The Devil Makes Three

by Tori Bovalino

  “Well,” Tess said, trying not to show her surprise. Eliot seemed like such a practical, unenchanted sort of person—not even close to the type interested in something like raising the dead. She’d be less surprised if he said he was studying intergalactic squirrels or something of the like. It was even more unlikely when she held up what she knew of his old, harsh-tongued father. “That sounds like an interesting project.”

  Eliot nodded, but he looked disappointed, like she hadn’t said what he’d expected—or like she’d said exactly what he’d expected, and that was even worse.

  They lapsed into an awkward bit of silence. Tess moved down a shelf, nearly tripping over a dusty box. She opened it to find it full of withered pages with jagged edges that looked like they’d been cut from the middles of books. On the lid of the box, Mathilde’s scrawl read Level 3 Dangers. Tess had no idea what to make of that or the danger scale that was being alluded to. She bent down to investigate the contents. The first page she picked up was wrinkled on the corner, as if it had been ripped straight from a book. It contained a list of things—dirt, blood, herbs, other random objects—and a sequence of words that looked to be in another language. She was testing out the shape of them when Eliot cleared his throat. Tess dropped the page.

  “Hey, what’s—”

  The sound of Eliot’s voice was cut off by a bizarre jarring sound, like metal grating against metal or stone, or a mechanical bit that hadn’t moved in decades. The sound grew louder, and Tess realized that there was movement, too—a bottom section of the shelf between Eliot and her was moving, sinking into the ground, and taking the books down with it.

  The shelf descended until it was flush against the ground, revealing a dark square in the wall.

  Silence pressed between Eliot and Tess. Tess looked over her shoulder, certain someone had heard the noise and would come running, certain that this was a prank.

  Finally, breathlessly, Eliot asked, “Was that supposed to happen?”

  Tess looked between Eliot and the hole. Now that her eyes were adjusting to the darkness within, she could make out stone steps leading down, further into the pits of the library. She had no idea what could be down there—and it wasn’t like her orientation tour of the stacks had included a discussion of the secret, creepy passageway.

  “No,” she said, certain that this was far, far outside of her job description. “No, that was not supposed to happen.”

  eleven

  Tess

  ONCE, WHEN TESS WAS MUCH YOUNGER AND NAT WAS BARELY taller than her knee, they found an abandoned tree house in the woods behind their house. It was the same kind of surprise: the woods were familiar, like the library was to Tess now, and there wasn’t supposed to be anything like that there. There shouldn’t have been anything … structural.

  But even when Tess was eight, the tree house didn’t feel foreboding. Abandoned, yes, and maybe a little sad because of it—a reminder that children grow older and leave their tree houses behind—but it did not feel dangerous.

  That was the main difference, Tess thought. Thick, cloying dread made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and goose bumps erupt on her arms. She felt the thrill of danger from the newly exposed staircase. So when Eliot turned on the flashlight on his phone and moved towards the door, she could only watch in horror.

  “Well?” he said, turning to look back, like he expected her to be on the step behind him. “Are you coming?”

  “Um, no,” Tess said.

  He cocked his head. “Why not?”

  There were a million things she could’ve said, but all moved too quickly through her thoughts for her to grasp one. “I’m not just following you into a hole in the ground,” Tess stammered.

  “Tess,” Eliot said, and again, she noticed the way he said her name: less like a word, more like a promise. If only she knew what he was promising. “What are you afraid of?”

  It was exactly something a serial killer would say. “I’m not afraid,” she lied. “I just have a sense of self-preservation. Unlike you, apparently.”

  Eliot laughed, and his mouth did a smooth little flip into a smile. “It’ll be an adventure,” he said, reaching out a hand toward her.

  Tess weighed her options. Obviously, she could not go in the hole, order Eliot back out, shut the passageway, and drag him back up to his office where she would never have to acknowledge him again.

  Except she couldn’t fight the curiosity herself, even though she was somewhat terrified. There was still time before Mathilde came back, and the thought of looking like a coward in front of Eliot rankled her. He just looked so confident, even standing there in the gaping hole to nothing, smiling at her. Tess groaned, kicking the box of dusty pages. She knew what her decision was, and she knew she was going to hate herself for it later.

  “Okay,” Tess said. She turned on her own phone flashlight and took his hand as more of a precaution against falling down the stairs than anything else.

  “Okay,” Eliot repeated, like he hadn’t been expecting her to come—but Tess had the suspicion that he had.

  They started down the steps. The walls were hewn in rough stone, porous and cold when she reached out for balance. The whole thing smelled like a damp basement, which wasn’t too surprising considering that was probably what it was. Tess didn’t look too closely at the walls because the bits she did see looked to be draped with cobwebs, and spiders topped the list of things she was afraid of. She considered dethroning spiders in favor of creepy staircases that randomly appeared, but so far, this staircase hadn’t done anything too malevolent.

  The staircase flattened into a narrow hallway made of the same stone. Shadowed indentations stood in the walls, filled with stone and rubble, as if other tunnels had once existed and been filled in. It was far colder down here. When she shivered, Eliot turned back to check on her. His face was all shadows.

  “Are you okay?” He spoke barely above a whisper, and Tess wondered if he felt the same disquiet she did, now that they were underground. There was no trace of a smile on his face.

  Tess nodded. She was glad for the darkness and how it masked the goose bumps creeping up her arms. Eliot turned away, and they pressed forward.

  It was then that Tess noticed the buzzing in her ears.

  It was less of a buzzing and more of a humming. Or maybe a whisper. She couldn’t hear it well enough to say. A discordant tone, somewhere far along the tunnel or deep within her head.

  “Do you hear that?” Tess whispered. Her voice sounded too loud.

  “Hear what?”

  “That.”

  Eliot stopped moving and cocked his head to one side. He didn’t let go of Tess’s hand, she noticed, and she wasn’t sure what to make of that. As Eliot listened to the humming, pulsing darkness of the tunnel, his hand tightened on hers.

  “Maybe?” he said. “Is it … like a ringing?”

  Maybe it was a ringing, maybe it was a hum, or maybe it was a faraway, sustained scream. “We should go back,” Tess said.

  Eliot pointed the flashlight forward. The darkness seemed to swirl and press closer, and the light of the flashlight was no match for the gloom. “I think it opens up a few feet ahead,” he said, squinting into the tunnel. “Only a bit farther. And then we’ll go back.”

  She didn’t want to go farther. Her brain was clouded with everything that could be up ahead: rotting bodies and giant spiders, abandoned and forgotten things. Everything inside of her was screaming to turn back. But Eliot was already moving forward.

  Tess bit back her fear and followed him down the tunnel. It was too narrow for them to walk side by side without brushing the walls. Instead, she let him lead her like she was a child, clinging to his hand. A large part of her knew she didn’t have to go, that she could turn back and leave Eliot alone in this godforsaken hole by himself. But there was a bigger part of her that felt a dangerous sort of thrill going on like this. There was something heart pounding about the press of his fingers and the sweat of his palm, and
she knew that even though he looked composed, he was scared too.

  “What do you think is up there?” Tess asked. Both of their footsteps were slowing, whether it was out of fear or excitement.

  “I don’t know,” Eliot said, and that small part of her relished the edge in his voice. He paused at one of the blocked off passages. Wordlessly, Eliot handed her the light. He dug his fingers around one of the bits of rubble and pulled. Pebbles shifted and dust rained down, but the blockage didn’t move. Tess just wanted him to quit touching things. She pushed the flashlight back into his hand before he could cause some sort of collapse.

  It was like the sleepovers she’d been to in middle school, where they had turned off the lights and shut the bathroom door and spoken “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror, or like the ghost stories told around a campfire, or even like the way those students who took out grimoires and recited spells felt. It was terror of the unknown, of the unknowable, and the realization that maybe, there actually was something there in the dark.

  As Eliot had predicted, the tunnel opened into a small room. The room had high ceilings and dirt floors and the same stone walls as the tunnel. It was damp and cold, like they’d left the modern day behind and walked directly into a medieval crypt. Tess imagined she could go to the walls, breathe a spell from one of the grimoires upstairs, and reveal an entire court that had long since been forgotten. Or the corpse of a banished king, full of magical vengeance. She shuddered and turned away, back towards Eliot, with his warm, human heartbeat and his broad-shouldered certainly.

  Tess and Eliot shone their lights around, and Tess half expected something to jump out of the darkness to grab them.

  Even though they weren’t moving, Tess didn’t let go of Eliot’s hand. A safety precaution.

  “What’s that?” Eliot said, and the echo of his voice made her jump.

  “What’s what?”

  Eliot dragged her closer to the far wall of the room, and Tess realized what he’d seen. There was a small alcove cut into the stone wall with a shelf in the middle. On that shelf was a book.

  She shouldn’t have been bewildered to see it there. After all, in a library, a book was about the most likely thing that could be found. But here amongst the dust and cobwebs, Tess was intensely surprised to see it.

  Tess picked it up. It was cool, like the air in the tunnel, and dry, which she wasn’t expecting, since the air decidedly wasn’t. The cover didn’t feel dusty like every other abandoned book she’d found. It was bound in something black and porous like skin—and maybe, Tess realized, it really was skin.

  Even worse was the clingy feel of it: there was this effect as if the book wanted to stick to her skin, as if it was begging her to open the cover and reveal the contents. Let me tell you my secrets, the book whispered inside of her. Let me give you what you desire. She shook it off, shuddering. Books didn’t whisper inside people’s brains. It was only her own fear, Tess decided, like the sensation of her name being called in a dark, silent room, on the edge of sleep.

  She dropped Eliot’s hand to aim her flashlight at the cover. There was no title.

  “What do you think it is?” Eliot asked.

  “I don’t know.” She opened the book and flipped through the pages. There were no words, no illustrations, nothing. The pages inside were blank, except for one short line on the very first page: Ex Libris Infernorum.

  “What does this mean?”

  Eliot squinted down at the book between them. “I think … well, ex libris is ‘from the library of.’ Infernorum could be, well. I think hell, or more generally, those below.”

  “From the library of those below,” Tess repeated. Something sounded in the tunnel behind them. Fear prickled up Tess’s spine. Was there someone else in the tunnel?

  Tess glanced back, but there was nothing else. They were alone.

  “Does it say anything else?”

  Tess shook her head, flipping through the pages again. All blank.

  “Maybe the ink is too light, and it’s too dark to see it in here?” he suggested.

  “Maybe,” Tess agreed, but she doubted it. There would at least be a trace of something, if the book was full of writing.

  “Oh,” Eliot said, running his hand along the upper edge of the alcove, wiping away years of dust. “There’s writing here.”

  Tess looked up as the inscription revealed itself, carved into the stone above the place the book rested.

  Let the righteous burn.

  They were quiet for a moment, Tess trying not to think about how they were underground, trying not to think of the sound of Eliot breathing, trying not to imagine the tunnel collapsing around them.

  “Let’s get back,” she said.

  He took the book from her hands and started back towards the stairs. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Wait.” She hadn’t been expecting him to take the book with them, and the idea of daylight on that hide-bound cover made her uneasy. “Don’t you think we should leave that here?”

  Framed by the mouth of the tunnel, Eliot looked at the book, then back at her. “Why?”

  “It gives me the creeps.” Though she couldn’t say for sure whether she considered herself righteous, the warning in the alcove was at least enough to give her pause.

  Eliot blinked slowly at her, and she could tell by his face that he had a million responses, some of them nice and most of them not, and he was deciding which was most appropriate for the situation.

  “Just spit it out,” Tess snapped.

  “Isn’t it a little ironic to be afraid of books if you, you know, work at a library?” Eliot swept a hand out as if they were standing in the stacks rather than in this horrifying, dead-end room. “Especially a library like this. It’s not entirely conventional, you know.”

  Tess did know, and the fact he pointed it out made her even more annoyed. “Lending out grimoires and finding creepy-ass blank books in secret tunnels are two entirely different things.”

  Eliot was still absorbed by the book. He tilted it to and fro, as if writing would magically appear if he shone the light on it just right.

  She could understand him being interested in the book—judging by the books he already had and his research project, this was right up his alley—but Eliot had a smile on his face. Down here, in the awful death tunnel, he looked positively gleeful.

  “Let’s get out of here before Mathilde comes back,” Tess said with a little more urgency. Time tugged at her: if Mathilde returned and found Tess and Eliot in the deepest part of the library, Tess would be in huge trouble.

  “We won’t get caught,” Eliot said, tucking the book under his arm. “And if we do, I don’t see how that would be a problem.”

  Tess blinked at him. Of course it would be a problem. “Why is that?”

  Eliot answered like it was obvious. “Because even though my father is terrible, he’s useful. I don’t mean to be that kid, but Ms. Matheson won’t do anything to me, even if she finds me in the stacks. She can’t.”

  Tess sputtered for words, but there weren’t any she could find to fill the steely, fiery, anger-filled second. Maybe she was actually going to kill him. Eliot was mistaken. Maybe he had power, or his father had power, but this was Mathilde’s domain.

  “It’s not you I’m worried about, Eliot,” she spat. Before he could say anything else, she spun on her heel and stalked back down the corridor. If he followed her, then whatever. But if he didn’t, she wasn’t going to stand around waiting for him, waiting to get caught by Mathilde. A few hours locked in this creepy dark hallway would do him good.

  At the very least, maybe it would make him stop smiling.

  His footsteps sounded behind her. Eliot didn’t extend a hand to her this time, which was good, because there was no way that Tess would’ve taken it.

  The light from the library barely penetrated the darkness as they went back towards the stairs. It was as if the square of empty space between the stairs and the library was a wall.
>
  Relief rushed through her the second she stepped out of the staircase, back onto the familiar, drab carpet of the special collections cage. Eliot leaned against a shelf, examining the book in the light.

  “Hey,” Tess said, and then when she failed to get his attention, the insufferable, self-centered bastard: “Hey. Eliot.”

  “What?”

  “We need to figure out how to close this.” The only thing Tess could think of that was worse than Mathilde finding Eliot Birch and her alone in the cage was Eliot Birch and her alone in the cage with a gaping hole to hell replacing one wall.

  She wasn’t going to be fired for discovering a secret passageway to nowhere, and she wasn’t going to be fired on account of Eliot. “How did you open this in the first place?”

  Eliot set the book on a clear space of shelf and joined her at the hole. “There was a … a switch thing.”

  Tess dragged over a box to stand on and peered between the books on the shelf, shifting them here and there. In a crack between two books, she caught sight of something along the wall. Why Eliot had reached through the entire shelf to the back wall was beyond her.

  She flipped the brassy metal switch. Instantly, the mechanical groaning started. Beside Tess, the displaced section of books ascended back into position, securely blocking off the tunnel once more.

  “That’s curious,” Eliot noted, as if he were watching a squirrel eat an acorn or examining an impressionist painting. He traced along the edges of the shelf where it had connected back to its space. “And you’ve never seen that before?”

  Tess crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t you think I would’ve been less surprised if I’d seen it?”

  Eliot shrugged. “Or you’re easily frightened.” It sounded like an insult to Tess, even though he didn’t say it like one. Or maybe, right now, every word that came out of his mouth felt like a slight. “I think I’m going to take this up to my office.”

  Clearly, the books they’d come to special collections for were no longer important to him. “And The Book of Shadows?”