The Combination (Night Fall ™) Read online

  THE

  COMBINATION

  E L I A S C A R R

  Text copyright © 2011 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.

  Website address: www.lernerbooks.com

  Cover photograph © iStockphoto.com/Adam Korzekwa.

  Main body text set in Momento Regular 12/16.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carr, Elias.

  The combination / by Elias Carr.

  p. cm. — (Night fall)

  Summary: On the hundredth anniversary of the erection of a high school building by an architect considered to be insane, the misdialing of locker combinations may turn the structure into a gateway to hell unless students Dante, Miranda, and Vincent can help historian Dr. Spangler stop it.

  ISBN 978–0–7613–7742–9 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—

  Fiction. 4. Horror stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C229323Com 2011

  [Fic]—dc22 2011000961

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1—BP—7/15/11

  eISBN: 978-0-7613-7952-2 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2950-5 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2949-9 (mobi)

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there

  wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared

  to dream before

  —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

  1

  Miranda Lee woke up sweating. That dream again. The one where everyone laughed and pointed as she tried and tried to get her locker open. In the dream she couldn’t even focus her eyes on the combination written on her schedule. She pulled the covers over her head.

  “Rise and shine!” her mom sang out, coming into her room and snapping up the shades. “Big first day of someone’s junior year! The journey to the right college begins today!”

  When Miranda shuffled out of her room wearing her school uniform, her dad stuck his head out of the bathroom. His face was half covered in shaving cream.

  “Our little girl is starting a big year!” he crowed. “Want to know my locker combination from first semester my junior year?”

  “Not really,” Miranda muttered.

  “Scorpion, fish, twins, bull, lion, crab, lion. I took it as lucky sign for my love life that year,” he chuckled. “Maybe Mrs. Konstantinos will give you a good one, too. Tell Ma I’m almost ready for breakfast.”

  Miranda sighed and plodded down the hall.

  While his mom stared at the TV, Dante Grant cracked a second egg into his protein smoothie. He was the first sophomore in years to make the St. Philomena High varsity football team. He knew he’d made the team because he was fast. He also knew if he wanted any real playing time, he’d have to be fast—and a lot bigger.

  As he gagged down the smoothie, the TV caught his eye. It was the local morning show. As usual, it had annoying, way-too-awake hosts chatting in a stupid fake living room. At the moment, though, the camera was slowly panning over the outside of St. Philomena High. The camera paused on the weird gargoyles and carvings on the roof.

  “The high school is one of Bridgewater’s most significant buildings,” said a perky reporter, “and this first day of school marks the one hundredth anniversary of the building’s opening.” The camera zoomed in on a row of tall, arched windows on the second floor. They were protected by iron bars. “Famed architect Ivor Shandor only built two buildings in the United States, one at 55 Central Park West in Manhattan and the other here in Bridgewater. Most of the building materials and fixtures came from local sources. But the unusual locks and lockers Shandor insisted on importing from a factory in his home country of. . . .”

  Dante chugged down the last of his shake. If he was going to hit the weight room, he had to get moving. First day of classes didn’t matter. He had real work to do.

  “Bye, Mom,” he said as he headed to the door, his backpack over one shoulder.

  “Bye,” his mother replied a moment later. She was still looking at the TV. The reporter was now interviewing a man in glasses and a tweed jacket. He had a British accent and seemed nervous.

  “Shandor was a genius, of course, but he was also a bit of a madman. For instance, he had very unusual ideas about the end of the world. . . .”

  2

  Black-and-white tile covered the floor of the basement of St. Philomena High, where echoing hallways opened into locker rooms, storage closets, and the weight room. In the center of the basement was the pentagon-shaped boiler room. On each wall was an arched steel door. Instead of a handle, each door had a huge wheel.

  Dante had no idea how those wheels-for-door-handles were supposed to work. He’d been in the boiler room, but he’d never had to open the doors.

  To call the enormous boiler room “creepy” was like calling Saw III “kinda scary.” Leaving a freshman wrapped in athletic tape in the middle of the dark boiler room was a longstanding St. Philomena football tradition. Dante remembered it very clearly from last year.

  He was a little proud of how he’d done as the “freshman mummy.” The seniors had picked him up—wearing only a towel— blindfolded him, wrapped him in tape, and dumped him in the dark boiler room. The last one to leave had yelled “Come on, Flash. Let’s see you run out of this.” And then he was gone. When the echo faded, only the low hum and rattle of the machines had remained in Dante’s ears.

  It only took him a minute or so to wiggle out of the tape and rip off the blindfold. He was still wet from the shower, so that was easy enough. The trick had been finding his way out in the total darkness. The room was full of ancient-looking heating equipment, tools, and random bits of iron he didn’t want to run into nearly naked. Despite what the senior had said, it hadn’t been the time to use his speed.

  Reluctantly, Dante had removed his towel and snapped it out in front of himself like a whip, figuring it would keep him from walking into something. He had taken three steps before he felt his towel hit something and catch. He pulled the towel back and felt it tear.

  “Son of a—!” His voice echoed back at him. He had carefully turned around, holding half a towel, and tried the other direction.

  This time he was luckier. His towel hit something—a wall. After spending forever groping along the wall, he found the right spot. Cautiously, he removed the vent and clambered through. As he blinked in the bright light, he felt relieved to see he was in the locker room.

  Then he’d seen a couple of girls in volleyball uniforms come around the corner and realized which locker room he was in. He was in the girls’ locker room, naked, with only half a towel.

  That had been the moment to run.

  On the first morning of the new school year, Dante didn’t have to worry about being hazed. Not only had he made varsity, he was also the only one in the locker room.

  “Everyone else is so lazy,” he said to himself, turning the dial on his lock. “I’m starting every game this season,” he continued, yanking the latch for emphasis. The combination must have been wrong, because it refused to budge. “Man, I hate these things. Why can’t we have normal locks?” Dante said, a litt
le quieter this time. He spun the dial once again.

  Somewhere deep in the boiler room, though, something did click. Dante didn’t hear it, but someone else did.

  3

  Miranda tried to slow down as she approached the front doors of the school. Back when she was a freshman, she’d run to every class because she didn’t want to be late. Her classmates lounging in the halls would snicker as she anxiously speed-walked past.

  “Nerd,” they’d say . . . or worse. But when they slouched in right before the bell rang, Miranda already had her desk perfectly arranged: notebook open, and a freshly sharpened pencil in her hand. Another sharp pencil parallel to the top of the page, and her lucky eraser in the upper left-hand corner of the desk. Trouble was, no one seemed much impressed.

  Now, as a junior, Miranda had learned to try to be a little cooler. But it was still hard work. She didn’t get teased as often, though people still muttered about how she threw the curve in every class. She even had a boyfriend.

  Miranda frowned, thinking about Vincent. She had been so excited last year when she found out he liked her. The last month of school had been a blur of passing notes in social studies and texting every night. But then she got a 96 on her social studies final. Any cool quota she’d built up that year had been blown when she burst into tears in front of the whole class. And her mom had had a talk with her about “distractions” and her older sister’s full scholarship to Harvard. . . .

  This year she had to apply herself to school like never before. This was the year that really counted with colleges, and she wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of getting into an Ivy League school.

  Even though there were still twenty minutes before homeroom, Miranda couldn’t help hurrying as she walked toward the library. Only a few other kids were there, picking up their schedules from Mrs. Konstantinos, the school librarian.

  Usually Miranda loved libraries and was a favorite with librarians. But Mrs. Konstantinos never seemed to remember Miranda, or anyone else for that matter. There had been a Mrs. Konstantinos at St. Philomena back when Miranda’s father was in high school. He said she’d died. That this Mrs. Konstantinos was the other one’s daughter or something. It didn’t make any sense to Miranda. Once she’d looked in the St. Philomena yearbook from the year her dad had graduated. The picture of Mrs. Konstantinos looked exactly the same. She’d looked in yearbooks even further back and found the same thing. And once, she’d just been paging through the yearbook from the year St. Philomena opened when Mrs. Konstantinos had spoken behind her.

  “What are you doing?”

  Miranda had jumped a mile, slammed the book shut, and murmured something about a report on St. Philomena history. But she was sure she’d seen a picture of Mrs. Konstantinos in the staff section that exactly the same as all the others for the last hundred years.

  As Mrs. Konstantinos looked for Miranda’s schedule, Miranda stared at the big, black, leather-covered book chained to the desk. Supposedly no one other than Mrs. Konstantinos had ever looked inside. It contained Miranda’s only real nemesis at St. Philomena High—the locker combinations. Math problems, English papers, badminton serves—all these Miranda knew she could conquer with hard work and her high IQ. But she’d never mastered the stupid locker combinations here. Worst of all, everyone switched lockers every semester. She was constantly trying to learn new combinations.

  Everyone knew—Miranda better than most, because she really had written a report on St. Philomena High’s history—that the lockers at the high school were one of its unique features. Instead of numbers, the locks embedded in the locker doors had strange astrological hieroglyphics on them. Each combination was a seven-symbol sequence.

  Mrs. Konstantinos’s book held the combination for each locker in the school. When the school office printed off the student schedules, it left the box for the locker combination empty. The stack of schedules was then delivered to Mrs. Konstantinos by the student office aide. Mrs. Konstantinos assigned a locker and wrote down the combination on each schedule. Miranda had always been assigned lockers down by the gym, far from most of her classes.

  With a thin smile, Mrs. Konstantinos handed Miranda her schedule. Miranda looked at it with trepidation. All advanced-placement classes of course. And here was the locker number—again, by the gym! And the string of strange symbols that were already swimming before Miranda’s eyes, just like in her nightmare. She rushed off— only fifteen minutes now to get her locker open and get to first period.

  Miranda finally found her locker near some scary-looking utility room doors. The lockers at St. Philomena were huge, with double doors, like a church. Stuffing freshmen in them was so easy that nobody bothered. And instead of being a simple rectangle, all St. Philomena High lockers had an arch at the top. There was a carving of some kind of little monster right above Miranda’s locker. He was sticking out his tongue.

  Miranda set her new shoulder bag down and took a deep breath. She held her schedule up to peer at the combination in the dim light.

  A scale was the first symbol. Not a good sign. She twirled the lock tentatively to the left until she found the scale. Crab—she twirled right slowly. What was this? She squinted. A bull? She turned the lock left. Crab again. Lion, fish—only one more left and maybe she’d get it open on the first try!

  “There you are, Jellybean!” said a voice in her ear. Miranda screamed, and her hand slipped, spinning the lock wildly. She heard a clunk from behind the utility door and screamed again. Down the hall someone else screamed, too—probably making fun of her.

  She turned to glare into the face of her boyfriend, Vincent. He was grinning and holding out a piece of paper and pen to her. He was wearing a strange skinny tie.

  “You can be the first to sign up for the new Numismatic Club. You can even be the vice president if you want. I mean, I thought we’d vote on it, but who says it has to be a democracy?” said Vincent.

  “You made me mess up my combination,” Miranda muttered, looking at her schedule again to start over. “And that tie isn’t dress code.”

  “Let me see,” said Vincent, yanking it out of her hand. “Got it memorized yet? Mine’s water guy, twins, fish, ram, virgin, crab, virgin.”

  Miranda ripped her schedule back out of his hand and scowled down at the lock as she murmured, “Scale. . . crab. . .”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Vincent asked.

  “Shh—I’m concentrating . . .”

  “You never wrote me back about the Numismatic Club in that letter I sent you last week from Chess Camp. Sorry I didn’t text last night. We got back kind of late and my mom said I had to go to bed. But don’t you think it’ll get a lot of interest in the club signup today? I already found an advisor . . .”

  Miranda tried to block out Vincent’s chatter and the screams down the hall as she turned the lock. She came to the last symbol. She held her breath as she yanked on the locker handle. Nothing. She groaned and leaned her head on the locker door.

  “Want me to do it?” Vincent asked, pushing her aside. “You sign up for Numismatic Club, and I’ll open your locker.”

  “No!” Miranda pushed him back, putting her hand over the lock. “I have to figure it out. I can do this.” She started again, trying to ignore Vincent’s helpful suggestions.

  Miranda was also trying to avoid talking about Numismatic Club, Vincent’s fancy name for a bunch of geeks who liked coin collecting. When she first started dating Vincent, Miranda had pretended to be interested in coin collecting, too. But there was no way this year that she had time for his club. Just thinking about all the extracurriculars she had signed up for on top of her AP classes made Miranda anxious. She knew what her mom would say about Vincent’s club. “You think this will impress a good school?”

  The two-minute warning bell rang. Miranda yelped and yanked on her locker handle. Nothing. She finally let Vincent open the locker for her and dumped her lunch and coat inside. Her bag was already heavy, and she hadn’t even gotten books.
She took everything else with her anyway.

  As Miranda sprinted up three flights of stairs to chemistry class, Vincent kept pace with her, talking the whole time. Neither noticed what was flying overhead. Or the banging on the lockers they passed. They made it through the chemistry classroom door just as the bell rang. The teacher looked up and sneered.

  “I expect everyone to be in their seats when that bell rings,” he said. Miranda quickly sat down in the nearest seat. Then she realized that she wasn’t sitting in the front row as she always did. The year wasn’t off to a good start.

  4

  The tardy bell had just sounded. Principal Jones was itching to get some paperwork done, but he didn’t want to interrupt Dr. Spangler. Spangler was still going on about the architectural significance of St. Philomena High, blah blah. Why Principal Jones couldn’t possibly put a new roof on the school unless he bought very expensive antique tiles like the originals, blah blah.

  “Ivor Shandor was an unappreciated genius!” Spangler said, waving his arms. “If you’d read the authoritative biography I wrote about him, you’d know that he imported those slate tiles from Moldova. And you want to replace them with asphalt shingles!?”

  “The roof is leaking,” Jones said again, trying to be patient. “And parents are not going to like it if I raise tuition to buy imported roof tiles. I barely have enough in the budget to—”

  “Mr. Jones!” the secretary banged open the door. “We need you to—” she broke off with a scream and fell to the floor, covering her head. Jones saw something dark flash past the door of his office.