The Book of Living Secrets, page 16
Seeing it horrified her, but it also gave her an idea. Just like Frodo, she would force herself toward the point of greatest danger.
She took Orla’s hand, clasped it. “If we make it to the road, we can try to reach the sea before your mother does.”
Orla’s round eyes lit up. “Yes . . . They will make her drink something to go to sleep, and as soon as she dreams, she will hear the call and take the walk. We could try to intercept her!”
“Surely we must try.”
“But it will not work.” Orla tried to snatch her hand back, but Adelle wouldn’t let go. “Other folk have tried to stop their family and their friends from going to the sea. Nothing works! They cannot be stopped. . . .”
“But we must try.”
“Yes. Yes, Miss Casey, you are right. My mother told us to fight, did she not? I will fight, but first I will take the leap.”
“Orla!”
But she had already gone, winding up with tiny steps, the run of a girl who had never played or thought about a sport in her life. Yet she gave it her all, flinging her arms wide and sailing across the four-foot gap, landing with a thump, her elegant heeled boots hanging over the edge, then kicking wildly until she managed to drag herself to safety. Orla flipped onto her back and let loose a delighted cry.
“I did it! Miss Casey, did you see? I did it!”
Connie would probably laugh if she saw the distance they were trying to cross, but Adelle had never been one for athletic feats, and definitely not those that potentially came with a sheer drop down five floors.
We must try.
Adelle knew that if it were her own mother on the line, she would do anything to help, and so she ran as fast as she could, kicking off from the very edge of the stone lip on the roof and landing with about the same clumsy elation as Orla. She skipped the celebration, hobbling along to join Orla at the observatory, where the Victorian girl had clearly found her sense of spirit and determination, picking up a chunk of fallen flowerpot and hurling it through the nearest glass pane.
Orla cried joyfully at that, too, though she was also just crying.
Helping Orla through the jagged space left by the crumbling glass, Adelle tried to soothe her with low, solemn words. “We’re going to find her, Orla. We’re going to fight.”
19
“HERE. RUSTLED THESE UP for you.”
Connie glanced up from her breakfast of gritty bread and cheese funky enough to clear a room. A heap of yellowed clothing fell onto the empty stool beside her. Mississippi crossed her arms and leaned against one of the uneven posts sketching out the shape of the bar.
At least there was coffee, even if it was weaker than her will to stay awake. The tea had done its job, banishing dreams but giving her restless sleep. She rubbed her knuckle into one tired eye and picked up the top garment from the pile: a rumpled cotton skirt dyed navy blue.
“To help you, ya know, walk among us,” Mississippi added in an undertone, punctuating it with a wink.
Connie smirked, but her smile soon faded. The night before, she had made Missi a promise she probably couldn’t keep. Her stomach twisted into a knot, and she shot a furtive glance at her new friend. “Thank you. I really appreciate it; I appreciate all of this.”
“You ain’t home yet—don’t thank me until we’re free of this pit.”
Speaking of . . .
Connie stood, wolfing down the last of her bread and picking up the rest of the clothes. “I should use the toilet and change.”
“After you do, meet me topside. There’s somethin’ I want to show you.”
They left in opposite directions, Missi heading back out toward the tunnel and Connie returning to her tiny sleeping den. She packed up her things and changed into her borrowed clothing, which felt more like a costume than anything she would wear normally. Nobody really noticed she had stripped down to her underwear, and Connie was used to wandering around almost naked in the locker rooms before soccer practice. In addition to the blue skirt, which rose high on the waist, Missi had provided a pair of wide-legged black trousers, a high-necked ivory woman’s blouse, and a trim blazer that had once been a lush periwinkle corduroy but now had elbows and collar faded to white from use.
At the very bottom, the sharpshooter had left a black-and-white-checkered bandanna. Connie held it for a moment, rubbing her thumb over the worn fabric. It was a touching gesture, one that said: You’re still one of us.
Connie shoved her tracksuit into her nylon gym bag, leaving the novel and her phone at the bottom. Before trotting off to the toilet, she slyly returned to the bar and asked Sleepless Joe for more coffee. While he was distracted, she drained the coffee, wincing from the bitterness, then shoved the cup in her bag along with the sad nub of a candle waiting to be burned on the edge of the bar top.
Just a stone from outside and the incense and she would be ready to cast the spell to return home. While she braved the toilet pit, she distracted herself with formulating a plan. She wasn’t sure yet if they could all travel with one spell. She and Adelle had arrived separately, and Connie had decided they ought to try to go at once the next time, to avoid the jumbled arrival they had suffered when entering the book.
And her promise to Missi . . . well, that was something else altogether.
She isn’t real. Even if she feels real, even if she seems like a friend, she’s just a character in a book, nothing more.
Connie wove her way back through the Congregation and away from the foul-smelling toilet ditch. Now that she had the checkered handkerchief tied around her neck, nobody bothered her or stopped her when she backtracked through the tunnel that led to the ladder and the chapel above.
Makeshift potato-sack curtains had been hung over the windows, the ill fit allowing meager morning light to filter into the chapel. Connie had visited King’s Chapel once on a field trip, and she remembered it being lush and formal, two stories, with a balcony and Roman-style white columns. Bright red pews lent it a regal air, while golden chandeliers cast a warm, holy glow over the marble walkway leading to the front. Now the pews were dirty and torn, the chandeliers lowered and ransacked for candles.
“Took you long enough,” Missi teased, waiting near one of the pews and picking at a nail in it with her forefinger. “Thought you might have fallen in. You afraid of heights?”
“No.”
“Good.” Missi turned, fringe flying, and brought Connie through the chapel and to a recessed series of stairs. “You told me your escape plan; now I’ll show you mine.”
They traveled up a few flights of perilously steep stairs, then up yet another flight of steeper, dirtier stairs curving claustrophobically higher into the bell tower. Connie remembered some kids on her field trip refusing to go up, terrified of the cramped little stairwell.
At the top they stood inside the King’s Chapel bell tower. Missi dodged right around the massive bell, modern for them but ancient for Connie, to a potato sack covering a window. The slats had been kicked out, so it opened onto a rickety platform and scaffolding someone had built onto the side of the bell tower, anchored to the narrow stone balcony fifteen or so feet below.
Connie felt the platform wobble as she crawled out onto it and winced, her breakfast swimming dangerously close to her throat.
“Just up the ladder. Almost there.” Missi scrambled up with acrobatic ease, then sat on the edge of the roof and dangled her legs over it.
The chapel didn’t have a steeple, though the roof over the main part of the building was sharply pointed. The roof of the bell tower, however, had barely any incline at all, enough so that someone, presumably Missi, had plonked something on the roof and covered it with a massive “tarp” of blankets and sacks stitched together haphazardly.
Connie breathed a sigh of relief once she was up the ladder and more firmly on the roof, kneeling and frowning at the covered object centered on top of the bell tower. In the swimming, foggy light of the morning, Connie could better see their location, and better see Missi.
“Are you wearing makeup?” Connie blurted.
She could swear the girl had rubbed pink paste on her cheeks, in almost comically perfect circles, like a doll’s symmetrical red dots.
Missi wiped hard at her face. “What? No. Is it stupid? You said last night ladies in the future wear all kinds of stuff on their faces! Anyway, I wouldn’t do that. You’re crazy. Here, look at this. . . .”
Connie grinned. Missi’s face was redder than ever as she blushed from her neck to the roots of her curling red hair.
After pulling the massive blanket off with a magician’s flair, Missi balled up some of the fabric and held it to her chest, waiting for Connie’s reaction with wide, glittering eyes.
“It’s . . .” Connie scratched the end of her nose. “It’s a basket?”
Missi rolled her eyes. “It’s a balloon. Don’t you dummies have those in the future?”
Connie smacked her forehead. “Yes, we do. You seem to be missing the balloon part, though.”
“Still finishing that,” Missi explained, dropping the covering blanket and running her hand reverently over the large and somewhat uneven weave of the square basket. “Joe and I work away at it at nights, bribe some of the children to do it with us. Their little fingers are better for stitchin’ anyway.”
“This is your escape plan?” Connie asked. She had to admit, it was imaginative. Borderline ridiculous, but also brave.
“We have tried every damn way out of this city except the air,” Missi replied, steel in her voice. “My daddy was in London before he had me—I got the idea from him. He met the great James Glaisher, the man who flew over London.” She heaved a dreamy sigh and looked to the sky. “Daddy would tell me all kinds of stories about him. About what a genius he was. Gave me a whole book full of his ideas about travel and balloons. Glaisher saw the streets of London from above, and he said the road ‘appeared like a line of brilliant fire.’”
Missi closed her eyes, a sweet, sad smile softening her face. “A line of brilliant fire. A dumb old road looking that way . . . I want to see the world that way too. I want to think one last nice and pretty thing about this city before I leave it behind for good.”
“Do you think it will work?” Connie asked. It wasn’t any crazier than a magic spell.
“Joe thinks we can manage, but it won’t carry much weight,” she replied, and with a grunt began covering the basket again. Connie rose to her feet to help, taking hold of one damp edge. “I said I would go first, and Farai isn’t scared to try neither. That way, it’s just two of us that go if . . . well, if the worst happens.”
Missi fell silent, looking more at Connie than at the blanket they were rearranging. “You think it’s stupid, don’t you?”
“I think it’s bold,” Connie said. Just like you.
It was Connie’s turn to blush, but Missi didn’t notice; she busied herself with soaking up the compliment.
“Just for that,” the sharpshooter said, digging in her pocket when the basket was once again covered and hidden, “you can have this now.”
Missi handed her a folded square of stained paper. When Connie flattened it out, she realized it was a crude map of Boston, primarily the streets surrounding the chapel and the relevant ones that would take her and Adelle to the seer woman.
“You were going to keep it from me if I thought your balloon was stupid?” Connie asked, glancing up from the map.
“Nah, but I might have made you squirm for a bit. . . .” Mississippi nodded toward the ladder. “Before you go, just . . . be careful, all right? I don’t trust that woman, not one bit. Farai and Geo are the bravest we got, and anything that scares them scares me, you hear?”
Connie nodded.
“Good. Go, get what you need to get, then come back here safely.”
“You’re worried about me,” Connie observed, finding that she didn’t so much mind when Missi blushed and smacked her playfully on the shoulder.
“I can take that map back,” the cowgirl warned, tilting her head to the side and raising a finger.
“Then how will I get you out of here?” It came out without Connie thinking. She regretted it immediately. Mississippi’s smile skewered her through the heart.
Don’t get her hopes up, you monster—you don’t know if she can come with you.
“I . . . I, um, I should go,” Connie mumbled, wrenching herself away and scrambling down the ladder. She couldn’t stand to look at the other girl for one more minute, not when her face was full of hope, and Connie had nothing but broken promises to offer.
20
ADELLE COULDN’T GET OUT of the Gardeners’ home fast enough.
Orla clung to her, the girls arm in arm, both of them keeping away from the walls. Whatever had happened to the family had not been peaceful. As soon as they reached the third floor, the corridors and rooms devolved into controlled chaos. The house lay in shadow, but here and there uncovered windows let in shafts of dreary light. Adelle almost wished for the full dark. Chairs were arranged in strange configurations in the middle of hallways; doors had had their knobs removed, and those knobs were found elsewhere, placed in a circle; words written in ink, feces, and blood covered the wallpaper.
Worse, Adelle recognized snatches of phrases, bits of sentences that twigged her memory and made her spine go rigid with panic.
Souls not just married together but irrevocably intertwined, sewn together with the thread of Fate. Tear them apart and they would bleed. For love was pain, that could not be denied—her heart ached for the thing she wanted, the thing she would stop at nothing to have.
As they traveled in a glued pair down the third-floor stairs, Adelle’s eyes remained fixed to the wall. Cold sweat gathered at her temples. The flowery descriptions in the novel no longer seemed so charming when they were written with scratching fingers in hardened, black blood.
Tear them apart and they would bleed. BLEED. Tear them apart. Tear.
TEAR AND BLEED. TEAR IT OUT OF ME.
TEAR IT OUT OF ME AND I BLEED.
“Poor Mrs. Gardener,” Orla whispered shakily. “Poor Mr. Gardener.”
“Did they have children?” Adelle asked, swallowing a sick, sour mouthful of fear.
“Y-yes. Two young sons and . . .” Orla glanced at her, pale as a cadaver. “And a baby.”
“I thought people walked into the sea,” Adelle said. She didn’t want to see any more of the writings, but something compelled her to look. As they rounded the landing, the scrawling on the wallpaper grew ever more frantic, the “paint” some unimaginable mixture as thick as paste. “Everyone keeps saying that, that they just walk . . .”
This doesn’t look like walking.
“Sometimes—sometimes people resist,” Orla stammered. “They try not to listen to the dreams, but it becomes worse and worse for them until they relent. It breaks my heart that they tried not to go. God in heaven, they were a lovely family.”
Adelle quickened her pace. She wanted out of the house. The words blurred as they made their way down toward the main level.
sewn together with the thread of Fate
SEW THEM SEW THEM I HAVE SEWN THEM TOGETHER
ANSWER ME FATE
ANSWER
YOU CALL AND I ANSWER
IT IS BORN
IT COMES
IT IS HERE
“We have to get out of here,” Adelle murmured. She didn’t feel well. It wasn’t just the smell or the palpable sense of dread and wrong and death that lingered in the house—when she looked away from the walls, she could swear the words were peeling off, following them, slithering like black snakes toward her. They wanted to infiltrate her mind, she was sure of it; they wanted to choke her like the vision from her dream. . . .
“We have to go, go now,” she whispered, breaking into a run. She knew the words were coming for her, hunting her.
Yes, so close, you feel it.
The voice. Adelle kept only the slightest grasp on Orla’s fingers, yanking her through the house until they stumbled into the front room. Something strange and yellow and taut like leather hung over the windows there. Adelle threw open the door, refusing to look any longer, refusing to acknowledge what those curtains might be.
Outside, the air obliterated the black snakes of words trying to infiltrate her. The door was shut and they were gone, but before she could think a single grateful thought, Orla gasped and flattened herself back against the door.
A Chanter standing in the road caught sight of them at once.
“What do we do?” Orla whispered.
He drew a weapon hanging from his belt, a club wrapped in newspaper, painted with paint or blood, Adelle didn’t care to know.
“We can’t go back in there,” Adelle replied. “We . . . we have to run, or fight him, or . . .” She couldn’t think. “Or . . . Or . . .”
A rumbling, grumbling thunder shook the ground beneath them. Orla screamed, huddling against Adelle’s side. But then the source of the noise made itself known—from down the road, to their right, back toward the Beevers’ house, a carriage shot along the cobbles, as unstoppable and swift as a runaway train.
The Chanter jerked to the side, club raised over his head, a muffled cry of surprise leaving him before the team of horses drove into his back, sending him flying across the road to land facedown in the gutter. The carriage pulled up short, the horses stamping and tossing.
The driver had protected his face from the dust with a black scarf, but he whipped it off to call out to them.
“Hampton!” Orla teetered forward on shaky feet, then found her footing and trotted to the box, taking his hand and wringing it. “You useful, beautiful idiot! You have saved us!”
“From now on,” he said with a nervous chuckle, wiping at his spot-covered face, “I promise only to hit the right folk.”
The door of the carriage swung open, surprising both of them, Orla bumping into Adelle. A pair of spectacles came first, then a handsome face, and finally a hand held out to help them.
“Caid! What are you doing here?” Orla’s surprise was forgotten, and she rushed to him.
