Page 70 of Switching Graves
The days are growing shorter as summer winds to an end, so I’ve got more time in the estate before the sun rises.
I miss my family. I miss my room and my school lessons and warm, cooked meals.
Lewis brings me food at least once a day—usually a chunk of bread and, if I’m lucky, a bit of dried meat from his pantry. I’ve learned how to hunt small prey and carefully roast them over a fire without creating too much smoke.
It took far longer than I’d like to admit to ensure the meat was cooked all the way through, but I ate it anyway.
He’s recommended that I stay clear of the estate during daytime hours, based on what his father has shared from the secret meetings he’s been attending with the mayor and a small group of business owners. They were the ones to organize the attack. He believes they’ve got plans for the home.
At night, I slip in through the servants' entrance and curl up in my father’s office. There’s a loft with a bed that still smells of him for the nights he worked late. Mercifully, they didn’t take it, though the rest of his things have been removed from the room.
They know I’m alive.
On the day of the burial, Mayor Payne came to ensure everything looked appropriate for their performance. That’s the only way to describe the show they put on for the townspeople that evening. It was the oddest thing, watching those who slaughtered my family pretend to cry over their dead bodies.
The mayor questioned why my casket was empty, and I’ve never seen a face turn so red as they explained there were only seven kids.
He spoke words I hadn’t heard before. He threw things around the way my younger sisters would do in one of their tantrums. And then, he told them to hunt me down.
“Do not spare an inch of land,” he had said in a tone that sent chills down my spine.
I spent the next week curled up in the catacombs with my family’s rotting bodies, only daring to crawl out of the entrance to the woods once a day for fresh air and a sip of water. It wasn’t until Lewis overheard the search crew say they thought I had run off to Infinity Heights that he suggested I stay in the woods during the day.
That was when I lost track of time, and perhaps a little bit of my sanity.
Hayes makes a reappearance in the quad a week after I take over his position as Whitlock’s TA. He ignores me at first, looking right through me to awkwardly greet Ava and Beatrix, feigning his usual warmness. I can tell he’s trying to act casual and put on a show, but there’s tension radiating beneath his weak mask. He isn’t sure who I’ve told about what happened between us.
Lucky for him, I’ve taken enough pity on him for taking his job that I haven’t shared his true character to our friends.
His smile never reaches his eyes, which are more tired and sunken in than usual. He’s wearing a cast on his right arm now, and winces every time he moves too fast or someone accidentally bumps into him. When Ava asks what happened, he shrugs and offers some excuse about getting too drunk and falling down a flight of stairs.
I don’t like the way he looks at me as he says it, as if I had some part.
Neither of us brings up the Falconry or our argument afterward. There’s nothing left to say, anyway. I feel guilty for taking his position as Whitlock’s TA, but I don’t bother explaining that I had very little choice in the matter. Not that he deserves to know anything.
I haven’t gone back to the quad since our awkward encounter and while I hate that it feels like he’s somehow won, I don’t feel right hanging out with him as if nothing happened.
The journals have taken over every second of free time I’ve had, anyway. When I’m not in class or studying, I’m combingthrough the entries in a combination of shock and horror at what this young boy had to endure. It was pure torture for him to survive each day while Nocturne Valley and Ravenshurst were spinning their own fictitious tales about his family.
Nocturne Valley has never felt right to me, even before I arrived and witnessed the odd behavior firsthand. Now that I see the truth ripped down to its bare bones and know of the blood spilled to get to where they are today, it’s only made being here that much more difficult.
The reality is chilling. To know that regardless of how hard you may work at something or how pure your intentions may be, it all boils down to how others are willing to speak about you once you’re gone. Entire lifetimes can be rewritten—achievements erased or stolen.
Finley Landry wrote out every detail as if he also realized this, and was terrified of the future that he knew would come. One where he and his family line would be cast out and erased—their life’s work forgotten. Even at his young age, he scribed things most people would overlook as his final act of defiance against a system that failed him.
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to use my gifts on the journals, desperate for the smallest glimpse into Finley’s world. I want to see what he looks like. I want to know what Ravenshurst and Nocturne Valley looked like when he was going through all of this.
But each time I’ve tried to call it into fruition, I remain here, in the present.
How many times have I cursed these gifts for manifesting at the most inconvenient times, only to be devastated that they won’t work when I want them to so badly? The universe has a twisted sense of justice.
Poppy is the only other person I’ve told about his journals. I’m terrified that Dr. Whitlock will discover that they’re missingfrom his shelves and immediately realize it was me who took them. I’m so far into this, the thought of handing them over before I have a chance to finish reading or switching them out for the others I know are sitting there makes me want to throw up.
She’s obviously not as invested in the twisted history as I am, but we’ve been bouncing theories off each other every night since I read the first entry.
“I still think the biggest question is why does Doctor Weirdo have the journals in the first place?” She’s repeated the same suspicion every time the topic comes up, as if he’s somehow tied to the events that happened over one hundred years ago.
“Maybe they were in the office before he took over and he has no idea they exist,” I reply hopefully, lifting the journal I’m reading to mindlessly flip through the pages.