Hell Bent--A Novel, page 2
“Holy shit,” he said when he saw Alex at the door, his eyes trained on the space a foot above her head. The glamour had added twelve inches to her height.
She raised her hand and waved.
“I … Can I help you?” Oddman asked.
Alex bobbed her chin toward the apartment interior.
Oddman shook his head as if waking from a dream. “Yeah, of course.” He stepped aside, sweeping his arm out in a grand gesture of welcome.
The living room was surprisingly neat: a halogen lamp tucked into the corner, a big leather couch with a matching recliner arranged to face a massive flat-screen tuned to ESPN. “You want something to drink or…” He hesitated, and Alex knew the calculation he was making. There was only one reason a celebrity would turn up on his doorstep on a Thursday night—any night really. “You looking to score?”
Alex hadn’t really needed confirmation, but now she had it. “You owe twelve large.”
Oddman took a lurching step back as if he’d suddenly lost his balance. Because he was hearing Alex’s voice. She hadn’t bothered to try to disguise it, and the dissonance between her voice and the glamour of Tom Brady created by the mirror had caused the illusion to waver. It didn’t matter. Alex had only needed the magic to get inside Oddman’s apartment without a fuss.
“What the fuck—”
“Twelve large,” Alex repeated.
Now he saw her as she was, a tiny girl standing in his living room, black hair parted in the middle, so skinny she might slip straight through the floorboards.
“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he bellowed, “but you’re in the wrong damn house.”
He was already striding toward her, his bulk making the room shake.
Alex’s arm shot out, reaching toward the window, toward the sidewalk in front of the Taurus Cafe. She felt the Gray in the beanie rush into her, tasted green apple Jolly Ranchers, smelled the skunk smoke of weed. His spirit felt unfinished and frantic, a bird slamming itself against a windowpane again and again. But his strength was pure and ferocious. She put up her hands, and her palms struck Oddman square in the chest.
The big man went flying. His body slammed into the TV, shattering the screen and knocking it to the floor. Alex couldn’t pretend it didn’t feel good to steal the Gray’s strength, to be dangerous just for a moment.
She crossed the room and stood over Oddman, waited for his dazed eyes to clear.
“Twelve large,” she said again. “You have a week to get it or I come back and break bones.” Though it was possible she’d cracked his sternum already.
“I don’t have it,” Oddman said on a groan, his hand rubbing his chest. “My sister’s kid—”
Alex knew the excuses; she’d made them herself. My mom is in the hospital. My check is late. My car needs a new transmission and I can’t pay you if I can’t get to work. It didn’t really matter if they were true or not.
She squatted down. “I feel for you. I really do. But I have my job, you have yours. Twelve thousand dollars by next Friday or he’ll make me come back and turn you into an example for every dime bag hump in the neighborhood. And I don’t want to do that.”
She really didn’t.
Oddman seemed to believe her. “He … got something on you?”
“Enough to bring me here tonight and to bring me back again.” Alex’s temples gave a sudden throb, and the oversweet tang of apple candy burst into her mouth. “Shit, man. You look bad.”
It took Alex a second to realize she was the one speaking—with someone else’s voice.
Oddman’s eyes widened. “Derrik?”
“Yeah!” That wasn’t her voice, wasn’t her laugh.
Oddman reached out to touch her shoulder, something between wonder and fear making his hand shake. “You … I went to your wake.”
Alex stood, nearly losing her footing. She caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection from the broken TV, but the person looking back at her wasn’t a scrawny girl in a tank top and jeans. It was a boy in a beanie and a parka.
She shoved the Gray out of her. For a moment, they stared at each other—Derrik, apparently. She didn’t know what had killed him and she didn’t want to know. He’d somehow pushed to the forefront of her consciousness, taken over her face, her voice. And she wanted none of that.
“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” she snarled at him. They’d become her favorite death words over the summer. He vanished.
Oddman had pressed himself against the wall as if he could disappear into it. His eyes were full of tears. “What the fuck is happening?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just get the money and all this goes away.”
Alex only wished she had it that easy.
Rete Mirabile
Provenance: Galway, Ireland; 18th century
Donor: Book and Snake, 1962
The “wonderful net” was procured by the Lettermen c. 1922. Specific date of origin and maker are unknown, but oral histories suggest it was created through Celtic song magic or possibly seidh (see the Norse sea giantess Rán). Analysis indicates the net itself is ordinary cotton, braided with human tendon. After a loved one had been lost at sea, the net could be thrown into the ocean while attached to a stake on shore. The next morning, the body would be returned, which some found comforting and others distressing, given the possible state of remains.
Gifted by Book and Snake when their attempts to recall specific corpses failed.
— from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus
Why is it the boys at Book and Snake don’t seem to be able to cook up anything that works the way it should? First they resurrect a bunch of sailors who can only speak Irish. Next they empty their not insubstantial coffers to get their hands on an authenticated letter from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom before Wolf’s Head can drum up the cash. A letter for the resurrection of a king. But who do they get when they light that thing up in their tomb? Not Amenhotep or good ol’ Tutankhamun, not even a headless Charles I at their door, but Elvis Presley—tired, bloated, and hungry for a peanut butter and banana sandwich. They had a hell of a time getting him back to Memphis with no one the wiser.
—Lethe Days Diary of Dez Carghill (Branford College ’62)
2
The walk back to campus was long, and the heat felt like an animal dogging her steps, its breath moist against the nape of her neck. But Alex didn’t slow her pace. She wanted distance between herself and that Gray. What had happened back there? And how was she supposed to keep it from happening again? Sweat trickled down her back. She wished she’d worn shorts, but it didn’t feel right to wear cutoffs to a beatdown.
She paralleled the canal trail, counting down her long strides, trying to get her head straight before she was back on campus. She’d walked part of that trail last year, with Mercy, to see the leaves turn, a flood of red and gold, fireworks captured in their fullest bloom. She’d thought how different it was from the LA River with its concrete banks, and she’d remembered how she had floated in those dirty waters, flush with Hellie’s strength, wishing they could both drift out to the open sea, become their own island. She’d wondered where Hellie was buried and hoped it was someplace beautiful, someplace nothing like that sad, scraping-along river, that collapsed vein.
The canal trail would be green now, choked with summer growth, but Grays loved it and Alex didn’t want to be anywhere near them just this minute, so she stuck to the dull parking lots and faceless office buildings of Science Park, hurried past the industrial lofts, and on to Prospect. Only Darlington’s ghost chased her here. His voice telling stories of the Winchester family and how their descendants had mixed and married with the Yale elite, or the hulking mass of Sarah Winchester’s grave across town—an eight-foot lump of rough-hewn rock, a cross pressed into it like a child’s school project. Alex wondered if Mrs. Winchester had chosen to be buried at Evergreen instead of Grove Street because she knew she wouldn’t rest easy right down the road from the factory where her husband had produced barrel after barrel, gun after gun.
Alex didn’t slow down until she’d passed the new colleges and crossed Trumbull. It was comforting to be back near campus where the trees grew over the streets in shady canopies. How had she become someone who felt more at home here than on the streets outside the Taurus? Comfort was the drug she hadn’t understood until it was too late and she was hooked on cups of tea and book-lined shelves, nights uninterrupted by the wail of sirens and the ceaseless churning of helicopters overhead. Her Tom Brady glamour had shaken loose completely when she’d let the Gray enter her, so at least she didn’t need to worry about causing a stir on campus.
Students were out enjoying the warm night, waddling along with couches jammed between them, handing out flyers for parties. A girl on roller skates coasted down the middle of the street, fearless, in a bikini top and tiny shorts, her skin gleaming against the blue night. This was their dream time, the magical early days of fall semester, the happy haze of meeting once again, old friendships rekindling in firefly sparks before the real work of the year began. Alex wanted to wallow in it too, to remember that she was safe, she was okay. But there wasn’t time.
The Hutch was only a few blocks away, and she stopped to try to get her head together, leaning against the low wall in front of Sterling Library. How had that Gray overtaken her? She knew her connection to the dead had been deepened by what she’d had to do in her fight with Belbalm. She’d called them to her and offered them her name. They’d answered. They’d saved her. And of course rescue had come at a price. All her life, she’d been able to see Grays; now she could hear them too. They were that much closer, that much harder to ignore.
But maybe she hadn’t really understood what salvation would cost her at all. Something very bad had happened in Oddman’s house, something she couldn’t explain. She was meant to control the dead, to use them. Not the other way around.
She pulled out her phone and saw two texts from Dawes, both exactly fifteen minutes apart and in all caps. URGENT CALL IN.
Alex ignored the messages and scrolled down, then typed out a quick It’s done.
The reply was immediate: When I have my money
She really hoped Oddman got his house in order. She deleted Eitan’s messages, then called Dawes.
“Where are you?” Dawes answered breathlessly.
Something big must be happening if Dawes was ignoring protocol. Alex could picture her pacing the parlor at Black Elm, her knot of red hair sliding to one side, headphones clamped around her neck.
“Sterling. On my way back to the Hutch.”
“You’re going to be late to—”
“If I stand here talking to you, I will be. What’s up?”
“They’ve selected a new Praetor.”
“Damn. Already?” The Praetor was the faculty liaison for Lethe, who served as a go-between with the university administration. Only Yale’s president and dean knew about the real activities of the secret societies, and it was Lethe’s job to make sure it stayed that way. The Praetor was a kind of den mother. The responsible adult in the room. At least he was supposed to be. Dean Sandow had turned out to be a murderer.
Alex knew a Lethe Praetor had to be a former Lethe deputy and had to be a member of the Yale faculty or at least reside in New Haven. That couldn’t be easy to find. Alex and Dawes had assumed it would take the board at least another semester to find someone to replace the very dead Dean Sandow. They’d counted on it.
“Who is he?” Alex asked.
“It could be a woman.”
“Is it?”
“No. But Anselm didn’t give me a name.”
“Did you ask?” Alex pushed.
A long pause. “Not exactly.”
There was no point needling Dawes. Much like Alex, she didn’t like people, but unlike Alex, she avoided confrontation. And really, it wasn’t her job. Oculus kept Lethe running smoothly—fridge and armory stocked, rituals scheduled, properties kept in order. She was the research arm of Lethe, not the harass-board-members arm.
Alex sighed. “When are they bringing him in?”
“Saturday. Anselm wants to set up a meeting, maybe a tea.”
“Nope. No way. I need more than a couple of days to prepare.” Alex turned away from the passing students, staring up at the stone scribes that guarded the Sterling Library doors. Darlington was with her here, picking away at Yale’s mysteries. “Egyptian, Mayan, Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, engravings of cave paintings from Les Combarelles. They covered all their bases.”
“What do they mean?” Alex had asked.
“Quotes from libraries, holy texts. The Chinese quote is from a dead judge’s mausoleum. The Mayan comes from the Temple of the Cross, but they chose it at random because no one knew how to translate it until twenty years later.”
Alex had laughed. “Like a drunk dude getting a kanji tattoo.”
“To use one of your turns of phrase, they half-assed it. But it certainly looks impressive, doesn’t it, Stern?”
It had. It still did.
Now Alex hunched over her phone and whispered to Dawes, knowing she probably looked like a girl in the middle of a breakup. “We need a delay.”
“What good is that going to do us?”
Alex didn’t have an answer for that. They’d been searching for the Gauntlet all summer and come up empty. “I went to First Presbyterian.”
“And?”
“Nothing. At least as far as I can tell. I’ll send you the photos.”
“Gateways to hell aren’t just lying around for people to walk through,” Michelle Alameddine had warned when they’d all sat down together at Blue State after Dean Sandow’s funeral. “That would be way too dangerous. Think of the Gauntlet as a secret passage that appears when you say the magic words. But in this case, the magic words are a series of steps, a path you have to walk. You take your first steps in the labyrinth, and only then does the path become clear.”
“So we’re hunting for something we can’t even see?” Alex had asked.
“There would be signs, symbols.” Michelle had shrugged. “Or at least that’s one theory. That’s all hell and the afterlife are. Theories. Because the people who get to see the other side don’t come back to tell about it.”
She was right. Alex had only been to the borderlands when she’d made her bargain with the Bridegroom, and she’d barely survived that. People weren’t meant to move between this life and the next and back again. But that was exactly what they’d have to do to get Darlington home.
“There are rumors of a Gauntlet on Station Island in Lough Derg,” Michelle continued. “There might have been one in the Imperial Library of Constantinople before it was destroyed. And according to Darlington, a bunch of society boys built one right here.”
Dawes had nearly spit out her tea. “Darlington said that?”
Michelle gave her a bemused look. “His little pet project was creating a magical map of New Haven, of all the places where power ebbed and flowed. He said some society members had done it on a dare and that he intended to find it.”
“And?”
“I told him he was an idiot and that he should spend more time worrying about his future and less time digging into Lethe’s past.”
Alex found herself smiling. “How’d that go over?”
“How do you think?”
“I actually don’t know,” she’d said at the time, too tired and too raw to pretend. “Darlington loved Lethe, but he also would have wanted to listen to his Virgil. He took that seriously.”
Michelle studied the leavings of her scone. “I liked that about him. He took me seriously. Even when I didn’t.”
“Yes,” Dawes had said quietly.
But Michelle had only returned to New Haven once over the summer. All June and July Dawes had been researching from her sister’s place in Westport, sending Alex into the Lethe House library with requests for books and treatises. They’d tried to come up with the right series of words to frame their requests in the Albemarle Book, but all that came back were old accounts of mystics and martyrs having visions of hell—Charles the Fat, Dante’s two towers in Bologna, caves in Guatemala and Belize said to lead to Xibalba.
Dawes took the train from Westport a few times so they could sit together and try to find someplace to start. They always invited Michelle, but she only took them up on it that one time, on a weekend when she was off from her job in gifts and acquisitions at the Butler Library. They’d spent all day poring over society records and books on the monk of Evesham, then had lunch in the parlor. Dawes made chicken salad and lemon bars wrapped in checkered napkins, but Michelle had only picked at her food and kept checking her phone, eager to be gone.
“She doesn’t want to help,” Dawes had said when Michelle left and the door to Il Bastone was shut firmly behind her.
“She does,” said Alex. “But she’s afraid to.”
Alex couldn’t really blame her. The Lethe board had made it clear they believed Darlington was dead, and they weren’t interested in hearing otherwise. There had been too much mess the previous year, too much noise. They wanted that chapter closed. But two weeks after Michelle’s visit, Alex and Dawes had gotten their big break: a single, lonely paragraph in a Lethe Days Diary from 1938.
Now Alex pushed off from the wall outside of Sterling and hurried up Elm onto York. “Tell them I can’t meet on Saturday. Tell them I have … orientation or something.”
Dawes groaned. “You know I’m a terrible liar.”
“How are you going to get better if you don’t practice?”
Alex dodged down the alley and entered the Hutch, welcoming the cool dark of the back stairs, that sweet autumn smell of clove and currants. The rooms were spotless but lonely, the battered plaid couches and scenes of shepherds tending their flocks trapped in gloom. She didn’t like spending real time at the Hutch. She didn’t want to be reminded of the lost days when she’d hidden in these secret rooms, wounded and hopeless. Pathetic. She wasn’t going to let that happen to her this year. She was going to find a way to keep control. She snatched up the backpack she’d loaded with supplies earlier—graveyard dirt, bone dust chalk, and something labeled a Phantom Loop, a kind of fancy lacrosse stick she’d pilfered from the Lethe armory.
