Catacomb by Madeleine Roux Page B

remember the last time he had felt so bone-tired. Sleeping in a real bed had brought to light all the bumps and discomforts caused by sleeping in a tent so many nights in a row. Now that he had an honest-to-God mattress under his back, he’d let himself succumb to it, sleeping hard, deep, and dreamlessly.
    But now Jordan was sitting on the end of Dan’s futon, his weight strangely light, hardly making an impression on the duvet.
    “What is it?” Dan repeated, groggy.
    Jordan sat staring at his hands, then twisted slightly, looking at Dan and grinding his lip piercing against his lower teeth, an anxious gesture Dan had noticed getting worse over the last few days. Jordan didn’t say anything; he just watched Dan, unblinking, the little black dot in his lip going around and around.
    “Jordan, you—”
    He fell abruptly silent, pushing back against his pillow as the piercing in Jordan’s lip began to move, then wriggle, then ooze out of his lip, growing into a long, black worm that spilled from Jordan’s mouth like a piece of slime. If Dan pulled the covers over his head, this would stop, but his hands refused to obey. Jordanclosed his eyes and yawned, his head rolling back as his tongue dissolved into a hundred black worms that dripped down onto the bed. When he opened his eyes again there was nothing there, just two black voids that glittered, trickling down his cheeks in dark rivers, as if his skull was filled with a thick, living oil.
    Jordan’s pale jaw loosened as if coming unhinged, and that was when Dan regained enough control of his faculties to throw the covers over his head and scream.
    The sound woke him out of the nightmare and into another one. Jordan was still there, sitting on the end of his futon. Dan swallowed, shivering as he slid the duvet down and leaned forward, then poked Jordan in the arm.
    His friend swayed and woke up, murmuring something incoherent before glancing around and finding Dan there, staring at him wide-eyed and shaky.
    “What the hell?” Jordan croaked.
    “My thoughts exactly.” Dan watched him, suspicious that this too would turn into a hallucination. “Are you . . . Why are you sitting there?”
    “Dunno.” Jordan squinted down at his hands, then at the empty futon he had vacated. “Must have sleepwalked. Probably in a bed, my body was like: mattress? Comfort? What is this new devilry?” He chuckled to himself, then tilted his head to glance at Dan. “You okay?”
    “Yeah. I just had a bad dream. That’s all.”
    “Sorry to wake you up.” Jordan stretched and stood, shuffling back over to his futon. Clearly, neither one of them wanted to acknowledge that this had happened before, to both of them. In both cases, the unexplained nighttime vigils belonged to peoplewho had lost it afterwards. It seemed like a bad omen now.
    “No more late-night-Houdini antics,” Jordan added, crawling into bed. “I promise.”
    But sleep was now the furthest thing from Dan’s mind. He rolled over, waiting until he was reasonably sure Jordan had fallen back to sleep before turning on his phone. Checking the time, he winced. If he couldn’t get back to sleep now, he would have a very long day ahead of him.
    Oh well.
    He crept from the futon to the desk. Nightmare aside, it felt weirdly refreshing to be awake while everyone else in the house was asleep. He really had missed his alone time over the past few days in the car. He never felt fully charged without it.
    Dan muted the sound on the laptop, navigating to Jordan’s email and the exchange he’d been having with Maisie Moore. Dan reread her last message, then copied her address into his phone. Closing the email and the laptop, he went back to the futon and typed out a message on his phone, asking when she would have time to meet up for lunch. She might think he was weird for sending an email at three in the morning, but at this point, he was way past caring what other people thought was weird.
    Before he’d even put his phone to