Chapter 57
No voices now, no mysterious noises. She kept her hands tight on the railing. She didn’t quite trust her legs anymore. No rooms, no stonework, no places to stop and rest, just the stairs continuing to turn, up and up.
She hesitated when she reached the two hundredth step. She wasn’t sure her count was right. She let herself pause and breathe. Then she began the climb again. Two hundred and ten, eleven, twelve.
Thirteen and she was standing at the entrance to Beinecke Library, the wind blowing hard against her, cooling the sweat on her neck. She pushed through the revolving door.
The shelves rose six stories up, all encased in the central glass column, an idol made of books at the heart of the temple.
The marble panels of the walls glowed amber.
She had come to love this place as Darlington did.
But was she in a memory from her own past or trapped in a slice of history she’d never seen?
“Alex!”
She turned. Darlington was standing behind the glass wall of the stacks, trapped inside the central column.
Another illusion. Or was it?
He held up his hand, pressing it against the glass. “You’re okay,” he said, his voice muffled. “I thought … When I ended up here, I thought something happened to you.”
Was he real? Had she somehow called to her second without meaning to? That wasn’t her plan. He was supposed to stay safe, beyond the reach of Golgarot.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A puzzle.” But was he the answer or the question? “There will be a test, a choice. They’re going to try to hurt you.”
“Whatever happens to me, you don’t break. You have to make it to the end of this. For all of us.”
Alex rested her forehead against the glass. Real or illusion, she wanted him here with her. She wanted to know she wasn’t alone.
“Look,” he said.
She turned. A man had entered through the revolving door. He was tall and bespectacled, with a thinning crown of tufty gray hair. His suit seemed modern enough, so they weren’t in the distant past.
“That’s the map thief,” Darlington said in wonder. “He was an antiquities dealer who stole hundreds of rare maps from different libraries. They caught him here.”
Alex found herself standing at the security desk, dressed in a guard’s uniform. The thief approached, smiling, but she could see the illusion already fraying at the edges. His jagged teeth pressed at the seam of his lips and the whites of his eyes were yellowing and bloodshot.
“Good evening,” he said, and his tongue lolled out of his mouth, unwinding like a spool of wet pink ribbon. “Oops,” he said with a giggle and tucked it back in. “I need assistance.”
So here it was. “How can I help?”
“It’s easy.” That’s what they all said, and it never was. “I need you to find the most valuable item in the library.”
She turned back to Darlington. He would know. But the stacks were filling with smoke. She could see him coughing, covering his mouth with his sleeve.
It’s not real.
Unless it was this time. Unless she had called him to her just to watch him die.
Then think, Stern. Solve the puzzle. Save me.
There was the Voynich manuscript, of course.
The Gutenberg Bible, kept in its own case, one page turned every day.
Shakespeare’s First Folio. Abraham Lincoln’s pen.
First editions of Leaves of Grass and Moby Dick.
The set of woodblock sutras from Japan, thought to be some of the oldest printed items in the world. There were too many possibilities.
“The books, Alex! You have to hurry!” Darlington was calling to her now. He’d stripped off his coat and he was using it to beat at the flames climbing the stacks.
She wanted to tell him they weren’t real, none of it was real, except he might be. And did that mean the fire was too?
He was pulling books from the shelves, trying to keep them from the flames. In a moment, she knew he would begin to scream, and then she would start to scream too.
“Answer the question,” commanded the demon in front of her.
His face had changed and she was staring at an old man in a bathrobe.
Daniel Arlington III, Darlington’s grandfather.
“Alex the whore who hungers after money, the dream of prosperity, the promise of wealth. You think you’re worthy of my precious boy? ”
She almost laughed at that. No, she did not.
“Do you know what he told me?” the old man said, pulling a cigarette from his crumpled pack. “He said you were a city at night: The closer he got, the dirtier you looked.”
Darlington would never say that. He was a gentleman to the core.
“Maybe he started that way, but look at him now.”
Inside the glass column, Darlington’s horns had emerged. He rammed his head against the wall, leaving smears of blood on the glass.
“Any good thing that gets near you goes to rot. Tell me what is most precious here or watch him crush his own skull like the dumb animal you made him.”
Darlington bellowed from the other side of the glass.
Another trick question. She knew it and she was tired of these games.
It was like being a child again, unsure of what was real, and no one to tell her how to keep the monsters at bay.
Until she’d come to Yale. Until Darlington had given her the moths, taught her the death words, stood with her against the dark.
Her freshman year, they’d come here together. He’d whispered in her ear and she’d felt a shiver pass through her. She’d dug her nails into her palm, willing herself not to notice him, not to make the mistake of wanting him.
What do you see?
They were standing in a room in the basement of Beinecke and he was pointing to a map on the wall.
It’s just Connecticut, she said.
Look again. Where it’s supposed to say New Haven.
From the south, her finger traced the coast. Greenwich, Stamford, Bridgeport. The same route as the Metro-North. There, the divot of the harbor. The map read, New Heaven.
A misprint, another good mistake.
Of all the treasures in this place, this is my favorite.
Why?
Because it’s a secret right in front of you. Because you’d walk right past it if you didn’t know to pay attention.
But Darlington always paid attention.
What was most valuable? Most precious? This moment, every small revelation, the man who had bothered to look twice at her, to look again. “Daniel Arlington V. Prince of New Heaven.”
Beinecke vanished. She was back on the staircase.
Her body felt heavy, not the armor but her bones, her skin, as if she could feel every memory and misery like the stones in Hector’s pockets.
Nowhere to go but up.
Two hundred and thirty.
Two hundred and forty.
No sound now but the ringing of the bell. The hatch above her would lead to the roof. She shoved it open and climbed through.