None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Laura Giebfried

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photo by Josh Pesavento

  (modified )

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/pezz/3190891080/

  None Shall Sleep

  Book One in the Damnatio Memoriae Series

  by Laura Giebfried

  Also by Laura Giebfried

  Song to the Moon (book 2)

  When I am Laid in Earth (book 3)

  Beating Heart Cadavers

  For Tom Frisk,

  Cult leader,

  partner in crime,

  and foul-weather friend.

  Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! Tu pure, o Principessa,

  nella tua fredda stanza,

  guardi le stelle

  che tremano d'amore, e di speranza!

  Ma il mio mistero chiuso in me;

  il nome mio nessun sapra!

  No, No! Sulla tua bocca lo dir quando la luce splende!

  Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio

  che ti fa mia!

  Il nome suo nessun sapr,

  E noi dovrem, ahim, morir, morir!

  Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle!

  Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincero! Vincero! Vincero!

  - from Turandot by Giacomo Puccini

  Translation:

  None shall sleep! None shall sleep! Even you, O Princess,

  in your cold bedroom,

  watch the stars

  that tremble with love and with hope!

  But my secret is hidden within me;

  none will know my name!

  No, no! On your mouth I will say it when the light shines!

  And my kiss will dissolve the silence

  that makes you mine!

  No one will know his name,

  and we will have to, alas, die, die!

  Vanish, o night! Set, stars!

  Set, stars! At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

  Ch. 1

  She died on a Friday, right in time to ruin the holiday plans for the students who had hoped to take the ferry to the mainland for the long weekend. The boys stood on the shore even still, watching as the police pulled the water-logged body from the ocean with mixtures of excitement and anticipation on their faces. Several more students joined the crowd once word got out, but by the time she had been zipped out of sight into a plastic-bag, Barker had gotten wind of the situation and sent someone down to chase them away. I watched them idly from the window of the residence building, the phone in my hand slipping down to my shoulder as I did so, until Karl’s sharp tone alerted me back to the conversation.

  “It’s the third one this year, Enim,” he said. “You can’t keep failing exams, especially in the year before college. What would people think?”

  “Right,” I said absently, still squinting to see the students whispering feverishly about what they had seen. “What would they think.”

  “I know this comes down to Jack’s influence – there’s no other explanation. I rather thought that you would have reevaluated your friendship with him by now, especially given the trouble that he got you into last year.”

  “True.”

  “You were very nearly expelled,” Karl went on without acknowledging the flatness in my tone. “Anyone else would have been. You’re lucky that Mr. Barker was compassionate enough to let you stay on –”

  “I’m lucky that my father paid Barker off, you mean.”

  I wrapped the phone cord around my fingers as I gave the blunt response, reveling in the sound of static as Karl struggled to respond. He would undoubtedly run his hands through his hair before smoothing it down again as he thought of a way to counter my claim, but even the image of him so frazzled in his neatly pressed suit and straight tie couldn’t lighten the mood brought on by his phone call.

  “I – he – that’s not true, Enim. He didn’t pay the headmaster off.”

  “He bought the lacrosse team another stadium,” I said. “They’re very pleased about it.”

  “That was a completely separate event. He donated the money so that you could have a better lacrosse team.”

  “I don’t play lacrosse. I don’t even go to the games. The only reason he wanted Bickerby to have a better sporting field was so that I could stay in school.”

  “That’s not true, Enim. If anything, he did it in the hopes that you might start playing a sport – we all agree that it would be good for you.”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, grateful that he couldn’t see my expression. Despite the fact that he was a lawyer, he had never been a very good liar: Barker had only consented not to expel me in return for a signed check.

  “I’m not playing a sport,” I said.

  “You really should though, Enim. It would do you good to spend some time outdoors, and you’d make friends with your teammates, and it would look good on your college applications –”

  “I’m not playing a sport.”

  “Well, alright then, what about another extracurricular activity? Something that you can do with your free time ... What about joining the book club? Or the chess team?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “I – well, all right. But there has to be something that you’d enjoy. What about the Latin Club? You like Latin.”

  I didn’t bother to respond. The fact that Karl knew so little about me was hardly a surprise, but it irritated me even so. The only reason that anyone took Latin was because it looked good to colleges, and the only reason that I had taken it was because my father had made me.

  “No?” Karl said when I failed to answer. “Come on, Enim. There must be something you’d enjoy doing besides for spending time with Jack.”

  “Not really.”

  “But you have to do something this semester – you can’t just not have an extracurricular activity.”

  “Of course I can. It’s not in the rules that I need one.”

  “You know what I mean, Enim,” Karl said tiredly. “Listen, your father understands if you don’t want to play the piano anymore, but he really thinks that you need to fill that time with another hobby.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yes, he does. He doesn’t like you having so much unused time – it can’t be healthy.”

  My father spent so much time planning my every move that it was a wonder he had time to do anything else at all. He wasn’t comfortable unless he could rest assured that he knew every part of my life was laid out and waiting to happen according to plan – a mission which, so far, had gone all but accordingly. I rather thought that he’d have an easier time accomplishing anything if he stopped dictating the strategies to his younger brother and just came home, but he was evidently confident enough to believe otherwise.

  “He’s just worried about you, Enim. He doesn’t want you to fall into the wrong ... activities because of all this extra time that you have now.”

  I could only imagine what activities my father feared I would fall into, because Bickerby Academy was undoubtedly one of the most difficult places to find trouble – or much of anything – in. It was located in what was, perhaps, the most desolate, forsaken place on earth: an island off the coast of Maine. The summers there were apparently quite beautiful, evidenced by the fact that there were a few dozen vacation homes lining the cliffs that overlooked the water, but I had hardly ever seen more than a few weeks of it. For the majority of the school year, Bickerby was shrouded in a bitter cold that seeped in through the cracks in the windows and up through the floors. Once winter hit, normally in a storm that changed the landscape into a blank expanse of white, the air became so frozen that it was hard to breathe.

  Of
course, nothing of such weather was mentioned on the brochures for the school. Bickerby Academy was marketed, quite rightly, as an all-boys boarding school that offered over sixty college credit courses, seven languages, several sports, and dozens of extracurricular activities to prepare students for success in college. Pictures of the campus had all been taken during the warm season, possibly at a time when school hadn’t even been in session, and were inviting enough so that concerned parents overlooked the short blurb about the dangerously cold winters. My father, however, undoubtedly welcomed the idea of the school being enclosed in a circle of snowdrifts for the good part of the year. Though he maintained that he had selected Bickerby solely based on its merits, I knew the real reason that he had chosen it for me over all of the other preparatory schools: it was located in a place with no cellphone coverage, no cable television, no internet service, and could only be reached by a ferry that didn’t run often enough. It was, in short, inescapable.

  “If he’s so worried, why hasn’t he called in seven months?”

  The sound of the phone clattering against wood indicated that Karl had dropped it on the desk, and it took him a moment of fumbling with it before he pressed it back to his ear.

  “He’s ... well, you know how difficult it is, Enim. He’s working very hard, and the time difference makes it near to impossible to call ...”

  “Right. But he talks to you about me every other day.”

  “Not ... not every other day,” Karl protested poorly.

  “Whatever. I don’t want to talk to him anyway.”

  Karl gave no answer. It was impossible to say which one of us was the worse liar, though I rather hoped that it was him. At the very least I hoped that he thought the reason I wanted my father to come home was so that I didn’t have to spend another moment with him.

  We had been doomed to not get along from the moment that he took over guardianship of me. Having never had children of his own, he had no idea how to handle me and so his role only involved passing along orders from my father and chauffeuring me to and from school on holidays. Despite my attempts to be insolent enough to warrant him insisting that my father had to come back, he was always too weak to make such a request.

  “It’s hard for him, Enim,” Karl said after a long moment. “Your mother was ... It’s hard.”

  I kept my eyes on the blur of dark green trees outside the window. In the distance, Julian Wynne was making his way towards the residence building. Despite my desire to end the conversation before he had the chance to eavesdrop on it, I said, “No, it’s not.”

  Karl sighed. Inwardly I wondered if he agreed that my father was the least affected of anyone involved in what had happened to my mother. He, at least, had had the opportunity to move away and get on with his life. I had been stuck in the midst of it far longer than I could stand, and Karl had somehow been dragged into it in his older brother’s wake.

  Claiming that I had assignments to get done, I hung up the phone and hurried away from the office, but had barely circled to the stairs when Julian Wynne called after me.

  “Enim!”

  His voice echoed with such resonance around the stairwell that I could hardly pretend not to have heard him. Pausing on the landing to the second floor, I waited for him to catch up with me.

  “Glad I caught you alone,” he said with a smile that didn’t match our acquaintance. “Seems like you’re never without Jack these days.”

  He sidled up to stand alongside me as we made our way to the fourth floor, walking at a much slower pace than I would have liked. Julian was, without a doubt, one of the friendliest people at Bickerby. There was something in the way he laughed that made the other boys want to be in on the joke, and something about the way he spoke that made them wish they knew what he was saying. And though I knew him well enough to know that all he truly cared about was getting information to spread around the campus about anything and everything of interest to him, regardless of how high the cost was to the person he had gathered it about, it was impossible to know if it was worse to be his enemy or his friend.

  “You know,” he said with a thoughtful look playing on his face, “if you wanted to come hang out with Kyle and me sometime, that would be fine. We haven’t seen much of you since …”

  He chuckled into the uncomfortable silence that the sentence led into as though the inferred situation was even remotely humorous.

  “Right. Well, I’ve been busy.”

  “Right – busy with Jack,” he said. He said the name with a roll of his eyes and bitter tone as though unconcerned that he was criticizing my best friend. “So why aren’t you doing orchestra this semester?”

  I studied him carefully as I considered my response. Julian and I had never been friends to begin with, having only known one another from living in the same building and being a part of Bickerby’s music program, and our association had only diminished further in recent months. I could tell that he was looking for something hidden beneath my well-pressed blue sweater and khakis about the events that had taken place the previous year, and I was none too eager to give anything away.

  “Too many classes,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, that’s too bad – we’re missing our only piano player.”

  We reached the fourth floor landing and I hastily pulled open the door. Our rooms were across the hallway from one another, but once I was inside mine with Jack, Julian would hardly think to bother me.

  “Right. Well, thanks, Julian, but I’ve really got to get some things done …”

  As I made to move towards the door, though, he reached out and latched onto my arm.

  “Wait.” His smile faltered and he had to work to keep it plastered to his face, but he gave a nervous laugh and relaxed his grip on my arm. “I was just wondering, did you see what happened down at the beaches today?”

  “Not really.”

  “Right, but you were on that side of campus before, right? So you know what’s going on?”

  “I heard there might’ve been an accident.”

  “Yeah.” His piqued interest lit up his face in eagerness. “Did you hear anything? Or see anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything,” he said impatiently. “I heard they found a body – a body. Can you believe it?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, it was some local girl’s,” he continued. “Apparently she’d gone missing a few days ago, and now her body’s floated up on Bickerby’s shores. I went down as soon as I saw the crowd and police swarming the place, but they had already chased everyone away before I got to see anything.”

  “Shame,” I said, but Julian was too preoccupied with the news to notice my derisive tone. A part of me thought that he somehow knew my aversion to the topic of drowning and had singled me out specifically, but I pushed the idea away at the thought of what Beringer would say if he knew how mistrustful I was becoming.

  “Well, it’s too bad you didn’t see anything,” he said, shaking me off now that he knew I had nothing to share. “We probably won’t know anything for a while, since it’s impossible to get any information around here ... The daily might say something tomorrow if we’re lucky, though the whole paper might just shut down – I doubt they know what to do when actual news comes up around here.”

  He waved me off and shut his door on me, and I turned to unlock my own before any more thoughts of the dead girl in the water could press against my mind. When I entered the dorm room, I paused in the doorway to survey it. It was seemingly just how I had left it: small and cramped, a dent in the plaster where Jack had kicked his foot through the wall, and the window cracked open several inches. My side of the room was neatly organized: the bed was made up nicely, the side table was clear, and my books were neatly ordered by subject on the shelf beneath. It was the focus of many snickers from the other students, none who had been burdened with the concern for tidiness. If only they could see how immaculate Karl kept his things, then perhaps they wouldn’t be so harsh on me.
<
br />   I maintained that I wasn’t really a neat person anyhow, the room just looked even tidier than it was because it was juxtaposed with Jack’s side. His clothes, both clean and dirty, were strewn over every surface as though the furniture and floor were the same to him as hangers. They littered the bedposts and end table, stuck out from his mess of sheets and covers, came out of drawers that were meant for school supplies, and created a second carpet on the floor around his bed. The furniture and molding on his side were also covered in little burn holes from where he stubbed his cigarettes out at random; at first glance, the walls appeared to be polka-dotted.

  Even though it looked the same as when I had left for classes that morning, I knew that Sanders had been there. As the monitor for our building, he had a key to all of the students’ rooms for security purposes. I doubted that he had ever used his ability to check in on us for our safety, though. Sanders’ idea of fun was catching another student breaking the rules. He reveled in handing out detention slips and was always looking for an act severe enough to warrant a trip to the headmaster. When he had first acquired the position, he had been somewhat terrifying given the seriousness that he took it with, but now it was more of an annoyance than anything.

  He had undoubtedly been searching for a pack of Jack’s cigarettes or any other substances that were against school rules. Yet the problem with sifting through Jack’s things was that, even if he put them back in the relative spots he had found them, the months’ worth of dust that had cultivated over his untouched books and lost articles of clothing would be upset and give the rifling away. I smiled at the thought of Sanders pawing through Jack’s array of dirty clothes and the questionable debris that had missed the trashcan only to come up with nothing. Jack was far better at hiding things than Sanders was at finding them.

  “Room search?” I asked, coming into the room and dropping my bag on the end of my bed.

  Jack swiveled around in the desk chair, a cigarette hanging lazily between two fingers, and an impish smile playing on his lips. With his dark hair, twice-broken nose and complete disregard for the school dress code, it was no wonder that both Karl and my father yearned for me to stop my association with him. He stubbed the cigarette out on the wood and tossed it in the direction of the trashcan before answering.