Excerpt: Unforgotten Losses

Of course, it was bad enough trying to negotiate the residential roads, but they were nothing compared to the university roads. The last time I'd followed Antonia, I'd been able to drive most of the way to the abandoned house, and my only restriction was trying not to be so obvious that Antonia would see me tailing her. That was utterly impossible now; if Halloween was a big deal for families with small children, it was a much bigger deal for the students and faculty at the university. As soon as I turned onto University Ave., I realized my stupidity. There was simply no way to drive through; the street was filled with people in costumes, wandering around, drinking, playing music, dancing, having a wonderful time and rendering the roads utterly inaccessible to cars. Cursing bitterly, I parked the car along the side of the road (in an illegal parking spot, but I rather doubted the university police were going to be able to do much ticketing tonight) and got out to travel the rest of the way on foot. It wasn't that far, I reminded myself, not even a mile and a half to the place where the trail began, and then a fairly short walk to the house, now that I knew where it was and how to get there.

Not only were there more students out in the streets than there had been kids back in the real world, but the college students' costumes were much more elaborate and took up much more room. As I tried to thread my way through dancing giant skulls and octopi and freight trains of engineering students, I remembered how much time we'd spent on making costumes when I was in school, much more time (and much more ingenuity) than we dedicated to our studies, especially in the fall. Halloween and the "parade" was one of the highlights of the fall semester, and nobody wanted to be left out. Cigarette smoke mixed with the sweeter smell of marijuana, though I couldn't see anyone who was smoking dope, and there was an underlying sharpness from spilled beer all around. A group of girls who were dressed up as zombie bridesmaids got tangled with what looked like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a UFO, and they basically blocked off the entire road for ten minutes. Torn between bemusement at the costumes and a growing sense of dread and fear about what was happening to Antonia, I tripped over the long tail of a nine tailed fox creature (some kind of demon, if I remembered my manga properly), and fell into a pair of disembodied giant human ears (at least their costumes were relatively soft, so I didn't hurt myself; I saw a couple of people who seemed to be trying to be some kind of electronic device, and there were all kinds of sharp, pointy things sticking out of them, which caused the other revelers to keep a healthy distance from them). All the dorms were lighted up and music blasted out from half the windows, adding to the cacophony on the ground, since nobody seemed to have coordinated which music which group of people played. In addition, many of the folks in costume on the street carried boom boxes playing all kinds of music and sound effects, and there were a couple of musicians playing guitars and saxophones as well as marching band instruments. Someone elbowed me and nearly knocked me over; a Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz offered me a beer, which I declined. I had to force myself to keep my focus on where I was going; it was too distracting to pay any attention to the costumed people around me (even that person who was dressed like a double helix of DNA; probably a bio major, I thought), beyond making sure that I wasn't about to run into any of them, which would have slowed me down even more.

There was a large party going on, complete with barbecue and kegs of beer, by the dorm closest to the end of the trail, and the whole lawn was filled with people screaming and singing and dancing and drinking and eating, so that just when I'd thought it was going to get easier for me to reach Antonia, I had to drop a shoulder and more or less bull my way through the largest crowd yet. That cold sense of dread increased as I got closer to the house; I shivered without knowing what exactly I was afraid of. I was half afraid that the whole trail was going to be full of revelers, and that I would be slowed down even there, but fortunately I was wrong, and nearly all the celebrators were at the party. I passed one or two strays in costume in the early part of the trail; one, who seemed to be dressed as a Marie Antoinette, had gotten her (his, as it turned out on closer inspection) dress caught on one of the shorter bushes, and the other, who seemed to be a werewolf or some other kind of hairy monster, was working patiently to remove the dress from the stickers without ripping it. And the lights from the party illuminated the first third or so of the trail, as the music and noise followed me into the woods for some distance.

But finally I was alone, and it was dark enough that I was glad to have my small flashlight, just as I'd been the last time I was walking this way. As the noise receded, I could focus better, and once again I had the frightened feeling in the pit of my stomach, the sense of wrongness that made me sweat, the certainty that something bad was happening or had already happened up ahead of me. I couldn't tell whether this was entirely my sensation or whether it was a residue of Cecily's fear, but it got stronger and stronger the closer I got to the ruined building.

I stopped briefly, on the edge of the clearing outside the building, and listened, sharpening all my senses to give me any information at all about what was going on in the basement of that building. I could, if I strained, hear the faint echoes of the party at the dorm, but once I screened that out, there was nothing, no sounds, no movement, nothing except that sense of dread, a fear that worked its way around my nerves and into my blood.

Retracing my steps from the last time, I entered the building and stopped cold. An almost physical wave of pain and fear and anger and triumph caught at me as soon as I set foot inside, and each step that I took toward the stairs going to the bomb shelter only increased the sensation. My heart pounded and my breathing quickened; either something was still going on, something I couldn't see or hear with any of my normal senses, or something horrible had already happened here, in the very recent past, so recently that the aftereffects were still vibrating in the very air around me.