Chapter 16
“WAY TO WORK ZARLENGO,” SAYS a sarcastic voice behind her.
In the time it takes Dez to turn and find Rafe in the doorway of the empty lecture hall, hands in his pockets, eyes holding out last night’s secrets, head tilted like she’s the one who ghosted the scene, her chest fills with heat.
“What kind of film school doesn’t let people choose their own projects?” she demands, walking toward him into the foyer of the building. Outside, through the windows, cyclones of snow raze the courtyard.
“The kind of program that trains you for the real world,” Rafe says, holding open the door for her, looking at the book tucked under her arm. “That’s a classic, by the way.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to read it.”
“Good plan. Go to a prestigious school, fight with the professors, and refuse to do the homework.”
“He only gave me the homework because I fought with him.”
“That might be a sign,” Rafe says as they come to a stop in the building’s foyer.
“Here’s your phone,” Dez says, tossing it at him in lieu of thanks.
Rafe catches it in the air without looking. “Any news from home? Has the heat died down or is the fuzz still afoot?”
“You’re a dick,” Dez says, and steps out into the dark and frozen squall.
“I’m more than that,” Rafe says, keeping pace as they brace themselves against the wind, walking back toward the towering Goliath building. “Even if my dick happens to be your favorite thing about me.”
“I’d hardly know,” Dez says before she can stop herself.
Rafe laughs, stops walking, and faces Dez. He reaches forward, wraps his fingers in her hair, and gives it a tug that makes her gasp. “You’re a horny little thing, aren’t you?” he whispers in her ear.
Dez holds her breath. God help her, she’s wet again.
“It was nothing,” she lies. “It happened once. It won’t happen again.”
She hopes she’s lying.
“Sure,” he says, breath against her neck, clouding the air with their attraction. “Just try to keep your clothes on today.”
“Try not to rip them off me.”
His eyes bore into hers. “This is only going to get more intense.”
“Are you talking about this school, or your eye contact?”
“All of it. So, you’d better decide if you can hang.”
“I can hang. Probably for longer than you.”
A smile like sudden sunlight makes Rafe look leading-man gorgeous. Too gorgeous. He’s hotter when he’s dark and domineering. “Prove it.”
They reach the ice-covered columns of Goliath’s portico, and Dez steps into dim light and relative sanctuary, stamping snow out of her boots. The stone corridor is candlelit and carpeted with Turkish rugs, lined by wooden benches, and pitch black at either end.
Dez knows by now that on the other side of the interior wall is the Vault, but what the Vault holds is still a mystery.
“Do you know who I got to work with last summer?” Rafe says, brushing snow off his shoulders.
“I give up.”
“Martin Pynch.”
Dez stares at him. Name dropping aside, it’s impressive.
Dez has studied all of Pynch’s movies. She agrees with basically everyone on earth that he’s one of the great directors of their time.
She can see Pynch inspiring Rafe, can even see Rafe impressing Pynch.
But the way Rafe phrased it … it reminds her of what Yael said yesterday about Samantha Cisneros.
Strange, both Rafe and Yael used almost precisely the same words.
Dez thinks of the tribute documentary she watched after Pynch passed away last year.
“So, you must have gotten to work with him,” she asks, “right before he died?”
Rafe nods. “Right before.”
“Is there a reason why Acheron matches students with filmmakers so late in their careers?” she asks.
“Because they have the most profound perspectives.”
Dez remembers Rafe said her package includes a summer internship. “So if I want to work with a particular director—”
Rafe nods. “All you’ve got to do is stick around. Not that it’ll be easy for you.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he says, running his teeth along his lower lip, “I intend to make it hard.”
His words confirm her suspicion that he chose to mentor her not because he thinks she’s talented, but because he wants someone to fuck with. Fine, she’ll keep her guard up, even as his gaze traces her features, landing on her mouth.
Instinctively, Dez looks at his mouth, too. And she wants him. She can’t help it. But before she knows it, Rafe has started down the corridor, disappearing where the light recedes.
“Where are you going?” she calls.
“To get you access to the Vault. Keep up.”
They walk in total darkness for a few paces, then a few paces more, until they’ve been walking so long in the pitch-black hall that Dez loses track of time, of space, even of herself. Finally, Rafe’s footsteps stop.
Dez slams into him, her face against the broad crevice of his back. The collision of their bodies sets off a series of explosions inside her. The heat of his skin through his clothes. His petrichor scent flooding her senses, as if she can feel it inside her.
He puts one hand on her back and presses an obscure space in the shadowy wall. The stone recedes, and on the other side, a light shines through. Dez looks inside and sees a small chamber that reminds her of a ticket booth at a train station. Rafe gestures her inside—
Where Esther’s walking out with her mentor, Yael’s fuck-boy Felipe. She’s rubbing her eyes like she’s been crying. Dez reaches for her arm.
“Esther, you okay?”
Felipe blocks Dez, putting up a hand. “Don’t touch her. It’s very fresh.”
“What is?” Dez asks.
“I thought we’d completed all the first-years,” a voice calls from within. Dez looks up to see Dr. Ezekiel standing behind a glass divider on the far side of the room. “Have you brought me another?”
“This is Desdemona,” Rafe says.
“Ah, yes. The last of the first.” Dr. Ezekiel opens a door in the glass divider and steps through it to stand before Dez. She swallows as he sizes her up.
His office is crammed with shelves holding strange curiosities—ancient Bunsen burners, broken mirrors, bird and butterfly wings cased in resin, and a whole glass case of antique syringes. Dez wonders if they’re props for movies being filmed this term.
Dr. Ezekiel walks over to a large wooden cabinet about five feet high and two feet wide. “Are you ready?”
“Is this the mind’s-eye access?” she asks.
He beams. “You look frightened. It won’t hurt.”
“Well, Dez is soft,” Rafe says.
Dez glares at him. Soft?
“I’m ready,” she tells Dr. Ezekiel. Whatever it is, if Rafe’s watching, she can handle it.
“Come close,” Dr. Ezekiel says, beckoning to a small metal pyramid on top of the cabinet. But instead of a sharp point, the pyramid’s top is a flat glass panel shaped like spectacles. She realizes she’s supposed to look down into the cabinet through them.
“What is this thing?” she asks.
“The first movie projector,” Dr. Ezekiel says. “This is Thomas Edison’s personal prototype of the kinetoscope, circa 1891.”
“No way,” Dez says, glancing at Rafe. “But how does it project? It looks like it’s designed for one person at a time.”
“Everything has to start somewhere,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
Carefully, Dez leans over the cabinet and presses her face against the primitive viewfinder. She sees only a vacant, blurry white.
“Remember,” Dr. Ezekiel says, “the most important thing is that you keep your eyes open. If you blink, the access will fail.”
For a moment, nothing happens. Then—
Her eyes fill with a vast desert wilderness, not unlike Death Valley.
It’s a scene from a movie. Dez is dropped into the action immediately as the camera moves across the wild, rough landscape.
Soon something moving frantically in the distance comes into focus.
A man’s bare, muscular back. He’s running.
Dez hears the labored grunt of his breathing. It’s so real, she feels his fear.
Good filmmaking.
Now the focus pivots away from him, back in the direction he’s run from. Toward what looks like … a shimmering translucent wall. It’s magnificently strange and yet somehow familiar.
“Don’t blink!” Dr. Ezekiel reminds her, and Dez strains not to.
She stares hard into the device and sees that on the other side of the translucent wall, the landscape is completely different.
Lusher and more verdant than what the man runs through.
A wild orchard of a thousand trees, the air alive with birdsong.
Dez thinks she smells honeysuckle, jasmine, like she’s right there in the midst of it.
She feels the wall luring her, almost calling her name.
She holds her breath, willing the man to go back.
It’s obvious he’s running the wrong way.
“Almost finished!” Dr. Ezekiel’s voice is strained and urgent. “Eyes open!”
Tears prick Dez’s eyes as a blinding light, brighter than anything she’s ever seen, flashes through the tiny lenses.
A fire ignites near the base of the translucent wall.
So hot Dez feels it singe her eyes. But still, she doesn’t blink.
Behind the fire, she sees someone wielding the fire, using what looks like a massive diamond sword.
The camera pans between the sword wielder, the fire, then back to the man who’s running from it, growing more distant in the frame.
A sob rises unexpected in Dez’s chest.
“You may close your eyes,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
Dez doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to miss a frame of this bizarre, engrossing film, but her eyes ache, and at last, she succumbs. She lets her eyelids drift closed for a fraction of a second.
On the other side of her blink, the vision before her is gone. Through the lenses, only blurry white remains.
She feels … sad, depleted. She can’t explain why except whoever made this film possesses an exceptional talent, and Dez wants to see more of it.
But it’s gone.
“Access granted,” Dr. Ezekiel says as Dez lifts her face from the kinetoscope. She finds herself back in the room, blinking rapidly to adjust. A blurry Rafe golf-claps.
Dez wipes her eyes, dragging from them something sticky and stringy, reminiscent of …
“Are these spiderwebs?” She swats at the stuff on her face.
“Perfectly natural, perfectly safe,” Dr. Ezekiel says, handing Dez a small mirror and pointing to a spot on her face where a tendril remains. “The scenes you saw are quite old.”
“They looked so modern,” Dez says.
“What did you see?” Rafe says.
“A glass wall,” she says softly. “Some kind of orchard. A man was … running.”
Dr. Ezekiel and Rafe exchange glances.
“What?” Dez says. “Why are you looking at each other like that?”
“Of course it’s private, what one sees in the kinetoscope,” Dr. Ezekiel says. “You don’t have to tell anyone anything about it.”
“How does it work?” Dez asks.
“Strong images,” Dr. Ezekiel explains, “widen our inner apertures. So that you’re able to see with more than the ordinary eye. What you just saw, you saw with your mind’s eye.”
Dez is familiar with the phrase the mind’s eye, but she’s always taken it to mean imagination, an inner realm of daydreams, fantasies disconnected from what her physical eyes perceive.
“The mind’s eye is where we see truth,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
Dez nods. This is how she’d like audiences to see her films, with widened inner apertures, receptive to truth.
“Is that why I felt so—”
“Invested?” Dr. Ezekiel says. “Yes. The mind’s eye is difficult to open, but when the right images flood the soul—with beauty, pain, desire, really any true point of view—I’m able to capture an imprint of it. Which I then use to make a key, granting you access to the facilities at Acheron.”
“You just scanned my mind’s eye?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
“Are we finished here, Zeke?” Rafe says.
“The campus is open to her now.” Dr. Ezekiel studies Dez through the glasses at the tip of his nose. “Be careful in there, Desdemona. But more importantly, be brave.”