Read Online The Mephisto Club by Tess Gerritsen - Free Book Online
Authors: Tess Gerritsen
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old. Popularly known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is a collection of ancient coffin texts. All the spells and incantations one needs to navigate the afterlife. She moves closer to the book, but hesitates to touch it, as though the pages might burn her fingers.
“Are you interested in death rituals?” I ask.
“It’s just superstition.”
“How do you know unless you’ve tried them?”
“You can actually read these hieroglyphs?”
“My mother taught me. But those are just minor spells. Not the really powerful ones.”
“And what can a powerful spell do?” She looks at me, her gaze so direct and unflinching that I wonder if she is more than she seems. If I’ve underestimated her.
“The most powerful spells,” I tell her, “can bring the dead back to life.”
“You mean, like in
The Mummy
?” She laughs.
I hear more giggles behind me and turn to see her two friends standing in the doorway. They’ve been eavesdropping, and they look at me with disdain. I am clearly the weirdest boy they have ever met. They have no idea how different I really am.
Lily closes the Book of the Dead. “Let’s go swimming, girls,” she says, and walks out of the room, trailing the sweet scent of her suntan lotion.
Through my window, I watch them head down the hill, toward the lake. The house is now quiet.
I go into Lily’s room. From her hairbrush, I pull off long brown strands of hair and slip them into my pocket. I uncap the lotions and creams on her dresser and sniff them; each scent brings with it the flash of a memory: Lily at the breakfast table. Lily sitting beside me in the car. I open her drawers, her closet, and touch her clothes. Clothes that any American teenager might wear. She’s just a girl after all, nothing more. But she needs watching.
It’s what I do best.
EIGHT
Siena, Italy. August.
Lily Saul bolted awake, straight from a deep sleep, and lay gasping among twisted bedsheets. The amber light of late afternoon glowed through the crack between the partially closed wooden shutters. In the gloom above her bed, a fly buzzed, circling in anticipation of a taste of her damp flesh. Her fear. She sat up on the thin mattress, shoved back tangled hair, and massaged her head as her heartbeat gradually slowed. Sweat trickled from her armpits, soaking into her T-shirt. She had managed to sleep through the worst heat of the afternoon, but the room still felt suffocating, the air thick enough to smother her. I can’t keep living this way forever, she thought, or I’ll go insane.
Maybe I’m already insane.
She rose from the bed and crossed to the window. Even the ceramic tiles beneath her feet radiated heat. Throwing open the shutters, she gazed across the tiny piazza, at buildings baking like stone ovens in the sun. A golden haze leafed domes and rooftops in umber. The summer heat had driven the sensible locals of Siena indoors; only the tourists would be out now, wandering wide-eyed through narrow alleys, huffing and sweating their way up the steep incline to the basilica or posing for photographs on the Piazza del Campo, their shoe soles melting and tacky on the scorching brickwork: all the usual tourist things that she herself had done when she’d first arrived in Siena, before she’d settled into the rhythms of the natives, before the heat of August had closed in on this medieval city.
Below her window, on the piazzetta, not a soul moved. But as she was turning away, she spied a twitch of motion in the shadow of a doorway. She went very still, her gaze fixed on the spot.
I can’t see him. Can he see me?
Then the inhabitant sheltering in that doorway emerged from its hiding place, trotted across the piazzetta, and vanished.
Only a dog.
With a laugh, she turned from the window. Not every shadow hid a monster.
But some did. Some shadows follow you, threaten you, wherever you go.
In her tiny bathroom she splashed lukewarm water on her face, pulled back her dark hair in a ponytail. She did not
“Are you interested in death rituals?” I ask.
“It’s just superstition.”
“How do you know unless you’ve tried them?”
“You can actually read these hieroglyphs?”
“My mother taught me. But those are just minor spells. Not the really powerful ones.”
“And what can a powerful spell do?” She looks at me, her gaze so direct and unflinching that I wonder if she is more than she seems. If I’ve underestimated her.
“The most powerful spells,” I tell her, “can bring the dead back to life.”
“You mean, like in
The Mummy
?” She laughs.
I hear more giggles behind me and turn to see her two friends standing in the doorway. They’ve been eavesdropping, and they look at me with disdain. I am clearly the weirdest boy they have ever met. They have no idea how different I really am.
Lily closes the Book of the Dead. “Let’s go swimming, girls,” she says, and walks out of the room, trailing the sweet scent of her suntan lotion.
Through my window, I watch them head down the hill, toward the lake. The house is now quiet.
I go into Lily’s room. From her hairbrush, I pull off long brown strands of hair and slip them into my pocket. I uncap the lotions and creams on her dresser and sniff them; each scent brings with it the flash of a memory: Lily at the breakfast table. Lily sitting beside me in the car. I open her drawers, her closet, and touch her clothes. Clothes that any American teenager might wear. She’s just a girl after all, nothing more. But she needs watching.
It’s what I do best.
EIGHT
Siena, Italy. August.
Lily Saul bolted awake, straight from a deep sleep, and lay gasping among twisted bedsheets. The amber light of late afternoon glowed through the crack between the partially closed wooden shutters. In the gloom above her bed, a fly buzzed, circling in anticipation of a taste of her damp flesh. Her fear. She sat up on the thin mattress, shoved back tangled hair, and massaged her head as her heartbeat gradually slowed. Sweat trickled from her armpits, soaking into her T-shirt. She had managed to sleep through the worst heat of the afternoon, but the room still felt suffocating, the air thick enough to smother her. I can’t keep living this way forever, she thought, or I’ll go insane.
Maybe I’m already insane.
She rose from the bed and crossed to the window. Even the ceramic tiles beneath her feet radiated heat. Throwing open the shutters, she gazed across the tiny piazza, at buildings baking like stone ovens in the sun. A golden haze leafed domes and rooftops in umber. The summer heat had driven the sensible locals of Siena indoors; only the tourists would be out now, wandering wide-eyed through narrow alleys, huffing and sweating their way up the steep incline to the basilica or posing for photographs on the Piazza del Campo, their shoe soles melting and tacky on the scorching brickwork: all the usual tourist things that she herself had done when she’d first arrived in Siena, before she’d settled into the rhythms of the natives, before the heat of August had closed in on this medieval city.
Below her window, on the piazzetta, not a soul moved. But as she was turning away, she spied a twitch of motion in the shadow of a doorway. She went very still, her gaze fixed on the spot.
I can’t see him. Can he see me?
Then the inhabitant sheltering in that doorway emerged from its hiding place, trotted across the piazzetta, and vanished.
Only a dog.
With a laugh, she turned from the window. Not every shadow hid a monster.
But some did. Some shadows follow you, threaten you, wherever you go.
In her tiny bathroom she splashed lukewarm water on her face, pulled back her dark hair in a ponytail. She did not
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