Chapter 22 Dorian
Dorian
Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
“A prison, you mean?” I tug at my glove, making sure it’s covering my skin. When I touched the door, I didn’t see anything like a prison, but then again, the memories tied to this place have mostly faded, leaving behind vague mirages of an empty and forgotten chamber.
“There’s no other explanation. The heavy doors, the iron bars. I’m just guessing, but it feels like a prison. What else could it be?” Raven asks.
“I don’t know,” Atticus says. “Professor White said nothing about a prison. It was supposed to house the school’s department of magical creation.
Perhaps, when it was abandoned, someone found a new use for this place?
Maybe there are answers down here and we just haven’t found them.
” I can only see the back of his head, the edges of his face limned in the golden glow from the lantern.
At the end of the tunnel, there’s a heavy wooden door. Smooth dark oak, with an iron latch. He gives us one final glance, fire in his eyes, and a wide smile, and then he opens it.
Inside is a small room with broken tables and chairs, crumbling with disuse and time, the chamber as windowless and dark as a cave. What anyone would be doing here is beyond me. There are doorways leading into other rooms equally dim and dingy.
“What is this place?” asks Atticus, holding the lantern high as he takes everything in.
“It sure doesn’t look like a classroom,” Raven says.
“We should split up,” Atticus suggests. “Light any candles you come across. Let’s see if we can find anything.”
There are wax candles in wall sconces, and we light them one by one with the lantern. Some have been burned down to nubs; others have never been lit. It’s as if whoever used this place intended to come back but never did. Maybe they abandoned these chambers in a hurry?
There are several antechambers, one with a small library full of rotting books beyond salvaging, and another with a bed, the fabric reduced to moldering rags.
I guess this was a workshop of some kind, with a sagging wooden table and broken glass bottles and fractured crystal balls littering the floor.
The ground is filthy, but so is everything in this place.
No one’s been here for probably a hundred years.
I light the remaining wall sconces in the workshop, illuminating the rest of the room as best I can.
It looks like the lab was the most well-used room in the complex.
It still has a rug, a broken mirror, and an old lace dress hanging on a hook, but now there are tree roots growing down from the ceiling.
I hear Raven and Atticus moving about in the next room, shifting what sounds like furniture.
I’m about to join them when I notice there’s a book on the desk, and I flip it open.
It’s written by hand in a flowing script, and I slowly turn the pages.
There are hundreds of entries, so I turn back to the very first page.
On yellowed parchment, written in blood-red ink, are the words The Life’s Work of Adelina Ward.
The vision returns to me, the images of terror flashing in my mind’s eye.
“Atticus, Raven?” I call out, my voice shaking.
The two of them are standing in the doorway a moment later. “What did you find?” Atticus asks.
The book in front of me looks like it could fall apart or crumble in the slightest breeze. “It’s Adelina Ward. I think this is her study. This is her…stuff,” I say, gesturing to the room.
“Adelina Ward, as in the wand you touched, the one that knocked you out?” Atticus raises his eyebrows.
Raven hovers by my side to take a better look, and I get the urge to touch the book with my bare hands, but I hesitate, remembering what happened when I picked up the wand. Raven flips the page, revealing a wall of cuneiform text.
“Akkadian?” I ask.
Raven nods. “Just like this one.” From her bag, she pulls out Professor White’s book.
The cuneiform script in it perfectly matches the handwritten letters in the book we’ve just discovered.
With a shudder, I realize what we’ve found: These two texts are written by the same hand.
The books are bound in the same leather and filled with identical weathered parchment.
“It’s a matched set,” says Raven, stunned.
“How’d Professor White get her hands on that one?” I ask Atticus.
“She was using the book as part of her research,” he answers. “She thought the entries in it might be important or somehow relevant to the restoration of Arches. If that’s true, then Adelina Ward must somehow be equally relevant.”
“So Adelina Ward, the woman from my vision, is somehow connected to the history of this place,” I say.
“That’s the only explanation, right?” asks Atticus. “Ward’s work must somehow be related to Arches. This was her lab, but why would she place it here?”
“It is strange…” says Raven. I touch her shoulder, and she jumps, as if she’d forgotten I was here.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Just a strange feeling. Like I’ve seen this book or maybe this handwriting before,” she murmurs, slowly placing both books in her bag, safely storing them away. She’s lost in thought.
Atticus circles the room. “We should keep searching. Maybe there is something we have yet to find.” He stares at the iron bars and the strange markings that cover the walls.
I run my hand through my hair and try to stop the chill sliding down my spine from making me shudder. But then I realize the chill isn’t my imagination. There’s a breeze. It flutters over the skin on the back of my neck, like a breath.
I spin around, but nothing’s there. I take a deep breath to calm my nerves, but then I feel it again. That breeze. It must be coming from somewhere.
I slip off my glove and hold out my hand, reaching to the air. The breeze flows between my fingers. The wind is coming from a crack in the wall, and I follow it.
“There’s something back there.”
When I press my hand to the cool brick, I sense it.
It’s faded with time but still legible—a memory from a distant past. I watch a ghost, nothing more than a hazy shape, drifting through this same room.
The phantom’s hand moves to the sconce on the wall, polished and new in the past, rusted and old now.
I slide my hand into the ghost hand’s place, and my solid form merges with the spectral one. Our hands tug at the lever at once.
The sconce grinds against the wall as it turns and something shifts.
The wall opens up, revealing yet another tunnel. Raven and Atticus stumble backward.
“A hidden passage!” Raven cries.
“Surprisingly common in Sibylline,” Atticus says.
Fresh air fills the room, and the temperature drops even more. The tunnel ahead is dark, and even the candlelight can’t penetrate it.
I take Atticus’s lantern and lead the way.
The passage is just like the others, with the same carved sigils, but the pattern is more frequent, more compact, the characters resembling the stars gathered at the center of a galaxy, the markings dense and jumbled, piling on top of one another until they’re almost unreadable.
The air here buzzes with magic. I can almost taste it.
Powerful magic was once at work in this place, and the lingering effects are still tangible.
After about fifty paces, the tunnel opens into a large, circular room, with high ceilings made of the same gray stone as the floors and walls.
Patches of moss grow in cracks, and there’s a faint sound of dripping water.
The walls here are thicker, too, the stones seemingly heavier.
The smell of stagnant water and wet stone caresses my face.
Every brick is marked with the same Akkadian sigils. Binding spells.
Making our way to the middle of the room, we find a large metal structure about the size of a small garage. Its iron bars are woven into a lattice cube. It has one door, and it hangs open.
“It’s…a cage,” says Atticus, slack-jawed.
There’s something on the floor inside the cage. Bleached white, covered in rags, a toothy grin.
A skeleton.