Alex hadn’t realized he had a holster and gun beneath his jacket. “I don’t think that’s going to do you much good in hell.” “Couldn’t hurt,” he replied.
Dawes took a small bottle from her pocket and dribbled oil onto her thumb. She smeared it across each of their foreheads. This had to be the datura.
“Are we ready?” Dawes asked.
“Hell yeah!” said Tripp.
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Turner. But Alex appreciated Tripp’s enthusiasm.
Dawes took a deep breath. “Let’s begin.”
They each touched their fingers to the blood welling from their arms.
“Soldier first,” Dawes said. Alex daubed her blood onto each of the four columns marking the entrance. Dawes followed, placing her blood over Alex’s, then Turner, and finally Tripp.
He looked at the smudge of their mingled blood and stood back. “How will we know if—”
Tripp was interrupted by a sound like a sigh, a whoosh of air as if a window had been thrown open.
The heavy wooden door beneath the Egyptian scribe had vanished, leaving nothing but darkness. No glimpse of the library nave beyond, no sign of life or light. It was like looking into nothing. A cold wind blew through on a moan.
“Oh,” said Dawes.
They stood in stunned silence, and Alex realized that, for all of their talk and preparation, none of them had really believed it would work. Despite
every miracle and horror she had witnessed in her time at Yale, she hadn’t been able to buy into a pathway to the underworld hidden right beneath their noses. Had some other group of fools once stood at this doorway awakened by their blood, on this same precipice, trembling and afraid? Dawes claimed the Gauntlet had never been used. But again Alex had to wonder, if that was the case, why build it at all?
“Alex is first, right?” Tripp asked, a quaver in his voice.
Her courage had shriveled at the sight of all of that empty. But there was no time to second-guess. She could hear people approaching down the street.
Come get me, Stern, he’d said. Please.
Alex touched her hand to the porcelain box in her pocket and stepped through the door.
Nothing happened. She was standing in Sterling’s cavernous nave. It looked no different than it had before.
Dawes bumped into her, and they both stumbled out of the way as Turner and then Tripp came through.
“I don’t get it,” said Tripp.
“We have to walk the path,” Dawes said. “That was only the start.”
Single file, they made their way down the nave toward the Alma Mater mural: soldier, scholar, priest, and prince, shrouded in gloom. A strange, shuffling parade. They turned right at the mural and marked the arches beneath the Tree of Knowledge with their blood. Again, the corridor beyond seemed to dissolve, as if their reality had dropped away and left a gaping void. Again, Alex took a deep breath, the diver preparing to sink beneath the surface, and stepped through.
On their right, they passed the glass door through which Alex would enter, but it wasn’t her time yet. The soldier would close the circle. They moved down the corridor, past Death peering over the student’s shoulder, and into the vestibule full of Jost Amman’s woodcuts. Above them Alex could just make out the black iron silhouettes of the mermen with their split tails, monster and man, man and monster.
The cut on Alex’s arm had begun to close, so she had to squeeze it to get the blood to well up again. One by one they anointed the doorway beside the
stone spider, beneath the inscription of Yale’s motto. Light and Truth. It felt like a joke when the door disappeared into flat black darkness.
“This is your station,” Dawes whispered, the first words any of them had spoken since they’d stepped back into Sterling.
Tripp’s jaw was set. His fists were clenched. Alex could see he was shaking slightly. She almost expected him to just turn on his heel and march right out of the library. Instead he gave a single, firm nod of his head.
Alex gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. It was easy not to take Tripp seriously, but he was here facing the same shapeless dread as the rest of them, and he hadn’t complained once. “See you on the other side.”
They moved on, passing into another narrow hallway that would take them to the University Librarian’s office. It was even darker here, the walls crowding in on them. The office felt less empty than suddenly abandoned, the desk chair askew, papers in messy piles.
There was nothing remarkable about this door, but emblazoned on the other side of it was a large stone sundial and two stained glass knights standing guard.
They made fresh cuts and daubed the door jamb with their blood, ready this time for the gap of darkness that opened and the icy wind that blew through.
“Keep your head straight,” Turner said as he took up his post.
The secret door was right behind them, beside the big stone fireplace with its grumpy Latin, barely visible unless you knew where to look for the outline hidden in the paneling. Alex and Dawes passed through it and into another dark, tiny vestibule that had no real purpose—unless you were trying to circumnavigate the courtyard.
They emerged in Linonia and Brothers, on the opposite end of the room from the niche where they’d hidden. Here again, it felt as if the place had been abandoned, as if the absence of the human could be felt.
At last they stood at the original entrance to the courtyard, Selin’s name emblazoned across the stone lintel in golden letters.
Alex didn’t want to leave Dawes there. She didn’t want to be alone in this dark cathedral of a building.
“The niches are all empty,” Dawes said.
“They are?” Alex asked, completely lost.
Dawes had the silver pitch pipe in her hands and her voice was quiet but steady. “All over the library, you can see these spaces, these stone frames where a sculpture of a saint should be, like in a cathedral. But they’re all empty.”
“Why?”
“No one really knows. Some people think they ran out of money. Some people say the architect wanted the building to look like it had been sacked.
All of its treasures stolen.”
“What do you think?” Alex asked. She could feel they were in uncertain territory, that this story, these words were what Dawes needed to keep going.
“I don’t know,” Dawes said at last. “We all have hollow places.”
“We’re going to bring him home, Dawes. We’re going to make it out of this.”
“I believe you. At least the first part.” She took a deep breath, set her shoulders. “I’ll be watching.”
Alex smeared her blood onto the entry. Dawes followed. This time the big double doors looked like they collapsed in on themselves, folding like paper as the wind howled through. It was louder now, moaning, as if whatever was on the other side of the darkness knew they were coming.
“Look,” Dawes said.
The script above the door had shifted into a different language.
