Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.

  When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where could she ever be safe again?

  She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.

  “They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s acting out now because of it … I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”

  Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.

  She rooted around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off, because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.

  “Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”

  Alex kept her eyes on the TV screen. “Can we have real pizza?”

  “I can make you pizza here. Don’t you want almond cheese?”

  Alex said nothing. A few minutes later, she heard her mother on the phone, ordering from Amici’s. They ate watching TV, Mira pretending not to watch Alex.

  Alex ate until her stomach hurt, then ate some more. It was too late for cartoons, and the shows had switched to the bright sitcom stories of teenage wizards and twins living in lofts, that everyone at school pretended they were too old for. Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?

  Her mother nibbled on a piece of crust. Then at last she reached for the remote and hit mute.

  “Baby,” she said. “Galaxy.”

  “Alex.”

  “Alex, can you talk to me? Can we talk about what happened?”

  Alex felt a hard burble of laughter pushing at her throat, making it ache. If it got free, would she laugh or cry? Can we talk about what happened? What was she supposed to say? A ghost tried to rape me? Maybe he did rape me? She wasn’t sure when it counted, how far inside he had to be. But it didn’t matter, because no one would believe her anyway.

  Alex clutched the pocketknife in her pajama pocket. Her heart was suddenly racing. What could she say? Help me. Protect me. Except no one could. No one could see the things hurting her.

  They might not even be real. That was the worst of it. What if she’d imagined it all? She might just be crazy, and then what? She wanted to start screaming and never stop.

  “Baby?” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. You know that, right? You—”

  “I can’t go back to school.”

  “Galaxy—”

  “Mama,” Alex said, turning to her mother, grabbing her wrist, needing her to listen. “Mama, don’t make me go.”

  Mira tried to draw Alex into her arms. “Oh, my little star.”

  Alex did scream then. She kicked at her mom to keep her away. “You’re a fucking loser,” she shrieked again and again, until her mother was the one crying and Alex locked herself in her room, sick with shame.

  Mira let Alex stay home for the rest of the week. She’d found a therapist to take Alex in for a session, but Alex had nothing to say.

  Mira pleaded with Alex, tried to bribe her with junk food and TV hours, then at last said, “You talk to the therapist or you go back to school.”

  So the following Monday, Alex had gone back to school. No one spoke to her. They barely looked at her, and when she found spaghetti sauce smeared on her gym locker, she knew that Meagan had told.

  Alex got the nickname Bloody Mary. She ate lunch by herself. She was never picked for lab partner or field-trip buddy and had to be foisted on people. In desperation, Alex made the mistake of trying to tell Meagan what had really happened, of trying to explain. She knew it was stupid, even as she’d reeled off the things she’d seen, the things she knew, as she’d watched Meagan shift farther away from her, her eyes going distant, twirling a long curl of glossy brown hair around her forefinger. But the more Meagan drew away, the longer her silence stretched, the more Alex talked, as if somewhere in all of those words was a secret code, a key that would get back the glimmer of what she’d lost.

  In the end, all Meagan said was, “Okay, I have to go now.” Then she’d done what Alex knew she would and repeated it all.

  So when Sarah McKinney begged Alex to meet her at Tres Muchachos to talk to the ghost of her grandmother, Alex had known it was probably a setup, one big joke. But she went anyway, still hoping, and found herself sitting in the food court, trying not to cry.

  That’s when Mosh had looked over from the counter at Hot Dog on a Stick and taken pity on her. Mosh was a senior with dyed black hair and a thousand silver rings on her corpse-white hands. She knew all about mean girls, and she invited Alex to hang out with her friends in the parking lot of the mall.

  Alex hadn’t been sure how to act, so she stood with her hands in her pockets until Mosh’s boyfriend offered her the bong they were passing around.

  “She’s twelve years old!” Mosh had said.

  “She’s stressed, I can see it. And she’s cool, right?”

  Alex had seen older kids at her school take drags on joints and cigarettes. She and Meagan had pretended to smoke, so she at least knew you weren’t supposed to blow it out like a cigarette.

  She clamped her lips on the bong and drew in the smoke, tried to hold it, coughed loud and hard.

  Mosh and her friends broke into applause.

  “See?” said Mosh’s boyfriend. “This kid is cool. Pretty too.”

  “Don’t be a creep,” said Mosh. “She’s just a kid.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to fuck her. What’s your name anyway?”

  “Alex.”

  Mosh’s boyfriend held his hand out; he had leather bracelets on both wrists, a smattering of dark hair on his forearms. He didn’t look like the boys in her grade.

  She shook his hand and he gave her a wink. “Nice to meet you, Alex. I’m Len.”

  Hours later, crawling into bed, feeling both sleepy and invincible, she realized she hadn’t seen a single dead anything since the smoke first hit her lungs.

  * * *

  Alex learned it was a balance. Alcohol worked, oxy, anything that unwound her focus. Valium was the best. It made everything soft and wrapped her in cotton. Speed was a huge mistake, Adderall especially, but Molly was the worst of all. The one time Alex made that mistake, she not only saw Grays, she could feel them, their sadness and their hunger oozing toward her from every direction. Nothing like the incident in the grove bathroom had happened again. None of the Quiet Ones had been able to touch her, but she didn’t know why. And they were still everywhere.

  The beautiful thing was that around her new friends, her high friends, she could freak out and they didn’t care. They thought it was hilarious. She was the youngest kid who got to hang with them, their mascot, and they all laughed when she
talked to things that weren’t there. Mosh called girls like Meagan “the blond bitches” and “Mutant Cutes.” She said they were all “sad little fishes drinking their own piss in the mainstream.” She said she’d kill for Alex’s black hair, and when Alex said the world was full of ghosts trying to get in, Mosh just shook her head and said, “You should write this stuff down, Alex. I swear.”

  Alex got held back a year. She got suspended. She took cash from her mom’s purse, then little things from around the house, then finally her grandfather’s silver kiddush cup. Mira cried and shouted and set new house rules. Alex broke them all, felt guilty for making her mom sad, felt furious at feeling guilty. It all made her tired, so eventually she stopped coming home.

  When Alex turned fifteen, her mother used the last of her savings to try to send her to a scared-straight rehab for troubled teens. By then Mosh was long gone, off at art school, and she didn’t hang with Alex or Len or any of the other kids when she came home for the holidays. Alex had run into her at the beauty supply, still buying black hair dye. Mosh asked how school was, and when Alex just laughed, Mosh had started to offer her an apology.

  “What are you talking about?” Alex said. “You saved me.”

  Mosh had looked so sad and ashamed that Alex practically ran out of the store. She’d gone home that night, wanting to see her mom and sleep in her own bed. But she woke up to a pair of beefy men shining a flashlight in her eyes and dragging her out of her room as her mom looked on and cried, saying, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t know what else to do.” Apparently it was a big day for apologies.

  They bound her wrists with zip ties, tossed her in the back of an SUV, barefoot in pajamas. They screamed at her about respect and breaking her mother’s heart and that she was going to Idaho to learn the right way to live and she had a lesson coming. But Len had shown Alex how to snap zip ties and it only took her two tries to get herself free, quietly open the back door, and vanish between two apartment buildings before the meatheads in the front seat realized she was gone. She walked seven miles to where Len was working at Baskin-Robbins. After his shift, they put Alex’s blistered feet in a tub of bubble gum ice cream and got high and had sex on the storeroom floor.

  She worked at a TGI Fridays, then a Mexican restaurant that scraped the beans off the customers’ plates and reused them every night, then a laser tag place, and a Mail Boxes Etc. One afternoon when she was standing at the shipping desk, a pretty girl with chestnut curls came in with her mother and a stack of manila envelopes. It took Alex a solid minute to realize it was Meagan. Standing there in her maroon apron, watching Meagan chat with the other clerk, Alex had the sudden sensation that she was among the Quiet Ones, that she had died in that bathroom all of those years ago, and that people had been looking straight through her ever since. She’d just been too high to notice. Then Meagan glanced over her shoulder and the skittery, tense look in her eye had been enough for Alex to come back to her body. You see me, she thought. You wish you didn’t, but you do.

  The years slid by. Sometimes Alex would put her head up, think about staying sober, think about a book or school or her mom. She’d fall into a fantasy of clean sheets and someone to tuck her in at night. Then she’d catch a glimpse of a biker, the skin scraped from the side of his face, the pulp beneath studded with gravel, or an old woman with her housecoat half open, standing unnoticed in front of the window of an electronics store, and she’d go back under. If she couldn’t see them, somehow they couldn’t see her.

  She’d gone on that way until Hellie—golden Hellie, the girl Len had expected her to hate, maybe hoped she would, the girl she’d loved instead—until that night at Ground Zero when everything had gone so very wrong, until the morning she’d woken up to Dean Sandow in her hospital room.

  He’d taken some papers out of his briefcase, an old essay she’d written when she still bothered going to school. She didn’t remember writing it, but the title read, A Day in My Life. A big red F was scrawled over the top, beside the words The assignment was not fiction.

  Sandow had perched on a chair by the side of her bed and asked, “The things you describe in this essay, do you still see them?”

  The night of the Aurelian ritual, when the Grays had flowed into the protective circle, taken on form, drawn by blood and longing, it had all come flooding back to her. She’d almost lost everything before she’d begun, but somehow she’d held on, and with a little help—like a summer job learning to brew the perfect cup of tea in Professor Belbalm’s office, for starters—she thought she could hold on a little longer. She just had to lay Tara Hutchins to rest.

  By the time Alex finished in the Lethe library, the sun had set and her brain felt numb. She’d made the initial mistake of not limiting the retrieved books to English, and even after she’d reset the library, there were a baffling number of hard-to-parse texts on the shelf, academic papers and treatises that were simply too dense for her to pull apart. In a way, it made things easier. There were only so many rituals Alex could understand, and that narrowed her options. Then there were the rites that required a particular alignment of the planets or an equinox or a bright day in October, one that demanded the foreskin of a yonge, hende man of ful corage, and another that called for the less disturbing but equally hard to procure feathers of one hundred golden ospreys.

  “The satisfaction of a job well done” was one of those phrases Alex’s mom liked. “Hard work tires the soul. Good works feed the soul!” Alex wasn’t sure that what she intended qualified as “good” work at all, but it was better than doing nothing. She copied the text—since her phone wouldn’t work in the annex, even to take a photo—then sealed up the library and trudged down the stairs to the parlor.

  “Hey, Dawes,” Alex said awkwardly. No response. “Pamela.”

  She was in her usual spot, huddled on the floor by the grand piano, a highlighter shoved between her teeth. Her laptop was set off to one side, and she was surrounded by stacks of books and rows of index cards with what Alex thought might be chapter titles for her dissertation.

  “Hey,” she tried again, “I need you to go with me on an errand.”

  Dawes shuffled From Eleusis to Empoli under Mimesis and the Chariot’s Wheel.

  “I have work to do,” she mumbled around the highlighter.

  “I need you to go with me to the morgue.”

  Now Dawes glanced up, brow furrowed, blinking like someone newly exposed to sunlight. She always looked a little put out when you spoke to her, as if she’d been on the brink of the revelation that would finally help her finish the dissertation she’d been writing for six years.

  She removed the highlighter from her mouth, wiping it unceremoniously on her nubbly sweatshirt, which might have been gray or navy, depending on the light. Her red hair was twisted into a bun, and Alex could see the pink halo of a zit forming on her chin.

  “Why?” asked Dawes.

  “Tara Hutchins.”

  “Does Dean Sandow want you to go?”

  “I need more information,” Alex said. “For my report.” That was a problem dear Dawes should be able to sympathize with.

  “Then you should call Centurion.”

  “Turner isn’t going to talk to me.”

  Dawes ran a finger over the edge of one of her index cards. Heretical Hermeneutics: Josephus and the influence of the trickster on the Fool. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.

  “Aren’t they charging her boyfriend?” asked Dawes, pulling at her fuzzy sleeve. “What does this have to do with us?”

  “Probably nothing. But it was a Thursday night and I think we should make sure. It’s what we’re here for, right?”

  Alex hadn’t actually said, Darlington would do it, but she might as well have.

  Dawes shifted uncomfortably. “But if Detective Turner—”

  “Turner can go fuck himself,” Alex said. She was tired. She’d missed dinner. She’d wasted hours on Tara Hutchins and she was about to waste a few more.

  Dawes worr
ied her lip as if she was legitimately trying to visualize the mechanics. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “No. Darlington does. Did. Fuck.” For a moment, he was there in the room with them, gilded and capable. Dawes rose and unzipped her backpack, removed a set of keys. She stood in the fading light, weighing them in her palm. “I don’t know,” she said again.

  She might have been referring to a hundred different things. I don’t know if this is a good idea. I don’t know if you can be trusted. I don’t know how to finish my dissertation. I don’t know if you robbed me of our golden, destined for glory, perfect boy.

  “How are we going to get in?” Dawes asked.

  “I’ll get us in.”

  “And then what?”

  Alex handed her the sheet of notes she’d transcribed in the library. “We have all this stuff, right?”

  Dawes scanned the page. Her surprise was obvious when she said, “This isn’t bad.”

  Don’t apologize. Just do the work.

  Dawes gnawed on her lower lip. Her mouth was as colorless as the rest of her. Maybe her thesis was draining the life right out of her. “Couldn’t we call a car instead?”

  “We may need to leave in a hurry.”

  Dawes sighed and reached for her parka. “I’m driving.”

  8

  Winter

  Dawes had parked Darlington’s car a little ways up the block. It was an old wine-colored Mercedes, maybe from the eighties—Alex had never asked. The seats were upholstered in caramel leather, worn in some places, the stitching a bit threadbare. Darlington had always kept the car clean, but now it was immaculate. Dawes’s hand no doubt.

  As if asking for permission, Dawes paused before she turned the key in the ignition. Then the car rumbled to life and they were moving away from campus and out onto the highway.

  They rode in silence. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was actually in Farmington, almost forty miles outside New Haven. The morgue, thought Alex. I’m going to the morgue. In a Mercedes. Alex thought about turning on the radio—the old kind with a red line that glided through the stations like a finger seeking the right spot on a page. Then she thought of Darlington’s voice floating out of the speakers—Get out of my car, Stern—and decided she was fine with the silence.