Conversationwise, he should have stuck with the aether-newt. “I mean, I couldn’t help noticing you went out a lot more this year. I was thinking you might go normal on me.”
“What’s that even mean? Wait—there’s our exit.”
While Eddy negotiated the ramp to the Gloucester bypass, then the sub-exit to the coastal highway, Sean tried to figure out for himself what he was getting at. His bad, running off at the mouth when he should have been snoring. “You know, normal. Like, not interested in geek stuff and magic.”
Eddy frowned at the innocent car in front of them, which meant she was really frowning at Sean. To give her space, he leaned out his window and caught the first salt breeze of their trip. Weird how much today’s drive was like their first to Arkham, down to the cloud-free sky and blue-green ocean lapping the seawall to their right. What if they really could go back a year, go back and change one thing? They could skip going to Horrocke’s Bookstore, where Orne’s advertisement for an apprentice had ambushed Sean. Maybe that would have discouraged Orne. Maybe he would have tried to lure someone else into magic—
“Sean.”
A fleet of cormorants paddled and dived among the mild waves. That meant there was a run of fish along the shore.
“Sean.”
He let the shoulder harness pull him back into his seat.
“I’m a born geek,” Eddy said. “That’s not going to change even if I do go all twu lub over someone.”
“Yeah, I guess you can’t change your genes.”
“Plus, how could I not be interested in magic? Like, I’m going to see something like the Servitor and go, ‘Oh, that was weird, now let’s forget about it’?”
Sean supposed Eddy saved her major angsting for Helen, like he saved his for Marvell, but he knew the Servitor had shaken her to the ground. Scary to think that the coolest person he knew was in the same boat as him. “No. You can’t forget. Unless someone hits you over the head.”
“Amnesia plots suck. Besides, we shouldn’t forget. I mean, a Servitor, a Geldman’s Pharmacy, you being a magician. Everything’s different. The whole universe, how it runs.”
What she was talking about, Marvell called a “paradigm shift”: a radical mental makeover that could inspire people to jump off bridges or drive cars into seawalls. Eddy would never crash a car, though. She’d be afraid of surviving and getting a ticket.
And sure enough, as the cliffs between Gloucester and Kingsport forced the road into climbing curves, she didn’t let the Civic swerve an inch from its lane. “Some people would go into denial about magic, though,” Sean said.
She snorted. “That’s hard where ‘magic’ equals a monster almost eating you.”
“Well, kind of.”
“And if you were in denial about magic, I guess you wouldn’t be going to Arkham to study it.”
“And you wouldn’t be going to work in the Archives. Whatever you tell your mom and dad about deciding whether to major in Library Science.”
“I don’t tell them that.”
“But you said—”
“That was my story before Helen came last week. We decided I better tell them the truth.”
“You told them about the Servitor?”
Eddy’s hands had slipped from the three and nine o’clock positions on the steering wheel. She quickly corrected the Driver’s Ed infraction. “We told them everything. Professor Marvell even joined in over Skype. Next day they went to Arkham to meet Dr. Benetutti.”
“She did magic for them? They must have freaked.”
“Not as much as I thought they would. And Mom’s all into the link between magic and math, which is one of Dr. Benetutti’s things.”
“And they’re still letting you go.”
Eddy nodded at the cresting road. “They know I’ve got to learn to deal with this.”
“Man, Eddy, you did deal with it. Better than me.”
“You got rid of the Servitor. You didn’t go over to Nyarlathotep.”
“Barely.”
“And you’re not too scared to study with the Order.”
“I’d be more scared not to.”
“Me, too, exactly,” Eddy said. “So shut up about me going normal on you.”
“Mouth officially shut. You’re deeply abnormal.”
Eddy pulled a huge fake smile, as if she were accepting a third-runner-up trophy. She accelerated over the crest, and summer dropped into place below them: antique Kingsport climbing the leafy westward hills, sailboats plying the harbor and ducking under the long bridge that spanned its mouth. Across the bridge, the coastal highway leaped up the cliffs between Kingsport and Arkham. Perched on the tallest was the cottage Lovecraft had called the Strange High House; below it, on Orange Point, was the Witches’ Burial Ground and a parking lot that glinted with excursion buses.
Beyond the lot was an overgrown path that led to Patience Orne’s grave. Last year he and Eddy had laughed about how crazy people used to be, thinking Patience was such a badass witch that she had to be buried apart from the others. They didn’t know anything yet about her husband, Redemption, but maybe his aether-newt had already been hovering around them, listening to their snark.
Sean hoped not, but maybe they’d better not stop at the Witches’ Burial Ground to use the restrooms, just go straight on to the Arkwright House, where, Helen claimed, the wards could bar a lot more than peeping newts.
* * *
The Arkwright House was on the corner of West and College Streets, facing the Miskatonic University Green. It stood on a walled terrace six feet above the sidewalk, a mansion of reddish brown stone three floors and an attic high. Eddy’s Arkham guidebook said it exemplified the Italianate style, what with its hipped roof and square cupola, its bracketed eaves and pedimented windows. Sean wasn’t sure which thingies were brackets and which pediments, but anyone could see the place was crazy historical, even if they missed the plaque on the gate that read:
THE ENDECOTT C. ARKWRIGHT HOUSE
ARCHITECT: THOMAS TEFFT
COMPLETED 1854
At over 150 years old, in a town famous for hauntings, the place had to have collected a ghost or two. Sean hadn’t noticed any when he had helped Dad take out the library windows last year, but that had been in broad daylight. Come nightfall, old Endecott might show up. Maybe Mrs. Endecott, dragging a gauzy train and a ghost-pug. Or did magical wards repel ghosts, too? If so, the Arkwright House would be spirit-free; an invisible barrier started a foot from the terrace walls, and an experimental probing had given Sean a hair-raising tingle on the verge of painful.
Inside the house, an unseen hand twitched lace curtains from a window. No ghost: Helen Arkwright emerged, and with her shorts and flip-flops, she was about as far as you could get from a Victorian specter. She ran down the steps and through the gate to join them. “You guys made good time!”
“Pretty amazing, with Eddy driving,” Sean said
Eddy was too busy hugging Helen to protest, but afterwards she punished him: “I had to drive. Sean was hungover.”
“Bull!”
Helen hugged Sean. If she was sniffing for alcohol, he couldn’t tell. “I vote bull, too,” she said.
Eddy clarified: “I meant from no sleep because he was talking to aether-newts all night.”
Would it have killed Eddy not to mention the sighting out on the sidewalk, where any lurking invisible familiar might hear? Helen must have read Sean’s mind, because she gestured them inside the gate and thus through the ward-barrier before saying, “Aether-newts?”
“Not plural,” Sean said. “Just the one we think is Orne’s. It let me see it last night.”
“Away from your house?”
“It was outside, I was in.”
“Did it communicate anything?”
“Flicked its tail, whatever that means. Then I kind of yelled at it, and it went invisible again.”
Eddy raised her eyebrows.
Helen asked no more. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s have
lunch first.”
Because the Arkwright House had been built way before it was fashionable for rich people to cook, the kitchen was in the basement. Luckily the basement was mostly above ground level, so Helen had been able to install a whole wall of windows to brighten up the long room. They ate chicken salad at a breakfast bar overlooking the back garden, which for now grew only Dumpsters and stacks of plywood—the carriage house was being remodeled to provide offices for the Order.
Lunch done, Helen led them through the first floor. Last summer it had featured stepladders and plaster dust and the frayed guts of knob-and-tube wiring. Now the marble floors, walnut woodwork, and plaster moldings looked like new. Eddy was impressed by the grandeur of the parlors and dining room, but when they walked into the library that took up the rear third of the floor, she went into near shock. At the east end were tall windows and a conference table with chairs as ornate as thrones. At the west end was a fireplace fronted by a leather couch and armchairs. Directly opposite the doors was a dais like an oversized pulpit or the upper deck of a ship. Computer stations ringed it, but on top was a massive antique desk, and above the desk were the stained glass windows Dad had restored: The Founding of Arkham.
Every other inch of wall space, from floor to fifteen-foot ceilings, featured bookcases, and every inch of every shelf was crammed with books.
Eddy came out of her bug-eyed catatonia and walked around the room, trailing her fingers across the book spines. “God, Helen. This is in your house.”
Someone who didn’t know Eddy might have mistaken her awe for horror, as if she’d opened a closet, and it had spilled out a horde of rats. Helen knew her well enough to say, “It’s great, isn’t it? None of my doing, except for the new workstations. Endecott Arkwright was the first collector. That’s his desk on the dais. My grandfather Henry and uncle John took over on the scholarly side. Theo Marvell says they built the biggest private collection of arcane literature in the country. The oldest and rarest books are in the Archives now, but still impressive.”
While she joined Eddy among the tomes, Sean climbed the dais to try out Endecott’s desk. The top was an acre of mahogany, with an inlaid monogram—ECA—wreathed in laurel leaves. It was more showy than useful, since once he’d sunk into the cushy desk chair, he’d have to stand to reach anything. He spun the chair toward the stained glass triptych and tilted back to look at it. Dad’s “after” photos hadn’t done The Founding of Arkham justice, but photos never did. You needed to see a window on-site, struck to life by the sunlight passing through it. He kept tilting until the chair back rested on the edge of the desk. The center window, twice as wide as the side ones, showed the future Arkham Harbor, with two Mayflowery ships on the water and Puritans on the foreground hill: a governor or mayor (he had fancier clothes than the rest), a minister on his knees praying, and soldiers with breastplates and helmets and muskets. The soldiers were the only ones who noticed the Indians approaching from the right window. No problem, they came in peace. The foremost Indian had his hand up, fingers practically in the Vulcan V-salute, and the other Indians toted a deer carcass and strings of fish.
Nobody in the center or right windows looked toward the dense forest in the left one. Sean didn’t either until disgust at his cowardice made him shift his gaze. The figure under the eaves of the wood had onyx skin and all-amber eyes. Add its Pharaoh getup, and it was totally out of place in a seventeenth-century scene on the planet Earth. And yet could Nyarlathotep ever really be out of place? Master of Magic, Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods, wearer of a million skins—maybe a million skins simultaneously! He could be anywhere, at any time, doing business for his cosmic bosses and looking for dumb magicians to enslave. Or dumb potential magicians, like Sean.
Dad had restored the Dark Pharaoh down to the enigmatic faintness of his smile, but after all, this Nyarlathotep was harmless glass, not a true avatar of the god. Sean could look away, no problem, and he did, lifting his eyes to the crow-familiar Nyarlathotep tossed skyward. Pre-Dad, it had been a winged black blob. Now Sean could see every feather, every claw, the whiskers around its beak, the inky buttons of its eyes; though a minor detail, the crow dominated the Founding by sucking in sun until the excess brilliance seeped out its edges like one of the subliminal haloes in Mom’s paintings.
Mom’s paintings? And did it—?
To get a closer look, Sean got up and stood below the left window. The wall beneath was still under his palm. So was its wooden frame and the bit of glass he could reach, just the wildflower-studded turf of the foreground. To touch the crow and check for a Mom-like hum to match that halo, he’d need a ladder.
In addition to the ladders that slid along bookshelves on steel rails, the library had stepladders that looked tall enough to reach the crow. But when Sean turned back to the windows, the crow had already lost its halo. It must have been the effect of a fleeting angle of sunlight, nothing magical after all, optical illusion, wishful thinking—
“Sean?” Helen said. She and Eddy stood at the library doors. “We’re going upstairs.”
“Coming.” After a last glance at the crow (no sneaky return of the halo), he jumped the three steps off the dais. It was time for real concerns, like whether Helen would stick him in a bedroom so museum-like, he’d be afraid to touch anything.
3
Helen’s bedroom was on the second floor, at the front of the house. She’d given Eddy the guest room opposite, which had a canopy bed and cushioned window seat and million-drawered writing desk straight out of Jane Eyre, or so Eddy gushed. Sean’s room was another flight up. “Originally the whole third floor was a ballroom,” Helen said. “Since the Order doesn’t host a lot of dances, we’ve remodeled it for students—four beds, two baths, and the common room.”
Sean had his pick of the bedrooms, and he picked the left front, which had furniture way less Masterpiece Theatre than Eddy’s: simple oak bed, simple oak desk, simple oak wardrobe, everything he could want except a TV. He hadn’t seen any TVs downstairs either. Maybe the Order wanted to make the house distraction-free.
That fear evaporated when they entered the common room. Like the library, it was at the back of the house, but the new bathrooms in the east and west corners made it smaller, and the furniture was comfortably modern: braided rugs, vinyl couch and recliners, game table, and a kitchenette with fridge and microwave. Over the gas fireplace hung a mantel-wide flat-screen TV.
Helen pointed out the empty bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, then winked at Sean and said, “Eddy, I put those in especially for you.”
“I didn’t bring that many.”
Instant pants-on-fire rating. “No,” Sean said. “It’ll just take a week to haul them all up.”
“We’ll get your stuff in a minute,” Helen said. “First I’ve got a quick heads-up for you two.”
Eddy parked on the couch, Sean on a recliner, while Helen stepped back into the hall and cocked her head as if listening. What with the Order’s wards, she couldn’t be checking for Orne’s newt. Could there be human spies? “Hey, Helen. Something wrong?”
Helen closed the door. She took the other recliner but kept her feet on the ground. “No. It’s just I didn’t know about this myself until last night. Not for sure, or I’d have mentioned it to your father, Sean, when I phoned yesterday.”
The excitement of arriving had shoved the mystery of the Helen-to-Dad call to the back of Sean’s mind. He opened his mouth to ask for the solution, closed it as Helen continued: “We’re going to have another student this summer. He came this morning.”
“Another magician student?” Eddy said.
“Yes. He’s gone out with Theo, but he’ll be back for dinner.”
Eddy scooted down the couch toward Helen. “Dish. How old is he? Where’s he from? Are you afraid we’re going to hate him or something?”
Helen gave a nervous laugh. “Eighteen. New York. And why should I worry you’d hate another student?”
“Because you’re making such
a big deal of warning us about him?”
“Direct hit,” Sean said.
And Helen laughed like her usual self. “No fair double-teaming me, and really, that’s the point. You guys are a team, you’ve been friends so long. That could make a new person feel like an outsider, and I don’t want that to happen to Daniel.”
“That’s the new guy’s name?” Eddy said.
“Yes, Daniel Glass.”
“So we shouldn’t be like, ‘We’re supertight, but who are you, dude?’”
“I know you wouldn’t do that deliberately.”
“He might just take it that way?”
To rescue Helen from Eddy’s rapid-fire interrogation, Sean jumped in. “What’s his deal, Daniel?”
“Well, Theo says he’s been isolated the last few years. Homeschooled, no real social life. He was badly hurt in a car accident, and he’s been through a lot of reconstructive surgery.”
So did he look like the Elephant Man? Sean searched for a more delicate way to ask. “So he’s a little funky looking?”
Helen shook her head. “All I noticed were a few scars on his hands. He did have neck surgery lately, so he’s wearing a brace. Otherwise, he looks ready to get back out into the world. You and Eddy could help him.”
Helping this Daniel guy could be either a big assignment or no big deal. No telling which until they met him. Eddy said, “We’ll be cool, Helen. And I’ll have your back if the guys act up.”
“My assistant dorm monitor? You’re on.”
“So should we drive around back to unload?”
“Yes, to the garage.”
Eddy, who still had the Civic keys, bolted for the stairs. It gave Sean a perfect opportunity to address that mystery phone call, so he stayed put and cleared his throat. Always quick on the uptake, Helen stayed put, too. “Something else, Sean?”
He got right to it. “Dad acted kind of weird after you called him yesterday.”
Helen’s smile went out like a blown bulb. “I’m sorry he was upset.”
“Yeah, I thought I must have screwed up somehow, so forget about my internship. But he said I was in the clear, and you’d explain the situation because it was magical and he didn’t really get it.”
Fathomless Page 3