The Dark Vault

by Victoria Schwab

  He sways and collapses to his knees right beside me, and even though he can’t touch me, even though I’m not here, I can’t help but shuffle back, careful to keep my hands on the floor, as he wraps his stained arms around his shirt. He can’t be much older than I am, late teens, dark hair combed back, strands escaping into his eyes as he rocks back and forth. His lips move, but voices rarely stick to memories, and all I hear is a hushushush sound like static.

  “Mackenzie,” calls my mother. The sound of her voice is distorted, vague and bent by the veil of memory.

  The man stops rocking and gets to his feet. His hands return to his sides, and my gut twists. He’s covered in blood, but it’s not his. There are no cuts on his arms or his chest. One hand looks sliced up, but not enough to bleed this much.

  So whose blood is it? And whose room is it? There’s that dress, and I doubt that the furniture, dappled with tiny flowers, belongs to him, but—

  “Mackenzie,” my mother calls again, closer, followed by the sound of a doorknob turning. I curse, open my eyes, and jerk my hands up from the floor, the memory vanishing, replaced by a room full of boxes and a dull headache. I’m just getting to my feet when Mom comes barging in. Before I can get the silver band out of my pocket and around my finger, she wraps me in a hug.

  I gasp, and suddenly it’s not just noise but cold cavernous cold hollowed out too bright be bright screaming into pillow until I can’t breathe be bright smallest bedroom packing boxes with B crossed out it still shows couldn’t save him should have been there should have before I can shove her tangled stream of consciousness out of my head. I try to force a wall between us, a shaky mental version of the ring’s barrier. It is fragile as glass. Pushing back worsens the headache, but at least it blocks out my mother’s cluttered thoughts.

  I’m left feeling nauseous as I pull away from her hug and maneuver my ring back on to my finger, and the last of the noise drops out.

  “Mackenzie. I’m sorry,” she says, and it takes a moment for me to orient myself in the present, to realize that she isn’t apologizing for that hug, that she doesn’t know why I hate being touched. To remember that the boy I just saw covered in blood isn’t here but years in the past, and that I’m safe and still furious with Mom for throwing away Ben’s things. I want to stay furious, but the anger is dulling.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I understand.” Even though it’s not okay and I don’t understand, and Mom should be able to see that. But she can’t. She sighs softly and reaches out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear, and I let her, doing my best not to tense beneath her touch.

  “Dinner’s ready,” she says. As if everything is normal. As if we’re home instead of in a cardboard fortress in an old hotel room in the city, trying to hide from my brother’s memories. “Come set the table?”

  Before I can ask if she even knows where the table is, she guides me into the living room, where she and Dad have somehow cleared a space between the boxes. They’ve erected our dining table and arranged five cartons of Chinese food in a kind of bouquet in the center.

  The table is the only piece of furniture assembled, which makes us look like we’re dining on an island made of packing material. We eat off dishes dug out of a box with a surprisingly informative label: KITCHEN—FRAGILE. Mom coos about the Coronado, and Dad nods and offers canned monosyllables of support; and I stare down at my food and see blurred Ben-like shapes whenever I close my eyes, so I wage a staring contest with the vegetables.

  After dinner I put Ben’s box in the back of my closet, along with two labeled DA. I packed those myself, offered to make space for them, mostly because I was worried Mom would finally get rid of his things if I didn’t find room. I never thought she’d get rid of Ben’s. I keep out the silly blue bear, which I set beside the bed, and balance Ben’s black glasses on its button nose.

  I try to unpack, but my eyes keep drifting back to the center of the room, to the floor where the bloodstained boy collapsed. When I pushed the boxes aside, I could almost make out a few dark stains on the wood, and now it’s all I can see each time I look at the floor. But who knows if the stains were drops of his blood. Not his blood, I remember. Someone’s. I want to read the memory again—well, part of me wants to; the other part isn’t so eager, at least not on my first night in this room—but Mom keeps finding excuses to come in, half the time not even knocking, and if I’m going to read this, I’d like to avoid another interruption when I do it. It’ll have to wait until morning.

  I dig up sheets and make my bed, squirming at the thought of sleeping in here with whatever happened, even though I know it was years and years and years ago. I tell myself it’s silly to be scared, but I still can’t sleep.

  My mind swims between Ben’s blurred shape and the bloodstained floor, twisting the two memories until Ben is the one surrounded by broken glass, looking down at his red-drenched self. I sit up. My eyes go to the window, expecting to see my yard, and just beyond it the brick side of Lyndsey’s house, but I see a city, and in that moment I wish I were home. I wish I could lean out my window and see Lyndsey lounging on her roof, watching stars. Late at night was the only time she let herself be lazy, and I could tell she felt rebellious for stealing even a few minutes. I used to sneak home from the Narrows—three streets over and two up behind the butcher shop—and climb up beside her, and she never asked me where I’d been. She’d stare up at the stars and start talking, pick up midsentence as if I’d been there with her the whole time. As if everything were perfectly normal.

  Normal.

  A confession: sometimes I dream of being normal. I dream about this girl who looks like me and talks like me, but isn’t me. I know she’s not, because she has this open smile and she laughs too easily, like Lynds. She doesn’t have to wear a silver ring or a rusted key. She doesn’t read the past or hunt the restless dead. I dream of her doing mundane things. She sifts through a locker in a crowded school. She lounges poolside, surrounded by girls who swim and talk to her while she flips through silly magazines. She sits engulfed in pillows and watches a movie, a friend tossing up pieces of popcorn for her to catch in her mouth. She misses almost every time.

  She throws a party.

  She goes to a dance.

  She kisses a boy.

  And she’s so…happy.

  M. That’s what I call her, this normal, nonexistent me.

  It’s not that I’ve never done those things, kissed or danced or just “hung out.” I have. But it was put-on, a character, a lie. I am so good at it—lying—but I can’t lie to myself. I can pretend to be M; I can wear her like a mask. But I can’t be her. I’ll never be her.

  M wouldn’t see blood-covered boys in her bedroom.

  M wouldn’t spend her time scouring her dead brother’s toys for a glimpse of his life.

  The truth is, I know why Ben’s favorite shirt wasn’t in the box, or his mile patch, or most of his pencils. He had those things with him the day he died. Had the shirt on his back and the patch in his pocket and the pencils in his bag, just like any normal day. Because it was a normal day, right up until the point a car ran a red light two blocks from Ben’s school just as he was stepping from the curb.

  And then drove away.

  What do you do when there is someone to blame, but you know you’ll never find them? How do you close the case the way the cops do? How do you move on?

  Apparently you don’t move on; you just move away.

  I just want to see him. Not a Ben-like shape, but the real thing. Just for a moment. A glimpse. The more I miss him, the more he seems to fade. He feels so far away, and holding on to empty tokens—or half-ruined ones—won’t bring him any closer. But I know what will.

  I’m up, on my feet and swapping pajamas for black pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, donning my usual uniform. My Archive paper sits on the side table, unfolded and blank. I pocket it. I don’t care if there are no names. I’m not going to the Narrows. I’m going through them.

  To the Archive.


  FOUR

  BEYOND THE BEDROOM, THE apartment is still, but as I slip into the hall I see a faint line of light along the bottom of my parents’ door. I hold my breath. Hopefully Dad just fell asleep with his reading light on. The house key hangs like a prize on a hook by the front door. These floors are so much older than the ones in our last house that with every step I expect to be exposed, but I somehow make it to the key without a creak, and slide it from the hook. All that’s left is the door. The trick is to let go of the handle by degrees. I get through, ease 3F shut, and turn to face the third-floor hall.

  And stop.

  I’m not alone.

  Halfway down the corridor a boy my age is leaning against the faded wallpaper, right beside the painting of the sea. He’s staring up at the ceiling, or past it, the thin black wire from his headphones tracing a line over his jaw, down his throat. I can hear the whisper of music from here. I take a soundless step, but still he rolls his head, lazily, to look at me. And he smiles. Smiles like he’s caught me cheating, caught me sneaking out.

  Which, in all fairness, he has.

  His smile reminds me of the paintings here. I don’t think any of them are hung straight. One side of his mouth tilts up like that, like it’s not set level. He has several inches of spiked black hair, and I’m pretty sure he’s wearing eyeliner.

  He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall as if to say, I never saw you. But that smile stays, and his conspiratorial silence doesn’t change the fact that he’s standing between me and my brother, his back where the Narrows door should be, the keyhole roughly in the triangle of space between the crook of his arm and his shirt.

  And for the first time I’m thankful the Coronado is so old, because I need that second door. I do my best to play the part of a normal girl sneaking out. The pants and long sleeves in the middle of summer complicate the image, but there’s nothing to be done about that now, and I keep my chin up as I wander down the hall toward the north stairs (turning back toward the south ones would only be suspicious).

  The boy’s eyes stay closed, but his smile quirks as I pass by. Odd, I think, vanishing into the stairwell. The stairs run from the top floor down to the second, where they spill me out onto the landing of the grand staircase, which forms a cascade into the lobby. A ribbon of burgundy fabric runs over the marble steps like a tongue, and when I make my way down, the carpet emits small plumes of dust.

  Most of the lights have been turned off, and in the strange semidarkness, the sprawling room at the base of the stairs is draped in shadows. A sign on the far wall whispers CAFÉ in faded cursive. I frown and turn my attention back to the side of the staircase where I first saw the crack. Now the papered wall is hidden in the heavy dark between two lights. I step into the darkness with it, running my fingers over the fleur-de-lis pattern until I find it. The ripple. I pocket my ring and pull Da’s key from around my neck, using my other hand to trace down the crack until I feel the groove of the keyhole. I slot the key and turn, and a moment after the metallic click, a thread of light traces the outline of the door against the stairs.

  The Narrows sigh around me as I enter, humid breath and words so far away they’ve bled to sounds and then to hardly anything. I start down the hall, key in hand, until I find the doors I marked before, the filled white circle that designates Returns, and to its right, the hollow one that leads to the Archive.

  I pause, straighten, and step through.

  The day I become a Keeper, you hold my hand.

  You never hold my hand. You avoid touch the way I’m quickly learning to, but the day you take me to the Archive, you wrap your weathered fingers around mine as you lead me through the door. We’re not wearing our rings, and I expect to feel it, the tangle of memories and thoughts and emotions coming through your skin, but I feel nothing but your grip. I wonder if it’s because you’re dying, or because you’re so good at blocking the world out, a concept I can’t seem to learn. Whatever the reason, I feel nothing but your grip, and I’m thankful for it.

  We step into a front room, a large, circular space made of dark wood and pale stone. An antechamber, you call it. There is no visible source of light, and yet the space is brightly lit. The door we came through appears larger on this side than it did in the Narrows, and older, worn.

  There is a stone lintel above the Archive door that reads SERVAMUS MEMORIAM. A phrase I do not know yet. Three vertical lines, the mark of the Archive, separate the words, and a set of Roman numerals runs beneath. Across the room a woman sits behind a large desk, writing briskly in a ledger, a QUIET PLEASE sign propped at the edge of her table. She sees us and sets her pen down fast enough to suggest that we’re expected.

  My hands are shaking, but you tighten your grip.

  “You’re gold, Kenzie,” you whisper as the woman gestures over her shoulder at a massive pair of doors behind her, flung open and back like wings. Through them I can see the heart of the Archive, the atrium, a sprawling chamber marked by rows and rows and rows of shelves. The woman does not stand, does not go with us, but watches us pass with a nod and a whispered, cordial “Antony.”

  You lead me through.

  There are no windows because there is no outside, and yet above the shelves hangs a vaulted ceiling of glass and light. The place is vast and made of wood and marble, long tables running down the center like a double spine, with shelves branching off to both sides like ribs. The partitions make the cavernous space seem smaller, cozier. Or at least fathomable.

  The Archive is everything you told me it would be: a patchwork…wood and stone and colored glass, and all throughout, a sense of peace.

  But you left something out.

  It is beautiful.

  So beautiful that, for a moment, I forget the walls are filled with bodies. That the stacks and the cabinets that compose the walls, while lovely, hold Histories. On each drawer an ornate brass cardholder displays a placard with a neatly printed name, a set of dates. It’s so easy to forget this.

  “Amazing,” I say, too loud. The words echo, and I wince, remembering the sign on the Librarian’s desk.

  “It is,” a new voice replies softly, and I turn to find a man perched on the edge of a table, hands in pockets. He’s an odd sight, built like a stick figure, with a young face but old gray eyes and dark hair that sweeps across his forehead. His clothes are normal enough—a sweater and slacks—but his dark pants run right into a pair of bright red Chucks, which makes me smile. And yet there’s a sharpness to his eyes, a coiled aspect to his stance. Even if I passed him on the street instead of here in the Archive, I’d know right away that he was a Librarian.

  “Roland,” you say with a nod.

  “Antony,” he replies, sliding off from the table. “Is this your choice?”

  The Librarian is talking about me. Your hand vanishes from mine, and you take a step back, presenting me to him. “She is.”

  Roland arches a brow. But then he smiles. It’s a playful smile, a warm one.

  “This should be fun.” He gestures to the first of the ten wings branching off the atrium. “If you’ll follow me…” And with that, he walks away. You walk away. I pause. I want to linger here. Soak up the strange sense of quiet. But I cannot stay.

  I am not a Keeper yet.

  There is a moment, as I pass into the circular antechamber of the Archive and my eyes settle on the Librarian seated behind the desk—a man I’ve never seen before—when I feel lost. A strange fear takes hold, simple and deep, that my family moved too far away, that I’ve crossed some invisible boundary and stepped into another branch of the Archive. Roland assured me it wouldn’t happen, that each branch is responsible for hundreds of miles of city, suburb, country, but still the panic washes through me.

  I look over my shoulder at the lintel above the door, the familiar SERVAMUS MEMORIAM etched there. According to two semesters of Latin (my father’s idea), it means “We Protect the Past.” Roman numerals run beneath the inscription, so small and so many that they s
eem more like a pattern than a number. I asked once, and was told that that was the branch number. I still cannot read it, but I’ve memorized the pattern, and it hasn’t changed. My muscles begin to uncoil.

  “Miss Bishop.”

  The voice is calm, quiet, and familiar. I turn back toward the desk to see Roland coming through the set of doors behind it, tall and slim as ever—he hasn’t aged a day—with his gray eyes and his easy grin and his red Chucks. I let out a breath of relief.

  “You can go now, Elliot,” he says to the man seated behind the desk, who stands with a nod and vanishes back through the doors.

  Roland takes a seat and kicks his shoes up onto the desk. He digs in the drawers and comes up with a magazine. Last month’s issue of some lifestyle guide I brought him. Mom subscribed to them for a while, and Roland insists on staying as much in the loop as possible when it comes to the Outer. I know for a fact he spends most of his time skimming new Histories, watching the world through their lives. I wonder if boredom prompts him to it, or if it’s more. Roland’s eyes are tinged with something between pain and longing.

  He misses it, I think; the Outer. He’s not supposed to. Librarians commit to the Archive in every way, leaving the Outer behind for their term, however long they choose to stay, and he’s told me himself that being promoted is an honor, to have all that time and knowledge at your fingertips, to protect the past—SERVAMUS MEMORIAM and all—but if he misses sunrises, or oceans, or fresh air, who can blame him? It’s a lot to give up for a fancy title, a suspended life cycle, and an endless supply of reading material.

  He holds the magazine toward me. “You look pale.”

  “Keep it,” I say, still a little shaken. “And I’m fine….” Roland knows how scared I am of losing this branch—some days I think the constancy of coming here is all that’s keeping me sane—but it’s a weakness, and I know it. “Just thought for a moment I’d gone too far.”