Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  She had the driver drop her in front of the fancy mini-mart on Elm. It wasn’t until she was already inside the store that she realized she was still wearing Darlington’s hat. She slid it off her head, then jammed it back on. It was cold. She didn’t need to be sentimental about a hat.

  Alex filled her basket with Chex Mix, Twizzlers, sour gummy worms. She shouldn’t be spending so much money, but she craved the comfort of junk food. She reached into the drinks case, rooting back for a chocolate milk with a better expiration date, and felt something brush her hand—fingertips caressing her knuckles.

  Alex yanked her arm back, cradling her hand to her chest as if it had been burned, and slammed the case door closed with a rattle, heart pounding. She stepped back from the case, waiting for something to come crashing through, but nothing happened. She looked around, embarrassed.

  A guy sporting little round glasses and a navy Yale sweatshirt glanced at her. She bent to pick up her shopping basket, using the chance to shut her eyes and take a deep breath. Imagination. Sleep deprivation. Just general jumpiness. Hell, maybe even a rat. But she’d pop in at the Hutch. It was right across the street. She could slip behind the wards to gather her thoughts in a Gray-less environment.

  She grabbed her basket and stood. The guy with the little glasses had come up next to her and was standing far too close. She couldn’t see his eyes, just the light reflecting off the lenses. He smiled and something moved at the corner of his mouth. Alex realized it was the waving black feeler of an insect. A beetle crawled from the pocket of his cheek as if he’d been keeping it there like chewing tobacco. It dropped from his lips. Alex leapt back, stifling a scream.

  Too slow. The thing in the blue sweatshirt seized the back of her neck and slammed her head into the door of the refrigerator case. The glass shattered. Alex felt the shards slice into her skin, warm blood trickling down her cheeks. He yanked her back, threw her to the ground. You can’t touch me. It isn’t allowed. Still, after all these years and all these horrors, that stupid, childish response.

  She staggered away. The woman behind the register was shouting, her husband emerging from the back room with wide eyes. The man in glasses advanced. Not a man. A Gray. But what had drawn him and helped him cross over? And why didn’t he seem like any Gray she’d ever seen? His skin no longer looked human. It had a sheer, glasslike quality through which she could see his veins and the shadows of his bones. He stank of the Veil.

  Alex dug in her pockets, but she hadn’t replenished her supplies of graveyard dirt. She almost always had some on her—just in case.

  “Take courage!” she cried. “No one is immortal!” The death words she’d repeated to herself every day since Darlington had taught them to her.

  But the thing showed no sign of distress or distraction.

  The shop owners were yelling; one of them had a phone in his hand. Yes, call the police. But they were screaming at her, not at him. They couldn’t see him. All they saw was a girl smashing their drinks case and tearing up their store.

  Alex launched to her feet. She had to get to the Hutch. She slammed through the door and out onto the sidewalk.

  “Hey!” cried a girl with a green coat as Alex smacked into her. The store owner followed, bellowing for someone to stop her.

  Alex glanced back. The thing with glasses glided around the owner and then seemed to leap over the crowd. His hand latched on to Alex’s throat. She stumbled off the lip of the curb, into the street. Horns blared. She heard the screech of tires. She couldn’t breathe.

  She saw Jonas Reed on the corner, staring. He was in her English section. She remembered Meagan’s startled face, the surprise giving way to disgust. She could hear Ms. Rosales gasp, Alex! Sweetheart! She was going to get choked out in the middle of the street and no one could see it, no one could stop it.

  “Take courage,” she tried to say, but only a rasp emerged. Alex looked around desperately, eyes watering, face suffused with blood. They can’t get to you now, Darlington had promised. She’d known it wasn’t true, but she’d let herself believe that she could be protected, because it had made everything bearable.

  Her hands scrabbled against the thing’s skin; it was hard and slippery as glass. She saw something burble up from the clear flesh of its throat, cloudy, dark red. His lips parted. He released her neck and, before she could stop herself, she inhaled sharply, just as he blew a stream of red dust into her face. Pain exploded through her chest in sharp bursts as the dust entered her lungs. She tried to cough, but the thing sat with his knees pressing down on her shoulders as she struggled to buck free.

  People were yelling. She heard a siren wail, but she knew the ambulance would be too late. She would die here in Darlington’s stupid hat. Maybe he’d be waiting on the other side of the Veil with Hellie. And Len. And all of the others.

  The world fluttered black—and then suddenly she could move. The weight vanished from her shoulders. She released a grunt and shoved to her feet, clutching her chest, trying to find her breath. Where had the monster gone? She looked up.

  High above the intersection, the thing with the glasses was grappling with something. No, someone. A Gray. The Bridegroom, New Haven’s favorite murder-suicide, with his fancy suit and silent-movie-star hair. The thing in glasses had hold of his lapels and he flickered slightly in the sun as they careened through the air, slammed into a streetlight that sparked to life and then dimmed, passed through the walls of a building and back out. The whole street seemed to shake as if rumbling with thunder, but Alex knew only she could hear it.

  The squeal of brakes cut through the noise. A black-and-white was pulling up on York, followed by an ambulance. Alex took a last look at the Bridegroom’s face, his mouth pulled back in a grimace as he launched his fist at his opponent. She bolted across the intersection.

  The pain in her chest continued to unfurl in popping bursts like fireworks. Something had happened to her, something bad, and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to stay conscious. She only knew she had to get to the Hutch, upstairs to the safety of Lethe’s hidden rooms. There might be other Grays coming, other monsters. What could they do? What couldn’t they do? She needed to get behind the wards.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw an EMT running toward her. She leapt up on the sidewalk around the corner and then into the alley. He was right behind, but he couldn’t protect her. She would die in his care. She knew this. She dodged left, toward the doorway, out of view.

  “It’s me!” she cried out to the Hutch, praying it would know her. The door blew open and the steps rolled toward her, pulling her inside.

  She tried to take the stairs on her feet but slid to her knees. Usually the smell of the hall was comforting, a winter smell of burning wood, cranberries cooking slowly, mulled wine. Now it made her stomach churn. It’s the uncanny, she realized. The garbage stink of the alley outside had at least been real. These false smells of comfort were too much. Her system couldn’t handle any more magic. She fastened one hand around the iron railing, the other braced against the lip of the stone step, and pushed herself up. She saw spots on the concrete, black stars blooming in lichen clusters on the stairs. Her blood, dripping from her lips.

  Panic reeled through her. She was on the floor in that public bathroom. The broken monarch flapped its one able wing.

  Get up. Blood can draw them. Darlington’s voice in her head. Grays can cross the line if they want something badly enough. What if the wards didn’t hold? What if they weren’t built to keep something like that monster out? The Bridegroom had seemed to be winning. And if he won? Who said he’d be any gentler than the thing in glasses? He hadn’t looked gentle at all.

  She tapped a message into her phone to Dawes. SOS. 911. There was probably some code she was supposed to use for bleeding from the mouth, but Dawes would just have to make do.

  If Dawes was at Il Bastone and not here at the Hutch, Alex was going to die on these stairs. She could see the grad student clearly, sitting in the par
lor of the house on Orange, those index cards she used to organize chapters spread out like the tarot before her, all of them reading disaster, failure. The Queen of Pointlessness, a girl with a cleaver over her head. The Debtor, a boy crushed beneath a rock. The Student, Dawes herself in a cage of her own making. All while Alex bled to death a mile away.

  Alex dragged herself up another step. She had to get behind the doors. The safe houses were a matryoshka doll of safety. The Hutch. Where small animals went to ground.

  A wave of nausea rolled through her. She retched and a gout of black bile poured from her mouth. It was moving on the stairs. She saw the wet, shiny backs of beetles. Scarabs. Bits of iridescent carapace glinting in whatever blood and sludge had erupted from her. She shoved past the mess she’d made, retching again, even as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening to her. What had that thing wanted from her? Had someone sent it after her? If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt. The stairwell was fading in and out now. She was not going to make it.

  She heard a metallic clang and a moment later understood it was the door banging open somewhere above her. Alex tried to cry out for help, but the sound from her mouth was a small, wet whimper. The smack of Dawes’s Tevas echoed down the stairs—a pause, then her footsteps, faster now, punctuated by “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  Alex felt a solid arm beneath her, yanking her upward. “Jesus. Jesus. What happened?”

  “Help me, Pammie.” Dawes flinched. Why had Alex used that name? Only Darlington called Dawes that.

  Her legs felt heavy as Dawes hauled her up the stairs. Her skin itched as if something was crawling beneath it. She thought of the beetles pouring from her mouth and retched again.

  “Don’t vomit on me,” said Dawes. “If you vomit, I’ll vomit.”

  Alex thought of Hellie holding her hair back. They’d gotten drunk on Jäger and then sat on the bathroom floor at Ground Zero, laughing and puking and brushing their teeth, then doing it all over again.

  “Move your legs, Alex,” Hellie said. She was pushing Alex’s knees aside, slumping down next to her in the big basket chair. She smelled like coconut and her body was warm, always warm, like the sun loved her, like it wanted to cling to her golden skin as long as possible.

  “Move your stupid legs, Alex!” Not Hellie. Dawes, shouting in her ear.

  “I am.”

  “You’re not. Come on, give me three more steps.”

  Alex wanted to warn Dawes that the thing was coming. The death words hadn’t affected it; maybe the wards wouldn’t stop it either. She opened her mouth and vomited again.

  Dawes heaved in response. Then they were on the landing, through the door, toppling forward. Alex found herself falling. She was on the floor of the Hutch, face pressed to the threadbare carpet.

  “What happened?” Dawes asked, but Alex was too tired to reply. She felt herself rolled onto her back, a sharp slap across her face. “Tell me what happened, Alex, or I can’t fix it.”

  Alex made herself look at Dawes. She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back to the basket chair, Hellie like a glowing slice of sun beside her.

  “A Gray, I don’t know. Like glass. I could see through him.”

  “Shit, that’s a gluma.”

  Alex needed her flash cards. The word was there, though, somewhere in her memory. A gluma was a husk, a spirit raised from the recently dead to pass through the world, go-betweens who could travel across the Veil. They were messengers. For Book and Snake.

  “There was red smoke. I breathed it in.” She heaved again.

  “Corpse beetles. They’ll eat you from the inside out.”

  Of course. Of course they would. Because magic was never good or kind.

  She heard bustling and then felt a cup pressed to her lips. “Drink,” said Dawes. “It’s going to hurt like hell and blister the skin right off your throat, but I can heal that.”

  Dawes was tipping Alex’s chin up, forcing her mouth open. Alex’s throat caught fire. She had a vision of prairies lit by blue flame. The pain seared through her and she grabbed Dawes by the hand.

  “Jesus, Alex, why are you smiling?”

  The gluma. The husk. Someone had sent something after her and there could only be one reason why: Alex was onto something. They knew she had gone to see Tara’s body. But who? Book and Snake? Skull and Bones? Whoever it was had no reason to think she would stop with a visit to the morgue. They didn’t know the choice she’d made, that the report had already been filed. Alex had been right. There was something wrong with Tara’s death, some connection to the societies, the Houses of the Veil. But that wasn’t why she was smiling.

  “They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.

  Manuscript, the young upstart among the Houses of the Veil but arguably the society that has weathered modernity best. It is easy to point to its Oscar winners and television personalities, but their alumni also include advisers to presidents, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, perhaps most tellingly, some of the greatest minds in neuroscience. When we speak of Manuscript, we talk of mirror magic, illusions, great glamours of the type that can make a star, but we would do well to remember that all of their workings derive from the manipulation of our own perception.

  —from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House

  Don’t go to a Manuscript party. Just don’t.

  —Lethe Days Diary of Daniel Arlington (Davenport College)

  10

  Last Fall

  The night of the Manuscript party, Darlington spent the early-evening hours with the windows of Black Elm lit, handing out candy, jack-o’-lanterns lining the driveway. He loved this part of Halloween, the ritual of it, the tide of happy strangers arriving on his shores, hands outstretched. Most times Black Elm felt like a dark island, one that had somehow ceased to appear on any chart. Not on Halloween night.

  The house lay in the gentle swell of a hill not far from the lands that had once belonged to Donald Grant Mitchell, and its library was stocked with multiple copies of Mitchell’s books: Reveries of a Bachelor, Dream Life, and the only title his grandfather had deemed worth reading, My Farm of Edgewood. As a boy, Darlington had been drawn in by the mysterious sound of Mitchell’s pen name, Ik Marvel, and woefully disappointed by the lack of anything magical or marvelous in his books.

  But that had been his feeling about everything. There should be more magic. Not the creased-greasepaint performances of clowns and hack illusionists. Not card tricks. The magic he’d been promised would be found at the backs of wardrobes, under bridges, through mirrors. It was dangerous and alluring and it did not seek to entertain. Maybe if he’d been raised in an ordinary house with quality insulation and a neatly mowed front yard, instead of beneath Black Elm’s crumbling towers, with its lakes of moss, its sudden, sinister spikes of foxglove, its seeping mist that crawled up through the trees in the autumn dusk, maybe then he would have stood a chance. Maybe if he’d been from somewhere like Phoenix instead of cursed New Haven.

  The moment that doomed him hadn’t even really belonged to him. He was eleven years old, at a picnic organized by the Knights of Columbus, which their housekeeper Bernadette had insisted on bringing him to because “boys need fresh air.” Once they’d arrived at Lighthouse Point, she sequestered herself beneath a tent with her friends and a plate of deviled eggs and told him to go play.

  Darlington had found a group of boys around his age, or they’d found him, and they spent the afternoon running races and competing in carnival games, then inventing their own games when those got boring. A tall boy named Mason, with buzzed hair and buck teeth, had somehow become the day’s decision maker—when to eat, when to swim, when a game got dull—and Darlington was happy to follow in his wake. When they tired of riding the old carousel, they walked down to the edge of the park that looked out over the Long Island Sound and the New Haven Harbor in the distance.

&nb
sp; “They should have boats,” said Mason.

  “Like a speedboat. Or a Jet Ski,” said a boy named Liam. “That would be cool.”

  “Yeah,” said another kid. “We could go across to the roller coaster.” He’d been tagging along with them all afternoon. He was small, his face dense with sand-colored freckles and now sunburned across the nose.

  “What roller coaster?” Mason asked.

  The freckled kid had pointed across the sound. “With all the lights on it. Next to the pier.”

  Darlington had looked into the distance but seen nothing there, just the fading day and a flat spit of land.

  Mason stared, then said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Even in the growing twilight, Darlington had seen red spreading hot across the freckled kid’s face. The kid laughed. “Nothing. I was just fucking with you.”

  “Tool.”

  They’d walked down to the thin sliver of beach to run back and forth in the waves, and the moment had been forgotten. Until months later, when Darlington’s grandfather opened his paper at the breakfast table and Darlington saw the headline: REMEMBERING SAVIN ROCK. Beneath it was a picture of a big wooden roller coaster jutting into the waters of the Long Island Sound. The caption read: The legendary Thunderbolt, a favorite at Savin Rock amusement park, destroyed by a hurricane in 1938.

  Darlington had cut the picture from the paper and taped it above his desk. That day at Lighthouse Point, that sunburned, freckled boy had seen the old roller coaster. He’d believed they could all see it. He hadn’t been pretending or joking around. He’d been surprised and embarrassed, and then he’d shut up quick. As if he’d had something like that happen before. Darlington had tried to remember his name. He’d asked Bernadette if they could go to the Knights of Columbus for bingo, potluck dinners, anything that might put him back in that kid’s path. Eventually his grandfather had put a stop to it with a growled “Stop trying to turn him into a goddamn Catholic.”