“Did you know that Marbrose City is cursed?” said Vipsania out of nowhere.
“Cursed?” Fern repeated. It was Thursday night, which was their last chance to pack for the freshman retreat to the Adirondack Mountains. Vipsania had been digging through her enormous collection of black jeans, black shirts, and—in Fern’s opinion, at least—scandalously expensive black underwear, trying to decide what she should bring for just two-and-a-half days in the wilderness. Fern had already finished packing—it took her barely more than five minutes—and was trying to relax on her bunk—something Vipsania’s manic energy and ever-expanding mess of clothes made rather difficult.
“Well, how else do you explain it?”
“Explain what?” said Fern.
“Everything. Like, do you know of any other city where the government and the mafia are this cozy? I mean, not that Bancroft’s a paradise, but it’s gotta be better than this, right? Do you guys have costumed freaks, or mob hits every other day, or a guy who punts around in the sewers on a creepy raft, or—.”
“We have plenty of strange things in Bancroft,” said Fern skeptically. “Not… those things in particular, but plenty of unusual phenomena.”
“Big words, Fernie,” said Vipsania with a wink. “I’ll have to show you what I mean when we get back. You still haven’t left campus yet, right? I’ve got some things that would make you come around.”
Fern privately thought that the evidential threshold for a curse on an entire city was impossible to meet, but she knew there was no point in telling Vipsania this. She peeked through the curtains of her window and looked over at Grayling Hall. One of the freshmen boys was standing shirtless in his bedroom window, flexing his muscles—if you could call them that—for the benefit of the girls across the way. Fern was too amused to be scandalized—and surely the designers of the campus had foreseen that this kind of thing would happen if they placed the boys’ and girls’ dorms directly opposite each other. The fun was cut short when Mr. Roulet, who oversaw the boys’ dorm, jerked him away from the window and unceremoniously closed the curtain.
Fern chuckled. Within the safety of Marbrose Catholic Academy, it was very hard to believe that this city could really be cursed—despite all the strangeness that seemed to whirl around a certain Dean Calvert.
Vipsania finally picked a shirt for a band—or perhaps a video game, Fern wasn’t quite sure—called “White Zombie” and set it aside for the next morning. Fern hoped that would mean they could turn out the lights and get some sleep—it was after curfew, after all—but instead, Vipsania stood on tiptoe and pulled a huge, black book off the highest shelf in her closet and handed it to Fern.
“In the meanwhile,” said Vipsania mysteriously. “Here’s a little background reading. They tore out all the most interesting pages, but there’s enough in there to make you think. Give it a try. You like books, right?”
“Are you giving me homework?” asked Fern, somewhat incredulously. She flipped the book over and read its title: The Lost Secrets of Marbrose City by M. Breyfogle.
“Just something to keep you company on the two-hour drive,” said Vipsania with a wink. “Since you don’t have an iPod.”
Fern was sure that any book that Vipsania thought was worth reading wouldn’t be a very comforting companion on the long trip, but she still slipped the heavy black book into her backpack as she crossed the bedroom to turn out the lights. Vipsania had a unique talent for nudging Fern out of her comfort zone, and since Vipsania was her best friend, Fern figured it was worth a little inconvenience to make her happy.
Fern stopped to say goodbye to Declan on her way to the school bus that was parked and waiting in Aquinas Circle. For the first time since she’d arrived at Marbrose Catholic, she’d changed back into her usual clothes, and she was surprised how different they felt after just two weeks in her school uniform. Was she… self-conscious? Maybe she’d just gotten used to not having to think about what she wore, but she couldn’t help but notice something in Declan’s gaze when he saw her in her ordinary clothes for the first time.
“Off to the mountains?” he said in his surprisingly deep voice.
“So it seems,” said Fern, avoiding his glance. “I’m not much of an outdoors type, but it should be interesting.”
“What happened to that tough working-class girl routine?” said Declan, grinning.
“I am also a city girl,” said Fern. “Public parks are my version of wilderness. I… guess I’ll see you on Monday.”
“You never know,” said Declan, and he went back to trimming the hedges the ran alongside Fenimore Hall. Fern was starting to get annoyed with teenage boys and their pointless secretiveness. She knew Declan would miss her and that he hoped she would make it there and back in one piece, but would it hurt him to say so? She turned and strode over to the bus, determined not to look back at Declan if he couldn’t even bother to say a proper goodbye.
“Ah, Miss Kubelsky,” said Dr. Goddard warmly. “Another name checked off the, uh, list and one step closer to our… departure.”
Fern smiled at Dr. Goddard’s melodramatic way of making even the most ordinary observations as she stuffed her bag beneath the bus and found her way to her seat. It was a more than two-hour trip from the school to the hunting lodge in the western Adirondacks that would serve as their home base during the next three days, and Fern wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. She sat with Vipsania near the front of the bus, but her roommate wasn’t very good company. She spent the entire trip either snoozing and drooling on Fern’s shoulder or listening to loud music with her headphones on, and Fern found herself alternating between flipping through the strange book Vipsania had given her and looking in silence at the countryside they were passing. The thick woodlands on either side were pretty, and so were the outlines of the fast-approching mountains, but Fern found herself returning again and again to the heavy black book she had open on her knees.
The Lost Secrets of Marbrose City wasn’t exactly a traditional work of history. It went over the entire sordid story of Marbrose City—starting, fittingly enough, with the hanging of 13-year-old Providence Coffin as a suspected French spy at Fort Brand in 1756—but it left out all the more prosaic events that people usually considered important like elections and municipal consolidations and world wars. Instead, it focused entirely on the weird and sensation things that Vipsania cared about, and with a thoroughness that was almost astounding. Fern read about the Lost Souls of Marbrose—urban legends who were supposedly very real—and the long, conspiratorial history of collaboration between the city council, and the mafia, and—if the mysterious author was to be believed—the city’s wealthiest families. There were murders, mysterious disappearances, corruption, insanity—everything Vipsania had been hinting at ever since they first met. Some of it was self-evidently ridiculous, like the stories about an ancient race of Native American ghouls who supposedly lived deep under the city, or the report of a steamship being attacked by a sea serpent in the middle of Marbrose Harbor in 1846—but there was enough in it that rang true to give Fern pause.
Vipsania was right that the book had been censored—by Fern’s reckoning, about 30 pages had been torn out completely, and about two dozen others had significant portions black out. Based on the index—one of the strangest Fern had ever read—she deduced that most of the censored pages dealt with the Great Families of Marbrose City. The Dreyfusses, the Sneads, the Lothians, the Comstocks, the Lambrights… and the Calverts. Dean’s family seemed to appear on every other page, and never in a complementary light. It went from James X. Calvert, the opium merchant who first established the family fortune, to “Iron Bill” Calvert, the prolific Indian killer, to Chester Damascus Calvert, the rogue archeologist and obsessive Egyptomaniac who somehow died of a rare tropical disease while on vacation in Atlantic City. It was information about the Calverts’ business and political dealings that seemed to be the main target of the censor, especially from the 1920s onward. What was even more alarming was what Fern found on the inside cover: a stamp declaring the book the property of the W. B. Shade Library—and no sign of Vipsania’s name on the sign-out slip. This book had been censored by the school, and stolen by Vipsania.
Fern wasn’t against librarians showing a little discretion about what they let students read. But there was a difference between protecting students and hiding the truth.
Honest people, Fern firmly believed, had nothing to hide.
It was getting dark by the time the bus rolled up an uneven gravel road to the hunting lodge in the middle of a dense pine wood that would serve as their base camp, and Fern slipped the strange book back into her backpack. Putting it out of her mind wasn’t so easy. She tried to tell herself that most of it was probably nonsense—the kind of tall tales that appealed to Vipsania’s morbid sensibilities—but then why bother to censor them? Fern caught a glance of Dean as they disembarked in front of the lodge, and tried to trace the resemblance between her classmate and his sinister ancestors that filled the pages of the strange black book. Maybe she was just prejudiced—and maybe she was a little distracted by just how handsome he was, even in the half-darkness—but she couldn’t find much in common between Dean’s pale, sensitive features and the hateful, ambitious faces of his ancestors. Father Rohrbach, Henry Galt, and even the Sicilian mafia were afraid of Dean Calvert. Was it because of his family? Were the Calverts monsters even by the standards of Marbrose City? Dean moved to brush his hair out of his face, and their eyes briefly met. He showed no hint of pleasure or annoyance, but just pulled his leather jacket a little closer and trudged off towards the warm light of the lodge. Fern watched him until Vipsania broke her concentration by elbowing her in the stomach.
“Can’t stare at him all night, Fernie,” she said. “We got places to be.”
Besides the entire freshmen class and half a dozen teachers, a few trusted upperclassmen had come along to act as counselors and make sure the younger students didn’t get in any trouble. Fern’s friend Nika was one of them, and she led the freshmen girls about 200 yards into the woods to the place where they were to set up camp, while the boys set out in the opposite direction. Fern was glad she’d remembered a sweater—it was much colder in the mountains, even in early September. She was also grateful that Nika—unlike Fern, Vipsania, Cassia, or Lyra—seemed to actually know how to put up a tent.
“I already regret this,” Vipsania groaned as she fumbled with the metal rods that gave structure to the baggy fabric. “I wanna sleep in the creepy lodge.”
“There’s not enough room,” said Nika. “And this is a camping trip.”
“We’ll sleep on the floor,” put in Cassia, who wasn’t having much better luck with her and Lyra’s tent. Fern stifled a chuckle. She seemed to be the only one who didn’t find the process impossibly complicated.
Once they’d finally got their tents set up and stored their things, Fern and the others returned to the lodge and had a late dinner of subs and chips—the only meal over the next three days that wouldn’t be cooked over a campfire. It was a cozy place, although Fern didn’t much care for the arsenal of old guns and animal trophies and rusty hunting traps that were almost the only decorations. Dr. Strathmore laid out all the expected rules: no boys in girls’ tents or girls in boys’ tents, always travel in pairs (or, in mixed company, groups of three), no leaving the tents after curfew. They were also absolutely forbidden from touching any of the "antiques" that hung from the walls of the lodge—not that Fern was even remotely tempted. Vipsania rolled her eyes through all of it, as though she had no intention of letting the teachers cramp her fun. Fern, meanwhile, gloomily imagined all the trouble Vipsania was likely to drag her into despite her best efforts.
Once they’d all been issued a stern warning about the consequences of fooling around—including the promise of a long ride back to Marbrose with only Sister Athanasia for company—the freshmen were divided into six smaller groups with a teacher and a counselor to pray for the weekend ahead. This was more up Fern’s alley, but she was dismayed to see that Vipsania’s sister Lucilla had been assigned to her group. Worse, the other freshmen seemed more than content to let “Pope Fern” do most of the talking—apparently she was the freshman class’s designated spiritual superstar, even to the boys. Fern thought she acquitted herself well enough, and she felt a slight satisfaction in proving to Lucilla that she wasn’t defined by her friendship with Vipsania.
“You two better keep to curfew,” said Lucilla as their group broke up and everyone headed back towards the campsite.
“It’s my intention,” said Fern. She didn’t want to speak for Vipsania.
Around nine o’clock, the upperclassmen started making the rounds warning everyone that it was time for sleep. They were planning a hike the slopes of Mount Siloam the next morning—a prospect that none of the girls found even remotely attractive—and they were supposed to start bright and early. That didn’t stop the four suitemates from gathering in Fern and Vipsania’s tent for one scary story before bed. Nika had given them five minutes, and Vipsania assured them that that was plenty of time for her to ruin any chance they had of a peaceful night’s sleep.
“So,” she began dramatically. “Did you guys notice anything strange about the hunting lodge?”
They all shook their heads. Vipsania scooted a little closer to the electric lamp, which was their only source of light.
“You know the animal trophies on the walls? None of them are from around here. That big grizzly in the main hall? Those only live out west. They haven’t lived in these parts since the Ice Age. And we’re too far south for caribou. It’s the same for all of ‘em. They aren’t real trophies, just decorations. So… what were they really hunting out here?”
The tent rustled as one of the counselors walked past. Fern wasn’t the only one who involuntarily shuddered.
“At the other end of the valley—maybe twenty miles away—there’s a little town called Rathom. That’s where Rathom Penitentiary is, and Mount Siloam Hospital for the Insane. And when people bust out of either of those places, this is the quickest route to Marbrose City—right through here.”
Vipsania lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. Fern glanced at the flap of the tent, making sure it was really shut.
“That’s why they built the lodge here back in the Twenties. Hank Dreyfuss, Cole Snead, and Mad Jack Calvert were on pretty good terms with the warden in Rathom Penitentiary, and if they got really bored, they’d give him a call and ask him to let one of the prisoners lose, knowing that he’d try and cross the mountains and head for Marbrose—the best place for a criminal looking to disappear. It seemed like a good way to make sure the guards lost your trail, and then in a few days you’d be hitchhiking your way to Marbrose City with nobody any the wiser. But when the convict tried to cross through this valley, the Huntsmen were waiting for him—waiting to trap the most dangerous game.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Lyra, although the tremble in her voice showed she wasn’t quite as confident as her words suggested. “Hunting people is illegal.”
“Laws are for poor people,” said Vipsania, almost smugly. “Believe me, I’m a Montagnese. I would know.”
Cassia Slaughter nodded seriously, like she knew exactly what Vipsania was talking about. Fern shifted uncomfortably on her sleeping bag.
“But… hunting people,” she pressed. “How could they—?”
“I mean, if a convict or a crazy person goes missing in the Adirondack wilderness, what’s the point of even investigating? Eaten by a bear. Fell into a cave. Froze to death. Case closed. And if the Huntsmen were caught, they could always say it was self-defense. There’s nothing illegal about walking through the woods with a burlap hood over your head.”
“How many times did this happen?” asked Fern. “And how do you know about it?”
“I know about it because I know stuff,” said Vipsania mysteriously. “Those three rich guys made trips out here for decades, so… probably a lot. It finally stopped when all three were caught in a landslide in 1951—at least, that’s what people think happened. Their bodies were never found. For all we know, the Huntsmen might still be out there, stalking through the woods in their burlap hoods, looking for—.”
“Girls—.”
All four of them screamed, and Nika jerked the tent flap open with annoyance etched over her face. Fern’s heart was racing, but Vipsania fell backwards onto her sleeping bag in a fit of self-satisfied giggles.
“Oh my god,” Cassia gasped. “Never do that again.”
“It’s your fault for telling scary stories,” said Nika. “Come on, get to bed. That hike tomorrow’s not gonna be fun.”
Cassia and Lyra shot Vipsania dirty looks as they left through the flap and almost sprinted through the darkness towards their own tent, which was just a few feet away. Vipsania was still basking in the glow of her successful scare, her feet propped up on her bag and her hands behind her head. Fern was pretending to be composed, but her hands were still shaking.
“Lights out in two minutes,” came Lucilla’s voice from outside. Vipsania sighed and rolled her eyes.
“Ugh. My sister the curfew Nazi. This isn’t even her part of the camp. Can you reach the lamp, Fernie?”
Fern turned the knob on the electric lamp so there was just enough light for them to finish preparing for bed. Vipsania lazily pulled off her boots and socks and tossed them into a far corner of the tent. Fern set about changing into her pajamas—a formality that, even in the wilderness, Vipsania found completely unnecessary.
“You made that up, didn’t you?” asked Fern. “The thing about… hunting people?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Vipsania, licking her lips.
“Please put your feet inside your sleeping bag,” said Fern. “They smell… absolutely atrocious.”
“Yeah, well your feet aren’t exactly fragrant,” said Vipsania. “Neither is the rest of you, for that matter.”
“At least my perfume wasn’t paid for with blood money.”
Vipsania snorted.
“Woo, Fernie, that was almost mean. You’re getting the hang of this. You know you can help yourself, right? What’s mine is yours.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” said Fern. “But there’s not much of yours that I’d want. I prefer to smell and dress like a… normal person.”
“Well, you wouldn’t fit my clothes anyway,” said Vipsania with a yawn. “You bring your rosary? We’re gonna need to hustle if we wanna get our prayers in before Lucilla comes back and gives us community service again.”
Fern had brought her rosary, and they managed to finish their prayers and turn the electric lamp all the way off just as they heard Lucilla’s approaching footsteps. The crunch of her hiking shoes on the leaves paused briefly beside their tent, then passed them by. Vipsania snickered.
“She’s gonna find some way to get me in trouble before the weekend is over. I’ll do my best not to bring you down with me, but no promises.”
“I appreciate the thought,” said Fern. “But I’m well aware that being friends with you carries the hazard of being tarred with the same brush.”
“Speaking of which… wanna wait five minutes and then go make ghost noises outside Lyra’s tent? She was super spooked.”
“Absolutely not,” said Fern, taking a sip of water from the plastic bottle she kept in her backpack.
“You’re no fun, Fernie. But, you’re a pretty good friend. Guess that makes up for it.”
“I do my best,” said Fern, her blush concealed by the darkness of the tent. A few minutes passed in silence. All around them, the rustling and creaking of the wood seemed to rise to fill the emptiness as the last of the stragglers were sent off to bed by Nika and Lucilla. It felt… eerie. Fern was already regretting letting Vipsania tell that scary story.
“Vipsania,” Fern whispered.
“Hmm?”
“I… don’t believe a lot of the stuff in that book you gave me.”
“Hey, a lotta people saw that sea serpent,” said Vipsania, with an even bigger yawn than before. “There are Marian apparitions that had fewer—.”
“I meant that stuff about the Great Families. There’s just… too much of it. It can’t all be true.”
“Why are you thinking about—oh, wait. Dean. You’re worried I gave you that book to convince you that he’s from rotten stock, right? And then I could steal him? Fernie—.”
“It’s not that,” said Fern, although she wasn’t quite sure if she believed her own words. “It’s just… Vipsania, not everything is a conspiracy.”
“Not everything isn’t,” said Vipsania. “I’m telling you, Fernie, why else would they tear so many pages out of that book if—?”
“Maybe they were worried about… firing the imaginations of impressionable children,” said Fern lamely. Vipsania propped herself up a little to look at Fern’s silhouette in the dark.
“If you won’t believe me, Fern, try talking to him. See what he thinks about his family.”
Fern frowned and rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on the uneven ground. The book was peeking out of her backpack, and she could just see the outline of its faded black cover against the fluttering fabric of the tent. It wasn’t like Fern Kubelsky to be so skeptical of a book, but ever since she’d arrived at Marbrose Catholic, it had become more difficult to tell what was true and what wasn’t. She trusted Vipsania, and Miss Stott, and even Declan Lovejoy to an extent, but she was beginning to question her own instincts. It was hard to believe that she really was in the midst of a dangerous conspiracy that went back decades—that she, Vipsania, Dean, and everyone else were just the culmination of some long-laid plan—or the latest people to be touched by an inexplicable curse. She’d hoped to leave these worries behind her when she left for the mountains, but even here, it seemed, the shadow of Marbrose City loomed. As tiredness overtook her and Fern slowly drifted off to sleep, she imagined snow falling over the valley, and the crunch of three pairs of heavy boots as they stalked their human quarry through the pines.