She heard someone singing and realized it was coming from a mirror set into a large elliptical basin of smooth gray rock. No—not a mirror, a pool of water so still and flat it looked like a mirror—and in it, she could see Mercy standing guard over their bodies—all of them lying on their backs in ankledeep water in the library courtyard, floating like corpses.
“Is that really her?” Tripp asked. All his bravado was gone, wrung out of him by the descent. And they were only at the beginning.
“I think so,” said Alex. “Water is the element of translation. It’s the mediary between worlds.” She was quoting the Bridegroom, words he’d spoken to her as they stood up to their waists in a river, in the borderlands.
Mercy was singing to herself. “And if I die today I’ll be a happy phantom…”
Good choice. The whole song was death words. Alex could hear the metronome ticking steadily away behind Mercy’s tune.
“Where do we start?” asked Turner.
His expression was stony, as if in the wake of all that misery there was nothing to do but lock down. He had his answer now, about what Alex had done in Los Angeles. And she had her answers to questions she’d never thought to ask Turner. The Eagle Scout. The killer.
Alex squinted out at the flat gray day. Could it even be day if there was no sun visible? The bruised sky stretched on and on, and wherever they were
… No pits of fire. No obsidian walls. It felt like a suburb, a new one, for a city that didn’t exist. The streets were spotless, the buildings nearly identical.
They had the shape of the strip malls that lived on every corner of the valley, full of nail salons and dry cleaners and head shops. But there were no signs over the doors here and no customers. The storefronts were empty.
Alex turned in a slow circle, trying to stifle the wave of dizziness that overtook her. Everything was the same sandy, washed-out beige, not just the buildings but the grass and the sidewalks as well.
She felt an unpleasant shiver move over her. “I know where we are.”
Dawes was nodding slowly. She’d put it together too.
They were standing in front of Sterling. Except Sterling was the orchard now, the basin full of water was the Women’s Table in their world. And that meant that all the rest …
“We’re in New Haven,” said Tripp. “We’re at Yale.”
Or something like it. Yale stripped of all its grandeur and beauty.
“Good,” she said with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Then we at least know the layout. Let’s go.” “Where exactly?” asked Turner.
Alex met Dawes’s gaze.
“Where else?” she said. “Black Elm.”
It should have taken them an hour on foot to reach Black Elm from campus.
But time felt slippery here. There was no weather, no movement of the sun overhead.
They crossed through a concrete courtyard and then down to what she thought was Elm Street, but it was lined with big apartment buildings. When Alex looked behind, it was as if the street had shifted. There was an intersection where there hadn’t been one before, a right turn where there’d been a left.
“I don’t like this,” said Tripp. He was shaking. Alex remembered the slide of the wet rope, the sea heaving beneath her.
“We’re okay,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”
“We should … leave bread crumbs or something.” He sounded almost angry, and Alex supposed he had good reason. This wasn’t an adventure. It was a nightmare. “In case we get lost.”
“Ariadne’s thread,” Dawes said, her voice unsteady.
The silence was too complete. The world too still. It felt like they were traveling through a corpse.
Alex kept her hand wrapped around the porcelain box. I’m coming to get you, Darlington. But she couldn’t stop thinking of Hellie. She could still feel Babbit Rabbit in her arms. He’d been alive. For a moment, they’d all been together again.
Alex didn’t know how long they’d been walking, but the next thing she knew they were standing outside of a chain-link fence. A huge sign read,
Future Home of The Westville: Luxury Living. The render was of a sleek glass building towering over a landscaped slice of lawn, a Starbucks at the base, happy people waving to each other, someone walking her dog. But Alex knew this path, the lumps of stone that had once been columns, the birch trees now cut down to stumps. “Black Elm,” Dawes whispered.
It seemed wise to keep their voices low. The houses along the street looked empty, their windows shuttered, their lawns gray and bare. But Alex caught movement from the corner of her eye. A curtain pushed aside from an upstairs window? Or nothing at all.
“We’re being watched,” said Turner.
Alex tried to ignore the fear that moved through her. “We need bolt cutters if we’re going to get past that fence.” “You sure?” Turner asked.
Alex looked down. The flame surrounding the Arlington Rubber Boots box was brighter, nearly white. She walked toward the fence, and then she was walking through it, the metal melting away to nothing.
“Cool,” said Tripp. But he sounded like he wanted to cry.
The driveway to Black Elm seemed longer, the road stretching like a gallows walk between the stumps of trees. But the house itself wasn’t visible.
“Oh no,” moaned Dawes.
Of course. The house wasn’t visible because it wasn’t a house anymore, just a forlorn pile of rubble. Alex caught a glimpse of something moving between the heaps of rock.
“I don’t like this,” Tripp said again. He had his arms crossed over his body as if to protect himself. Alex felt a softness toward him she hadn’t before. She could still taste the sharp tang of chlorine at the back of her throat, feel Spenser’s foot digging into her crotch and the weight of Tripp’s shame, forever pinning him beneath the water.
