Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Queen > Status Update

Laughter. That’s how the clip started. No light, no color, just a black screen and the hyena-ish laughter of teenage boys. Next, an unfocused image filled the screen of Rudy’s iPhone. The perspective swung until the camera centered on its subject: The van, as black as a million midnights rolled together. “We find the freak in its native habitat,” a boy’s voice intoned, then giggled hysterically.

“I won’t hurt you. You trust me, right?” I trusted her, but we were kids. Even back then I knew that kids could get carried away with their games.

But if there was a premeditated top layer of my thoughts, what actually made me jump was more primitive. I think sometimes your blood asks you a question. One that forces you to put yourself at risk for something you really need—a thing so important that the rest of your life hinges on it, and the penalty of not going for it means you’ll live half the life you could have.

Harry and I padded down the hall, past a heavy door that lay partially open. Beyond it, I could see a room with an antique wooden desk hemmed by walls covered in— “Are those teeth?” Harry whispered. Yes, they were. Disembodied sets of teeth. Teeth without mouths. Perfect pearly white dentures, hundreds of them, mounted on the walls like hunting trophies.

But when I looked back, the door had shut behind us. On its own, maybe, so silently I’d missed the catch of its latch. Or had something slipped in from behind us—a hand with dead black blood collected under the fingernails—to ease it closed?

I hadn’t responded to Harry’s calls or texts. After I stopped searching for Plum, I withdrew into my room, to my shelves full of books. I wrapped myself up in stories, pushing away the painful edges of reality, locked in with heroes and heroines who weren’t freighted with the frailties of regular people.

The ringing was coming from that emptiness. Down there with the beetles and earthworms, something else moved too . . . something large and possibly larval. I could see them. Three bodies . . . or how bodies might look after being sunk underground for a month.