Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  I knew she was right, but all I wanted to do was kiss her some more. I leaned toward her.

  “Promise me you’ll keep me informed,” she said. “Tell me everything you find.”

  I sighed and stood up. “I will. I promise. But it’s just a hunch right now.”

  “A hunch is better than nothing,” she said, also standing.

  I wasn’t ready to say goodbye just yet. I liked being with her, and not just because she could tell me about my past. I felt good around her. I felt like myself.

  I reached for her hand. Our fingers twined around each other. Her lips had felt so good on mine I pulled her close for another taste. Mary the bartender yelled at us to get a room. Jordana gently pushed me away, grinning.

  “You have to go,” she reminded me, hitting me playfully on the chest. “You have a world to save, remember?”

  * * *

  I was back at Citadel forty minutes later, surprised to see Isaac still awake. He was sitting alone at the big table in the main room with his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. On the table in front of him was Calliope’s notebook, as well as nearly a dozen other books from his library and his laptop. He glanced studiously back and forth between the mess on the table and the words on the whiteboard.

  “We were wrong, it’s not a code,” I said as I shrugged out of my trench coat.

  Isaac looked up at me with a satisfied grin. “I know,” he said, taking off his glasses. “It’s a map.”

  Seventeen

  The hour was late, but this was too big to sit on until morning. With Philip away, we called Bethany and Gabrielle back at Citadel. Only, Gabrielle wasn’t answering her phone. I tried calling her multiple times. It left me with a bad feeling. Where was she? I hoped she was okay. Bethany came in, but as we sat at the big table in the main room she barely looked my way. I could tell she was still upset from earlier.

  Isaac stood in front of the whiteboard. “As soon as we learned the Codex Goetia was missing, things began to fall into place. I’ve been wondering all this time what Calliope was looking for, how she thought she could stop Arkwright before he summoned the demon. Now I understand. Calliope was looking for the Codex fragments. She knew if she could get to them before Arkwright did, she could stop it. The spirits she communed with gave her the information in her notebook, but I believe she was only just starting to decipher it when she was killed.”

  “The Codex was broken into three fragments, and each fragment was hidden separately,” I said. I stood up and walked over to the whiteboard, studying the phrases written there:

  Eternal voice and inward word

  Arching towers kirk

  Hidden mariner lost at sea

  Beneath the three monuments

  Look to the Trefoil pieces

  The Angel of the Waters

  Codex Goetia

  “They’re clues. All of them,” I said. “Bethany figured out one of them earlier today.” I erased Arching towers kirk and wrote in Erickson Arkwright. “Arkwright could have left New York City anytime to start a new life under his assumed identity, but he didn’t. He stayed here. Why? Because he knew the three pieces of the Codex were here, too, and he wanted them. He just didn’t know where they were. Somehow he must have discovered Calliope was asking questions about him, about his cult, and about the demon, Nahash-Dred. My guess is, he thought if Calliope knew this much, she might also know where the fragments are. He began watching her, following her, waiting to make his move.” I thought of Calliope’s gutted body nailed to the ceiling of her bedroom. “He must have tortured her for information. I’m guessing she died before he found out about her notebook.”

  “Hold on, Trent,” Bethany said. She was looking at me finally, but her gaze felt as hard and sharp as drill points. “What makes you so sure these are clues to the fragments’ locations?”

  “That’s not my name,” I told her. “Call me Lucas.”

  Bethany’s eyebrows lifted so high they nearly left her head. “What?”

  “Trent isn’t my name,” I explained. “It never was. I know it’s a lot to get used to. It’s a lot for me to get used to, too. But Lucas is my name. And to answer your question, the reason I’m sure these are clues to where the fragments are hidden is because we wrote them down wrong. That’s why we didn’t know from the start that Calliope was creating a kind of map.”

  I erased one word from the third line, another word from the fourth line, and yet another from the fifth. Then I wrote them all together on their own line above the others, spelling out:

  Three hidden pieces

  “There’s more,” Isaac said. He picked up the dry-erase marker and circled the word monuments on the whiteboard. “There are thousands of monuments across New York City. Not just in our cemeteries. Our parks are filled with statuary, our plazas, squares, pedestrian malls. The façades of buildings like Grand Central Terminal. New York is a city of monuments, second in the country only to Washington, D.C. I think this is telling us the three fragments are hidden under three different monuments.”

  “I’m convinced the fragments are still out there,” I said. “Calliope died before she could collect them herself. Now it’s up to us. If we find them before Erickson Arkwright does, we can stop him from summoning Nahash-Dred. We can stop him from ending the world.”

  “So, Lucas,” Bethany said, treating my name like a verbal eye roll. “Why don’t you tell us what our next step is?”

  I sighed. I was never going to hear the end of it from her. “Our next step is to figure out what all this means.” I turned back to the whiteboard.

  Three hidden pieces

  Eternal voice and inward word

  Erickson Arkwright

  Mariner lost at sea

  Beneath the monuments

  Look to the Trefoil

  The Angel of the Waters

  Codex Goetia

  This wasn’t going to be easy. Even knowing that each phrase meant something important, it still looked like a bunch of gibberish to me.

  We started at the top. Isaac ran the phrase Eternal voice and inward word through an Internet search engine. He spun the laptop around on the table so Bethany and I could see the results on the monitor.

  “It’s from a poem,” he said. “‘The Shadow and the Light’ by John Greenleaf Whittier.”

  “The Shadow and the Light” ran several pages long. Isaac scrolled through it until he reached the pertinent stanza:

  O Beauty, old yet ever new!

  Eternal Voice, and Inward Word,

  The Logos of the Greek and Jew,

  The old sphere-music which the Samian heard!

  I had no fucking idea what it meant. I read it again and again until my eyes hurt, and all I learned from it was that I didn’t like poetry. At least I’d discovered something new about myself. Did my dislike of poetry belong to Lucas West, too, I wondered? Was it something I’d carried with me through the amnesia, or was it new, something more Trent than Lucas?

  The implications of that thought floored me. Were there things about me that were more Trent than Lucas? How far had I strayed from who I used to be? What would it mean to Jordana when she started to see I was no longer the same man she knew? Wasn’t I the same man she’d had feelings for? I put the thought out of my head. I didn’t want to think about it.

  We scoured the Internet for more information about the poem. The poet Whittier was an American Quaker and abolitionist from Massachusetts who died in 1892. As far as we could tell, Whittier never lived in New York City. Never even visited it. So maybe the clue wasn’t about the poet, but something in the poem itself. More research revealed the poem was about Pythagoras, known as the Samian because he was born on the island of Samos, and about religion, with Logos meaning the Word of God. That didn’t make much sense in this context, either. None of it did. The poem was starting to feel like a dead end. But the spirits had given Calliope this phrase for a reason. I refused to give up until I knew why.

  I took the notebook off
the table and started leafing through it. The answer had to be in it somewhere. Maybe I’d overlooked something important. I found a page filled with the words Eternal voice and inward word scrawled all up and down the paper in varying sizes, some in all capitals. But something else was on the page, too. It was another of Calliope’s sketches: a woman, naked and looking up to the sky. Her right hand was raised and holding one end of her removed gown. The rest of the gown wound behind her to wrap its other end around her left leg. She was leaning back against an unusually small, kneeling horse.

  “Take a look at this,” I said, showing the sketch to Isaac and Bethany. “Is there anything in the poem about a woman and a horse?”

  Isaac scrolled quickly through it on his laptop. “Nothing.”

  Bethany studied the sketch, biting her lip in concentration. “I’ve seen this before. I know I have.”

  “Could it be a painting?” I asked.

  She shook her head and looked at the whiteboard again. “No. The notebook references monuments, not paintings. Isaac, can I try something on your computer?”

  “Of course.” He slid the laptop over to her.

  Bethany bent over the keyboard, the glow from the monitor lighting her face. Isaac and I leaned in to see what she was doing. Into the search field of an Internet search engine she typed the phrase eternal voice and inward word. Then she added +monument and hit the enter button. A screen of links appeared. She clicked on the first link. Our jaws dropped.

  The Web page showed a photograph of a tall fountain in front of a marble wall. At the top of the fountain was the statue of a naked woman leaning back against a small, kneeling horse—exactly the same as the sketch in Calliope’s notebook. Above the statue, a stone plaque on the wall was etched with the words:

  BEAUTY

  OLD YET EVER NEW

  ETERNAL VOICE

  AND INWARD WORD

  “My God, that’s it,” Isaac said.

  “Where is this?” I asked.

  Bethany looked up at me, her blue eyes reflecting the light from the monitor. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It’s the New York Public Library, the main branch on Forty-Second and Fifth.”

  “Then that’s where you’ll go,” Isaac said. “One of the fragments must be under that statue.”

  Eighteen

  It was still dark out when I parked the Escalade on a side street near the New York Public Library’s main branch. The long, columned, museumlike building covered two city blocks along Fifth Avenue in Midtown. The nighttime floodlights were still on, illuminating the famous twin lion statues in front of the library and casting shadows across its tall, vaulted windows. Yet even at this predawn hour, Fifth Avenue was active. Off-duty cabs and delivery trucks barreled down the street, and the sidewalks were peppered with the occasional jogger and early morning commuter. There was no way Bethany and I could do this without being seen. Luckily, we had just the thing. I left my trench coat in the car and slipped on an orange, reflective construction vest instead—the closest thing to an invisibility cloak in New York City. Bethany wore her usual cargo vest. Together we looked enough like two Con Ed or Verizon workers on the job that nobody would give us a second look. We hoped.

  We climbed the grand stairs toward the library’s majestic, columned entrance. Directly on our left was the statue of the naked woman leaning back against her kneeling horse. It stood within an arched alcove in the library wall, at the top of an elaborately designed, multi-tiered fountain. Above the alcove was the plaque bearing the now familiar words from Whittier’s poem. The fountain itself was dry, allowing us to climb right up to the statue. A fine mesh net hung in the alcove to protect the statue’s delicate details from the crowds of people who passed it every day. We ducked under the net and into the narrow space between the statue and the alcove’s back wall.

  Bethany and I hadn’t spoken a word to each other since leaving Citadel. She was still angry with me. I wasn’t all that pleased with her, either. Why couldn’t she just be happy for me? Didn’t she understand how much it meant to me that someone remembered me? That someone cared about me?

  I shook it off and focused on the statue in front of us. If a fragment of the Codex Goetia really was beneath it, how were we supposed to get to it? The quickest and easiest way would be to move the statue. I put my hands against the cool marble, braced my legs, and pushed. I was hoping it would slide along a hidden track to reveal a secret hatch, but that didn’t happen. The statue didn’t move an inch. I pushed harder, strained against it, but the damn thing didn’t budge. It was solid stone, way too heavy for one man to move. Too heavy for a dozen men, probably. I let go, breathing hard from the exertion. Bethany stared at me.

  I shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”

  She arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Was it? Really?”

  “If you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it.”

  I looked up at the statue and rubbed my chin in thought. The skin on my jaw felt surprisingly smooth. I was used to stubble—there wasn’t much time to shave when you were busy chasing monsters and Infecteds all over town—but I had wanted to look presentable for my date with Jordana. The thought of her put a smile on my face. I felt her kiss on my lips again. It was a warm, welcome memory on a cold October morning. But the memory wasn’t enough. I wanted more, and soon.

  “Are you going to help me look, or are you just going to stand there grinning like an idiot at a statue of a naked woman?” Bethany said.

  I came back to myself and realized I’d been staring into space while lost in my thoughts about Jordana. Except the space I’d been staring into was occupied by the marble woman’s nude body. Damn. I needed to pull it together.

  “Help you look for what?” I asked.

  Bethany sighed. She ran her hands along a portion of the statue’s marble pedestal. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you? Fine, for the second time, there has to be a door here, or a panel. Some way of getting under the monument. Or there might be a lever or a button that opens it. If someone hid the fragment under the statue, they had to get down there somehow.”

  That made sense. It also made sense that if there were a door, or a mechanism to open one, it would be within easy reach. Whoever hid the fragment here wouldn’t have put the entrance anywhere too high up or too hard to get to. They would have wanted quick access, a way to get under the statue before anyone saw them or figured out how they did it. They also certainly would have camouflaged it to look like part of the statue. While Bethany continued checking the pedestal, I ran my hands over the small marble horse, the highest point of the statue within easy reach. I felt for a switch or button on its hooves, in the bends in its raised front leg and the etched strands of its mane and tail, but there wasn’t one. I didn’t find any seams or hidden panels, either. There was nothing to indicate a secret entrance.

  Damn. Why couldn’t it be easy, just this once? I wanted to get back to Jordana and tell her we’d found the first fragment. No, what I really wanted was to kiss her again. The thought made me glow inside. What a fool Lucas West had been—what a fool I’d been—to let her slip away the first time. It made me wonder again just how different I’d been as Lucas West. Who was he? What was he like? The answer lay locked away in my memories. Memories Jordana held the key to.

  But when I got those memories back, would I still be me? Or would I be him?

  “You’re doing it again,” Bethany said, interrupting my thoughts. She was on her knees, feeling around the base of the pedestal. “Why did you bother coming if you’re going to make me do this by myself? You need to get your head in the game.”

  She was right, but how the hell was I supposed to concentrate when I was closer than ever to knowing who I was? Closer than ever to the past I’d forgotten? Family. Friends. Loved ones. Lucas West’s life might have been different from mine, but that was what I liked about it. He was normal. Lucas West wouldn’t find himself poking around an old statue before the sun was even up, looking for a secret door. He had his own a
mbitions, his own routines, his own worries. All of which had come to an end when—

  When something happened to him. When something turned him into me. But what?

  At the foot of the pedestal, Bethany bent forward. Her hair shifted to reveal a pointed ear. Bethany’s past was as much a mystery as mine. No wonder she was upset. I was getting answers while she was still in the dark.

  “Do you remember anything about your family?” I asked. I figured if we had something this enormous in common, we should be talking about it, not giving each other the silent treatment.

  Bethany looked up at me sharply. “Let’s just focus on the task at hand,” she said. The edge in her voice could cut the marble walls around us.

  Fine. I squatted down and started examining the opposite corner of the pedestal from her, forcing myself to concentrate. The edge of the pedestal had been carved in the form of a horn of plenty, its mouth spilling forth a selection of marble fruit. I ran my fingers down the widening shape of the horn, feeling for anything out of the ordinary like a seam or a loose part. I stopped when I came across a single ram’s head carved amid the apples and grapes. That was odd. What was it doing there? It was hidden in the design, but didn’t fit with the rest of it. I poked at the ram’s head, thinking it might be some kind of button or switch, but nothing happened.

  Bethany looked over at me. “Did you find something?”

  “Maybe.”

  I changed tactics. Instead of pressing it like a button, I tried spinning it like a dial. The ram’s head turned easily, shifting clockwise. A soft groan came from the back wall of the alcove. I turned around to see a section of the wall slide aside. Beyond it was a narrow, empty space. There was no floor, only steps leading down into a thick darkness.

  I gawked at it, astonished. A hidden staircase inside the wall of the New York Public Library. The secret parts of this city never ceased to amaze me.

  I moved toward the steps, but Bethany stopped me. “Hold on, Trent, let me go first.”

  She fished the small, mirrored charm from her vest and muttered a spell. The charm blazed into light and she started down the steps. I followed her. When we were a few steps down, the door in the wall slid back into place, cutting off all light from outside.