Chapter 7 – The First Dead Body

To give Abby Fate some credit, the current scenario was the picturesque scene for a truth-or-dare bottle spinning, ghost story telling student misadventure. Both the uneasy ambience and the mood were perfect. All they needed to complete the ambience were a few lit candles and a chalk drawing of a ritual magic circle on the classroom floor.

The way that the school had been entirely sealed off from the outside world gave the university the feeling of an enclosed passenger vessel at sea, tossing and turning as a dangerous storm brewed outside. A clap of thunder sounded, causing the entire building to vibrate as the steady beat of rain drummed down onto the building from the outside. On occasion, stray monsters could be heard clawing or banging against the steel fortifications. In the distance the muffled rat-a-tat of machine gun fire and explosions could be heard.

The clawing sounds were the worst, like fingernails dragged against a blackboard, and by the sound of it at least some amount of damage was being done to the wall. A thousand lives trapped within the university could only pray that the fortifications installed by the Gammon Corporation would hold strong.

“I’m so glad I’m not out there,” Finn said timidly. “It must be really bad if we can hear fighting this close by. We’re not even close to the city center.”

“Let’s hope that the military can get things under control quickly,” William replied. Truth be told, he felt a bit sick, his nerves more shot than usual.

“They can always send in the tanks and get awakeners to hel–”

“Boo!” shouted a female voice from the side, causing Finn to yelp and crash against a cabinet in his startle.

A clear peal of laughter came from the side, as Abby Fate and Vanessa Lullaby walked out into the open. Both of them had switched out of their formal attire and were wearing gray pajamas, which were issued out earlier during dinner. William and Finn had also changed into the same.

“Oh come on, don’t be so scared already. We haven’t even started yet,” Abby said. “Look what I found.”

She held up a bottle of rice liquor and four cups to her face triumphantly.

“Now where’d you find that?” Finn asked with awe.

“I have my ways,” Abby said cheerfully. “This game’s not as fun without a little booze.”

“Won’t we get in trouble if the professors find us drinking?”

“It’s not against the rules, is it? And plus, they won’t find us,” Abby replied. “The professors are probably getting drunk as we speak. Where do you think I found this? I got it straight from the professors’ cabinet in their rec room.”

“Wow, you actually snuck in there…”

“I didn’t sneak in. Professor Usha wanted me to grab her coat for her and so I did, and took something for the road as well. They won’t miss one bottle.”

Both girls looked quite glowing in their loose pajamas and slippers. Playing drinking games with company while telling ghost stories… this situation seemed almost too good to be true. In some ways, William almost felt thankful for the monster outbreak that led to the sequence of events that culminated in the current moment. Not to mention, it was a good distraction to keep his mind off of other things that were fueling his paranoia.

“Now all we need to do is find an abandoned classroom,” Vanessa said. “And then let the games begin.”

The four of them walked down east wing and settled into a random classroom with some science equipment laying around. Vanessa went to hit the lights, but they didn’t turn on.

“Um, I think they cut out the power,” she said, fumbling in the dark.

“Give me a sec. I have an idea,” William said. “There’s storage in the back.”

Taking out his phone, he turned on his screen for light and headed to the back of the classroom, flipped through the storage cabinets before coming back with two burners and a few half-used candles that were discarded after some experiment.

“Wow, mood lighting. Who taught you about that?” Vanessa joked as William began to light the candles one by one with the burners.

“Nobody taught me,” he replied. “I’m used to lighting candles in my apartment.”

“Classy,” Abby added. “And why do you do that?”

“To try to manifest a fire ability.”

Abby Fate snorted loudly as she munched on chips from the bag in her hand. “That was not the answer I was expecting.”

“My mother has our housekeepers keep a few candelabras lit in the living rooms,” said Vanessa Lullaby. “They add a bit of warmth to the décor.”

Not having an eviction notice hanging on the front door adds to my apartment’s décor, Wiliam thought to himself, although he didn’t say anything out loud. To be honest he always felt a bit out of place at Trinity Academy, as someone from his background.

With the candles lit, the last piece of the puzzle to complete the ghost story aesthetic was a chalk drawn ritual circle.

“Hang on.”

William grabbed a piece of chalk from the blackboard and began to draw a big circle on the floor with several concentric circles that vaguely resembled what he saw in comics. Abby looked over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow.

“That’s wrong,” she finally said, as if she couldn’t bear to watch William fumble with the chalk any longer. “Give me that.”

“Wrong?” Vanessa asked, looking just as bewildered as Wiliam and Finn.

“This is how the circle of moloch is supposed to look,” she said, going quickly to work. “The devil’s horns go there… the five handed shrike goes here… what?” she said in annoyance, looking up at the three of them staring at her in disbelief.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“You memorized all of that?” said Vanessa.

“Obviously. It wasn’t hard. This is just a basic summoning circle. You haven’t even seen the more advanced stuff yet. Some of those need ingredients like beetles and flesh sacrifice,” she said nonchalantly. “Oh and blood, lots of blood.”

“I don’t even want to imagine what kind of ability you’re going to awaken,” Finn said nervously.

Abby laughed. “Who knows, we’ll have to see.”

William could see her as an actress in a horror movie. She would make a great killer, with blood all over her face and her eyes opened maniacally, and nobody suspecting her due to her well-behaved, high GPA facade.

The three of them watched as she finished the chalk ritual circle in a frenzy, its shape taking a more twisted form than what William had originally envisioned. Now that it was complete, it certainly looked legitimate.

“Great, now we’re ready to start. But first, everyone has to take two shots!”

Vanessa poured for all of them and they quickly toasted and downed shot after shot, with both of the girls laughing at Finn’s grimace and bright red cheeks. As the warmth spread across their bodies, they laughed and chatted vigorously as the night went by and Abby continued to amaze them with her obscure occult knowledge. Abby kept losing the games and ended up drinking the most, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“And that’s when he flipped out and started—”

“Wait, shhh,” Vanessa said suddenly in the middle of their celebrations, putting a finger up to her lips. “There’s someone outside.”

The sound of heavy footsteps could be heard coming from outside as the four of them tried their best to keep silent.

“Who is that?” Finn asked in a small voice.

“Maybe a professor,” Vanessa replied, her voice unsure. “It sounds like they’re gone. We should keep it down though.”

The room creaked and groaned, an ominous sound that would send a chill down anyone’s spine.

“Finn, I dare you to go outside and check who it was,” Abby said. “Consider it payback for when I lent you my notes.”

Finn’s face went as white as a sheet. “I-I can’t, w-what if it’s a professor and we get in trouble?”

“Oh come on, don’t be such a–” she began to say, when she was interrupted by a blood curdling shriek coming from down the hall.

“Is that someone screaming?” Vanessa said, her eyes nervously darting towards the door.

Even the occult obsessed Abby looked alarmed.

“William… can you go check that out?” Vanessa asked.

William had already risen to his feet before she said that out of sheer instinct. He felt his alert state cutting through his slight tipsiness as he moved cautiously towards the door. Suddenly, another even higher pitched scream pierced the hallway, followed by the sound of someone running.

“Help! Someone, come!” shouted a male voice from down the hall.

“That doesn’t sound good,” said William, grabbing a burner from the counter before swinging the door open.

Vanessa, Abby, and Finn all gathered behind William as they peered down the hallway as a male student just nearly ran past.

“Why are you guys in there—oh well, it doesn’t matter—someone’s hurt bad. He’s not moving. I’m going to find a professor—”

“Easy there. What happened?” William asked.

The male student took a deep breath. “A bunch of my friends were thinking of playing a stupid game, I mean everyone’s bored out of their goddamned minds right now with how the lockdown’s going and how hard it is to find enough beer to go around, so we were heading to the gymnasium to grab some mats. That’s when we went past the janitor’s utility closet. The door was open for some reason, and we saw someone just laying there on the floor, not moving at all!”

“Who was it?”

“I think his name was Ebenezer or something old fashioned like that?

William frowned. Didn’t they just see him in stability storage this afternoon?

“Let’s go,” he said, motioning the other three to follow before turning back to the male student again. “Go find a doctor. We’ll check on Ebenezer.”

“Ebby?” Abby said. “Isn’t that the kid we saw Luke bullying this morning…”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

They moved down the east wing hallway and shortly ran into a small crowd of a dozen forming around the janitor’s closet. One girl sobbed quietly into her hands as a guy knelt over Ebenezer, checking his body.

He appeared to have collapsed on the floor in the exact same spot Abby had been standing earlier in the morning. His face was pale as a ghost and frozen in an expression of shock.

“What happened?” William asked.

The male student kneeling over him looked up. “He’s not breathing. I… I think he’s–.”

A gruff white haired professor burst onto the scene, elbowing away students to get a better look.

“What’s going on over here?” he demanded.

“Professor Snow,” the male student said. “We found him like this just a few minutes ago.”

“Call a nurse!” Professor Snow demanded, looking around wildly for a volunteer. He ended up pointing at a female student. “You, go fetch the nurse.”

She lowered her head and ran down the hallway, whimpering as she went.

The professor put a pair of fingers on Ebenezer’s neck pulse, then cursed under his breath. “No pulse, and his body’s cold… he’s dead. A Trinity student is dead! How the hell did this happen?”

“We don’t know, we just saw the janitor’s closet door open and found him like this!”

“Preposterous.”

The professor continued to examine the body in a fervor, pulling down his collar, checking his eyes, looking around his head.

Meanwhile, the sound of scratching against the walls intensified, with monsters outside the lockdown attracted by the commotion.

“Professor, is it possible that a m-monster killed him?” a terrified female student asked. “D-did a monster get into the school?”

“That’s nonsense,” said Professor Snow immediately.

“B-but aren’t some monsters more active at night time?”

“It’s impossible for any monster to have gotten in. There’s also no sign of any trauma on the kid’s body at all. Kind of looks like he just had a heart attack, got shocked to death judging by that expression. If a monster got him, he’d be pretty torn up.”

“Professor Snow is correct,” said Professor Ghoulstein, who had just arrived at the scene with his trademark scowl on his face and the nurse behind him. Even in the dim lighting of the hallway, his unhealthily gray complexion could be seen quite clearly.

Professor Snow nodded to the nurse and stepped aside as she opened up her first aid medical kit. After taking some measurements and examining the body, she came to the same conclusion.

“I think this is just an unfortunate accident,” said the nurse. “His cause of death is shock, and it appears he’s been dead for at least two hours now.”

William frowned. The last time he and Finn saw Ebenezer was in stability storage. If he were to reconstruct the timeline, Ebenezer must have died of shock within the four or so hours after they left stability storage.

So what happened in those four hours? William furrowed his brows, deep in thought. Uneasiness began to build in his chest, forming what felt like a hard rock that made it hard for him to breathe. Ebenezer was desperate to obtain a bottle of sherry the last time they saw him. So what made him give up? And how does a perfectly healthy eighteen year old suddenly die of shock?