The Descent

SIX

“It was a dream. Just a dream.”

Adair meant to be reassuring. I knew that he wanted me to blink my eyes and see that I was in his study and not the horrible dungeon of my dreams; to catch my breath and say with an embarrassed chuckle, “Oh, you’re right of course. I see that now.” But I didn’t.

I didn’t need him to tell me it had been a dream. I knew I was awake now and on the other side. However, wisps of the dream were still trapped in my head, making it hard to separate nightmare from reality. I could still see the demon’s rippling red haunches and shoulders, as well as the golden eyes that had sized me up with such calculation. I could still smell the monster’s ashy, earthen odor.

“It was more than a dream. I know it.” I shuddered against the memory.

He didn’t release me. Instead, he started to rub my back as you might to console a child. “It was a bad dream, I’ll give you that. You had me worried . . . you were making horrible noises in your sleep. I thought you were choking. I tried to wake you up, but it was as though you were in a trance. I called your name and I even shook you, but you didn’t respond.”

“That’s what I mean—if it had been a regular dream, you should’ve been able to wake me. Something’s going on, I can feel it.” I let him hold me for a long moment and buried my face against his chest, breathing in his once familiar scent.

After I’d had a minute to gather my wits, Adair gently pulled me to my feet. “We’ve been cooped up in here too long. We should get out of the room for a while. Clear our thoughts. I think the girls have made lunch. There’s something delicious in the air, mushroom soup, perhaps? Why don’t we see what they’re up to?” He was trying to take my mind off my fright, and was probably right about our needing a change of scene: I couldn’t hide in the study forever.

We followed the aroma down to the cavernous kitchen, where the two girls were huddled over a huge stockpot on the stove. They lifted their heads when we entered.

“Ah, look who’s here. Come to join us?” Terry asked, stepping to the worktable. She wiped her hands on her apron before taking up a massive chef’s knife to mince parsley.

“Still among the living, are you? We thought maybe you’d died in there.” Robin’s rejoinder fell flat, like the taunt of an insecure young child.

“We’re catching up on old times,” Adair said. A wooden bowl held slices of rustic homemade bread. He fished one out.

“If you can bear to come up for air, you are welcome to join us for lunch,” Terry said briskly as she scooped up a handful of parsley and dropped it into the pot. “It’s just about ready.”

“It smells heavenly,” I offered, and then I thought of Adair’s description of the hallucinogenic meal the witch sisters had made for him and wondered where the mushrooms had come from, if they could’ve been gathered on the mystical island.

Robin danced up to me, and said, “I was about to go down to the wine cellar to get something to go with lunch. We’ve nothing suitable up here. Do you want to come with me? It’s quite impressive. I’ve never seen so many bottles in one place at one time before, except at a grocer’s.”

I’d been into the labyrinth belowstairs only once, the morning when I’d gotten hopelessly lost, and had resolved not to venture down again, but there didn’t seem to be any danger in going with Robin. “All right,” I said. “I’d like to make myself useful.”

She took me through a nondescript door at the rear of the kitchen, which opened onto a long set of stone steps descending into darkness. Robin didn’t seem intimidated by the cellar in the least; she knew where all the light pulls were, and what’s more, she kept up a stream of chatter as she led the way deeper and deeper under the fortress. The plaster walls eventually gave way to brick, and then stone. It felt as though we’d burrowed straight down toward the center of the earth, a strangely far distance from the living quarters for a wine cellar, but perhaps necessary due to the vicissitudes of the rock and creeping seawater. The halls here were very dark, with few overhead lights. I was starting to wish that she’d brought a flashlight.

“This way,” she said cheerily as we entered a very narrow hall. I was seized by a sudden feeling of claustrophobia, as though the walls were starting to press in on me. Then we passed a door that seemed familiar, though I knew I hadn’t been this way before. I stopped to take a closer look, letting Robin go on ahead. The door was old and scarred, gouged by something very sharp by the look of it. I put a hand to the wood and it swung open, as though whatever was inside had been waiting for me.

I groped along the wall for a light switch, but there was none. The light from the hall, dim as it was, was sufficient; as I looked around, I again felt a sense of déjà vu. It was then I realized that the floor underfoot was packed dirt, smooth from disuse. And the walls were stone, made of very large, precisely cut blocks. In a flash, I knew it was the room from my dreams.

I wanted to scream but it was as though I was back in my nocturnal prison and I couldn’t, my voice trapped in my throat. I turned to the door and it suddenly swung shut in front of me. I thought I’d seen the fleetest glimpse of Robin at the door, a smile on her sly face, her hand on the iron latch. I started pounding on the door, calling, “Let me out, let me out!” as soon as my voice came back to me. I struggled with the latch but it wouldn’t work, the mechanism frozen in place. “Robin, this isn’t funny. Let me out now!” I shouted, but I heard nothing on the other side of the door, not even the patter of retreating footsteps.

I kept pounding, all the while telling myself to stay calm, not to lose my head. It wasn’t the room from the dream, it couldn’t be. That was just a dream and this was reality. And yet . . . I could swear that I was beginning to smell the same dark aroma from my dream, the smell of ashes and earth. And I thought I heard something coming toward me from the dark recess of the room, a heavy, blunt footfall, one deliberate step at a time, and the snort of animal breathing. I shrieked in earnest, kicked and banged, jerked on the latch so mightily in an attempt to fling the door open that I might’ve dislocated my shoulder. To no avail. The acrid smell of scorched earth wrapped around me, and the heavy breath washed down my neck in cascades as though the monster was standing right over me . . . and just as I thought I felt the brush of its taloned hands reaching for me, I was pulled under by blackness.

“Dear God, Lanore, you gave me a terrible fright,” Adair said as soon as I opened my eyes.

Where was I? Not in the dungeon, I saw that right away. I was lying in my bed in the guest room, Robin and Terry visible over Adair’s shoulder, hovering at the doorway. Adair sat on the edge of the bed, watching me intently.

I bolted upright, but the sudden movement made my head spin, and Adair grabbed my shoulders to keep me from tumbling out of bed. “The cellar—”

“You’re safe,” he said, trying to get me to lie back. “Robin came to get me. She said you were trapped in one of the storerooms. The door shut behind you and she couldn’t get it open.”

The fleeting glimpse of her sly smile was frozen in my memory. “She’s lying,” I countered. I was ready to throw back the blanket and climb out of bed to confront her, but Adair held me in place. “She locked me in there! She did it on purpose. She wanted to frighten me,” I insisted, pointing in her direction.

“What cheek!” Terry shouted at me from the doorway, but I noticed that Robin scurried backward into the hall, out of my view.

“Now, Lanore, really,” Adair said, trying to soothe me. “Why would she do that?”

“How should I know?” I snapped. “All I know is that she did.”

“You’re tired, and you’ve had a lot on your mind lately, Lanore,” he said loudly enough to be overheard by the girls, then added under his breath, “Are you sure it’s not your imagination?” But he had been heard after all, for there was a giggle at the door, mean and childish and meant to intimidate me.

I grasped Adair’s shirt and pulled myself closer to him. “Adair, we need to speak in private. Please,” I said in a low voice.

He twisted in his seat and barked at the two women to leave us alone and, once they’d slunk away grumpily, got up to close the door after them. “Are you quite sure that you saw Robin close the door?” he asked skeptically as he resumed his seat.

I wanted to remind him that he was the one who suspected the malevolent witch sisters of possessing the Englishwomen in some way, but didn’t want to be pulled into an argument on the matter, not at the moment. “Never mind about that—that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” I closed my eyes and an image of the ochre stones rushed up and sent a fresh shiver through me. “That room in your basement, the room where I was trapped . . . it’s the place in my dream. The dungeon.”

He stared at me uncomprehending for a minute, and then shook his head. “You must be mistaken. . . . It can’t be.”

“It is. I’m not imagining it,” I said hotly.

“Not imagining, but maybe it’s the power of suggestion. You told me that you got lost in the basement the other day—maybe you’re only remembering what you saw then. Maybe that’s why the room seems familiar to you.”

That sounded reasonable, but—no. I hadn’t been lost in the basement for long, and besides, I hadn’t gone nearly that far down the passage on my first morning here. The hall in my dream looked precisely the same as the one snaking beneath Adair’s home—they were the same. I didn’t have the slightest doubt. I was going to tell Adair all about the demon I’d seen in my dream and whose presence I’d felt underground, but I decided not to mention it lest he refuse to send me to the underworld, thinking it too dangerous.

“Something’s going on, Adair. These dreams are a message. I know it, I can feel it.” The dreams were coming fast and furious now, and what’s more, they were breaking through to the daylight world, having followed me to Adair’s island—or lured me here. I was beginning to believe there was some kind of intelligence behind them. Someone was trying to communicate with me. It was time to lay my cards on the table. I was going to need to ask Adair for his help at some point, and it seemed that the time had come. I took a deep breath. “I don’t think they’re dreams, not exactly. I think they’re something else. I think Jonathan is trying to contact me.”

This was not going to be an easy topic to discuss with Adair, no matter how I brought it up. Jonathan was the last person in the world Adair would want to talk about, especially with me. He’d never liked Jonathan; what’s more, I don’t think he forgave Jonathan for breaking my heart (and, to an extent, never forgave me for falling in love with Jonathan in the first place). To say that the three of us had a complicated history was an understatement, and I’m sure Adair had hoped that was behind us now that Jonathan was dead. Only here he was again, still coming between us even in death.

Adair gave me an incredulous look, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “You think he’s trying to reach you?”

“You sound as though you don’t believe it’s possible, but why not? You brought him back from the dead once, proving that he continues to exist—why shouldn’t he try to contact me?” Adair started in surprise and tried to cover it up, but I had been waiting for this. “Yes, I know all about it, Adair. I knew that you brought Jonathan back from the dead, thinking he could tell you how to find me. And I know what he told you, too, once you’d resurrected him.”

“That he’d been brought to the attention of the queen of the underworld,” Adair said tensely, as though even the words—“queen of the underworld”—spooked him.

“I heard how this queen had learned about him, too,” I went on, pressing the momentary advantage I had while Adair was still in shock over how much I knew. “It was because of the tattoo, the tattoo you gave him, like the one you have on your back. This queen must’ve been looking for it—looking for you.”

At this last part, Adair grew grave and tense, his cheek twitching involuntarily. But he seemed to want to deflect attention and said to me, briskly, “It seems you know a lot for someone who wasn’t there. How did you learn of this, Lanore? It had to come from one of the others who had been with me at the time. So, which one was it? Was it Pendleton, Alejandro? Or was it Jude?”

There was a time when Adair couldn’t stand for his minions to talk about him behind his back, and if any of us were caught doing so, it would’ve been grounds for a most unpleasant punishment. So the minions rarely shared confidences with one another, and on that rare occasion when we did, we kept that secret sacred, on pain of torture. It was Jude who had told me, but I had to wonder if it mattered now. Adair seemed much changed from his old self. He’d set the others free to live their own lives, and here he was, living on the island, in seclusion. Still, it felt like a betrayal to give that name up. “I can’t tell you and I’m sure you understand why,” I said after a second’s hesitation. “But you shouldn’t doubt that I know it all, everything that happened between you and Jonathan.”

As Adair’s face clouded with shame and uncertainty, I leaned even closer to him and held his hands tightly so he couldn’t pull away. “I don’t care about anything that happened in the past, Adair,” I said hotly, pleading with him. “I don’t care if you kept Jonathan from me, if you want to keep everything he told you a secret from me forever. But I know about this queen and that she’s made Jonathan her prisoner, and all this time it’s been preying on my mind.”

I could tell Adair wasn’t happy to hear that I’d been thinking of Jonathan, that I’d never stopped thinking about Jonathan, but he tried to hide his concern behind a breezy wave of his hand. “I don’t know why you call him a prisoner. . . . The word he used was ‘consort.’ I suppose you don’t like to think of him as her consort, however. And as for this queen, why concern yourself with her at all? There are endless myths of devils, demons, and gods who oversee the transition of souls to the next plane of existence. In some religions, the figure that rules the underworld is a woman, yes. I must say that I wasn’t surprised to hear that this queen had been taken with Jonathan—why shouldn’t she be susceptible to his charms, like every other female who has crossed his path?” I detected a note of exasperation in his tone. There was another pause, a gaze askance. “I sent him back, yes, but you should know that he wanted to go back. And . . . Jonathan told me the queen would come looking for him, and you must understand, I did not want that to happen.”

A flush of color bloomed on Adair’s face and he ducked his head so I couldn’t study his face while he spoke. “What I have to say isn’t very flattering, Lanore, but I’ll tell you to prove that I’m being honest with you. In the course of my life, I’ve done things that others might call questionable. I did so always thinking I was in the right, of course, that these things were necessary for the betterment of science, to improve what we knew about the world beyond our natural world, the supernatural world. If I felt a qualm for what I’ve done, well, I told myself it didn’t matter because I was going to live forever. I would never see the judgment day. Only that wasn’t strictly true, was it?

“I’ve been outrunning death for centuries now. For a time, I didn’t believe that there would be anyone to answer to. I’ve had my doubts that there was anything waiting on the other side of the veil, but Jonathan’s taken care of this, hasn’t he? He tells us that there’s something, someone, waiting for us on the other side. I should’ve gone there—to the underworld, the domain of this queen—centuries ago. Surely if the queen came looking for Jonathan and found me, she would take me with her. But I wasn’t prepared to be held accountable for my sins.”

I lifted an eyebrow. Even a man as unrepentant as Adair could be afraid of judgment and punishment. Except he had proof now, didn’t he, once he’d spoken to Jonathan. Something waited for us on the other side, and he was afraid of it. “That’s why you sent Jonathan back—not because you didn’t want me to see him again.”

“He said this queen would come looking for him, and I knew —I felt in my heart—that I could not let this happen. We cannot meet.” He seemed embarrassed by his admission. I wanted to assure him that everyone is afraid of dying and of the unknown, but I knew he didn’t want to be comforted by me. It would make him appear weak, and he hated weakness in anyone. He absolutely wouldn’t be able to tolerate it in himself.

Adair looked at me, ashamed. “Is this what you wanted to hear from me? A confession? To learn that I have fears, too?”

I still held his hands, and now gave them a squeeze. “I don’t want you to hide your feelings from me, Adair. It’s in these moments that I feel closest to you, I think,” I admitted. He colored again, this time in surprise. “Anyway, that’s why I’ve come to you. I’d heard that Jonathan was being held prisoner by this queen of the underworld and I want to see if I can help him.”

He shook his head. “Leave it be, Lanore. You don’t owe Jonathan anything. Let him take care of himself.”

“It’s not a matter of owing him anything, Adair. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him, trapped in purgatory. I was willing to put all that had happened aside and accept that I’d done the best I could, that Jonathan was gone from my life. But then these nightmares started, and they were all so vivid and so—obviously directed me. At first I thought it was a guilty conscience, just as you said . . .”

“What else could they be?” he asked, still skeptical.

“I think it’s a message. He’s being held prisoner in the underworld—and someone wants me to know it. Maybe it’s Jonathan, maybe it’s someone else, but I think somebody wants me to act.”

“And what makes you think it is Jonathan?” Adair asked.

“Well, we have a bond between us—more so than the presence,” I added, referring to the almost telepathic signal that existed between the person who had bestowed immortality and the recipients of this gift. We companions had always called it “the presence,” an ever-present electronic vibration in our heads that tethered us to Adair. There had been one between me and Jonathan, but it had been broken the day I’d released him from his human form. The bond I was referring to now was the bond that had existed between Jonathan and me from childhood, a special love that had survived infidelities and blistering honesty, a bond that seemed indestructible.

“It would be unwise to assume that Jonathan is behind these dreams,” Adair warned.

“It doesn’t matter where the dreams are coming from. They’re terrible, and getting worse. I can’t ignore them any longer. I want to go to the underworld, Adair. I’m going to get this queen to release him.”

He stared at me as though I had lost my mind. “And what do you think this would accomplish? Your loyalty to Jonathan is admirable, but . . .”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Adair. I know it’s foolish, but I feel in my heart that it’s what I need to do.”

“And how do you plan to do this? How do you propose to find this woman?”

The moment of truth had arrived. “That’s why I’ve come to you. I want you to send me to the underworld.”

He drew away from me as though I’d turned into a serpent before his very eyes. “You say this lightly, as though it is an easy thing! And how do you propose I do this? There’s only one way that I know of, and that would be to release you—to kill you.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking for,” I said, rushing to reassure him. “I wouldn’t ask you to release me, not after having gone through that hellish ordeal myself. I know better now.” I killed Jonathan and carried that guilt with me every day since; I knew I would never be entirely happy again.

“I think there’s another way to accomplish this.” Adair listened skeptically as I explained how I thought he could assist me. “When I heard that my house in Paris had mysteriously burned to the ground, with no trace of arson, no sign of any accident, I knew it had to be you. Somehow you’d been able to do this even though you were nowhere near the city. I didn’t see how this could be possible, so I thought and thought about it until I saw that the only explanation was that you must’ve been able to will your consciousness outside your body. That somehow you were able to reach across an ocean and start this fire in the real world, the physical world. I think that’s the answer. Do you think you can do that for me, or teach me to do it? To send my consciousness to the underworld?”

He looked at me, still stricken. “I wish you wouldn’t ask me to do this, Lanore. There are so many uncertainties, I don’t know where to begin. . . .” He broke away from me and rose from the bed, and went to the window, rubbing his chin distractedly. “I might be able to send you there—it is not a given, not by any stretch—but more worrisome still is, how would you come back? What if I couldn’t bring you back? You could be lost to the other side forever.”

I don’t think I’d ever seen Adair so distraught, not even when he released me from the palazzo at Garda. He paced in front of the window. “The only answer would be for me to go with you to the underworld—but I cannot do that. I have explained to you already.”

“I understand, Adair. I’m not asking you to come with me,” I said gently.

“How can you ask me to do this, Lanore?” he asked, his voice taut with anger and distress. “I might be the instrument of your destruction.”

“I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t want to make you suffer.”

“And what if Jonathan did not wish to come back? Have you thought about what you’ll do then? Will you stay with him forever in the afterlife?”

“I’m not looking to stay with Jonathan, Adair.” I lowered my gaze so he wouldn’t see the love in my eyes. “I want to come back here.”

He continued, carried away by his worry. “We’ve no idea what would be waiting on the other side. It could be the very end of you, but it’s obvious that you won’t let me talk you out of it. Why should I be surprised that you’re willing to risk everything for Jonathan?” His voice was heavy; I’d hurt him deeply. “If you’ve nothing left in this life to live for . . . nothing at all . . .” I could have said something to him then, perhaps I should have, but if I told him that I had feelings for him—dare I say that I loved him—he would never let me go. He’d never risk losing me. So I held my tongue.

He turned away from me. “I can see you’ve made up your mind and so . . . I can only tell you that I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can promise you at the moment.”

“Adair—” I started toward him.

He held up a hand to make me keep my distance. “No. I need to be alone to think. Don’t come after me, Lanore. I’ll let you know when I’ve made a decision.” He turned around and swiftly exited the room, closing the door behind him.