Chapter 39
Alex woke to screams. For a moment she didn’t know where she was.
She often stumbled out of sleep sure that she was back at the apartment in Van Nuys, that Yale and Lethe and Il Bastone had all been a dream.
There was always a sense of confusion, misery tinged with relief, because Hellie was still alive, but they were both trapped at the bottom of a well.
Then reality returned: the sound of Mercy’s snores if she was in her dorm room, Dawes banging around in the kitchen below if she was in the Dante bedroom.
Not tonight. The room was quiet. Darlington slept beside her, entirely human now, his hair tousled, his body sprawled across the bed. Outside, someone shrieked.
Alex wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and made herself rise and walk to the narrow window.
Snow lay heavy over the Black Elm grounds and the sky had cleared to reveal a faint smatter of stars.
The bare branches of the trees were full of owls, all of them screeching and clicking, flapping their wings.
“I don’t think they approve,” Darlington mumbled.
“Good.”
Yesterday she’d felt a deep mourning. But now, thinking of her father, of his very special bloodline, his precious order of priests, she felt a kind of mad rage overtake her.
A secret society operating within the secret societies, one more door locked, one more path barred.
So she wasn’t a hidden princess, and no matter what Turner said about callings, she had no glorious destiny before her.
Mishap, mistake, abomination. Fine. Plenty of good things happened by accident.
Penicillin and … She’d think of something else eventually.
She cracked open the window. “Hey!” she yelled at the owls. “Go fuck yourselves!” They paused their shrieking, then started right back up again. She wedged the window closed against the din. “Worth a try.”
“I’m sure the neighbors agree.”
“Are we going to talk about … the glow?”
“I’d prefer we didn’t.”
“Does it only happen when you’re—”
“Yes.”
“And what if—”
Darlington pulled the covers over his head. “Can you allow me some measure of dignity?”
“Dignity is for the weak, Darlington.”
“I will give you twenty American dollars to change the subject.”
“Now we’re talking. What is this?” she asked, leaning over his desk and touching her finger to an old newspaper clipping of a roller coaster. She’d seen it before when she was searching for clues to his disappearance and the Bridegroom’s murder-suicide.
“The Thunderbolt. It used to be right out there on the water at Savin Rock.”
“Was it part of your magical map?”
“Come back to bed and I’ll tell you.”
She felt like she’d been dunked in sunlight.
She’d been in this room before, this strange, intimate space.
But this time she’d been invited. He’d brought her here.
He’d somehow offered himself up to her. It was awful, actually.
How was she going to recover from someone like Darlington when there was no one like Darlington?
She slid into bed, grateful for his warmth, the rare happiness of lying entwined with him. She knew there was no permanence here, but she intended to enjoy it while she could.
“Go on.”
“The Thunderbolt led me to Lethe. When I was a kid, I went to a picnic at Lighthouse Point—”
“The place with the carousel?”
She felt him nod against her hair.
“We were all bored and looking across the Sound, and one of the other kids said he wished we could go over to Savin to ride the roller coaster. But this was way after all the attractions at Savin Rock had been destroyed. He pretended it was a joke, but even then I knew he was lying. He’d seen something the rest of us couldn’t see. ”
“Can places be Grays?” Alex had never even considered that possibility.
“I think so. There are records of people who could see old monuments, houses, even cities that don’t exist anymore.
A fisherman claimed he saw Atlantis in the waters near the Azores, and he was widely mocked in every newspaper of the time, but a consortium of businessmen and archaeologists sponsored a secret dive there and they found amphorae with a language no one has seen anywhere else. It’s a rare talent.”
“So you’re saying I’m special but not that special.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m glad I didn’t have to spell it out for you.”
She laughed. “And that’s what made you wonder about the uncanny.”
“That was the start,” he said, and she knew there was more, his grandfather’s death, the years he’d spent alone in Black Elm. “I looked everywhere for that kid, but I didn’t have much to go on.”
“I think I met him.”
Darlington pushed himself up on his elbow. “What?”
“At Savin Rock. There was a Gray in the shallows. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. He said he knew you, but that you were different now, scarier.”
“He’s dead?”
“If it’s the same person. I think he drowned. He went out into the water trying to find the Thunderbolt.”
Darlington lay back, his head cushioned on his folded arm, gazing at the ceiling. “Well.”
“Sorry.”
He gave his head a soft shake. “I just thought … I figured he grew up, maybe left town. I guess I thought we’d cross paths one day, that his gift would somehow put him on the road to Lethe too.
All that time I was getting older and hunting ghosts and trying to get to the other side. He never got to live any of it.”
“It’s lonely when you can see a world no one else can.
” Alex had assumed that seeing old places wouldn’t be as harrowing as seeing the human dead.
But something had driven this kid into the water, probably that same desperate desire for proof, for evidence that he was either mad or not.
Alex had believed she was crazy for so long and that, more than the visions of wounds and missing limbs—the man who had wandered naked into her fourth-grade classroom with his stomach cut open from some botched operation, the little girl with a black gap where her right eye should be, a bullet that had passed straight through—had knocked her permanently off-balance.
It wasn’t the horror of what you saw. You could get used to anything, really.
It was wondering if what you saw was real or if your mind had manufactured it. “I guess some places get hold of you.”
“They do,” Darlington said and laid his hand lovingly on the wall, as if Black Elm could feel his touch the way that Il Bastone seemed to.
“Shit,” she blurted, sitting up abruptly. “Who built the hedge maze?”
“What?”
“The hedge maze in the back of the house,” she said, already shaking off the blankets and pulling on her underwear, her bra.
“Why are we putting on clothes? That seems like a terrible idea.”
“Darlington, just answer me.”
“My great-grandfather, actually. He had it commissioned before he died. It fell apart when my grandfather got sick. I never got around to fixing it up.”
“You should have.”
“Why?”
He’d shoved up on his elbows, and he was staring at her like she was out of her mind.
“Get dressed.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to get out of here.” Alex looked around the room, feeling her skin pimple with gooseflesh. “Your great-grandfather didn’t best his demon and I know exactly where it went. The demon became Black Elm, Darlington. It’s this fucking house.”