Ninth House
Page 44
Slowly, North rose. His eyes were dark and mournful as ever, but there was a new caution in them as he looked at Alex. Is he afraid of me? She didn’t mind the idea. Maybe he’d think twice about jumping into her skull again. Still, she felt for North. She knew loss, and he’d lost Daisy twice—first the girl he loved, and then the dream of who she’d been.
“I need you to make sure there’s nobody in the hall,” Alex said. “No one can see me leave this room.”
North drifted through the door, and for a long moment Alex wondered if he’d just leave her here with a dead body and a carpet covered in powdered evil.
Then he passed back through the wall and nodded the all-clear.
Alex made herself walk. She felt strange, wide open and exposed, a house with all its doors thrown open.
She smoothed her hair, tugged down the hem of her dress. She would have to act normal, pretend nothing had happened. But Alex knew that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d been doing it her whole life.
We say “the Veil,” but we know there are many Veils, each a barrier between our world and the beyond. Some Grays remain sequestered behind all of them, never to return to the living; others may be glimpsed in our world by those willing to risk Hiram’s Bullet, and others may pierce still further into our world to be seen and heard by ordinary folk. We know too that there are many borderlands where the dead may commune with the living, and we have long suspected that there are many afterlives. A natural conclusion is that there are also many hells. But if there are such places, they remain opaque to us, unknown and undiscovered. For there is no explorer so intrepid or daring that he would dare to walk the road to hell—no matter how it may be paved.
—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House
Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto.
While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.
—Ladino saying
32
Spring
Alex met Dawes at the Hutch and they walked up Elm to Payne Whitney, to the intersection that Sandow had chosen for his murder rite, the place where Tara Hutchins had died. Auspicious. Spring flowers had begun to emerge on the edges of the empty plot of land, pale purple crocus, tiny white bells of lily of the valley on their hesitant bent necks.
It was hard for Alex to be away from the wards. All her life she’d seen Grays—the Quiet Ones, she’d called them. They weren’t keeping quiet anymore. She could hear them now. The dead woman clad in a nightgown singing softly to herself outside the music school. Two young men in coats and breeches, perched on the Old Campus fence, exchanging gossip, the left sides of their bodies charred black from some long-ago fire. Even now she had to actively ignore the drowned rower running wind sprints outside the gym. She could hear his heavy breathing. How was that possible? Why would a ghost need to breathe? Was it just the memory of needing air? An old habit? Or a performance of being human?
She gave her head a little shake. She would find a way to silence them somehow or lose her mind trying.
“Someone talking?” Dawes asked, keeping her voice low.
Alex nodded and rubbed her temples. She didn’t know how she was going to fix this particular problem, but she did know she had to make certain the Grays didn’t realize she could still hear them, not when so many were desperate for connection with the living world.
She hadn’t seen North since the afternoon of the party at the president’s house. Perhaps he was somewhere grieving what Daisy had become. Maybe he’d created a support group on the other side of the Veil for the souls she’d kept captive for so many years. Alex didn’t know.
They paced the perimeter of the land the dean had intended for St. Elmo’s. Alex hoped flowers would grow over the place where Tara had died. She had sent the recording of Sandow’s confession to the Lethe board. It was horrible, they agreed. Grotesque. But mostly it was dangerous. Even if Sandow’s ritual had failed, they didn’t want anyone getting the idea there might be a way to create a nexus through ritual homicide—and they didn’t want Lethe connected to Tara’s death. Excluding a few members of the board, everyone still believed Blake Keely was responsible for the murder, and Lethe intended to keep it that way.
This time, Alex wasn’t going to push. She had too many new secrets that needed keeping. Sandow’s death had been chalked up to a sudden, massive heart attack during his welcome-home party. He’d had a bad fall only a few weeks before. He was under tremendous financial stress. His passing had been cause for sadness, but it had drawn little attention—especially since Marguerite Belbalm had disappeared after being seen with him at the same party. She’d last been observed entering the president’s office to speak to Dean Sandow. No one knew where she was or if she’d come to harm, and the New Haven PD had opened an investigation.
Lethe had no idea what Belbalm had been or how she was connected to Sandow’s death. Alex had made sure to cut off the recording before the professor entered the office. The Lethe board had never heard the term “Wheelwalker” and they were never going to, because unless Alex was very much mistaken, she had the ability to create a nexus anytime she wanted—all she had to do was develop a taste for souls. She’d seen the way Lethe and the societies worked. That wasn’t knowledge any of them needed.
Dawes glanced at the time on her phone, and in silent agreement they left Payne Whitney behind and turned right down Grove Street. Ahead, Alex saw the massive mausoleum of Book and Snake, a gloomy block of white marble surrounded by black wrought iron. Now that Alex knew they hadn’t sent the gluma after her, that they hadn’t had any involvement in what happened to Tara, she had to wonder if they could help her find Tara’s soul. Though she didn’t like the idea of stepping beneath that portico or of what the Lettermen might demand in trade, Lethe owed Tara Hutchins some kind of rest. But that would have to wait. She had another task to accomplish before she could help Tara. One she might not survive.
Alex and Dawes passed under the massive neo-Egyptian gates of the cemetery, beneath the inscription that had pleased Darlington so: THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.
Maybe not just the dead if Alex put her mind to it.
They passed the graves of poets and scholars, presidents of Yale. A small crowd was gathered at a new headstone. Dean Sandow was still keeping the best company.
Alex knew there might be Lethe alumni in the crowd today, but the only one she recognized was Michelle Alameddine. She wore the same stylish coat, her dark hair pulled back in a neat twist. Turner was there too, but he gave her the barest nod. He wasn’t happy with her.
“You left me a body to find?” he’d growled at her when she’d agreed to meet him at Il Bastone.
“Sorry,” Alex had said. “You’re really hard to shop for.”
“What happened at that party?”
Alex had leaned against the porch column. It felt like the house was leaning on her too. “Sandow killed Tara.”
“What happened to him?”
“Heart attack.”
“Like hell. Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t have to.”
Turner had looked at her for a long moment, and Alex had been glad that for once she was telling the truth.
They hadn’t spoken since, and Alex suspected that Turner wanted to be done with her and all of Lethe. She couldn’t blame him, but it felt like a loss. She’d liked having one of the good guys in her corner.
The service was long but dry, a recitation of the dean’s accomplishments, a statement from the president, a few words from a slender woman in a navy dress that Alex realized was Sandow’s ex-wife. There were no Grays at the cemetery today. They didn’t like funerals, and there wasn’t enough emotion at this graveside to overcome their revulsion. Alex didn’t mind the quiet.
As the dean’s coffin was lowered into the earth, Alex met Michelle Alameddine’s eyes and gave a brief bob of her head—an invitation. She and Dawes drifted away from the graveside, and Alex hoped Michelle would follow.
When they reached a quiet corner between two stone sphinxes, Dawes said, “Are you sure about this?” She’d worn mom slacks and pearl earrings to the funeral, but her red bun had slid gently to one side.
“No,” admitted Alex. “But we need all the help we can get.”
Dawes wasn’t going to argue. She’d been full of apologies once Lethe had reached her at her sister’s house in Westport and she’d heard the real story of what happened at the president’s party from Alex. Besides, she wanted this quest, this mission, as much as Alex did. Maybe more.
Alex saw Michelle headed their way through the grass. She waited for her to join them, then dove right in. “Darlington isn’t dead.”
Michelle sighed. “That’s what this is about? Alex, I understand—”
“He’s a demon.”
“Excuse me?”
“He didn’t die when he was eaten by the hellbeast. He was transformed.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Listen,” said Alex. “I’ve spent some time in the borderlands recently—”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Every time I heard … well, I don’t know what they were—Grays? Monsters? Some kind of creature that wasn’t quite human on the darker shore. They were saying something I couldn’t quite make out. I thought it was a name at first, Jonathan Desmond or Jean Du Monde. But that wasn’t it at all.”
“And?” Michelle’s expression was rigidly impassive, as if she was fighting to appear open-minded.
“Gentleman demon. That’s what they were saying. They were talking about Darlington. And I think they were scared.”
Darlington was a gentleman. But this isn’t a time for gentlemen. Alex had barely registered the dean’s words at the time. But when she’d played back the recording of their conversation, they’d stuck in her head. Darlington: the gentleman of Lethe. People had always described him that way. Alex had thought of him like that herself, as if he’d somehow stepped into the wrong time.
But it had still taken her a while to put it together, to realize that the creatures on that dark shore had always muttered those strange sounds when Alex mentioned Darlington or even thought about him. They hadn’t been angry, they’d been frightened, the same way the Grays had been frightened the night of the prognostication. It had been Darlington who had spoken “murder” at the new-moon rite, not just some echo—but it was Sandow he’d been accusing, not Alex. The man who had murdered Tara. The man who had tried to murder him. At least, Alex hoped that was the case. Daniel Tabor Arlington, always the gentleman, a boy of infinite manners. But what had he become?
“What you’re suggesting isn’t possible,” said Michelle.
“I know it sounds that way,” said Dawes. “But humans can become—”
“I know the process. But demons are created one way: the union of sulfur and sin.”
“What kind of sin are we talking about?” said Alex. “Masturbation? Bad grammar?”
“You’re in a graveyard,” chided Dawes.
“Trust me, Dawes. The dead don’t care.”
“There’s only one sin that can make a man into a demon,” Michelle said. “Murder.”
Dawes looked stricken. “He would never, could never—”
“You killed someone,” Alex reminded her. And so have I. “‘Never’ is a big word.”
“Darlington?” Michelle said incredulously. “The teacher’s pet? The knight in shining armor?”
“There’s a reason knights carry swords, and I didn’t tag you in so we could argue. You don’t want to help, that’s fine. I know what I know: A hellbeast was sent to kill Darlington. But he survived and that thing shat him out in hell. We’re going to go get him.”
“We are?” said Michelle.
“We are,” said Dawes.
A cold wind blew through the cemetery trees and Alex had to restrain a shiver. It felt like winter trying to hold on. It felt like a warning. But Darlington was on the other side of something terrible, waiting for rescue. Sandow had stolen the golden boy of Lethe from this world, and someone had to steal him back.
“So,” she said as the wind picked up, shaking the new leaves on their branches, moaning over the gravestones like a mourner lost to grief. “Who’s ready to go to hell?”
The Houses of the Veil
“The Ancient Eight”
MAJOR HOUSES
Skull & Bones — 1832
Rich or poor, all are equal in death.
Teachings: Extispicy and splanchomancy. Divination using human and animal entrails.
Notable Alumni: William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Kerry.
Scroll & Key — 1842
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.
Teachings: Duru dweomer, portal magic. Astral and etheric projection.
Notable Alumni: Dean Acheson, Gary Trudeau, Cole Porter, Stone Phillips.
Book & Snake — 1863
Everything changes, nothing perishes.
Teachings: Nekyia or nekromanteía, necromancy and bone conjuring.
Notable Alumni: Bob Woodward, Porter Goss, Kathleen Cleaver, Charles Rivkin.
Wolf’s Head — 1883
The strength of the pack is the wolf. The strength of the wolf is the pack.
Teachings: Therianthropy.
Notable Alumni: Stephen Vincent Benét, Benjamin Spock, Charles Ives, Sam Wagstaff.
Manuscript — 1952
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.
Teachings: Mirror magic and glamours.
Famous Alumni: Jodie Foster, Anderson Cooper, David Gergen, Zoe Kazan.
LESSER HOUSES
Aurelian — 1910
Teachings: Logomancy—word binding and divination through language.
Notable Alumni: Admiral Richard Lyon, Samantha Power, John B. Goodenough.
St. Elmo’s — 1889
Teachings: Tempestate Artium, elemental magic, storm calling.
Notable Alumni: Calvin Hill, John Ashcroft, Allison Williams.
Berzelius — 1848
Teachings: None. Founded in the tradition of its namesake, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the Swedish chemist who created a new system of chemical notation that left the secrecy of alchemists in the past.
Notable Alumni: None.
Acknowledgments
In New York: Many thanks to everyone at Flatiron Books, particularly Noah Eaker, who took a gamble on this book early, Amy Einhorn, Lauren Bittrich, Patricia Cave, Marlena Bittner, Nancy Trypuc, Katherine Turro, Cristina Gilbert, Keith Hayes, Donna Noetzel, Lena Shekhter, Lauren Hougen, Kathy Lord, and Jennifer Gonzalez and her team. Thank you to New Leaf Literary—Pouya Shahbazian, Veronica Grijalva, Mia Roman, Hilary Pecheone, Meredith Barnes, Abigail Donoghue, Jordan Hill, Joe Volpe, Kelsey Lewis, Cassandra Baim, and Joanna Volpe, who championed me and this idea from the start.
In New Haven and at Yale: Professor Julia Adams of Hopper College, Angela McCray, Jenny Chavira if the Association of Yale Alumni, Judith Ann Schief in Manuscripts and Archives, Mark Branch of the Yale Alumni Magazine, David Heiser of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Michael Morand at the Beinecke, and Claire Zella. Thank you to Rabbi Shmully Hecht for granting me access to the Anderson Mansion and to Barbara Lamb, who shared her extensive knowledge of Connecticut and squired me through many cemeteries. I have taken the occasional liberty with New Haven history and geography. Most notably, Wolf’s Head built their first hall on Prospect Street in 1884. The new hall on High Street was built more than forty years later.
In California: David Peterson for the Latin assists, Rachael Martin, Robyn Bacon, Ziggy the Human Cannonball, Morgan F
ahey, Michelle Chihara, Sarah Mesle, Josh Kamensky, Gretchen McNeil, Julia Collard, Nadine Semerau, Marie Lu, Anne Grasser, Sabaa Tahir, Robin LaFevers, Victoria Aveyard, and Jimmy Freeman. Thank you also to my mom, who first sang to me in Ladino, to Christine, Sam, Emily, Ryan, Eric who has somehow kept me laughing, and the manatee.
In the Hall: Steven Testa, Laini Lipsher, and my own wolf pack of ’97.
Everywhere else: Max Daniel at UCLA and Simone Salmon for their help with Sephardic ballads, Kelly Link, Daniel José Older, Holly Black, Robin Wasserman, Sarah Rees Brennan, Rainbow Rowell, Zoraida Córdova, Cassandra Clare, Ally Carter, Carrie Ryan, Marie Rutkoski, Alex Bracken, Susan Dennard, Gamynne Guillote, and Michael Castro.
Many books helped build the world of Ninth House: Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism by Vincent Scully; Patrick Pinnell’s Yale University: An Architectural Tour; Loomis Havemeyer’s Go to Your Room: A story of undergraduate Societies and Fraternities at Yale; Brooks Mather Kelley’s Yale: A History; Joseph A. Soares’s The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges; David Alan Richards’s Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies; Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities; Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City by Preston Maynard and Marjorie B. Noyes; New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design by Elizabeth Mills Brown; Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven by Mandi Isaacs Jackson; and The Plan for New Haven by Frederick Law Olmsted and Cass Gilbert. I found the ballad “La Moza y El Huerco” in the article “Sephardic Songs of Mourning and Dirges” by Paloma Díaz-Mas. Thanks also to the Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project.
Also by Leigh Bardugo
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