Free Sanctum by Madeleine Roux Page B

view by the shadow of the dessert station, was a little boy, seemingly abandoned. Frantic, Dan glanced in every direction. Nobody else saw him—thin, maybe nine or ten years old, dressed in a striped sweater and torn, too-short pants. It looked like the top of his head was lumpy, almost misshapen, and bleeding .
    The little boy was clasping something hard in his hands, holding it tight to his chest. His eyes bugged, hollow and empty like Doug’s, like—
    “Dan?” Abby sat down across from him, frowning. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She laughed, but Dan could hardly breathe enough to respond.
    “Do you . . . Is there a boy in the corner?” he whispered. “Is there a boy behind me in the corner? A little one—striped sweater. Funny pants.”
    “Um, no, I don’t think so.” And then indulgently, “Let me check.” Abby hoisted herself up, looking over his shoulder for a long, tense moment. She lowered herself back to the bench and politely cleared her throat. “There’s nothing there, Dan. Well, maybe like a wrapper or two, but not a little boy. Are you seeing things now?”
    Yes .
    “No.” Dan swatted haphazardly at the sweat popping out on his forehead. “I mean, I’m just starving. Are you starving? I’m starving .”
    He glanced at the photo under his tray. Jesus, the little kid had looked just like the one in the picture.
    “It’s not like I’m going to judge,” she said, taking up a spoon. “Remember? I’m hearing voices? None of us are exactly in tip-top mental shape at the moment. If you are seeing things, you have to tell us.”
    “You win. I am , all right? There was a boy standing right behind me, and I heard him singing some kind of nursery rhyme, only it had my name in it.” But it wasn’t his name, not really. Nobody called him Daniel. “God . . .” He shook his head, scrambling the ten different thoughts all warring for dominance ( I shouldn’t have told her; of course I had to tell her , etc.). “This place is some kind of collegiate Bermuda Triangle.”
    “Hey,” she said. Abby’s warm hand reached across the table and closed around his. The tiny squeeze she gave his wrist almost made him forget where they were. For a second they were just two normal teenagers. Boyfriend and girlfriend, having dinner. “Even if it is, we’ll find a way out.”
    “Thanks, Abby, I . . . That makes it better. You make it better.”
    “Hey, kiddos, buckle up—I’ve brought homework!” Jordan arrived in a burst of busy energy, sitting down hard next to Dan before shifting a two-foot-tall stack of newspapers, almanacs, and books onto the table. “Oof. Man, those were heavy.”
    “What’s all this?” Abby asked, taking back her hand so she could eat her cereal.
    “Couldn’t get that damn picture out of my head,” Jordan explained quickly, divvying up the stack of stuff evenly into three piles. The rain had splattered and streaked his glasses. “And I also needed an excuse to ditch Cal. So I thought, okay, why not see if we can dig up more on the carnival? I hit up the library and smooth-talked the kid working the front desk to let me take a peek in the archives. I figured someone must have written about the carnival back in the twenties, right?”
    Crunching an apple, Jordan pushed his copy of the addresses across the table. Already, a print of a local map waited underneath, with each of the coordinates circled in red ink.
    “There’s tons of stuff in there about what was going on in Camford last time the carnival was here, plus stuff about the carnival itself.”
    “Wow,” Dan said. “Nice work.”
    “Eh, it was nothing.” He shrugged. “It’s easier to stay busy. If I just sit around it’s like my mind starts to, I don’t know, implode or something. Busy is better.”
    The top folder on Jordan’s pile teemed with photographs and news clippings—so many, in fact, that the bottom seam of the folder had started to tear. Dan carefully plucked the file off