Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Maybe I shouldn’t have let Jamie talk me into watching Speed when I was twelve, because this freight elevator is terrifying me. It’s nothing more than a platform. No walls, no doors. Thank god we’re only going down one level.
The ride is slow and jerky, like the cable is catching on rust. And the screech of metal on metal has every hair on my body standing on end. Surely the racket is going to alert security.
“Can’t you do a sound shield?” I ask Leo.
“Not when we’re in motion.”
That’s a pretty major caveat.
Throughout our ride down, the raw walls of the shaft are in full view. And they’re not cinderblock, they’re stone, the original foundations from the eighteenth century. What’s living in those walls? Or on them?
As we near the bottom, I brace myself for a bone-rattling crash, but the antique elevator grinds slowly to a halt with only the slightest kickback.
For a moment we all stand there, frozen, waiting to be accosted by security guards, or by some ancient archivist who’s been down here so long he’s half-mushroom. A few of us even dare to breathe.
No one comes.
Finally, Topaz shoves open the gate. “Are we doing this or what?”
We take a collective deep breath and follow. There’s only one way to go: left. With our phones lighting the way and our footsteps muted on the painted concrete floor, we travel, two-wide, down the narrow hallway.
Topaz comes to a stop at the first room and holds a hand out behind her. “Flashlight.”
Aaron obliges, and we all hold our breath, waiting as she opens the door. A motion-sensor light flicks on, bathing the small space in a blue fluorescent glow.
“How do you feel, Betts?” Avery asks as I cross the threshold.
“Just a little off.” Not even as bad as I felt in the conference room.
The six of us cram shoulder-to-shoulder into the small space. It’s a forest of metal shelves piled high with boxes. I read their labels: staplers, dry-erase, envelopes, file folders.
Aaron mutters, “Nothing but office supplies.”
“Archaic office supplies,” I say. “I doubt anyone’s been in here in years.”
Back in the main artery, we come upon another hallway, branching off to the right.
It’s so dark and cavernous, I can’t see where it ends.
I shiver and gratefully follow the group as they pass it by.
We’re heading in the right direction, anyway.
I know because the wrongness and disharmony are back.
Skin crawling, I grab the closest person.
“Everyone stop,” Avery says, glancing down at my fingers digging into her forearm. “Betts? Are we going the right way?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, hang on to me.” She loops my arm through hers.
The next room we enter isn’t the one we’re looking for, but it’s evidence that the rooms are getting progressively older the further we get from the elevator.
Leo shines his phone light around the space, spotlighting its dank stone walls and lumpy floor.
“I wonder if there used to be a furnace in here,” he says, pointing to a square hole in the outer wall. “I’ll bet this was the coal chute.”
Something drips on my head, and I back out fast, gritting my teeth to keep from yelping. But the hallway isn’t any safer. The short distance to the next door feels like a twenty-mile hike. I’m stumbling up and down sand dunes in a desert, battling the hot, dry wind.
I imagine wrapping my velvet cloak tightly around me, pulling the hood down to protect my eyes from the heat and sand. Keep them out, keep them out, keep the emotions out.
“Hold on.” Aaron holds up his hands. “I hear something.”
Yet again, all six of us freeze, right outside the doorway. We hold back our questions, letting him listen uninterrupted. Meanwhile, Topaz and Rime scan the hallway for danger.
“Holy shit!” Aaron’s eyes are huge. “It’s hammering on metal. I think I’m hearing the forge!” He squeezes past us and launches into the room, triggering another motion-sensor light, this one even more anemic than the last. “It’s louder in here,” he calls out. “And look, the windows!”
We pour in after him, and in my eagerness, I rush, forgetting about the energy field I’ve come from and the one I’ve just thrown myself into.
As my knees buckle, Leo grabs me. I grip his shoulders and imagine my cloak covering my whole body, sheltering me in darkness.
The emotions are outside it, I’m safe inside.
The emotions are outside it, I’m safe inside…
“Are you still hearing the metal?” Rime asks Aaron.
“Yeah. Nice and loud.”
Feeling more stable, I loosen my grip on Leo and study the room. It’s stone like the furnace room and equally damp. The tracery windows, all three of them, are smaller than I expected and positioned up along the plaster ceiling, cobwebs linking one iron fleur-de-lis to another like swag curtains.
“Hey, ya’ll, look!” Avery holds up a gothic candelabra. “More iron stuff.”
Stuff. That’s the best word for what’s in this room.
Stuff you suspect is valuable but you don’t have time to do the research, so you toss it all into a dank storage space and vow to one day “sell this shit on eBay.” That kind of stuff.
I wander among the antique tables, dragging my fingers along the cold knickknacks, leaving dark trails in the white dust.
Suddenly, a yearning grips my chest, stealing my breath.
I want what I want, and I’ll do anything to get it.
A few steps deeper into the room, and the desire gives way to terror. What have I done? I whirl, desperate to escape, to run from what I’ve created.
“Betts.” Someone grabs my arm, halting my flight. “Look at me.”
Leo.
I drag a hand down my face. I’m Betts Peterson, Brownhill student, Newberry Hall resident, English major.
“I’m okay,” I tell him, exhaling long and slow.
As I reorient myself, I notice exactly where I’m standing relative to the windows.
I signal for Leo to wait and take several steps toward the door.
As I expected, the intensity of the emotions drops from, let’s say, a six to a four on the Peterson Clairsentience Scale.
I one-eighty and walk back the way I came.
Five… six… eight. When panic has me seeing spots, I stop. “It’s strongest here.”
“Where?” Leo asks.
“Here.” Duh. Where I’m standing. Less than two feet away from slamming face-first into the stone wall. The one with the three windows.
“What’s here?” he gently urges.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I’m terrified. But… but I want to give in. I want to do all sorts of horrible things. Fun things. Crazy things. Evil things.” Suddenly a word comes to me, skipping my brain and traveling straight from my intuition to my lips. “Hubris.”
“Hubris,” Leo repeats, half to himself. “And it’s strongest right here?”
“Yes, right here. When I went back there, it got weaker.”
He guides me a few steps to my left, then to my right.
“No change,” I say. “It’s strong all along this wall.”
“That doesn’t make sense. This is the edge of the building. There’s nothing on the other side but dirt.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few months, it’s that things don’t have to make sense to be real. Determined, I pull a rickety-looking, moth-eaten, upholstered chair up close to the wall. “Aaron, can I borrow you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is the metal sound louder here than in the middle of the room?”
“Hold on.” He shuffles back and forth several times. “Definitely.”
I gesture toward the chair. “What if you stand on this?”
He climbs up, Leo and I holding out our hands in case the chair gives out underneath him.
“Weaker,” he proclaims. He hops down and squats close to the floor. “Stronger.”
I crouch next to him, and right away the fiery horror cranks up. “Stronger,” I confirm.
Then, with his and Leo’s help, I stand on the chair. “And less up here.”
“It’s like y’all are listening for termites or mice or something,” Avery jokes. But it is, kind of. There’s something on the other side of that wall, or just beneath it. Something we can sense.
The question is, how do we get to it?
“Alright everyone, move aside.” Topaz rounds an empty spindle bookshelf and elbows her way to the wall. “And back up.” She throws a grin over her shoulder. “Unless you want to make some new friends.”
Leo jumps in front of me and nudges me back until my thighs hit the dusty table. I’m pinned there, watching over his shoulder as Topaz turns her hands upright and points them low at the wall, curling her fingers.
Using her weaving magic.
I lurch back, but the table doesn’t budge. A swishing sound, like a hand brushing down a smooth sheet, sends my fingers digging into Leo’s arms.
“Aw, hell no,” Aaron mumbles. “Just. No.” He and Avery shelter behind Rime, Aaron poised to run and Avery bouncing up and down in excitement.
The floor between Topaz and the wall undulates like the distant ocean. When light flashes on scales, I cower behind Leo, burying my face in his back to stifle my scream.
“They’re blacksnakes,” he tells me. “They won’t hurt you.”
Blue, black, pink polka dots—what do I care?
They’re snakes. I peer around his arm to watch as they slither over Topaz’s feet, winding like cats around her legs.
One twists up her torso and slips over her shoulders.
There must be ten of them, but more are coming.
I gulp down my terror and disgust as they wiggle out of the wall and drop to the floor like pork through a meat grinder.
Topaz crouches close to the wall and places a hand on the stones, heedless of the snakes still squeezing through the cracks. “There’s a room on the other side.”
“What kind of room?” Rime asks.
“Like this, but lower.”
“Ask them what’s in there,” Leo says.
Topaz plays with a snake like it’s a Slinky. “Metal. Broken tools and glass. A crumbling hearth.”
We all gasp, “The forge.”
“How are we supposed to get in there?” Rime side-steps snakes as he approaches the wall. “There’s no door or hatch or anything.” With his phone light, he searches every square foot for some sort of opening, beating a fist on the loosest-looking stones.