Hell Bent--A Novel, page 23
“That so?” She turned on Daniel Tabor Arlington III in his blue bathrobe. “Darlington deserved better than you or your crap son, and this isn’t your house anymore. Death is the mother of beauty,” she snarled. All that Wallace Stevens ought to be good for something.
The old man vanished, his expression indignant.
Alex glanced up at the ceiling, and the next thing she knew she was climbing the stairs, moving down the hall. She hadn’t meant to go to the second floor. She was just supposed to retrieve the box and get out of Black Elm fast. Or was she lying to herself? Had she wanted to see Darlington before they attempted the Gauntlet? She didn’t try to fight whatever force took hold of her this time. She let herself be carried into the heat and golden light of the ballroom.
He was standing close to the circle’s edge, gaze locked on her. He was the demon she remembered, naked, monstrous, beautiful. Not the young man she’d spoken to her in her dream. Heat seemed to eddy around them, something stranger than a mere change in temperature, a crackle of power that she could feel against her skin. The circle of protection flickered. Was it growing fainter? Dissolving as it had in her dream?
“We’re coming to get you,” she said. “You need to be ready.”
“I can’t hold on much longer.”
“You have to. If … if it doesn’t work, we’ll come back to strengthen the protections.”
“You can certainly try.”
Alex was unpleasantly reminded of Linus Reiter, sprawled on his cream-colored couch, daring her to hurt him.
“Tonight,” she repeated.
“Why wait?”
“It isn’t easy to figure out a Gauntlet and assemble a search party of killers willing to go to hell. And Dawes says our chances are better on a night of portent.”
“As you like, Wheelwalker. You choose the steps in this dance.”
Alex wished that were true. She had the powerful urge to draw closer, but the fear inside her was just as strong.
“Was it you in the dream? Was it real? Is this?”
His smile was the same as it had been in the dream when he said, “This isn’t the time for philosophy, Stern.”
The hair rose on her arms. But was that confirmation or just another riddle for the demon to taunt her with?
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. The demon’s cool voice wavered, and he was only Darlington now, scared, desperate to find his way home. “Why risk your life and your soul?”
Alex didn’t know how to answer. She was putting her future at stake, her mother’s safety, her own. She was asking other people to put their lives on the line. Turner thought this was a holy war. Mercy wanted to wield the weapon that had been used against her. Tripp needed spending cash. And Dawes loved Darlington. He’d been her friend, one of the few who had bothered to take the time to know her and too dear to lose because of that. But what was Darlington to Alex? A mentor? A protector? An ally? None of those words seemed sufficient. Had some soft-boiled part of her fallen for the golden boy of Lethe? Or was this something less easily named than love or desire?
“Do you remember when you walked me through the ingredients for Hiram’s elixir?” she asked.
She could still see him standing over the golden crucible in the armory, his graceful hands moving in clean precision. He’d been lecturing her on the duties of Lethe, but she’d barely been listening. His sleeves were rolled up, and she’d been uncomfortably distracted by the shift of muscles in his forearms. She’d done her best to inoculate herself against Darlington’s beauty, but sometimes she still got caught off guard.
“We stand between the living and the dead, Stern. We wield the sword no one else dares lift. And this is the reward.”
“A chance at a painful death?” she’d asked.
“Heathen,” he’d said with a shake of his head. “It’s our duty to fight, but more than that, it’s our duty to see what others won’t and never avert our eyes.”
Now, standing in the ballroom, she said, “You didn’t turn away. Even when you didn’t like what you saw in me. You kept looking.”
Darlington’s gaze shifted and flickered like firelight. Gold and then amber. Bright and then shadowed. “Maybe I know a fellow monster when I see one.”
It felt like a cold hand shoving her away. Like a warning. She wasn’t stupid enough to ignore it.
“Maybe,” Alex whispered.
She made herself turn, leave the ballroom, walk down that dark hall. She forced herself not to run.
Maybe they were just two killers, cursed to endure each other’s company, two doomed spirits trying to find their way home. Maybe they were monsters who liked the feeling of another monster looking back at them. But enough people had abandoned them both. She wasn’t going to be the next.
Matching luminaries
Provenance: Aquitaine, France; 11th century
Donor: Manuscript, 1959
Believed to have been invented by heretical monks to hide forbidden texts. The glamour will remain strong for as long as the lanterns are lit. Those outside of the light’s reach will find their fear increasing as they draw closer. Ordinary candles may be used and refreshed accordingly. Donation made after storage above the Manuscript nexus created some kind of disturbance in the enchantment and two members of the 1957 delegation were lost for over a week in shadow.
—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus
Halloween is an evangelical holiday. If you don’t celebrate, you’re forced to hide from those who do lest they slap a mask on your face and demand you caper about in the name of fun.
—Lethe Days Diary of Raymond Walsh-Whiteley (Silliman College ’78)
26
They met at the library at eleven o’clock and holed up in one of the niches in the Linonia and Brothers reading room. Dawes had somehow chosen the exact spot where Alex loved to sit and read and fall asleep with her boots on the grate of the heater. How many times had she looked out at the courtyard through the wavy glass of the windows without knowing she was looking at the gateway to hell?
They set the pair of luminaries they’d procured from the armory at opposing corners of the entry to the reading nook. What they created when lit wasn’t precisely a glamour, but a swarm of thick shadow that repelled any curious gaze.
Fifteen minutes before midnight, a voice came over the loudspeaker reminding students that the library was closing. People laden with backpacks and satchels trudged out to make the walk home to dorms or apartments in a forced march past Halloween partiers. Security guards came through next, passing their flashlights over the shelves and reading tables.
Alex and the others waited, watching the flicker of the luminaries in the corners, pressed against the walls for no good reason, trying to be as quiet as possible. Tripp had worn the same polo, blazer, and backward cap he’d had on at their planning dinner. Turner was in what looked like expensive gym clothes and a puffer jacket. Dawes was in her sweats. Mercy had chosen fatigues paired with a black sweater and looked like the chicest member of a special forces unit. Alex was in Lethe sweats. She didn’t know what this night would bring, but she was tired of losing perfectly good clothing to the arcane.
Shortly after midnight and without warning, the lights clicked off. All that remained were dim security lights along the floors. The library had gone silent. Dawes took out a thermos. To disrupt the alarm systems, she had brewed the same tempest in a teapot they’d used to break into the Peabody, but she’d steeped the tea longer and acquired a better-insulated container.
“Hurry,” she said. “I don’t know how long it will last.”
They got Mercy settled in the courtyard, and Alex and Dawes helped her into the salt armor—gauntlets, bracers, a helm that was far too big for her head. She even had a salt sword. It was all very impressive, but Alex had to wonder if it would stop a monster like Linus Reiter. When Mercy pulled a vial of Hiram’s elixir from her pocket, Alex wanted to swat it out of her hand. But the time for warnings and worry had past. Mercy had made her choice and they needed her here, their sentinel. Alex watched her pop the cork and down the contents, her eyes squeezed shut as if she were swallowing medicine. She shuddered and coughed, then blinked and laughed.
At least the first dose hadn’t killed her.
When Mercy was positioned by the basin with the ticking metronome set on the ground beside her, they crowded around the security desk at the front of the library, checked the Rose Walk for students passing by, then slipped outside.
“Quick,” said Dawes as one by one they made incisions on their arms.
“We should have done it across our palms,” said Tripp. “The way they do in movies.”
“No one gets infections in movies,” Turner shot back. “And I actually need the use of my hands.”
Alex hadn’t realized he had a holster and gun beneath his jacket. “I don’t think that’s going to do you much good in hell.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” he replied.
Dawes took a small bottle from her pocket and dribbled oil onto her thumb. She smeared it across each of their foreheads. This had to be the datura.
“Are we ready?” Dawes asked.
“Hell yeah!” said Tripp.
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Turner. But Alex appreciated Tripp’s enthusiasm.
Dawes took a deep breath. “Let’s begin.”
They each touched their fingers to the blood welling from their arms.
“Soldier first,” Dawes said. Alex daubed her blood onto each of the four columns marking the entrance. Dawes followed, placing her blood over Alex’s, then Turner, and finally Tripp.
He looked at the smudge of their mingled blood and stood back. “How will we know if—”
Tripp was interrupted by a sound like a sigh, a whoosh of air as if a window had been thrown open.
The heavy wooden door beneath the Egyptian scribe had vanished, leaving nothing but darkness. No glimpse of the library nave beyond, no sign of life or light. It was like looking into nothing. A cold wind blew through on a moan.
“Oh,” said Dawes.
They stood in stunned silence, and Alex realized that, for all of their talk and preparation, none of them had really believed it would work. Despite every miracle and horror she had witnessed in her time at Yale, she hadn’t been able to buy into a pathway to the underworld hidden right beneath their noses. Had some other group of fools once stood at this doorway awakened by their blood, on this same precipice, trembling and afraid? Dawes claimed the Gauntlet had never been used. But again Alex had to wonder, if that was the case, why build it at all?
“Alex is first, right?” Tripp asked, a quaver in his voice.
Her courage had shriveled at the sight of all of that empty. But there was no time to second-guess. She could hear people approaching down the street. Come get me, Stern, he’d said. Please.
Alex touched her hand to the porcelain box in her pocket and stepped through the door.
Nothing happened. She was standing in Sterling’s cavernous nave. It looked no different than it had before.
Dawes bumped into her, and they both stumbled out of the way as Turner and then Tripp came through.
“I don’t get it,” said Tripp.
“We have to walk the path,” Dawes said. “That was only the start.”
Single file, they made their way down the nave toward the Alma Mater mural: soldier, scholar, priest, and prince, shrouded in gloom. A strange, shuffling parade. They turned right at the mural and marked the arches beneath the Tree of Knowledge with their blood. Again, the corridor beyond seemed to dissolve, as if their reality had dropped away and left a gaping void. Again, Alex took a deep breath, the diver preparing to sink beneath the surface, and stepped through.
On their right, they passed the glass door through which Alex would enter, but it wasn’t her time yet. The soldier would close the circle. They moved down the corridor, past Death peering over the student’s shoulder, and into the vestibule full of Jost Amman’s woodcuts. Above them Alex could just make out the black iron silhouettes of the mermen with their split tails, monster and man, man and monster.
The cut on Alex’s arm had begun to close, so she had to squeeze it to get the blood to well up again. One by one they anointed the doorway beside the stone spider, beneath the inscription of Yale’s motto. Light and Truth. It felt like a joke when the door disappeared into flat black darkness.
“This is your station,” Dawes whispered, the first words any of them had spoken since they’d stepped back into Sterling.
Tripp’s jaw was set. His fists were clenched. Alex could see he was shaking slightly. She almost expected him to just turn on his heel and march right out of the library. Instead he gave a single, firm nod of his head.
Alex gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. It was easy not to take Tripp seriously, but he was here facing the same shapeless dread as the rest of them, and he hadn’t complained once. “See you on the other side.”
They moved on, passing into another narrow hallway that would take them to the University Librarian’s office. It was even darker here, the walls crowding in on them. The office felt less empty than suddenly abandoned, the desk chair askew, papers in messy piles.
There was nothing remarkable about this door, but emblazoned on the other side of it was a large stone sundial and two stained glass knights standing guard.
They made fresh cuts and daubed the door jamb with their blood, ready this time for the gap of darkness that opened and the icy wind that blew through.
“Keep your head straight,” Turner said as he took up his post.
The secret door was right behind them, beside the big stone fireplace with its grumpy Latin, barely visible unless you knew where to look for the outline hidden in the paneling. Alex and Dawes passed through it and into another dark, tiny vestibule that had no real purpose—unless you were trying to circumnavigate the courtyard.
They emerged in Linonia and Brothers, on the opposite end of the room from the niche where they’d hidden. Here again, it felt as if the place had been abandoned, as if the absence of the human could be felt.
At last they stood at the original entrance to the courtyard, Selin’s name emblazoned across the stone lintel in golden letters.
Alex didn’t want to leave Dawes there. She didn’t want to be alone in this dark cathedral of a building.
“The niches are all empty,” Dawes said.
“They are?” Alex asked, completely lost.
Dawes had the silver pitch pipe in her hands and her voice was quiet but steady. “All over the library, you can see these spaces, these stone frames where a sculpture of a saint should be, like in a cathedral. But they’re all empty.”
“Why?”
“No one really knows. Some people think they ran out of money. Some people say the architect wanted the building to look like it had been sacked. All of its treasures stolen.”
“What do you think?” Alex asked. She could feel they were in uncertain territory, that this story, these words were what Dawes needed to keep going.
“I don’t know,” Dawes said at last. “We all have hollow places.”
“We’re going to bring him home, Dawes. We’re going to make it out of this.”
“I believe you. At least the first part.” She took a deep breath, set her shoulders. “I’ll be watching.”
Alex smeared her blood onto the entry. Dawes followed. This time the big double doors looked like they collapsed in on themselves, folding like paper as the wind howled through. It was louder now, moaning, as if whatever was on the other side of the darkness knew they were coming.
“Look,” Dawes said.
The script above the door had shifted into a different language.
“What does it say?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know,” Dawes said. She sounded breathless. “I don’t even recognize the alphabet.”
Alex had to force her feet to move. But she knew it wouldn’t get any easier. It never did.
“Be ready,” she told Dawes, and then she was rounding back past the entrance and down the nave once more. The soldier. The one to walk alone. Alma Mater gazed benevolently down at her, surrounded by artists and scholars, flanked by Truth, naked in her allegory.
It wasn’t until Alex was right in front of the mural that she realized what had changed. They were all staring at her now. The sculptor, the monk, Truth with her mirror, Light with her torch. They were watching her, and whatever human features the artist had granted them did not seem quite natural anymore. Their faces looked like masks, and the eyes peering through them were too bright, alive and keen with hunger.
She made herself keep walking, resisting the urge to look back, to see if somehow one of them had pried itself free of the frame and crept after her. She passed beneath the Tree of Knowledge, noting the sculptural niche at its center. Empty. How had she never noticed that before?
Finally, she arrived at the glass door that would lead her to the courtyard. A panel of yellow and blue stained glass marked the entrance. She had looked it up. Daniel in the lions’ den.
“We’re coming for you, Darlington,” she whispered. She could hear the soft ticking of the metronome.
Once more she touched the porcelain box in her pocket. I have been crying out to you from the start. She dipped her thumb into her blood and dragged it across the door.
It vanished. Alex stared into the starless void, felt the cold of it, heard the rising wind, and then, floating above it, the soft sweet hum of middle C. Come on along. Come on along. She stepped into the courtyard.
As soon as her boot hit the stone path, the ground seemed to shake.
“Shit,” Tripp squeaked from somewhere to her left.
She could see now: ordinary night, Mercy at the courtyard’s center, Dawes, Tripp, and Turner at the other corners.
She kept walking, kept marching toward the basin, keeping time with the metronome. With every step came another little earthquake. Boom. Boom. Boom. Alex could barely keep her footing.
