Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 17
Afterward, she sat on the floor in the middle of a heap of sweaters and underwear, flushed and nearly shaking with frustration. Of course Pearl wouldn’t leave the books here, of course, or she wouldn’t have given Esther an express hint to look in her room while she was out. Esther had known this was a trap and had stepped directly into it, telling herself all the time that it was her decision, that she was in control.
She rose from the detritus of her frantic search, delivered a vicious kick to the dresser, then picked up one of Pearl’s discarded boots and smashed it into the mirror. The crack and crash of broken glass was only briefly satisfying, and the silvery shards clung to the frame like teeth in a mangled jaw. She slammed the door on her way out.
She’d barely eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, so she went to the kitchen, still shaking, and begged a plate of breakfast leftovers from a disgruntled cook. Alone at a table in the empty mess hall, she barely tasted the food, her eyes fixed on nothing. She felt as if the station walls were dissolving around her and the ice creeping in.
As she chewed the last bite, the double doors banged open, and Trev burst through them. He had a wool hat balled in one hand and snow goggles hanging around his neck, his bunny suit unzipped and hanging around his waist with his legs still encased in insulated fabric. His expression was anxious, though it relaxed somewhat when he saw Esther, and she found herself rising even as he hurried over to her.
“What is it?” she said.
“The medic says she’ll be okay,” Trev said first, which raised her alarm instead of calming it as he’d probably intended, “but Pearl fell while we were skiing and really messed up her arm. Broke her wrist and hit her head pretty hard, too.”
“Oh god,” Esther said, forgetting for a moment that she shouldn’t care—should even, perhaps, be relieved. “But she—you said she’ll be all right?”
Trev ran a hand through his hair, face pale. “Yeah, I mean, she definitely blacked out for a minute, which was like, pretty scary, honestly, but she knew the date and her name and everything. I was too freaked out to try and move her myself, so I radioed for help and a group of people came and took her back to the infirmary. That’s where she’s at now.”
“Well,” said Esther, still torn between conflicting emotions, “it’s lucky you were with her.”
“I know, right? Anyway, she keeps asking for you. And she’s like . . . pretty agitated about it? Kinda freaky. So I told the medic I’d come find you, bring you back to calm her down.”
Esther hesitated. This had to be another one of Pearl’s tricks, but if so, she couldn’t parse it. “Did you see her fall?”
“No, she was behind me. I definitely heard it, though.”
Maybe she was faking, Esther thought, but why? “What about her wrist? Did the medic say it was broken, or did Pearl—”
“They already set it and everything,” Trev said. He half turned, moving toward the doorway, clearly expecting her to follow, and Esther did not know how to refuse without looking like a grade-A asshole. And her nerves had calmed as soon as she’d gotten something in her stomach, which meant her curiosity was once again more powerful than her self-preservation. So, shaking her head at herself, she went after him.
Esther had been to the infirmary a couple times for work-related injuries and had always found it bright and bustling. Today, though, it was dimmer and quieter than normal—the overhead lights had been shut off and the desk lamps were reflected in the full-length mirror fixed to the opposite wall. There was no one at those lit desks and Pearl seemed to be the only patient, curled up on one of the cots with her mop of blond hair spread out over a pillow, the sound of her heavy breathing suggesting sleep. The other four beds were empty.
Esther moved toward Pearl’s still form. Her eyes were closed, her face slack. Asleep, or pretending. Her still face made Esther’s traitorous heart thump painfully.
“She seems to have calmed down all right without me,” she said, but Trev didn’t answer. She turned to find his back to her, his head bowed over the doorknob. He was locking it. From the inside. “What—” she said, and he turned. His anxious expression had fallen away, and he was grinning at her, completely at ease.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said, jingling the ring of keys in his left hand.
In his right hand, he held a gun.
13
“Why does everything around here have to be so fucking creepy?” Collins asked, his voice echoing oddly in the dark stairway. He’d gone first up the steps, maybe out of force of protective habit, though both he and Nicholas had experienced a spike of panicked doubt when the bookshelf began to solidify again behind them. In order to come back through that same door Collins would need to read the spell aloud again. There was a small shelf set into the wall of the staircase that fit the book perfectly, so they left it behind and started up the wooden stairs, guided by the beam of Collins’s keychain penlight.
Despite the light it was very dark, and Nicholas did not like the dark. He’d been in the dark for days when he’d been kidnapped and in the half dark ever since, always aware that he was one eye infection away from darkness of a more permanent nature. This, coupled with the steep climb and the general intrigue, meant his heart was beating rabbit-fast by the time they reached what seemed to be a long, dark landing that took them to the left. The stairs had zigzagged three times, leading them up the house’s stories.
“Are we in the attic or something?” Collins said, gazing down the black hall.
“Thereabouts,” Nicholas said, trying not to let Collins hear how out of breath he was. He reached out to touch the wood on either side of him, gauging the width of the passage, which was narrow. “To be specific,” he said, “I think we’re in the attic walls.”
Collins made a noise of displeasure. “Is Richard hiding a crazy wife up here, or what?”
“Why, Collins, I didn’t have you down as a Brontë fan.”
“I had a thing for Jane. Hot little weirdo. So, what’s up here?”
“Nothing, as far as I know,” Nicholas said. “Bare boards, mouse turds.”
Collins started walking. Behind him, Nicholas was mapping out their steps—they’d climbed through the south wall and turned left, which meant they were headed east, walking in stacked parallel to the corridor that led to Richard’s rooms on the third floor and Maram’s on the second. After a few minutes Collins stopped abruptly, and Nicholas saw that the passageway had ended. There was no doorway at this end, nor any opening, and Nicholas assumed it was a dead end. But then Collins said “Oh,” and crouched to shine his light downward. Beneath his feet, the metal handle of a trapdoor flashed into view, and when he pulled it up with a grunt, there was another steep staircase going down.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Nicholas.
“Creepier and creepier,” corrected Collins, and Nicholas couldn’t argue. He was less prone than Collins to being spooked, but the darkness and inexplicability of the staircases and passages were eerie even to him. Collins had already started down the steps, however, despite his own clear hesitance, and Nicholas followed. This staircase wasn’t quite as dark as the hall above it—there was a faint line of light beneath the door at the bottom, which seemed promising.
“Where do you think we are in the building?” Collins asked over his shoulder, footsteps dull in the close wooden space.
“West Wing,” Nicholas said.
“That’s where your uncle lives.”
“Yes.”
“Shit,” said Collins, “maybe he really does have a secret wife. Or maybe he and Maram use these passages for a late-night rendezvous and—”
He stopped talking because he’d pulled open the door, found a light switch, and was now squinting in the sudden brightness. He stood still, peering out at whatever lay beyond the door, and right as Nicholas was about to push him forward, he went of his own accord. He said, as Nicholas joined him, “Mirrors.”
This was accurate. They were standing in a room full of mirrors.
Or, not full, exactly: the small room itself was empty save for two heavy wooden chairs pulled up to a round table. It was the walls that were filled, lined with full-length mirrors, ten of them in total and identical. They were wider than normal, wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side, framed simply in dark wood and hung with no embellishment on the white walls. In each one of their forty corners was a dried, reddish-brown smear of blood.
Each mirror also had a handwritten label tacked atop it, in what Nicholas recognized as Richard’s handwriting. He began reading the labels automatically—Kitchen, Gym, Bathroom North, Bathroom West, Clinic—but then he glanced again at the glass itself and all his attention focused laser-sharp.
“There’s another door over here,” Collins said, but Nicholas wasn’t listening.
The mirrors did not reflect the room he and Collins were in. They did not even reflect Nicholas himself. Or not exactly. It was like looking into a clear pond: Nicholas could see the suggestion of his own reflection on the surface, the refraction of light, but he could see through, as well, to different rooms entirely. Many of them appeared to be bathrooms, but the mirror labeled Kitchen showed, yes, a kitchen, a large one from the looks of it, with stainless-steel tubs and gigantic ten-gallon pots and a man with his hair held back in a tie-dyed bandana bent over an enormous frying pan. The Gym mirror showed several weight benches, and, in the background, what looked like a row of treadmills. There was someone here, too, a bearded man doing squats, sweat rolling down his forehead.
Nicholas had written the spell that linked these mirrors. Could this be the reason Maram had sent him here? So he could see the results of his hard work?
“Check this out, it’s a whole other room,” Collins said, and Nicholas looked up to find him leaning out of a door, beckoning.
Nicholas glanced back at the mirrors and then reluctantly dragged himself toward Collins. His reluctance turned to wonder, however, when he stepped through the door and found himself, unmistakably, in Richard’s study.
He’d only been in this room once, right after he’d successfully written his very first book, but he’d been aware the visit would be a rare one and so his memory of it was sharpened with particular attention. From what he could see now, not much had changed. Like most of the rooms in the house it had expansive windows and high ceilings, not so different from Nicholas’s own study though larger and more opulent, the marble fireplace ornate in a way that was impressive as well as functional. Shelves crowded most of the wall space, towers of gleaming wood that held not books but objects, artifacts that had hypnotized Nicholas when he’d sat here as a child: a fist-sized dog of red clay, a meticulously painted Cypriot amphora, a stuffed capuchin monkey with glassy obsidian eyes, an enormous sterling bell. It was like the back room of a museum. He knew most of these objects must be attached to a spell somewhere or had been once.
“Don’t touch anything,” he told Collins.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Collins said.
“I cannot stress how very much we shouldn’t be here,” Nicholas said.
“You want to leave?”
Nicholas certainly did not. He understood now why Maram had been so uncharacteristically secretive—she’d be in even more trouble than Nicholas if Richard learned she’d told him how to get in, yet she had told him. She knew how curious he had always been about this place, the one room in the house that was stubbornly closed to him, so perhaps this was a gift to soften an otherwise dreadful week. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d so directly gone against Richard’s wishes and the gesture warmed him even as he worried they’d be caught.
Collins had stopped in front of Richard’s vast walnut desk and was staring at the painting of Nicholas’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on the wall behind it. The ivory-framed portrait gazed down at them, the surgeon austere in his blood-crusted apron, the oil paint shining thick and darkly red. There was even blood beneath the nails of the man’s hands, a delicate detail that Nicholas noticed with some measure of respect.
“Is that a leg bone?” Collins said, pointing to the bottom section of the frame.
“It is,” Nicholas said.
“Is that some British shit? Putting human bones on picture frames?”
“He was a surgeon,” said Nicholas. “Famous for his speedy amputations, which I imagine must have included plenty of legs.”
“And what, he kept them after he’d sawed them off? To make furniture, like a serial killer?”
“He kept one, at least,” Nicholas said, not wishing to give Collins the satisfaction of his own discomfiture, but in truth he did find it off-putting to imagine someone strapped to a table in an old surgical theater, screaming as his ancestor hacked through bone and tendon while curious medical students scribbled notes.
Nicholas turned away, shaking his head, to examine the rest of the room. There were a few other frames on the wall but instead of art they held more objects: a mummified bat who’d been pinned behind glass, a Victorian brooch of knotted human hair, a woolen blanket embroidered with gray moths.
On Richard’s desk were two things that appeared interesting. One was a leather binder full of old yellowing pages, each individually laminated to delay the aging process. A quick perusal of the first few pages suggested they were the drafted text of a book Nicholas had neither seen nor written, and the drama of the opening lines alone convinced him it deserved a closer look. Flesh of my flesh, it began. Bone of my bone. Only mine own blood can end me.
The other thing that drew his attention was a cloth-bound book nearly as thick as a novel, and he found himself drawn to it despite the twinge of fear and disgust the depth suggested. A book of this thickness would take at least an hour to read aloud, which meant, for the second time that day, he was looking at a book a Scribe had given their life for—somebody like Nicholas had given all their blood to supply the ink to write this book. He turned the front cover and looked down at the neat, cramped handwriting, then flipped to the back.
The spell was rechargeable, though not endlessly so like the wards or the spell that had faded the bookcase for those few minutes. It could only be recharged once a year on the anniversary of its first reading, and as he noticed this, he realized at what spell he must be looking. He read the first few pages to get a sense of the text and confirm his suspicions that yes, it was the spell that located Scribes. The same spell Richard performed every year only to tell Nicholas, every year, that he was still the only one.
It was a complicated piece of writing, and despite the unease Nicholas felt with the amount of blood necessary, he found himself reading it with interest. It was the kind of spell his father referred to as “crystal ball” magic in his notes and what Maram called “intuitive divination”—an object-connected spell that delivered a specific piece of information directly into the reader’s mind. The Library’s expiration date was the only other such spell Nicholas had ever encountered, connected over and over again to the books and to Richard’s mind.
Nicholas had written object-connected spells before, such as the one that linked the mirrors in the other room, but he’d never written this kind of “crystal ball” spell. Nor would he ever. Intuitive divination demanded more blood than a single body could provide.
Still, it was fascinating to see the choices this anonymous Scribe had made, particularly the clocklike structure of the paragraphs and the way they used rhyme to double down on the cognitive connection. He could learn a lot from a spell this powerfully specific and wondered why Richard had never shown him before. Curious about the nature of the linked object, he carefully turned the pages, searching to see what the spell had been fastened to.
He found it in the middle of the spell: a directive to connect the reader’s cognition to “the view from the body that gives life to power.”
What on earth did that mean?
He knew it would be repeated somewhere in different terms at least three more times, and he bent closer to the pages to look. He found “The sight of the heart that pulses the force,” which didn’t make things much clearer, so he scanned onward. He was so focused that he jumped when Collins spoke to him.
“I think you need to see this,” Collins said. He was across the room, standing in front of one of the shelves.
“In a minute,” said Nicholas, rereading to find his place again.
“Nicholas,” Collins said, and something in his tone made Nicholas glance up. “You need to see this.”
Oh-so-carefully, Nicholas set the book down on the desk and came to join Collins where he stood, apparently transfixed, in front of a large glass jar with something suspended in the middle.
“Look close,” Collins said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but . . .”
Humoring him, Nicholas looked at the jar. It was at the height of his head and about the same size, with a few bloody marks that were probably part of a spell to keep glass from breaking. The lid, too, seemed to have been spelled.
Nicholas turned his attention to the contents of the jar, though he wasn’t certain what he was looking at: some kind of small orb floated in some kind of liquid, which wasn’t water, he could tell that much. It was thicker, a kind of translucent viscous goo, and the orb was not so much floating as suspended.
It was an eye.
Or an eyeball, to be precise, removed from the skull with surgical precision. It was facing them. Nicholas could see the red cloud of veins and ligaments that trailed it like a comet. He was no expert, but the iris so closely resembled the painted version of his own prosthetic that he figured it must have come from a human. Beside him, he felt Collins shift his weight, clearly disturbed by the sight. Nicholas did not feel much better. His own left socket tingled in sympathetic response and his stomach churned. It was uncanny to be stared at, literally eye-to-eye, by something so ghastly yet so recognizable. So familiar.
Too familiar.
“Collins,” Nicholas said, and the word came out hoarse. He turned to face his bodyguard. Collins stared back, jaw clenched, and a shiver ran through him. He said, “It looks like mine.”
