I leaned even closer. “Go on.”
“I don’t know if you actually saw any of this, because it’s all the way down in the woods near the lake, but there’s a bunch of half-finished buildings there. They were designed to look like the rest of the campus, so they look freaking ancient. But they’re not. They’ve just been abandoned and neglected for thirty years, so parts of them are crumbling, and other parts have been swallowed up by the woods.”
“Are we allowed down there?”
“School rules say no, and there’s a perimeter thingy blocking it off, but everyone sneaks down there at some point anyway,” Trina said. “Anyway, here’s the deal with that whole thing: it’s meant to be haunted.”
I snorted with amusement. “Haunted?”
“Yup. Or a site for Satanists to perform rituals in,” Trina said, rolling her eyes. “I know how ridiculous it sounds, but the rumors have been around forever.”
“Why?”
“People always sneak down there for hookups or parties, and over the years, a few of them have found some pretty weird shit,” Adam said.
Trina nodded. “Yeah. Like red symbols on the walls. Candles. Little bits of weirdly-designed jewelry. Stuff like that which could be literally anything, or just a prank, but it winds up getting spun into a big story.”
“You’re forgetting the girl,” Adam said, nudging Trina’s side.
She slapped her hand down on the table. “Oh! I can’t believe I forgot that!” she said. She lowered her voice. “All the way back in 1995, some students supposedly found a body there.”
“Supposedly?” I said, brows furrowing.
Trina nodded. “There’s nothing about it online. No records anywhere, as far as we know. But yeah… rumor has it they found a girl. She was naked. Strangled.”
“Apparently it also looked like she’d been kept somewhere for days and tortured before she was killed,” Adam added.
“Shit. That’s horrible.”
“She was the first-ever RFA scholarship student, too, if the rumors are actually true,” Adam said. He stuck his hands out in a mock-strangling gesture. “Better watch out, Laney. You could be next…”
Trina elbowed him. “Don’t be a dick!”
“I’m just kidding,” Adam said. “Don’t worry, Laney. I’m pretty sure it’s not even true. Just a scary story to freak out all the freshmen.”
I sat back and put my hands on the table, fingers interwoven in a pyramid shape. “So the school is haunted and filled with murderers. Is that the gist of what you’re telling me?”
Trina giggled. “According to the legends, yes.”
“But that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Adam said.
“Wait… really?” A fluttery feeling appeared in my belly.
Trina nodded. “There are all sorts of rumors about what used to happen here when it was still a university,” she said. “Most of it originated in nearby towns, where the people were kinda envious of everything Royal Falls had. So they made up nasty rumors, and I guess they stuck.”
“Like what?”
“There was allegedly some sort of secret society for guys at RFU. So secret that no one knew what they called themselves or what they did,” Adam said. “Some people claimed they were just a typical old boys’ club who liked to throw exclusive parties with strippers and drugs. Or they organized fetish events and orgies.”
“But others said there was drug dealing, prostitution, and even ritualistic murder going on in their ranks,” Trina added. She lifted a shoulder. “Who knows?”
“Wow.”
“The part that I find really creepy is that because no one knows if there even was a secret society here, there’s no way to know if it’s extinct.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I’d only heard half of what she said, because I was still thinking about the other stuff regarding the possible drug dealing, orgies, and ritualistic murders. It was wild.
“I mean, most of the rumors assume it ended when RFU closed in 1988. If it actually ever existed.”