Chapter 15
In Irvine Hall, there was a single elevator, constructed by William Irvine himself. It had ornate iron doors, its cabin was relatively small, and its control panel sported about a dozen buttons, each corresponding to a different location—New York City, Amsterdam, Kyoto, Moscow, Boston, Beijing. With the press of a button, the cabin accessed these different cities as easily as the levels of a building. Unlike the elevator that Lennon had summoned, William’s elevator didn’t spawn at random. It was a fixed feature of Irvine Hall: reliable, efficient, and perfect in its functionality, despite its old age.
This was the elevator through which Lennon, and many of her peers, had first entered Drayton. It was also the elevator that she was instructed to take back to Benedict’s home in Utah for the first of her weekly lessons in gatekeeping. Eileen had wasted no time adjusting her schedule. The night of the hearing, the vice-chancellor had arranged for her first class with Benedict to take place the following afternoon.
The journey to Utah took the better part of three minutes, and Lennon took this opportunity to examine William’s elevator. Apart from the fact that it was a bit old and rickety, the elevator seemed completely normal. Riding in it, Lennon would’ve never guessed that it accessed different cities instead of floors.
She wondered why the faculty had been so panicked by the elevator she’d opened. What was so dangerous about this means of transportation anyway? As far as she could tell, it was nothing more than a faster alternative to driving or flying. But none of the faculty had treated it as such. There was something she didn’t yet understand that Dante and the rest had been either unable or unwilling to disclose the night of the hearing. And Lennon was determined to discover what exactly that was.
There was a man waiting for her in the foyer of Benedict’s house when the elevator slowed to a stop. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with brown eyes and a lick of golden-blond hair that swept tastefully across his brow. He had an aquiline nose and high cheekbones.
“I’m Claude,” he said without really looking at her, which was a bit awkward because, with the two of them alone in the hallway, there was nothing much else for him to be looking at. He extended a pale hand threaded with delicate blue veins.
She shook it. It was damp and very cold. “Lennon.”
“A pleasure.”
There was an awkward silence, during which Lennon expected Claude to offer some explanation of who he was and why he was greeting Lennon instead of Benedict. When he didn’t, Lennon, a little affronted by his rudeness, said: “And you are…?”
“Ben’s apprentice. He asked me to show you in. I’m sorry he’s not here to do it himself, but he’s out in the garden attempting to behead—or if not that, then poison—the mole that’s been digging up his rosebushes. But he’ll be in shortly.” Claude spoke with a gravelly antebellum drawl that made him sound like a southern aristocrat who’d died and been buried, exhumed, and reanimated.
They sat together in the living room, where—on a large oak coffee table—a selection of hors d’oeuvres had been arranged—finger sandwiches, cut vegetables, and the like. Lennon didn’t partake of anything but a small cup of tea that tasted so strongly of roses it was almost unpleasant.
Claude watched her from an armchair across the room, his brow furrowed. His pale eyes possessed a disconcerting intensity that made Lennon feel like she was crawling out of her skin.
“You’ll have to forgive my staring. It’s just that I expected… more .” This would’ve been rude if it’d come from the mouth of anyone else, but Claude delivered this naked truth with an air of nonchalance. As if he was simply too casual to be cruel.
But even though Lennon knew he meant no harm, she still bristled a bit. “More of what?”
“Well, now that I’ve said it out loud…I don’t really know. I guess I just expected someone different. Older. But you can’t be more than, what? Twenty-one?”
“Four,” Lennon corrected him. She drained her teacup, set it down in the saucer with a clatter, and winced.
Claude only smiled, pulling a small flask from the pocket of his blazer. He offered it to her, and when she shook her head he merely shrugged, and poured a generous splash into his own teacup. “It helps with the nerves,” he said.
Benedict entered then, or perhaps he’d been stalling in the doorway for some time, waiting for the right moment to make his presence known. He was light-footed, as if he had memorized each of the creaking floorboards of the old house and took special care to avoid them. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and a dirty canvas apron.
“Off you go,” he said, shooing Claude out of the chair he sat in.
He obliged, winking at Lennon on his way out of the parlor.
“I see you’ve met my apprentice,” said Benedict.
“How is an apprentice any different from an advisee?” Lennon asked.
“Simple,” said Benedict, lowering himself into his chair. “An apprentice is someone who’s actually going to be something someday. Something more than the average student at Drayton. A professor like myself typically has only one, maybe two, apprentices in a lifetime. That’s because, as my apprentice, Claude will take up my tenure. This house and everything in it will become his. He’ll be tasked with protecting this gate and by proxy one of the few entrances to Drayton itself. He will, in essence, become me. In choosing him as my apprentice, I’ve chosen my successor.”
Lennon wondered who Dante’s apprentice was, if he had one. If not, was there a chance—however slim—that she could be considered for the role?
“Your Dante was apprenticed to Eileen,” said Benedict, as if sensing that her thoughts had turned to her own advisor. “He’ll one day—sooner rather than later, I suspect—choose an apprentice of his own. I’d thought Emerson O’Neill was a shoo-in for the role, the two of them being so close and her having so much promise. But now that you’ve come along with your elevators…I suspect you may be an upset in her path to succession.”
Lennon indulged herself, for a moment, with the idea of becoming faculty. She imagined a corner office, with a fireplace and Eames chair. Faculty cocktail hours and long walks around Drayton Square. Yes, she decided, she did want that. She wanted that very much, enough to rip that dream straight from Emerson’s clutched hands. Enough to fight for it. She had no interest in congressional seats or the sort of stupid money that could buy a house in Montecito. She didn’t want fame and was too selfish to have a real heart for philanthropy the way that Nadine did. But Drayton would give her two things she desired: power and the skill to use it.
“Of course, you’ll have to work hard,” said Benedict. “Harder than you have been working. I’ve looked over your transcript. Your grades are abysmal at best, and I think you know that. But there is hope for you, in the form of that elevator you called. Your special talent.”
“But I don’t know how I did it,” said Lennon. “Dante said emotion might’ve triggered me—”
“Emotion is not reliable. Nor is it a substitute for skill. You need to approach this pragmatically so that the power you wield remains firmly within your control. Because if you fail to do that, the aftermath of that failure could be both devastating and far-reaching.”
Lennon sensed there was something more he wasn’t saying, about the gates and their mysterious power. But she knew that if it was something he was willing to share, he would have. “All right,” she said. “How do I do that?”
Benedict didn’t answer that question directly. At least not at first. “As I’m sure you know by now, there are those whose will is strong enough to shape the hearts and minds of men. But then there are those whose will is so strong it can shape reality itself. You appear to fall into the latter category, as did William Irvine before you.”
He paused for a moment, considering what he wanted to say next. “At Drayton, we teach illusion work. Typically, these studies are reserved for second-year students. These illusions are essentially advanced applications of persuasion that warp sensory stimuli in order to convince a subject of a specific reality.” Benedict demonstrated this by abruptly changing the scene outside the parlor windows from day to night.
“Oh my god.”
“It’s quite an impressive little trick,” said Benedict, and he quickly restored the windows to their true appearance. “But it can be more than that. When illusion work becomes more advanced than the little parlor trick I demonstrated to you, it enters the realm of theoretical persuasion. The long-held idea is that when you create an illusion so believable that even reality takes it for truth, what you’ve done, in effect, is create a new reality. That is the skill that both you and William possess in the form of your elevators.”
“This is simulation theory,” said Lennon.
“You’re not wrong,” said Benedict. “But let me be clear, you and William Irvine are not the only two individuals who are able to create illusions so convincing they become reality. There have been a number of exceptional practitioners in Drayton’s long history—John Drayton and Dante being two of them—whose talent and brilliance allowed them to bend the laws of reality in ways both small and large. However, you and William Irvine are set apart in that your ability to bend reality extends well beyond shaping matter. You appear to possess the ability to bridge space, in the form of traveling across the material plane by elevator. That is what makes you different, special.”
“Why do the gates take the form of elevators?” It was a question that had plagued Lennon since the hearing.
“They don’t always,” said Benedict. “The gate William first opened was, in fact, a single door. Then a hallway with many doors. After he saw an elevator in New York for the first time, he began to spawn those too. My suspicion is that humans need a way to conceive of the inconceivable. The image of the door or the elevator is a familiar one and has been for some time. It creates a sense of liminality that enables us to conceptualize its basic function.
“I would imagine that many years prior, a gate—to someone who had never before laid eyes on an elevator, or before an elevator was invented—might’ve appeared to them as a stairway, or a corridor like William’s, or perhaps a curtain to be drawn back. An ancient human might’ve seen a field of high grass moving with the wind, offering glimpses of another world behind it. The possibilities are endless, really. The mind makes reality. Your gate manifested itself to you in the form of an elevator because that is an image that both invites use and most accurately conveys its purpose.”
“You talk like it’s a sentient thing. A creature with a mind of its own.”
“It’s not. But you most certainly are, and the elevator is you.”
From there they began to practice, a series of exercises not unlike the ones that Lennon endured in Dante’s persuasion classes. Although, unlike in those classes, Lennon channeled her will not toward a rat but toward the empty far wall of Benedict’s parlor, trying to summon an elevator.
As it turned out, Benedict was not of much help on the practical end of things. This was not so much his fault as it was the school’s. Decades ago, in the days after William Irvine’s death, the library had caught fire, and many of the records that William kept on how to raise a gate were lost to the flames.
“If you know how to do it, why can’t you just force me to with persuasion?” Lennon asked, frustrated.
“If only it were that simple,” said Benedict, staring at her across the table. That crude portrait on the wall behind him seemed to stare down at Lennon too. “The short answer is that you have to learn to do it on your own at first. In the beginning, no one can do it for you.”
“But why?”
“It’s like if you tried to force a newborn baby to walk. As an adult, you’re quite competent, but it’s not the same for an infant. Their feet are too round and swollen to stand on, their legs too weak to support them, the ligaments of their necks not yet developed enough to hold their own heads aloft. Even if you forced them into the proper positions, it would be pointless. It’s an anatomical impossibility for a newborn to walk at that nascent stage. The same can be said for you now. You have to develop your mind—building its proverbial muscles—in order to endure the rigors of raising a gate reliably. No one can do it for you. At least, not until you learn to do it yourself. It’s the same with almost every persuasive skill.”
“So you’re saying I’m screwed if I can’t figure this out by myself?”
Benedict gave her a curt little smile. “How about you try again? This time, replicate your state of mind when the elevator first appeared.”
His phrasing made it sound simple, but the ask itself was almost impossible, unless Lennon got her hands on the same psychedelic drugs that Kieran had gifted her that night at the party. After taking them, she’d felt relaxed and dreamy, like her soul was spilling out of her body, but she was too sedated to even care.
Her mindset now was completely different. Under Benedict’s careful observation, she felt small and scrutinized and horribly anxious. She’d never performed well under pressure—had loathed public speaking and presentations and anything that required her to deliver a performance in front of an audience of any size. Her mental state couldn’t have been farther from the sleepy serenity she’d experienced out in the garden with Sawyer. After several long hours with nothing to show for their efforts Benedict, looking deeply troubled, ended their lesson.