Chapter 9 #2
They all turned to Darlington as if he had some greater insight into the minds of these eager young men.
And maybe he did. What might he have done, whom might he have hurt to see to the other side?
Lethe had been created to keep the societies from preying on their fellow undergraduates and New Haven residents.
But maybe that had been a lie from the start.
“I don’t have an answer,” he said. “The Gauntlet wasn’t built for pickpockets and tax cheats. The descent demands blood.” That was the truth of it. The motive didn’t matter: mercy, survival, justice, revenge. A ticket to hell through the Gauntlet required murder. No free passes.
“Victimas,” Alex said, referencing the name given to subjects used for the Skull and Bones prognostication rituals, men and women laid out on tables, their organs used to predict the movements of the stock market, then sewn up again and sent home—if they were lucky and if they had a home to go to.
Mental patients, men who slept rough, people without families or friends to notice if they suddenly went missing or to object if they came out of the hospital with a new scar.
“When the societies need bodies, they find bodies.”
But there was a big difference between a ritual gone wrong and targeting four people for death.
“Kittscher was a skeptic, an atheist,” Darlington mused. “That might mean he’s Doubting Thomas.”
Turner frowned. “And Reiter is Prince Henry why? Because he’s rich? Seems thin.”
“We’ll put the names and the year through the Albemarle Book,” Dawes said. “There has to be a connection.”
Alex’s eyes roved over the old pages from Kittscher’s Lethe Days Diary. “He doesn’t sound scared at all. The entries leading up to the descent are happy, almost giddy. He’s excited.”
Darlington spread his hands as if in apology. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a man on a great adventure. He has no idea what’s waiting for him.”
None of them had. The silly nicknames, the cocky pose in front of Sterling. Whether it was real fearlessness or a veneer of cheap bravado, these pilgrims hadn’t approached the Gauntlet with caution. They’d leapt right into the abyss.
“Listen to this,” said Turner. “It’s all Manifest Destiny and it’s not our right; it’s our duty until November 1. Then he says, I am without energy or will to record what has happened. I know only despair. There is but one word I need write that may encompass our sins: hubris.”
Darlington almost laughed. “He can be taught.”
“They must have made the descent on Halloween,” Turner said. “Just like we did.”
“That’s it?” demanded Alex. “There’s no description of what actually happened?”
“There are notes,” Turner said. “No formal entries.”
Because they’d been hounded by demons. They hadn’t managed to survive or to pull their monsters back to hell.
They hadn’t had a Wheelwalker or a Dawes or a Turner.
Rudolph Kittscher had managed to graduate, then vanished from history.
Reiter’s life had been stolen by his demon.
It was unlikely the others had fared any better.
“We need to spend real time with these new documents,” Dawes said primly. “You can’t just dial up the answers. Research isn’t like that. It takes time.”
“I don’t have time,” Alex practically snarled. But as soon as she saw Dawes’s stricken expression, her own face crumpled. “I’m sorry. Shit. I’m sorry, Dawes. You did great and I’m an asshole.”
“We haven’t been through everything,” Dawes said, that wounded look vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. “You don’t know what we might find in these records.”
This was friendship, he supposed. You learned the rhythms of hurt and apology. You crashed through each other’s lives and hoped for grace in the final tally of the damage. He wondered what he might hope for in that reckoning. How much harm might he do and what forgiveness might be waiting?
“What did Alban Reed want with you?” Darlington asked Alex, eager to steer his thoughts away from the maudlin.
“He wanted to ask what I knew about Reiter.”
“Are we lying to each other now?”
Alex looked out the window. “Pretty sure Lethe has been selling me bullshit from the start.”
He didn’t like it when she turned away from him. “I’m not Lethe.”
“Maybe not now, but you sure were.”
“If you want to keep arguing, let me know,” said Turner, nose buried in his phone. “But I think I found Rudolph Kittscher.”
“I doubt that,” Dawes said. “We scoured public records.”
“Under Thomas Neumann. That’s Kittscher’s mother’s maiden name. He’s living in Rhode Island.”
Doubting Thomas.
“You found an address?” Alex asked.
“He’d be close to one hundred and twenty years old!” Dawes exclaimed.
“Maybe his demon got him the way Reiter’s did,” said Alex. “Maybe the new name is cover.”
“It’s not possible,” Dawes insisted, and Darlington understood she didn’t want it to be so.
Turner laughed, the sound strange over the rattle of the train car, and the Praetor snuffled in his sleep. “You sure you want to use that word? Around here, it’s practically a dare.”
“Thomas Neumann could be Kittscher,” said Darlington. “Or his demon. Or no relation at all. The only question is what we’re going to do about it.”
Dawes smoothed the stack of papers on her lap. “This is why we went after the records, isn’t it? To try to find a lead? Even if it’s just a relative, Kittscher might have left something behind. An heirloom. Some bit of family lore.”
“Then we go,” Alex said, still looking through the window at nothing. “But we go prepared.”
They rode on in the dark, reading excerpts from the pages Dawes had found and speculating on the theories put forward in Kittscher’s Daemonologie.
At some point, Darlington realized that Alex had dozed off beside him, her head tucked against his shoulder, her face troubled even in sleep. He felt a strange sense of accomplishment, as if a man-eating tiger had rested its head in his hand.
“Be careful,” Dawes said, watching him with worried brown eyes.
“It’s okay, Pammie. I’m only at risk of getting drool on my coat.”
“I meant be careful with her.” Dawes slid her headphones over her ears. “She’s more fragile than she seems.”
Maybe we all are, Darlington thought and closed his eyes, praying they might all prove stronger than they believed as the train clattered on through the long Connecticut night.