Chapter One
Middleton Village’s high school cafeteria was bustlingly loud, cliques gabbing over the latest gossip under the yellow and black banner of the Timberwolves mascot. They eyed each other with their usual small-town hostility—and then some. After all, Middleton Village was not the usual town. Everyone knew it was cursed.
The cheerleaders in yellow and black whispered with snickering giggles, peering over at chubby James Peterson who sat with pimple-face and lanky Daniel Smith. Both geeks had been missing for over a year and had only recently returned. Originally people thought they had been caught in the curse that had been swallowing boys in the old library for centuries. But they, with the eight others, claimed they had merely been kidnapped by the Wolf’s Wood Cult and tortured. James and Daniel had bonded over it, apparently.
What really happened to them was much weirder.
The jocks of Middleton High snorted, listening to them talk in secret code about battles and laughing about things that couldn’t have possibly happened in real time. The preps, goths, and skaters rolled their eyes as the boys’ conversation grew more animated. James led it with such robust fervor, which in his nerd clothes made him look downright delusional.
“Remember when you met that woman from the Salt Sea? What were you then, thirty?” James’s thick foamy hair stood up as he leaned over his cafeteria tray of macaroni and cheese. His round, plastic rimmed glasses awkwardly framed his pudgy face as he openly grinned.
James and Daniel sat on the far side of the cafeteria at their own exclusive table. No one else wanted them to join them anyway, but then the boys didn’t really care. Their disinterest was the worst to deal with; as everyone wanted them to care they were considered geeks.
Daniel replied with an embarrassed laugh, his pimples even blushing, “Gardenia? Oh, don’t even talk about her. I was trying to forget her.”
Everyone passed them, attempting to ignore their loud buddy-buddy laughs and bizarre inside jokes. It was like that among all the escapees from Wolf’s Wood Cult—lots of inside talk that made those that had not been kidnapped feel oddly left out.
Eddie White, for example, the brown-haired boy who regularly wore thick glasses and a pocket protector filled with pens and a calculator, approached the pair and said to them in a courtly voice, “Can I join you sirs? This bar seems too full for the likes of us.”
And as the nerdly duo laughed, waving him down to an open spot on the bench beside them, their schoolmates smothered snorts and eye rolls. Pathetic. At least every Middleton Village teen around them thought so. Eddie had set his tray down on the table, scowling at the boy that had just bumped into him on purpose. His tray jostled.
At least Eddie reacted.
“You are welcome, Sir Strength Heart,” Daniel said, grinning without any care that he was under social condemnation as a loser.
People around shook their heads and went back to eating the cafeteria food, which was a great deal less stomach-turning than the conversation at the geeks’ table anyway.
“Have you seen Sir Cooly?” Eddie asked the two pals.
Both boys shook their heads and dug into their macaroni and cheese with their sporks.
As if heralded with a gong, a thunderous clatter and a crash erupted from the cafeteria doors, making all heads turn to see who had come next. There Peter McCabe in his usual green striped shirt, lay sprawled on the floor. His lunch tray was under him, his backpack zipper unzipped. The contents had dumped out on the linoleum, with papers, books, and a plastic shrunken head tied to the zipper pull. Two of Andrew Cartwright’s friends stood over him, laughing from the belly and chest.
Almost at once the three nerdy boys stood up, bristling. Their hands groped their hips with the desire to grab a sword and jump out into to fight. However, they felt nothing but their flat pockets. Blanching briefly before getting ready to use their own fists, their fingers curled tight into balls.
But before they could step from their seats, Andy entered the cafeteria. He stared down at the dark-haired boy on the floor for just a second before bending over to help him up.
“Pete. What happened?”
The silence in the cafeteria broke, the noise once more roaring into clamor. Andy was ok, though he too had been snatched by the cult. Red haired, freckled, and tall, he was the captain of the basketball team and a star on the school soccer team. But he too talked in code when he hung around those geeks. It was incredibly disconcerting.
The group at the table could no longer hear what Andy was saying, though they watched carefully, mostly keeping an eye on Andy’s jock friends. They watched Peter blink up at Andy’s face to discern if he was a friend or foe.
Unlike Eddie, Daniel, and James, Peter McCabe was the creepy, oddball geek type that people picked on less and avoided more. The boy was also on the school soccer team, a better player than Andy even—if his teammates would just admit it. Secretly, a good number of his classmates thought he was cool. He had been snatched three months before Andy had—right after soccer camp. And though Andy had teased Peter mercilessly before he had disappeared, Andy was one of the few who candidly admitted he liked the guy before he had vanished—soccer-admiration mostly. Of course, now things were different. Now they were openly friends.
Peter reached up, accepting Andrew’s arm, and allowed him to lift him to his feet. With a grin, Peter nodded to him then started to gather his things from off the floor. Andy tapped him on the shoulder. When Peter looked up, Andy handed him his own lunch tray, taking the backpack from Peter. Everyone in the cafeteria heard Andy say, “I’ll join you guys as soon as I can. Give me a second.”
Andy gathered up the contents of Peter’s bag, grimacing at the shrunken head before putting it back in. He zipped the bag up and passed it back. Taking it with a smile that was too fond for Andy’s jock friends’ comfort, Peter wended his way to the geek-duo’s table with Andrew’s lunch in hand where the three boys stood watching him with grins. They were just as relieved as Peter looked.
“Peter, what happened?” Daniel asked, sitting back down. His fist unclenched.
Setting his lunch tray on the table along with his backpack, Peter let out a huff. “Ah, just Andy’s friends. Thought it was funny to trip me.”
He peeled open his carton of orange juice and set it on the table with an irritable thud. Then he dusted off the bench, checking it for gum wads.
The trio glanced back at Andy who carried Peter’s old tray back to the cafeteria line with a particularly sharp word to his childhood pals. Of course both jocks stared at Andy as though he was the one behaving badly. Mark looked flabbergasted and David scowled, shaking his head while saying something that made Andy gape and glare at him.
“Well, maybe they are better friends!” Andy’s voice echoed into the cafeteria from the food line.
Everyone stared. It was as they had feared. Andy had fallen for the geeks.
Peter glanced back.
Daniel smiled, stabbing more macaroni and cheese.
“Where is Sir Cooly?” Eddie asked again, peering over at the main doors.
“Semour?” Peter replied. Sitting down, he took a sip of his juice.
Eddie nodded with a sigh. Peter was the only one that did not call them by their personal code names—what everyone around them saw as good, but what his cult escapee pals considered dismaying. After all, what really happened to them had been life changing.
But Peter didn’t know the nerd cluster well enough to remember them when they had been ‘trapped by the cult’ a month ago, and he didn’t bother to use those names afterward when they were home. He said it was impractical and foolish. Everyone was already staring at them like a bunch of weirdoes, and he was sick of it. Of course, he was right. Their classmates thought their private nicknames for each other were the icing to their already abnormal cake. But those names were significant to the boys.
“He was heading this way last time I saw him,” Peter said, now peeling open the fruit cup lid and picking up the plastic spork to eat.
Eddie craned his neck to look at the door. So did Daniel.
“Not here.” Eddie frowned, and he peered down at his own meal.
Andy came out of the lunch line again carrying a new tray of food. His friends followed him in, sulky and sour. Walking by their table with a nod that reminded them all of his promise to join them, he continued on to his usual lunch table. He did have a reputation that he still felt somewhat bound to.
They returned his nod and watched him go. Mark, David and their other pal Darryl sauntered after him. Darryl flicked the backs of Peter’s and Eddie’s heads as he strolled by. Andy didn’t see it. Otherwise there would have been a real scene, and Andy probably would have joined his new buddies that very moment instead of later. After all, in truth, he had been the geeks’ friend longer than he had with his jock friends—with a lifetime of battles together, and not metaphorically. Their code name for him was Red, short for the Red Knight.
“Chosen One!” Daniel sprang up from his food tray with a grin.
All four boys rose and stared at the brown-haired girl that stood with a lunch bag at the entrance of the cafeteria. She spotted them, shook her head and adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses on her face, then walked across the room towards them.
She kept shaking her head until she reached them. The cafeteria din lulled as all ears perked up to listen to the words the queen of outcasts would say.
“Would you quit calling me that?” Jessica said, much to the sensible relief of everyone around the boys.
The foursome sighed, sharing looks.
Daniel shrugged. “Maybe.”
Jessica exhaled with annoyance and sat down. “No one is going to get it, and it sounds strange.”
Jessica was not a geek either—but no one wanted to admit it. She wore glasses, a great social faux pas at Middleton High and the prime excuse to call someone a nerd or geek. But she never did anything to truly classify her as a geek. No. Her unfortunate sin was that she was an outsider, the first real one in about a hundred years. Jessica had moved into Middleton Village with her mother in September. She was a California girl, the daughter of a magician-by-trade, thief, and con-artist—and her mom who worked for Mr. Howard Richard Deacon the II, the billionaire extraordinaire who owned most of the town and tons of real estate around the world. Her parents had just divorced and her mother had transferred to Middleton Village to get Jessica as far away from her father as possible.
The last outsider to enter Middleton Village was the late H. Richard Deacon the I, the father of the current Mr. Deacon the II and grandfather to the famous Howie Deacon the III who was currently living at some New York City boarding school. They were loved, gossiped about, and feared, sometimes all at the same time. Most of the jobs in Middleton Village were dependent on the success of Deacon Enterprises, so no one snubbed the Deacons.
However, those of Middleton Village disliked Jessica for one main reason. She was lucky to live in both worlds: theirs of exclusive Middleton, and that of the outside world, which they, themselves, could not touch. After all, the town was cursed. No one could move in, unless obviously helped by someone on the inside. And no one could move out—unless of course he wanted to come to an untimely death. That’s what happened to the mother of Michael Toms who had been born and raised in Middleton Village. She had married a wealthy man and moved to San Diego—then years later died in a freak drowning in the ocean somewhere off the coast while learning to surf. Michael was one of the other victims of the cult, and when he had escaped the cult with the geeks, he happily fled back to California.
Jessica was envied, though didn’t know it. Even the group of geeks looked upon her enviously, though they never told her so.
And Jessica disliked Middleton. She saw it as the pit of civilization. And she would have been all too happy to leave it if she could. To her, she was just as trapped in Middleton Village as she was when she had been snatched—the final captive of the Wolf’s Wood cult and the one who freed the boys. She envied Michael Toms—the only true escapee from the curse of Middleton Village, imagining him living somewhere near a California beach, driving a new car, and gabbing with his friends about his adventures in a magical land.
She held up the piece of paper that told her so.
“I got another letter from Sir Long Shanks,” she said, placing it on the lunch table.
All four boys peered down at it. Eddie snatched it up then read it out loud.
Oct. 15
Hi guys,
I wish you were all here. Private school is great. The teachers are fantastic. They took us to the tide pools yesterday, and my skin is still peeling from the sunburn I got, but oh, it was so fun. I got a date for Homecoming this next weekend. Her name is Sarah Parker, and she is a beach bunny—it is so great. I’m going to take her in my new car. I feel like I was given a whole new life, and the time in the book was only a trial run.
I heard about Red’s friends from Pete. You tell Red to keep them tied up or something. Us knights must stick together.
Nate the old zombie says hi. He’s been fishing lately. He caught a tiger shark off the pier a week ago. You should have been there to see it. He says to tell the old hippie he can come over for Christmas. We need his address by the way.
I got to run. I’m meeting Sarah at the beach tonight for a barbecue.
Your friend,
Michael Toms
“Lucky,” Daniel said, slumping back. “Long Shanks always did get the girls.”
“Hi, guys, what’s up.” Andy walked toward the group at the table.
Ears around them perked up again. Eddie handed him the letter from the ex-knight, Sir Long Shanks.
Andy read it and smiled.
“Lucky dog,” Andy said, handing the letter back to Eddie.
The boys nodded in unison.
Jessica sighed, taking the letter back, then folded it up. “At least one of us is having fun.”
“Two of us,” Peter reminded her, lifting his finger. “Nathaniel is living in a beach house near Michael.”
Jessica nodded. “That’s right. Two of us. But old Nate deserves the break. He was a zombie nearly his whole life. Michael only was one for a few years.”
Peter shook his head at her. “That’s bad enough. Do you know what it is like being a zombie?”
“I was one for a few minutes,” she replied defensively, stuffing the letter back in the envelope.
The others turned their eyes to their lunch. The students around them shook their heads and swallowed the nonsense they heard.
“Where’s Sir Cooly?” Andy asked, looking across the table and then the cafeteria.
Eddie looked up again to the door.
“He hasn’t come yet,” Daniel answered with a shrug.
Andy shook his head grimly and broke into a quick walk across the linoleum to the cafeteria door. The others immediately stood and hurried after him out the cafeteria. Andy turned toward one hall, prowling it as he walked on a hunt. Jessica, Eddie, and James ran down after him.
“Not here,” Andy said, shaking his head.
“Fellas!” Daniel said waving them toward the other hall that went east-west.
The four turned and dashed down the hall where Peter and the boy they once knew as Swift were fiddling with a spinning combination lock on one of the tall hall lockers. When they got nearer, they heard pounding and shouting coming from the inside.
“I told you, I don’t know the combination. It’s not my locker,” the muffled voice said. He then thumped against the locker with what sounded like his head.
“Who did this to you?” Andy asked breathlessly as he leaned with a bang against the lockers next to him. “It wasn’t one of my—”
“No, Red,” replied the voice inside. “It wasn’t one of your friends. It was Milton Coombe. Peter’s cousin.”
Peter rolled his eyes and slumped against the locker.
“Are you in his locker?” Andy asked, still angry.
The person inside shifted his weight. The metal bowed somewhat.
“No,” his voice sounded hollow and tired. “It’s Mary Pransford’s. It smells like hairspray in here.”
Jessica smirked, shifting her arms into a fold. Mary Pransford was in her first hour class. A pretty sophomore that all the other girls followed. She used to pick on Jessica during class, but that was before Jessica had been snatched then returned with an attitude. Mary only muttered rude things under her breath now.
The boys in the hall stared at the securely shut locker, listening to the breathing of their friend trapped inside. Andy punched the locker next to it. Eddie shoved Daniel aside to try the lock. It just stuck and jangled.
“Should we get the janitor?” James suggested with a shrug as he peered down the hall.
“I think Sir Cooly should just wait and jump out at Mary when she opens her locker,” Peter said, getting up.
“Mary went home sick,” the voice in the locker replied, sounding very miserable. “Your cousin was taking her to the nurse when he shoved me inside.”
“Sick?” Daniel asked with a smirk. Nobody in the group liked Mary much.
“Mono,” the boy inside the locker replied with a faint chuckle.
They all grinned. Eddie tried harder to undo the lock.
“So we should get the janitor,” James said again, stepping toward that end of the hall.
Jessica sighed. Digging out a set of keys from her pocket, she reached up to the door. “Don’t bother.”
All of them watched her approach the locker, nudging Eddie aside. Drawing a peculiar looking key from the ring then lifting a couple of pin thin gadgets as well, she stuck them into the small keyhole in the center of the combination lock. All of them held their breaths, watching her. Andy peered down the hall and then back at what she was doing.
“Where did you get that?” he asked with a gasp of taboo.
Eddie shook his head. “The question is how did you get that into the school? What about the metal detectors? Wouldn’t those be considered weapons?”
Jessica smirked as she tweaked the pin thin objects slightly. The lock turned. She lifted the latch. A thin fair-haired, gangly boy of with thick glasses tumbled out of the locker, looking somewhat green.
“A magician’s daughter learns more than magic tricks when the magician is my father,” she said. She put the key ring away.
Sir Cooly, the gangly boy better known as Semour Dawson, rubbed his sore neck and back, dropping down on the tile in a squat.
Andy gave Jessica an amused, yet disapproving look. “Really, Jess. You talk like your father was a pickpocket.”
She shrugged then looked the other way. However, she did not close the locker. Instead she reached over to Peter and zipped open his backpack. Peter opened his mouth to protest when she took out his shrunken head. She hung it on the mirror in Mary’s locker.
“Couldn’t we just leave a threatening note?” Peter asked, shaking his head. “I like that head.”
Jessica smirked and closed the door, pointing across the hall. “Your locker is over there and mine is over there,” pointing to another place in the hall. “When she sees it and screams her head off, you can save it.”
“I hope she has a good scare,” Semour said, glaring back to the closed locker. “She helped Milton shove me in.” He rubbed his neck and back with a moan, “My old bones can’t take this kind of abuse.”
Eddie rolled his eyes and squatted down beside him, joined by Daniel and James.
“Really, Sir Cooly, why are you talking about old bones? You’re just as young and skinny as the rest of us.” Eddie glanced at James, “Well, almost all of us.”
James elbowed him and stood up. “Ignore him. He never reached retirement.”
Daniel laughed as he got up again.
Eddie glared at them both. “Don’t be stupid. We’re all at the beginning again.” Then he slumped against the locker. “Skinny, underdeveloped, and easy to pick on.” He sighed louder. “Gosh, I wish I still had those muscles.”
Andy also nodded with a long nostalgic breath.
That’s what disturbed the kids of Middleton High the most. Andy, along with the rest of the geeks, was nostalgic—nostalgic—for where they had been before they had come back to Middleton Village. Nostalgic for a cult that had kidnapped and tortured them? Not one of them came back without a collection of nasty scars as well as a few open wounds. And what was with all the code names they kept hearing? Sir This, Chosen One That, and calling a few Zombie? And all their crazy whispered stories? Was the torture that incredibly awful that they all hallucinated together? Impossible.
But really, deep down, secretly, everyone feared what they overheard in the geeks’ hushed conversations—that the Wolf’s Wood Cult was a farce they invented because the truth was even more frightening than they could bear. And the truth? The boys of Middleton Village, for centuries, were in fact being sucked into a cursed book inside the library—a portal to another world.
Semour rose. “Well, these bones have lived over eighty years, and they don’t forget that time as quickly as your young body does.”
He rubbed his very young and thin neck. Semour was fourteen, but barely looked it. He always had a leaner build, even when he became a knight like the rest of the boys in that other world they so often whispered about. He had been gone from Middleton Village the longest—nearly four years. He was eleven when he disappeared into the library, and his parents and little brother searched for him for two years before giving him up for lost. Funny thing was, when he turned up with the rest of the boys, he continued to talk like an old man even though he was physically younger than all of them.
“Those years, count,” Semour said with a huff.
Andy decided not to argue with him, though Eddie rolled his eyes, choosing to save the argument for later.
The seven teenagers returned to the cafeteria. When they reached their table, they stopped and stared. The table was piled with their lunch trays, loaded with garbage and puddles of milk and old soda. Andy noticed his tray was left untouched. He shook his head.
Jessica took in a breath and let it out. She lifted her lunch bag with a shrug.
“That’s why I bring my lunch now,” she said, pulling out a drink box and sitting down.
Eddie frowned at his soaked tray.
Daniel jabbed his soggy macaroni and cheese—and bean curd and milk with a sprinkling of crumbled cupcake—with the plastic spoon.
“They should have added raisins,” he said, stirring it.
James stared at his friend.
Shrugging, Daniel continued. “I could have picked out the raisins.”
The chubby pal smirked then laughed out loud. The two buddies broke into jokes of remember-when-we-ate-this-and-that. Eddie just sat hunched, shaking his head. Semour chuckled once or twice then got up.
“I’ll get us lunch,” he said, walking toward the lunch line doors.
“I’ll go protect you,” Andy said, following.
Semour scowled as he snapped something back that few heard. They only caught the word, “young’un” and something that sounded like, “In my day we…”
The group at the table laughed as they shoved the trays of food into the garbage can.
“Weirdoes,” everyone around them muttered slowly clearing out of the cafeteria.
The seven were soon alone, hastily eating what little Semour and Andy could get from the cafeteria ladies. Jessica watched them with a sigh.
That was life in Middleton Village.
People looked at them like a bunch of weirdoes, not giving them a chance. That was why they told that story about the cult. That was why they kept together. Middleton Village was dangerously superstitious and highly bigoted. There wasn’t anything they could do to change it. And if they told the truth about the magic that had trapped them, they were more likely to be burned for witches than believed. It was for their safety.
But Jessica had a dark feeling she didn’t tell the other boys about. It was a foreboding that crawled out of her gut and attempted to fill her chest, a feeling that she had since they had buried the magic book they had been ensnared in and hid the emblem from the cover in another place. The fact was, the creepy library was still standing.
It had been scheduled for demolition months ago, but with the disappearance of the librarian—a real witch they had trapped in the book the night they returned (she wanted to turn them into cockroaches); the library had simply sat. They still had the key to the back door. Peter kept it. And they had briefly searched the library for the supposed hidden room that was rumored to be filled with more magic books. But the Ladies’ Aid Society had reopened the place and set a new librarian, a Miss Pratt, in the old librarian’s place. Since then, the teens had not felt it safe enough to continue the search. So they gave up.
But Jessica still had that dark feeling—that and her palm had been itching lately.
Her palm, when she had been sucked inside the book with the rest of the boys, had been burned with a spiral, spiky, sun-shaped symbol upon entry to the magic land. Though the mark did not come with her when she returned back to this world, remaining clean and unscarred the last month, that morning when she awoke it itched like an old peeling blister. It wouldn’t have bothered her, but it had burned and itched more furiously when she passed through the town square near the public library on her way to school that morning. And now it itched something awful.
She sighed as she watched their classmates flee from them in the school cafeteria. It wouldn’t have bothered her half as much if her palm wasn’t itching.
Daniel rubbed his hand with a peek at his palm.
Jessica blinked when she saw him.
He shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets, gazing at the almost empty cafeteria. “I think we’d better get to class.”
James stood up and nodded, wiping his mouth. Eddie rubbed his stomach and moaned to himself. The one lunch had not been enough.
Andy handed him his last piece of apple.
The skinny boy in glasses took it with a smile. “Thanks.”
Semour stood up, rubbing his palm with his thumb unconsciously.
Peter slung his backpack onto one shoulder and sighed again with longing for his missing shrunken head. He glanced at Jessica with a mildly sulky expression on his face. He also rubbed his palm.
Andy stood up. “Alright, let’s go.”
They picked their things up and dropped their garbage into the trash. The cafeteria was completely empty now.
Jessica sighed and rubbed her hand again. It stung. She turned it over to look at it as they passed through the doors to main hall once more. Leaning on the door, waiting for Peter and Eddie, she gasped, clenching her wrist.
She jerked around showing the others. “Look!”