Angry God

by L.J. Shen

You didn’t see anything. He is not coming for you. He didn’t even see your face. Every bone in my body shivered as I tried to bleach the image I’d just seen from my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and rocked back and forth, curled like a shrimp on the hard mattress. The rusty metal legs of the bed whined as they scraped against the floor.

I’d always been a bit wary of Carlisle Castle, but up until ten minutes ago, I’d thought it was the ghosts that terrified me, not the students. Not a thirteen-year-old boy with a face like The Sleeping Faun sculpture—lazily beautiful, impossibly imperial. Not Vaughn Spencer. I grew up here and had yet to encounter anything as scary as that brash American boy.