Kenny texted the other Vindicators to warn them away from the school.
Eddie & team snooping around basement—stay away until i say clear
Charlie wrote back:
why snooping?
Kenny replied:
Someone told him about graffiti
Vanhi wrote
WHO?
I don’t know.
Charlie wrote back:
Does he know it’s us?
Not yet
Peter said,
I’ll go now. Clean it up
Kenny answered:
I tried. Door won’t open. Breath of God gone.
Vanhi wrote:
Fuuuuuuuck.
Kenny replied:
I’ll handle.
Vanhi asked:
How?
Kenny didn’t answer. He went silent because Eddie walked up, with Candace in tow. She had a nice camera with her, the paper’s high-end Nikon. Huge flash, great for lighting blood markings in dark spaces. Their sudden appearance made him put down his phone abruptly and not answer Vanhi’s question about how he was going to fix this. But he also had no fucking clue.
Eddie paid off the janitor, a slow man named Mr. Walker, who without hesitation said he’d let them in. The school had cleared out, and the basement was deserted.
“Ready?” Kenny said, trying to sound excited in a positive way.
He noticed the throbbing in his fingers. That afternoon, he’d run home to shower and change clothes, dipping his pierced fingers in rubbing alcohol and nearly bringing his parents in when he yelped. He slipped that hand into his pocket now, without realizing he was doing it.
The boiler room door was closed, the magnetic swipe box next to it at knob level.
Kenny didn’t dare pull out his phone to see if the cryptic firelight writing was still on the door. Or if the magnetic swipe box was still overlaid with glowing spy-fi keypad controls.
Instead, trying to act nonchalant, Kenny said, “So this is the boiler room?”
“Technically, they call it the mechanical room,” Eddie answered. “I pulled the specs. They put the security pads in when they added the panic doors last year.”
“Isn’t it locked?” Kenny asked, again trying to act clueless and calm.
“Not for long,” Eddie said.
Soon enough, they heard footsteps, and the lanky frame of Mr. Walker came ambling down the hall. He was in no particular hurry, which drove Kenny nuts because all he wanted to do was get this over with.
Kenny wasn’t sure who limped more, Mr. Walker or Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths.
When Mr. Walker finally made it down the hallway, he and Eddie had a spirited, quiet exchange. Eddie finally slipped another $20 bill into Mr. Walker’s hand.
He ambled to the door and said, “Well, good evening to you,” to Candace and Kenny, as if he were just passing by. He put his badge on the reader, then let the elastic cord suck it back to his belt.
He kept on walking in the other direction, mumbling something to himself inaudibly and scratching the back of his head as he shuffled away.
Kenny hesitated when Eddie pulled the door open.
“What are you waiting for?”
“We’re not supposed to be in here,” Kenny said.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“Don’t be a pussy,” Candace added. She was half-Scottish, half-Jamaican, with reddish-blond braids and brown skin.
Kenny nearly blurted, I’m not a pussy, which he realized was exactly what a pussy would say. So instead he scowled at her as if the idea were preposterous, then walked into the boiler room. Like the door and the keypad, the room itself was stripped of its enhancements from last night—no glowing open-mouthed furnace, no diminutive animated god.
Everything was much more boring in realspace.
But it was still dark and hard to navigate, with steam valves, large boilers and control panels, and color-coded piping wrapping the walls and ceilings.
“How does anybody work in here?” Candace asked.
“They don’t, really,” Eddie told her. “It’s almost all Wi-Fi now. They only come down here if there’s an actual mechanical issue. A stuck valve or something.”
It felt warm and damp, but Kenny realized he was starting to sweat. He thought about his Columbia application. Eddie’s excitement: This is our Friends of the Crypt!
“Where is it?” Candace asked.
“Keep looking,” Eddie said.
Kenny realized the best thing he could do—the least guilty-looking thing he could do—was to be the one to find it. They were going to find it anyway. He needed to stay in the loop. Keep their trust. Then, when the moment was right, kill the story. Somehow.
“Look!” Kenny said. The moment he did, he thought, Is my premise flawed? Maybe the guilty person would find it first, because he knew just where to look!
“Oh, wow,” Candace said.
Eddie just exhaled. A slow breath.
Splashed across the surface of the boiler was a bloody pentagram, upside down and menacing. In the context of the Game, it had seemed perfectly in place, among the belching smoke and glowing glyphs and little Hephaestus. But now, in the real world, boring as all get-out, the bloody diagram stood alone, startling and grotesque. The heat from the boiler had cooked the blood (it was obviously blood) to a gooey dried paste. It looked hideous.
And huge. How much blood had Kenny given? At the time, it was incremental. Now all at once it slapped him in the face: What have I done?
“This was no prank,” Eddie said.
Suddenly, there was a burst of light. Insanely, Kenny thought for a half second that it was the God Game, coming to the rescue somehow.
But it was Candace, snapping her first picture, the flash sizzling.
“Did your parents ever tell you about the Friends of the Crypt?” Eddie asked them softly, almost piously.
“I heard about it,” Candace said. “When I went to the Grove one time.”
“They met there, out in the woods.”
“They blew up a car,” Kenny added.
“Yeah, after putting a live cat inside,” Candace said.
“That was twenty years ago. And still, my mom would never let me play in those woods,” Eddie said.
Another flash went off, lighting the bloody pentagram, drawn in stark lines that dripped downward, startling Kenny all over again.