A Place So Wicked Patrick Reuman (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📖

page. One link read: “Latin Flashcards.” It was a link to some school website, which he clicked on. Upon a quick scan of the page, what he saw didn’t look like it was going to help them very much. But what it did tell him was essential; the words were in Latin.

The internet had plenty of language translators. He found one and pasted the words into it. What came out was this: “Beyond these MANENT OF THE DARK Will as free Keywords Canta.” Toby stared at it, Eli and Paisley on either side of him doing the same.

Eli was typing quickly into his own phone. “Manent means…used as a stage direction to specify that named characters do not leave the stage.” He looked back at Paisley’s phone in Toby’s hand. “That makes no sense at all.”

Before Toby could reply, Eli started typing into his phone again, his fingers moving like lightning in a mad dash. “Canta means…nice, neat, or pretty.”

“I don’t understand,” Paisley said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why would it say this on the door?”

“Wait,” Toby said, remembering a time in eighth grade when he tried using an internet translator on a Spanish assignment. “It’s probably not right. These internet translators are crap at best.”

He stared hard at his own, at the door in the photograph, wondering what detail he missed. He felt like he was defusing a bomb, like the words he was trying to translate off the door were numbers counting down to zero, down to their destruction.

“Hold on,” Toby said as he started typing frantically into Paisley’s phone.

The words on the door seemed to be broken up into parts. To the left, and to the right of the lines, plenty of empty space was left where more words could have been placed but weren’t. He knew other languages didn’t necessarily form sentences in the way English did, but all that extra space seemed strange to him if not there to separate the portions of text into three separate lines of one larger statement. As if the three lines were deliberately distinct and meant to be translated separately.

“If you make the words lowercase, it changes the meaning in the translator,” Eli said. “ULTRA HAEC QUAEDAM TENEBRAE MANENT in lowercase translates, according to this translator, into ‘Beyond these kind of darkness remain.’”

Toby stood, staring at his phone, the light gleaming off his skin. “Beyond these kind of darkness remain—will as free—the key is to sing.”’

“Recite,” Eli said, looking up from his own phone. “Canta can also mean recite, I think.”

“What?” Paisley said. She was trying not to be hysterical, but she was slowly losing her grip. Every second they spent on not understanding this gibberish put them one moment closer, she thought, to something terrible.

Toby pondered the words. He knew what it sounded like, what he thought they may be implying, but there had to be something else because this couldn’t be it. He didn’t want it to be it. But somewhere deep within him, he knew that the worst was going to be the truth.

“Behind the door, there is a darkness. Will it free,” Toby said. “The key is to sing.”

“The key is recite, I think. To will the darkness free, the key is to recite the words,” Eli said.

Toby and Eli locked eyes, both trying to process what was happening. Paisley’s eyes were glossing, just moments from tears, not from sadness, but fear for them all.

Toby turned and took a step away, stutter stepped in one direction as if unsure, then turned back to face them. “When I went down into the basement with my dad, I read the words on the door out loud. If that’s what the words meant, that reading it would set the darkness free, why didn’t anything happen? Everything is still exactly how it was before.”

33

The hour was late. Lisa had finally fallen or, perhaps more accurately, crashed to sleep after what seemed like an eternity of near-puke wrenching. Now she lay there, the blanket up to her eyes, sleeping restlessly, her snores, which emerged rarely, mixing with groans of pain.

Richard, on the other hand, couldn’t even manage that much. He would, on occasion, pass out only to wake again just minutes later, the pain in his abdomen like a knife being twisted in his innards. He would groan, tears filling his eyes, and then nearly pass out. Even the short bouts of sleep, or unconsciousness, he managed to obtain, he wasn’t sure if they were actual sleep or his body simply giving out, the surges of agony just too much to handle.

He rolled over, away from his wife in hopes that his cries of sickness would not wake her. He couldn’t bear the idea of waking her, leaving them both awake and struggling. Small bits of light poured in through the window, giving the bedroom a dim glow. He couldn’t see beyond the window, his vision blurring from the sickness at such a distance. Sometimes he couldn’t even see what was right in front of him, the roof a blur when he laid on his back, his wife’s outline only an obscure shape even from barely a foot away.

The light coming in through the glass reminded him for a fleeting moment of the blinding light that came down from the alien spaceships in all those old B-movies until it faded away and the bedroom came into focus for a minute. He could see the outline of the window and furniture throughout the still mostly empty space that was their bedroom. Even now, they still hadn’t replaced most of the furniture they had left behind, leaving a majority of the house feeling like a bare skeleton, the heart, his family, there but lacking the flesh that made a house a home.

A jolt came. He crunched together, retracting into a fetal position. He clenched his belly