What the hell?
I prayed the wig would hold. The clips were strong, but not that strong.
The tugging sensation stopped. The blindfold stayed in place, and the wig hadn’t budged, thank God.
“What ar—” I started, but a hand hit my back, shoving me forward. My hands shot out instinctively, feeling for the empty space in front of me.
The hand pushed me again. I stumbled into a walk. Soon, threads of dim light framed the top and bottom of my vision, creeping in around the blindfold’s edges. I focused on the feeling of my sneakers padding on the tiles of the practice room hall, then up the stairs, then over the moaning floorboards of the main library. The scent of yellowing pages and dust descended.
The shock had faded into a frenzy of disbelief. Initiation.
I wondered for a split second if they were going to make me wrestle a bear, but on second thought, bear-wrestling was way cooler than most hazing I’d heard about. Usually, it sounded pointless and humiliating, like chugging hot sauce, or swallowing live goldfish, or sitting on blocks of ice naked until certain body parts went numb. If they even tried the goldfish thing, that was the end. I had limits.
We clanked up the iron steps that led from library floor to library floor. I bumped my shins repeatedly. I could already picture the watercolor of bruises that would be my legs tomorrow. After three staircases, a door clicked, the air cooled, and the floor scraped under eight pairs of feet, summoning up an image of worn stone. We walked up more stairs, steeper this time.
A hinge ahead whined. The hand at my back guided me forward and stopped me still.
I waited for a minute. Footsteps creaked and shifted in the darkness—and another sound, the distinctive strike and hiss of a match. Then a hollow shhh noise I couldn’t identify.
A slight pressure worried at the back of my head, and the blindfold fell from my eyes. I blinked rapidly, praying my eyebrows hadn’t smudged. Thank God I’d used enough setting spray to freeze a ferret in place.
The room was circular, like the top of a fairytale tower. The shadow of an upright piano stood opposite the door. Sheets of heavy cloth covered patches of wall where the windows must have been, creating thick darkness. The beat-up pinewood floor, scarred and uneven with age, reflected the only source of light: the line of long candles in the Sharps’ fists. Thin, dripping candles, propping up curls of flame that danced at the tips of their chins.
About eighty smartass comments jumped to the tip of my tongue.
There must be some mistake, I wanted to say. I auditioned for a singing group, not the Freemasons.
Wait, shit, I wanted to say. I forgot to bring all the goats I raised specifically for sacrificial purposes.
All right, I wanted to say with a sigh. Which one of you do I have to exorcise?
None of it came out. Their faces lit from beneath by the firelight, the Sharps looked weirdly menacing—even J. Crew Junior, who, true to form, was wearing salmon-colored shorts.
Directly in front of me, Trav—the only one without a candle—held an open book. I squinted through the flickering light. A list of names, handwriting leaning every which way, was splattered down the aging pages. One cursive scribble read “Demetrius Dwiggins,” and I blinked at it several times, expecting the name to disappear, sure that it was some terrifically ridiculous stress hallucination. Near the end of the list were Trav’s name, neat and printed, and Isaac’s, extravagantly looped.
“Um,” I said. “Should I sign this?”
Trav stared ahead as if he hadn’t heard a word. I took half a step and heard a gentle trickling, clicking sound. I looked down. My feet were surrounded by a spread of tiny cardboard fragments: an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.
I scanned the Sharps and their candles again. Each candle was a different length. I understood at once: finish putting this together before all six burned out, or . . . or what? Was some poor goldfish awaiting its fate in another room?
No time. I stepped out of the spread of pieces, crouched, and got to work.
The pieces were a chaos of bulbs and corners, layers of compacted cardboard loosened by years of hurried fingers. The first candle had already gone dark by the time I pieced together the border, an intimidatingly large rectangle.
I sorted the mess of black and white pieces by color and started forming patches. The activity was weirdly hypnotic, a mindless cycle of testing curves against each other, searching for a perfect fit. Time slipped away. Forming Rorschach blots against the floorboards, I nearly forgot where I was.
Then the distant Palmer bell chimed eight o’clock, and I glanced up to find that half the candles had already died. When I went back to the puzzle, the half-light started doing its work. Black and white both started to look like dark gray. The edges of pieces blurred. In the twitching shadows, their shapes became uncertain.
Then I linked two patches together and saw, suddenly, what this was. The fragment formed a sloppy but distinctive letter T. The puzzle was some sort of message.
A fourth candle burned down to a wax-coated fist, and the wick sputtered out.
My knees ached against the floorboards. My eyes were strained and watering. I squinted and rubbed them, focusing in.
Soon the first word was finished: THE. I bricked together an R near the bottom left and a K in the right corner. I shuttled an island of completed puzzle around, rotating it, trying to force the lines to match up. Then it joined to form THE CROW’S.
The light seemed to lurch. I looked up. The fifth candle had gone out. One left.
As the glowing tip of the fifth candlewick faded from red to nothing, Trav hummed a note, and the Sharps began to sing.
“Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”
The solemn arrangement of the Irish folk song was so full, so startling, that I couldn’t think. With the words curling into my ears, splintering my focus, I looked down at the mess of cardboard under my fingers and started to panic.
THE CROW’S . . . the crow’s what? With this music distracting me, finishing the puzzle was all but shot—could I figure it out with a guess?
No. I’d made it this far. I didn’t need to guess—I needed to work harder.
I gritted my teeth and hunched to the side, throwing my shadow away from the remainder of the puzzle. Problem pieces that hadn’t seemed to fit anywhere started slotting into place, even as they turned into fragments of nothing beneath my clumsy fingers. Fighting the Sharps’ serenade, I formed B, then E. I already knew what the phrase was by the time I pressed the last puzzle piece into position. THE CROW’S BEAK.