Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  She caught a flicker of movement from the benches that overlooked the operating arena. The theater had two local Grays who always sat in the same places, just a few rows apart: a female mental patient who’d had her ovaries and uterus removed in a hysterectomy in 1926, for which she would have been paid six dollars if she’d survived the procedure; and a male, a medical student. He’d frozen to death in an opium den thousands of miles away, sometime around 1880, but kept returning here to sit in his old seat and look down on whatever passed for life below. Prognostications only happened in the theater four times a year, at the start of each fiscal quarter, but that seemed to be enough to suit him.

  Darlington liked to say that dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home. Easier said than done when the only other thing to look at in the room was a man playing with another man’s innards like they were mah-jongg tiles.

  She remembered Darlington’s shock when he’d realized she could not only see ghosts without the help of any potion or spell but see them in color. He’d been weirdly furious. She’d enjoyed that.

  “What kinds of color?” he’d asked, sliding his feet off the coffee table, his heavy black boots thunking on the slatted floor of the parlor at Il Bastone.

  “Just color. Like an old Polaroid. Why? What do you see?”

  “They look gray,” he’d snapped. “That’s why they’re called Grays.”

  She’d shrugged, knowing her nonchalance would make Darlington even angrier. “It isn’t a big deal.”

  “Not to you,” he’d muttered, and stomped away. He’d spent the rest of the day in the training room, working up a cranky sweat.

  She’d felt smug at the time, glad not everything came so easily to him. But now, moving in a circle around the perimeter of the theater, checking the little chalk markings made at every compass point, she just felt jittery and unprepared. That was the way she’d felt since she’d taken her first step on campus. No, before that. From the time Dean Sandow had sat down beside her hospital bed, tapped the handcuffs on her wrist with his nicotine-stained fingers, and said, “We are offering you an opportunity.” But that was the old Alex. The Alex of Hellie and Len. Yale Alex had never worn handcuffs, never gotten into a fight, never fucked a stranger in a bathroom to make up her boyfriend’s vig. Yale Alex struggled but didn’t complain. She was a good girl trying to keep up.

  And failing. She should have been here early to observe the making of the signs and ensure the circle was secure. Grays as old as the ones hovering on the tiered benches above didn’t tend to make trouble even when drawn by blood, but prognostications were big magic and her job was to verify that the Bonesmen followed proper procedures, stayed cautious. She was playacting, though. She’d spent the previous night cramming, trying to memorize the correct signs and proportions of chalk, charcoal, and bone. She’d made flash cards, for fuck’s sake, and forced herself to shuffle through them in between bouts of Joseph Conrad.

  Alex thought the markings looked okay, but she knew her signs of protection about as well as her modern British novels. When she’d attended the fall-quarter prognostication with Darlington, had she really paid attention? No. She’d been too busy sucking on ginger candy, reeling from the strangeness of it all, and praying she wouldn’t humiliate herself by puking. She’d thought she had plenty of time to learn with Darlington looking over her shoulder. But they’d both been wrong about that.

  “Voorhoofd!” the Haruspex called, and one of the Bonesmen darted forward. Melinda? Miranda? Alex couldn’t remember the redhead’s name, only that she was in an all-female a cappella group called Whim ’n Rhythm. The girl patted the Haruspex’s forehead with a white cloth and melted back into the group.

  Alex tried not to look at the man on the table, but her eyes darted to his face anyway. Michael Reyes, age forty-eight, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Would Reyes remember any of it when he woke? When he tried to tell someone would they just call him crazy? Alex knew exactly what that was like. It could be me on that table.

  “The Bonesmen like them as nuts as possible,” Darlington had told her. “They think it makes for better predictions.” When she’d asked him why, he’d just said, “The crazier the victima, the closer to God.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed,” he’d quoted. Then he’d shrugged. “Their bank balances say yes.”

  “And we’re okay with this?” Alex had asked Darlington. “With people getting cut open so Chauncey can redecorate his summer home?”

  “Never met a Chauncey,” he’d said. “Still hoping.” Then he’d paused, standing in the armory, his face grave. “Nothing is going to stop this. Too many powerful people rely on what the societies can do. Before Lethe existed, no one was keeping watch. So you can make futile bleating noises in protest and lose your scholarship, or you can stay here, do your job, and do the most good you can.”

  Even then, she’d wondered if that was only part of the story, if Darlington’s desire to know everything bound him to Lethe just as surely as any sense of duty. But she’d stayed quiet then and she intended to stay quiet now.

  Michael Reyes had been found in one of the public beds at Yale New Haven. To the outside world he looked like any other patient: a vagrant, the type who passed through psych wards and emergency rooms and jails, on his meds, then off. He had a brother in New Jersey who was listed as his next of kin and who had signed off on what was supposed to be a routine medical procedure for the treatment of a scarred bowel.

  Reyes was cared for solely by a nurse named Jean Gatdula, who’d worked three night shifts in a row. She didn’t blink or cause a fuss when, through what appeared to be a scheduling error, she was slated for two more evenings in the ward. That week her colleagues may or may not have noticed that she always came to work with a huge handbag. In it was stowed a little cooler that she used to carry Michael Reyes’s meals: a dove’s heart for clarity, geranium root, and a dish of bitter herbs. Gatdula had no idea what the food did or what fate awaited Michael Reyes any more than she knew what became of any of the “special” patients she tended to. She didn’t even know whom she worked for, only that once every month she received a much-needed check to offset the gambling debts her husband racked up at the Foxwoods blackjack tables.

  Alex wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or if she really could smell the ground parsley speckling Reyes’s insides, but her own stomach gave another warning flutter. She was desperate for fresh air, sweating beneath her layers. The operating theater was kept ice cold, fed by vents separate from the rest of the building, but the huge portable halogens used to light the proceedings still radiated heat.

  A low moan sounded. Alex’s gaze shot to Michael Reyes, a terrible image flashing through her mind: Reyes waking to find himself strapped to a table, surrounded by hooded figures, his insides on the outside. But his eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling in steady rhythm. The moan continued, louder now. Maybe someone else was feeling sick? But none of the Bonesmen looked distressed. Their faces glowed like studious moons in the dim theater, eyes trained on the proceedings.

  Still the moan climbed, a low wind building, churning through the room and bouncing off its dark-wood walls. No direct eye contact, Alex warned herself. Just look to see if the Grays—She choked back a startled grunt.

  The Grays were no longer in their seats.

  They leaned over the railing that surrounded the operating theater, fingers gripping the wood, necks craned, their bodies stretching toward the very edge of the chalk circle like animals straining to drink from the lip of a watering hole.

  Don’t look. It was Darlington’s voice, his warning. Don’t look too closely. It was too easy for a Gray to form a bond, to attach itself to you. And it was more dangerous because she already knew these Grays’ histories. They had been around so long that generations of Lethe delegates had document
ed their pasts. But their names had been redacted from all documents.

  “If you don’t know a name,” Darlington had explained, “you can’t think it, and then you won’t be tempted to say it.” A name was a kind of intimacy.

  Don’t look. But Darlington wasn’t here.

  The female Gray was naked, her small breasts puckered from the cold as they must have been in death. She lifted a hand to the open wound of her belly, touched the flesh there fondly, like a woman coyly indicating that she was expecting. They hadn’t sewn her up. The boy—and he was a boy, skinny and tender-featured—wore a sloppy bottle-green jacket and stained trousers. Grays always appeared as they had in the moment of death. But there was something obscene about them side by side, one naked, the other clothed.

  Every muscle in the Grays’ bodies strained, their eyes wide and staring, their lips yawning open. The black holes of their mouths were caverns, and from them that bleak keening rose, not really a moan at all but something flat and inhuman. Alex thought of the wasps’ nest she’d found in the garage beneath her mother’s Studio City apartment one summer, the mindless buzz of insects in a dark place.

  The Haruspex kept reciting in Dutch. Another Bonesman held a glass of water to the Scribe’s lips as he continued his transcriptions. The smell of blood and herbs and shit hung dense in the air.

  The Grays arced forward inch by inch, trembling, lips distended, their mouths too wide now, as if their jaws had unhinged. The whole room seemed to vibrate.

  But only Alex could see them.

  That was why Lethe had brought her here, why Dean Sandow had grudgingly made his golden offer to a girl in handcuffs. Still, Alex looked around, hoping for someone else to understand, for anyone to offer their help.

  She took a step back, heart rabbiting in her chest. Grays were docile, vague, especially Grays this old. At least Alex thought they were. Was this one of the lessons Darlington hadn’t gotten to yet?

  She racked her brain for the few incantations Darlington had taught her last semester, spells of protection. She could use death words in a pinch. Would they work on Grays in this state? She should have put salt in her pockets, caramels to distract them, anything. Basic stuff, Darlington said in her head. Easy to master.

  The wood beneath the Grays’ fingers began to bend and creak. Now the redheaded a cappella girl looked up, wondering where the creaking had come from.

  The wood was going to splinter. The signs must have been made incorrectly; the circle of protection would not hold. Alex looked right and left at the useless Bonesmen in their ridiculous robes. If Darlington were here, he would stay and fight, make sure the Grays were contained and Reyes was kept safe.

  The halogens dimmed, surged.

  “Fuck you, Darlington,” Alex muttered beneath her breath, already turning on her heel to run.

  Boom.

  The room shook. Alex stumbled. The Haruspex and the rest of the Bonesmen looked at her, scowling.

  Boom.

  The sound of something knocking from the next world. Something big. Something that should not be let through.

  “Is our Dante drunk?” muttered the Haruspex.

  Boom.

  Alex opened her mouth to scream, to tell them to run before whatever was holding that thing back gave way.

  The moaning dropped away suddenly, completely, as if stoppered in a bottle. The monitor beeped. The lights hummed.

  The Grays were back in their seats, ignoring each other, ignoring her.

  Beneath her coat, Alex’s blouse clung wetly to her, soaked through with sweat. She could smell her own sour fear thick on her skin. The halogens still shone hot and white. The theater pulsed heat like an organ suffused with blood. The Bonesemen were staring. Next door, the credits rolled.

  Alex could see the spot where the Grays had gripped the railing, white slivers of wood splayed like corn silk.

  “Sorry,” Alex said. She bent at the knees and vomited onto the stone floor.

  * * *

  When they finally stitched up Michael Reyes, it was nearly 3 a.m. The Haruspex and most of the other Bonesmen had left hours before to shower off the ritual and prepare for a party that would last well past dawn.

  The Haruspex might head directly back to New York in the creamy leather seat of a black town car, or he might stay for the festivities and take his pick of willing undergrad girls or boys or both. She’d been told “attending to” the Haruspex was considered an honor, and Alex supposed if you were high enough and drunk enough, it might feel like that was the case, but it sure sounded like being pimped out to the man who paid the bills.

  The redhead—Miranda, it turned out, “like in The Tempest”—had helped Alex clean up the vomit. She’d been genuinely nice about it and Alex had almost felt bad for not remembering her name.

  Reyes had been transported out of the building on a gurney, cloaked in obfuscation veils that made him look like a bunch of AV equipment piled beneath protective plastic sheeting. It was the most risky part of the whole night’s endeavor as far as the safety of the society went. Skull and Bones didn’t really excel at anything other than prognostication, and of course the members of Manuscript weren’t interested in sharing their glamours with another society. The magic binding Reyes’s veils wobbled with every bump, the gurney coming into and out of focus, the blips and bleeps from the medical equipment and the ventilator still audible. If anyone stopped to take a close look at what was being wheeled down the hallway, the Bonesmen would have some real trouble—though Alex doubted it would be anything they couldn’t buy their way out of.

  She would check in on Reyes once he was back on the ward and then again in a week to make sure he was healing without complications. There had been casualties following prognostications before, though only one since Lethe had been founded in 1898 to monitor the societies. A group of Bonesmen had accidentally killed a vagrant during a hastily planned emergency reading after the stock-market crash of 1929. Prognostications had been banned for the next four years, and Bones had been threatened with the loss of its massive red stone tomb on High Street. “That’s why we exist,” Darlington had said as Alex turned the pages listing the names of each victima and prognostication date in the Lethe records. “We are the shepherds, Stern.”

  But he’d cringed when Alex pointed to an inscription in one of the margins of Lethe: A Legacy. “NMDH?”

  “No more dead hobos,” he’d said on a sigh.

  So much for the noble mission of Lethe House. Still Alex couldn’t feel too superior tonight, not when she’d been seconds from abandoning Michael Reyes to save her own ass.

  Alex endured a long string of jokes about her spewed dinner of grilled chicken and Twizzlers, and stayed at the theater to make sure the remaining Bonesmen followed what she hoped was proper procedure for sanitizing the space.

  She promised herself she’d return later to sprinkle the theater with bone dust. Reminders of death were the best way to keep Grays at bay. It was why cemeteries were some of the least haunted places in the world. She thought of the ghosts’ open mouths, that horrible drone of insects. Something had been trying to slam its way into the chalk circle. At least that was how it had seemed. Grays—ghosts—were harmless. Mostly. It took a lot for them to take any kind of form in the mortal world. And to pass through the final Veil? To become physical, capable of touch? Capable of damage? They could. Alex knew they could. But it was close to impossible.

  Even so, there had been hundreds of prognostications in this theater and she’d never heard of any Grays crossing over into physical form or interfering. Why had their behavior changed tonight?

  If it had.

  The greatest gift Lethe had given Alex was not the full ride to Yale, the new start that had scrubbed her past clean like a chemical burn. It was the knowledge, the certainty, that the things she saw were real and always had been. But she’d lived too long wondering if she was crazy to stop now. Darlington would have believed her. He always had. Except Darlington was gone.

&
nbsp; Not for good, she told herself. In a week the new moon would rise and they would bring him home.

  Alex touched her fingers to the cracked railing, already thinking about how to phrase her description of the prognostication for the Lethe House records. Dean Sandow reviewed all of them, and she wasn’t anxious to draw his attention to anything out of the ordinary. Besides, if you set aside a helpless man having his guts rearranged, nothing bad had actually happened.

  When Alex emerged from the passage into the hallway, Tripp Helmuth startled from his slouch. “They almost done in there?”

  Alex nodded and took a deep breath of comparatively fresh air, eager to get outside.

  “Pretty gross, huh?” Tripp asked with a smirk. “If you want I can slip you some of the tips when they get transcribed. Take the edge off those student loans.”

  “What the fuck would you know about student loans?” The words were out before she could stop them. Darlington would not approve. Alex was supposed to remain civil, distant, diplomatic. And anyway, she was a hypocrite. Lethe had made sure she would graduate without a cloud of debt hanging over her—if she actually made it through four years of exams and papers and nights like these.

  Tripp held his hands up in surrender, laughing uneasily. “Hey, just tryin’ to get by.” Tripp was on the sailing team, a third-generation Bonesman, a gentleman and a scholar, a purebred golden retriever—dopey, glossy, and expensive. He was rumpled and rosy as a healthy infant, his hair sandy, his skin still tan from whichever island he’d spent winter break on. He had the ease of someone who had always been and would always be just fine, a boy of a thousand second chances. “We good?” he asked eagerly.

  “We’re good,” she said, though she was not good at all. She could still feel the reverberation of that buzzing moan filling up her lungs, rattling the inside of her skull. “Just stuffy in there.”