None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 15

  “All right, so I’ll see you in a bit, then,” he said. “Don’t let Dictionary out while I’m gone.”

  The cat mewed up at me from beneath the desk. I narrowed my eyes at it in return.

  When Jack had gone, I curled up against the headboard and wrapped the comforter around me again, slowly munching on the bagel in the silence. The wind had died down considerably from the day before, but still shook over the ocean in the distance. I stood and pulled my damp clothes from the day before off and dressed despite having no intention of leaving the room for the rest of the weekend. The cat’s eyes followed me all the while.

  For a long while I debated what to do. The music from the opera that had been following me was too persistent and haunting to ignore, but the thought of admitting it to anyone was worse. I wondered what Jack would think if he knew that I was hearing things, or worse – what Beringer would do if he found out.

  I brought the comforter over to Jack’s bed and sat upon it so that I could look out of the window. Over the tree-line in the distance, the ocean was glistening in a deep, royal blue. I watched it waving at me from afar and leaned my head up against the glass. Beneath the scent of cigarettes, I could smell the salt in the air as clearly as if I was standing on the shore. In my tiredness I allowed the memory to come rather than forcing it away, and the image of my mother standing on the beach with her back to me as she stared out across the ocean molded in front of my mind. I wondered what she saw in it that was so enticing, and I wished that I could pull her away.

  Be a good boy, Enim, and don’t tell your father on me.

  “I shouldn’t have let her go,” I said into the window, my breath fogging up the glass. From beside me, Dictionary mewed disapprovingly. I tore my eyes from the water to look at her before returning to my bed. As I shut my eyes decisively to sleep, it was with the hope that when I woke up, I would feel better.

  Ch. 8

  By the time that I had trudged across the campus to the library midway through December, the snow had soaked my pants from the knees down. The leather on my already-worn loafers, which seemed to be permanently soaked with snow, finally gave way and ripped along the sole. I took note of the damage just inside the library door before sighing and making my way to an empty table.

  There were so many assignments and exams to study for in the week before the holiday break that I had barely gone a moment without sitting hunched over my books, and my back had developed a crick that no amount of straightening would fix. As I pulled my Physics book closer to me from across the table to check an equation, a shadow fell across me from the side.

  “Hi, Enim.”

  Porter gave his usual polite greeting as he approached the table. I glowered at him before quickly pulling out the copy of the assignment that I had done for him, eager to give it to him so that he would leave me in peace. Upon pocketing it, however, he sat down next to me.

  “Studying hard for the Calculus exam?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, good ... Because, you know, I’ve had such a good semester since our little deal, and I’d hate for anything to mess up my grade now.”

  “Right.”

  He had already given me a run down about the exam several times over the past month, going over how I would write down both the questions and the step-by-step answers for him in detail before dropping off the pages before his exam began, and I was in no mood to hear it once again.

  “And I know that you’d hate it if I accidentally mentioned that you see a ...”

  “You’ll get the answers, Porter,” I said angrily. “Now stop talking.”

  He gave me a surly look before getting up and shuffling away. As I watched him go, I had the sudden urge to throw my textbook at his retreating form.

  No sooner had I returned to my work than I was interrupted again, this time by Julian Wynne, who sat down on my other side with his roommate, Kyle Trask.

  “Hey, Enim,” he said. His usual friendly tone was somewhat lessened as though he was still upset about the conversation we had had weeks before, but seemingly not enough to warrant being left alone. “What are you up to?”

  “Studying.”

  “Yeah, I could see.” Julian eyed my Physics homework with an unpleasant expression. “Glad I took Chemistry.”

  I paused halfway through the equation that I was working on, too distracted to think of the next step. Julian put his elbows on the table and leaned closer.

  “Say, Enim, are you and Porter friends or something?”

  “What? No, definitely not.”

  “Oh, good,” Julian said. “Only, I saw him over here talking to you before, and I thought that maybe ...”

  “Thought what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It looked like you two were having a pretty interesting conversation.”

  I glared at Julian out of the corner of my eye. Between him, Thomas, and Cabail, I was being to feel as if everyone was watching me.

  “Well, we weren’t,” I said. “Why would I have anything to do with Porter anyway?”

  “It’s not like you have great taste in friends,” Trask scoffed.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Julian gave a nervous laugh.

  “Right, well, we were just wondering,” he said. “It sort of looked like he was ... bothering you about something.”

  I chewed the inside of my mouth as I debated what Julian might have overheard. His mouth was curled in a pleasant smile, but his eyes were darting over my expression.

  “I just helped him study a couple of times,” I said nonchalantly. “Now he thinks we’re friends or something.”

  “Right.”

  He nodded without believing me, and I returned to my work in the hopes that he had lost interest and would leave. Just as I picked up my pen to finish the equation, however, he began to speak again.

  “So what’s Jack been up to lately?”

  “What?”

  “Jack,” Julian repeated. “I haven’t seen much of him lately. What’s he been up to?”

  “Nothing.” I gave Julian a wary look before pulling my eyes away again. I could imagine the look of mocking hilarity on his face if he knew that Jack was trying to solve a murder.

  “Jack’s never up to nothing,” Julian said.

  “Well, now he is,” I said.

  Trask scoffed again.

  “Yeah right,” he said. “He’s been weird since Miss Mercier died.”

  Julian nodded in agreement.

  “I heard him asking Senora Marín about her a few weeks ago – practically pleading with her for information. It was weird enough that he was so obsessed with her when she was alive, but now he’s obsessed with her death, too.”

  I gave them each a disapproving look.

  “So? You two were pretty interested in that local girl who washed up on shore in October,” I said.

  Julian’s smile twitched.

  “Right, but ... that was different, Enim.”

  “How so?”

  “Because, that girl was ... that was just a bit of excitement. I mean, we didn’t know her. But Miss Mercier ...”

  “Everyone knows Jack liked her,” Trask said.

  “Everyone liked Miss Mercier,” I said.

  “Not like Jack liked her.”

  I threw another cold look their way before shaking my head and packing up my belongings; it was obvious that I would never get anything done in the library.

  “Come on, Enim,” Julian said. “You have to admit that it’s weird. Kyle and I are just worried about you being stuck in the dorm with him all the time. What if he goes all weird or something?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “He’s up to no good, Enim,” Julian said flatly as I stood to leave. “And if he does something stupid, he’s going to drag you down with him.”

  I moved to step around the table but Julian caught my arm and held me back.

  “Don’t forget what he did last year,” he said lowly. “He pulled that stunt and then l
et you take all the blame.”

  “I took the blame because I was the one who did it,” I said.

  “Brainwashed him, too,” Trask muttered.

  I yanked my arm free and strode away from the table before the conversation could go on a moment longer. When I returned to the dorm room, Jack was sitting on his bed with Dictionary in his lap. Though she wasn’t quite as skeletal as she had been when we found her, she was just as eerie to look at. I put my bag next to the bed before sitting down.

  “You’re back soon,” Jack said. “Finally realize that it’s not worth it to study?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Then why’re you here? Miss me that much?”

  He gave me a devious smile and I rolled my eyes.

  “Library’s a bit too crowded,” I said. “Thomas and Julian wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “Porter and Wynne? Are they friends now?”

  “No; they came over separately. Thomas wanted to harass me about math, and Julian just wanted to remind me how much he hates you.”

  “How sweet of him. I’ll remember that the next time I pass him in the hallway.”

  He looked back down at the paper he was reading while absentmindedly petting Dictionary with his other hand.

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “Just reading something about Miss Mercier.”

  “Right.” I paused as I watched him, a frown forming on my face. “Say, Jack, you don’t ... I mean, you don’t tell people that you’re interested in her murder, do you?”

  “Who would I tell? You’re the only person I can stand talking to.” He glanced up and caught my expression. “Why?”

  “Nothing, just something Julian said.”

  “About me and Miss Mercier’s murder? What’s that?”

  “Just ... just that you were interested in it.” When Jack looked taken aback, I quickly went on. “I told him that you weren’t, plus I reminded him how interested he and Trask were about the dead girl earlier this semester, and that seemed to shut him up.”

  “Right, exactly,” Jack said, still looking a bit unsettled. “They talked about her for weeks. Trask used to sit next to me in History and go on and on about it ... ‘What do you think she did? Think she jumped?’ It was like he’s never heard of someone dying before.”

  He shook his head and returned to the paper again, and I took the opportunity to pull my textbook back out of my bag. When I opened it back to the page I had been studying, though, I noticed that Jack’s eyebrows had turned downwards in a frown.

  “Wait a minute ...”

  “What?” I said.

  “That girl,” he said, rubbing his forehead as he tried to remember. “The one who drowned. What was her name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it started with an ‘S’ ...”

  “That’ll narrow it down.”

  “Samantha? No, Sarah,” he said. “Sarah someone.”

  “Why does it matter?” I said. I hadn’t like discussing the girl months ago, and now that it was so close to the holidays my aversion to the subject had only increased. I regretted having brought her up at all. “She died months ago.”

  I tried to turn his attention elsewhere, but he had already jumped up from the bed and paid me no mind. As he began to sift through the pile of mess on his side of the room in search of something, I eyed him questionably.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the article.”

  “What article? The one about the dead girl?” I said exasperatedly. “Jack, that was months ago. You’ll never find –”

  “Here!”

  He had overturned an enormous pile of textbooks and short-sleeved shirts to reveal the newspaper lying flattened beneath them. I faltered midsentence and shook my head.

  Still standing in the middle of the room, he began to read through the headline quickly. His eyes swept over the sentences at record speed, and when the article was cut off, he flipped through the pages to find the rest of it in another section.

  “Sarah Hayes,” he said. “Nim, her name’s Sarah Hayes.”

  “So?”

  He ran his hand through his hair fervently, his eyes seemingly glued to the page.

  “Sarah Hayes. That’s one of the names on Miss Mercier’s list!”

  When I only stared at him in bewilderment, he brought the hand-written list over for me to see. As I read down to find the name at the bottom, he flipped through the newspaper pages again to reread the article.

  “Did they ever figure out how she died?” he asked. “This one only talks about how she was found.”

  “She drowned.”

  “Right. Drowned. But how?”

  “Toppled off the cliffs jogging.”

  He was too busy studying the article to notice the deadened sound of my voice. I swallowed as I thought again of the dead girl that had crept into my thoughts at night months ago and turned my head so that I didn’t look out the window at the ocean. Though distant, the sound of it had grown louder in the quiet.

  “So Miss Mercier has a list of girls’ names, and one of the names is of the dead girl who fell off the cliffs,” Jack said. “But why?”

  “Maybe she was petitioning for a fence to be put up.”

  “But what’s with the other girls’ names?”

  “Maybe they’re friends of Sarah’s.”

  “I’m not sure that that makes any sense.”

  “I’m not sure that any of this makes any sense, Jack,” I said, but he had busied himself with lighting a cigarette and appeared not to have heard me.

  He had not gotten any further in his reasoning by midweek, and I was too concerned with passing my exams to be of much help to him. What was more, I was reluctant to give any of my attention to the unexplained dead girl. I could still hear the sound of the ocean too loudly from the distance, and my thoughts had formed the distorted image of her falling from the cliffs and plummeting into the water. It repeated over and over again in my head until it morphed into one of a woman with blond hair and a white dress plunging into the water, only she wasn’t falling from the cliffs, but rather jumping from a bridge ...

  “Are you all right, Enim?”

  I looked up from the floor as Beringer noticed my preoccupation. He considered me carefully from across the desk, a small frown pulling at his face. I nodded quickly before straightening in my seat and smoothing down my sweater to reassure him.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Of course. Only ... you looked a bit far away.”

  He studied me as I gave him a polite smile in the way that made me wonder if he could tell what I was thinking. If nothing else, I was sure that he knew that I wasn’t being honest.

  “Is there anything you wanted to talk about today in particular, Enim?”

  The subject that I had been trying to avoid thinking of for so many months pressed down against my eyes, and I shut them to block the images out. I kept my teeth clenched on my tongue and shook my head. Beringer’s brow fell a bit into a frown.

  “You know, Enim, you can tell me anything,” he said. “You always can. No matter what you say, I won’t judge you. Do you know that?”

  My expression twitched and I nodded unconvincingly. Beringer’s frown deepened.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say, Enim?” he asked patiently. “Anything at all?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe something that’s been on your mind?” he suggested. “Or something that’s been bothering you? It can be anything.”

  “No, there’s ... there’s nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  He was waiting for me to change my mind, just as he had been doing since we had begun the sessions months before. The hopefulness that he had had then had faded ever slightly, and I wondered how long it would take before I had worn him out, just as I had done to Karl and my father and anyone who had ever associated with me at Bickerby.

  As I struggled to find something to say that
would placate his concerns, he leaned forward into his hands and pressed them to his mouth to hide a frown. His sleeves were rolled back and his reading glasses were tucked over his shirt in lieu of a tie, and the light that the desk lamp sent over his eyes and skin made them glow in warmth. He seemed to be the only thing on the island that had not succumbed to the harshness of the winter. For a moment, as I stared at him, I wondered what it would be like to talk to him because he wanted to talk to me and not because he was paid to, and I wished that he was there because we were friends rather than because of the horrific tragedy that I refused to speak to him about.

  “I ...”

  The familiar music from the opera had begun again. It came over the distant trees and around the cracks in the window to splinter against my ear, and I jerked away from the sound with a sudden shake of my head.

  “What is it, Enim?” Beringer asked, mistaking the reason for my movement. “What were you going to say?”

  “No, it’s nothing. I ... I was just thinking of something, but it’s not important.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  I put my hand over my eyes and shut them tightly as I tried to think. The idea that I dragged Beringer out to the island only to make him sit in uncomfortable silences with me only worsened my ability to think up anything to say to him, and the music that had twisted its way back into my head was clouding every thought that I had.

  “Turandot.”

  “Sorry?” Beringer shook his head as though he hadn’t heard me correctly. “What’s that?”

  “Turandot,” I repeated, though I already dreaded bringing it up. “It’s an opera.”

  “Oh, I see. Is that something for school?”

  “No, it’s ... just an interest.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Really?” he said. “Forgive me, I’ve just ... never heard of a teenage boy who enjoys opera. How did that interest arise?”

  I shifted carefully in place.

  “I ... It was my mother’s favorite. She used to play one of the arias on the piano, and she would tell me the story at night.”

  “I see,” Beringer said delicately. “And she taught you to play it, too?”

  I nodded.

  “And what brought those memories up today?”