“Then I’ll show you. Come on.” Hollis turned and beckoned for me to follow, leading me up onto the porch, through the frat house front door, and straight into hell.
Once inside, I stopped and stared. Then I couldn’t stop staring. It was impressive, really, to see how quickly the party had moved from beach to home. Unlike Hollis and me, everyone else apparently must’ve driven back to campus after the eleven p.m. bonfire cutoff. The entire downstairs of Pike house was currently decorated in flames and pitchforks while a black light lit the living room with swirls of neon and the crush of painted bodies. Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” thundered over the speakers, set on hellish repeat, and the line for the keg stretched from the kitchen, winding down a long hallway.
I probably would’ve kept standing there for all eternity except Hollis tapped my shoulder and pointed to a staircase. Spell broken, I nodded and trailed after him, departing hell and ascending into a world bright and glittering—the second floor of the frat house had been transformed into a cloudy fog machine–generated sort of paradise. Every surface was covered in aluminum foil and flickered with candlelight. Glitter and angel wings fluttered from the ceiling while Sia sang passionately.
The party’s theme, it dawned on me, was a direct nod to the Feast of Avalon—that other celebration of light and dark, good and evil, those warring forces of our world. But there was no time for any deeper theological musing; dragging me down a confusing twist of corridors, Hollis quickly pulled me into a filthy bedroom and shut the door behind us. Then locked it. I looked around. The place was disgusting. It resembled a rat’s nest more than anything else—papers were tacked to the wall, clothes strewn everywhere, dishes piled in a corner, including dirty ones crusted with bits of food.
“Nasty.” I pointed at a small cloud of fruit flies. “Don’t you eat in the dining hall ever?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Now look at this.”
“At what?”
“Right here.” Shoving a bunch of crap onto the floor, he switched on a desk lamp and flipped open his laptop. Huddled beside him, I watched as he got online and pulled up the Dover Springs website, navigating to the page titled “Our History.” “Tell me what you see.”
I squinted at the screen. The page described information I already knew: how the site of Dover Springs had originally housed a private mental asylum that had been in operation from 1886 to 1907, at which point the hospital had tragically burned down. Rather than rebuild, the doctors who had operated the asylum decided it would be better and more charitable for the Dover community to start a private university instead.
“Okay,” I said when I was done reading. “So what?”
“Did you look at the picture?”
I hadn’t, but on the page was an old black-and-white photograph of a group of stuffy-looking old white guys—the school’s founders. They were standing on the main campus’s lawn, flanking a large sign with the Dover Springs crest carved into it.
“How many people are in that photo?” Hollis asked.
I quickly counted. “Thirteen.”
“Do you consider that a good number or a bad one?”
I paused. “An unlucky one.”
“Fair enough,” Hollis said. “Well, I’ve been curious about the real history behind this place, so I did some digging into who these guys were and especially the asylum that was here before. The one that burned. And despite all that charitable talk, it was a pretty fucking awful place. There were reports of abuse. Neglect. People claimed they were wrongfully held for years on end. Families were broken up. Spouses couldn’t get their loved ones out, even when they wanted to leave.”
I frowned. “But that’s just how it was back then, right? People with mental illnesses weren’t treated fairly. Or humanely. I mean, it’s shitty, but I don’t know that it means the Dover Springs Asylum was any more cruel than any other place.”
“Maybe not. But they were definitely more corrupt. Did you know that the town of Dover used to have a special committee that had the power to determine if someone needed to be institutionalized? And their decisions were legally binding. There were no hearings or means of recourse; they had complete discretion. This committee called themselves the Commission of Lunacy.”
“No way,” I said. “That can’t be a real thing.”
“It was. And from the records I found, those same thirteen doctors who ran that hellhole, who got subsidies from the state for every patient they housed, were the exact same doctors who made up the commission.”
I pointed at the photo. “These guys?”
He nodded. “It’s all on record, if you know where to look. With the commission’s power, they were able to have Dover citizens committed for the most ridiculous reasons: being distraught over a breakup, losing faith in their religion. Even for getting fired from a job or protesting unfair work practices. Usually, it was poor people. Or women.”
“Jesus.”
“The worst of it is, when the hospital caught fire, all the staff and doctors got out safely, but they didn’t go back for a lot of the patients. And you know how long it must’ve taken the fire department to get up that hill. By the time they arrived, nineteen patients had died, locked in their rooms; some in restraints, waiting for help that never came. Can you imagine? Being shut in there for no reason in the first place—or because someone wanted you locked up and out of the way—and then dying like that, completely helpless?”
“I really can’t,” I said, although I wondered if he knew anything at all about our country’s current issue with mass incarceration. “It’s disgusting. But, Hollis, these doctors, the school founders . . . When you said the killer wasn’t a who but a what, what did you mean?”
“I meant, what if the killer’s not a person at all, but a whole group of people?”
My mind spun. Thirteen. He’d said there’d been thirteen doctors.
“What kind of group?” I asked cautiously.
“What else?” Hollis said. “A coven.”
*
A coven. I stepped back from his desk. “You can’t actually believe that.”
His face colored. “Sure I can! It makes sense, doesn’t it? They were the Commission of Lunacy, for God’s sake. They essentially murdered nineteen innocent people who they wrongly locked up, and as a result, they were rewarded with this school, where they profited even more. If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is. And so maybe that coven is still around. Maybe those same thirteen men weren’t men at all, and they have to keep killing every so often, in order to . . .”
I stared at him. “In order to what?”
“Stay alive,” he whispered.