by Danny Tobey
I started to protest, but Miles raised his giant hand with such force that I took a step back.
“How can you be so cold?” Sarah snapped.
“Cold?” He stared at her. He almost roared. “You think I’m cold? I knew Chance better than either of you. I’ll be mourning him long after he’s just a footnote in your memory.”
His eyes actually started watering.
“Miles . . .” Sarah said gently.
“I don’t want to hear it. Chance is gone.”
“This isn’t about Chance,” she said. “Miles, they’re killing kids. Twenty-two-year-olds, right at the start of their lives.”
“You can’t beat these people!” he barked. “Say we tell people what we know. So what? We’re only alive because it’s easier for them than cleaning up the mess we’d make. But they could clean it up. We’re alive at their convenience. That’s it.”
“You’re right,” I said.
Miles did a double take. Sarah looked at me like I’d betrayed her.
“What?”
“You’re right.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever said that before,” Miles mumbled.
“Exposing what we know won’t help us.”
“Thank God. At least someone’s been paying attention.”
“We have to beat them another way.”
His smile dropped; he let out a low growl.
It was time to tell them what I’d been thinking about, ever since my trip back from New York. The final piece of the puzzle. Their Achilles’ heel. The piece that had been right in our faces the whole time. We just hadn’t seen it.
“Something’s been bothering me,” I said. “Remember what Isabella told us? Possession is a temporary state, right? You do the ritual, magic happens, and then bam, it’s over. Right?”
Miles closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything.
Sarah nodded. “Right.”
“So how are they maintaining this for the entire life of the victim’s body—until they’re ready to skip to their next generation of hosts? We’re talking sixty years . . . How do they do it?”
“I don’t know,” Miles snapped. “What am I, Grand Poohbah?”
“Miles, listen. What did I see, when I was in the tunnel over the ceremony? Remember? There were dancers, right? And drummers? And the priest with the crazy eyes? And behind them, what did I see?”
He tried to remember, then shook his head.
It had been there, right in front of us, all along. Sarah’s eyes lit up.
“Behind the dancers?” she asked.
I nodded.
“And behind the priest, on the altar?”
“Right . . .”
“A machine. You said you saw a machine.”
“That’s right—”
“A machine, or something like that, in the dark, twisting and moving like the dancers were. That’s what you said.”
I nodded. Her eyes were bright, alive.
Miles didn’t say anything. He just nodded slightly.
“Isabella didn’t say anything about a machine, did she?”
He shook his head no.
“Of course she wouldn’t,” I continued. “It’s totally out of character with the ritual . . .”
Sarah smiled, remembering my exchange with Isabella.
“ ‘What if someone were using voodoo . . .’” she recited.
“ ‘. . . someone from outside the culture . . .
“ ‘In a way it was never intended,’” Miles finished.
I nodded.
“What if the machine . . .”
“. . . was some kind of extension of the ritual . . .”
“Prolonging it . . .”
“Sustaining it . . .”
Miles shook his head as the idea unfolded.
“It’s an addition.”
“A mechanization.”
“Assembly-line voodoo,” I said, smiling.
“Then it stands to reason,” Miles continued, “that if the machine is prolonging a temporary state—possession—indefinitely, then if we . . .”
“. . . destroyed the machine . . .”
“. . . we’d end the possession . . .”
“. . . and then . . .”
“. . . what then?” Miles asked. “Are the victims—what did Izzy call them?—the horses . . . are they still in there, somewhere?”
“Would they come back?”
“ ‘When the god dismounts, the priest is himself again, weary maybe, dazed,’ but . . .”
“. . . but this is so much longer . . . not minutes but decades . . .”
“If you cut them off too long, do they die?” Miles asked.
“Don’t we owe it to them to find out?” Sarah replied.
Miles laughed harshly.
“Owe them? What do we owe Nigel . . . Daphne . . . John? Those people used Jeremy. And when he had nothing left to offer them, they dropped him without a second thought.”
“So what?” I said. “So they deserve to die?”
“No. And they don’t deserve you risking your life to save them, either. Or me.” He laughed. “Would they do it for us?”
“No,” I said softly.
“It’s not just Nigel, Daphne, and John,” Sarah said. “It’s everyone who came before or after. A new group of students every year.”
“People we don’t know,” Miles said. “People who would slit each others’ throats for an A.”
Sarah leaned toward us.
“It doesn’t matter if they’d do it for you. It doesn’t matter why us. Us is all there is.” She looked at Miles and me matter-of-factly. “I’m going. Whether you two do or not.”
I met her stare and nodded.
“I’m in,” I said.
We looked at Miles.
“Even if your theory is correct,” he said, “you’re talking about walking right into the sanctum sanctorum.”
“That’s right.”
“You could be walking to your death.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Think about it. They only need to do the ceremony once per initiate, right? The machine does the rest. They already did Nigel. Maybe the others too. So there’s a good chance no one’s even down there now.”
He didn’t argue.
“Miles, you know about this stuff. You were the one who cracked the voodoo puzzle. I don’t think we can do this without you.”
He scratched his beard. He mumbled something that sounded like what a clusterfuck.
“Get in, smash the machine, get out?” he asked.
I nodded.
He closed his eyes.
“Can we set the place on fire, for fun?”
“Sure we can.”
At long last, he sighed.
“Why not?”
Sarah let out a cry and hugged the big man.
32
I found the lever, more like a clutch, somewhere in the upper bowels of the fireplace. The room was perfectly silent in the middle of the night. My cheek was pressed against the marble, while my hand groped around inside the mantel. I heard it before I saw it—releasing the clutch led to the popping open of a tall panel by the desk. Sarah clapped her hands. “Perfecto,” I heard Miles say, his voice echoing into a larger place.
Just this morning, we were sitting in Sal’s, trying to think of a door they wouldn’t be watching. We had a map—the one Chance and I had concocted with the help of the late Frank Shepard. We knew where we had to go and what we had to do, which was why Miles’s leather satchel now contained a crowbar instead of postmodern gibberish. We just needed a starting point, a way down into the tunnels. Preferably one they wouldn’t be guarding with a team of assassins. Which meant, strangely enough, that the best door for us would be one we didn’t know existed.
Where to start? There was the hatch under my bed, extra handy if you were inclined to murder me in my sleep. Not to mention it was the first place I’d think of, if I were dumb enough to go after them (which apparently I was). No thanks. There was the elev
ator in the old house on Morland Street, but I’d been blindfolded, and anyway it was a natural second choice. There was Humpty Dumpty’s library passage—but we didn’t have his keys. There was the plant manager’s office—wired with a burglar alarm. There was the sewer by Nigel’s house. They sure as hell were aware I knew about that. I thought of the Puppet Man, coming toward me on his gangly spider legs, that long silver fang in hand.
There had to be a better way.
I’ve said it before—the brain is an amazing thing. Sometimes it tries to help you, even if you’re too stupid to notice. I found myself struggling to ignore a sudden, pointless memory: leaving Bernini’s office for the first time, walking away down that old hallway.
Stop it, I told myself: focus on the problem.
What did Bernini say, seemingly to himself, as I’d walked away?
V&D perhaps?
And what next . . .
That other voice, unexpected, much, much colder—a voice I now assigned to the priest with the twisted, yellow-eyed stare.
We’ll see, he’d said.
Where had he come from? No one else had been in Bernini’s office with us. No one had passed me in the hall.
It was suddenly clear.
There was another door in Bernini’s room. Well hidden and, as far as they knew, totally unknown to us.
I had a less pleasant memory: my last visit to Bernini’s office. His cool termination of my services. The way he let me get all the way to his door before he called my name and asked for his key back.
But that was perfect, wasn’t it?
He had his key back.
A door I didn’t know about, in a room without a key.
I thanked God for the anal-retentive, type-A, worst-case-scenario worldview of young lawyers, as I pulled my copy of Crime and Punishment off my bookshelf, opened it to the middle, and let the spare key to Bernini’s office fall into my hand.
Perfecto.
Beyond the hidden door was a staircase that spiraled within a tall shaft. We took it down: Miles, then Sarah, then me, the air cooling as we wound downward. At one point, there was an indentation in the wall, the size of a stone. I peeked in and saw a tiny view of the city, through two small holes at the far end of the nook. I realized that we were inside the turret of the law school’s west corner; I was looking out through the eyes of a gargoyle. The staircase continued down below ground level and eventually let us out into a cellar, which threaded us into the tunnels.
We followed the map, using a small compass of Sarah’s from her father. He was a tycoon of some kind at a Boston investment bank that had started three hundred years ago as a maritime trading company. In a nod to the past, they gave nautical compasses to their new executives, and he had given his to Sarah when she graduated from medical school. This was the first time she’d taken it out of its leather pouch, which gave her a perverse satisfaction, under the circumstances.
The steam tunnels seemed darker now. Somewhere outside, a cold front was pulling the temperature down to minus four—a cold so extreme that all life seemed to pause—and the maintenance lights, usually so bright, were pulsing dimly as the campus struggled to heat itself. The only sound was the occasional hiss or drip far down the tunnel, and of course the slap of our feet, which we tried to keep to a minimum. I thought of the Puppet Man. Sarah was next to me. Miles lagged behind, his leather satchel over his shoulder. He was the only one who seemed totally at ease. He might as well have been strolling to a Phish concert.
I looked at the map in my hands and thought with a shiver: two of the three people who contributed to this are dead—Frank Shepard for about two hundred years, Chance Worthington for about two days. I was the only one whose name was still ticked in the Alive column.
We passed under Creighton and Worley. We knew we were under the Michaelson Chemistry Labs when the vapors hit us through the air vents overhead, and we passed a trash heap of old beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, all shattered and discarded—a tribute to two centuries of clumsy students. We arrived below Embry House and took fork after fork to place ourselves directly below the Steel Man. I tried to hear the thumping of music as we passed beneath that famed party room—I imagined the beautiful people dancing in the style of my generation, rugby players and sorority sisters grinding against each other five floors above us.
And then, at the end of our map, we saw a door. It was one of many in a small deserted hallway. We were in a branch of a branch of a branch of the tunnels. No one would ever come this way unless they knew exactly what they were looking for.
We almost passed it.
It would’ve been an ordinary door, identical to dozens of utility closets and electrical rooms we’d already passed, except for the subtle glyph above the door frame:
Two small eyes—orange pupils and black irises—staring down at us.
I gave the knob a turn, and the door opened.
33
“Where are we?” Sarah whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“This is where you saw the ceremony?”
“No. This is nothing like that. Too small. Too . . . homey. The place I saw was like a cathedral.”
“Well, where is that?”
“I have no idea.”
The place we were in looked like a junior common room in one of the dorms, in a state of bad neglect. There were several couches with cracked and worn leather. There was a rug in the center of the room that had never been fancy, but now it was threadbare. The air was stale. I shut the door behind us and switched on a dim lamp. Old photos covered the walls, hard to make out through thick layers of dust.
On the wall opposite us were two doors.
“I guess we try those,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Sarah whispered.
“Why not?”
“No lock on the door, out there in the hall. Don’t you think that’s weird? Why wouldn’t they lock their door?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we just got lucky for once.”
“I doubt it. The only way you’d come through that door is if you were looking for it. I think this room is the lock.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “I just wouldn’t go touching everything.”
“Look at this,” Miles said.
We turned around.
On a small end table, he’d found two statues; miniature kings standing side by side, carved out of limestone. The pedestals put them at eye level with us.
They were intricately detailed, with lined robes and faces. You got the feeling they were meant to be brothers. One looked kindly, the other cold.
“Look,” Sarah said. She was next to me, pointing at a plaque on one of the pedestals. It had an inscription in foreign letters. It looked like Greek.
“Miles, do they take your Classics degree back if you actually use it for something?”
“You mock,” Miles said, “but what would you do without me?”
He leaned over the plaque and ran his finger across the raised letters.
“It’s a parable,” he said. He laughed. “About two brothers, sworn to guard a crossroads. Not just any crossroads. One path leads to glory beyond your wildest dreams. The other leads to . . . oh.”
“What—death?”
“I wish. It’s from Paradise Lost. ‘To bottomless perdition, there to dwell, in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.’”
“Penal fire?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the crossroads between heaven and hell?”
Miles nodded.
I looked at the far wall.
“Two doors. Two paths. How do we choose?”
Miles put his finger back on the words. “According to the parable, you can ask each brother which way to go. But there’s a hitch. By law, one of the brothers must always lie. The other must always tell the truth.”
“No hint on which one’s which?”
Miles read the rest.
> He shook his head.
“That’s all it says.”
“What does it matter?” Sarah whispered. “They’re statues. How are we supposed to ask them anything?”
I looked at the two men. Each had one arm raised over his heart, the other down by his side. At the base of each statue was a small rectangular stone that rose slightly above the stones around it.
“Okay,” I said. “We push that stone. That’s how we ask. Does it say anything about chances? How many chances do we get?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“We should be careful.”
“You’re right,” Miles said. He reached out and pressed the stone in front of one statue.
“Miles!” Sarah cried.
The stone sank down under his finger. We heard the clicking of chains, and then, suddenly, the statue’s arm began to move. Where the forearm met the elbow, there was a joint, disguised by the grooved folds of his robes. His arm actually rotated, like the hand of a clock, toward the statue’s right. He came to rest pointing toward the right-hand door across the room.
“Well, it works.”
“That was stupid,” Sarah snapped. “This isn’t a game. Stop acting like it is. Someone could get hurt.”
“We had to try. What’d you want to do, talk about it until we lost our nerve?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said again, poking him in the chest with her finger.
“Okay, sorry.” He rubbed his chest, then nodded at the statue. “Now we know. He wants us to go that way.”
“We don’t know anything,” Sarah said. “Is he the brother who lies or the brother who tells the truth? Maybe he’s pointing us to our death.”
“Fine,” Miles said. He pushed the other stone.
“Crap!” Sarah shouted.
This time, the brother statue rolled his arm in the opposite direction, toward the door on the left.
“Great! Which way do we go now, genius?”
“Miles,” I said, “stop touching and start thinking. Of course they were going to point in opposite directions. One’s lying, one’s not.”