The old dining hall was on the first floor of their dorm, right next to Maria and Lily’s room, but it wasn’t used anymore. A massive cafeteria had been built in the new student life center on the other side of the hill years before any of them had come to Acheron. This room was much too small for actual dining anyway. It was the size of a small classroom, with just one long wooden table and a straight row of stiff-backed chairs on either side.

Until tonight Maria had only ever been in this room for a minute at a time, cutting through it on her way to the staff kitchen to rinse her coffee mug or avoid one of her so-called friends. But for all the years Maria had lived in this dorm, every time she’d been in this room—and sometimes when she’d only passed by the door in the hall—she’d felt it. The tingly sensation she remembered from staring into that mirror on the porch.

That was why Lily had suggested this room for their first session with the board. That, and because the old dining hall had never been renovated.

The Acheron campus was a converted old plantation, one of the oldest in Virginia. Most of the school buildings were new, but their dorm, where all the high school students lived, had been the plantation’s big house, where the master and his wife and children lived. It was huge and ostentatious—a typical plantation house—and it had been remodeled and expanded over the years, with new technology put in and more rooms added to the wings. This part of the house, though, was original. For all any of them knew, the table they were sitting at was the same one where Acheron’s original owners, the Siward family, had been served dinner by their slaves. The room had high ceilings, a huge fireplace, dusty landscape paintings in moldy frames, and a diamond-patterned wood floor that had probably been beautiful before it was scraped raw by generations of chairs. In the far corner was a rocking chair too rickety for anyone to sit in. The lower-school students liked to spook each other, saying they’d walked by the old dining hall late at night and seen the chair rocking with no one in it.

The nicest artifact in the room, though, was the ancient chandelier over their heads. It had surprised them all by lighting up when Brandon climbed onto the table and pulled the cord, shaking up enough dust they were still sneezing an hour later.

The shadow in the corner of the ceiling was ten feet from the chandelier. It wasn’t moving, but Maria could still see those bent knees and elbows. Crouched. Waiting.

Waiting for what?

The planchette started moving again before Maria could ask the spirit another question.

“What’s it doing?” Brandon said.

Maria didn’t know. She’d never seen this happen before.

The planchette slid into the top right corner of the board. That didn’t make sense. There weren’t any letters or pictures there.