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

playing games. I was panicking and my mind was just taking the thing I was most afraid of—the thing that had crawled into my nightmares—and convincing me it was real.

But I needed out. I started moving again, but everywhere I turned, there he was, always just a few yards away, always still and watching me. The beating lights were knocking me off-balance. I blinked and whipped around, looking for the other lights, the ones that spelled out the exits, but soon everything was a dizzying display of flashing red.

I quickened my pace, but so did the masked figure. No matter how far from him I got, he got closer. Now I was pushing past people, arms knocking against shoulder blades, elbows in ribs. The guy in the mask, he moved faster, too. He shoved through the crowd just as I did, and everyone he pushed out of the way glared or shouted at him. Which meant they saw him, too.

Or was that just my mind again? All the faces around me began to morph together, ghosts and mummies and dirty looks from behind face paint bleeding together into the same rubbery white.

I was getting closer to the back of the warehouse, closer to where I thought the stairs were. But every time I turned my head, he was right behind me, three yards away, then one yard away. He swiped at me and missed.

I ran faster. My breathing hitched, coming shorter and shorter, the red flashing in my eyes. I reached the edge but there were no stairs, no exit, just a high gray wall. I spun, looking for a way out, kept spinning, searching, until someone grabbed my upper arms. I would’ve screamed but I was petrified.

It wasn’t the masked figure, though.

The person steadying me was Jason.

As in Voorhees, the killer from Friday the 13th. I gulped in air, letting his mask consume my whole line of sight. The steadiness brought me back down, and when I looked around I didn’t see the masked figure anywhere. Now that I’d stopped spinning, all the masks around me began to look like cheap plastic again. My breathing slowed, coming back to normal. Had there even been anyone chasing me in the first place?

The real Jason Voorhees didn’t talk, but this one did. “Dance?”

It was the last thing I wanted to do. But it meant I wouldn’t have to be alone, at least for this moment. I pulled him toward the center of the dance floor.

It was just as DJ Freshman decided to play the first slow song of the night. Well, as slow as an autotuned Miley Cyrus song could get. Jason and I challenged it, swaying even slower than the beat. He rested his hands on my hips and I let myself rest my head against his chest. I took in deep breaths, allowed myself to be engulfed by him, and by the weird song, the randomness of this moment. The fear was subsiding and I was getting my bearings again. I already knew that as soon as the song was over, I would go.

But I was so lost in the moment that I didn’t even realize we had stopped swaying until Jason bent his head low. “Leave the club.”

I pulled my head back. Did he mean this club—this warehouse? No, of course not.

I reached up and brushed the mask up over his face. I should’ve recognized his voice. Low, like the rumble from subway tracks.

Bram’s eyes were unwavering. I used both palms to push him away from me. This time when I looked for the signs for the exit, I found them. I left without looking back.

 29

IT WAS MOVIE night the next evening. When I walked into Bram’s study he acted like he always did. Like I was a barely registering blip on his radar. Like what had happened at the Halloween party hadn’t happened at all.

But I knew that no matter how he acted I was very much still on his mind based on the movie he chose for us to watch.

“Tonight is one of my favorites,” he announced. “Funny Games.”

He didn’t look at me as he said it, which meant he missed seeing the color drain from my face. Funny Games was a movie about a family who are at their lake house when two young guys, as clean-cut as any of the boys at Manchester, show up at their door asking to borrow some eggs. When they enter, they hold the family hostage and torture them.

A home invasion movie. He picked the English-language version for my benefit, surely. This way there were no subtitles for me to ignore. Bram, who apparently still wanted me out of the club, was going to force me to watch and listen to this. And I would. I would be like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, my eyelids forcibly pulled back as I watched the horror unfold before me. I told myself I would do it to prove my standing in the club. For my sick, twisted exposure therapy. And for my own pettiness, so that Bram wouldn’t intimidate me with this dick move.

I sat motionless, not letting any trembling fingers or nervous lip-biting betray me, but inside I was an earthquake. Freddie, sitting next to me on the sofa, must’ve felt the tremors because he slipped his hand into mine and made our fingers interlock.

Your breathing’s different when you’re conscious of it. When you have to remind yourself to do it. So you count your breaths, make sure you don’t forget them, but they remain shallow. You breathe deep, trying to reel in a good one, but no matter how much you gulp it’s never enough.

I made it as far as the scene where one of the home invaders uses a TV remote to disturbing effect before I flinched and turned away. As if on cue, Bram turned to look at me, his eyes daring me to say something. And I realized in that