Reapers - Thirteen Brothers

VII - All Sorts of Weird (1 of 2)

--XIII--

It had been three days since I came to Lindsay's house. We never really talked after that. I kept arriving late in class purposively, left two seconds after the bell had rung and spent my lunch breaks in the field bleachers just so she wouldn't have a chance to ambush me.

There were rumors about her and her mother. Macy Cartridge from the Science Club was my informant. Yeah. I hung with her, which was a little desperate, even for me.

"Lindsay's mom used to be famous for her fortune-telling," said she, her face inching closer and closer towards my face until it reached an uncomfortable distance. "There even came a time that she was considered one of the tourist attractions in Ashland."

I swallowed the last bite of my apple pie. It felt like wood was scraping the inside of my throat. "Does any of her... predictions come true?"

"Why?" There was a glint of wicked curiosity in her dark eyes that left an unsettling feeling in my stomach. "She predicted something for you, didn't she?"

"Not really," I lied, staring at my empty plate to hide my reaction. "Just curious. That's all."

She had brought out a laptop from her bag and started to type something in Google. After clicking on the first search result, she showed it to me. It was some news about a freak accident in Centralia some time ago.

"Five years back, a group of researchers went to Centralia to make some sort of documentary. Sadly, it didn't go well."

"And... how is this related to Mrs. Moseley?"

Rolling her eyes, she closed the tab and turned the laptop to herself. "A few days later, the police searched all over the place but they never found anyone. All they got was what remained of the filming equipment. There were talks around town that the police were able to rescue some of the footages. And it contained some pretty disturbing stuff, I heard. The kind that involved ghosts and demons and hell."

"You don't really believe that, do you? I mean ghosts? Pshh..." I managed to put on a smile of disbelief. But at this point, I could well believe anything if that meant I wouldn't have to admit that I was going mad. Having transferred to more than ten schools, I thought I had seen it all. Turned out, I could not be more wrong.

Macy stared hard at me. "None of the crew came back, by the way. Lindsay's dad was one of them. Her mom didn't take it so well and had gone from plain weird to full-blown bonkers. She started making mumbo jumbo prophesies about Doomsday, evil spirits; that kind of stuff. In short, she had become the town's crazy mascot."

"That's... a harsh way to put it," I commented, peering over her laptop.

Macy immediately snapped it close. I caught a glimpse of the mini social networking site I had visited before to find out about North Schuylkill. It looked like she was a contributor there. The articles in there were mostly gossip and exaggerated stories.

"Reality is harsh, Aramis," Macy muttered, rolling her eyes.

I had a bad feeling that I might see my name in that site's pages one of these days. As of now, that was not yet a priority in my Worry List.

I would love to think that Mrs. Moseley was just a crazy woman with an obsession for fake jewelry. But something inside me was afraid that she was telling the truth.

As anyone might expect, I ditched Macy after lunch. I decided that things weren't working between the two of us when she started to talk about the cursed chair and Hazel Hemlock's death. I knew where she was going and I did not want to go there.