Chapter 15 #2
“I was asking him about the identities of the other pilgrims and what happened to them. He said…” Darlington closed his eyes, remembering Kittscher’s mad gaze, his hungry mouth.
He’d been sweating then, his eyes sizzling in their sockets, blood trickling from the corners as the salt water did its work.
“Henry learned to kill. I learned how to lie. Nicky hid at home. Hector had to die. Then he looked up at me and said, Nice boots.”
“Gibberish,” said Turner.
But Dawes shot to her feet. “They’re all in Dante!” She bolted for the parlor. “I mean in the cantos. Well, in the afterlife,” she muttered, the rest unintelligible as she vanished from sight.
“Dawes?” Tripp called. “Are you—”
But Dawes was already hurrying back into the dining room, her laptop in hand, her messy bun sliding to the side of her head.
“The names!” she practically shouted. “Hector appears in Limbo, the great Trojan warrior, a soldier. Henry has to be Henry III. Dante sees him in purgatory, in the Valley of the Princes.”
Darlington tried not to gape like a fool. Why hadn’t he seen it?
“It’s right there,” he said with a laugh. “Right on the page. Nicky is Pope Nicholas III. Dante gives him one of the most vivid and comic punishments in purgatory. He’s buried alive upside down, wedged into the floor of hell.”
“The priest!” Turner said, slapping the table.
“Why Nick Zanca, though?” asked Dawes.
“It’s a reference to what Pope Nicholas is wearing,” Darlington said. “They’re military boots. Some scholars think Dante was making a point about Nicholas compromising his spirituality in pursuit of earthly power.”
“That’s a deep cut,” said Turner.
Darlington nodded slowly. “It must have been a kind of joke between them. But Kittscher was most definitely the scholar.” Soldier, scholar, priest, and prince. The four offices of the pilgrims, the roles they’d taken on in the descent.
Dawes frowned. “So why call himself Thomas?”
“Because he’s a pretentious ass.” Darlington couldn’t help smiling.
“Doubting Thomas is a reference to Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest religious scholars to ever live. He authored the Summa Theologiae, and he was a huge influence on Dante. Some scholars even call the Divine Comedy ‘the Summa in verse.’ Aquinas was, of course, a believer but we know Kittscher wasn’t.
So he called himself Doubting Thomas. Another little joke. ”
“I don’t get it,” said Tripp.
“I didn’t say it was a good joke.”
“But where does this get us?” Turner asked, his frustration clear. “Now we know why these young idiots chose their nicknames. They all liked Dante. How does this get us any closer to sealing up the door to hell?”
“I…” Dawes shut her laptop and her hands disappeared into her sleeves. “I guess it doesn’t.”
The spark racing through them fizzled, that brief glimpse of hope withering to nothing. Just a demon’s game. A bit of nonsense. Turner had it right. Gibberish.
“I can’t sit here all night debating dead men,” Turner said. He looked tired, angry. “We finally found one of the original pilgrims and he turns out to be another vampire—”
“Not exactly,” said Dawes.
“Then what was he?”
Darlington had contemplated that very question for much of the drive home. “I think he was something like a nachtzehrer.”
Tripp squinted at him. “A what now?”
“It means nighteater. It’s a creature from German folklore that feeds on members of its own household. A little like a succubus.”
“A sex vampire?”
Darlington sighed. “Yes, Tripp. But without the sex or the blood.”
Turner scrubbed a hand over his face. “I really don’t care. We fished a girl out of the Sound last week. She was only twenty-four. That’s the real world. That’s why I spent all day talking to witnesses at Savin, and that’s where my attention needs to be, not … playing guessing games with demons.”
No one protested as he rose and gathered his things. Alex and Darlington followed him silently into the entry as Dawes and Tripp started clearing.
“We’ll go over the rest of what he said,” Darlington offered. “I could be forgetting something important.”
“We found the lost papers,” Turner said. “We even found one of the original pilgrims. We’re still coming up empty. Alex—”
“I know.”
“We need answers. We need to talk to your mom.”
“I get it.”
Turner slid on his coat, then he stopped, his arm only halfway through the sleeve. “What did the demon say? About the sun?”
Darlington tried not to show his discomfort.
“He said I follow Lethe like—” He tracked Turner’s gaze to the staircase, the centerpiece of Lethe, made of heavy dark wood and worth more than everything else in the house put together.
It was emblazoned with sunflowers. “Keep fast thy hold,” he recited, “for by such stairs as these must we perforce depart from so much evil.”
“Dawes!” Alex shouted. “Dawes, come here!”
Together they ran their hands along the sunflowers that scrolled along the polished wood, tapping and knocking, looking for a loose board or a hollow sound.
“You think there’s something in the stairs?” Dawes asked as she and Tripp joined them, adding to the strange rhythm of knocks and plunks.
No one answered because the answer was always the same: I hope. I hope.
“What else happens in that passage of the Inferno?” Alex demanded.
“You’re actually asking me to hold forth on a classical text?”
“That’s right, Darlington. Talk Dante to me.”
With pleasure. “Each book in the Divine Comedy has thirty-three cantos. Virgil leads Dante out of hell in the last canto of Inferno. He’s panting and tired and Dante is clearly shaken by everything he’s seen.
He’s afraid that they’re just looping back into hell, that there’s no way out.
But Virgil explains that they’ve passed through the center of the world and it only seems like they’re backtracking because everything has reversed. ”
“The landing,” Dawes said. “It’s where the staircase changes direction.”
Darlington lunged up the stairs to the landing and shoved aside the threadbare rug. He knocked his knuckles against the floorboards, his worry growing. Were they all just playing Kittscher’s game, grasping at hints that led nowhere?
“Wait,” Alex said. “Dawes, did you already clean the compact we used on Reed?”
She shook her head. “I hadn’t gotten to it yet.”
Alex and Dawes charged into the parlor leaving Darlington, Tripp, and Turner to stare at each other.
“You ever feel like you went to bed and woke up on the other side of the looking glass?” Turner asked.
“Every day,” said Darlington.
“I miss dreaming,” Tripp said.
“You don’t dream?” Turner asked.
“Nope. I just close my eyes and then I open them again.”
Alex rushed back into the room—accompanied by Alban Reed.
“Shit!” Tripp barked.
“It’s me,” said Dawes from within the glamour.
“I know, but still!”
He reached out to poke Dawes’s cheek, and she batted his hand away. “Stop that.”
She stood a few steps down from the landing and leaned over it, then clicked play on the recorder.
“Alban Reed … I’m the Lethe board president.”
Dawes released a bleat of surprise as one of the floorboards disappeared. It didn’t dissolve. It simply wasn’t there anymore, a black gap. The house seemed to sigh around them, as if Il Bastone had been keeping a secret for far too long.
“So, who wants to put their hand in there?” Turner asked as they hovered on the steps, staring at that little slice of darkness.
“I’ll do it,” said Tripp, and before any of them could stop him, he shoved his arm into the gap.