by Lev Grossman
That night Plum ate her first course as usual, two rather uninspired crab cakes, skipping the wine, as she usually did, then excused herself to go to the ladies’. As Plum passed behind her Darcy discreetly held out the silver pencil case behind her back, and Plum pocketed it. She wasn’t going to the ladies’, of course. Well, she was, but only because she had to. She wouldn’t be going back after.
Plum walked briskly through the empty House to the Senior Common Room, which the faculty rarely bothered to lock, so confident were they that no student would dare to cross its threshold unchaperoned. But Plum dared.
The Senior Common Room was a cavernous, silent, L-shaped chamber lined with bookcases and littered with shiny red-leather couches and chairs. It was empty, or almost. The only person there was Professor Coldwater, and she wasn’t worried about him. She figured he might be there. Most of the faculty were at dinner, but according to the roster it was his turn to eat late, with the First Years.
He was an odd one, Professor Coldwater. Young for a professor. Kept to himself—you rarely saw him outside the classroom. He was new, and opinion about him was divided as to whether he was a genius or a bit insane or both. He had a cult following among the students: his lectures were peppered with exotic magicks and bravura demonstrations, or so the legends went. Plum had never seen one—she was way past Minor Mendings.
The other professors didn’t seem that wild about him. He was constantly getting handed the crap jobs that nobody else wanted, like eating with the First Years. He didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he just didn’t notice. She got the impression he had something else going on, something that was part of a larger frame of reference than the changeless yet ephemeral world of Brakebills. He was always hurrying in and out of the library with thick books under his arms, mumbling to himself like he was doing math problems in his head.
That was one of the reasons she wasn’t too worried about his catching her in the Senior Common Room. Even if he did notice her he probably wouldn’t care enough to write her up; more likely he would just kick her out. Either way: totally worth it.
Right now Professor Coldwater was at the far end of the room with his back to her. He was tall and skinny and stood bolt upright, with his weird white hair, a wineglass forgotten in his hand, staring into the fire. Plum breathed a silent prayer to whatever saint it was who watched over absent-minded professors and made sure their minds stayed absent. She cut swiftly through the right angle of the L into its shorter arm where he couldn’t see her.
Because it was time for the grand reveal. Toward the end of dinner, when Wharton was ready to bring out the dessert wines, he would retreat to the wine closet, which wasn’t so much a closet as a room the size of a studio apartment. To his shock he would find Plum already in possession of same, having entered it on the sly through a secret back passage from the Senior Common Room. Fait accompli. Then she would present the League’s demands, and he would capitulate to every single one of them.
It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work she’d find some normal, less dramatic way to corner him.
She looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt by the wainscoting. She took a deep breath. Third panel from the left. Hmm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it or not. Well, she’d try it both ways. She traced a word in Old English with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, and meanwhile clearing her mind of everything but the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot-buttered toast point.
Lemon squeezy. She felt the locking spell release even before it happened: the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges.
Annoyingly though, the passage had been sealed. Ten feet in it ended in a brick wall, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to form a design that Plum recognized as an absolutely brutal hardening charm—just a charm, yes, but a massively powerful one. Not undergraduate stuff. Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent some time on it too. Plum pursed her lips and snorted out through her nose.
Crouching down, she stepped into the passage and pulled the little door shut behind her. She snapped on a simple light spell, a friendly glowy will-o’-the-wisp. Then she stared at the brick wall for five minutes, in the dimness of the little passageway, lost to the world in an analytical trance. In her mind the pattern in the bricks floated free and hung before her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining. Mentally she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it from the inside with cognitive fingers, feeling for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances.
There must be something. Come on, Plum: it’s easier to break magic than to make it. You know this. Whoever drew this seal was smart. But was she smarter than Plum?
There was something odd about the angles. The essence of a glyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the underlying topology—you could deform it a good deal and not lose the power as long as its essential geometric properties remained intact. The angles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary.
But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny. They were sharper than they needed to be. They were nonarbitrary. There was a pattern to them, a pattern within the pattern: 17 degrees, 3 degrees. Seventeen and three. Two of them here, two of them there, the only angles that appeared twice.
When she saw it she snorted again. It was a code. A moronically simple alphabetical code. Seventeen and three. Q and C. Quentin Coldwater.
It was a signature of sorts, a watermark. A Coldwatermark. Professor Coldwater had set this seal, and when she saw that, she saw it all. He’d wanted a weak spot, a back door in case he needed to undo it later. His vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern. She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one particular brick. She ran it all the way around the edge, then she knocked on the brick with her knuckles: shave and a haircut. Free and loose, it pushed out cleanly: clunk. Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart.
Why would he have sealed it up? And why him in particular—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush. She could always ask him, he was standing about twenty yards away. Or she could get on with what she was here for. It was chilly in the passageway, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room. The walls were unfinished boards over very old stone.
Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Common Room to the back of the wine closet, but she’d only gone half that distance before she came to a door, fortunately unlocked and unsealed. More passage, then another door. Like she was going through a series of airlocks. Weird. You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years.
The fifth door opened onto open air. That was very odd. It was a pretty little square courtyard that she’d never seen before, maybe twenty yards on a side. Mostly grass, with one tree, a pear tree, espaliered against a high stone wall. She’d always found espaliers a little creepy. It was like somebody had crucified the poor thing.
Also she was almost positive that there shouldn’t have been a moon tonight.
“Nutso,” Plum said quietly. She frowned at it. The moon looked back at her blankly, pretending not to care. She hurried across the courtyard to the next door.
It opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library. That definitely wasn’t right; she was traversing some magically noncontiguous spaces here. The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which to be honest she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought t
here were any actual books up there.
In fact now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those tiny houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees; she felt like Alice in Wonderland, grown too big. The books looked real enough though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold. Some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.
The other weird thing was that they weren’t quite inanimate: they poked themselves out at her from the shelves, butted her as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs pretty hard. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this is like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.
No, thank you. If she wished to consult them she would be in touch via the usual channels. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the far end of the balcony—it was practically a cat-door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking longer than she thought.
But it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.
This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact it was one—as near as she could tell she was inside one of the walls of Brakebills. On the other side was the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clank of heavy silverware, and she could look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. In fact they were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary, and the sight of it made her hungry. She felt like she was a million miles away from everyone and everything she knew. She was a ghost herself, the skeleton at the feast, the world in the walls. She already felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for back when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.
And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. She was going to get through this. For the League.
Though God, how long was it going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof. The night air was bone cold. She hadn’t been up here since the time Professor Sunderland had turned them into geese and they’d flown down to Antarctica to study at Brakebills South. It was lonely and quiet after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees. The roof was so sharply raked she had to crawl again, and the shingles were gritty under her palms. She could see the Hudson River off in the distance, a long sinuous leaden squiggle. She shivered just looking at it.
And for the record: no moon. It was gone, back to its proper place.
Which way? She was losing the thread. After a long cold think, resulting in no definitive conclusions, Plum just jimmied the lock on the nearest dormer window and let herself in.
She was in a student’s room. Actually if she had to she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though she’d never seen it.
“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”
What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. Somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was fucking with her.
The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She half suspected she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! That would actually be kind of cool.
This would have been a reasonable moment to bail, exit the vehicle and slink back to the dining hall. But no: that would mean giving up, going back, and that wasn’t Plum. She went forward, always forward, never look back. Eye of the tiger. She had a job to do, a mission for the League, of which she was the God damned chief executive officer.
So she wasn’t going to fight against the dream-logic, she was going to steer into the skid and see where it took her. Onward and downward.
To leave by the front door, she knew instinctively, would have been to break the dream-spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a small door at the back of it. Turning to take a final look around she couldn’t help but notice, by the by, on his desk, a fresh box of those pencils. He’d already got replacements. Why exactly had they thought those were the only ones? He probably had truckloads of them. She opened the door in the closet and stooped through.
—
From here on out her travels ran entirely on dream-rails. The door took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. The spaces were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as the spatial kind. In fact it was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye-sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.
She watched herself leave the courtyard. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself and turn around, and the timeline would be permanently busted and altered, or if this was more of a two-way mirror deal. Maybe she could tip herself off—have the shrimp fra diavolo instead of the crab cakes!
She frowned. The causality of it was tangled. Though this much at least was clear: those boots had had a good run but it was time for them to go. On the upside, if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.
The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, though at first the difference was hard to put your finger on. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. The light was fire- and candlelight. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge four-poster bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long straight hair and bad teeth.
Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago, Revolutionary-era Brakebills. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only briefly, incuriously, as she passed, then went back to talking. No question what they were up to.
“Another League,” Plum said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”
She was still savoring the satisfaction of it when she opened the next door into a room she didn’t recognize at all. Until she did.
She tried to back out, but the door had locked behind her. It wasn’t even a room at all but a rough round rock-walled cave, where a group of strangers were playing out the bloody last act of some byzantine Renaissance tragedy. Two boys were on the ground, facedown, shivering as their precious blood turned the sand around them to dark muck.
“Oh, fuck,” Plum whispered. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
She plastered herself back against the wall. She had never seen real wounds before. Five more girls and boys were standing around in various states of shock and distress and anger. One girl had a gun; the others were focusing all their magical strength on a man in a gray suit. Crazy harsh enchanted energies streamed out of them and crackled through the air and assaulted the man, with hardly any effect other than to flap his lapels.
He looked vaguely familiar. And there was something wrong with his hands.
In the corner, in a heap, lay a huge woolly carcass with one thick curling knobby horn visible. Oh, God. The scene was starting to clarify itself to her, to take on a horrible meaning even over and above the obvious. That ram had to be Ember, one of the twin gods of Fillor
y. And the man in the suit, she did recognize him—she didn’t, but she did. His round, pasty face had the unmistakable stamp of a Chatwin. This was some ancestor of hers, and she was in Fillory, and it was all real, all of it.
But it wasn’t Fillory, not like in the books. It was a sick nightmare Fillory. The room flashed and flared with dangerous light. Rocks rained down on the man in the suit. The air smelled like cordite. She couldn’t be here. She was going to go insane. Whatever it was that had chewed up her ancestors and spit them out had found her. It was here in this room with her. It was the room.
“No,” she breathed. “Oh God, no! God no!”
She tried the door again just because it had to open, it had to, she couldn’t be here! And now it did. It had mercy on her. Effortlessly, no resistance—it even opened out where before it had opened in. She half ran, half fell through it and slammed it behind her, and everything was quiet again. She was in a silent room, a safe room: the familiar homely little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.
Oh God. Oh, thank God. It was over.
She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. A dry sob. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. None of it. Or it was real but it was over. She almost laughed. She didn’t care either way as long as she was safe now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep here after the meeting last night and it was all a dream. Whatever, this whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going forward either. She would stay in this stupid little windowless room with its crap carpet forever if necessary. She loved it. It was the most beautiful room she’d ever seen.
