Chapter 71 – A Hidden Message – Erica Henson

A full day of helping Jackie to officialize new clubs left me feeling spent and drained of energy. This new club system came with stacks of paperwork that the principal and vice principal were happy to pass off to an assortment of office assistants. Four of us were excused from class after lunch to start working on it. We didn’t even finish until study hall was almost over. Needless to say, I felt like I was dead on my feet.

Now that the work was done I decided that I’d head over to the newspaper club to talk to Zoe about the experience. It took all of my willpower to push myself in that direction. I was walking like a zombie. It felt like I could collapse and fall asleep at any moment. When I finally made it to the newspaper club room I was disturbed to hear another voice giggling to Zoe before I could open the door. My hand rested on the door handle apprehensively, until I recognized the voice.

“Oh, there she is.” Zoe said as I came in, “Look, Erica, we’ve got another member!”

“Michelle…?” I asked Zoe in equal amounts of curiosity and disbelief.

“Yes…?” Michelle asked as if I were talking to her.

“We met up yesterday at the whole club recruitment thing.” Zoe said casually, “Michelle says she wants to officially join our group! She just brought me her official application. Isn’t that great?”

I shuddered at the word ‘application’ after thinking of all the applications I had to handle this afternoon.

“That’s real great.” I said sarcastically.

My negative tone must’ve gone over Michelle’s head because she didn’t take it as a slight. Instead, she giddily stood up out of the chair she was sitting in and came to take both of my hands in her own.

“Thank you! I’m glad to be joining the newspaper club! I hope we’ll make some interesting articles going forward! I’ve already got some ideas that I want to submit!” Michelle said.

“Just stick to the article submission format that I just showed you.” Zoe said to Michelle from behind, “If you have any questions contact me in the newspaper club ChatCat group. I’ll help you out.”

Michelle looked back and smiled.

“Thank you! I’m going to go back to class and get started on drawing one up! Thanks for letting me join!”

“You’re welcome!” Zoe said.

Michelle smiled at me one more time. I was too tired to even return the gesture. She dashed out of the clubroom, the door flying open as she ran out. I closed the door all the way, and leaned back against it. Zoe was giving me an unusually positive look. She was never so upbeat. This made me wonder just how much she was invested into our newest member.

“Michelle…?” I asked once again, hoping for an actual answer.

Zoe sat up straight and turned her chair back to her computer screen.

“What’s the problem? Do you have something against Michelle?” She asked without looking back.

“It’s not like that, it’s just… She’s a gossip, you know?”

“I know,” Zoe said, “That’s why I’m sure she’ll be an interesting source of information. People have no qualms talking to her and she’s good at socializing. She fills a niche that you and I aren’t well equipped for.”

“Well, that’s true I guess…”

“Most importantly, she’s a junior. You and I are going to graduate soon. I need someone that can take over. I thought it was going to be a difficult and excruciating challenge to find people, but the club recruitment day solved that.”

I walked over towards Zoe and took the chair beside her that Michelle was sitting in earlier. Zoe was busy proofreading some article she was working on.

“From what it sounds like a lot of groups at this school were in a similar position.” I said.

“I never thought I’d find myself wanting to actually thank Val and the student council, maybe even Lilith.”

“According to Jackie, this was mostly Holly’s doing.”

“I’ll need to thank her sometime. We’ve even got a few other applicants lined up. If all goes well then I won’t have to worry about the newspaper club outlasting me, especially if this new club system stays around.”

“You’re happier about this than I thought you’d be. I was under the impression that you didn’t want anyone disturbing your privacy.”

She turned towards me with a serious look.

“It wasn’t like that. It’s just that you were keeping me from getting work done. I didn’t have the self-control to resist your advances… It’ll be better with more people here.”

Was that her true reasoning? She didn’t want to fall for me? That was definitely my fault for being so playful with her. It was in my nature. That bad habit began with Iris, like many of my bad habits did.

I got out of my chair and slid myself into Zoe’s lap. She didn’t push me away, but she also didn’t hold me like she used to.

“I’m sorry.” I said. “I know I can be needy at times.”

“At times,” Zoe echoed with a huff, “Don’t tell me you’re trying to change my mind. Erica, I told you…”

“That’s not what I meant.” Erica said, “I know, I’m in a relationship with someone. That’s not why I’m bothering you right now. It’s just that… I felt like this was our private place. This was always a place for me to come and cooldown. The thought of other people being here… The thought of us never being alone like this again…”

She finally held me, but the way she was holding me was strictly like that of a friend. She was careful to keep some distance between us.

“This is for the best.” She reaffirmed, “The newspaper club has to go on, and I think this is the way that it does. We might have lingering feelings, but my feelings for the club haven’t changed. I want to see it do well into the future.”

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I smiled at her.

“I admire that. I’ll do what I can to help, but I don’t know if it’s much. Things have been so busy since the Fall Festival.”

“Actually, there was something I wanted to talk to you about that.” Zoe said seriously.

She pushed me out of her lap and back into my chair. She pulled up an image file on her computer. It was a scan of one of the pamphlets that the Occult Club was handing out. She clicked through multiple images, representing scans of different pages. She stopped on one page near the end. She pointed out the text at the bottom of the image.

“This is a URL.” Zoe said. “Everyone who has read this pamphlet seems to have missed it. Michelle pointed it out to me earlier. She said someone else pointed it out to her.”

“What does it link to?” I asked.

“That’s the interesting part. I saved it. Hold on,” Zoe said as she pulled up the bookmark.

She clicked a link she saved in her bookmark list, sending her to the URL listed on the pamphlet. I immediately recognized the video that the URL linked to as Megan’s video of the school basement. The strange thing was that the URL in the pamphlet skips to the middle of the video. The part that Megan walks down into the basement for the first time was outright skipped. It was like there was something here that was specifically being pointed out. Zoe froze the video at a specific time and pointed at the screen.

“Here,” She said, “This is another URL in the background.”

“Is that what that is?”

“It took me a moment to realize it too. This might be my fifth time watching this video and I still can’t tell what it says. It looks like the paint is drooping. The title of the website says the Immortal something or other.”

“The Immortal Diary,” I said. “Let’s put that into the address bar and see what comes up.”

“Alright,” Zoe said.

There was a moment’s delay before the webpage responded to the input address. When it did, it brought us to a blog-style website of minimalist design. At the top was a simple banner labeled “The Immortal Diary”, beneath that was the symbol of a white rose. The page was filled with text from top to bottom, with the only exception being an image of a painting down near the bottom. Along with it was a stylized ‘M’ that represented the logo of our school.

“The Immortal Diary…” Zoe read out loud as she began to highlight random text.

Both of us quietly skimmed the text on the page. It was some sort of personal journal or daily log. There were dates of descriptions of some person attending a nearby school, but I couldn’t pin the relevance of why it was in our basement. As Zoe scrolled to the bottom of the page we noticed the page counter down at the bottom. It said page 1 of 300. There were next and previous buttons beside it.

“300 pages,” Zoe said incredulously, “This is a beast of a diary. I’m going to skim the next few pages until we find something noteworthy.”

It didn’t even take two minutes to find something noteworthy. The diary’s author began detailing her transfer to Meredith’s School for Troubled Girls. She described the exterior and interior of our school in harrowing detail. The next few pages were an intense analytical breakdown of the school and its social ongoing issues. Zoe and I were no longer skimming, but reading with interest. Then there was a point that grabbed Zoe so much that she stood out of her chair.

“Oh my god!” Zoe shouted, “Lilith is mentioned here!”

“What? Where…?” I asked.

Zoe sat back down and pointed out the text. The text didn’t mention Lilith specifically, but mentioned someone named Jonathan Meredith and his daughter. I assumed Zoe knew Lilith well enough to know the name of her dad. This person had met Lilith as a child. That meant the stories within this diary didn’t take place too long ago. Zoe turned to the next page and we were both taken aback by what we saw.

“The Killing Cat…” I said.

The next few pages were filled with pages of the Killing Cat. This person was an artist of professional quality. These sketches weren’t just absent-minded doodles, but showed artistic discipline. Was this really a student from our school? They were incredibly gifted. I pointed out one of the sketches.

“Can you enlarge this sketch? There’s a signature at the bottom. I want to see what it says.” I said.

Zoe did as I asked.

“Malorie… Noelle…” Zoe managed to piece together.

She was stunned. So was I.

“She…” I started to say before I could properly organize my thoughts, “She’s the one that wrote that pamphlet, The Night of the Killing Cat. She’s also the one that went missing all those years ago. Wait… Ms. Logan also mentioned her when she went to confront Jackie during the Fall Festival. Her mentioning Malorie was what caused Jackie to lose it.”

“There’s more to this story than we’re picking up on.” Zoe said. “This diary must be the key. The question is was that URL in the basement painted by this Malorie girl herself?”

“It must’ve been Ms. Logan.” I said. “She had extensive access to the basement going by what Jackie and Angelica were saying before. It wasn’t until recently that Jackie was able to keep her out for good. Ms. Logan didn’t last long after that. They were constantly fighting up until the day she was fired. It was all connected to the basement, and this Malorie person.”

“Let’s keep looking for clues.” Zoe said.

She began flipping through the pages at a faster rate. There was so much to take in that we couldn’t afford to be meticulous about it. Some of the pages were filled with artwork, mostly of the school. However, a significant amount was artwork of paranormal beings like ghosts and spirits. Zoe decided to skip straight to the last page to see what she would find. Down at the page number box she put in 300 out of 300. The last page contained an image of three girls standing together.

“That’s her…” I said.

The image was labeled down at the bottom. The names were Abigail Logan, Malorie Noelle, and Vivian Hale. The caption said ‘The Art Club’ beneath the names. Going by how young Ms. Logan was in the picture this was sometime during her high school years. It looked like they were celebrating some reward, but only Ms. Logan and Malorie were interested. Vivian Hale was looking off with a disenfranchised expression.

“They were close friends.” I realized while staring at them. “Ms. Logan actually looks normal in this picture. There aren’t any bags beneath her eyes and she looks genuinely happy. I never saw her smile like this for as long as I knew her.”

“What actually happened to Malorie? She just went missing and was never heard from again? Was she kidnapped?” Zoe wondered out loud.

It wasn’t a question for me, I knew, but it made me think.

“When Ms. Logan was confronting Jackie she mentioned something that pissed Jackie off. She taunted Jackie by asking her if she was going to ‘stitch her mouth like Malorie’. Maybe that had deeper meaning than I suspected.”

“None of this sounds good.” Zoe said. “This sounds like some real shady shit.”

“What’s that, over there?” I asked and pointed at the screen.

There was a pentagram logo just beneath the image on the last page. Zoe scrolled over the logo and it lit up. She clicked it and it brought us to a new page. This page wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t ‘part’ of the diary, but its own web page. The webpage was black with white text. The banner said ‘The Ritual of Knives and the Sacrifice of Malorie Noelle’. The text was a simple list of names with a sketch beneath it.

This sketch wasn’t like the others. This was a novice artist, at best. The artwork, however, still conveyed a horrifying message. It depicted a girl lying in some sort of box or coffin, her mouth sewn shut with medical stitches. She had no eyes. The eyes were represented as just featureless black holes. She was wearing a frilly looking dress, and had cuts all along her arm that were visible. She was practically being drowned in a sea of flowers and roses.

“Is this…” Zoe started to say. She had to back away from the screen to get a more full view. “Is this Malorie?”

I was speechless. Was this really what happened to Malorie? Zoe was overlooking the list of names to try understanding the image. However, the list of names stood out to me more. There were a few names that I recognized on that list. The name at the very top, however, was Jackie Sampson.

“I recognize some of these people.” I said, pointing at the list of names, “Some of these people are friends with Jackie! Look! There’s Officer Morelli! Hell, even Ms. Logan is up here. Why would she put herself on this list?”

I stared down at my hands in my lap as I thought about the seriousness of this list.

“If all this is true then maybe she turned on her friend.” Zoe said. “Maybe Malorie did something that…”

“No!” I said as I remembered something, “Ms. Logan mentioned this too! She was talking about how Malorie’s voice wouldn’t let her sleep. I didn’t know what she meant by that. It might mean that she has serious regrets… Maybe… Maybe Malorie was the reason that she was so messed up.”

Zoe backed away from the computer and turned her full body towards me as she prepared to speak.

“Erica… Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” She asked.

I looked up at her, filled with a sense of dread.

“Zoe… I think they killed Malorie.”