Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  After a long moment, he said, “Would it help to break something else?”

  She was breathing hard. “Maybe.”

  Darlington rose and opened a cupboard, then another, and another, revealing shelf after shelf of Lenox, Waterford, Limoges—glassware, plates, pitchers, platters, butter dishes, gravy boats, thousands of dollars’ worth of crystal and china. He took down a glass, filled it with wine, and handed it to Alex.

  “Where would you like to start?”

  7

  Winter

  There had to be a Lethe protocol for murder, a series of steps she should follow, that Darlington would have known to follow.

  He probably would have told her to enlist Dawes’s help. But Alex and the grad student had never managed to do much more than politely ignore each other. Like almost everyone else, Dawes had loved shiny-penny Darlington. He’d been the only person who seemed totally at ease talking to her, who had managed it without any of the awkwardness that hung over Dawes like one of her bulky, indeterminately colored sweatshirts. Alex was pretty sure Dawes blamed her for what had happened at Rosenfeld Hall, and though Dawes had never said much to Alex, her silence had taken on a new hostility of slammed cupboards and suspicious glares. Alex didn’t want to talk to Dawes any more than she had to.

  So she would consult the Lethe library instead. Or you could just leave this whole thing alone, she thought as she climbed the steps to the mansion on Orange. A week from now, Darlington might be back beneath this very roof. He might emerge from the new-moon rite whole and happy and ready to turn his magnificent brain to the problem of Tara Hutchins’s murder. Or maybe he’d have other things on his mind.

  There was no key to get into Il Bastone. Alex had been introduced to the door the first day Darlington brought her to the house, and now it released a creaky sigh as she entered. It had always hummed happily when Darlington was with her. At least it hadn’t sicced a pack of jackals on her. Alex hadn’t seen the Lethe hounds since that first morning, but she thought about them every time she approached the house, wondering where they slept and if they were hungry, if spirit hounds even needed food.

  In theory, Dawes had Fridays off, but she could almost always be counted on to be burrowed into the corner of the first-floor parlor with her laptop. That made her easy to avoid. Alex slipped down the hall to the kitchen, where she found the plate of last night’s sandwiches Dawes had left covered with a damp towel on the top shelf of the fridge. She shoveled them into her mouth, feeling like a thief, but that just made the soft white bread, the cucumber coins, and thinly sliced salmon spiked with dill taste better.

  The house on Orange had been acquired by Lethe in 1888, shortly after John Anderson abandoned it, supposedly trying to outrun the ghost of the cigar girl his father had murdered. Since then, Il Bastone had masqueraded as a private home, a school run by the Sisters of St. Mary’s, a law office, and now as a private home perpetually awaiting renovation. But it had always been Lethe.

  A bookcase stood in the second-floor hallway beside an antique secretary and a vase of dried hydrangea. This was the entry to the library. There was an old panel in the wall beside it that supposedly controlled a stereo system, but it only worked about half the time and sometimes the music coming through the speakers sounded so tinny and far away, it made the house feel more empty.

  Alex drew the Albemarle Book from the third shelf. It looked like an ordinary ledger bound in stained cloth, but its pages crackled slightly as she opened it, and she swore when a low thrum of electricity jolted through her. The book retained echoes of a user’s most recent request, and as Alex flipped to the last page of entries, she saw Darlington’s scrawl and the words Rosenfeld Hall schematics. The date was December 10. The last night Daniel Arlington had been seen alive.

  Alex took a pen from the top of the secretary, wrote out the date and then Lethe House protocols. Homicide. She slid the book back onto the shelf between Stover at Yale and a battered copy of New England Cookery, Vol. 2. She’d never seen any sign of volume one.

  The house gave a disapproving groan and the shelf shook slightly. Alex wondered if Dawes was too deep in her work to notice or if she would be turning her eyes to the ceiling, speculating on what Alex might be up to.

  When the bookcase stopped rattling, Alex gripped its right side and pulled. It swung out from the wall like a door, revealing a two-story circular chamber lined with bookshelves. Though it was still afternoon, the sky through the glass dome above her glowed the luminous blue of early dusk. The air felt slightly balmy and she could smell orange blossoms on the air.

  Lethe had a limited amount of room, so the library had been rigged with a telescope portal, using magic borrowed from Scroll and Key and deployed by the late Lethe delegate Richard Albemarle when he was still only a Dante. You wrote down the subject you sought in the Albemarle Book, placed it in the bookcase, and the library would kindly retrieve a selection of volumes from the Lethe House collection, which would be waiting for you when you swung open the secret door. The full collection was located in an underground bunker beneath an estate in Greenwich and was heavily weighted toward the history of the occult, New Haven, and New England. It had an original printing of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and fifty-two different translations of its text, the complete works of Paracelsus, the secret diaries of Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon, a spell book from the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Chak Chak, a signed photo of Calvin Hill, and a first edition of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale along with a spell written on a Yankee Doodle napkin that revealed the book’s secret chapters. But good luck finding a copy of Pride and Prejudice or a basic history of the Cold War that didn’t focus entirely on the faulty magic used in the wording of the Eisenhower Doctrine.

  The library was also a little temperamental. If you weren’t specific enough in your request or if it couldn’t find books on your desired subject, the shelf would just keep shaking and eventually start to give off heat and emit a high, frantic whine, until you snatched the Albemarle Book and murmured a soothing incantation over its pages while gently caressing its spine. The portal magic also had to be maintained through a series of elaborate rites conducted every six years.

  “What happens if you guys miss a year?” Alex had asked when Darlington first showed her how the library worked.

  “It happened in 1928.”

  “And?”

  “All of the books from the collection crowded into the library at once and the floor collapsed on Chester Vance, Oculus.”

  “Jesus, that’s horrible.”

  “I don’t know,” Darlington had said meditatively. “Suffocating beneath a pile of books seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant.”

  Alex always approached the library with caution and didn’t get near the bookcase when it was shaking. It was too easy to imagine some future Darlington joking about the delicious irony of ignorant Galaxy Stern being fatally clocked in the jaw by rogue knowledge.

  She set her bag down on the circular table at the room’s center, the wood inlaid with a map of constellations she didn’t recognize. It was strange to Alex that the smell of books was always the same. The ancient documents in the climate-controlled stacks and glass cases of Beinecke. The research rooms at Sterling. The changeable library of Lethe House. They all had the same scent as the fluorescent-lit reading rooms full of cheap paperbacks she’d lived in as a kid.

  Most of the shelves were empty. There were some heavy old books on New Haven history and a glossy paperback titled New Haven Mayhem! that had probably been sold in tourist shops. It took Alex a minute to realize that one shelf was packed with reprints of the same slender volume—The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House, initially hardbound and then stapled together more cheaply when Lethe lost some of its pretensions and began watching its budget.

  Alex reached for the most recent edition, the year 1987 stamped on its cover. It had no table of contents, just pages reproduced crookedly on a copier w
ith the occasional note in the margin, and a ticket stub for Squeeze playing the New Haven Coliseum. The Coliseum was long gone, demolished for apartments and a community-college campus that had failed to materialize. Alex had seen a teen Gray in an R.E.M. T-shirt roaming around the parking lot that had taken the Coliseum’s place, moving in aimless circles as if still hoping to score tickets.

  The entry for murder was frustratingly short:

  In the event of violent death associated with the activities of the landed societies, a colloquy will be called between the dean, the university president, the active members of Lethe House, the acting Centurion, and the president of the Lethe Trust to decide a course of action. (See “Meeting Protocols.”)

  Alex flipped to “Meeting Protocols,” but all she found was a diagram of the Lethe House dining room, along with a guide to seating according to precedence, a reminder of the need for minutes to be kept by the residing Oculus, and suggested menus. Apparently, light fare was prescribed, alcohol to be served only upon request. There was even a recipe for something called minted slush punch.

  “Big help, fellas,” Alex muttered. They talked about death like it was a breach of manners. And she had no idea how to pronounce “colloquy” but it was obviously a big-ass meeting she had no intention of calling. Was she really supposed to hit up the president of the university and invite him over for cold meats? Sandow had told her to rest easy. He hadn’t said anything about a colloquy. Why? Because this is a funding year. Because Tara Hutchins is town. Because there’s no indication the societies are involved at all. So let it go.

  Instead, Alex returned to the hallway, shut the door to the library, and reopened the Albemarle Book. This time the scent of cigars puffed up from the pages and she heard the clinking of dishes. That was the Lethe memory of murder—not blood or suffering, but men gathered around a table, drinking minted slush punch. She hesitated, trying to think of the right words to guide the library, then she inscribed a new entry: How to speak to the dead.

  She slid the book into place and the bookcase shuddered violently. This time when she entered the library, the shelves were packed.

  * * *

  It was hard not to feel that Darlington was somehow looking over her shoulder, the eager scholar restraining himself from interfering in her clumsy attempts at research.

  When did you first see them? Alex had told Darlington the truth. She simply couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen the dead. She’d never even called them that in her head. The blue-lipped girl in a bikini by the pool; the naked man standing behind the chain-link fence at the schoolyard, toying lazily with himself as her class ran suicides; the two boys in bloody sweatshirts seated at a booth at the In-N-Out who never ordered. They were just the Quiet Ones, and if she didn’t pay them too much attention, they left her alone.

  That had all changed in a Goleta bathroom when she was twelve years old.

  By then she’d learned to keep her mouth shut about the things she saw, and she’d been doing pretty well. When it was time to start junior high, she asked her mother to start calling her Alex instead of Galaxy and to fill out her school forms that way. At her old school, everyone had known her as the twitchy kid who talked to herself and flinched at things that weren’t there, who didn’t have a dad and who didn’t look like her mom. One counselor thought she had ADD; another thought she needed a more regular sleep schedule. Then there was the vice principal, who had taken her mother aside and murmured that Alex might just be a little slow. “Some things can’t be fixed with therapy or a pill, you know? Some kids are below average, and there’s room for them in the classroom too.”

  But a new school meant a fresh start, a chance to remake herself into someone ordinary.

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed to be different,” her mother had said when Alex had summoned the courage to ask for the name change. “I called you Galaxy for a reason.”

  Alex didn’t disagree. Most of the books she read and the TV shows she watched told her different was okay. Different was great! Except no one was different quite like her. Besides, she thought, as she looked around their tiny apartment laden with dream catchers and silk scarves and paintings of fairies dancing under the moon, it wasn’t like she was ever really going to be like everyone else.

  “Maybe I can work up to it.”

  “All right,” Mira said. “That is your choice and I respect it.” Then she’d yanked her daughter into her arms and blown a raspberry on her forehead. “But you’re still my little star.”

  Alex had squirmed away, laughing, nearly woozy with relief and anticipation, then started thinking about how she could get her mom to buy her new jeans.

  Seventh grade started and Alex wondered if her new name was some kind of magic word. It didn’t fix everything. She still didn’t have the right sneakers or the right scrunchie or bring the right things for lunch. It couldn’t make her blond or tall or prune her thick eyebrows, which had to be vigilantly kept from joining forces to create a unified eyebrow front. The white kids still thought she was Mexican and the Mexican kids still thought she was white. But she was doing okay in class. She had people to eat with at lunchtime. She had a friend named Meagan, who invited her over to watch movies and eat bowls of sugary name-brand cereals shimmering with artificial colors.

  On the morning of the Goleta trip, when Ms. Rosales told them to buddy up and Meagan seized Alex’s hand, Alex felt a gratitude so overwhelming, she thought she might vomit the tiny blueberry muffins the teachers had provided. They spent the morning drinking hot chocolate from foam cups, pressed together on the green vinyl seat of the bus. Both of their moms liked Fleetwood Mac, and when “Go Your Own Way” came on the bus driver’s radio, they sang along with it, mostly shouting, giggling and breathless as Cody Morgan pressed his hands to his ears and yelled at them to SHUT UP.

  It took nearly three hours to get to the butterfly reserve, and Alex savored every minute of the drive. The grove itself was nothing special: a pretty sprawl of eucalyptus trees lined by dusty paths, and a guide who talked about the eating habits and migration patterns of monarchs. Alex glimpsed a slender woman walking through the grove, her arm hanging from her body by the barest scrap of tendon, and quickly looked away, just in time to see a blanket of orange wings gust up from the trees as the monarchs took flight. She and Meagan ate their lunches shoulder to shoulder on picnic tables near the entrance, and before they got back on the buses, everyone went to use the bathrooms. They were low slab buildings with damp concrete floors, and both Meagan and Alex gagged when they entered.

  “Forget it,” said Meagan. “I can hold it until we get back.”

  But Alex had to go. She chose the cleanest metal stall, laid toilet paper carefully on the seat, pulled down her jean shorts, and froze. For a long moment, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The blood was nearly dry and so brown that she had trouble understanding it was blood. She’d gotten her period. Wasn’t she supposed to have cramps or something? Meagan had gotten hers over the summer and had lots of thoughts about tampons and pads and the importance of ibuprofen.

  The only important thing was that the blood hadn’t soaked through to her shorts. But how was she supposed to make it through the bus ride home?

  “Meagan!” she shouted. But if anyone else was in the bathroom they’d already cleared out. Alex felt her panic rise. She needed to get to Ms. Rosales before everyone was seated and ready to go. She would know what to do.

  Alex wound a bunch of toilet paper around her hand and tucked the makeshift pad into her ruined underwear, then pulled up her shorts and shoved out of the stall.

  She yelped. A man was standing there, his face a mottled mess of bruises. She was relieved when she realized he was dead. A dead man in the girls’ bathroom was a lot less scary than a living one. She balled her fists and pushed through him. She hated going through them. Sometimes she got flashes of memory, but this time she just felt a blast of cold. She hurried to the sinks and quickly washed her hands. Alex could sense he
was still there, but she refused to meet his gaze in the mirror.

  She felt something brush the small of her back.

  In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband of her shorts.

  Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do that, she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.

  Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her. She screamed and screamed.

  That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed, hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.

  Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.

  Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.