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

I TURNED TO run, but Freddie’s fingers were already clenched around my wrist, the tip of his blade suddenly against my sternum. I tried to grab it with my free hand, but Freddie pressed the blade harder, shaking his head.

This boy holding a knife to my chest couldn’t have been Freddie. I didn’t recognize him. I’d wandered into the uncanny valley somehow, and I wanted out.

“The rules,” I said frantically. Rules were the only thing that made sense right now, and, something told me, the only thing that Freddie would adhere to. “A member of the Mary Shelley Club can never be a target.”

Not me. It couldn’t be me. I’d just asked Thayer who the target was tonight. I realized slowly that when he didn’t answer, it wasn’t because he didn’t know. It was because he did.

“You’re still probationary, remember?” Freddie said. “You were never a member of the Mary Shelley Club. My Fear Test began the moment I met you. Before you even knew what the Mary Shelley Club was.”

He didn’t need the knife; his words were a stab to the heart. Was this a nightmare? Was I asleep? I told myself to wake up, dug my fingernails into the meaty parts of my palms, hard enough to draw blood. But nothing roused me. Not even the knife still pointed at my heart.

“The rest of the club didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. Especially Bram. They thought I’d slip up or you’d catch on, so they let me go with it. I guess they thought it’d improve their own chances of winning.”

Freddie’s voice, muffled behind the mask, took on an anecdotal quality, the way it did whenever he talked horror trivia with me. It was a punch to the gut, remembering moments like those, where we could happily waste so much time discussing the minute details of our favorite slashers.

All of it had been a lie. I’d opened up to him and he’d used it all against me.

“Do you get it now?” he said. More urgency in his voice, more pressure behind the knife. “Felicity, Bram, even sweet Thayer. They were all lying to you. When you were trying to figure out who the Masked Man was? We all knew. We all put on the mask, we all twisted the knife. Can you just appreciate that? How long it all took? The buildup? I served a five-course meal, Rachel—just for you.”

He pulled off the mask and showed it to me, as if I was seeing it for the first time. “Didn’t you ever notice the face? Long. Sunken cheeks. Scars everywhere. It’s Frankenstein, painted white.”

Of course it was. Mary Shelley’s monster had been staring me in the face all this time and I couldn’t see it. Only someone who had an obsession with horror movies would take a cue from the Halloween mask: repurpose a recognizable, innocuous face by turning it into something horrible. Freddie was probably really proud of that one.

“So tell me,” he said, “how’d I do?”

I tried to push him off me but Freddie’s grip was too strong. I’d never seen him this way. In all our time together—as friends walking to the subway, when I was kissing him in dark corners—I’d never seen just how intimidating he could be. How menacing his smile actually was. It was like watching a performance, but I couldn’t follow the plot.

“This isn’t you,” I said. “You’re good.” It wasn’t just a tactic, an attempt to appeal to his compassion. I meant what I said. “I know you didn’t kill Saundra.”

“Why? Because I was with you when she died?”

“Because Thayer told me,” I said. My teeth were starting to chatter, but it had nothing to do with the cold. “Before Felicity stabbed him, he told me he was on the roof.”

Freddie sighed and shut his eyes, annoyed. “See, this is why he had to go. He was blabbing to everybody. You know he was going to confess to knowing what happened to Saundra. That he’d been up there when she got spooked. That I drugged her.”

“You what?”

“He didn’t tell you that part?” Freddie said. “Saundra fell, Rachel. Thayer chased her all the way up to the roof—she basically led him there herself—and she got scared. She tripped over herself and fell through the skylight. Thayer actually tried to catch her but … well, you know.”

It made sense now why Thayer had done a complete one-eighty after Saundra’s death. He blamed himself.

“She was never supposed to die,” Freddie said. He almost seemed to feel bad.

“You drugged her.”

“Only to make things more interesting.”

I crave chaos. He’d told me that a long time ago and I was only starting to understand how seriously I should’ve taken him.

“Thayer couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to go digging. He grew a conscience. I couldn’t let him talk.”

“So you unleashed Felicity on him?”

“If he confessed to the Saundra thing, then he’d confess to the game, and to the club. Felicity understands that.”

I hated how clinical he sounded, talking about violence and death and betrayal like they were predetermined answers on one of his cheat sheets.

“Understood,” I spat. “I bashed her head in.”

Freddie watched me carefully. “You’re bluffing,” he said.

“I’m not.”

He must’ve heard something in my voice or seen something in my face, because his expression changed, almost like he was amused.

“You think I’m bad. But of the two of us”—he poked me with the knife—“only you’ve killed somebody.”

Despite everything—despite the feel of his knife as it threatened to break through my coat—I longed for another way out. I receded inside myself, searching for a glimmer of hope, for something that would take me out of this situation. A magic word that would make all of this stop.

“Armadillo.”

My voice was so small I doubted if Freddie fully heard me. I could barely hear myself. At first he seemed confused, but then his eyes dimmed, a black flicker of recognition dawning on him. We were back in that alleyway, before Thayer’s Fear Test,