Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [28]
This time they both had better flashlights than Loch’s little penlight, and Loch had an LED work light as well. Spirit didn’t ask him where he had gotten it, or how, but it was probably through Muirin.
They didn’t need Muirin’s skeleton keys this trip, because they weren’t going to the hidden storage room yet, but to the regular storage rooms. Which was just as well because those hidden rooms gave her the serious creeps. Dungeonlike cells, an operating room, and boxes of the records and belongings of the students who had vanished … it was too much like something out of a horror movie.
Now if you were looking at things in the best possible light for Oakhurst, it kind of made sense to have prisonlike cells down there given what Doctor Ambrosius said about the wizard war. If you caught one of the bad guys you would want a place to hold and interrogate him, right? Doctor A. might be one of the good guys, but it was pretty obvious that he was no kind of angel; the way Oakhurst was run alone showed that the people at the top were pretty cold and businesslike when it came to doing “what needed to be done” to win this war. There was a Darwinian ruthlessness about the way that competition was encouraged here.
And on the good side, none of those rooms, at least during Spirit’s cursory look around, had shown any signs of actual use.
But still … the fact that they were there at all was seriously creepy. And it began to strain things more than a bit to have all the personal belongings of all of the kids who had disappeared stored down there. But what really put the frosting on the cake were the records, all marked “Tithed.” Who had marked them that way? Had it just been a frustrated guess on the part of one of the administrators? Or had it happened after the records were put down there, as a kind of smug “gotcha” by the person who had called the Hunt? And if that was the case, then why do something like that to alert Doctor A. that whoever-it-was walked among them?
It was way more complicated than Spirit could figure out.
This time they had something quite simple to dig up. Addie needed pictures, photos, of the tree. They all agreed that it was too risky to try photographing it unless one of them got a class assignment in art that involved photography with an open-ended “photograph what you want.” You couldn’t exactly line everyone up for a candid shot in front of the tree, because—well, why would you want to do that in the first place? As a memento of your friends? You were discouraged from having friends. To send to your family? Even if you had family, you couldn’t e-mail them to your family, because you couldn’t e-mail anyone. So until one of them got that sort of chance, it was better to look for existing photos.
In its ongoing attempt to make things look as normal as possible, Oakhurst had a yearbook—and, sporadically, a school paper. That, Spirit figured, and Loch agreed, would be where there were any free-roaming photos of the Tree.
It meant going through a lot of dusty boxes and leafing through a lot of books and six-page newspapers that pretty quickly started to look alike. But it did yield some pay dirt; occasionally some club or team actually would pose in front of the Tree. It was never quite the same shot, so the marks never looked quite the same, and it appeared that the marks had no particular aversion to being photographed. Interestingly, the best shots were by someone who was actually in the photo, meaning that he or she had set the camera on a timer, then run around to be in the picture—so the aversion communicated itself to the photographer, but not the camera.