Soulstice by Simon Holt

Author:Simon Holt [HOLT, SIMON]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316071413
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2009-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

14

Aaron and Reggie dropped their bikes behind the football field bleachers and walked the two hundred yards to the school. The sun had gone down, and mosquitoes swarmed them in search of moist skin and fresh blood. Both walked wide circles around the pale pools of light cast by the humming floodlights that illuminated pockets of brick along the building. The school looked like a prison in the night, harsh and secretive.

Aaron spotted the broken window first.

“There. Principal’s office. Figures.”

He scuttled across the sprinkler-soaked grass in an awkward crouch. Reggie followed.

“No alarms?”

“No. But after tonight?” Aaron pulled two sets of latex gloves from his backpack and handed a pair to Reggie. Then he took a flashlight out and used it to brush away the glass teeth that protruded from the side and bottom edges of the pane. “This will be the Kassners’ last break-in, I think. Don’t cut yourself, Reg.”

Aaron slipped in through the window, stepped onto the air-conditioning unit that lined the back wall of the room, and hopped to the floor. He offered up a hand to guide Reggie down into the office. Even in the relative dark, she sensed the carnage first. She could smell it.

Formaldehyde.

She snatched the flashlight from Aaron and scanned the room with the ghostly beam of light. Lab animals had been strewn across the floor, some of them torn into pulpy pieces. Two headless rat bodies littered Principal Padian’s oak desk, and blood had been smeared across the family pictures that adorned each corner. In the pen cup, the decapitated heads of the rodents were punctured atop the tips of fine custom pens. A dissected frog was pierced into the back of the leather chair with yellow and blue pushpins. There was nothing ritualistic or sacrificial about any of the butchery, nothing to suggest that the bloody mess had any purpose. It was simple and brutal cruelty.

“Keech.” The scene reminded Reggie too much of what Henry’s Vour had done to his pet hamster.

Aaron observed the dead creatures with a cool distance but said nothing. The killer or killers had taken their time. They had enjoyed themselves.

“Let’s go, Reggie. And don’t touch anything. Nothing we can do here.”

Reggie walked ahead down the dark hall. It was a mine of destruction: every glass case shattered, every art piece thrown to the tile floor and smashed. When the Vour inside Henry terrorized her last winter, the film of fear had blunted her anger. But now with each step down the trashed school hall, her blood pumped harder and hotter at this recklessness.

First, the monster had violated her home, her family. And now it spilled its malice across the rest of her life in Cutter’s Wedge, and its evil wreckage marked the deterioration of her own fear and empathy. She stalked into the dark cafeteria toward the double doors that lead into the kitchen.

“Yo.”

A hulking figure stepped out from the shadows and stood right in front of the doors.

“I wondered if you’d show.”

Reggie stopped and thrust the flashlight beam into the large boy’s face.

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