Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  “There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.”

  Again the murmuring rose from the banks of the western shore, and this time Alex thought she could pick out the sound of what might have been French. Jean Du Monde? It might be a man’s name or just nonsense syllables her mind was trying to shape into meaning.

  “You’ve had over a hundred years to try to find this mystery killer,” Alex said. “Why do you think I’m going to have any better luck?”

  “Your associate Daniel Arlington was looking into the case.”

  “I don’t think so.” An old murder that headlined Haunted New England tours wasn’t Darlington’s style at all.

  “He visited the … place where we fell. He had a notebook with him. He took photos. I highly doubt he was just sightseeing. I can’t get past the wards of the house on Orange Street. I want to know why he went there and what he found.”

  “And Darlington isn’t … he isn’t there? With you?”

  “Even the dead don’t know where Daniel Arlington is.”

  If the Bridegroom hadn’t found Darlington on the other side, then Sandow had to be right. He was just missing, and that meant he could be found. Alex needed to believe that.

  “Find Tara,” Alex said, eager to be out of the water and back to the world of the living. “I’ll see what work Darlington left behind. But I need to know something. Tell me you didn’t send that thing, the gluma, after me.”

  “Why would I—”

  “To form a connection between us. To make me indebted to you and lay the groundwork for this little partnership.”

  “I didn’t send that thing after you and I don’t know who did. How am I to convince you?”

  Alex wasn’t sure. She’d hoped she’d somehow be able to tell, that there was some vow she could force him to make, but she supposed she’d know soon enough. Assuming she could figure out what Darlington had discovered—if anything. The factory that had been the murder site was a parking garage now. Knowing Darlington, he’d probably gone there to take notes on the history of New Haven concrete.

  “Just find Tara,” she said. “Get me my answers and I’ll get yours.”

  “This is not the pact I would have chosen, nor are you the partner I would have sought, but we will both make the best of it.”

  “You’re quite the charmer. Daisy like that way with words?” The Bridegroom’s eyes turned black. Alex had to force herself not to take a step backward. “Quick temper. Just the type of guy to off a lady who got sick of his shit. Did you?”

  “I loved her. I loved her more than life.”

  “That isn’t an answer.”

  He took a deep breath, summoning his composure, and his eyes returned to their normal state. He held out his hand to her. “Speak your true name, Miss Stern, and let us make our bargain.”

  There was power in names. It was why the names of Grays were blacked from the pages of Lethe’s records. It was why she would rather think of the thing before her as the Bridegroom. The danger lay in connection, in the moment when you bound your life to someone else’s.

  Alex fingered the carob pod in her pocket. Best to be ready in case … what? He tried to drag her under? But why would he? He needed her and she needed him. That was how most disasters began.

  She took his hand in hers. His grip was firm, his palm damp and ice-cold against hers. What was she touching? A body? A thought?

  “Bertram Boyce North,” he said.

  “That’s a terrible name.”

  “It’s a family name,” he said indignantly.

  “Galaxy Stern,” she said, but when she tried to pull her hand back, his fingers closed tighter.

  “I have waited a long time for this moment.”

  Alex popped the carob pod into her mouth. “Moments pass,” she said, letting it rest between her teeth.

  “You thought me sleeping, but I heard you say, I heard you say, that you were no true wife.” Again, Alex tried to pull away. His hand stayed closed hard around hers. “I swear I will not ask your meaning in it: I do believe yourself against yourself, and will henceforward rather die than doubt.”

  Rather die than doubt. Tara’s tattoo. The quote wasn’t from some metal band.

  “Idylls of the King,” she said.

  “You remember now.”

  She’d had to read the whole long sprawl of Tennyson’s poem as part of the preparation for Darlington’s and her first visit to Scroll and Key. There were quotes from it all over their tomb, tributes to King Arthur and his knights—and a vault full of treasures plundered during the Crusades. Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live. She remembered the words etched into the stone table at the Locksmiths’ tomb.

  Alex shook free of the Bridegroom’s grip. So Tara’s death was potentially connected to three societies. Tara was tied to Skull and Bones through Tripp Helmuth, to Book and Snake by the gluma attack, and—unless Tara had a secret taste for Victorian poetry—she was linked to Scroll and Key by her Tennyson tattoo.

  North bowed slightly. “When you find something that belonged to Tara, bring it to any body of water and I will come to you. They are all crossing places for us now.”

  Alex flexed her fingers, wanting to be free of the feel of the Bridegroom’s hand in hers. “I’ll do that.” She turned from him, biting down on the carob pod, her mouth flooding with a bitter, chalky taste.

  She tried to push toward the eastern bank, but the river yanked at her knees and she stumbled. She felt herself pulled backward as she lost her footing, her boots seeking purchase on the riverbed as she was dragged toward the host of dark shapes on the western shore. North had his back to her and he already seemed impossibly far away. The shapes did not look quite human anymore. They were too tall, too lean, their arms long and bent at wrong angles, like insects. She could see their heads silhouetted against the indigo sky, noses lifted as if scenting her, jaws opening and closing.

  “North!” she shouted.

  But North did not break his stride. “The current claims us all in the end,” he called without turning. “If you want to live, you have to fight.”

  Alex gave up trying to find the bottom. She wrenched her body toward the east and swam, kicking hard, fighting the current as she plunged her arms into the water. She turned her head to gasp for breath, the weight of her shoes drawing her down, her shoulders aching. Something heavy and muscular bumped her, driving her back; a tail lashed her leg. Maybe the crocodiles couldn’t harm her, but they could do the river’s work. Fatigue sat leaden in her muscles. She felt her pace slow.

  The sky had gone dark. She couldn’t see the shore any longer, wasn’t even sure she was swimming in the right direction. If you want to live.

  And wasn’t that the worst of it? She did. She did want to live and always had.

  “Hell!” she shouted. “Goddamn hell!” The sky exploded with forked lightning. A little blasphemy to light the way. For a long, horrible moment, there was only black water, and then she spotted the eastern shore.

  She drove forward, plowing her hands through the water, until at last she let her legs drop. The bottom was there, closer than she’d thought. She crawled through the shallows, crushing lotus blossoms beneath her sodden body, and slumped down on the sand. She could hear the crocodiles behind her, the low engine rumble of their open mouths. Would they nudge her back to the river’s grasp? She dragged herself a few more feet, but she was too heavy. Her body was sinking into the sand, the grains weighing her down, filling her mouth, her nose, drifting beneath her eyelids.

  Something hard struck Alex’s head again, then again. She forced her eyes open. She was on her back on the floor of the temple room, choking up mud and staring at Dawes’s frightened face framed by the painted sky—mercifully static and free of clouds. Her body was shaking so hard she could hear the thump of her own skull on the stone floor.

  Dawes seized her, wrapped her up tight, and, slowly, Alex’s muscles stopped spasming. Her breathing returne
d to normal, though she could still taste silt and the bitter remnants of carob in her mouth. “You’re all right,” said Dawes. “You’re all right.”

  And Alex had to laugh, because the last thing she would ever be was all right.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she managed.

  Dawes slung Alex’s arm around her shoulders with surprising strength and pulled her to her feet. Alex’s clothes were bone dry, but her legs and arms felt wobbly, as if she’d tried to swim a mile. She could still smell the river, and her throat had the raw, fish-slick feel of water going up her nose.

  “Where do I leave the key?” asked Dawes.

  “By the door,” said Alex. “I’ll text Salome.”

  “That seems so civil.”

  “Never mind. Let’s break a window and pee on the pool table.”

  Dawes released a breathy giggle.

  “It’s okay, Dawes. I didn’t die. Much. I went to the borderlands. I made a deal.”

  “Oh, Alex. What did you do?”

  “What I set out to do.” But she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. “The Bridegroom is going to find Tara for us. That’s the easiest way to figure out who hurt her.”

  “And what does he want?”

  “He wants me to clear his name.” She hesitated. “He claims Darlington was looking into the murder-suicide.”

  Dawes’s brows shot up. “That doesn’t sound right. Darlington hated popular cases like that. He thought they were … ghoulish.”

  “Tawdry,” said Alex.

  A faint smile touched Dawes’s lips. “Exactly. Wait … then the Bridegroom didn’t kill his fiancée?”

  “He says he didn’t. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  Maybe he was innocent, maybe he wanted to make peace with Daisy, maybe he just wanted to find his way back to the girl he had murdered. It didn’t matter. Alex would hold up her end of the bargain. Whether you made a deal with the living or the dead, best not to come up short.

  We may wish to pass more quickly over Book and Snake, and who could blame us? There is an element of the unsavory to the art of necromancy, and this natural revulsion can be nothing but increased by the way the Lettermen have chosen to present themselves. When entering their giant mausoleum, one can hardly forget one is entering a house of the dead. But it is perhaps best to put aside fear and superstition and instead contemplate a certain beauty in their motto: Everything changes; nothing perishes. In truth, the dead are rarely raised beneath their showy pediments. No, the bread and butter of the Lettermen is intelligence, gathered from a network of dead informants, who traffic in all manner of gossip and who needn’t listen at keyholes when they can simply walk unseen through walls.

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

  Tonight Bobbie Woodward coaxed the location of an abandoned speakeasy from what looked like little more than the remnants of a spine, a broken jawbone, and a hunk of hair. There is no amount of Jazz Age bourbon that can make me forget that sight.

  —Lethe Days Diary of Butler Romano (Saybrook College ’65)

  13

  Last Fall

  Darlington had woken from the Manuscript party with the worst shame hangover of his life. Alex showed him a copy of the report she’d sent. She’d kept the details murky, and though he wanted to be the kind of person who demanded a strict adherence to the truth, he really wasn’t sure he could look Dean Sandow in the eye if the specifics of his humiliation were known.

  He’d showered, made Alex breakfast, then called a car to take them both back to the Hutch so he could pick up the Mercedes. He returned to Black Elm in the old car, the images of the previous night a blur in his head. He collected the pumpkins along the drive and put them in the compost pile, raked the leaves from the back lawn. It felt good to work. The house suddenly seemed very empty, in a way it hadn’t in a long time.

  He’d brought few people to Black Elm. When he’d invited Michelle Alameddine to see the place his freshman year, she’d said, “This place is crazy. How much do you think it’s worth?” He hadn’t known how to answer.

  Black Elm was an old dream, its romantic towers raised by a fortune made on the soles of vulcanized rubber boots. The first Daniel Tabor Arlington, Darlington’s great-great-great-grandfather, had employed thirty thousand people in his New Haven plant. He’d bought up art and iffy antiquities, purchased a six-thousand-square-foot vacation “cabin” on a New Hampshire lake, given out turkeys at Thanksgiving.

  The hard times had begun with a series of factory fires and ended with the discovery of a process to successfully waterproof leather. Arlington rubber boots were sturdy and easy to mass-manufacture but miserably uncomfortable. When Danny was ten, he’d found a heap of them in the Black Elm attic, shoved into a corner as if they’d misbehaved. He’d dug through until he found a matched pair and used his T-shirt to wipe the dust off them. Years later, when he took his first hit of Hiram’s elixir and saw his first Gray, pale and leached of color as if still shrouded in the Veil, he would remember the look of those boots covered in dust.

  He’d intended to wear the boots all day, stomping around Black Elm and mucking about in the gardens, but he only lasted an hour before he pulled them off and shoved them back into their pile. They’d given him a keen understanding of why, as soon as people had been offered another option for keeping the wet off their feet, they’d taken it. The boot factory had closed and stood empty for years, like the Smoothie Girdle factory, the Winchester and Remington plants, the Blake Brothers and Rooster Carriages before them. As he grew older, Darlington learned that this was always the way with New Haven. It bled industry but stumbled on, bleary and anemic, through corrupt mayors and daft city planners, through misguided government programs and hopeful but brief infusions of capital.

  “This town, Danny,” his grandfather liked to say, a common refrain, sometimes bitter, sometimes fond. This town.

  Black Elm had been built to look like an English manor house, one of the many affectations adopted by Daniel Tabor Arlington when he made his fortune. But it was only in old age that the house really became convincing, the slow creep of time and ivy accomplishing what money could not.

  Danny’s parents came and went from Black Elm. They sometimes brought presents, but more often they ignored him. He didn’t feel unwanted or unloved. His world was his grandfather, the housekeeper Bernadette, and the mysterious gloom of Black Elm. An endless stream of tutors buttressed his public school education—fencing, world languages, boxing, mathematics, piano. “You’re learning to be a citizen in the world,” his grandfather said. “Manners, might, and know-how. One will always do the trick.” There wasn’t much to do at Black Elm besides practice and Danny liked being good at things, not just the praise he received, but the feeling of a new door unlocking and swinging wide. He excelled at each new subject, always with the sense that he was preparing for something, though he didn’t know what.

  His grandfather prided himself on being as much blue collar as blue blood. He smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, the brand he’d first been given on the factory floor, where his own father had insisted he spend his summers, and he ate at the counter at Clark’s Luncheonette, where he was known as the Old Man. He had a taste for both Marty Robbins and what Danny’s mother described as “the histrionics of Puccini.” She called it his “man-of-the-people act.”

  There was little warning when Danny’s parents came to town. His grandfather would just say, “Set the table for four tomorrow, Bernadette. The Layabouts are gracing us with their presence.” His mother was a professor of Renaissance art. He wasn’t entirely sure what his father did—micro-investing, portfolio building, foreign-market hedges. It seemed to change with every visit and it never seemed to be going well. What Danny did know was that his parents lived off his grandfather’s money and that the need for more of it was the thing that lured them back to New Haven. “The only thing,” his grandfather would say, and Danny did not quite have the heart to argue.


  The conversations around the big dinner table were always about selling Black Elm and became more urgent as the neighborhood around the old house began to come back to life. A sculptor from New York had bought up a run-down old home for a dollar, demolished it, and built a vast open-space studio for her work. She’d convinced her friends to follow, and Westville had suddenly started to feel fashionable.

  “This is the time to sell,” his father would say. “When the land is finally worth something.”

  “You know what this town is like,” his mother said. This town. “It won’t last.”

  “We don’t need this much space. It’s going to waste; the upkeep alone costs a fortune. Come to New York. We could see you more often. We could get you into a doorman building or you could move someplace warm. Danny could go to Dalton or board at Exeter.”

  His grandfather would say, “Private schools turn out pussies. I’m not making that mistake again.”

  Danny’s father had gone to Exeter.

  Sometimes Danny thought his grandfather liked toying with the Layabouts. He would examine the scotch in his glass, lean back, prop his feet by the fire if it was winter, contemplate the green cloud formations of the elm trees that loomed over the back garden in the summer. He would seem to think on it. He would debate the better places to live, the upside to Westport, the downside to Manhattan. He’d expound on the new condominiums going up by the old brewery, and Danny’s parents would follow wherever his fancies led, eagerly, hopefully, trying to build a new rapport with the old fellow.

  The first night of their visits always ended with I’ll think on it, his father’s cheeks rosy with liquor, his mother gamely clutching her cocoon of plush cashmere around her shoulders. But by the close of day two the Layabouts would start to get restless, irritable. They’d push a little harder and his grandfather would start to push back. By the third night, they were arguing, the fire in the grate sparking and smoking when no one remembered to add another log.