Ninth House

by Leigh Bardugo

  For a long time Danny wondered why his grandfather kept playing this game. It wasn’t until he was much older, when his grandfather was gone, and Danny was alone in the dark towers of Black Elm, that he realized his grandfather had been lonely, that his routine of the diner and collecting rents and reading Kipling might not be enough to fill the dark at the end of the day, that he might miss his foolish son. It was only then, lying on his side in the empty house, surrounded by a nest of books, that Darlington understood how much Black Elm demanded and how little it gave back.

  The Layabouts’ visits always ended the same way: his parents departing in a flurry of indignation and the scent of his mother’s perfume—Caron Poivre, Darlington had learned on a fateful night in Paris the summer after sophomore year, when he’d finally worked up the courage to ask Angelique Brun for a date and arrived at her door to her looking glorious in black satin, her pulse points daubed with the expensive stink of his miserable youth. He’d claimed a migraine and cut the evening short.

  Danny’s parents had insisted they would take Danny away, that they’d enroll him in private school, that they’d bring him back to New York with them. At first Danny had been thrilled and panicked by these threats. But soon he’d come to understand they were empty blows aimed at his grandfather. His parents couldn’t afford expensive schools without Arlington money, and they didn’t want a child interfering with their freedom.

  Once the Layabouts had gone, Danny and his grandfather would go to dinner at Clark’s and his grandfather would sit and talk with Tony about his kids and look at family photos and they’d extoll the value of “good, honest work” and then his grandfather would grab Danny’s wrist.

  “Listen,” he would say, his eyes rheumy and wet when you looked this close. “Listen. They’ll try to take the house when I die. They’ll try to take it all. You don’t let them.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Danny would say.

  And his grandfather would wink and laugh and reply, “Not yet.”

  Once, installed in a red booth, the smell of hash browns and steak sauce thick in the air, Danny had dared to ask, “Why did they even have me?”

  “They liked the idea of being parents,” his grandfather said, waving his hand over the leavings of his dinner. “Showing you off to their friends.”

  “And then they just dumped me here?”

  “I didn’t want you raised by nannies. I told them I’d buy them an apartment in New York City if they left you with me.”

  That had seemed okay to Danny at the time, because his grandfather knew best, because his grandfather had worked for a living. And if maybe some part of him wondered if the old man had just wanted another shot at raising a son, had cared more about the Arlington line than what might be best for a lonely little boy, the rest of him knew better than to walk down that dark hall.

  As Danny got older, he made it a point to be out of the house when the Layabouts came to town. He was embarrassed by the idea of hanging around, hoping for a gift or a sign of interest in his life. He’d grown tired of watching them play out the same drama with his grandfather and seeing them indulged.

  “Why don’t you leave the old man alone and go back to wasting your time and his money?” he sneered at them on his way out of the house.

  “When did the little prince become so pious?” his father had retorted. “You’ll know what it’s like when you fall out of favor.”

  But Darlington never had the chance. His grandfather got sick. His doctor told him to stop smoking, change the way he ate, said he could buy himself a few more months, maybe even a year. Danny’s grandfather refused. He would have things his way or not at all. A nurse was hired to live in the house. Daniel Tabor Arlington grew grayer and more frail.

  The Layabouts came to stay, and suddenly Black Elm felt like enemy territory. The kitchen was full of his mother’s special foods, stacks of plastic containers, little bags of grains and nuts that crowded the counters. His father was constantly pacing through the ground-floor rooms, talking on his cell phone—about getting the house assessed, probate law, tax law. Bernadette was banished in favor of a cleaning crew that appeared twice a week in a dark green van and used only organic products.

  Danny spent most of his time at the museum or in his room with the door locked, lost in books he consumed like a flame eating air, trying to stay alight. He practiced his Greek, started teaching himself Portuguese.

  His grandfather’s bedroom was crowded with equipment—IVs to keep him hydrated, oxygen to keep him breathing, a hospital bed beside the huge four-poster to keep him elevated. It looked like a time traveler from the future had taken over the dim space.

  Whenever Danny tried to talk to his grandfather about what his parents were doing, about the real estate agent who had come to walk the property, his grandfather would seize his wrist and glance meaningfully at the nurse. “She listens,” he hissed.

  And maybe she did. Darlington was fifteen years old. He didn’t know how much of what his grandfather said was true, if the cancer was speaking or the drugs.

  “They’re keeping me alive so they can control the estate, Danny.”

  “But your lawyer—”

  “You think they can’t make him promises? Let me die, Danny. They’ll bleed Black Elm dry.”

  Danny went out alone to sit at the counter at Clark’s, and when Leona had set a dish of ice cream in front of him, he’d had to press the heels of his hands against his eyes to keep from crying. He’d sat there until they needed to close and only then taken the bus home.

  The next day, they found his grandfather cold in his bed. He’d slipped into a coma and could not be revived. There were furious, whispered conversations, closed doors, his father yelling at the nurse.

  Danny had spent his days at the Peabody Museum. The staff didn’t mind. There was a whole herd of kids who got dumped there during the summers. He’d walked through the mineral room; communed with the mummy, and the giant squid, and Crichton’s raptor; tried to redraw the reptile mural. He walked the Yale campus, spent hours deciphering the different languages above the Sterling Library doors, was drawn again and again to the Beinecke’s collection of tarot cards, to the impenetrable Voynich Manuscript. Staring at its pages was like standing at Lighthouse Point all over again, waiting for the world to reveal itself.

  When it started to get dark, he took the bus home and crept in through the garden doors, moving silently through the house, retreating to his bedroom and his books. Ordinary subjects weren’t enough anymore. He was too old to believe in magic, but he needed to believe that there was something more to the world than living and dying. So he called his need an interest in the occult, the arcane, sacred objects. He spent his time hunting down the work of alchemists and spiritualists who had promised ways of looking into the unseen. All he needed was a glimpse, something to sustain him.

  Danny had been curled up in his high tower room, reading Paracelsus beside Waite’s translation, when his grandfather’s attorney had knocked on the door. “You’re going to have to make some choices,” he’d said. “I know you want to honor your grandfather’s memory, but you should do what’s best for you.”

  It wasn’t bad advice, but Danny had no idea what might be best for him.

  His grandfather had lived off the Arlington money, doling it out as he saw fit, but the estate prohibited him from leaving it to anyone but his son. The house was another story. It would be held in trust for Danny until he was eighteen.

  Danny was surprised when his mother appeared at his bedroom door. “The university wants the house,” she said, then looked around the circular turret room. “If we all sign off, then the profits can be shared. You can come to New York.”

  “I don’t want to live in New York.”

  “You can’t begin to imagine the opportunities that will open for you there.”

  Nearly a year before, he’d taken the Metro-North to the city, spent hours walking Central Park, sitting in the Temple of Dendur at the Met. He’d
gone to his parents’ apartment building, thought about ringing the bell, lost his nerve. “I don’t want to leave Black Elm.”

  His mother sat down on the edge of the bed. “Only the land is valuable, Danny. You have to understand that this house is worthless. Worse than worthless. It will drain every dollar we have.”

  “I’m not selling Black Elm.”

  “You have no idea what the world is like, Daniel. You’re still a child, and I envy that.”

  “That’s not what you envy.”

  The words emerged low and cold, exactly the way Danny wanted them to sound, but his mother just laughed. “What do you think is going to happen here? There’s less than thirty thousand dollars in the trust for your college education, so unless you think you’d like to make some friends at UConn, it’s time to start reevaluating. Your grandfather sold you a false bill of goods. He led you on just as he led us on. You think you’ll be some Lord of Black Elm? You don’t rule this place. It rules you. Take what you can from it now.”

  This town.

  Danny stayed in his room. He locked the door. He ate granola bars and drank water from the sink in his bathroom. He supposed it was a kind of mourning, but he also just didn’t know what to do. There was a stash of one thousand dollars tucked into a copy of McCullough’s 1776 in the library. When he was eighteen he’d have access to his college fund. Beyond that, he had nothing. But he couldn’t let go of Black Elm, he wouldn’t, not so someone could put a wrecking ball through its walls. Not for anything. This was his place. Who would he be untethered from this house? From its wild gardens and gray stone, from the birds that sang in its hedges, from the bare branches of its trees. He’d lost the person who knew him best, who loved him most. What else was there to cling to?

  And then one day he realized the house had gone silent, that he’d heard his parents’ car rumble down the drive but never heard them return. He opened his door and crept down the stairs to find Black Elm completely empty. It hadn’t occurred to him that his parents might simply leave. Had he secretly been holding them hostage, forcing them to stay in New Haven, to pay attention to him for the first time in his life?

  At first he was elated. He turned on all of the lights, the television in his bedroom and the one in the den downstairs. He ate leftover food from the fridge and fed the white cat that sometimes prowled the grounds at dusk.

  The next day, he did what he always did: He got up and went to the Peabody. He came home, ate beef jerky, went to bed. He did it again and again. When the school year started, he went to school. He answered all of the mail that came to Black Elm. He lived off Gatorade and chicken rolls from 7-Eleven. He was ashamed that sometimes he missed Bernadette more than he missed his grandfather.

  One day he came home and flipped the switch in the kitchen, only to discover the electricity had been turned off. He pulled all of the blankets and his grandfather’s old fur coat down from the attic and slept buried beneath them. He watched his breath plume in the quiet of the house. For six long weeks he lived in the cold and dark, doing his homework by candlelight, sleeping in the old ski clothes he discovered in a trunk.

  When Christmas came, his parents appeared at the front door of Black Elm, rosy-cheeked and smiling, laden with presents and bags from Dean & DeLuca, Jaguar idling in the drive. Danny bolted the doors and refused to let them in. They’d made the mistake of teaching him he could survive.

  Danny worked at the luncheonette. He got a job laying out manure and seed at Edgerton Park. He took tickets at Lyric Hall. He sold off clothes and pieces of furniture from the attic. It was enough to keep him fed and keep the lights on. His few friends were never invited over. He didn’t want inquiries about his parents or about what a teenage boy was doing alone in a big, empty house. The answer he couldn’t give was simple: He was caring for it. He was keeping Black Elm alive. If he left, the house would die.

  A year passed, another. Danny got by. But he didn’t know how long he could keep just making do. He wasn’t sure what came next. He wasn’t even sure if he could afford to apply to college with his friends. He would take a year off. He would work, wait for the money from his trust. And then? He didn’t know. He didn’t know and he was scared, because he was seventeen and already weary. He’d never thought of life as long, but now it seemed impossibly so.

  Later, looking back on what happened, Danny could never be sure what he’d intended that night in early July. He’d been in and out of the Beinecke and the Peabody for weeks, researching elixirs. He’d spent long nights gathering ingredients and sending away for what he couldn’t scavenge or steal. Then he’d begun the brew. For thirty-six hours straight he’d worked in the kitchen, dozing when he could, setting his alarm to wake him for the next stage in the recipe. When at last he’d looked down at the thick, tarlike syrup at the bottom of Bernadette’s ruined Le Creuset, he’d hesitated. He knew what he was attempting was dangerous. But he’d run out of things to believe in. Magic was all he had left. He was a boy on an adventure, not a boy swallowing poison.

  The UPS man had found him lying on the steps the next morning, blood streaming from his eyes and mouth. He’d made it out of the kitchen door before he’d collapsed.

  Danny woke in a hospital bed. A man in a tweed jacket and a striped scarf sat beside his bed.

  “My name is Elliot Sandow,” he said. “I have an offer for you.”

  Magic had almost killed him, but in the end it had saved him. Just like in stories.

  14

  Winter

  Alex curled into the window seat at the Hutch, and Dawes brought her a cup of hot chocolate. She’d placed a gourmet marshmallow at the top, the kind that looked like a rough-hewn stone yanked from a quarry.

  “You went to the underworld,” said Dawes. “You earned a treat.”

  “Not all the way to the underworld.”

  “Then give the marshmallow back.” She said it shyly, as if afraid to make the joke, and Alex cradled her cup close to show she was playing along. She liked this Dawes, and she thought maybe this Dawes liked her.

  “What was it like?”

  Alex looked out over the rooftops in the late-morning light. From here she could see the gray gables of Wolf’s Head and part of the ivy-tangle backyard, a blue recycling bin leaning tipsily against the wall. It looked so ordinary.

  She set aside her bacon and egg sandwich. Usually she could eat at least two herself, but she could still feel the water pulling her under and it was messing with her appetite. Had she really crossed over? How much was illusion and how much was real? She described what she could and what the Bridegroom required.

  When she finished, Dawes said, “You can’t go to Tara Hutchins’s apartment.”

  Alex picked at her sandwich. “I just told you about communing with the dead in a river full of golden-eyed crocodiles and that’s what you have to say?”

  But apparently a taste of adventure had been enough for Dawes. “If Dean Sandow finds out what you did to Salome to get us into the temple—”

  “Salome may bitch to her friends, but she’s not going to bring in the big guns. Offering us access to the temple, stealing from Scroll and Key, it’s all too messy.”

  “And if she does?”

  “I’ll deny it.”

  “And you want me to deny it too?”

  “I want you to think about what’s important.”

  “And are you going to threaten me?” Dawes kept her eyes on her cup of cocoa, her spoon circling around and around.

  “No, Dawes. Are you afraid I will?”

  The spoon stopped. Dawes looked up. Her eyes were a warm, dark coffee, and sunlight caught in her messy bun making the red in her hair glow brighter. “I don’t think I am,” she said, as if she was surprised by the fact herself. “Your reaction was … extreme. But Salome was in the wrong.” Dawes with the ruthless streak. “Still, if the dean learns you made a deal with a Gray…”

  “He won’t.”

  “But if he does—”

  “You’re a
fraid he’ll call you out for helping me. Don’t worry. I won’t snitch. But Salome saw you. You might have to keep her quiet too.”

  Dawes’s eyes widened and then she realized Alex was kidding. “Oh. Right. It’s just … I really need this job.”

  “I get it,” said Alex. Maybe better than anyone else who had ever sat beneath this roof. “But I need something that belonged to Tara. I’m going to her apartment.”

  “Do you even know where she lived?”

  “No,” Alex admitted.

  “If Detective Turner figures out—”

  “What’s Turner going to find out? That I went halfway to the underworld to talk to a ghost? I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count as witness tampering.”

  “But going to Tara’s apartment, going through her stuff—that’s breaking and entering. It’s interfering with an active police investigation. You could be arrested.”

  “Only if I get caught.”

  Dawes gave a decisive shake of her head. “You’re crossing a line. And I can’t follow if you’re going to put both of us and Lethe at risk. Detective Turner doesn’t want you involved and he’ll do whatever he has to do to protect his case.”

  “Good point,” Alex said, considering. So maybe instead of going around Turner, she should just go through him.

  * * *

  Alex wanted to hide at the Hutch and let Dawes make her cups of cocoa. She wouldn’t have minded a little mothering. But she needed to go back to Old Campus, to renew her grasp on the ordinary world before the things that really mattered slipped away.

  She left Dawes in front of the Dramat, but not before she’d asked about the name she’d heard—or thought she’d heard—spoken in the borderlands. “Jean Du Monde? Or maybe Jonathan Desmond?”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell,” said Dawes. “But I’ll do a few searches and see what the library has to say once I’m back at Il Bastone.”