by Kit Alloway
* * *
Peregrine’s house was a monstrosity of modern art. Gray concrete boxes attached to each other in strange ways; the place resembled a compound more than a home, except that its third floor was significantly larger than its first, as though a toddler had decided to see how precariously he could stack his blocks. Tinted windows without shutters looked out onto gravel instead of a lawn.
“Wait, is that it?” Will asked as he got out of Whim’s Lincoln Town Car.
“Oh, that’s it,” Whim assured him. “Peregrine had it custom-designed by a famous Brutalist architect after Dustine left him. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological significance to that…”
If there was, Will didn’t get it. The place was just ugly.
“I don’t hear the dogs,” Deloise said, helping Winsor into her wheelchair.
“Maybe they starved to death,” Whim said. He walked up to the gray steel door and tried the cold metal handle. “Too much to hope for, I suppose. Where’s the guard?”
Will took a quick walk around the house, but he found no one. The lights were off inside. When he peered through one window, he noticed that the oven and microwave clocks weren’t on.
“Somebody turned the power off at the breaker box,” he told his friends when he reached the front door. “And there’s no guard.”
“If the power is off, will the alarm still work?” Deloise asked.
“After three months?” Whim said. “I doubt it. But if the cops show up, you can just say you’re his granddaughter.”
“I don’t want to get arrested,” Will told him.
“We won’t. Who commits a robbery with a girl in a wheelchair?”
Whim was already getting a toolbox out of the back of his Lincoln. Will crossed his fingers and hoped the alarm didn’t go off.
They ended up having to break a window in a first-floor powder room. Deloise wriggled through and unlocked the front door.
The exterior had been ugly, but at least it had been simple; the interior was a psychotic wash of colors and objects. So much stuff had been crammed into the entryway that Will immediately drove Winsor’s chair into a sculpture stand. Luckily the pointy iron sculpture—a cactus, maybe? Or a turkey?—didn’t fall.
On one wall hung a painting of three soldiers kicking a fallen refrigerator. On the opposite wall hung a print of a partially autopsied horse. Above them dangled a chandelier made from baby doll arms holding lightbulbs in their hands.
“What is all this?” Will asked as they passed a living room furnished with only suede-covered dental chairs. On what Will thought was supposed to be a coffee table—it was made of bundles of newspapers wrapped in chicken wire—sat a half-dozen pornographic Etch A Sketches.
“Peregrine thinks he’s a modern art connoisseur,” Deloise said. “But his taste is … questionable.”
“You just don’t understand the avant-garde,” Whim said sarcastically, and he gestured to a teddy bear with sad eyes sitting on a black box. On the front of the box was a red button above a label that read DO NOT PUSH BUTTON.
Whim pushed the button.
“You’re fat!” the bear told him. “You’re ugly! I hate you!”
“Nice,” Deloise said. Winsor cracked up.
“Josh must loathe this place,” Will said.
“You have no idea,” Whim told him.
They decided to search room by room. Deloise and Will took the second floor and left Whim and Winsor to explore downstairs. The first room off the staircase—the steps of which were all welded street signs—was Peregrine’s office. Aside from more terrible art, the room was relatively bare. The desk was just a grand piano lid on six legs.
“He must not work at home much,” Will said. “He doesn’t even have a computer.”
“He doesn’t even have a pen,” Deloise pointed out. “I think this whole room is for show.”
“I think the whole house is for show,” Will said.
In the bedroom, they found a perfectly made bed on a plastic pedestal, above which hung a near life-sized oil painting of Peregrine, surrounded by his dogs. Six brightly colored, formal dream-walker robes attired headless mannequins. Like the office, the bedroom felt like no one called it home.
“In here, Will,” Deloise said from the walk-in closet.
Here they found the first real evidence that someone lived in the house. Several shirts had been knocked off their hangers, a pair of shoes had fallen to the floor, and a sock drawer sat open.
“Someone went through here,” Will said. “Maybe the gendarmes.”
“The gendarmes wouldn’t have done this. Probably Peregrine stopped here before he went wherever he went, and he packed in a hurry.” Almost by habit, she reached out to close the sock drawer, then frowned. “This drawer is really shallow.”
Will examined the closet, but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. It was hard to tell in the dim light coming from the bedroom window.
“The ceiling light in here isn’t centered,” Deloise pointed out. “Neither is the island.”
“Maybe it’s avant-garde,” Will said.
“Maybe.” Deloise stepped outside the closet, then back inside. “Are disproportionally thick walls postmodern?”
Will stood beside her so that he could see what she saw.
“Someone moved this closet wall in. You don’t think…”
Deloise smiled. “I do think.”
They started searching for a mechanism. Will opened drawers, yanked on hanging bars, flicked the light switch up and down. Deloise pulled the clothes off the racks so she could see the wall clearly, but nothing happened, and nothing that looked like a trigger appeared.
“Wait,” she said. “Let’s think this through. The wall can’t move left because it would go into the bedroom. Right, it goes into the bathroom. Maybe it pushes back.”
Together, they braced their shoulders against the wall and shoved. Nothing happened except that Will’s shoulder hurt.
“Maybe it pulls out,” he suggested.
They each grabbed hold of a shirt bar and pulled. The wall didn’t budge.
“Maybe it’s just a stupid-thick wall,” Will said. “Or maybe it is a fake wall, but it won’t move with the power off.”
Deloise blew out a puff of air, making her bangs lift as if with a breeze. “Maybe,” she admitted, but her affectation gave Will an idea.
“It goes up!” he said. “We have to lift it up!”
Taking hold of the edges of the shelves, they each heaved up. Will was expecting the wall to weigh more than it did, and the force of their lift caused the entire wall of shelving to fly up from the floor. It disappeared into the ceiling, revealing a narrow staircase behind it.
“Good gracious,” Deloise said.
Flicking their lighters, they followed the stairs down into a deep basement.
“This is spooky,” Will admitted in a whisper.
The flame of his lighter illuminated two more mannequins, one wearing a ball gown and another in a tux. Will jumped before realizing they weren’t alive.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, touching his chest as if that might slow his heart.
The basement looked like the backstage of a Broadway theater. Costumes hung from clothes racks. A makeup table with a lighted mirror sat beside a wall of wigs and prosthetic noses. Trunks full of props sat open along one wall, and Deloise found a pair of candles to light.
The most striking feature, though, was the painted iron garden archway in the middle of the room. When Will used his lighter to reflect the candlelight at it, the space within the arch filled with shimmering Veil.
“This must be where Peregrine staged nightmares,” Deloise said. “What else would he have been doing with all this stuff? Look.” She pulled a golden crown from one of the prop boxes. “Didn’t the people who had nightmares about Mirren say she was always wearing a crown?”
Among the costumes were numerous dresses, some of them very royal. Among the wigs was one that closely resemb
led Mirren’s long red hair.
But the longer Will looked, the older the objects he found appeared. One of the trunks had a layer of dust as thick as snow on the top, and inside were old-fashioned suits and furs that smelled strangely sweet.
“Del,” Will said. “This isn’t just stuff he used to stage nightmares about Mirren. He must have been staging nightmares for decades.”
Deloise sniffed a bottle of foundation and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t even think they still make this brand.” She gazed around. “You know what we have here? Proof. We can prove he rigged the Accordance Conclave, prove he made people hate Mirren for no reason.”
“Yeah,” Will said, but he was distracted by a shimmer at the far end of the basement. Moving toward it, he flicked his lighter, and he realized he was standing in front of a metal door. It hung open far enough that Will could see it was as thick as the bank vault door that protected the archway at home.
“Hey, Del, over here.”
He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped inside, holding his lighter out before him.
It was a bedroom. With the vault door lock on the inside.
Unlike the bedroom upstairs, this one contained an unmade twin bed heaped with comforters and down pillows. A worn flannel robe hung from a hook on the wall, and slippers had been kicked off beneath it. A bookshelf was stuffed with fantasy and romance paperbacks, their spines broken and peeling. An enormous television took up most of one wall, complete with every game console Will had ever heard of, and in front of it was a tricked-out gaming chair.
“Oh, heavens,” Deloise said. “What is this? Was he holding somebody prisoner down here?”
Sadness like a weighted vest settled over Will. “No,” he said, and reached out to touch the bedsheets. They, too, were flannel. “This is his real bedroom.”
“What do you mean?” Deloise asked.
Will sat down on the bed and sank into it up to his hips; he’d never sat on such a soft mattress. “I think the bedroom upstairs, like the rest of the house, is just for show. I think this is where he came to be by himself.”
“But he always ranted about the evils of television and video games,” Deloise pointed out. “There must be a hundred games down here.”
“Yeah. He was a hypocrite. And he was ashamed of that.”
The walls were painted a light blue, the carpet was almost as soft as the bed, and a night-light stuck out from one of the electrical outlets. It wasn’t so much a bedroom as a secret retreat where everything was cozy and comfortable and safe.
Safety, Will thought. That’s what he wanted here. To be safe from the world, from judgments, from pretense. He came down here to be himself.
“This is Grandma Dustine,” Deloise said, picking up a framed photograph from the nightstand. She sat down on the bed next to Will, atop one of the comforters, then shifted around so she could pull something from beneath the blanket.
It was a stuffed rabbit, the fur threadbare, the paint worn away from its eyes, its ears so thin they flopped over its face.
Deloise released a little cry. “This is the saddest place I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah,” Will echoed.
“What do you think is wrong with him?” she asked.
Will sighed. He touched the rabbit in Deloise’s hands, found the fur still soft. Through the open door, he could see the racks of costumes and rows of wigs.
“I think he wants to be someone else. I think he wants people to see him as brilliant and sophisticated and debonair. And I think he desperately wants control over his life, even if that requires control over other people.”
Will had been afraid of Peregrine for months. But what he had forgotten—and what he had only remembered when he entered this strange sanctuary—was that people who committed acts of great cruelty were those who had experienced great cruelty. He’d witnessed it in Feodor, and he was witnessing it again, here, with Peregrine. Beneath the angry, controlling, manipulative monster he had become was just a man who wanted to feel safe.
Truth be told, Will wanted the same thing. He had come here to find something he could use against Peregrine, but he knew he would never confront Peregrine about this place.
Despite everything Peregrine had done to him, Will wasn’t willing to let his pain make him cruel.
Fourteen
Mirren Rousellario lived an hour outside of Tanith in an old farmhouse on a hill. She lived with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, and when Josh drove up, Mirren’s family was planting bulbs in the flower beds in front of the house.
Katia tossed her silvery hair back and wiped her dirty palms on her jeans when Josh walked up. “Hi. How are you?”
She offered Josh her hand; Katia wasn’t quite as good as Mirren was at adapting to social conventions. They shook. “I’m fine. How’re you?”
Casting a confused eye at Josh’s too-large jeans, she said, “We’re putting in tulips. Would you like to help?”
“No,” Josh admitted. “I kind of hate gardening.”
Katia laughed. “So do I, but that’s never stopped Mom from making me do it.”
Katia’s mother didn’t look too excited at Josh’s visit; she never did. Josh suspected she’d made Collena’s shit-list for helping Mirren try to restore the monarchy. Then again, Mirren would almost certainly have died if Josh and Will hadn’t pulled her out of the Dream, so Josh didn’t feel too badly about it.
“Is Mirren around?” she asked.
“She’s in the trimidion.” As Josh walked toward the side of the house, Katia called, “Don’t let her make you help with the tiling!”
Mirren had only been to Josh’s house a couple of times since they’d gotten back from the Death universe with Feodor in tow, but Josh saw her at least once a week. Sometimes she came out to help Mirren build.
Sometimes they worked on the other thing.
About a hundred yards behind the old farmhouse sat a stone structure. It had nine sides, each of them containing an arched, open doorway, and within each of the doorways hung an ornate iron lantern. The structure was huge and stood close to three stories. Josh found Mirren inside. She had carved a pool into the floor, the bottom of which was nine or ten feet belowground. In the center of the pool was a circular island that could be reached by nine narrow stone walkways that extended from each of the doorways.
Hanging above the concrete island was a red granite pyramid twelve feet tall. Doorways had been carved into each side, so that there was an empty space in the middle; essentially, the doorways led nowhere. But the carvings at the bottom corners indicated that the granite pyramid was actually a trimidion.
Mirren, her red hair coiled up in a messy bun, was sitting on the floor of the empty pool, grouting tiles. She lifted her face when Josh said her name, and a faint smile crossed her face.
“Hello, Josh. I was hoping you’d get here in time to help with the tiling.”
Josh climbed carefully down into the pool. “How could I resist?”
Having been born a year after the Rousellarios were deposed, Josh had never seen a royal trimidion, but she had Feodor’s memories of the one Mirren’s grandparents had built. Most trimidions measured the emotional turmoil in a fairly limited geographical range. Supposedly a royal trimidion could measure emotional turmoil in the entirety of the three universes, but as far as Mirren knew, the secret of making them do so had died with her parents. Then again, royal trimidions were also rumored to be able to heal people who entered them, grant wishes, and function as time travel devices, so Josh wasn’t sure how much to hope for.
This building was going to be Mirren’s royal trimidion.
Josh joined her on the half-finished floor. The granite trimidion swung above them on its monstrous chain, making her a little anxious. She hated to imagine that thing coming down on them.
Mirren offered her a water bottle, and Josh took a sip. “I was actually trying to avoid the tiling.”
Mirren smiled, though her gray eyes were—as usual—serious. Josh was al
ways surprised by how beautiful Mirren was, even sweaty and tired and with grout on her smooth cheek. “I can’t blame you. It’s incredibly monotonous.”
“Have you got the trimidion working?” Josh asked, noticing that one corner hung lower than the others.
“No, not yet. I was hoping I’d figure out how to activate it once I had the major pieces in place, but nothing’s coming to me.” She wiped her forehead on her sleeve. “Can you imagine doing all this for nothing?”
“You didn’t do it for nothing,” Josh told her.
Mirren had showed her the note Haley had left for her before he went into Death. Build the royal trimidion, it read. Mirren kept it in a little glass vial that hung around her neck.
She picked up her trowel again. “How’s Feodor?”
“He’s good,” Josh said, and then thought it was the wrong thing to say. “He’s … fine, or, whatever Feodor is.”
“I’m not going to hold his being fine against you, Josh. You know that.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant … He always pretends to be in the same mood, you know? He’s always got this front up. So who knows how he’s really feeling.”
“If anyone could, it would be you.”
“Everybody seems to think so,” Josh said tartly, recalling Will’s nightmare.
Mirren lifted an eyebrow.
“Never mind,” Josh said.
“No, now you have to tell me.”
“I didn’t come out here to complain about Will. And you’re busy—”
“I’m more than capable of smearing grout and listening at the same time.”
Josh sighed. “All right. Last night I was dream walking…”
She told Mirren about Will’s nightmare that she had been half-possessed by Feodor. One thing Josh had discovered about Mirren—she was ridiculously poised and dignified and had perfect manners, but she was surprisingly easy to talk to.
“I don’t know what to make of any of it. For two months I thought Will was trying to make me feel bad, and now suddenly he says, ‘No, no, I actually want you back.’ Did he mean he was working on it in counseling? ’Cause I thought he went to therapy to be less anxious, not to get back together with me. And why was I so pretty in the nightmare? He can’t really see me that way. I just literally don’t look like that.” Josh fell back against the central pillar, exhausted. “Sometimes I wish he’d just yell at me and sleep with my best friend like Ian did. At least I’d know what that meant.”
