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

initiation, when I told you guys what happened when I was attacked. I left something out. I told you there was one person there. Matthew Marshall. But there was someone else. Another person in a mask.”

Their faces colored with varying degrees of shock, except for Bram, who knew all of this already. Felicity leaned forward, eyes sharp. “That’s quite the omission.”

“Who was he?” Freddie asked. If he was hurt that I hadn’t shared this with him, he didn’t show it.

“I don’t know. He ran off. He never came forward after what happened to Matthew. The police had no leads.” I swallowed and picked at the cuticle of my left thumb. I only looked up again after a few moments passed, afraid of what the club’s reaction would be. “What if he’s back?”

“Why would he…?” Thayer started.

“To get back at me,” I said. “Revenge for killing his friend?”

“So let me get this straight,” Felicity said. “Some guy from your past is tormenting us by threatening to further expose our whole deal unless we finish the contest where he’ll probably kill us?”

When Felicity said it, it sounded ridiculous, but, “Yeah.” I stood up. I couldn’t just keep sitting there, doing nothing. “You don’t have to worry. It’s me he wants.”

“So what now?” Thayer asked.

“We have to finish the game,” I said. I never thought Felicity and I would agree on something so preposterous, but she was right. If I wanted to put an end to this, we would have to put an end to the game.

“Wait, hold up.” Freddie stood up, too. “We don’t know that it’s this guy you’re talking about.”

“Who else would toy with us like this?” I asked.

“Whoever it is, we can’t just follow his commands,” Freddie said. “He wants to finish the game so he can lure us into a trap.”

“No,” I said. “We’re going to be the ones to lure him.”

I was making the plan up on the fly, but as soon as I said it, I knew it was the only way to make this stop.

“Look, if this guy followed me here, then he’s determined,” I reasoned. “And if he showed up at all the other Fear Tests, then he’s going to show up at the final Fear Test, too.”

They watched me, their collective stares Children of the Corn-icy. I felt awful for bringing them into my nightmare, but there was nothing I could do about it now. Except get them on board. “Now that we know he’ll be there, we can level the playing field,” I said. “We can smoke him out. Put an end to this.”

I didn’t yet know what that meant, or what I’d be willing to do for us to come out on top. All I knew was that the only way out of this fucked-up game was through it.

I had to face the monster.

That night, I dreamed we were in the kitchen. Again. Our designated battleground. Like always, the tile floor was cool under my head. I couldn’t see anything behind his mask, no eyes behind the eyeholes. He was calm. Ready. But this time so was I.

This time, I was the one holding the knife.

I plunged it into him.

 49

THE NIGHT CALLED for fear. It was close to two in the morning and quiet on the Upper West Side. Well, quieter than usual for New York. The only people still outside, lurking in the streets, were looking either for fun or for trouble. So here I was. I was playing a game, but it’d stopped being fun a long time ago.

I walked alongside the waist-high stone barrier that surrounded Central Park. It was snowing and the wisps of white filled the air, like the sky was a down pillow slashed through the middle. Its beauty did not escape me. And to think that if I’d been in bed right then, I’d have missed it. My mom hadn’t caught me all the other times I’d snuck out, and tonight had been no different. Sneaking into Central Park was another story. I’d never been to the park this late, but I knew it’d been closed for an hour. I’d actually googled it. Would there be guards at the entrances? Gates closed? Would they cart me off to jail if they caught me?

I should’ve been scared because I was walking into the belly of the beast. The Masked Figure was out to get us—me—and I was heading straight for him. But I felt calmer than I had in a year. This time I wasn’t going to let him hide in the shadows. I was ready to confront him, find out who he was. Stop him.

There was a lone figure standing like a statue at the Eighty-First Street park entrance, his shoulders and head frosted with snow. A pit of dread formed in my stomach and grew bigger and bigger as I drew closer, until finally, the shadowed features of his face assembled into someone I recognized.

“Thayer?”

He blinked like I’d startled him, even though he’d been watching me approach. “Hey,” he said.

“You want to go in together?”

“Yeah.” He stuffed his fists into the pockets of his thick Canada Goose jacket. “Let’s get this over with.”

It turned out there were no guards blocking our way, none of those blue wooden NYPD sawhorses to weave around. We walked through the open entrance and into Central Park like we were taking a stroll at noon.

Usually grass and a network of trails and pathways could be seen, but all of it lay buried under an expanse of white. Only the lamps, glowing like little moons in the night, demarcated the pathways.

Freddie’s instructions for his Fear Test had been simple: Meet at the Delacorte Theater.

It was an open-air amphitheater that overlooked the stony turrets of Belvedere Castle. That section of the park was ensconced in trees and follies and reservoirs like it was straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale.

I’d been there only once before, two summers earlier, when Mom had gotten us tickets