Ninth House

⁴ Last Fall

“Come on,” Darlington said, helping her to her feet. “The illusion will break any minute and you’ll be lying in the front yard like a noon drinker.” He half-dragged her up the stairs to the porch. She’d handled the jackals well enough, but her color wasn’t good and she was breathing hard. “You’re in terrible shape.”

“And you’re an asshole.”

“Then we both have hardships to overcome. You asked me to tell you what you were getting into. Now you know.”

She yanked her arm away. “Tell me. Not try to kill me.”

He looked at her steadily. It was important she understand. “You were never in any danger. But I can’t promise that will always be the case. If you don’t take this seriously, you could get yourself or someone else hurt.”

“Someone like you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Most of the time nothing too bad happens at the Houses. You’ll see things you’d like to forget. Miracles too. But no one completely understands what lies beyond the Veil or what might happen if it crosses over. Death waits on black wings and we stand hoplite, hussar, dragoon.”

She placed her hands on her thighs and peered up at him. “You make that up?”

“Cabot Collins. They called him the Poet of Lethe.” Darlington reached for the door. “He lost both his hands when an interdimensional portal closed on them. He was reciting his latest work at the time.”

Alex shuddered. “Okay, I get it. Bad poetry, serious business. Are those dogs real?”

“Real enough. They’re spirit hounds, bound to serve the sons and daughters of Lethe. Why the long sleeves, Stern?”

“Track marks.”

“Really?” He’d suspected that might be the issue, but he didn’t quite believe her.

She straightened and cracked her back. “Sure. Are we going in or not?”

He bobbed his chin toward her wrist. “Show me.”

Alex lifted her arm, but she didn’t shove her sleeve back. She just held it out to him, like he was going to tap a vein for a blood drive.

A challenge. One that he suddenly didn’t want to accept. It was none of his business. He should say that. Let it go.

Instead, he took hold of her wrist. The bones were narrow, sharp in his hand. With his other hand he pushed the fabric of her shirt up the slope of her forearm. It felt like a prelude.

No needle punctures. Her skin was covered in tattoos: the curling tail of a rattlesnake, the sunburst bloom of a peony, and…

“The Wheel.” He resisted the urge to touch his thumb to the image below the crook of her elbow. Dawes would be interested in that bit of tarot. Maybe it would give them something to talk about. “Why hide tattoos? No one cares about that here.” Half the student body had them. Not many had full sleeves, but they weren’t unheard of.

Alex yanked her cuff back down. “Any other hoops to jump through?”

“Plenty.” He pulled open the door and led her inside.

The entry was dark and cool, the stained glass throwing bright patterns onto the carpeted floor. Before them, the great staircase wound along the wall to the second story, dark wood carved in a thick sunflower motif. Michelle had told him the staircase alone was worth more than the rest of the house and the land it was built on.

Alex released a small sigh.

“Glad to be out of the sun?”

She made a soft humming noise. “It’s quiet here.”

It took him a moment to understand what she meant. “Il Bastone is warded. As are the rooms at the Hutch…. It’s that bad?”

Alex shrugged.

“Well… they can’t get to you here.”

Alex looked around, her face impassive. Was she unimpressed by the soaring entry, the warm wood and stained glass, the scent of pine and cassis that always made stepping into the house feel a bit like Christmas? Or was she just trying to seem that way?

“Nice clubhouse,” she said. “Not very tomblike.”

“We’re not a society and we don’t run like one. This isn’t a clubhouse; it’s our headquarters, the heart of Lethe, and the storehouse of hundreds of years of knowledge on the occult.” He knew he sounded like a horrible prig but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “The societies tap a new delegation of seniors every year, sixteen members—eight women, eight men. We tap a single new Dante—one freshman every three years.”

“Guess that makes me pretty special.”

“Let’s hope so.”

Alex frowned at that, then nodded at the marble bust propped on a table beneath the coat rack. “Who’s that?”

“The patron saint of Lethe, Hiram Bingham the Third.” Unfortunately, Bingham’s boyish features and downturned mouth didn’t lend themselves to immortalization in stone. He looked like a perturbed department store mannequin.

Dawes shuffled out of the parlor, her hands curled into the sleeves of her voluminous sweatshirt, her headphones snug around her neck, a vision in beige. Darlington could feel the discomfort radiating off her. Pammie hated new people. It had taken him the better part of his freshman year to win her over, and he still always had the sense that she might be one loud noise away from bolting into the library, never to be seen again.

“Pamela Dawes, meet our new Dante, Alex Stern.”

With all the enthusiasm of someone greeting a cholera outbreak, Dawes offered her hand and said, “Welcome to Lethe.”

“Dawes keeps everything running and ensures I don’t make too big a fool of myself.”

“So it’s a full-time job?” asked Alex.

Dawes blinked. “Evenings and afternoons, but I can make myself available to you with enough notice.” She glanced back at the parlor worriedly, as if her long-unfinished dissertation was a baby crying. Dawes had served as Oculus for nearly four years and she’d been hammering away on her dissertation—an examination of Mycenaean cult practices in early tarot iconography—all the while.

Darlington decided to put her out of her misery. “I’m giving Alex the tour and then I’ll take her across campus to the Hutch.”

“The Hutch?” asked Alex.

“Rooms we keep at the corner of York and Elm. It’s not much, but it’s convenient when you don’t want to trek too far from your dorm. And it’s warded too.”

“It’s stocked,” Dawes said faintly, already scooting back into the parlor and safety.

Darlington gestured for Alex to follow him upstairs.

“Who was Bathsheba Smith?” Alex asked on his heels.

Then she had been reading her Life of Lethe. He was pleased she remembered the name, but, if memory served, Bathsheba appeared on the first page of the first chapter, so he wasn’t going to get too excited. “The seventeen-year-old daughter of a local farmer. Her body was found in the basement of the Yale Medical School in 1824. She’d been dug up for study by the students.”

“Jesus.”

“It wasn’t uncommon. Doctors needed to study anatomy and they needed cadavers to do that. But we think Bathsheba was an early attempt to communicate with the dead. A medical assistant took the fall, and Yale’s students learned to keep their activities more quiet. After the discovery of the girl’s body, the locals nearly burned Yale to the ground.”

“Maybe they should have,” murmured Alex.

Maybe. They’d called it the Resurrection Riot, but it hadn’t turned truly nasty. Boom or bust, New Haven was a town forever on the brink of things.

Darlington toured Alex around the rest of Il Bastone: the grand parlor, with the old map of New Haven above the fireplace; the kitchen and pantry; the downstairs training rooms; and the second-floor armory, with its wall of apothecary drawers, all of them stocked with herbs and sacred objects.

It was left to Dawes to make sure they were kept well supplied, that any perishable items were freshened or disposed of before they turned foul, and to maintain any artifacts that required it. Cuthbert’s Pearls of Protection had to be worn for a few hours every month or they lost both their luster and their power to protect the wearer from lightning strikes. A Lethe alum named Lee De Forest, who had once been suspended as an undergrad for causing a campus-wide blackout, had left Lethe with countless inventions, including the Revolution Clock, which showed an accurate-to-the-minute countdown to armed revolt in countries around the globe. It had twenty-two faces and seventy-six hands and had to be wound regularly or it would simply begin screaming.

Darlington pointed out the stores of bone dust and graveyard dirt, with which they would provision themselves on Thursday nights, and the rare vials of Perdition Water, said to come from the seven rivers of hell and that were to be used only in case of emergency. Darlington had never had cause to tap into any of them, but he kept hoping.

At the center of the room sat Hiram’s Crucible, or, as the delegates of Lethe liked to call it, “the Golden Bowl.” It was the circumference of a tractor wheel and made of beaten twenty-two-karat gold.

“For years, Lethe knew there were ghosts in New Haven. There were hauntings, rumors of sightings, and some of the societies had managed to pierce the Veil through séances and summonings. But Lethe knew there was more, a secret world operating beside ours and frequently interfering with it.”

“Interfering with it how?” Alex asked, and he could see the narrow line of her shoulders tighten, that slightly hunched fighter’s stance.

“At the time, no one was sure. They suspected that the presence of Grays in sacred circles and temple halls was disrupting the spells and rituals of the societies. There were signs that stray magic loosed from rituals by the interference of Grays could cause anything from a sudden frost ten miles away to violent outbursts in schoolchildren. But Lethe had no proof and no way to prevent it. Year after year they attempted to perfect an elixir that would allow them to see spirits, experimenting on themselves through sometimes-deadly trial and error. Still, they had nothing to show for their work. Until Hiram’s Crucible.”

Alex ran her finger against the gilded edge of the basin. “It looks like a sun.”

“Many of the structures in Machu Picchu were dedicated to the worship of the sun god.”

“This thing came from Peru?” Alex asked. “You don’t need to look so surprised. I know where Machu Picchu is. I can even find Texas on a map if you give me enough time.”

“You’ll have to forgive my lack of familiarity with the curriculum of the Los Angeles School District or your interest in same.”

“Forgiven.”

Maybe, thought Darlington. But Alex Stern looked like the type to hold a grudge.

“Hiram Bingham was one of the founding members of Lethe. He ‘discovered’ Machu Picchu in 1911, though that word tends to ruffle feathers, since the locals were perfectly aware of its existence.” When Alex said nothing, he added, “He was also rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones.”

“Nice,” said Alex.

Darlington held back a sigh. Of course that would be what got her attention. “Bingham stole about forty thousand artifacts.”

“And brought them back here?”

“Yes, to Yale, to be studied at the Peabody. He said they would be returned after eighteen months. It took literally one hundred years for Peru to get them back.”

Alex flicked her finger against the crucible and it emitted a low hum. “They forget this in the return shipment? It seems pretty hard to miss.”

“The crucible was never documented because it was never given to Yale. It was brought to Lethe.”

“Stolen goods.”

“Very much so, I’m afraid. But it’s the key to the Orozcerio. The problem with Lethe’s elixir wasn’t the recipe; it was the vessel.”

“So it’s a magical mixing bowl?”

Such a little heathen. “I might not put it that way, but yes.” “And it’s gold all the way through?”

“Before you think about trying to run off with it, keep in mind that it weighs twice as much as you do and that the whole house is warded against theft.”

“If you say so.”

With his luck she’d find a way to roll the crucible down the stairs into the back of a truck and melt it down for earrings.

“The elixir has plenty of other names besides Orozcerio,” he said. “The Golden Trial. Hiram’s Bullet. Every time a member of Lethe drinks it, every time the crucible is used, he takes his life in his hands. The mixture is toxic and the process incredibly painful. But we do it. Again and again. For a glimpse behind the Veil.”

“I get it,” said Alex. “I’ve met users before.”

It isn’t like that, he wanted to protest. But maybe it was.

The rest of the tour was uneventful. Darlington showed her the storage and research rooms in the upper stories, how to use the library—though he warned her not to use it on her own until the house got to know her—and finally the bedroom and adjoining bath, tidied and readied for her as Lethe’s new Dante. He’d moved his own things to Virgil’s suite at the end of last year, back when he’d still believed he’d have a proper protégé. He’d felt embarrassingly sentimental about it all. Virgil’s quarters were a floor above Dante’s and twice as large. When he graduated, they would be left empty so that they would be available to him if he chose to visit. The vanity had belonged to Eleazar Wheelock. Half of the wall facing the bed was taken up by a stained-glass window depicting a hemlock wood, positioned so that as the sun rose and set throughout the day, the colors of the glass trees and the sky above it seemed to change as well. When he’d moved in, he discovered that Michelle had left him a bottle of brandy and a note on her last visit:

He’d always thought Longfellow was tripe, but he’d treasured the note and the brandy anyway.

Now he watched Alex sweating amid the luxury of his old rooms, rooms that had been rarely used but much beloved—the dark blue walls, the canopied bed with its heavy teal covers, the armoire painted with white dogwood. The stained glass here was more modest, two elegant windows—clouds in shades of blue and violet set atop starry skies—bracketing a fireplace of painted tiles.

Alex stood at the center of it all, her arms wrapped around her middle, turning slowly. He thought again of Undine. But maybe she was just a girl lost at sea.

He had to ask. “When did you first see them?”

She glanced at him, then at the window above her, the moon waxing forever in a stained-glass sky. She picked up the Reuge music box from the desk, touched her finger to the lid, but then thought better of it, set it down.

Darlington was a good talker, but he was happiest when no one was speaking to him, when he didn’t have to perform the ritual of himself and he could simply be left to watch others. Alex had a grainy quality to her, like an old film. He could tell she was making a choice. Whether to reveal her secrets? Whether to run?

She shrugged and he thought she would leave it at that, but then she picked up the music box again and said, “I don’t know. I thought they were people for a while, and it’s not like anyone pays attention to a kid talking to no one. I remember seeing a fat guy in nothing but socks and undershorts, holding a remote control in one hand like a teddy bear and standing in the middle of the street. I remember trying to tell my mom he was going to get hurt. On our trip to the Santa Monica Pier, I saw a woman lying in the water like a picture of…” She gestured as if stirring a pot. “With her hair and the flowers?”

“Ophelia.”

“Ophelia. She followed me home, and when I cried and shouted at her to leave, she just tried to push closer.”

“They like tears. The salt, the sadness, any strong emotion.” “Fear?” she asked. She was so still, as if she were posing for a portrait.

“Fear.” Few Grays were malevolent, but they did love to startle and terrify.

“Why aren’t there more of them? Shouldn’t they be everywhere?”

“Only a few Grays can pass through the Veil. The vast majority remain in the afterlife.”

“I’d see them at the supermarket, around the hot-foods case or those pink bakery boxes. They loved our school cafeteria. I didn’t think about it much until Jacob Craig asked if I wanted to see his thing. I told him I’d seen plenty of them, and somehow it got back to his mom, and she called the school. So the teacher brings me in and asks, ‘What do you mean you’ve seen lots of things?’ I didn’t know to lie.” She plunked the music box down. “If you want to get Child Protective Services called fast, just start talking about ghost dick.”

Darlington wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A dead highwayman lurking romantically at the window? A banshee roaming the banks of the Los Angeles River like La Llorona? There was something so ordinary and awful about her story. About her. Someone had reported Alex’s case to CPS, and one of Lethe’s search algorithms or one of their many contacts in one of the many bureaus that they paid off had caught mention of those notable key words: Delusions. Paranoia. Ghosts. From that point on, she’d probably been watched. “And that night in the apartment on Cedros?”

She frowned and then said, “Oh, you mean Ground Zero. Don’t tell me you haven’t read the file.”

“I have. I want to know how you survived.”

Alex rubbed her thumb over the edge of the windowsill. “So do I.”

Was that enough? Darlington had seen the crime-scene photos, video taken by officers arriving on scene. Five men dead, all of them beaten nearly unrecognizable, two of them staked through the heart like vampires. Despite the carnage, blood spatter indicated it was all the work of one perpetrator—arcs of red, every vicious blow struck from left to right.

Something was off about the whole thing, but Alex was never a suspect. For one thing, she was right-handed, and for another, she was far too small to have wielded a weapon with so much force. Besides, she had enough fentanyl in her system that she was lucky she hadn’t died herself. Her hair had been wet and she’d been found naked as a newborn. Darlington had dug a little deeper, unable to shake his suspicions, but there had been no blood or remains in the drain—if she’d somehow been involved, she hadn’t showered the proof away. So why had the attacker left the girls alone? If the police were right and this was some kind of beef with another dealer, why spare Alex and her friend? Drug dealers who beat people to death with bats didn’t seem like the spare-the-women-and-children type. Maybe the attacker had believed they were dead already from the drugs. Or maybe Alex had tipped someone off. But she knew something more about what had happened than she’d told the police. He felt it in his bones.

“Hellie and I got high,” she said quietly, still brushing her finger against the windowsill. “I woke up in the hospital. She didn’t wake up at all.”

She looked very small suddenly and Darlington felt a stab of shame. She was twenty, older than most freshmen, but she was still just a kid in a lot of ways, in over her head. And she’d lost friends that night, her boyfriend, everything familiar.

“Come with me,” he said. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he felt guilty for prying. Maybe because she didn’t deserve to be punished for saying yes to a bargain no right-minded person would refuse.

He led her back to the gloom of the armory. It had no windows, and its walls were lined in shelves and drawers nearly two stories high. It took him a moment to find the cupboard he wanted. When he rested his hand on the door, the house paused, then let the lock give with a disapproving click.

Carefully, he removed the box—heavy, gleaming black wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“You’ll probably need to remove your shirt,” he said. “I’ll give Dawes the box and she can—”

“Dawes doesn’t like me.”

“Dawes doesn’t like anyone.”

“Here,” she said. She pulled the shirt over her head, revealing a black bra and ribs shadowed like the furrows of a tilled field. “Don’t get Dawes.”

Why was she so willing to put herself in his hands? Was she unafraid or just reckless? Neither trait boded well for her future at Lethe. But he had the sense that it was neither of those things. It felt like she was testing him now, like she’d laid down another challenge.

“Some propriety wouldn’t kill you,” he said.

“Why take the chance?”

“Usually when a woman takes her clothes off in front of me I have some warning.”

Alex shrugged, and the shadows moved over her skin. “Next time, I’ll light the signal fires.”

“That would be best.”

Tattoos covered her from wrist to shoulder and spread beneath her clavicles. They looked like armor.

He opened the box’s lid.

Alex drew in a sudden breath and skittered backward.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. She’d retreated nearly halfway across the room.

“I don’t like butterflies.”

“They’re moths.” They perched in even rows in the box, soft white wings fluttering.

“Whatever.”

“I’ll need you to stay still,” he said. “Can you?”

“Why?”

“Just trust me. It will be worth it.” He considered. “If it’s not, I’ll drive you and your roommates to Ikea.”

Alex balled her shirt in her fists. “And take us for pizza after.”

“Fine.”

“And dear Aunt Eileen is going to buy me some new fall clothes.”

“Fine. Now come here, you coward.”

She crossed back to him in a kind of sideways shuffle, averting her eyes from the contents of the box.

One by one, he took out the moths and laid them gently on her skin. One at her right wrist, her right forearm, the crook of her elbow, her slender biceps, the knob of her shoulder. He repeated the process with her left arm, then placed two moths at the points of her collarbones where the heads of two black snakes curled, their tongues nearly meeting at the hollow of her throat.

“Chabash,” he murmured. The moths beat their wings in unison. “Uverat.” They flapped their wings again and began to turn gray. “Memash.”

With each beat of their wings, the moths grew darker and the tattoos started to fade.

Alex’s chest rose and fell in jagged, rapid bursts. Her eyes were wide with fear, but as the moths darkened and the ink vanished from her skin, her expression changed, opened. Her lips parted.

She’s seen the dead, he thought. She’s witnessed horrors. But she’s never seen magic.

This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.

The moths beat their wings again, again, until they were black, then blacker. One by one they tipped from her arms and dropped to the floor in a faint patter. Alex’s arms were bare, stripped of all sign of the tattoos, though in places where the needle had gone deep, he could still discern faint ridges. Alex held her arms out, breath coming in gasps.

Darlington gathered the moths’ fragile bodies, placing them gently in the box.

“Are they dead?” she whispered.

“Ink drunk.” He shut the lid and placed the box back in the cupboard. This time the lock’s click seemed more resigned. He and the house were going to have to have a discussion. “Address moths were originally used for transporting classified material. Once they drank a document, they could be sent anywhere in a coat pocket or a box of antiques. Then they’d be placed on a fresh sheet of paper and would recreate the document to the word. As long as the recipient knew the right incantation.”

“So we could put my tattoos on you?”

“They might not fit quite right, but we could. Just be careful…” He waved a hand. “In the throes. Human saliva reverses the magic.”

“Only human?”

“Yes. Feel free to let a dog lick your elbows.”

Then she turned her gaze on him. In the shadows of the room, her eyes looked black, wild. “Is there more?”

He didn’t have to ask what she meant. Would the world keep unraveling? Keep spilling its secrets?

“Yes. There’s plenty more.”

She hesitated. “Will you show me?”

“If you let me.”

Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.

Months later, he would remember the weight of the moths’ bodies in his palm. He would think of that moment and how foolish he had been to think he knew her at all.