I blinked. “Nathan? Are you okay?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he replied, concerned. “Did they just… hypnotize us?”
I nodded. “And the pixies saved our behinds.” The pieces were slowly making sense. “I’ve got a feeling that, if we’d followed them, we’d have ended up in the same situation as the missing magicals. That’s why there were no signs of a struggle: no one did struggle. They came here of their own accord, because of the Will-o’-the-Wisps.”
Nathan’s face was marginally visible in the light of the glowing pixies who’d come back to roost. “Pardon?”
“They’re Will-o’-the-Wisps,” I said, fixing him with a stern gaze. Weren’t we almost trapped like everyone else, and wasn’t he supposed to be a genius in this subject? “Do you know anything about them?”
“Yes. They are thought to be controlled by…” He trailed off, looking at the pixies on his shoulder.
“By?” I prompted.
He cleared his throat, his eyes wide. “Pixies.”
Boudicca leapt to the defense of her people, chattering loudly, jabbing and pointing like there was no tomorrow. I got the feeling she disagreed with Nathan, and I wished more than ever that I had a way to understand exactly what my Purge beasts were saying. It would’ve made this so much easier.
“Calm down,” I urged Boudicca. “Explain it slowly, so I can get the gist.”
She turned her pulsating spots to a sad shade of blue and began to act out the message she was trying to get across. First, she pointed at me and pretended to walk across my shoulder, shivering and hunched, her expression scared. Then, she pointed to herself and lifted up off my shoulder, gesturing and beckoning as though she were leading me somewhere. For her next act, she dropped suddenly to the floor, as if she were dead, and turned her spots purple. She rose up with her arms outstretched, like a resurrected mummy, and returned to her second performance of guiding me somewhere. Then, things turned bad again as Boudicca began snickering and tiptoeing through the air, leading me, presumably, down the wrong path.
“The Wisps are spirits of lost souls?” I said. Boudicca nodded vigorously. “Who haven’t been able… to cross to the afterlife?” She nodded again, flashing her purple spots. “But how did they end up like this, causing trouble? They aren’t poltergeists.” Boudicca grumbled something rude in pixie and flashed her purple spots more frantically.
Nathan cleared his throat. “I think she’s trying to say that they were brought into being with some kind of Necromancy. Purple is the color of Necromancy.”
Boudicca took off and hurtled toward Nathan’s face, landing a huge smacker on his nose. She flew back again, smoothing down her hair with sudden bashfulness. In fairness, poor Nathan looked stunned, and maybe a little horrified.
“I guess that means you were right,” I said, chuckling nervously. “Did you bring them into being? I didn’t know you were Necromancers.”
Boudicca gestured, and then swept her hands through the air in a cross.
I arched a confused eyebrow. “You were, but you’re not anymore?”
She grinned and nodded, before motioning in the direction of where the Wisps had disappeared. I tried to remember the rest of the scenes that she’d played out so I could put together a timeline of events in my head.
“So, you brought them into being with Necromancy and gave them the task that you’d been doing of guiding travelers? Only, they… stopped doing what you told them to, and started leading people astray instead?” I was really wading through some wild speculation here. “And that’s when you had your Necromancy abilities taken away from you?”
Boudicca punched the air and nodded effusively. She held up her index finger and added one last scene. Miming to perfection, she signed out a doorway, then pretended to get sucked through, shaking her fists as her spots flashed red with anger.
“They got trapped behind the Door to Nowhere because they were disobeying?” I guessed.
She grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. But she wasn’t quite done. Flying right up to my face, she tapped my forehead. And I had a horrible feeling I understood exactly what she was trying to say this time.
I lowered my voice, so Nathan wouldn’t hear. “I opened the Door to Nowhere by Purging you?”
She tilted her head from side to side and tapped my forehead again.
“I opened it by coming here?” I asked.
No matter which way I swung it, I was responsible for this. The pixies hadn’t stolen anyone directly, and neither had I, but our joint actions had caused a chain reaction that had opened up this mysterious door.
She repeated the head tilt.
I sighed, exasperated. “You don’t know why the Door is open?”
She nodded and pressed her bony finger between my brows.
“You don’t know, but you think it has something to do with me?”
Her black eyes widened in apology as she gave one last, slow nod. I really hadn’t wanted Leviathan to be right… about any of it. The Door to Nowhere was real, and I’d played a part in unlocking it so the Wisps could get out and wreak havoc. He might have had incorrect information about the Wisps, but he’d been on the right track. Maybe, if he wasn’t so arrogant, he would’ve paid attention to beasts who hadn’t warranted his attention, and I’d have been spared this lesson in advanced charades. But I couldn’t change that now. I couldn’t change any of it.
“Is everything all right?” Nathan stepped into my hazy view.
I tried to rally my nerve, for his sake. “I think so. Those Wisps were trapped beyond the Door to Nowhere, and now it’s open. They’re leading people off the path and through the Door, because that’s what they do. It’s real, and it’s here, and I’m guessing it’s down at the bottom of the sphere, since that’s where the Wisps went.”
“But… there has never been any connection between Will-o’-the-Wisps and the Door. Both show up in ancient texts, but never together. And, like I said before, the gateway has only been mentioned once as being anywhere near here.” He scratched his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to. Not everything is written down in books, Nathan. Sometimes, there are things in this world so great that they have to be kept secret at all costs.” A lump formed in my throat as the feeling of responsibility built in my chest, the pressure immense. “All I know is, something happened here. Something stirred this place into reacting.”
Nathan’s eyes opened wide. “It’s the construction! If the Door is down there, it must’ve been unearthed when they started building the foundations. They didn’t begin on the sphere too long ago—maybe a week before you arrived—so, if we add a bit of wait time for the gateway to gather energy from… some unknown source, then the timeline would fit!”
Nathan O’Hara. You really are one of the good ones. In the space of one theory, he’d managed the impossible—he’d taken the weight of all of this off my guilt-ridden shoulders and displaced it elsewhere. Thanks to Leviathan—and Boudicca, to a lesser extent—I’d been so sure that this was my fault. Instead, it appeared this might be a hideous coincidence, after all. The Door needed bestial energy, that was what Leviathan said. Well, the Institute had an entire Repository just waiting to be sapped as an energy source. And all of that would’ve begun a week before I arrived. Sure, I might’ve added a little bit of juice, but only once the ball was already rolling. Tentative relief washed over me as I hoped, with all my heart, that Nathan’s theory was right.
“Can I ask you one thing?” I straightened, dragging my confidence with the rest of me.
Nathan nodded. “Of course.”
“Have any of the beasts in the Repository seemed sluggish or weird lately? You know, around the time the foundations for the sphere were dug?” I wanted one last piece of evidence to exonerate me.
He rubbed his stubbled chin in thought. “Now that you mention it… yes, they’ve been more lethargic, and less inclined to emerge from their mist. I thought it had to d
o with the changing seasons and the particularly awful weather we’ve been having, as Purge beasts can be very sensitive to atmospheric pressure.”
“Do you think the Door might’ve been sapping their energy?” I put it out there and prayed.
He squinted, thinking. “I don’t see why not. It certainly fits the timeline.”
Thank Chaos! Thank freaking Chaos! That meant it wasn’t the pixies, it might’ve had very little to do with me, and I could stop feeling like everyone who’d gone missing had marched off to a terrible fate because I’d had the audacity to come to the Institute. A nagging thought in the back of my head reminded me of the other missing magicals, the ones out there in the wider world, disappearing each month. The Door couldn’t have had anything to do with that.
“Then let’s find this Door.” I steeled myself, letting the pixies light the treacherous path down the central walkway. They didn’t provide much light, the equivalent of cat’s eyes reflecting at the side of the road, but it was enough to avoid tumbling to a tragic death.
Nathan followed me toward the middle of the sphere only to veer off and pause at the sheer lip of the suspended walkway, staring into the abyss below. A pole, which would one day have glass orbs clinging to it like in the Repository, stood within arm’s reach, though we’d have to lean out at 45-degrees to grab it.
He cast me an anxious smile. “I wanted to be a firefighter when I was little. I guess now I’ll finally find out if it would have worked out.”
“You’re going to go first?”
He gulped and reached for the pole, his toes barely hanging onto the walkway. “Looks like it.” He grabbed onto the pole and swung his torso toward it, and his legs followed. He clung koala-style for a moment, frozen. A second later, he whooshed downward, with a horde of pixies hot on his heels, and disappeared from view.
Taking a deep breath, I approached the spot where he’d stood. Boudicca plopped onto a sitting position on my shoulder and gripped my T-shirt with both hands. Why she didn’t fly down with the others, I had no clue, but I liked having her with me.
“Hold on, Genie,” I whispered, wishing my words would somehow find her.
I leaned out past the point of no return and grabbed the pole, then froze, half on the walkway and half off. Finally, I wrapped my legs around the pole, as Nathan had done, and clung there for a few seconds. It was always a mistake to look down, but the fact that I couldn’t see a damn thing down there made it ten times worse. Genie had saved my behind more than once. Now, it was my turn to reciprocate.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I loosened my grip and plummeted into the unknown.
Twenty-Five
Genie
Did I fall asleep? Bright light burned through my eyelids. Closed eyelids. I could see all the little veins crisscrossing over the thin skin. I must’ve fallen asleep at some point, though I didn’t remember dropping off. And why was the sun shining in my face? Ireland hadn’t seen more than an hour of strong sunshine since I’d arrived.
I groaned, cracking my eyes open. I was in the new wing somewhere, and one of the hunters was shining a flashlight in my face, asking why I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been. There were nearby voices—other hunters, probably—but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
But then my eyes adjusted to the light, and I froze. The new wing, I realized, was long gone, and… oh, man, was I not in Kansas anymore.
I lay on a sloping hill that led down to a purple stream, and the grass was the silvery white of fresh winter frost. The colors were all wrong. Bright, red-trunked trees grew white leaves, copses of pale purple bushes carried alarming bright blue fruit, and above stretched a sunless pink sky with pastel yellow clouds. There were moving clouds, but no wind. There was light, but no sun. There was definitely supposed to be a sun. Everyone knew that.
What the hell happened to me? My body was shaking, but not from the cold. It was the shock of jolting out of my happy daze into whatever this was supposed to be. Presumably not the real world anymore.
I squinted as I noticed hovering lights by the stream. They bobbed around in a familiar way. Little gassy balls of color, playing with one another. Where had I seen that before? My mind felt like it’d been stuffed with cotton balls, and the trippy landscape wasn’t helping.
You followed them here… It was coming back in hazy bursts, like a half-remembered dream. Only this was the part that felt like a dream. I remembered being in the new wing and hearing that song… A mesmerizing tune that pulled me through a door of light. I realized, with a stomach lurch, that this must have been where it led to. A hidden world. And, if it was hidden, who the heck was going to find me?
I lifted my hand to my brow, blocking out the light that seemed to be everywhere at once. It took just half a second to spot another person… and another, and another. Quite a lot of people, actually, all scattered across the sloping hills, tucked under the weird trees, or sitting by the stream as if everything was totally cool. But they didn’t seem very… with it. They were all staring into space, their lips moving in a steady rhythm. The whisper of the cumulative voices drifted across the hidden realm like wind.
Getting up, I dusted off the back of my jeans. A silver, glittery residue clung to my palms, so I wiped harder, sending cascades of powder floating to the floor. Sort of like snow, but not. Sort of like frost, but not.
Trying my best to ignore the bizarreness, I set off to explore. Every footfall made the grass crunch, leaving my distinct footprints. I saw more of these tracks trailing the hills, where people had obviously gone a-wandering. So, why wasn’t anyone walking now? It looked like someone had arranged them in this world the way they wanted them, like dolls or mannequins, then abandoned them. And not one of them seemed to be aware of their surroundings.
Edging down the slope, I spotted a familiar face standing on the stream bank. Dark hair, sourpuss face, fancy clothes—oh yeah, I remembered this girl. Xanthippe. The first to go missing, and the first to launch a discriminatory tirade at me. Gritting my teeth for the anticipated cry of “Get away from me, filthy Atlantean,” I headed toward her. But she didn’t even turn when I touched her arm.
“Xanthippe?” I shook her arm, this time. “Hey, Xanthippe!”
Her eyes stayed fixed on something in the distance as her mouth moved, whispering words I had to lean close to hear. “I’ll follow you. I’m here. I want to hear the music.” I waited for her to snap out of it, but she just kept repeating those three sentences, stuck on a loop. Her eyes were zoned out, entranced.
“Xanthippe!” I screamed in her ear, yanking on her arm. But every time I pulled her, she moved right back into her autopilot position.
Okay, this is freaking me out. I scanned the rest of the people, in search of more familiar faces. There must’ve been thousands of people scattered to the four corners of this place. Some wore modern clothes, so I guessed those were Institute people. However, they were a distinct minority. The rest, from what I could tell, were either re-enactment enthusiasts or… or what? Was it possible that they were actually from an ancient time? Old-timey jerkins and bloomer-looking pants stopped mid-calf. Long cloaks and men in plate armor. Hunched elderly folks in threadbare dresses and tunics.
One of the armored men wasn’t too far away—twenty yards or so. Making a decision, I left Xanthippe to her mantra and made a beeline for the soldier. The glowing orbs closest to him winged away, not wanting to be close to me. I didn’t mind that one bit; I didn’t want to be close to them either. The soldier was less frozen than some of the others, doing a kind of box-step on replay. I gave his sword a wide berth as I approached.
“Hello?” I patted him awkwardly on the back. “Can you hear me?”
The soldier continued to box-step, his chainmail clattering with each move, all the while speaking in an accent so thick, I wasn’t even sure he was speaking English. “Leanfaidh mé thú. Táim ag teacht. Fan liom. Leanfaidh mé thú. Táim ag teacht. Fan liom. Leanfaidh mé thú. Táim ag teacht. Fan liom.”
“Am I dead?” Finch and Harley had comforted Persie and me with tales of the afterlife. They’d categorically confirmed its existence, after Persie had had a nightmare about dying. But even they didn’t know what lay in the great beyond, behind the proverbial veil. They knew it existed, because they’d had passed loved ones communicate with them, but there was still no roadmap. Maybe I’d found it. Maybe that was where the door really led.
If this was heaven, it wasn’t for me. And the floating orbs whizzing around made poor and slightly unnerving angels.
Determined to push away my increasing terror, I stepped away from the soldier and headed for a duo of elderly folks, an old man and woman, both drowning in dirty cloaks. Beneath, they wore a tunic and a dress, respectively. The woman carried a basket, while the man had his arm around her, and both had muddied, bare feet. Like they’d walked into a bog. Another strange detail. Where, here, could they have gotten their feet so filthy? The grass couldn’t be drier—it crunched, for Pete’s sake.
This time, I stepped right in front of them. “Excuse me?”
They stared right through me, both chanting the same mantra under their breaths: “I’ll follow you. I’m coming. Wait for us.”
“Who are you following?” I asked helplessly.
The same words repeated back.
“Someone else has to be awake!” I snapped, my nerves jangling. “Hey! HEY! Can anyone hear me? Where the heck are we?!”
Why was I the only conscious person here? Was I supposed to be like them, a glitching statue? A blood-chilling thought snuck into my head. What if I would end up like them? Was it only a matter of time? I had no idea how long I’d even been here.
I decided I’d find someone in modern clothing. Maybe they wouldn’t be as stuck as the others. But then I heard, behind me, a crunch of the silver grass. I whirled around, and there, approaching on the opposite side of the riverbank, was a man, and he was looking at me. A conscious, mobile, non-hypnotized man. He was dressed in old-fashioned clothing, too—black leather pants tucked into high boots, and an elegant jacket that split into coattails at the back. Brass buttons went all the way up to his high collar, and he carried a riding crop in his left hand.
Harley Merlin 19: Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere Page 26