Chapter 45
Alex had chosen Grove Street Cemetery because she didn’t want any other Grays around to witness their conversation, and Grays hated anyplace and anything that reminded them of death.
Maybe she would have been better off going to meet them in the Borderlands and maintaining the illusion that she couldn’t hear the dead, but she didn’t have time to get access to Wolf’s Head or to fuss with an intricate ritual.
As it turned out, everyone wanted to come with her.
“Turner and Dawes can come,” she told them.
“I beg your pardon?” Darlington objected.
“Come on!” Tripp cried.
“The dead don’t like demons,” Alex said. “And I don’t want Hector getting spooked.”
She could see Darlington didn’t like it and she didn’t like it either. She’d gotten used to having him at her side.
“I’m going to walk you out,” he said as they headed down the steps.
“I can manage not to die on the front path.”
He pointed to the roof of Il Bastone, where a dozen barn owls had gathered. “They’ve been there since this morning.”
Had the priests sent them to spy on her? To frighten her?
“I don’t suppose we have a magic spell for avoiding owl attacks?” she asked.
“Even if we did, I’m not sure those are ordinary owls.”
She wanted to take Darlington’s hand. She wanted to kiss him goodbye. Instead, she backed down the front walk, keeping an eye on the roof. “Leave me alone, you creepy moon-faced weirdos.”
Alex supposed if they were going to dive-bomb her, they were missing the perfect chance.
“Let’s go,” she said when they reached the sidewalk. “But you’re not going to see anything. Not unless you drink Hiram’s elixir.”
“You can just drink a potion and see ghosts?” Turner asked.
“Side effects may include kidney failure,” Dawes said.
Turner pulled up his collar. “I’ll pass.”
Alex buried her hands in her coat pockets as they turned down Temple. She had never gotten used to the cold. Maybe it was too many years in the California sun, the hard-baked heat of Van Nuys blacktop, and the steady burn of Valley sage. New England would probably always feel wrong to her.
Turner made a disgusted noise when they passed beneath the towering Egyptian gates that read, THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.
“Uncorrupted,” he complained, finishing the proper read of the line. “The dead shall be raised uncorrupted. What is wrong with you people?”
“They’re here,” she said as she caught sight of the Bridegroom and Hector waiting by Arthur Twining Hadley’s tomb with its soaring Celtic cross.
The font, Darlington had once pointed out.
That curving bridge between Deco and Nouveau.
Deeply romantic. She was glad to have his voice in her head, and it did look like something that had been dragged over from Avalon.
Alex knew Hadley had been a member of Skull and Bones and later president of Yale.
He had died in Japan, and there was a story that he’d been buried in full samurai regalia, complete with sword.
He had been alive to see Harkness built, and the quadrangle.
Had he known what some of the alumni from his society were planning?
Had he helped to shepherd the projects himself?
“I don’t like this,” said Dawes.
“You could have stayed home.”
“No, I could not.”
“What do they look like?” asked Turner.
“The Bridegroom looks like Morrissey,” she said. “But bloodier. Hector is wearing a suit.”
She left it at that. Grays appeared as they had in death and the soldier’s suit was soaked, its pockets bulging with stones. There was a sweetness to his face, a childishness that was at odds with the burly shoulders and thick neck.
“Hi, Hec,” she said. “You don’t know it, but we’ve met before.”
“We have?”
“Sort of.”
“This is so weird,” whispered Turner.
“I can hear you and so can he.”
“It’s hard to get used to,” Dawes said.
Turner clamped his lips shut. He was trying.
“I need to know what you know,” she said to Hec.
“About what?”
“All of it,” she said. “The Gauntlet. The armor.”
Hec’s face fell. “You want to walk the Gauntlet? That’s no job for a wren, no job for anyone.” He turned to North. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“You can’t blame him,” North said. “Death is meant to be the end of suffering. Hell offers a different promise.”
It was why the dead feared demons as they did nothing else. Alex remembered the fear the thought of the gentleman demon had roused in the shades of the Borderlands. She thought of the yoke with its rows of garnet and onyx, beautiful in its own way, but a symbol of agony without end.
“I get it,” she said. “I truly do. But I’m not asking you to take on Golgarot—”
At the sound of the demon’s name, Hec began to fade. Alex couldn’t allow that. “Sorry, Hec. No more welching.”
She held out her hand and tugged.
Alex heard Dawes gasp in understanding. She registered the shock on Hec’s face, the look of betrayal he cast at the Bridegroom, and then he was with her.
She tasted tobacco on her tongue, heard the grunt of bodies crashing into each other, the crunch of frost beneath cleats.
The air was thick with the smell of old leather and wet grass.
The gents in the Hall weren’t a bad lot, and he liked their times together, but he knew he was a little slow to keep up.
Rudy never let him forget it, but the cuss wasn’t all bad either.
On the field, none of that mattered. Best believe he hated practice, especially when the weather turned cold, taking the big old bus out to the Bowl.
None of the windows would close all the way, and the whole contraption stank of engine fumes.
But the games? Always a gasser. The cheering crowds, the gals in the stands, the feeling of getting it right again and again and again.
The armor. Alex pushed. Heart of Gold, Hand of God, Feet of—
The Wheel spun and she felt his dread. He was looking through the window and his mother should not be there, but she was and he’d broken her heart. “My sweet boy, why won’t you let me in?”
“You’re not my ma.”
“Maybe I’m not, because I couldn’t have raised a killer, could I? What did I do wrong? I tried my best to raise you right.”
“You did, Ma.”
“No son of mine could do such a thing. Kill an innocent man. I can smell the blood on you.”
They’d done that together. He and the others.
Soldier, scholar, priest, and prince. They’d poured the poison into droppers and then one by one into the waiting mouths of the men laid out side by side in the old operating room that Bones liked to use.
Lionel had shown them the secret entrance, a notch in the wall like in the picture shows.
He’d thought that would be the hard part, the ugly part, but he’d gotten it so wrong.
He hadn’t been able to look at the other lads when they’d come back from …
where they’d been. It hadn’t been at all what he expected, what Rudy said it would be.
But he’d thought they were in the clear.
Until his mother showed up. She’d been following him for days now.
At first his salt guardian had gotten the best of her, his bulldog barking and yapping, biting at her heels.
But then it was like she wasn’t scared of it anymore and she talked and talked, made him feel so low he didn’t think he’d ever get up again.
Maybe he was losing his mind and he’d end up in the nuthouse. It would serve him right.
He went to Rudy, begged him for help. He was the smart one. But Rudy had looked pretty rough himself, pale as a dead man and looking over his shoulder like he was being hunted. He wouldn’t come off the porch at Il Bastone, wouldn’t let Hec in either.
“It’s up to you,” Rudy said. “You have to make the ascent. You have to pull the demons back through.”
“I can’t do it. I need the rest of you.”
“Lionel went back to Sweetwell. If you don’t put on the goddamn armor, we’re sunk. All of us.”
“We need Danny. He can fence. He can fight. I went all the way over to that big house of his. But he won’t even answer the door.”
“It has to be you. Only you can save us. Soldier, your hour has arrived.”
In that moment, talking to Rudy, Hec believed he could do it. He would do it. His father had served. He’d come back from fighting the Huns, and Ma said he wasn’t right after that, couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep, like a ghost.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ma had told Hec. “You’re meant for better things than this.
You’ll work a real job in the city and you won’t come home with your hands stinking of fish.
” She’d believed in him. They all had. Rudy and Danny and Lionel.
He was the soldier. He could face their enemies, save the day.
He’d gone straight to Wolf’s Head to retrieve the Heart, but his mother was waiting at the gate.
“It’s the shame I can’t bear,” she said, “to know my son is a killer.”
They were all killers. It was for a higher cause. That had to count for something. Besides, this thing was not his mother, could not be his mother. She was back in Maine, taking in neighbors’ laundry because his father wouldn’t go out on the water anymore.
“Can’t keep my balance,” he’d told Hec. “The damnedest thing. I get in the boat and I can barely stand.”
Hector felt the same way. He couldn’t steady himself. The world was sliding away beneath him and he couldn’t get his footing back.
His salt guardian rushed at her, barking and snapping. Rudy had laughed when he’d pulled the little salt bulldog from the crucible. “You couldn’t be easier to read if I wrote you in a book, Hec.”
Ma kicked the dog hard and it whimpered, vanishing into nothing.
He tried one last time. He used the telephone in the Hall to place a call to Mr. Harkness, but the man who answered said that no one was in.
Whom should he say is calling? My name is August Hektor Nygard.
They call me Hec. It seemed like a good joke at the time.
I went to hell and I need help from the man who sent me there.
The words had gotten stuck in his throat, and he’d stood there in silence until at last the operator asked, “Sir, would you like to make another call?”
Ma was still waiting by the gate. “You know what you have to do,” his mother said. “You know what you deserve.”
The Wheel spun and he was standing in the shallows out at Savin Rock.
The pier had burned up in a fire just last year, but he and the boys still liked to come down to visit Bluebeard’s Castle or ride the Devil.
He stood in the dark, the glittering lights behind him, the fun houses and fortune tellers.
He could hear people laughing and screaming.
Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
For a while he sat on the sand and then he collected as many stones as he could from the seawall.
He wasn’t supposed to die on the ocean. He was supposed to be better than the farmers and fishermen, the oyster shuckers and lobstermen.
But in the end his good grades and his way with a run didn’t matter. The sea would take him anyway.
He walked and kept walking. He was cold, but that was okay. He could rest when he reached the bottom. He would float on down and Ma would forgive him. Everyone would forgive him. And Rudy and the others? Well, Rudy was clever enough to figure it all out.
Ma was beside him now and she took his hand and her fingers didn’t feel right. Ma’s hands were always rough from work, but now they were soft and slick like kelp. She was pulling him down deeper, into the waves. She was helping him the way she always had.
“That’s my good boy,” she said, and her mouth filled with water, but she was still smiling.
He smiled too.
Alex gasped, gulping cold air as she shoved Hector out of her.
Turner and Dawes were holding her up as she coughed and spat salt water.
“I had to go,” Hec said, staring at her with sad eyes. “I couldn’t fight him on my own.”
“Tell me how to beat him.”
“A little thing like you?”
“You might be surprised,” said North.
“Put on the armor. Open the door. At midnight, the soldier makes the ascent. When the bells ring the arena opens. But he has to climb too.”
“Who?”
Hec looked around as if afraid of being overheard. “Golgarot. He has to survive the climb.”
“What’s so hard about the climb?”
“I don’t know. I never got to that.”
“And at the top?”
“You have to beat the devil at his own game.”
“Do I get a golden fiddle out of it?” Both Hec and North frowned in confusion.
“You get to have a second and so does he.”
“A second?”
“They can’t enter the arena unless you call out, but then they’re stuck too. Danny was supposed to be my second.”
“But he didn’t come,” Alex said, thinking of Black Elm, of the demon in its walls.
“You understand, don’t you? I couldn’t do it on my own.”
She did and she was terrified.
“If the soldier falters, he may call upon his second,” Hector said, as if he were reciting from a rulebook. “But Danny was yellow. Just a no-good.”
“He was fighting his own demon,” Alex said.
Hec shuddered. “I can’t blame him. I was yellow too in the end.”
“You were supposed to bring a demon back with you. Put it in a cage.”
He laughed. “Can you believe it? What a bunch of rubes we were.”
“But the armor was your fail-safe.”
“That’s right. If something went wrong, if we couldn’t control the prize, the soldier was supposed to shove the thing back through. Send it on its way.” Again that pleading light came into his eyes. “You see how it was, don’t you? We were all supposed to be together. A team.”
Like players on a field. Like children in a schoolyard.
“Sorry it didn’t work out that way, Hec.”
“You shouldn’t go.”
“I have to. Someone has to clean up the mess you and your chums made.”
Hec shook his head. “But you can’t win.”
“So people keep telling me.”
It was time to let Hec go. “Is it then so sad a thing to die?” she quoted.
Death words. A little Virgil to send two phantoms on their way.