Chapter 53
The morning and then the day passed in a blur. There were moments when Darlington forgot what they might be facing and that these might be his final hours on earth. Then reality would return, a sudden kick, a missed step.
The campus was still very much awake in the hour before midnight, lights spangling the heavy stone buildings of the dorms, cars still rushing past on Elm and Chapel.
The world goes on.
He had always been greedy for signs of magic, glimpses of the beyond. But now he envied the people who did not know, who would sleep easy in their beds and wake tomorrow never realizing how the world had changed or failed to change because of one skinny, stubborn girl.
They entered Branford near the base of the tower, directly beneath the conquest room.
An old millstone was embedded in the stone path to the courtyard.
Another lay in the central courtyard at Sterling.
Darlington had never set foot on this particular stone because of the legend that anyone who did would not graduate, but Dawes, Turner, and Alex strode over it without regard. An unknown story had no power.
Outside on High Street and inside the courtyard, they placed spells of obfuscation to hide their comings and goings and a barrier of repulsion so that anyone approaching the tower would simply wander off.
They laid out elaborate patterns of salt knots surrounding Branford College and finished with containment charms over the doors and windows of the chapel so that no one would see light escaping and wonder what intruders were doing in the tower so late at night.
Above the door to the chapel he noted an inscription that had always seemed odd to him: HEREIN WE ALL REJOICE.
Why rejoice when the chapel was itself a place of mourning?
Perhaps it had been an entreaty, an expression of faith.
If a demon might be brought to heel, what magic might be at hand? What possibility?
Alex had to be inside the stairwell when midnight came. The Harkness bells didn’t ring after dinner. But tonight, if the artifacts did what they were supposed to, those chimes would strike twelve.
The chapel itself was a small, square chamber with a soaring Gothic ceiling.
Darlington had always loved it as he had loved all the hidden places of Yale.
It was the last room to be finished in the quadrangle and he had never questioned that, but it occurred to him now that this place was the only room truly given over to grieving Charles W.
Harkness. The rest was dedicated to him, but it was all public-facing, profuse with ornament.
The focus of this room was a spare stone hearth.
It bore none of the elaborate decoration of which James Gamble Rogers and Lee Lawrie had been so fond, only a single spare inscription commemorating Charles’s life and death.
It was as if Anne and Ned Harkness had demanded this small space be devoted to sadness, no matter the secret intentions of all the other structure and stonework.
The warm wood panels that surrounded the rest of the room showed scenes of Yale history: the founding of the university, the ridiculous bully club supposedly stolen from a sailor, the fossil of the five-toed horse housed at the Peabody, the building of the first college library.
He saw Alex gazing up at a carved cutlass and the inscription dedicated to the senior class dismissed without a graduating ceremony.
“World War I?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The soldier at the top of the tower who symbolizes the First World War holds no weapon. One of four soldiers, representing four wars—always the pattern of four.” He couldn’t seem to stop lecturing her, as if he could build a wall from all his inane facts to surround her.
“Owing to the condition of war,” she quoted from the inscription. “Such a civilized way to phrase it.”
Ceremony, decorum. That was the way of Yale and the societies.
“We should start,” Dawes said quietly, though it was clear she didn’t want to.
Darlington had felt there should be a grander vehicle for transporting the artifacts. A trunk. A treasure chest. Instead, they’d packed them in a big duffel bag. Now he and Turner squatted beside it and removed the carefully secured bundles one by one.
Dawes unwrapped the Heart of Gold first and slipped the carnelian chains over Alex’s head.
Next came the greaves. Darlington knelt at her feet to secure them around her shins.
If they really had belonged to Achilles, he hoped they’d do more for Alex than their original owner.
Better in wartime, she’d said. Achilles knew he would die and entered the fray anyway.
Did that make him arrogant or brave? Did he somehow hope his fate might change and he would be spared?
Turner unwrapped the Knuckles of Shimshon and Alex grinned as she slid them on. Again Darlington felt an unpleasant echo—Good Ol’ Hec boasting, The devil hasn’t met my one-two!
Finally, Darlington unwrapped the helm that had supposedly belonged to Arthur’s father. It was the only piece of the whole lot that looked properly imposing. He set it on her head.
“How does it feel?”
“Heavy,” she admitted. “But not heavy enough.”
After all that fuss, it didn’t amount to much.
Alex looked less like a holy warrior than a child playing knight with a few scrounged baubles and a fancy kitchen pot atop her head.
There was no incantation to speak, no ritual to follow.
For all the pomp and history of Lethe and the societies, in the end, all they had were the ramblings of a ghost and a scrap of hope.
They stood in the silence of the chapel. Then Dawes put her arms around Alex. Darlington followed. Turner was the last.
“We are the shepherds,” Alex said shakily.
“We are the shepherds,” they replied.
It was almost like praying together.
“Come back to us,” Dawes whispered, her eyes full of tears.
“Give ’em hell,” Turner said and clapped her on the shoulder.
Darlington touched her cheek once, briefly. “’Til the end of days,” he promised.
“And after,” she replied.
She would call to him. She had promised she would and he would be there to serve as her second in victory or defeat.
“Be ready,” she said.
He slung the bag holding the Voynich Coffin over his shoulder. “I will.”
Alex turned and opened the door to the stairwell. It looked ugly and modern compared to the chapel—nothing but brick walls, concrete. She stepped through the threshold and the building gave the faintest tremor. Dawes gasped.
When Alex turned back to them, the armor had changed. This was the armor she’d worn in hell, the soldier’s armor: gleaming black metal emblazoned with snakes.
She raised her hand and he remembered her standing on the curb outside Turner’s mother’s house when Mercy left, alone and still hoping. He lifted his own hand in what he prayed was not farewell.
High above, the bells of Harkness began to strike midnight. The door slammed shut.