Chapter 54
The chime of the bell never ended. The sound simply sustained, a long, vibrating note that seemed to make the air shimmer around her.
Alex stood staring at the door. All she wanted was to push back through, tell them she’d changed her mind. They could just keep hunting demons. And when Golgarot came, she’d hide under the covers with Darlington, safe behind the wards of Il Bastone, and let the world fend for itself.
There was nothing to do but start. The stairs were stone, and when her boot struck that first step, it clanged.
The sound echoed back to her, folding in on itself, growing instead of fading, joining that ringing chime.
She didn’t want to take the second step.
Right now she stood between two worlds, the mortal realm and the demon sphere.
When she lifted her foot, when she placed herself fully on that staircase, there would be no turning back.
But if she had intended to run, that chance had passed.
The Bridegroom was waiting to help her to the other side. And if she had to spend a thousand years haunting every girl Darlington tried to date and listening to a Victorian ghost mope, there were worse fates.
“I’m so fucking scared,” she said to no one.
Me too. It was a quiet voice, the smallest whisper, the same voice that had warned her to be careful when she’d faced the demon at the day care. Deja de chingar, he’d said. Stop fucking around.
“Theo?”
A funny little flutter passed through her and she knew the voice belonged to Kittscher’s final victim, the last bit of him rescued from oblivion. She was grateful not to be alone.
I’ll take you with me, she promised. We’ll both cross over to the Veil. And one day, when Theo’s mother passed and later his sister, she’d go to meet them. She’d tell them what really happened to Theo; she’d bring that last spark to them cupped in her palms.
Or maybe you’ll win, Theo whispered.
She laughed and that terrible thrum swallowed the sound. You’re new here, kid. You’ll figure it out. The good guys don’t win in these stories. And that made her laugh even harder because she wasn’t a good guy at all.
She took the second step. Nothing changed. But when she looked back at the door to the chapel, it was gone, the wall a smooth expanse of perfectly laid bricks. She had made her choice without making it. How much of her life had been just like that?
One step, then another, the stairs turning in a slow spiral, the path so narrow her shoulders brushed the walls.
She counted—ten, then twenty, thirty, forty.
Darlington had said there would be an office here where the carillonneurs worked and practiced, but the landing was empty stone, the only feature the changing staircase—metal now, gaps between the steps, a railing.
At seventy-one, she’d be a quarter of the way there.
Four pilgrims, four artifacts, four sets of seventy-one stairs. At fifty, she heard voices, the sound of a crowd.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. If the last thought she had was Darlington reciting poetry to her, that didn’t seem so bad.
Another step and she smelled—salt water, the cinnamon and sugar of frying churros. Another and she heard the looping whine of an electric guitar.
It was warm now, the light in the stairwell too bright. Another step, another. She was squinting against the brightness. She couldn’t see the stairs anymore. She had to trust her feet to find the way. She could feel sweat beading under her armor.
Except her armor was gone. She was wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops, a black tank top over her swimsuit.
She was standing on the Venice boardwalk and Hellie was beside her, all muscles and tanned skin in a bikini top and board shorts.
She’d braided her hair. She was holding out her tarot deck. She pulled the Nine of Wands.
“No way I’m getting that tattooed on me. Let me draw again.”
She pulled a card, but Alex couldn’t quite make it out.
The bell jingled as they opened the door and passed into the cool dark.
They pushed through a beaded curtain and into the front room.
The walls were covered in all the usual offerings for dabblers who didn’t want something original—skulls, flowers, military insignia.
A woman stood at the counter. She had to be in her sixties and she was strangely clean-cut: lean, dressed in a black satin slip, no ink, no piercings, a smooth cap of short white hair.
Marguerite Belbalm. The Wheelwalker responsible for every nexus at Yale. Daisy.
Golgarot had shown her visions in hell, some real, some imagined. This seemed to be a combination of the two.
“Welcome, welcome,” Belbalm said in her light French accent, a complete fabrication, the posturing of a woman who had lived a century stuck in New Haven, greedy for the cosmopolitan life her fiancé had once promised, unable to escape the magical hold of the city. “He’s just finishing up.”
Over Belbalm’s shoulder, the tattoo artist was working with his back to her, inking a Grateful Dead dancing bear onto the ropey calf of a kid with a skateboard.
“Who’s first?” Belbalm asked with a smile.
Hellie raised her hand. “I’m just making up my mind.”
“May I?” Belbalm asked, reaching for the deck.
Alex wanted to scream for her to stop, but Hellie handed over the cards.
“Would you like a reading?” Belbalm asked.
“No,” Alex said too harshly.
Hellie laughed. “Why are you so stressed?”
“Maybe we should get ice cream or something first.”
“He has time now,” said Belbalm. “Who knows what might come later?” She spread the cards over the counter. “Choose.”
Hellie pointed to a card in the middle and Belbalm plucked it up. She held it in the air and flipped it, revealing a man in a red miter.
“Name it,” she said, her eyes fastened on Alex. Her irises looked yellow in the dim light, a wolf’s eyes.
Alex glanced at Hellie, but Hellie was gone.
“Name it,” Belbalm demanded. “This shouldn’t be hard. You learned my true name. You made me take it back.”
She smiled and Alex saw her gums were black.
I’m in it now. She had lost her connection to the mortal world when she had started up the staircase. But this was the ascent, the mirror of the Gauntlet, the new trial she would have to face. This was what Hector had meant when he’d said that she and Golgarot would both have to survive the climb.
“Ow! Don’t go too deep.”
Hellie’s voice, trying to sound cheerful but not quite landing.
In the room behind Belbalm, it was Hellie on the table now.
The tattoo artist hunched over her long, tanned legs.
Her shorts were pulled down to show her flat stomach and her hip where his gloved hands were working, the high buzz of the gun too loud.
Alex tried to move toward her, but she couldn’t. She was rooted to the spot.
“All you have to do is name the card and you can walk through that door, back to the stairs and your absurd quest. But if you fail…” Belbalm gave the careless, disinterested shrug Alex had so admired before she knew who and what the professor really was. “My lord awaits you.”
Alex looked back to the door where she and Hellie had entered.
Through the swaying beaded curtain, she saw the steps of Sterling Library where she’d once escaped Golgarot.
The starving hounds the demon kept circled two empty thrones, whimpering and panting.
One of them gripped the jeweled yoke intended for Alex in its crooked jaws.
“Hey!” Hellie yelped. “Stop it.” She was crying now. “I don’t like this. Alex? I want to go. Let’s get out of here, okay?”
Alex couldn’t bear it. She was failing Hellie all over again.
“Name the card, Alexandra.” Belbalm had always gotten her name wrong.
“I’m coming, Hellie,” Alex said. “Just hold on. I’m coming.”
“So many promises,” Belbalm said, the card flipping front to back to front in her hand. “But you never arrive on time. Not for Mercy. Not for Hellie.”
Hellie screamed. She was writhing on the table now, but the tattoo artist’s hand gripped her thigh, holding her down.
Alex couldn’t think straight. The card flipped and flipped again. A staff—no, a scepter, the miter. This was easy. The High Priest. The Hierophant. She’d lived with Mira long enough to know it.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Belbalm demanded. “Listening to her cry out? But you were always so cold, Alex. It took forever to make you come. A real fucking chore.”
“Would you shut up so I can think?” Alex bit out, but her heart was pounding.
Hellie released a high wail, a child’s cry, desperate and lost. Alex wanted to smash the glass counter. The tattoo artist craned his neck and looked back at her.
Ariel. The last man to hurt Hellie. The one to make her want to die.
I killed you, Alex thought frantically. Hellie and I made sure you could never hurt another girl again. But there would always be men like Ariel.
Think.
Scepter and miter. That was the Hierophant. But that was too easy, and nothing about this was supposed to be easy.
Belbalm grinned and a long string of drool fell from her lips, pooling on the countertop. “Name it,” she growled.
I need you, Dawes. She would know in an instant. The Hierophant—maybe, but look again. The scepter is jeweled. Could he be a king? The Emperor? A dog peeked out from behind his throne, sweet-faced and small, nothing like Golgarot’s hounds. That could be the Fool?
Not a dog, Alex. Something sillier, more wonderful. Look again.
An otter. That meant this was the Whithorn deck, and its artist, a follower of St. Cuthbert, had switched up the iconography of the Magician and the Hierophant. No one knew why. Deliberate or a mistake? Penicillin, Alex thought wildly. Let’s hear it for good mistakes.
Hellie screamed.
Alex snatched the card from Belbalm’s hand and slammed it down on the counter. “The Magician,” she spat, feeling Dawes’s relief and pride flood through her. “Choke on it.”
Belbalm’s jaws snapped. The tattoo parlor vanished and she was back on the Harkness stairs.
Alex pressed her hand to her mouth, trying to push back a surge of nausea. What about Hellie? She needed to know Hellie was okay.
“It wasn’t Hellie,” she said out loud. Not Hellie. Not Belbalm. Not even Ariel. Just demon games. “I solved your fucking puzzle.”
But whose puzzle was it? The donors got together and they consulted their ancient texts and they hired an architect and they built a Gauntlet and a tower and they let their mice loose in the maze, but who was watching?
Who was judging? If she had been called, then who was on the other end of the line?
God or the Devil? What if it was no one at all?
“I can do this,” she said. “I can win.”
So why didn’t it feel that way? If she could just get a moment away from that awful hum, that tolling of the bell. But all she could do was climb.
“Seventy-two,” she grunted out and used the railing to drag herself up. “Seventy-three.”
One foot in front of the other, her breath coming easier despite the work of it as she put distance between herself and the illusion of the tattoo parlor.
Eighty steps. Ninety. There was supposed to be a big drum here, where the water tower had once stood, but there was only the spiral.
Higher, her thighs burning, her legs too heavy.
Darlington’s voice—This is where it all opens up.
You’ll get some air and light and it’s where we see Lawrie’s stonework really stars.
There were supposed to be eight statues of Yale “worthies,” Noah Webster, Samuel Morse, controversial Calhoun.
You get the idea. Larger than life. Now we get to the lantern—an octagon. A smaller octagon sits atop that.
Eight worthies, eight walls, eight Houses of the Veil. Darlington’s facts, his fingers tracing the blueprints, telling her the secret story of Yale.
One hundred. Let’s go.
But at 120 she heard new sounds. Hoofbeats. Men shouting.
She knew what was waiting at 142. Another puzzle. A new horror.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alex made herself climb.