The Midnight Gate

by Helen Stringer

  “At last!” said Steve.

  They stepped inside. Above their heads was a domed iron grille that was open to the sky, casting weird checkerboard shadows over roughly constructed stone terraces. On closer inspection, she realized that the terraces had actually been thrown together from odd bits of poorly painted concrete stacked into imitation rocky outcroppings.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  “It’s like an enclosure in a zoo,” said Steve.

  He was right, but if it was a zoo, it was a rather run-down one. The replica rocky outcroppings were gray and striped from years of rain, and the dirt floor was littered with large bones that Belladonna really hoped weren’t human.

  She took one glance around and knew that this wasn’t the sort of place where you should linger if you had any common sense at all.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she whispered, and led the way toward a dark opening in the far wall.

  “Not so fast!” said a cracked, high-pitched voice.

  Belladonna and Steve stopped and peered around for the source of the voice, but all they could see was dark concrete and the barred roof. Steve took an exploratory step forward, keeping his eyes on the gray terraces.

  “Stop!” said the voice.

  This time Belladonna knew exactly where it was coming from: There was some sort of cave halfway up the wall. She didn’t say anything but pointed out the spot to Steve. They both shaded their eyes and peered into the space, but all they could see was the faint sparkle of eyes.

  “Oh,” said the voice, “so you want to see me, is that it? You want to stare.”

  “No,” said Belladonna quickly. “That is…”

  “Well, have a good look, then! You’ve paid your admission. It’s your right, I suppose!”

  Belladonna was about to protest that they had no desire to stare and that they hadn’t paid any admission for anything, but the words died on her tongue as the creature stepped out of the shadows.

  “Oh, wow,” muttered Steve, his eyes like saucers.

  The first thing Belladonna noticed was the feet. They were the talons of a bird of prey but easily a hundred times larger than any hawk or eagle she’d ever heard of. The ribbed toes and curling claws were designed to cling to branches and to grab and rip flesh. Belladonna shuddered.

  “Yes, horrible, aren’t they?” said the creature.

  “No … I mean…” Belladonna looked up as she spoke and found herself face-to-face with a creature she couldn’t even begin to identify. She glanced at Steve, hoping for assistance, but he was just staring, his mouth slightly open.

  Which was quite an understated response when you considered what they were both looking at.

  The feet and body were those of a bird of prey, that was certain, but the head was human. An old lady, in fact. All yellowing skin and cascading wrinkles. She looked fed up and angry at the world and, given her situation, Belladonna couldn’t blame her one bit.

  “Hello,” she said, hoping that she could start again.

  The creature looked at them, cocked her head sideways, and fluttered down.

  “We brought a gift.”

  The bird-woman turned around. She was half in shadow now and Belladonna was able to see that the bird part of her really was spectacularly beautiful. The feathers were golden brown and tan and shone in the moonlight like satin.

  “What are you thinking?” snapped the woman.

  “That your feathers are really beautiful,” answered Belladonna truthfully.

  The creature paused for a moment, then preened a wayward feather before returning to Belladonna.

  “My name is Aello,” she said, ignoring Steve entirely. “Have you heard of me?”

  Belladonna shook her head.

  “No,” said Aello sadly. “All is forgotten. There were three of us. Sisters, you know. I’m all that’s left. I don’t know what’s happened to the others. That’s families for you.”

  “I’m sure if they knew—”

  “They’d laugh. That’s what they’d do if they knew. Laugh. Pathetic, isn’t it? People used to live in fear of our approach, quake at the sound of our wings, and now look at me—a glorified porter!”

  The bird-woman looked at her feet sadly and scratched small circles in the sand with a claw.

  “Why were they scared of you?” asked Steve.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Well, I can see that you don’t look … that the way you … but that’s just a first impression, and—”

  “We’re harpies,” said Aello irritably. “We stole their food, ripped the unsuspecting from their beds, and dragged them here to the Land of the Dead. There were no first impressions, only final ones.”

  Steve stepped backward in surprise at the venom in her voice, and Belladonna began to realize that she’d probably made a mistake in trying to chat with Aello and that perhaps the time was right to ease the conversation back to the gift.

  “I was wondering—” she began, but the harpy had already fixed her with a hungry, gimlet eye.

  “You understand that I’m going to have to eat you both,” she said in a resigned tone of voice that implied a sort of bored regret. “No offense.”

  “We’d prefer that you didn’t,” said Belladonna, backing slowly away.

  The harpy sighed, walked slowly toward her, and examined her closely.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said finally. “If the present is good, if it’s something pretty, maybe I’ll let you go.”

  Belladonna’s heart sank. She didn’t have anything even remotely pretty.

  The harpy looked at her expectantly and cocked her head on one side again. Belladonna swung her backpack onto the ground and unzipped it. She stared into it, as if something might just materialize through sheer strength of will, then reached in and took out half a packet of ginger snaps.

  “What’s that?” snapped Aello.

  “Ginger snaps,” said Belladonna, who was sort of hoping that the orange packaging might qualify as “pretty” in the Land of the Dead.

  It didn’t. Aello shook her head and peered over the bag.

  “What else?” she asked, turning to Steve.

  Steve opened his backpack and showed the harpy the contents. She glanced in without much interest and was about to turn her attention back to Belladonna when something caught her eye.

  “What’s that? There’s something shiny.”

  “Um…” Steve reached into the bag. “House keys.”

  “Show me.”

  He removed his massive key ring, loaded down with the keys to his house, the shop, his Dad’s storage unit, and the tiny pen light.

  “Oh!” gushed the harpy. “Lovely! Put it around my neck!”

  Steve looked at the keys and then Belladonna, who nodded eagerly.

  Steve reached into a pocket and extracted a small bundle of string from the collection of random objects that he’d shoved into his pocket over the previous week. He untangled it and looped the keys onto it. Aello grinned with delight as he tied the keys around her feathered throat, revealing a mouth that had barely half its full complement of teeth. Then she scurried away to gaze at the effect in a small puddle near the middle of the enclosure. Belladonna watched as she preened, smiling and muttering to herself.

  “Can we go?” she asked finally.

  “What?” Aello looked up, surprised to see that they were still there. “Yes! Yes! Go.”

  They didn’t need telling twice. They both scooped up their backpacks and ran for the dark opening beneath the concrete outcroppings. This led into a dank tunnel, which quickly revealed a narrow hallway that, in turn, opened into a large room with windows that looked across Grendelmere.

  Belladonna realized that they must finally be in the actual House of Ashes. Steve ran to one of the windows and looked outside.

  “What can you see?”

  “Nothing. The lake, the trees. Walls.”

  She joined him by the window and for a moment they stood, gazing over t
he labyrinthine streets far below and reveling in the feeling of the soft night breeze against their faces.

  “What is today?” asked Steve.

  “I don’t know. Friday by now, I should think.”

  “No, the date. What’s the date?”

  “The twenty-eighth of February.”

  “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my birthday.”

  “Really?” Belladonna was surprised—not that he had a birthday, of course; obviously, he had to have one of those—but that he told her about it. For some reason, he was never particularly forthcoming about the non-Paladin side of his life. She knew about the shop and she knew that his mother had disappeared, but other than that, she didn’t know very much. She’d always just assumed that he saved his real conversations for his football-chess-club-tormenting friends.

  “It’s not really on the twenty-eighth,” he said, “it’s on the twenty-ninth.”

  “You were born in a leap year?”

  “Yes.” He turned to her and grinned. “I’m really only three.”

  Belladonna laughed, “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks.”

  The clouds parted and the bright blue moon of the Land of the Dead shone down on the glistening lake and the dark fortress.

  “It feels so far away,” said Belladonna.

  “I know. Like the Proctors and the Empress and the school don’t exist at all.”

  “What if we can’t figure it out? If we don’t know what to do to stop them … and her?”

  Steve turned away from the window and looked at her.

  “We can’t think about that now. If you start thinking about all the things that could go wrong, you can’t do anything. You just have to pretend that everything’s okay and then just deal with things when they come up.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Belladonna, smiling. “That’s how you manage at school, isn’t it? You just don’t think about how late your French homework is or how you’re going to explain when Mr. Fredericks and Miss Venable actually compare notes.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. It’s just school, you know. They’re only teachers. It isn’t the end of the world.”

  Belladonna glanced at him sharply.

  “Okay, yes, this could be the end of the world. But we can’t worry about things we have no way of knowing. Right now we just have to concentrate on getting to the Queen of the Abyss. We’ll figure everything else out later.”

  Belladonna nodded. She felt envious of Steve’s ability to set things aside and just tackle the problem at hand. It might not serve him well in the long run, but she’d give anything, right now, this minute, to be able to stop worrying—about the Empress, the Proctors, the names on the coins, and whether the Queen of the Abyss would be good or bad. She leaned further out of the window, examining the walls, the lake, anything to try to take her mind off it all.

  “Um … having said that. There is one other thing,” said Steve.

  “Yes,” said Belladonna, closing her eyes and letting the soft breeze riffle through her hair. “The day after tomorrow is the Day of Crows.”

  She opened her eyes, turned away from the window, and smiled at Steve.

  “Onward and downward?”

  “Yes.”

  They left the window and walked toward an open door on the far side of the room.

  “Maybe the Queen of the Abyss will have a birthday cake for you,” said Belladonna.

  “Oh, I’m sure she will. And balloons.”

  They continued on their way, passing from one vast empty room to another. There was no furniture anywhere, no decoration on the walls, and barely any light, but they kept marching on through the great fortress toward the Queen of the Dead.

  Hours seemed to pass, but just as Belladonna was beginning to think she might need a rest, she saw something up ahead. Something shiny, something that glistened in the moonlight. And it seemed to be swaying slightly, like fabric.

  “Look! What’s that?”

  As they got closer, she could see that it was a curtain set into a carved stone archway. A slight breeze wafted in from a narrow window high on the wall and gently fluttered the material. Belladonna reached forward to push it aside.

  “Ow!”

  She snatched her hand back.

  “What is it?”

  “Something bit me!”

  Steve peered at the curtain, then suddenly jumped backward.

  “Oh, yagh!”

  Belladonna rolled her eyes and leaned forward, then it was her turn to start in surprise—the curtain wasn’t fabric at all, but a rippling sheet of spiders. Thousands of tiny black spiders.

  The small creatures were linked together by their legs and small pieces of web, each grasping the next. Separately, they were nothing more than rather unimpressive spiders no more than half an inch across, but together they made an impressive symbiotic life-form. (Belladonna remembered symbiosis from Miss Kumar’s Biology class, though she did wonder why she remembered it now when she couldn’t recall it for the life of her during the test last month.)

  She considered the problem, then slowly moved her hand toward it again. This time she noticed how the spiders moved toward the point where her hand would reach the curtain.

  “Hello?” she said tentatively.

  The spiders were just spiders, however, and declined to respond.

  “You’re talking to spiders,” said Steve drily.

  “I think they’re guardians.”

  She considered the problem for a moment, then swung her backpack onto the stone floor and began rummaging through it. She pulled out the half-empty packet of ginger snaps again, then hesitated. It was the last food they had (other than whatever was in Steve’s thermos), and if it took too long to complete the journey, there was a possibility that they might be forced to eat the food of the Dead. Or starve. But the results would probably be the same. On the other hand, if they didn’t leave a gift for the spiders, they’d be stuck on this staircase until the crack of doom.

  She put the cookies on the floor and pushed them toward the spiders with her toe. At first, nothing happened; the packet just lay there, rocking back and forth slightly. Then, with a movement so fast that Belladonna wasn’t even sure she saw it, the curtain was gone and the spiders were on the cookies, a single pulsating mass of shining black.

  Steve shuddered and Belladonna had to agree that the heap of spiders was definitely much worse than a gently wafting sheet of them. She gave them as wide a berth as she possibly could and walked through the archway.

  “Come on!” she urged, as Steve hung back, staring at the spiders.

  “I’m coming,” he said, rather unconvincingly. But he closed his eyes, got as close to the wall as he could, and inched through the arch.

  “I’ll bet Edmund de Braes wasn’t afraid of a few spiders,” said Belladonna.

  Steve ignored her and moved further into the new room and away from the spider arch.

  “We’re outside!”

  He was right. A cold breeze whipped around their faces and there was suddenly light and air. It was still dark, of course, but at least now they were outside with the blue moon shining above and dusky clouds trailing across the sky.

  Belladonna breathed deeply, feeling as though she had been trapped in a dismal cellar for weeks. And now they were in a garden.

  Sort of. Or maybe it was a patio. It was obviously in the middle of the palace and was the size of a small lawn. Just about the size of the back garden at home, actually. Only here, instead of a border of skinny rhododendrons, the whole garden was bounded by a covered marble walkway, its coffered roof held aloft by elegant columns. In the center was a narrow path, bisected by a small reflecting pool. On either side of that, clusters of herbs released their heavy fragrances into the night. Without realizing what she was doing, Belladonna moved into the garden, reaching for the plants. She brushed their leaves gently and drank in their aroma.

  She had never been a particularly garden-y person. Weedi
ng and planting and water features held no charms for her. But ever since last October, when she’d seen what a truly dead world could be like, she’d had a new appreciation for everything green.

  “Belladonna…” Steve was whispering and his voice sounded strange.

  Then she sensed it.

  They were being watched.

  20

  The Manticore

  BELLADONNA SPUN AROUND—there was nothing there, but Steve moved in close behind her.

  “We need to move,” he whispered.

  She noticed that he had the plastic ruler in his hand and wondered how he knew. How did he know that now was the time for the Rod of Gram? He hadn’t taken it out when the harpy had threatened them, or when Euryale had first appeared, with her mask and head of venomous snakes.

  “There’s a door. Over there. Let’s go.”

  Belladonna nodded. They started to move slowly across the garden toward the door.

  This time she really thought she saw something. A movement, just to her left, but too far back to be sure. They stopped and waited. Nothing.

  But it was still there.

  They took a few more steps. This time there was no question. She saw a tail—a long, muscular tail—vanish behind one of the columns.

  “Was that a cat?” whispered Steve. “It sort of moved like a cat.”

  “A really big cat,” said Belladonna warily.

  They stood still and listened … and watched. Nothing.

  “Okay,” said Steve finally, “this is stupid. We’ll just go to the door, leave something for whatever it turns out to be, and carry on.”

  Belladonna nodded and they both marched forward with what she hoped were looks of steely determination, but before they reached the end of the short garden, there was the crisp clicking sound of claws on stone, and the creature that had been stalking them leapt in front of the door.

  Belladonna gasped and stumbled back, almost falling into the reflecting pool. Steve backed up slowly, standing between her and the creature while she scrambled to her feet. She was really impressed with his unruffled reaction because this was a creature like no other she’d ever seen.

  Its body was that of a lion, but bigger than she remembered from trips to the zoo, and its fur was a weird sort of red color that darkened almost to burgundy on the legs and tail. The claws were dark and metallic, and clearly didn’t retract, scraping the stonework and leaving white marks wherever the creature went. But it wasn’t the body or the claws that were most striking about this guardian. It was the head and tail.