Sanctum by Madeleine Roux

the stack and opened it, watching a cascade of old pictures spread out onto the table. He glanced through one after another. . . . Bearded ladies, muscle men, a tightrope walker, a carousel. Ghostly remnants of a happier time in Camford, before it had been marred by the warden’s legacy.
    “There’s, um, been another development, too,” Abby said. She nodded toward Dan, a gentle prompting that made him feel both sheepish and protected. They were his friends. He had to trust them.
    “She’s right. It’s . . . It’s weird to admit, but I’m starting to see things. Well, just the one thing so far, so maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’ll stop at that.”
    “Whoa.” Jordan slowly lowered his half-eaten apple to the table. “What kind of things? Er, thing?”
    “A little boy,” Dan replied. Automatically, he pictured the kid again and shivered. “But he looked . . . old, like he was from another time. The weird thing is, he looked like the kid in the picture Felix gave me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

    “Yikes. That is some M. Night Shamalamadingdong shit.” Jordan took another bite of the apple, but slowly this time. With a full mouth he added, “Do you think it’s stress, maybe? Or the lack of sleep? Are you sure it was . . . Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”
    “Well, I guess not,” Dan murmured. “He was singing my name at me, and it reminded me of that Doug kid, the way he just said my name over and over again. So maybe I was thinking of that and conjured up the kid from the photo?”
    “I keep hearing Lucy,” Abby confessed, chewing her lip. Her hair was still damp from the rain. “It’s getting worse. It’s like being here is . . . accelerating something. I’m hearing her all the time now.” She took Dan’s wrist again. “I’m not sure coming back was such a good idea. Maybe we should’ve left all of this alone.”
    “We could still leave,” Jordan said, losing interest in his apple. “If you guys really don’t think we should be here . . .”
    “No,” Dan said. His eyes rested on the photo, focusing on the pale, strange little boy in the image. “We have to start tracking down those addresses. Tonight.”
    “Okay then,” Jordan said. He took a newspaper off the top of his stack and opened it, getting down to work. “Tonight. Before we lose it altogether.”

Chapter 12
     
    D an couldn’t hear his own thoughts over the THUMP-WUB-THUMP of the bass. If this was what hanging out with friends was like in college, he’d take a book, a chai latte, and a quiet corner in the library, thank you very much.
    “It’s like the stereo is inside my head!” he shouted at Jordan as they stood in the cramped, sweaty foyer.
    “Yeah!” Jordan screamed back. “Isn’t it fantastic?”
    Well, there was no accounting for taste. The police would probably show up any second to break up the party. What sort of neighbors wouldn’t complain about noise this loud?
    Dan turned a full circle, trying to spot Abby among the sea of heads bobbing along to the music. It didn’t help that he couldn’t remember what she was wearing. He hadn’t changed from earlier, but he’d turned up in the quad at nine to find that literally every other person going in their group—Abby, Jordan, Micah, Lara, and Cal—had done something large or small to freshen up or completely change their appearance.
    Lara had worn a pair of high-waisted denim cutoffs over purple tights. The dye job on the shorts made them look like a rainbow, something that he pointed out trying to make conversation, only to have her rebut coldly that it was “ ombre , not rainbow.” She managed not to freeze to death outside by wearing a huge, bulky coat over everything. It reminded Dan vaguely of a flasher.
    Heads half-glued together, Abby and Lara had engaged in rapid-fire chitchat as they all hurried across campus. Both girls had dark hair, and Abby had braided hers into about ten different designs and pinned