Chapter 1

Time: Friday, December 21, 2018 4:05 PM EST, nine kilometers northeast of Burlington, Vermont

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Jada looked at the driver with only a tiny hope of getting her roommate to give up. Once Emily had her mind latched on an idea, she had the tenacity of a Maine lobster holding onto it.

Emily pulled the car over to the side of the rough country road and squinted at the signs ahead of them. The sun had been behind thick clouds most of the afternoon, but was finally making an appearance just when it wouldn’t do much good. It was ten minutes before sunset and the road surfaces were already in twilight shadows. Only the upper half of the nearby pines and blue spruces were catching the day’s brief golden light.

“Enjoy the sun while you can,” said Jada. “There’s supposed to be a big snowstorm moving in tomorrow.”

“Uh huh. Not that big I heard...” mumbled Emily as she stared at her map.

“Emily, are we lost?”

Emily looked up and gave a small sigh. “Nope. I know exactly where we are, right here...” pointing at the map display on her phone, “the intersection of Discovery and Lost Nation Roads.”

“Marvelous! I knew this place looked familiar!” Jada replied with mild sarcasm. They had spent the last twenty minutes making one and a half round trips down and back a short three kilometer run of Lost Nation Road.

Emily gave a dismissive grunt and started up the car again, pulling into a turnaround on the deserted road and making an easy U-turn. “I’ll go more slowly. It’s got to be here somewhere. You watch the right; I’ll watch the left.”

“Oh, just drive. I can watch both sides.”

“Yeah, okay. Any driveway at all not leading to a house, tell me to stop...”

“Right...” Jada smiled at her friend as the car returned to the southeast. The task of inspecting the now familiar road was boringly easy, and she began to reminisce about meeting her roommate at the beginning of the term. Jada hated the thought of being prejudiced, but she was half convinced architecture students were an entirely different species from engineering students.

Jada’s first year as a University of Vermont undergrad had been filled with two major commitments. The first was serious study, spending many evenings working either at the campus libraries or at her desk in her quiet dorm room. The second commitment was fulfilling her training and competition requirements for her partial scholarship. Jada was an orphan, totally on her own and managing a scary package of student loans and a tenuous athletic scholarship. She thought her five-year path to a Masters in Mechanical Engineering was very much dependent both on maintaining an excellent academic record and staying in excellent physical health.

At her dorm, Jada’s freshman year was filled with quiet study, but this past term a large herd of architecture students had moved into her area and the character of the wing had changed completely. Parties, loud music, boys wandering the halls at all hours, even during school nights; didn’t these architecture students ever have to study? Apparently not, but they paid the price as their term projects became due.

Jada smiled at the memory. Candice, the freshman dorm queen of midnight gothic and heavy metal, had finally been shown the error of her ways. A sophomore engineering student named Erica would pound on Candice’s door almost nightly, complaining that the loud music was preventing her from sleeping. And throughout the fall term, her pleas for quiet were ignored.

The moment for revenge had come two days ago at the end of the term when the architecture projects were due. After a semester of partying, many of the freshman students suddenly realized just how much time it took to build a professional model. A number of the students had waited until the last few days, and Jada was convinced several were using speed to stay awake to complete their work.

Late last Wednesday as midnight approached, Candice had walked out of her room exhausted, carrying almost a square meter of a very professional looking building design, due promptly at 8 AM the following morning. It was a full layout complete with parking lots and landscaping and even tiny miniature trees artistically lining the access road. She had created something quite beautiful, and she left the model on the floor outside her dorm room for the glue to dry, Awake for over forty hours, Candice returned to her room and collapsed upon her bed.

Ten minutes later Erica came out of the adjacent room, heading to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and what was in her way but the large landscape. It would have been so easy to walk around it, but should she, after an entire term of pounding heavy metal? No. Boom, boom, crunch, crunch, it was just like Godzilla going through Tokyo.

Jada was awakened by a tremendous scream shortly before 1 AM. Fearing someone was being raped or murdered, she grabbed her robe and dashed outside her room, only to discover a shocked, horrified and bewildered Candice staring at her 3-D model that was now in a completely 2-D state.

It was an act of pure revenge. Erika had confessed to Jada the following day that she was the culprit. Erika had no hope that Candice would take the hint and lower the volume on the stereo system. Erika’s action was one of pure revenge, plain and simple, and Candice currently had an incomplete in the course. She would have to rebuild her project after she returned from Christmas vacation.

Emily’s car reached the southern end of Lost Nation Road. The connection to Route 15 was now just a few hundred meters away. They could be back on campus in fifteen minutes. Jada turned to her friend and smiled hopefully. “Hungry? I could make some lentil soup. Maybe we could go see a movie afterwards. I hear Flashpoint Seven is pretty good.”

Emily frowned and looked at the clock. “The posting said admission would be open until 5:22 PM. We still have another hour to find the place.”

“A strange time to turn away new guests, don’t you think? I mean, why not a simple 5:30 or something?”

Emily shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Jada sighed. “I think I do. The winter solstice is at 5:22 PM today. Hello winter! The fact that they’re supposedly locking the party doors at that exact moment is a tip-off this is all ... well, don’t you find it really odd?”

“Oh Jada, have a little faith.”

“Faith in what? That there really is a party god? Emily, get real! And besides, it’s getting dark.” Jada hoped Emily could hear the slight whine in her voice as she pointed through the window towards the east northeast. “See that bright silver light on the horizon? That’s what we engineering types call the rise of the full moon. Aren’t you afraid of werewolves? And more to the point, how are we going to find this place at night if we can’t even see it in the daylight?!”

Emily’s eyes lit up and she snapped her fingers. “Exactly! The castle’s lights should be more visible in the dark! Let’s make the loop again and look for the lights of a large building.”

“Uh...” But Emily was already making another U-turn, and Jada didn’t have the heart to argue the issue. She settled back and began scanning the trees, occasionally glancing at Emily and smiling at her roommate’s misplaced determination.

“Well, it’s not as if I don’t owe her a few favors,” Jada thought. Emily shared something in common with Jada. They were both Jewish orphans, and Jada suspected that was why campus housing had asked her if she were willing to room with the first year undergrad. But unlike Jada who had been abandoned, Emily’s parents had been killed a year ago in a car accident. She was now of legal age and on her own, but unlike Jada had almost a half million dollars in inheritance and life insurance benefits.

And during their first week together, Jada discovered Emily also had a heart of pure kindness. “What’s this?” Jada had asked, walking into her dorm at the beginning of the term and discovering a large pile of brand new textbooks on her desk.

“Oh, I was in the bookstore, getting my course books. You should see the lines!” Emily paused and added casually, “I thought I’d pick up yours too.” She turned away and started folding her wash.

Jada stared at the pile of mint condition books and picked up one. “Yeah, these are my course books all right ... How did you know?”