5. The Seemingly Endless Opening of Doors #2
She plunges her hand down the side of Briar’s mattress and gropes; Briar sits up, shuffles away, bangs into the window and discovers with relief that it won’t open past about five inches, so there’s no risk of free-falling to a picturesque death impaled on the iron fleur-de-lis fence below.
‘Hads,’ someone says from the doorway. ‘You said two minutes.’
Tate and Westby are standing there. Fantastic.
Briar’s mouth feels like dry Weetabix. ‘This is my room.’
‘Temporarily,’ Hadley says, with a grunt of effort. ‘It’s been ours for years, and thanks to you we’ve had to relocate. Can you move over? You’re weighing down the mattress.’
‘Sorry to inconvenience,’ Briar mutters, but they shift off the bed anyway, because it feels weird to just sit there and watch while somebody’s elbow-deep in your linens.
‘Don’t be a bitch,’ Hadley bitches, hoisting the corner of the mattress up. ‘Hold this.’
Briar shakes their head, but for some reason, they do hold it.
‘There. Done.’ Briar is imagining booze, Class A drugs, perhaps a small machete - but Hadley emerges holding a collection of small, scientific-looking bottles with droppers in. Briar lowers the mattress back down onto its supports, and Hadley hops off the platform, circumventing the stairs.
‘Explain,’ Briar says, crossing their arms over their chest.
‘Best if you don’t know,’ says Westby. ‘Otherwise you could be on the hook for joint enterprise.’
‘So it’s . . . illegal?’
‘People throw words around all the time now. Legal, illegal. Who even knows what they mean.’
Tate sighs. ‘It could end up being quite illegal.’
‘That’s enough talking now,’ Hadley says. ‘Back to sleep, bye-bye.’
‘Say, Jones, you’ve got arms,’ Westby exclaims suddenly.
‘Oh,’ says Tate, stepping forward to get a better look. He’s wearing a soft black polo neck, and he’s got a single lavender glass bead swinging from one ear. ‘You do. Well done.’
‘Thanks,’ says Briar, unimpressed.
Westby’s nodding, like a plan is coming together in his head. ‘Have you ever held a medium-to-large trapdoor open by yourself?’
‘No,’ Briar says flatly, ‘but I’ve always wanted to.’
‘Leave it,’ hisses Hadley. ‘We don’t need them.’
Westby doesn’t seem so sure. He clicks his fingers and points. ‘I’ll give you a proper tour. I’ll tell you everything. I’ll make that NDA worth your while.’
Hadley snorts. ‘West, don’t be so cheap.’
‘I’m an absolutely enormous slut for trapdoor arms,’ says Westby. ‘Helpless. Helpless! What do you say, Jones? You’ll be a hero. Standing up in the face of tyranny, helping out the little guy. One for the history books.’
Briar looks at the three of them, framed in the doorway in their head-to-toe black outfits, and imagines saying no, keeping their head down, doing the job they’re here to do - leaving Temple barely having scraped the surface of the school’s secrets.
‘Jones?’ Westby repeats, with a bit more urgency.
Jones says yes.
If you follow Jim’s Passage all the way past the new cricket pavilion and down past the old one too, which is miraculously still standing despite the fact that it’s shedding key parts of its anatomy and primarily held up by a thick tangle of ivy, then go through the small gated cemetery at the far reaches of the school grounds, with the names and dates long worn off the headstones, you end up in a stone outbuilding.
This building might have once been used for storage, but is now a dumping ground on the borderlands, a place where rusty rakes, old plastic feed bins and fraying compost bags are sent to rot.
‘Did they keep chickens here?’ Briar asks, toeing one of the bins. Hadley shushes them. She insisted Briar wear all black, so their white tank top was swapped out for its dark counterpart. Combined with dress trousers, Briar thinks they look a bit Italian, but also a bit like a prick.
‘Goats,’ Tate whispers, with a wink. ‘For blood sacrifices. And soft cheeses.’
Briar smiles tentatively back. Hadley is irritated, Westby serious, but Tate actually seems to be enjoying himself. His polo neck is mildly ridiculous considering the temperature, but he wears it well.
‘All right, Jones,’ Westby says sombrely. ‘Time to shine.’
Briar’s guarding their twisted ankle like a wounded animal, keeping the weight off as subtly as possible; no need for anybody else to know they’re in pain, although luckily it’s already starting to subside.
The trapdoor is absurdly heavy. Tate helps Briar heave it open, and then they ease it down onto the rotten floorboards as it sheds dull flakes of rust from its handle and hinges.
‘We can’t open it from below, it’s too high and too heavy,’ Hadley whispers, tying her shaggy hair up with black elastic.
‘But we can’t risk someone down there walking past and noticing it’s open.
So just wait here, stay hidden until we come back, we’ll knock, you help us out. Don’t do anything else. Don’t wander.’
They take it in turns to ease themselves down, hitting the ground below with soft thuds, and then they’re gone without another word.
Briar lowers the trapdoor as carefully as possible, letting it fall the last couple of inches, blowing up a fine spray of ground dust that makes them sneeze.
They sit down on the feed bin to wait. Scratch at a mosquito bite on their ankle. Study the trapdoor.
It can’t be impossible to lift it from below. It’s likely just a matter of leverage.
Briar finds some half-rotted wood stacked in a corner, lifts the trapdoor back up a foot or so, and then wedges the plank in so it’s propped subtly open. It looks fine. It’ll be fine.
‘It’s fine,’ Briar says into empty air - and then they lift the door up all the way, arms straining, and slide in through the gap, letting it fall shut behind them.
The wood softens the slam to a dull thunk.
Briar falls for a fraction longer than expected, underestimating the drop, and rolls to a stop once again clutching their shitty ankle, biting their lip bloody to prevent loud, indiscreet swearing.
They’re in a dark tunnel, which is lit from farther ahead by one of those LED camping lights, bright white and incongruously sterile.
Briar’s just going to have a peek. A quick look, to sate their curiosity, and then it’s back to guard duty. There are only two directions to choose from, so they follow the light.
The soft earth hushes their footsteps to almost nothing, so there’s not much need to sneak, until the timbre changes and Briar realises they’re now walking on rough stone.
The walls around them are stone too, uneven and hazardous, leering out of the walls where the LEDs hit them.
It reminds Briar of something, but it’s not until the tunnel widens that they realise what it is.
Briar’s mum has dragged them around enough National Trust properties that they can recognise a grotto when they see one.
It’s a small manmade cavern, unnaturally spherical, housing a murky, green-grey circular pool.
A classical white statue cloaked in wet moss rises from its centre.
At some point during Temple’s history, someone rich must have been feeling whimsical.
The walls are slick and green in here, the air cool, and Briar can hear the steady drip of water from somewhere above.
There are two openings leading away from the main cave. Briar picks the one that promises more light, and has to slow down when the path gives way to gravel, to try to mitigate the worst of the noise.
It occurs to them then that they should probably feel afraid.
There’s no telling what they’re walking into.
The power - and limits - of the scholars at Temple are still a total mystery.
Seb was able to knock Briar to the ground without so much as a flick of his wrist, and he’s somebody who liked Briar, once.
What might someone else be able to do? Someone surprised, or hostile?
This is uncharted territory. Now that it’s an actual magic school, they might be in actual danger.
It still just feels too far removed from reality. Briar has a protein bar in their pocket. Surely nobody could be violently murdered by means of dark magic while in possession of something as mundane as a protein bar.
The temperature is rapidly dropping, Briar’s breath crystallising in the air. There’s a murmur ahead. Perhaps water, perhaps low voices. This next tunnel veers to the right and suddenly opens up into enormous darkness, the suggestion of a curved ceiling above.
Briar’s eyes adjust - they’re standing twenty feet up from the bottom of a much bigger cavern.
The ledge they almost walked right over is dizzying, and they hurriedly step back, flush against the wall.
From their brief glance down at the ground, it’s clearly packed with scholars.
There’s water, too, a black waterfall pouring down the side of the wall, wearing a groove into the rock.
They risk another look. A path winds its way from where Briar is standing all the way around the edge of the space, gently sloping down to meet the uneven, pitted floor, and clustered in the middle of the cave like so many well-dressed stalagmites are at least a hundred kids.
They’re tiny, and in the light of the lanterns that have been scattered around - real pillar candles now, no more artifice - it’s clear they aren’t cloaked or uniformed.
They must be pips. A feeling of unease unfurls in Briar’s stomach, watching them shiver in their shirtsleeves and glance doubtfully around them.
What was it Westby said about these first few weeks? Initiation? Trials?
The base of the waterfall thunders into another pool, the dark water sluggish out of the spray, undulating with ripples as the ceiling drips.
Someone has arranged long wooden planks across it, haphazardly nailed together into a makeshift bridge.
It doesn’t bode well. The initiates seem to be realising that too.
Most of them are staring at the water in terror.