by Angel Lawson
War paint. You’re fantastic, Cherry.
In the lobby, I stop at the public phone and dial. I’m not surprised when the call goes to voicemail. I glare the one potential eavesdropper out the door before I leave the message.
“Okay, Mary. So I have no idea why you brought me to this place, or what the hell is going on. I’ve got maybe one shot to figure it out before they have the law haul me off. But whatever happens, I’m taking the heat for this. All of it. It goes on me and me alone, okay? I don’t know what you set me up for, but these kids, there’s no way they’d survive the system.” I take a deep breath, and don’t ask the questions burning in my mouth. “Full charges if you have to, maximum time, maximum security. But Julian and Faye. Memory. They have futures. Keep their records clean.”
A computerized voice says I’ve reached my time limit, and would I like to hear my message played back. I hang up the phone.
“You missed curfew last night, Tyrell.” Jeremy leans against the wall by the desk in the dorm lobby, with his arms folded over his chest. “Want to explain yourself?”
“Not particularly.” I smile at his attempt to stare me down. His face looks much worse than mine.
“I reported you, y’know. The cops will be here any second. There’s no way you’re getting out of this and don’t even think for a minute I’m taking the fall for you or that little slut.”
“Do what you have to do,” I tell him, not even rising in defense of Memory, because I’ve already won. “Just get out of my way.”
I step close, and rise up in my shoes a little, forcing him to crane his neck and take a step backward. I turn, and walk out the door, the first fight I’ve ever willingly walked away from.
But now I’m stuck, staring at the buttons on the keypad to Memory’s dormitory, with cops already on campus. For once there are no girls coming in and out of the building. I have my hand raised to knock when the door opens from the inside and I find myself face to face with a pretty blonde in a pink t-shirt.
“What on earth happened to your face?” Danielle asks.
“I, uh, got in a fight.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Who was it?” She smirks. I don’t want to say, because it proves her right, but her eyes widen. “Not Julian?” she gasps. “No way. I didn’t think he had it in him.”
I roll my eyes, and try to catch the door as it closes behind her, but I’m not fast enough. The clock tower reads 8:45. Dammit.
“Oh, right,” she says. “Of course not. It was Jeremy.”
“Look, Danielle, I—”
“You’re going to get kicked out, you know. I hope she’s worth it.” She sighs, shakes her head, but turns and punches numbers on the keypad. “Room 113. On the left.”
“Thank you,” I mutter, because she hasn’t said I-told-you-so, and telling her I’d already been in Memory’s room, hell, I’d been in her bed, well, she didn’t need to hear that. I slide past her, and inside. The silver letter opener is heavy in my pocket, tapping my thigh with every stride. The door is locked. I knock, wait, knock again, but there is no answer.
I swear, and wave to a girl in the hallway, as if it’s okay for me to be where I am. She has a towel on her head and a shower caddy in her hand. I ask, “Have you seen Memory? Or Faye?”
She stares at my battered face and says, “Memory ran down the hall, like two minutes ago. I haven’t see Faye since yesterday.”
“Can you check the bathroom?” I ask. “See if she’s in there?”
She frowns. “What are you doing here?”
“Dean Burnett sent me to find her,” I improvise. “News about her brother.”
“Oh, sure, of course!” She sets her caddy down by a door and goes back the way she came. I step close to the door, slip the knife from my pocket and wedge the slim blade between the door and the jamb, with a much-practiced bend of my wrist. The knife flexes and slides against the tongue of the lock. I pop the knob with one twist, and the door opens.
The room is empty. She even made the bed, smoothed sheets erasing my presence there. There’s a note on the end, on top the package from Sonja’s mother. I pick both up. The bracelet is gone, but this time, I read Miriam’s letter.
Sonja- Give Constance a hug for me when you see her. Sorry I was gone before you went to register for SHP, the judge granted the custodial release at the very last second.
I wanted to give you this before you left but there wasn’t time. You’ll have to finish the binding. Clasp all together to make an unbroken chain. Once bound, the links will align and never separate. I’ll see you soon.
Remember: Some things are set in motion before time ever began. Be careful. I love you, Mom
I stare at the words, and the M that makes a distinctive peak at the top of the letter. Swallow when my throat goes dry. Sonja’s mother didn’t know her daughter wasn’t here.
The girl in the hallway calls into the bathroom. I hear no reply.
Memory has added to her nightmare drawings: A girl’s face, dark eyes, long nose and perfect lips, and a boy, same nose, eyes stubborn, mouth thin. Herself and Julian.
A tiny girl with huge eyes and a pixie mouth, like the Japanese comic books, hovers underneath another symbol and the arrow shaped rune points to a guy with a not-quite straight nose and no hair. Under the last, drawn in less detail, rougher, faster, is a girl with braids and a wide button nose. I don’t know who she is, but I can guess. Miriam’s daughter, who has been missing for over a week. I take a picture of the wall, working the camera with one hand.
Glancing once more at the writing on the note, I shove it in my bag with the Nikon, and slide out of the room as the girl checking the bathroom rounds the corner. She shakes her head at me. I nod once, and leave.
*
Memory isn’t at the fountain, or under any of the trees nearby. I twist the zoom lens onto the camera body, pan over the quad, and this time I’m not surprised when the scenery changes. Fuller trees fill my vision, and the chapel. A hand with glittered fingernails twists an ancient ceramic doorknob. I don’t question what I see or even the strangeness of it anymore.
This girl, with eyes that let her brother see through them when she is asleep and me when she is awake, is magic. No, not Magic. Faye is the one who believes in mysterious things. And Wisdom is Sophia in Greek, the same meaning as Sonja, Anders told me a week ago. My brain tumbles. I push the stray thoughts aside, refocus on what I know is real.
The door doesn’t open for Memory. I watch through her eyes as she picks her way around, toes of her boots careful on the dirty stairs down into the cellar doorway. This time the knob turns, and the door opens.
“Cherry, wait!” I glance back at the cop car, and then casually walk across the quad, hands in my pockets, calling no attention to myself, an easy pace toward the trees that shield the tiny church. No one calls my name, and no sirens wail over the campus. When I round the bend in the tree line I break into a sprint, one hand on my camera bag to keep it from banging my side, following her boot prints in the grass, and I’m halfway there when I slow to breathe. I look up, see the front door through the trees, closing shut behind a tall figure.
“Mem!” I call, but it’s too late.
I run the rest of the way, duck below a tree branch, and up to the church. I tug on the handle, swearing when the door doesn’t budge. My eyes are pulled to the top of the door. The symbol, Faye’s perth rune, isn’t visible, but I know it’s there. I move around the outside and down the cellar steps, to the one I saw Memory open. A mark is carved high on the door, and I grab my camera, pull up the last picture I took. It’s from the girls’ dorm room wall, Memory’s profile under the same rune, the one she called Muninn. It’s the same one that’s been etched behind my eyes since I kissed her.
The door is locked. I wrench on the knob, but it’s tougher than it looks, and the frame has a lip too deep for me to jimmy a blade into. I leap up the stairs, to the window I’d popped open the other day, and shove it open. “Memory,” I call into the dark, bu
t there is no answer.
My head fits into the frame, but not my shoulders. I stare at the dust that covers the floor of the room, wait for my eyes to adjust, but I see no footprints. No crescent sweep of the door disturbs the layer of gray, either. “Dammit,” I mutter, and then again, louder, when I rap my head on the window frame.
I know she’s inside. I saw the door open, I know I did. I raise my camera again, but no matter how I focus, I still see the door in the stone wall in front of me. Nothing. It’s like Cherry isn’t even in this plane of existence anymore.
Heart slamming hard, I circle the building to the next door, where the earth has eroded away from the wall. The vines have recently been pushed away from the top, revealing a rune in the wood. This one matches Julian’s profile on Memory’s wall. Huginn.
The rusty knob is chest high, and doesn’t turn. I wrench it hard, drive my shoulder into the door as I do, but the lock holds fast. The next has no symbol, the door worn smooth by time or weather, and is also locked, but at the fifth I stop. The marking is familiar. I don’t have to examine the pendant I lifted from Sonja’s bracelet to know that the rune matches, but I look anyway. They both are arrows, pointing up, the way the drawing on the wall pointed at me. The others were Thought, Memory, Wisdom, and Magic. The only one left is War. No way I’m a match to any of the others. I grab the knob and twist—
—and I’m pulled into darkness and cool, stale air.
24
Mythology
I’m in a cavern. Dark, silvery light from a tunnel on the opposite side bounces off the mica in the rocks. I look behind me, place my hand on cool stone. The wood door is gone. There are no hard benches, no early American rafters, and no whitewashed walls. The sweltering June heat is still on my skin, warm on my jeans, but not here. Here the air cool and dusty dry.
“Julian?” I whisper, and when my ears pop, anxiety settles in, sharp in my belly.
I’m underground. Like my dream, the walls are high on all sides, and I want to pinch myself, to see if I’m still dreaming, but I know I’m not. My dreams don’t have smells in them; the mineral scent of the rocks, a faint whiff of kerosene. I raise my hand to my nose and sniff the artificial rose in the industrial soap from the dispenser in the girls’ dormitory.
“Julian!” My voice is swallowed, carried upward into to the dark. I know if I look up I won’t see a ceiling, so I don’t, because I don’t want to remember it.
I grab my cell phone from my little bag; there’s No Service Available. I look at the time, and count backward, calculating the minutes it took to get from my dorm room to the chapel; there’s no elapsed time, but I mentally scan back anyway, looking for gaps in my memory, the black holes of unconsciousness from passing out or being put under, like when I got my wisdom teeth out last year.
I slide my feet on the ground as if I’m blindfolded, watching each step by the dim light of my phone, toward the tunnel on the opposite wall. Shoe prints make a path in the dirt, modern soles leading to the rough arch. None lead away. The tunnel slopes downward, shallow stairs cut into a limestone hallway, the light brighter with every turn in the jagged rocks. I move forward, trailing my hand on the dirty walls. Some stones are dry, some damp with mineral sweat. I round a sharp corner, and throw my arm up against the glare from the room that opens beyond the tunnel. As my eyes adjust to the contrast of bright and dark, I force myself to take a long, deep breath.
I’m in an antechamber of another cavern, a small “room” with natural thrusts of rock, opening up to a vast cave that rises above and below, with a waterfall trickling from the unseen ceiling and disappearing through the hole it has carved through the floor. The room is lit by a single white light, a Coleman lantern, painful against the black shadows thrown around the cave.
“Memory!” Julian shouts.
I spin around. My brother is bound by modern handcuffs around his wrists and ankles, locking him to heavy iron chains set into the wall and floor. Macabre shadows mask his face, making his bones stand out, sharp and skeletal.
“Julian! Oh, my God. I knew it, I knew you weren’t at the hospital!” I run to him and wipe his hair from his forehead where it lays limp over his eyes. There’s a gash over his eyebrow that has dried, crusty with blood and grime.
“Hospital? I’ve been down here for—how long has it been?” He looks to his left. A girl with black hair unraveling from braids huddles on the ground, staring up at me with dull eyes. She’s thin as a rail but I recognize her under the dirt caked on her face and hands. Her clothes hang loose over her shoulders as she claps her chained wrists around her knees.
“Sonja!” I tug at the chains around my brother’s wrists. Blood smears my hands where he’s struggled against the metal shackles. “Jules, you’ve been gone for two days. Anders told me you got stung by a bee.”
The chains are attached to the stone, where massive rings have been bolted into the rock. I dig at the rust until my fingernails tear, but the iron doesn’t give. I bend down to Sonja, tug on her handcuffs, but she shakes her head at me, grabs my fingers in hers. I squeeze back.
“Anders brought me here,” Julian says. “Well, I guess he did. I don’t know how. One minute I was sitting in his office and then next I was down here, and the bastard’s cuffing me up in these chains.” His fury makes his body rigid, eyes narrow and predatory, dangerous, a wild raptor caged against its will. “Sonja was already here.” He looks me up and down. “How did you find us? Did Anders bring you?”
“I went through the chapel door. It opened up here.”
“What? The chapel on campus? That Ethan took pictures of?”
Sonja nods.
“Your dream,” I say. “I knew something was wrong. I came as soon as I puzzled it out.”
“That makes no sense.” He shakes his head, twists against the shackles. “You need to get out of here. Anders has lost it. Like, completely. He’s insane.”
“I’m not leaving you here like this!” I look around for something to pry at the chains. “He’s psychotic! He’s willing to do this to us because he’s afraid of getting his dissertation discredited?”
“He won’t hurt us. He wants us for something. Something beyond the book.” Jules nods to the floor where a plastic jug of water sits by a white and red cardboard bucket, chicken bones, picked clean, in the bottom. A blanket is wadded next to it and a metal bucket with a lid sits not far off. “Go. Get help, but find Ethan and Faye. Don’t let them come down here.”
“Ethan’s probably been arrested by now, and Faye is gone, too. Since yesterday.” At my words, Julian’s face flashes with something I’ve not seen before, a dark despair that tells me Ethan is right; my brother is love with her.
Sonja tugs my hand. “Aunt Connie,” she says, voice hoarse. “Go find Constance, in the kitchen. Tell her to find my mother. She’ll know what to do.”
“I’m not leaving you down here. Either of you.” I repeat. I don’t tell them why, that I don’t see any way to get back, the only exit in the cavern led here, and the opening at the other end of this cave slopes further down, widening into blackness. “We’ll all get out of here together.”
Sonja groans, lets go of my hand, and buries her face in her palms.
“Memory, get out of here,” Julian repeats. “If Ethan is in jail then we have more time. Find Faye, and don’t come back down here!”
“Why? I thought you said he wasn’t going to harm you!”
“Not until we’re all together. All of us. He’s crazy, Memory. This is all some kind of ritual he’s reenacting, a ceremony to Odin, and we represent the crows.”
“No one worships the Norse gods anymore! This is unbelievable. That died off long before this area was settled—” I close my mouth, stare down at Sonja. My voice catches in my throat. “The chapel. With the five doors. One for each of Odin’s crows. What is he trying to do?”
“Open the portal,” she says.
“What portal? To Asgard? This is ridiculous. We’re not birds.” I stare at her
face. There’s a scrape on her chin, half healed. She stares back at me, wipes away a tear with her wrist. The chain rattles. “You can’t believe that!” I yell. The echoes bounce off the stones, and out into the dark.
“It doesn’t matter. He believes it.” Julian says.
“It’s the truth.” More tears track down Sonja’s face. “Why do you think you remember everything? And Julian can’t satisfy his need for information? Faye and her runes. Ethan and his oppositional disorder.”
“What are you talking about?” I shout at her. “You’re delirious. And you don’t know anything about me, or us. You’ve never even met Ethan, or Faye!”
“Yvengvr has been waiting for his vengeance for eons. The day I was born, he started plotting how to bring us together. And now here we are.”
Julian is watching me, waiting for my reaction, which is total disbelief. “Seriously?” I ask him. “You believe this?! What the hell is wrong with you?”
He doesn’t back down, and I look over my shoulder, where he is staring, to a tangle of metal wires sitting in the shadow of a rock outcropping. I’ve seen something like it before, the color and weight, but not in that shape.
“I don’t know what to believe, Memory, and it doesn’t matter. But if you don’t get out of here, and quick, we’re going to end part of whatever sick fantasy he’s concocted in his mind. I think he really does believe he’s carrying out the will of Yvengvr. Odin’s son who was cast out of Asgard in the legends.” He nods his head to the other three sets of irons bolted to the tone wall. “Don’t let him test his theory.”
“Jules, I can’t!”
“Go. Now,” he pleads. “He needs to have all of us. Without everyone, he’s stalled, he can’t perform his rites or sacrament or whatever the hell he is planning to do.”
Sonja nods again.
“But it’s just a crazy story! There is no witch and no crow people and no portals into the earth—” I stop talking before Julian catches my thought. He doesn’t, but Sonja does.
