time to the music.

The other girls slipped around Liv and Harley, disappearing into the crowd. Harley—who was still holding Liv’s wrist as if she were a child—leaned over to say, “This is the main room. There are two more. I’ll show you.” Then she began to lead Liv around the edge of the dance floor.

The next room seemed to be made of gold. The walls were hammered gold, and gold leaves hung from weeping golden willows while golden spotlights illuminated a dancer in a cage hanging above the crowd, her whole body painted gold. After that was the room made of silver: curving silver tree trunks; silver leaves that shivered in the warm, perfumed air; silver strobe lights that made every dancer’s skin look like platinum. Harley took Liv toward the bar in the silver room, and when Harley let go of her, she realized that sometime during their circuit of the club, Harley had switched to holding her hand.

Harley leaned close and said, “I have to go look for someone. I’ll come back for you before three. You should have a drink.” She pressed a goblet into Liv’s hand, and before Liv could object, Harley was gone.

The goblet was made of heavy gold and encrusted with jewels; it was the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a fairy-tale castle, not in a nightclub. Liv stared at the reflected lights in the shimmering liquid and sniffed it suspiciously. She still felt tipsy from the vodka and wasn’t sure if she should mix it with this...wine? She looked out at the crowd, wondering where Harley had vanished to so quickly, but she couldn’t find her. She couldn’t see any of the other girls from Castle Hall, either. She was about to put the goblet down—she had a sudden urge to look for Harley—when a boy appeared in front of her. He had spiky black hair and both of his arms were covered with full-sleeve tattoos. Liv couldn’t quite make out what the tattoos were—they seemed to swim in her vision—but she noticed that he was holding a gold goblet like hers.

“Hey, you’re new here,” he shouted over the music. He smiled at her, and she stared at him, unexpectedly transfixed. He clinked his goblet with hers and took a sip of his drink. Without thinking, she mirrored him. The wine was bracing—cool and sharp, as if she had inhaled a breath of winter.

She didn’t remember much of what happened after that, but she did remember him taking the empty goblet out of her hand and saying in her ear, “Dance with me.” His words slid like honey down her throat, and she let him lead her onto the dance floor beneath the silver leaves. He was lithe and beautiful and he tasted as icy as that wine when he kissed her. The music seemed to embed itself in her body beat after beat, and she felt as if she could dance with this unnamed boy forever and never be sated.

And then Harley was back, pulling her away from the boy and saying, “Come on, Liv. Time to go.” And Liv stumbled through the crowd, holding Harley’s hand, and she couldn’t remember why she had ever wanted to dance with that boy in the first place.

* * *

Liv awoke the next morning in Harley’s sister’s room, feeling like her head had been stuffed with cotton balls. She glanced at the clock and realized she had already missed breakfast and most of history class, but when she ran across campus and burst into the classroom, the teacher didn’t even notice.

It took almost all day for Liv to shake off her hangover. It wasn’t until she and the others were back in Harley’s room that night, passing the vodka bottle around again, that she felt as if she had finally returned to the real world—just in time to leave it.

At midnight, Harley reminded them of the rules: They had to return by 3:00 a.m., and nobody could bring anything back with them. Then she pushed the bed aside and pulled up the trapdoor, and once more a flight of stairs was revealed. Liv was prepared for a long descent, but tonight it was different. This time the stairs ended after only ten steps, delivering the twelve girls into a tunnel dug out of the earth. Liv didn’t understand how it was possible, because they should only be on the second floor, but there appeared to be roots growing out of the walls.

“It wasn’t like this yesterday, was it?” Liv whispered over her shoulder to Paige.

“Sometimes it’s different,” Paige said.