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

was lying to herself. Anyone could tell the difference between the clanks of pipes and the groan of hundred-year-old original wood floorboards. Wyatt was asleep in his room and there was no one at the door and she was holding the only other living thing in the house. But someone was upstairs.

Lux didn’t move; she didn’t even breathe.

The noise she was hearing was footsteps again. She counted them. First four. Then two. And, after a long pause—one.

Her phone buzzed and she jumped, dropping the puppy, who let out a pitiful whimper as she scampered away, her little nails clacking on the hardwood. It was a text from Bram.

Be there soon.

How soon? She texted quickly, trying to stay calm.

Few blocks away.

I think there’s someone in here, she typed.

She waited for Bram to reply, but a new text never came and she was getting anxious.

Hurry. I keep hearing all these noises, she texted again.

Another beat that stretched excruciatingly long. She saw the dancing ellipses pop up, but then they disappeared. Her brow crinkled as she watched the screen. Finally Bram wrote back.

You’re imagining things.

Even though it was what she wanted to hear—that it was nothing—it still felt crummy to have her fears invalidated. She clenched her jaw. Just get here.

There was a broom closet between the living room and the kitchen that the family mostly kept all their untidy crap in, and Lux went to it. There was enough room inside for her to stand. She wedged herself in the dark, cramped space and listened.

After a moment, she could hear the front door opening. She strained to hear more, hoping for the sound of Bram’s voice. Maybe he’d call to her, or maybe he’d announce himself and scare off whoever was upstairs.

She shook her head. There is no one upstairs, she reminded herself. But as she listened for a sign—for something—all she heard was footsteps slowly going up the stairs.

“Bram?” she whispered. She wrapped her fingers around the doorknob, turning it slowly so that it did not make a single sound. She pushed the door open a sliver, only enough for her to peek through. She had a straight line of sight to the staircase.

There was no one there. But it must’ve been Bram. He’d gone up to check that the coast was clear, which it obviously was. She wasn’t going to stay locked in a closet. There was no order to that, no control. She pushed the door open farther and slipped out. Her socked feet padded up the staircase. Lux didn’t stop until she got to the second floor. Wyatt’s room was down the hall to the right. She knew Bram would have checked there first. She turned left and walked to the end of the hall, where the Salgado-Hydesmuirres’ master bedroom was.

When she got there, she saw a man standing with his back toward her and nearly collapsed with relief. It was Mr. Hydesmuirre. She recognized his London Fog coat. He must have come home early.

“Mr. Hydesmuirre, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

But when he turned around, the face she saw was not Mr. Hydesmuirre’s. It wasn’t even human. It was white, rubbery, covered in ugly scars. A mask.

Lux’s scream was so loud and so forceful it propelled her out of the room like a bottle rocket. She ran down the hall, but the man in the mask came after her.

She couldn’t let him catch her. She didn’t slow down when she got to the stairs. She continued to pump her legs, to sprint, but he was right behind her. She could feel him like she could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck. And then she could feel two firm hands pushing into her shoulder blades.

As Lux fell the rest of the fourteen steps and crashed to the bottom of the staircase—a scream stuck in her throat—the last thing she saw was that monster’s face.

 33

LUX SPENT THE night in the hospital with a broken arm and six stitches in the back of her head. Bram sent out a text saying he’d found her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. But when Lux woke up, she had a story. One that was different from the one I had intended to tell.

According to Bram, Lux said there was a man in a mask. And he’d tried to kill her.

There was a flurry of texts from the rest of us, wanting more details and asking more questions. But the texts from Bram stopped coming.

The next day it seemed like the whole school had as much information as I did. The rumor mill of Manchester was spinning on overdrive, pouring with sympathy for Lux, exalting Bram for rushing to her rescue. It wasn’t like when Sim had declared that a masked man was after him and no one believed him. Everyone believed Lux. It was like a trend. Largely ignored but as soon as the most popular girl in school christened it acceptable, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The Masked Man was a thing now—as exciting as a new handbag or the latest pointless game app. An instant legend, on everybody’s lips.

The news was of such mythic proportions that Saundra couldn’t even wait for lunch to talk about it. She cornered me at my locker after homeroom, breathless with excitement. “Someone attacked Lux! Someone in a mask!”

I shut my locker a little too forcefully. I felt bad when Saundra jumped, but this whole thing had me on edge. It’d been my Fear Test and it’d gone all wrong. Someone had gotten seriously hurt and I was responsible. Indirectly or not, I had put Lux in harm’s way.

And there was the issue of this mask. There wasn’t supposed to be a mask in my Fear Test.

“Can we not talk about it?” I started walking to my next class, but Saundra followed, incredulous.

“Are you kidding me? Your nemesis got taken out and you don’t want to talk about it?”

“She’s not my nemesis,” I