The Midnight Gate

by Helen Stringer

  “Hank is an idiot. The gift does not need to have value, but it must be of value to one of you, at least.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Pencils and pens would not fall into either category.”

  “What if it was a really nice pen, like one of those fountain pens they sell in the posh stationery shop in town?”

  “Do you have such a pen?”

  “No. But if I did, then it would have value, wouldn’t it? So when you say that pencils and pens don’t have any value, that’s not strictly true.”

  The gorgon just stared at him.

  “I’m really tempted to just take off my mask and turn you to stone.”

  “Don’t do that!” said Belladonna quickly. She rummaged through her bag and produced the Wild Hunt’s horn. “How about this?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a horn. It calls the Wild Hunt.”

  “Don’t give her that!” said Steve. “We might need it.”

  “It has to be of value. Here. Take it.”

  “Fine,” said Euryale, snatching it off her without even looking. “Off you go, then.”

  “Great!” said Belladonna in an artificially cheerful way that she knew would fool no one. “Thanks very much!”

  Steve looked like he was about to say something else, so she gave him a shove toward the opening in the wall. The important thing now was to find the final coin. They’d just have to manage it without the help of the Hunt.

  The gorgon watched them for a few moments, then made a disapproving smacking sound with her teeth and disappeared inside her temple.

  “Hey!” said Steve, turning around. “Did you hear that? I’ve heard that before.…”

  “Oh, come on,” said Belladonna.

  They clambered over the last few rocks to the gap in the wall, which turned out not to be a gap at all but two dark pewter-colored metal gates that rose, smooth and unmarked, to the full height of the walls.

  “How are we supposed to—” began Steve, but before he could finish, one of the great gates ground slowly open, just enough to let them pass.

  “Yowza,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” said Belladonna, “yowza.”

  They looked at each other, took a deep breath, and walked into the House of Ashes.

  19

  The Guardians of the Gates

  EVEN AS BELLADONNA and Steve passed under the massive lintel at the entrance of the House of Ashes, the door began to swing shut, and as it crashed into place, Belladonna couldn’t help feeling that there was a finality to the reverberating sound, a sense that from here there could be no going back.

  She hesitated for a moment and stared at the gray metal of the door with its eight massive iron hinges and six rusty bolts.

  “This is weird. I thought there’d be a courtyard.”

  “What?” She turned around, but Steve wasn’t really speaking to her.

  He was right, though. She had assumed there’d be a courtyard too. In almost every castle she’d ever visited, either with her parents or on school trips, once you passed through the main gate, you were either in a central courtyard or in a passageway leading to a central courtyard. But the gates of the House of Ashes opened onto a street.

  Not like a street at home, of course. This one was more like the pictures she’d seen of medieval towns, with buildings huddled close together and upper stories hanging so far out that they seemed about to tumble down from their own weight. At ground level were shops that opened directly onto the roughly cobbled street, where the worn tracks of millennia of cartwheels could be seen on either side of a wide stone gutter. Every detail was clear and it took a few moments for Belladonna to realize that it shouldn’t be like that. It was night. Or it had been night outside the walls. Inside, it was something else altogether. It was as if the citadel were stuck in a perpetual dusk, like a rainy afternoon on a winter day, but without any actual rain.

  “Come on,” she said, trying to sound grim and confident, “let’s go.”

  Steve nodded and they both took a deep breath and started to walk down the street. Their feet echoed in the stillness that lay over the place, and Belladonna imagined that this was what it must have been like for the first people who discovered Pompeii. The silence enveloped them as they passed by bakers, butchers, grocers, and garages. Nothing moved within the looming houses and shops, no breeze caught the awnings, and no birds or animals foraged or sang.

  But Belladonna knew she and Steve weren’t alone.

  She knew that eyes were watching their every move, watching them glance into the shops and peer down the narrow passageways. They were watching from doorways and windows and craning to see them from the upper stories.

  “Do you feel like someone’s watching us?” whispered Steve, glancing left and right and trying to walk as quietly as possible.

  Belladonna nodded. Once, she slowed down, convinced that someone was about to come out, but no one did. She imagined that this was what life was like for people who couldn’t see ghosts: feeling the prickle on the back of the neck, the slight movement out of the corner of an eye, but never seeing a single spirit. For Belladonna, however, it was a totally new experience. It was as if these eyes and their owners were another class of ghost altogether, ones who hovered not between this world and her own but between this world and somewhere else entirely.

  She decided to pick up the pace—there was no point in dwelling on who (or what) was watching them. They just needed to get to the Queen of the Abyss as fast as possible.

  “Wait!” hissed Steve, raising a hand to hold her back. “There’s someone there.”

  “No, I think it’s just our—”

  “Who seeks to enter?” boomed a hollow, sickly voice.

  Belladonna froze and looked at Steve, who was staring intently ahead. She followed his gaze and realized that what she had thought was just another shop door was actually a narrow iron gate that extended upward until it became lost in the general gloom. She looked around for the source of the voice and was finally able to make out a shadowy figure standing to the left of the gate, so completely swathed in black that he almost seemed to become one with it.

  “Who seeks,” he repeated sternly, “to enter the home of She Who Watches?”

  “Um … Belladonna Johnson,” said Belladonna.

  “And Steve Evans.”

  Belladonna flinched as their voices echoed up and down the street. The black-clad figure stepped forward, but she still couldn’t make out any details of his face or figure.

  “Are you living children?” he asked.

  “Yes,” whispered Belladonna.

  “Why would living children wish to enter the domain of the Mistress of Death?”

  “We’ve come to ask for the Ninth Noble.”

  “The what?”

  “The Ninth Noble,” said Steve. “It’s a coin.”

  The black-clad creature stared at them. At least, Belladonna assumed he was staring. It really wasn’t possible to tell what he was doing.

  “Do you think,” he hissed finally, “that this is some sort of shop?”

  “Well, obviously it’s not really a coin,” said Steve testily. “It just looks like one.”

  The black figure stared again, then turned and walked back to his post next to the gate.

  “You must leave something with me,” he said.

  “I know … um…” stammered Belladonna.

  She swung her backpack to the ground and pulled out Dr. Ashe’s bell.

  “Will this do?”

  The creature leaned forward, then seemed to nod.

  “It is adequate. Place it on the ground before me.”

  “But—” began Steve.

  “It calls the Dead,” whispered Belladonna. “I really don’t think we’re going to need it here.”

  “Oh. Right. Good point.”

  “Place it on the ground!”

  Belladonna did as she was told, and the guardian reached down and picked it up.

  And then
he was gone. He seemed to have melted completely into the shadows.

  “Whoa,” whispered Steve. “These people are creepy.”

  The tall iron gate slowly creaked open. Steve pulled it wide and they stepped through.

  The street was gone. Now they were on a dirt road bounded by high stone walls. The path curved up toward the towers of the citadel like a massive spiral stair, and every hundred feet or so, torches burned in braziers set into the rock.

  “I don’t like this,” said Steve. “It’s a bit too much like that thornbush thing of Dr. Ashe’s.”

  “Maybe we should find another way.”

  Steve nodded and they turned back, but the iron gate had gone. In its place was just another piece of gray wall. It was as if the gate had never existed.

  “Great.”

  He glared at the wall as though he could make the gate reappear by sheer force of will.

  “Come on,” sighed Belladonna. “This is going to take forever if we keep stopping.”

  Steve reluctantly joined her and they began walking along the path.

  “Have you got enough in there for all seven guardians?” he asked, nodding toward her backpack.

  “I think so,” she said. “I’ve got a roll of Parma Violets, um … some ginger snaps, a photo of my Mum and Dad…”

  “I’ve got my Geography homework, my thermos … the ruler.”

  “You can’t give the ruler away,” said Belladonna. “We might need it.”

  “I know, but—”

  Belladonna was destined never to know what he was going to say because at that moment, something else spoke. Something with a sibilant voice. Something that clearly thought it was whispering.

  “These ones are alive!”

  “No, they’re not!”

  “Yes, they are! Look, that one’s tired. The climb is making it pant a little. Only the live ones do that.”

  Belladonna and Steve stopped and stared at each other.

  “Uh-oh,” said Steve.

  Belladonna put her finger to her lips to stop him talking and strained to look ahead. There was nothing there, just more wall, but the voices had been real, and she could hear something else as well.

  “Can you hear that?” she whispered.

  Steve nodded slowly. The sound was like sliding or rumbling. They looked up. Above their heads the walls were topped with crumbling battlements, just like the ones Belladonna remembered from old films on television or the tops of castles on family holidays to Wales. But there was nothing there that could have spoken.

  “Did you see that?” whispered Steve urgently. “There! Look!”

  Belladonna looked up at the top of the wall where there was a larger break in the ramparts and she saw it. The shimmer of green scales and the flash of three-lidded eyes.

  “What should we do?” whispered Steve.

  “Walk.”

  He nodded and they marched forward, straining to hear whatever was behind the wall.

  Finally, after what felt like hours of hard slog up the steep pathway, they rounded a corner and found themselves facing another door. This one was set into the stone wall and its surface was smooth and gray. But there was no sign of a guardian. Belladonna glanced around, confused.

  “Hello?” called Steve hopefully.

  “Just a minute!” came the reply. “We’ll be right there!”

  “No, we won’t,” muttered another voice. “And if you think I’m slithering over that wall, you are sadly mistaken!”

  This time Belladonna knew where the voice was coming from—it was directly overhead.

  They tilted their heads up to the top of the wall and saw three reptilian faces staring back. Belladonna smiled hopefully. The creatures looked very big, but not unfriendly, with their iridescent green scales and pointed faces. Their eyes were dark yellow flecked with black, and each had a narrow red stripe that ran over the top of its head across its nose and down to its mouth where a needle-like purple tongue continually tested the air.

  “Hello,” said Steve again. “Are you the guardians of the gate?”

  The creatures glanced at each other, then vanished from view, but Belladonna could hear them arguing in hushed, angry tones as they moved along the inside of the wall toward the door.

  This was followed by silence, some scrabbling, the grind of shooting bolts, and a scraping sound as the door slid slowly open. But instead of finding themselves facing three reptilian creatures, Belladonna and Steve were face-to-face with one reptile and three heads.

  The creature tumbled out of the door in a cascade of coils the size of tree trunks and came to a halt about two meters in front of them. The heads eyed their backpacks expectantly before turning their attention to Belladonna and Steve themselves.

  “Did you bring a present?” said the middle head.

  The other two heads looked irritated and swung themselves around in such a fashion that they managed to push the offending head into the background.

  “Sorry about that,” said the left-hand head. “Rude.”

  “Are you alive?” asked the right-hand head.

  “Yes,” said Steve. “We’re alive.”

  The reptile heads looked impressed, and the left-hand one adopted an I-told-you-so expression.

  “I knew you were,” he said. “I told them so, but they wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Only because live people would have to be madder than leverets on a hot day to come anywhere near the House of Ashes,” said the right-hand head.

  “No offense,” he added.

  “None taken,” said Belladonna, trying to remain serious as Steve did his best to stifle a giggle.

  “What is your gift?” asked the left-hand head.

  “Present! Present! Present!” enthused the middle head, bursting between the other two and eyeing the backpacks.

  “Something edible would be nice,” said the right-hand head quietly.

  Belladonna nodded, rummaged through her pockets, and emerged with the Parma Violets.

  “What is that?” asked the middle head suspiciously.

  “Sweets,” said Belladonna. “They’re violet flavored. There are twelve in a pack, so you get four each.”

  The heads looked at each other, then nodded.

  “Alright,” said the left-hand head, “you may pass.”

  “Thank you,” said Belladonna, picking up her backpack and beginning to move toward the door.

  “Just a moment,” said the middle head. “Could you unwrap them, please? We don’t have any fingers.”

  Steve smiled and picked up the packet. He opened it carefully and set the sweets out in three piles of four each. The reptile looked pleased, so far as reptiles can, and began to sniff the sweets expectantly.

  Belladonna and Steve walked quickly to the door and through the opening, past coil after coil of the reptile’s body. The only sound from the creature now was the crunch of Parma Violets and the occasional wet click of a happily flicking tongue. The coils curled around the doorjamb almost at right angles and down a passageway that ran parallel with the outer walls. A perfect lair for a snake, thought Belladonna.

  “Which way?” she said, looking down the passages on either side.

  “Neither,” said Steve. “I think it’s this way.”

  He stepped forward and lifted the latch on a small wooden door directly in front of them. Belladonna couldn’t understand why she hadn’t noticed it right away, but she was prepared to believe that he was right and followed close behind as he cautiously pushed on the roughly hewn timber. The door swung inward to reveal almost complete darkness—they could just make out the first three steps of a steep staircase leading upward.

  “Oh, great,” said Steve. “More stairs.”

  “At least they’re going in the right direction,” said Belladonna. “Up is definitely the way we need to go, after all.”

  Steve sighed.

  “Three down,” he muttered, “and four to go.”

  Belladonna peered up the stairs. It looked d
ark. And steep.

  “Oh, well,” she sighed, “if we don’t start, we’ll never get there.”

  She began to climb with Steve slogging along close behind her.

  The stairs were bounded on each side by stone walls, roughly hewn from granite. Belladonna felt that they were inside the island rather than in a building on top of it. She reached a hand out to feel the wall—it was dry and cold, with the sort of deep chill that struck right to the bone. She shoved her hand into her pocket to try to get it warm again and noticed something else: She always seemed to be able to see three steps ahead.

  “Are you using your flashlight?”

  “What?” said Steve.

  “Your flashlight. On the key chain. To light the way.”

  “No. It’s not dark. I can see where we’re going.”

  “I know. Weird, isn’t it? It ought to be dark.”

  There was light, but from where?

  They kept climbing and after a few moments Belladonna heard a dull groan from behind. She stopped and turned around.

  “Don’t stop!” Steve pushed her forward, his voice tense. “Keep moving!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Look up.”

  She looked up and at first saw nothing. Then a movement. And another one. Something was up there.

  It was an insect. No, insects. There were lots of them. She strained to see and was gradually able to make them out. There was a small ledge above their heads and there were white insects, like crickets or grasshoppers but with extremely long legs and no eyes at all. As they passed, the insects scuttled to the edge of the ledges and crevices where they lived and lit up, casting a sickly yellow light down into the stone corridor.

  “Amazing.”

  “You would say that,” said Steve, shuddering. “Have you seen how long their legs are?”

  “They’re only insects,” said Belladonna, loving the idea that Steve was more scared of them than she was. “What do you think makes them glow? Maybe it’s our breath.”

  “This is me not caring,” he grumbled. “Would you get a move on?”

  After about half an hour of slogging up the stairs, they came to a large wrought-iron gate with rusty hinges and a broken lock. Was this one of the gates? She looked around for any sign of a guardian, but no one spoke or barred their way, so she reached forward and pushed at the gate. It creaked loudly and swung inward.