“Disguise?”
“I’m suspended. I can’t very well walk around campus looking like this.”
“Walk around?”
“I have these,” he said, producing some balls of hair. “Borrowed them from the theater department.” The pieces uncurled in his hand. A beard and mustache, I was guessing. “But I know little about the application of cosmetics. It’s something I must study, apparently. Could you?”
“I’m in my pajamas, in case you didn’t notice,” I said. “I have an exam this morning.”
“It’s early yet.”
“Did you sleep in there?”
“Maybe just a catnap,” he said.
“I don’t like boys sleeping in my closet.”
“It’s wildly uncomfortable, if you must know. I can’t see it becoming a thing.”
“Get out of there this instant.” I pulled him out. “Stay here. I have to warn Natalie and Jamala there’s a boy in our room. They’re showering.”
I took off, in part to clear my head. I warned off my roommates, borrowed a neighbor’s robe, and returned to the room.
“What about your costume?” I asked as I used some watered-down glue to stick on his facial hair. I used both eyebrow pencil and gray eyeliner to give him fans at the edges of his eyes and worry lines in his forehead. I made his cheeks slightly hollow—not tricky on such a skinny boy—and his mouth to turn down into a frown.
“Theater department. I hung it up in your closet. The college professor, mad-scientist look.”
“I sleep too heavily.”
“Natalie snores,” he said.
“Tell me about it.” I cut him off before he actually did, though I could listen to that accent of his for hours. “It’s an expression!”
“Ah-ha! Right! Eleven minutes.”
“Don’t do that! You’re making me nervous. I’ll have you looking like an ogre.”
“Just as long as the ogre doesn’t look like me, I’m all set.”
“Voilà!” I held up my hand mirror to his face. He scrunched his nose, squinted, frowned. Smiled. Turned his head this way and that.
“Excellent job, Moria.”
“Of course it’s excellent,” I said.
“Careful now. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.”
I wanted to kick him. Instead, I held up my hand. “My fingers. You were interested in the stains.”
“The Name of the Rose,” Lock said. “Great book. You should read it. Monks. Murder. What could be better? Headmaster warned us, warned us all, not to touch the Bible. It wasn’t ink on your fingers, it was some kind of amnesia drug.”
He told the same story I would later hear he’d told James. The more I heard the more vulnerable and afraid I felt. I didn’t appreciate blacking out for an entire twelve hours. Ick.
“You’re better now, that’s what counts.”
“But why smell my clothes? That was perverted! And crawling around to look at my shoes? What was that all about?” I asked.
“James,” he said. “It’s about James. I will explain, I promise. But now, if you’ll turn your back, I need to change into my suit.”
A visiting professor with full facial hair walked across the school lawn toward Main House as the tower clock neared 7:37 a.m. James was standing at the base of the school sundial looking lost. Technically, the sun had risen exactly an hour earlier, but at the moment of the autumn solstice—an hour past sunrise—the sundial cast its shadow forward, down its steps and onto the surrounding marble pedestal. There, a single gray, rectangular stone was inlaid, seemingly out of place until the moment arrived.
“Morning,” the older guy said.
James nervously regarded the passing stranger, several yards off. “Morning.”
The professor nodded and continued on his way.
In front of James, an unusual phenomenon was occurring. The sun caught the ancient symbol—the X and the P—atop the sundial, throwing a most unexpected shadow onto the errant gray stone. It formed a perfect cross intersected by what looked like a key.
But more unique, the shadow covered up enough of the odd stone to leave only a discolored area of the stone showing: an unmistakable arrow pointing to the chapel.
Seconds later, the images crept forward and dissolved, absorbed by the grass.
Sherlock stayed the course, still heading for the Main House. At the last moment, as James opened and then pulled the heavy door closed, Sherlock sprinted for the chapel. His mustache flew off his upper lip. He pulled the chapel door open only inches and slipped inside, immediately crossing the vestibule, and ascending the stairs into the balcony. He saw James turn and look back toward him. Believing he’d been spotted, Sherlock nearly called out. Then it occurred to him to pivot and look behind him. There, the chapel’s enormous rosary window glowed as if divinely illuminated. Its colors shone like never before. Sherlock couldn’t take his eyes off the window exploding in colors.
Perhaps a minute passed before a shaft of light broke free from a disc of glass at the window’s perfect center. The beam strengthened and shifted, traveling with the movement of the sun, first a knife blade then a full-fledged spotlight. Its brightness caught the millions of flecks of dust in the air, swirling like snowflakes. It bored across the distance of the chapel, above the nave, concentrating its focused, blazing energy onto a center wooden panel behind the altar along the chancel’s curving back wall.
As quickly as it had arrived, it was gone.
Sherlock watched as James looked down. He heard him gasp as James spotted the inlay of the key in the floor stone. Sherlock had a decision to make. Worried for James, he moved quickly down the stairs, and up the nave.
“You’re meant to open it,” Sherlock called out, disguising his British accent in favor of a gravelly Brooklyn drawl.
James watched the older professor shuffling toward him. “I saw you outside! Who are you?”
“A friend. The center panel will open, I think you will find.” Sherlock stopped far enough away to maintain his anonymity. Another yard or two and James would certainly spot the boy beneath the disguise.
James didn’t appreciate the company. “What’s it to you?”
Sherlock didn’t answer at first. “It won’t be easily found,” Sherlock said in his own voice. “The key is the key.”
“Is that you? Seriously? What the heck?”
“The door will lead to the organ pipes.” Sherlockian voice again. “A play on words, you see? Music has keys. If you will allow me, I’d like to help.”
“You don’t quit.”
“No, regrettably. Not in my nature. It’s for Moria I’m doing this, not you, James, if that’s of any consequence. Not sporting the way they dealt with her. I’d like to get this all behind us. Please,” he added, finding the word difficult to say.
“I don’t need help.”
“I never said you did. I’m offering it.”
“Well,” James clearly didn’t know what to say to that. “You look stupid dressed like that. I can’t believe you said hello to me and I missed it was you.”
“I’m rather enjoying myself.”
“You’re weird.”
“A majority opinion, to be sure,” said Sherlock.
“You think it’s the Bible? In there?”
“I’m not sure. I think . . . no, I know . . . that this is where the clues end.”
“Father didn’t want me finishing them.”
“Say again?”
“Said he needed time, more time. He didn’t say what for.”
“On the odd chance we’re successful . . . wait here one minute, will you?” Sherlock returned with two pair of white cotton gloves used by altar boys to clean the chapel silver and handbells. “Why are you being nice to me?” Sherlock asked.
“You’re annoying, but you’re helpful. I need you.”
Sherlock nodded.
“I believe what you told me in the tunnel. I’m on a mission, here, Holmes. It may or may not include you. For now it d
oes. That’s me being honest, in case you don’t recognize it.”
Sherlock laughed aloud.
“How . . . why do you think . . . how can you always be so sure of yourself?” James sounded at once both impressed and upset.
“I lay no claim to anything found,” Sherlock said. “The clues were intended for you, James, not me. They end here. Now. Through that door.”
“Okay, then. Let’s get this over with.”
CHAPTER 39
OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
FAILING TO FIND A LATCH TO OPEN THE WALL panel, Sherlock stepped back to examine it from a distance.
His frustration palpable, James commented again that he was ready for “it to be over.”
“Sadly, my boy,” Sherlock said, “I sense it’s only just beginning.”
“How do we open it?”
Sherlock moved the wrought-iron candle stand aside and placed his weight onto the toe of his shoe. He had to point his toe like a dancer in order to deliver his weight only onto the keystone. It moved down under the pressure. The wood panel sprang open. The size of a narrow door.
“That was a lucky guess,” James said.
“An educated guess, but yes. Tread carefully, my friend,” cautioned Sherlock. “We’ve arrived to the end of the road, and sometimes that takes the shape of a cliff.”
Inside the cloistered space, hundreds of metal organ pipes stood like soldiers from short to tall. Row after row of them. Stair-step landings provided access to the rows of pipes on either side. The only light came through acoustic fabric panels that during services allowed the organ music to reach the chapel’s interior. A quick look around failed to reveal much of anything.
“Maybe more of a dead end than a cliff,” said James.
“Look for a key or tree branches carved into one of the wind boxes or perhaps the pipes. I’ll take this side, you take that.”
“More clues?” James groaned.
“They didn’t make it easy for you.”
“Me? I doubt that.”
“Yes, you, James. Legacy. The family Moriarty.”
Less than a minute passed. “It felt better when I hated you,” James said. Sherlock joined him to see the key-and-tree emblem engraved below the air hole in one of the medium-sized pipes.
Sherlock dropped to his knees and grappled in the semidarkness. The wind box beneath the marked pipe had been customized.
“It’s hinged. Stand back,” Sherlock said.
James stepped aside.
Sherlock yanked the organ pipe. It moved like a lever, and as it did a section of the landings on the stairs lifted and opened. Flickering yellow light came out of it.
Sherlock sniffed the air. “Ah,” he said. “That explains it.”
“Explains what, exactly?” James sounded frightened or excited. It was hard to tell which.
“Your sister’s clothing . . . last night when she disappeared . . . I saw her today and smelled it in her hair . . . at least I thought I did. It proved to be in her clothing. I deduced she’d been taken someplace closed. I thought perhaps a church in Boston, one that uses incense. I was wrong. It’s here. That’s the smell.”
“They took her here?”
“To question her, I imagine, which makes this place all the more dangerous to you, James. I have protected myself to some degree. We must accept that the clues may not lead to a prize. I suggest we turn around while we still can.”
Something struck Sherlock’s head. A club or metal pipe. It hit him from behind. The yellow light dimmed. Sherlock saw the papier–mâché face of a raven head and beak. Then, his mind went blank.
CHAPTER 40
ONLY IF YOU’RE LUCKY
JAMES WAS URGED DOWN A SET OF STEEP STONE steps by a cloaked raven behind him.
“You hurt my friend,” James said, amazed to hear himself calling Sherlock his friend.
“Silence, please.”
As he reached the bottom, James flinched as two men stepped out of shadow to wrap a purple cape around him. The two men wore horrid gargoyle masks obscuring their faces. Judging by their height, they were either sixth form or adults.
“I don’t like this. I’d like to go back.”
“There is no going back.”
James was encouraged lower through the narrow stairway. Torches burned. He turned to the right and entered into a large space with earthen walls encrusted with enormous tree roots. There was a ceremonial altar behind which stood three figures, the center of whom wore a red gargoyle mask the color of old blood. Torches stuck out from the dirt walls, illuminating the space in a flickering dance of shadows.
On a stand in front of the three was a large leather volume that he knew had to be his family Bible.
James sucked for air.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, twenty or more figures surrounded the room, all in full costume.
“James Keynes Moriarty!” thundered the central figure. “You will bow before this tribunal and, on this day, the twenty-first day of September, the autumnal equinox, be presented with the rules and requirements to be initiated as a journeyman in the Fellowship of Scowerers, like your father and his father before him.”
James was led to face the three. He was moved by the raven onto one knee and his head was pushed down to bow in submission. He shook with fear.
“In two days you will be offered the opportunity, one time and one time only, to have your name inscribed into this Bible. Tonight, you will be schooled by the fellowship as to our ways, though not our secrets. Those will only be revealed if and when you say the words.” The voice from the red mask sounded deep and rich and, somehow, vaguely familiar. Crudgeon? he wondered. “You may refuse us at any time in the next several hours. So be it. You will remember nothing of this. We will see to that.”
“Like Moria!”
“Silence! Your friend upstairs and you will know nothing of this place. For you both, the clues will stop at the sundial. Only then, if you’re lucky. You will be forever puzzled by what they may have meant.”
James lifted his head slightly. The Bible was only a yard away. He looked down at his gloved hands.
This moment was what Father had seen coming. The clues had led Father just as they had led James. Father had lost his chance at whatever he’d needed more time for. James knew it had something to do with this place, and these men and this Bible. He would not leave his father’s death without more answers.
“I accept.”
CHAPTER 41
IN AN UNEXPLAINED HURRY
WHILE THE STUDENT BODY’S ATTENTION WAS on Headmaster Crudgeon and Mrs. Furman at the front of Hard Auditorium, I took a moment to search faces, hoping I might see Sherlock in disguise.
“Quiet please!” Mrs. Furman clapped three times sharply, reminding me of elementary school. The audience went silent.
“Students!” Headmaster Crudgeon called out in a voice that barely needed the microphone he held. “It is my pleasure to announce that the Moriarty family Bible has been found and therefore mandatory study hall for all forms is hereby suspended!”
A roar went up that may have cracked the building’s foundation. I hadn’t found a single face that might be Sherlock. For me, there was nothing to cheer about. Natalie, who was sitting next to me, looked at me with sympathy in her eyes, believing my lack of enthusiasm was a carry-over from my internment in the infirmary.
Crudgeon raised his hand. Mrs. Furman took one step forward and the place went as quiet as if we’d all been slapped in the face.
“You may be pleased to know you have the efforts of one particular student to thank for the Bible’s recovery.”
I felt a sudden heat flood through me, pride and gratitude that Headmaster would single out Sherlock despite his suspension. That, I realized, was why I couldn’t see him anywhere. No doubt Crudgeon had commuted his suspension and had him waiting in the wings of the stage to come out and receive the recognition he so deserved. Things actually did work out in the end, I thought. For the first time in what see
med like a long time the sting of Father’s death lessened, if only a fraction.
“James, would you please stand up,” Crudgeon said.
Sitting in the second row, my brother came to his feet, basking in the outrageous volume of cheers and applause that erupted. Kids thundered their feet on the floor, turning the entire auditorium into a kettle drum. James waved like the queen of England.
We met eyes, he and I, and I felt a pain in my gut as if I’d been stabbed. It was as if his eyes had turned into black cinders. My brother was gone; I didn’t know this boy.
I couldn’t take it. I hunched and moved past knees and reached the aisle and, as the student body rose to its feet in adulation for my brother, I fled the auditorium.
Mistress Grace followed me out and caught up to me.
“Moria, dear, whatever is the matter? Are you not feeling well? Should we get you back to the infirmary?”
“No . . . no. Thank you, though.” I tried to think of a plausible explanation for my departure. “I was claustrophobic, that’s all.”
“We need to get you to the infirmary, dear. We’re going now, before the students are released. Off we go.”
“Really, I’m fine!”
“It’s not up for discussion.” She took me by the arm. I considered resisting but she was acting so strange—so buddy-buddy—that I didn’t have the heart.
Adding to the oddity, laidback Mistress Grace was in a hurry. And it wasn’t just her physical movement; she embraced me with an urgency that put me on edge. I didn’t need guiding; I knew how to reach the infirmary.
We scurried across the back lawn toward McAndrews Science Hall and rode an elevator to the third floor.
“You go into room 4, dear. I’ll let the nurse know we’re here.”
Tired and upset, I was more than happy to follow her instructions. I had little desire, but perhaps great need for rest.
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