Chapter 32
They went up the winding staircase to the Special Collection—Arthur had sometimes called it the treasure room, a name that
seemed more apt that evening—with Donna leading the way, the ring of keys in one hand. Gwen was behind her, with Tana close
on her heels, helping her along. Gwen needed the assistance. By the time she was halfway up, her hoodie was soaked through
the back with sweat and her legs were shaking. Every leap to the next step sent a sick, piercing jolt through her insides.
Something was very wrong in there. Her face was hot and sometimes the world went a little dark on her, as if someone were
fiddling with a dimmer switch.
And yet, for all that, she felt an easiness in her heart she could not have imagined possible in such a moment. It was like
the feeling when the last bell rang on the final day of school, and all of summer stretched out before a person. She had not
wanted to believe that Arthur, in the unhappiest days of his life, had misused Tana, who had been so often misused by others.
Although, in truth, she had never been able to hate him for anything. Arthur was perfectly capable of hating himself enough
for both of them. He had lashed himself, loathed himself, all his life, for an act of moral stupidity he had not in fact committed.
She wished he knew the truth of it. Maybe she would have a chance to tell him tonight.
Donna had the door to the treasure room open and stepped aside to let Gwen past. It was a small sort of door, and Tana had to let go of her.
As she went through, lost in her thoughts, Gwen’s left foot caught on the stone jamb.
The crutch slipped free, spun, and fell.
The floor rushed up at her. She got her hands up to keep from smashing face-first, but her knees hit the marble with a crack.
Her elbows folded and she felt something tear inside her—like someone pulling apart a wet, rotting sheet.
She tried to cry out but couldn’t get any air.
Pain flared in the damaged lung, as if she had inhaled hot ash.
In an instant, the other women were around her. Allie was trying not to cry, which vaguely irritated Gwen. She was the one
who was hurt, not Allie, why did Allie always have to be half in tears? She wanted to bark at her. Instead, she reached out
and found Allie’s hand and patted it. It seemed one could not break a lifetime of habit—a lifetime of reassuring the distraught—without
the sort of premeditated effort that was currently beyond her.
“It’s all right,” she said, although it most certainly was not all right. She could feel blood leaking down her back, through the bandage, staining the band of her sweatpants.
“Oh, this is fucked,” Tana said. “This is so fucked. What is she doing out of a hospital bed? I didn’t sign up to watch a
sick woman die in front of us.”
“If she was in her hospital bed,” Donna said, her tone impassive, “she’d die for sure. And a whole lot of others with her.
It’s Easter Sunday in four hours. This is what’s happening.”
Tana twisted her head around, looked as if she were going to flare up . . . then visibly bit back whatever she was going to
say. Robin Fellows patiently moved along the line of windows, which overlooked the library floor below, pulling down the shades
as she went, hiding the treasure room from the sight of anyone who might pass through the lobby. Donna eased the door shut
and locked it behind them.
Allie and Tana each took an arm and helped Gwen to her knees. Tana lifted the back of her shirt to look at the wound.
“This is sopping.”
“I’ve got a kerchief,” Robin said, sinking to her knees beside them and digging in her clutch.
Tana peeled off the bloody gauze. The smell made Gwen feel like gagging: the nasty-sweet fragrance of spoilage, like a bowl of rotting fruit.
Tana used the strips of tape from the old square of gauze to stick down the thick pad of Robin’s kerchief.
Sparks were still whirling and flashing in front of Gwen’s eyes.
Tana approached Donna, whispering at her in an angry hiss.
Donna put a hand on her chest and pushed her back a few feet, didn’t deign to reply.
Gwen looked around the room, which she had never once entered, not even during her three and a half years as a student. It
was a long and peaceful space for contemplation, with a few scarred wooden tables and straight-backed chairs. Someone had
left a folded newspaper on one of them; it fluttered gently in a breeze that came from who knew where. The bookshelves were
covered in wire grating, the grating secured with padlocks, a safety feature added in the years after the robberies. With
funding from Colin Wren himself, the school had erected a glass wall in the back third of the room, and the most valuable
books were now on the other side. One needed the correct keypad code to enter. The space in there was climate controlled,
and a camera had been mounted in one corner to keep the glass vault under observation. Fortunately, it was pointed away from
the rest of the room, the lens aimed at that back wall of precious volumes. The embrasures were narrow slits in the stone
wall. Those slits were a full foot deep, and Gwen thought again that the place almost seemed to have been built to keep out
a dragon.
Donna sank to her knees beside Gwen. “Hon, if you’ve got it in you, I think we better try to bring Arthur across now.”
“How do we do this?” Allie asked, her voice fretful and uncertain.
“The same way we brought King Sorrow through,” Gwen said. “The same way Llewellyn Wren brought Elwood Hondo into our world.
Through shared belief . . . and shared magic. Do you have my cell phone? And the projector?”
Allison threw back the flap of the messenger bag. She set the contents on the floor, lining everything up in a neat row: the cracked Russian mirror, Gwen’s phone, and the Bluetooth projector shaped like a black Coke can. Lastly, she removed the cloak made of itchy-looking brown and gray hair.
“Ugh,” Allie said. “I think thirty percent of this thing was woven out of pubic hair. What do we do with it?”
“Put it over her,” Donna said, and nodded at Gwen.
“No,” Gwen said. “It’ll hide me from King Sorrow, and I don’t want to hide from him. Not yet. I want him to know where I am. One of you wear it.”
“Allie,” Tana said.
“Yeah, make Allie wear the pube cloak,” Donna said.
“That makes it unanimous then,” Robin said.
“It’s not unanimous,” Allie said. “I’m not voting for myself.”
“You’re not voting at all,” Donna said. “Because we decided it’s you.”
“No. No, I—”
“Enough,” Gwen croaked. “We need to do this thing. Put it on, Allie. You’re our backup plan if this doesn’t work tonight.
If the rest of us get wiped out, you can try again.”
Donna and Tana half wrestled the robe onto Allie. It had a mossy rope that could be drawn to bunch the collar up around the
throat and create a hood. Allie squirmed and flushed, but at least she didn’t rip it off. And while they were forcing her
into the martyr’s robe, Robin turned the projector on and pointed it toward the greenish wall of glass in the back of the
room. Gwen opened the video on her phone and hit play, set to repeat over and over, until the battery ran out.
And Arthur joined them, there in the library.
Gwen is on the ground, covered in an ankle-length cape, a silky blanket draped over the arch of her back. A thug with a bulging
Boris Karloff forehead stares stupidly down at her: he has just knocked her off her roller skates and down to the blacktop.
He has his lacrosse stick in his hands. Some of the other lacrosse kids mill about, a bunch of pimply teens looking offended
and confused about what just went down.
Allie screams off camera.
“Gwen! You’re going to die!” Allie screams. “You’re going to die!”
Allie skates into the field of view, wearing the head of a unicorn and rubber horse hooves over her hands. She seems intent
on barreling right into the biggest of the lacrosse dumbbells, but before she can get to him, Van is there, sailing lightly
and gracefully in to grab her around the waist and lift her right off her feet. Her hooves paw the air.
The biggest lacrosse player—the one who struck Gwen down—is saying something, trying to explain himself in a mulish voice.
He isn’t looking when Arthur Oakes glides into the circle of boys, hunched low, moving with purpose. Arthur has to be doing
nearly twenty miles an hour when he throws his shoulder into the stomach of the boy who knocked Gwen off her feet. The kid
barks like a dog and doubles over. His hands go loose, and it is the easiest thing in the world for Arthur to snatch the lacrosse
stick out of his hands.
Arthur was a ghost. They were all ghosts. Projected upon the glass wall, the figures in the film assumed a brilliant transparency,
shimmered like soap bubbles. It felt good to see him again . . . Arthur and Van both. Hail, hail, Gwen thought, the gang’s all here. Even Colin was with them now, of course. He was the one behind the camera.
Donna took Gwen’s left hand. Allie, kneeling on the other side, took her right. Without any discussion at all, the women in
the tower had arranged themselves in a line facing that thick wall of soda-bottle green.
“Come back to us, Arthur,” Donna said.
“Yo, Art,” Tana called, holding Allie’s hand. “Where you at?”
“Robin,” Allie said. “Look for him in the mirror. Keep your eyes peeled for anything that doesn’t make sense. Give it a few
moments and if nothing happens, pass it on.”
Robin lifted the cracked mirror, and turned her face this way and that, as if inspecting her eyelashes. “Are you there, Arthur?
We miss you.”
“So much,” Gwen whispered. “Come back, Arthur. Let’s go sledding. Let’s go for a ride into the Long Dark.”
“Let’s go!” Arthur
shouts, in a laughing voice, whirling round and around on his skates, slinging that lacrosse stick like a knight laying into