The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky (ebook reader for manga TXT) 📕

hands gripped my shoulders and forced me into a sitting position. The engine started up again, and I jostled with the sudden movement.

I couldn’t see anything beyond the hood, but my breathing grew more and more rapid as images of the attack flashed before me, when I was held down on the kitchen floor, my arms pinned just like they were now.

I screamed. The sound that tore out of me was primal, a sound I didn’t recognize. But a voice cut through it.

“Hey, it’s okay.” In the complete darkness, the voice rang clearly in my ears.

“Freddie?”

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Freddie said. “Hey, pull over.”

“No stopping now. This is how we do things,” someone else said.

The club. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. My heart was still beating at a breakneck pace, but now as much from adrenaline as from fear. It was almost exactly like the feeling I used to get from watching horror movies, but tenfold. One hundredfold. Adrenaline didn’t always have to mean fight or flight, did it? What if sometimes it meant stay and see what happens? Adrenaline for the reckless.

“If she scares this easy, maybe we should let her go,” another voice said. This time, it was a girl’s.

“No,” I said quickly. I’d gotten this far. “I’m fine.”

“Good,” Freddie whispered close to me, his voice like a calming balm. “We’re almost there.”

A new sensation broke through the darkness: a hand gently encircling mine. I squeezed Freddie’s hand back, grateful.

The ride felt quick, like it hadn’t lasted more than five minutes. But maybe that was just because everything inside me was racing. The van came to a stop, and two hands took me by my arms and hoisted me to a stand. We walked for a few minutes, and then I could tell we’d gone indoors when the salty smell of sand and ocean changed instantly to the canned smell of a damp room. I heard keys or a chain jingling, the wail of a metal door opening.

“Watch your step,” someone told me. I lifted my knees high with caution. Freddie, who was still holding my hand, guided me carefully.

At last we stopped walking. There was a tug at the back of my head and the hood slid off my face.

I blinked quickly, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I was in front of a wall. A lumpy gray wall. After a few more blinks, I saw that the lumps were actually pieces of skeleton. Skulls, ribs, and hands were suspended in motion and reaching out to me, like they were trying to break free from the cement. I stumbled backward, my feet catching on a long metal rail on the floor that curved into the darkness.

“Easy,” Freddie said, grabbing me before I fell.

I spun around and saw that he was standing next to three other people. There was Thayer; the girl I remembered from the abandoned-house party—the same one who’d called me a murderer on the lunch line; and then there was Bram Wilding. Lux McCray–dating, object-of-Saundra’s-affections, reluctant-term-paper-partner Bram Wilding.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Only a little!” Thayer said. He wore a long red robe, or maybe it was a cloak. “We are always kidding, but only a little.”

I struggled to understand what I was seeing. I was pretty sure I’d never once seen this mix of people together in school. I took in my current surroundings, a dark, low-ceilinged Halloween-looking bonanza, with ghouls up on the walls and weird train tracks along the floor.

And then there was Bram. Out of everything, he was the thing that made the least sense. I was beginning to wonder if this was some sort of murder club and I’d been incredibly stupid to let them take me to a second location. But as the minutes passed, none of them brandished any weapons.

Finally, Thayer edged forward, and I reflexively took a step back and tugged on the edges of my sleeves.

“So you like scary movies,” he said.

Not what I was expecting him to say. “Uh, yeah.”

Felicity fixed me with a brittle stare, but Thayer’s face had broken into a grin. “What kinds?”

“Kinds?”

“Kinds of scary movies,” Thayer said.

“Oh. Well, I like it when scary movies are atmospheric? I also like slashers.”

“My favorite, too!” Thayer said. He was practically giddy now, which only seemed to make Felicity scowl more deeply. I avoided looking at Bram.

“Hey, quick lightning round for a minute: Who was the killer in Halloween?”

Was he kidding? “Michael Myers.”

“Correct! And in Prom Night?”

“Would you lay off her, Thayer?” Freddie said. “Sorry,” he said to me. “Thayer likes to get ahead of himself sometimes. I know this is probably really confusing.”

“Yes,” Thayer said. “You’re probably asking yourself, ‘Why is Thayer the only one who bothered to dress up for this momentous occasion?’ The answer is, I tried to get everyone else on board with the Skull and Bones robes—you know, proper attire, but as usual, I was the only one who bothered to follow the dress code for the initiation ceremony.” He flicked imaginary dirt off his velvety shoulder.

“Initiation ceremony?” I looked at the others, searching their faces for clues. Felicity looked kind of ticked off. Bram looked the way he always looked: borderline bored. But Freddie smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile back, reassured in spite of the incredibly bizarre situation.

“Have you ever heard of Mary Shelley?” Freddie asked.

The question was so random it temporarily stumped me. Felicity pounced. “She doesn’t even know who Mary Shelley is.”

I could hear the derision in her voice, and even though these people had just kidnapped me, I still wanted to belong. To have my shot. Or at least to hear what their ridiculous supersecret weird-as-fuck club was about.

“I know who Mary Shelley is,” I said. “She wrote Frankenstein, right?”

“Do you know the story of how she came up with the idea for Frankenstein?” Freddie asked.

I hated to admit it in front of Felicity, who seemed to be looking for any chance to crucify me, but I shook my head.

“Oh,