by Laura Legend
Cass smiled. Maya eyed her, head slightly cocked to one side as if she was still assessing Cass. She then continued: “We should get some rest and then try first thing in the morning.”
Maya paused, as if waiting for them to fill in the next obvious blank in their conversation. She looked at them both, lingering for a moment at Cass’s wayward eye, then explained, “There are only two beds in the bedroom.”
Cass and Maya both turned to Zach.
Zach put up his hands in a defensive gesture. “What? I definitely don’t need both the beds,” he teased.
“Right,” Maya said, “I am glad to hear you agree. Cass and I will share the room and you will sleep out here.”
19
With that, the evening came to an abrupt end. Maya repacked her bag and Cass crashed on a creaky twin mattress. Zach found an extra blanket in the closet and made himself a bed on the living room floor. Maya turned out the lights and, within sixty seconds of lying down, was gently snoring.
Dim light from a street lamp cast a shadow through the blinds and onto the wall above Cass’s bed. Cass lay in bed for a long time, staring at the bars of light and shadow, exhausted but not sleeping. Her emotions, unsettled, rattled their cages. Every time she closed her eyes, rather than seeing darkness, Cass would see the unmarked door they’d passed after descending the stairs into the Underside. The image was sharp and vivid. She could almost feel the door’s lock, bright and cold and solid, under the tips of her fingers.
The previous night’s twelve hours of rest now seemed like an impossibly distant miracle. How had she done it? How had she finally slept after months of torment?
What was different?
Zach.
The answer was Zach.
Cass grabbed her pillow and tiptoed out to the front room. Maya continued to snore. Zach also looked to be asleep. Cass settled onto the floor behind him, balling up her pillow and slipping an arm around his waist. The zoo of emotions in her head quieted down. Her guilt over Richard’s supposed death, the loss she’d been struggling both to feel and move past, and her growing desire for Zach’s steady presence in her life stopped fighting with each other. She felt an honest hush of gratitude and acceptance take hold. She squeezed Zach tighter, snuggling close. Everything in her head went silent.
Zach rolled toward her, mumbling something, his eyes half open, pulling her close.
The second time he tried to say it, Cass made out what he was whispering.
“I’m sorry, Cass. About Richard. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. They were wrong to ask me to keep it a secret. And I was wrong to go along with it . . .”
Cass didn’t answer. She didn’t want to sort out feelings she couldn’t quite feel. She knew that underneath her relief at Richard’s reappearance, she was also incredibly angry at the deception. But it wasn’t just Zach. Ultimately, it was Richard’s choice not to let her know he was alive. And that choice cut her deeply.
So she pressed a finger to Zach’s lips to silence him. He hesitated for a moment—but when she left her pistachio-stained finger on his lips, he kissed it. Then kissed it again. Cass leaned in and returned his kiss, her hand slipping beneath his torn shirt, resting in the small of his back. She bit his lip, lightly, playfully. He tucked her dark hair behind her ear. He pulled her closer, gently, his arm around her waist. He held her as if with one wrong move, he might shatter her. His hand settled low on her hip, his thumb hooked inside the waistband of her jeans, trying to hang on.
She kissed him again, fiercely. Her weak eye slipped into focus, softly burning.
Zach forgot his own name.
When he remembered, he opened his eyes again. He was startled by what he saw. Whiffs of radiantly white smoke rose from Cass and swirled around them. He looked directly into her normally cloudy eye, illuminated now from the inside out.
He smiled crookedly at the sight of her glowing. Cass, embarrassed, buried her head in his shoulder, biting her own lip this time.
“Zach,” she said.
“Cass,” he returned, waiting.
Cass didn’t know what to say next. They enjoyed the silence.
“Just rest, Cass,” Zach said. “Just rest, now.”
Her eyelids were heavy. She mumbled a response. She wrapped Zach around her like a blanket and slipped almost immediately into a deep sleep. Zach folded her even more tightly into his arms and joined her.
They slept without interruption until the morning.
Cass slept without stirring until she woke with a start when something sharp scratched her bare ankle. The morning sun had already flooded the room with light. She could feel a hot line of blood welling on her ankle. Cass forced herself to lie perfectly still.
Whatever had scratched her, it wasn’t Zach.
20
Atlantis was purring and batting Cass’s leg with his paw. How the cat had gotten to Rome or into a locked room—these were things Cass wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Atlantis came and went as he pleased. Apart from Cass, he lived a mysterious life all his own. Cass, though, was always happy to see him.
Cass reached down and scooped him up, burying her face deep in his fur. He reminded her of home. Zach mumbled something about being late for his third period biology class and fell silent again, his arm still around Cass.
“Hmmm,” Maya said from the bedroom door, already dressed and ready to go. She surveyed the scene: Zach snuggling Cass snuggling Atlantis. “I do hope sleeping together on the living room floor also actually involved getting some sleep. We have got a busy day ahead of us.”
Zach jerked awake, his cheeks flushing a crimson red. He started to protest but Atlantis squirmed free of Cass and started batting at his nose like a ball of string.
Zach stumbled to the bathroom and Cass tidied up the mess, folding blankets, moving couches, and making beds. While Zach was still in the shower, a delivery boy showed up with coffee and biscotti. When Zach rejoined them, Cass took her turn in the shower.
It was hard to say what last night had meant. Cass and Zach were hesitant to make eye contact. They gathered up their gear. The tension between them was subtle but palpable.
While Cass and Zach were waiting awkwardly on the small landing at the top of the stairs to the apartment, Maya was still inside, shutting everything down. As Zach started to whistle, studying the clouds in the morning sky, Cass decided this wasn’t going to work. They couldn’t just pretend to go back to the ways things had been before. And whatever her feelings for Richard, she couldn’t ignore the very real way in which Zach grounded her, and the way she was coming to need and desire him.
I’m choosing, she realized. Seeing Richard had released something inside her: a mixture of guilt and desire with a dash of fantasy and yes, even love, would continue to run its course, but she would no longer allow it to control her choices. And I’m choosing Zach.
“Zach,” she said, taking his hand and calling for his attention.
“It’s okay, Cass . . .” he said, looking over her shoulder.
“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” Cass responded, pressing him back against the door and kissing him again. The kiss went on long enough that Maya had to rattle the door knob and ask to please be let out of the apartment. When she finally got through the door, Zach, rather than blushing again, just beamed. Maya couldn’t help but offer a small eye roll, but she was glad for the improved vibe.
They hurried out to the street where Maya had a car waiting for them. Atlantis jumped free of Cass as they got into the car, but Cass was pretty sure that, on several occasions along their route, she spotted him weaving through the crowded sidewalks, following them.
The driver left them off at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls but they weren’t actually aiming to see the chains yet. First, they needed to track down the missing element of the spell-breaker. Cass led them around the corner of the basilica and down a narrow side street. The small, private library they needed was a couple of blocks away. The library was a small, two story
building, a nondescript converted house. A small wooden sign, written in Latin, hung neatly from an iron rod above the door: Bibliotheca Mysteria.
Cass stopped at the door, trying to decide if they were supposed to knock first. Maya, though, brushed past Cass and walked right in. Cass and Zach followed her to find themselves in a small foyer with a few books and artifacts on display and a tiny Italian woman, surely in her seventies with coke-bottle glasses perched on her nose, seated behind a desk. The sign on her desk read: “By Appointment Only.”
Maya, in fluent Italian, explained that they needed access to the collection this morning. The old woman, her eyes comically magnified by her thick glasses, looked up at Maya in disbelief. She shook her head and pointed to the sign.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she said. “The collection can only be seen by appointment.”
Maya steeled herself for negotiation. “I understand,” she said. “With whom should I speak to make a reservation?”
“I make all the reservations,” the woman sternly replied, gripping the appointment book, surprised that anyone would think differently.
“May we have a reservation for this morning,” Maya asked, checking her watch, “for the top of the hour?”
The librarian opened her appointment book and scanned through all the appointments for the coming week. The entire page was blank. Then she pointed to the appointment sign.
“Again, I’m afraid that’s impossible. As the sign indicates, all appointments must be made a week in advance.”
Maya bent close, examining the fine print of the sign. It did indeed say this in tiny letters at the bottom of the sign. Maya looked at the librarian, at the empty appointment book open on the desk, and then back at the librarian. She waited.
“I don’t make the rules,” the librarian said. “I just follow them. You’re welcome to make an appointment for this time next week.”
Maya looked like she was struggling to formulate a sufficiently diplomatic response. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursed, and one vein in her left bicep visibly throbbed.
Zach felt like he’d better jump in with some kind of distraction. He looked down to find Atlantis at his feet, purring and rubbing up against his leg. He gave Cass a nudge, picked up the cat, and started to loudly praise the cat’s beauty.
“Awww, what a bweautiful kitty-witty cat,” he exclaimed, stroking Atlantis between the ears and drawing the librarian’s attention away from Maya. The distraction was surprisingly effective. At the sight of Atlantis, a look of horror crossed the librarian’s face.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing, young man!” she half-shouted, half-sneezed. “Get that filthy animal out of here!”
She grabbed a broom from behind the desk and went after Zach and the cat with surprising speed, as if she intended to either sweep them away or beat them over the head. She looked ready to do whichever was necessary.
Zach started backing away toward the door, all the while going on and on in his sing-song voice about “not hurting bweautiful kitty-witties.” The more he cooed and backpedaled around the room, the angrier the librarian became.
Cass, meanwhile, could take a hint. She grabbed Maya by the elbow and, as the librarian sneezed and took an actual swing at Zach’s head, the two of them slipped quietly into the special collections room behind the desk. The room was gorgeous. It was filled with floor to ceiling shelves, books, reading tables, lamps, rich carpets, and the heady scent of yellowed paper and worn leather. Cass’s heart leapt: there were few things in the world she loved more than old books.
“Okay,” Cass said, trying to focus on their situation, “now what? That distraction isn’t going to last long. She’ll have Zach bruised and out the door any minute. We’ll never find what we’re looking for in time.”
“True,” Maya said. “But it is also the case that what we are looking for is unlikely to be found in this part of the collection. We do not just need access to the special collection, we need access to the . . . special special collection.”
With that, Maya pulled a funky, three-pronged key from her bag with the head of an actual skeleton cast on one end. She headed for a side door and took a look inside. It appeared to be a broom closet. She shut the door again, inserted the key, and turned it an entire three hundred and sixty degrees.
When she opened the door a second time, a deep, golden light shone out.
“This is the room we need,” Maya said.
Cass stepped through the door and found herself in a vast, Gothic room with a bank of stained glass windows on one end, framed by arches and lit by torches, with shelves of books receding upward and outward into the darkness.
21
The light filtering through the stained glass was weak and came from a low angle. Rather than morning, it felt like early evening. It felt like twilight. “We’re in the Underside,” Cass deduced.
“Very good,” Maya said. “Often, there are, in very old places like this, little pockets of the Underside adjacent to the everyday world or forgotten passages leading from one world to the other. These spaces aren’t always stable and, sometimes, they move of their own accord, slipping from one neighboring space to another. Sometimes, like a bubble, they just pop and disappear altogether.”
Cass craned her neck backward, trying to take in the size of the space while also remembering that, in the everyday world, all of this fit in a broom closet.
“I don’t know how I’ll even begin to sort through the books we have here,” Cass said, cowed by the undefined size of the stacks receding into the darkness. “It could take days for me to just get my bearings, and weeks of research after that to gather the obscure information about Paul that we’d need for the missing element of the spell-breaker.”
Cass trailed her hand along the spines of a row of leather-bound books, scanning the mostly Greek, Latin, and Arabic titles.
Maya smiled. “In this place, I think we may be able to take a more direct route. Are you familiar with a lost text called ‘The Gospel According to St. Paul’?”
“Yeah,” Cass said, “I’ve heard of it. But no one has read it. It’s been lost for almost two thousand years. Many scholars doubt there is such a thing. Its existence is only mentioned in a handful of apocryphal texts.”
Cass’s attention snagged on the cover of a book she’d just stumbled across on the shelf: Aristotle’s book on Comedy, the lost second half of his Poetics. She reached to pull it off the shelf but Maya, from behind, constrained her arm and gently pointed her face in a different direction. Her touch was firm but inviting. Cass felt a pleasant, electric shock travel down her spine as Maya whispered into her ear: “Not today, my dear. Not today. What we need is over there.”
Maya smiled and pointed at an old fashioned card catalogue, straight out of the fifties, positioned beneath a torch on the other side of the room.
“This is how we find the book we need. The book is somewhere in this labyrinth of stacks. The catalogue is the key to those stacks. The trick, though, is that an extremely valuable book like Paul’s Gospel is unlikely to just have a card of its own. But, if we’re lucky, we should be able to decode its location from a couple of other cards.”
Maya stooped down to examine the labels on the different card catalogue drawers. Cass watched over her shoulder. Maya ran her finger from one drawer to the next and stopped abruptly at the top of the third row.
“This is the one,” Maya said, sliding her finger into the drawer’s rounded brass handle.
But when she pulled, nothing happened. She tried again, pulling harder. Still nothing. The drawer was wedged in place.
“There is no way this damn drawer will have the better of me,” Maya threatened. She slid her index finger back into the brass handle and pulled, her triceps in sharp relief. When the handle itself began to bow outward, Cass feared that she’d just pull the handle clean off and leave the drawer intact. But before the handle could snap, the drawer came loose all at once. It came flying out of its slot, scatte
ring a thousand manually typed index cards into the air.
“Mother!” Maya swore as the cards went airborne, swirling around them like a blizzard of fat, flat snowflakes.
Cass, though, didn’t panic. The moment the cards came loose, Cass felt a deep calm settle over her. The truth was that they couldn’t afford to fail at this. Miranda was in danger and they needed to act fast. They needed to find her.
And, especially, the truth was that Cass needed to find her.
Cass flashed on a memory of Miranda, graveside at Rose’s funeral, pulling Cass close and kissing her on the forehead. When the image flashed in her mind, Cass felt a small, white fire flicker and ignite in her head.
Time slowed to crawl, but Cass could still move freely. Unhurried, she stepped into the eye of the blizzard. Her weak eye wandered of its own accord from one card to the next, reading each of them as they fluttered by.
“Here,” she said to herself, plucking a card from the air. “This one.”
She pinched a second and a third between her thumb and index finger. “And this one. And this one.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for, but when she saw a card they needed, it clearly stood out from the rest. It gave off a faint glow. Cass turned slowly in a circle, her wandering eye still scanning each card.
She plucked a fourth card from the air, then bent low to look more closely at a final card, already close to the ground. “And this one,” she finished, snagging the fifth.
Once she had all five cards in hand, time snapped back into its regular shape and the remaining cards that had, a moment ago, been suspended in the air, crashed to the ground in a heap, covering the stone floor in chaotic layers of white index cards.
Cass fanned out all five cards in her hand and held them up for Maya like she’d just been dealt the winning hand in poker.