𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐘𝐏𝐒𝐎 | ᴍɪʟʟᴀʀᴅ ɴᴜʟʟɪɴɢꜱ

𝟏𝟓] 𝐉𝐀𝐂𝐎𝐁 𝐁𝐄𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐋𝐔𝐍𝐀 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐃

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ JACOB BECOMES LUNA LOVEGOOD

"ABE, IS THAT YOU?"

     I thought I'd dreamed it. I waited for the girl to speak again, but for a long moment there was only the sound of rain banking off the roof, like a thousand fingers tapping way off somewhere.

     Then a lantern glowed to life above me, and I craned my neck to see a half dozen kids kneeling around the cragey jaws of broken floor, peering down.

     I recognized them somehow, though I didn't know where from. They seemed like faces from a half-remembered dream. Where had I seen them before--and how did they know my grandfather's name?

     Then it clicked. Their clothes, strange even for Wales. Their pale, unsmiling faces. The pictures strewn before me, staring up at me just as the children stared down. Suddenly I understood.

     I'd seen them in the photographs.

     "Jake..." I whispered quietly, hoping that he came to the same conclusion that I had.

     "I know," he said even quieter.

     The girl who'd spoken stood up to get a better look at me. In her hands she held a flickering light, which wasn't a lantern or a candle but seemed to be a ball of raw flame, attended by nothing more than her bare skin.

     I'd seen her picture not five minutes earlier, and in it she looked much the same as she did now, even cradling the same strange light between her hands.

     I'm Calypso, I wanted to say.

     But my jaw had come unhinged, and all I could do was stare.

     The girl's expression soured. We were wretched looking, damp from rain and dust-covered and squatting in a mound of debris.

     Whatever she and the other children had been expecting to find inside this hole in the floor, I was not it.

     A murmur passed among them, and they stood up and quickly scattered. Their sudden movement knocked something loose in us and we found our voices again and shouted for them to wait, but they were already pounding the floorboards toward the door.

     We tripped through the wreckage and stumbled blindly across the stinking basement to the stairs. But by the time we made it back to the ground floor, where the daylight they'd stolen had somehow returned, they had vanished from the house.

     We bolted outside and down the crumbling brick steps into the grass, screaming,

     "Wait! Stop!" But they were gone.

     I scanned the yard, the woods, breathing hard, cursing myself. Something snapped beyond the trees. I wheeled around to look and, through a screen of branches, caught a flash of blurred movement--the hem of a white dress. It was her.

     We crashed into the woods, sprinting after. She took off running down the path. We hurdled fallen logs and ducked low branches, chasing her until my lungs burned. She kept trying to lose us, cutting from the path into the trackless forest and back.

     Finally the woods fell away and we broke into open bogland. I saw my chance. Now she had nowhere to hide—to catch her we had only to pour on the speed—and with me in sneakers and jeans and her in a dress it would be no contest.

     Just as I started to catch up, though, she made a sudden turn and plunged straight into the bog. I had no choice but to follow.

     Running became impossible. The ground couldn't be trusted: It kept giving way, tripping us into knee-deep bog holes that soaked our pants and sucked at our legs.

     The girl, though, seemed to know just where to step, and she pulled farther and farther away, finally disappearing into the mist so that we had only her footprints to follow.

     After we had lost her, we expected her prints to veer toward the path, but they plowed ever deeper into the bog. The mist closed behind us and we couldn't see the path anymore, and I began to wonder if I'd ever find my way out.

     Jake tried calling to her--our names are Jacob and Calypso Portman! I'm Abe's grandson! I won't hurt you!-but the fog and the mud seemed to swallow his voice.

     Her footprints led to a mound of stones. It looked like a big gray igloo, but it was a cairn—one of the Neolithic tombs after which Cairnholm was named.

     The cairn was a little taller than Jacob, long and narrow with a rectangular opening in one end, like a door, and it rose from the mud on a tussock of grass. Climbing out of the mire onto the relatively solid ground that ringed it, I saw that the opening was the entrance to a tunnel that burrowed deep inside.

     Intricate loops and spirals had been carved on either side, ancient hieroglyphs the meaning of which had been lost to the ages. Here lies bog boy, I thought. Or, more likely, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. But enter we did, because that's where the girl's footprints led.

     Inside, the cairn tunnel was damp and narrow and profoundly dark, so cramped that I could only move forward in a kind of hunchbacked crab-walk. Luckily, enclosed spaces were not one of the things that scared the hell out of me.

     Imagining the girl frightened and trembling somewhere up ahead, Jacob talked to her as we went along, doing his best to reassure her that we meant no harm. His words came slapping back at us in a disorienting echo.

     Just as my thighs were starting to ache from the bizarre posture l'd been forced to adopt, the tunnel widened into a chamber, pitch black, but big enough that I could stand and stretch my arms to either side without touching a wall.

     I pulled out my phone and once more pressed it into service as a makeshift flashlight. It didn't take long to size up the place. It was a simple stone-walled chamber about as large as my bedroom-and it was completely empty. There was no girl to be found.

     We were standing there trying to figure out how the hell she'd managed to slip by when something occurred to me-something so obvious that I felt like a fool for having taken this long to realize it.

     There never was any girl. I'd imagined her, and the rest of them, too. My brain had conjured them up at the very moment I was looking at their pictures.

     "Did you see them too?" I asked him quietly and still out of breath. "Am I crazy?"

     Jake wiped his hands on his pants. "You're just as sane as I am."

     "Is that an insult?"

     It was impossible; those kids had all died a lifetime ago. Even if they hadn't, it was ridiculous to believe they would still look exactly as they had when the photos were taken.

     Everything had happened so quickly, though, I never had a chance to stop and wonder if I might be chasing a hallucination. I could already predict Dr. Golan's explanation: That house is such an emotionally loaded place for you, just being inside was enough to trigger a stress reaction.

     Yeah, he was a psychobabble spewing prick. But that didn't make him wrong. I turned back, humiliated. Rather than crab-walking, I let go of the last of my dignity and just crawled on my hands and knees toward the gauzy light coming from the mouth of the tunnel.

     Looking up, I realized I'd seen this view before: in a photograph in Martin's museum of the place where they'd discovered the bog boy. It was baffling to think that people had once believed this foul-smelling wasteland was a gateway to heaven-and believed it with such conviction that a kid my age was willing to give up his life to get there.

     What a sad stupid waste.

     I decided then that I wanted to go home. I didn't care about the photos in the basement, and I was sick of riddles and mysteries and last words. Indulging my grandfather's obsession with them had made me worse, not better.

     It was time to let go.