Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 15

A noise came out of Mischa that sounded like a cross between a whimper and a gasp. I leaned back against the cold wall of the small building as my eyes adjusted to the near dark. A glimmer of cold blue natural light came in through the window on the heavy metal door, but the electrical safety lights in the columbarium glowed an unnatural shade of orange. It occurred to me that we were basically in a prison.

"It's alright," Henry assured Mischa. "The lights are probably on a timer set to dim themselves after the door locks."

"It's not alright!" Mischa exclaimed. Her voice echoed off of the walls of the stone building, reverberating at every angle. "This isn't a security mishap, Henry! The ghosts locked us in! Violet must know we're here!"

I felt Trey's arm around my shoulders again, and he pulled me close. His warm lips grazed over my forehead. "Don't listen to anything," he instructed me. "We're going to be fine."

"Mischa, do you hear yourself? There's no such thing as ghosts. You sound crazy," Henry reprimanded her. "Hopefully, the guy I just talked to can figure out where we are and get us out of here."

I didn't say a word. I already knew in the marrow of my bones that the guard with whom Henry had just spoken had absolutely no intention of driving over to the East gate to see if a bunch of kids were locked inside a columbarium. That guy was halfway home, probably already thinking about which television show he'd be turning on the second he entered his house.

"And what if he doesn't, Henry? We have to spend the night in here with a bunch of pulverized dead bodies! We're going to freeze to death. You know that, don't you? McKenna probably already has frostbite on her toes."

I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the echoing voices. I knew Mischa wouldn't freeze to death. She couldn't freeze; Violet had said she'd choke. Violet's never wrong, I thought to myself. My reasoning was becoming fuzzy and sluggish. But the rest of us could freeze to death. Anything at all could happen to me, Trey, and Henry.

Despite the evident danger we were in, since our fate was basically now controlled by the ghosts who'd tricked us into entering the columbarium, my biggest concern was my mother. It was almost three, and we weren't boarding a train bound for Kenosha at that very second. There was no way I'd be home by six o'clock for dinner at that point, and little chance I'd be home by seven. No matter what happened to us that afternoon, my mom would never in a million years understand what had brought us to a cemetery so many miles away from our hometown.

"Okay, guys, we need to stay calm," Trey told Henry and Mischa. "However we've ended up in here, there has to be a way to use whatever security system is in place to our advantage. Do you think there's a motion detector in here?"

Henry waved his arms around wildly in the dark, and it made no difference at all in the level of lighting. From where I sat, the whites of his eyes were the only feature on his face that I saw clearly. I barely saw the blurriness of his arms flapping against the dark walls behind him. No alarms sounded. "No motion detector," Henry surmised.

"Or, if there is one, it's been disabled," Trey corrected Henry.

"Of course it's been disabled!" Mischa continued to freak out. "Don't you realize how smart they are?"

"Okay, okay," Trey agreed. He let go of me and walked the length of the small building, sizing up the small stained glass window at the other end of the room.

"Trey, are you serious right now? That window is way too small for any of us to climb through," Mischa whined.

"Yes, I'm aware of that," Trey said patiently, doing his best to endure Mischa's hysteria. "I don't want to squeeze through it. I just want to break it to see if an alarm sounds."