by Dan Jolley
DEDICATION
For Tracy
Always.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
– 1906 –
The subterranean smell came to Jackson Wright first, thick and damp and dark. His eyelids didn’t want to open, but he forced them. When they finally peeled back from his raw, gravelly eyes, he found himself staring at the intersection of four stone arches fifteen or twenty feet above him.
Where am I?
He tried to look around, but . . . couldn’t. When he strained to turn his head, pain ground into his temples. He tried to search out the cause of that pain, but his hand stopped short, halted with a metallic clank. He couldn’t move his legs, either. The sharp tang of panic began to rise in his throat.
I’m shackled! Someone’s chained me down to . . . what?
Jackson could still move his fingertips. He used them to feel around as best he could. He lay, helpless, bound hand and foot to what felt like a massive stone slab.
What he’d at first thought to be a distant buzzing in his ears clarified: a soft chanting filled the chamber where he was imprisoned. Jackson felt his panic grow. He didn’t recognize the words, but it sounded like dozens of voices, and they were coming from all around him.
He couldn’t move his tongue. He could hardly even make a sound. I can’t speak! Terror stabbed at him like a knife to his guts. Was he . . . had someone drugged him? Where had he been, that someone could have slipped something into his food or his drink? The last thing he remembered was leaving the house with his father for an after-dinner walk. Everything else was . . . gone.
Papa! Papa, help me! The words slammed inside his skull. Desperate. Useless.
The chamber’s faint illumination shuddered and flickered like firelight. A writhing, dancing shadow fell across him, and only the metal strap holding his head in place kept Jackson from recoiling—but then his heart leaped.
Papa!
Jackson’s father leaned over him, his fine, white-gold hair, hair the same color as Jackson’s, all but hidden by the cowl of a long black robe.
Papa, help me! Get me out of here! Papa!
But Jackson saw something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before. Something hard and cold, like chips of ice. Without saying a word, his father moved away, out of Jackson’s sight.
Another man approached from the other side of the slab. Tall and narrow through the shoulders, he was draped in a hooded robe identical to the one Jackson’s father wore. But this man’s face looked like old, white leather, and his green eyes shone with an eerie radiance that turned Jackson’s mouth as dry as sand.
Mama! He imagined his mother’s gentle, dark eyes. Mama! I won’t run in the house anymore. I promise I won’t! Please! Please help me!
“Zxarna vrahmu otvortse. Dvai shvioutei pivuntxa.” As the green-eyed man spoke, the words buzzed and vibrated in Jackson’s ears, in his skull, as if a swarm of tiny insects had begun digging and gnawing at his brain. His hands longed to scratch, to tear at his scalp, but still he couldn’t move. As he spoke, the green-eyed man pulled a stone tablet from inside his robe. The stone was green, not entirely unlike the man’s frightening, luminous eyes, and it was crystalline, its color somehow both dark and bright at the same time. It looked like a solid slab of stone, but then the man opened it, and Jackson saw that the odd tablet had pages like a book. Yet the man didn’t hold it the way other people held books. He held it in the way someone would hold a live, venomous snake: carefully, and with great respect. Maybe even great fear. “Dvai shvioutei pivuntxa, majia povrunshei taigho shviunta!”
The bizarre language reverberated around the chamber—not an echo, but dozens of voices repeating everything the green-eyed man said. This repetition somehow made the harsh words a thousand times worse.
“Taigho shviunta. Taigho shviunta.” The unseen crowd chanted. Jackson would have cried out if he’d been able to make any noise at all . . . because he recognized one of those voices as his father’s.
As the incantation continued, Jackson felt the air around him change. He couldn’t move his head, but his eyes darted in every direction. His vision went momentarily white as a circle of fire exploded into being eight feet above the slab where he was bound. Its heat made the skin of Jackson’s face pull tight. The burning ring rotated slowly above him, an enormous, twisted, ghastly version of the halos he’d seen over the heads of saints in church. Is this how I’m to die? Like a twig in a bonfire? Red-orange flames danced and licked around a blinding-white core . . .
. . . and as the crown of fire spun, a broad arc of water surged up through the air from Jackson’s left, climbing in the shape of a rainbow over the flames. The water churned and frothed far above him, suspended in midair as it formed another ring, reflecting the fire in icy shades of white and blue and green. The same hard, cold colors he’d seen in his father’s eyes.
Jackson whimpered.
Without warning, a blast of arctic wind channeled its way across Jackson’s body, running frigid fingers through his hair. The very slab beneath him trembled and shivered, pulsing like a great, stone heart.
Jackson’s muscles clenched as he tried again to free himself. It would have been better to scream his throat raw than suffer this paralysis. His heart thundered in his narrow chest, and tears as hot as lava squeezed out of his eyes.
He watched, stunned, as his tears fell up. They left his face and streaked straight into the broad, terrible arc of water above him, each drop gleaming like glass in the instant before the impossible current swept it away.
“I am Jonathan Thorne.” It took Jackson a heartbeat to recognize the words as English, and another to realize the green-eyed man wasn’t talking to him, or to the assembled crowd. He was talking to the strange green-crystal book itself. The scratching, hungry echoes of the other language still crawled beneath Jackson’s skull as the green-eyed man went on. “I am the opener of the way. I am the leader of the faithful. I am the author of doom and the wielder of power.”
Jonathan Thorne pulled a slim silver dagger from the sleeve of his robe and sliced open the tip of his own thumb without hesitation. Jackson’s heart nearly stopped at the sight of the blade. In the firelight, Thorne’s blood was as black as ink. Thorne leaned over and touched Jackson’s forehead, painting something there, Jackson couldn’t tell what. Straightening up and using the same thumb, Thorne drew a five-pointed star inside a circle on the cover of the strange book.
“I am Jonathan Thorne,” he repeated. “I am the seeker of magick. I am the explorer of the lost paths. I am the One Above All Others, and with this blood I name myself master of a new world of boundless power!”
Slowly, so slowly, Thorne raised the dagger. The knife shifted in his grip, blade pointing straight down. Straight at Jackson’s heart.
Jackson’s thoughts blurred as panic choked him. Wake up wake up I’ve got to wake up! This isn’t real. I’m having a nightmare. Why can’t I wake up? Why why why? WAKE UP!
A flicker of movement from Jackson’s left drew his eyes, and for an instant, for just a split second, he thought he had awakened. Be
cause there was his father, coming back to save him! He tried to cry out, tried to force his unwilling tongue to move. . . .
But he could only watch as his father, with that terrible stony coldness in his eyes, slid off the signet ring Jackson wore on his left middle finger.
No! Papa, what are you doing? Why are you letting this happen?
Jackson’s father turned the ring over in his fingers, examining it in the harsh light from the circle of fire overhead. It was simple, gold, bearing the Wright family’s wagon-wheel crest: five spokes within a circle. It had belonged to Jackson’s grandfather. “You won’t need this where you’re going, my son,” the elder Wright said as he slipped the ring inside his robe.
When his father turned away from him a second time, Jackson felt his heart break.
Perhaps that was why it hurt so little when Thorne raised the silver dagger and plunged it into Jackson’s chest.
Death.
Jackson had given a good bit of thought to dying after his pet beagle was run down by a team of horses pulling a mail wagon. He expected to feel his life slide away from him. He imagined his consciousness fading like the flame of an oil lamp as its fuel runs dry.
But instead, the air around him seemed to coalesce, growing thicker and taking on a crimson hue. He could still hear the chanting voices—“Taigho shviunta! Taigho shviunta!”—but everything he could see was now a horrible bloodred, as if he was seeing it through some kind of . . . what was it? A film? A skin? Blood seemed to flow out of his chest, and the strange membrane grew and thickened with it. Soon it surrounded him.
Suddenly the chanting voices surged, became shouts, and the stone slab beneath him lurched. The ceiling trembled, and dust and bits of mortar rained down; and from somewhere, from everywhere, a vast, deafening roar shook the earth itself.
As the bloodred cocoon tightened around Jackson’s body, the chanting voices turned to screams.
“Earthquake!” someone screeched.
It was the last word Jackson heard before this world became lost to him.
1
“Okay, guys,” Brett said, pushing coal-black hair out of his face. “Lily and me’ll lift on three, and Gabe, you push. Got it?”
Gabe Conway squared his shoulders and gripped a length of rebar with pale hands. He wedged the rebar down beside the manhole lid and nodded, while Brett and Lily Hernandez tightened their grips on the lid hook.
Lily nodded, too. Until a few days ago, she’d had shoulder-length black hair just like her brother’s but on a whim had decided to get it cut into a short bob. Now she teased Brett endlessly about his shaggy “emo hair.”
Brett glanced over his shoulder at Kaz Smith, who was standing lookout at the mouth of the narrow alleyway, head swiveling back and forth. Beyond the alley, a bank of moonlit clouds had erased the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. “All clear?”
“For now,” Kaz whispered. He ran an anxious hand over his buzz cut. “But I hear voices! Just hurry up!”
“One . . . two . . . three!”
The twins pulled, and Gabe pried with the rebar. The sewer cap was even heavier than it looked, but with the three of them pulling, the lid eventually squealed and grated its way free of the manhole. Brett and Lily dropped the hook beside Gabe’s now slightly bent rebar as Kaz pattered over to them.
“Okay, everybody down!” Brett barked. Gabe might have been a little irritated at the order if not for the ridiculous grin plastered across Brett’s face. Gabe had never seen Brett so excited, and Brett got excited a lot.
Gabe clicked on his flashlight. “Whatever you say, boss.” He peered down at the rusty ladder riveted to the side of the vertical shaft. “Why don’t you take the lead?”
“As if I wasn’t going to!” Brett clamped his own flashlight between his teeth and disappeared down the ladder in a flash.
“We’re really doing this, huh?” Kaz edged one toe toward the opening. “Can I just repeat that this is a terrible idea? It was a terrible idea when Brett had it, and it’s still terrible. What if there are, like, mutated alligators down there? Or flesh-eating mole people? Or . . . or rats?” As he was complaining, Kaz clicked on his head-mounted flashlight and started down the ladder after Brett, grumbling the whole way. “I mean, I’m going, but these rungs are a case of tetanus just waiting to happen. I don’t even remember when I had my last shot. . . .” His voice trailed off as he vanished into the darkness after Brett.
My best friends, disappearing. How appropriate.
Gabe turned to Lily and gestured toward the manhole. “Ladies first.”
Lily cocked her head and frowned at him with her huge, dark eyes, black as ink in the dim light. She and Brett had the same eyes. “What’s wrong, Gabe? I thought you were excited about this field trip?” That was their code for the adventures they went on: “field trips.” Like sneaking into the abandoned drive-in theater to watch horror movies on a laptop all night, or their marathon Ouija board session in the graveyard.
Lily’s forehead smoothed out as she seemed to realize what was bothering Gabe. She’d always been able to read him. “Oh. Hey, relax, all right? It’s not like you’re never going to see us again! My cousin Marybeth moved to freaking Tennessee, but I FaceTime with her almost every day. I think we talk more now than we did when she lived here.”
Gabe managed a halfhearted smile. “It’s just, you know, I’m tired of all the moving around. I mean, seven cities in twelve years? Who lives like that? You’d think Uncle Steve was in the military.”
She smiled back at him. “I bet you’ll make tons of new friends in Philadelphia and forget all about us.”
Gabe could always count on Lily to try to boost his spirits when he was feeling down, but he wanted to say so many things in that moment. Things like: But I’m tired of moving all over the country! and I love San Francisco and I don’t want to leave. Most of all, he wanted to tell Lily, You don’t understand. You guys are the only real friends I’ve ever had. But he’d never say any of that out loud, and before he even had the chance, Kaz’s voice drifted up from below.
“Hey! You’re not bailing on us, are you?”
“Duty calls!” Lily said brightly, and scampered down the ladder like a monkey.
Gabe followed. He had to drop the last three or four feet from the bottom of the ladder to the floor of the sewer tunnel, and his sneakers splashed in a shallow trickle of liquid that he tried very hard not to think about. The stink of rot and stale air made Gabe’s eyes water. He shined his flashlight around, picked out Lily and Kaz, and started to say “Where’s Brett?” but only got as far as “Where’s B—” before Brett leaped out of the shadows and shouted “Boo!”
Gabe didn’t move or flinch, just closed his eyes and hoped no one could tell how fast Brett’s little scare had made his heart beat. Brett’s raucous laughter echoed up and down the tunnel. “Solid as a rock, this guy!” Brett bumped him with his shoulder, and Gabe couldn’t help but return Brett’s grin.
“If we’re going to do this, could we please just do it?” Kaz waved a hand in front of his face. “It smells like a giant Porta-Potty.”
“Fine, jeez, gotta be so serious all the time.” Brett unslung his knapsack and rummaged around in it. “Do you not realize how epic this is gonna be?” He pulled out a rolled-up piece of silky cloth bound by a black ribbon. Gabe, Lily, and Kaz gathered around to watch him unfurl it.
Gabe felt a pang when he looked at that piece of cloth. Uncle Steve’s occult research was way off-limits and usually kept under lock and key. The only reason they’d found the cloth in the first place was because three-quarters of Steve’s office already sat packed in boxes, and in all the chaos of packing, he’d forgotten to lock the door. So what if Gabe and his friends had done a little snooping and poking and prodding? The man had so much bizarre stuff, how could anybody keep from at least taking a look at it?
Besides, Gabe had not stolen it. He’d borrowed it. Technically it wasn’t even him doing the borrowing. Brett had popped open that particular
box. And anyway, it wasn’t like any of this stuff was real. If Brett wanted to add some make-believe to this last field trip, why not play along?
Brett held up the cloth, and Kaz and Gabe shined their lights on it, illuminating a map with the title “The Golden Gates” stitched across the top. Gabe had never seen a map like this before. For one thing, it’d been hand-sewn into the silk with about a hundred different colors of shiny, metallic thread. For another, it depicted San Francisco, but not the real San Francisco. This was more like . . . art. Like an enhanced version of the city from some alternate universe, shimmering with color, all the buildings and streets magnified and twisted and surreal.
“Such a weird map,” Kaz said for the thousandth time. “I don’t know how you can even tell where we are.”
“Everything about this is weird,” Lily murmured.
“Would you all just relax?” Brett laid the map down across his knapsack and pointed. “Here’s us. And the entrance to the secret tunnels is down there. And the secret room is right there.” He stabbed a spot on the map. “It’s, like, only half a mile away. Easy! Now come on!”
Brett’s kid-on-Christmas-morning enthusiasm kept his insistence from becoming irritating. Or, at least, too irritating. With Brett leading the way, the four of them trooped along the tunnel and deeper under the city, the only noises the splashing of their feet and the sounds of distant traffic above them.
After ten or twelve minutes the traffic sounds faded, and eventually stopped.
“How far underground are we?” Kaz wondered, but no one answered him.
Gabe turned the situation over in his mind. Brett had been talking about some sort of secret tunnel system underneath San Francisco for weeks, but Brett talked about a lot of stuff. Like the monster in Lake Champlain, and the haunted island off the coast of Venice, and how the entire city of Paris was full of ghosts because of the catacombs. Except this time things had started clicking into place: first Uncle Steve announced they were moving. Then Brett convinced them all to take a look at the “priceless artifacts” and “important research” that Gabe’s uncle usually kept behind locked doors. And then Brett stumbled across this weird map that just happened to show the exact maze of secret tunnels below the city that he’d been obsessing over.