The book of living secre.., p.10
The Book of Living Secrets, page 10
Chewing and chewing, her eyes traveled the long road back to the bar, where Missi fell into conference with her lieutenants, Farai and Geo.
The Clackers got their magic, right? But we got ours, too.
The thought gave Connie a glimmer of hope. If she survived the night, then the girls who dabbled in magic might know where to find incense. Connie closed her eyes and put another cracker in her mouth, imagining it was one of her mom’s silver-dollar pancakes, sweet and fluffy, doused in maple syrup. Home was somewhere, locked behind a tall, dark door; she just had to survive long enough to find it.
12
“HERE, PLEASE SIT DOWN.” Severin tugged Adelle lightly over to the rows of chairs. She sensed the strength in his grasp, but he didn’t use it against her. His hold on her felt sure yet tender. This was what people meant when they said gentleman. He beamed at her, his smile dazzling. “You look as if someone gave you a fright. How may I help? Or perhaps it is my shocking manners that have horrified you.” He curled his finger against his lip and chuckled. “May I have your name? Mine is Severin Sylvain.”
I know.
“Adelle,” she said. “Adelle Casey.”
Her heart flip-flopped in her chest as she tried to sit down in the chair, managing her cumbersome bustle, pads, and skirts. She was, as Orla would say, completely a-jumble.
“And your friend, what was her name? Perhaps if we find her, it will calm you, Miss Casey.”
“Orla . . .” Connie. Connie Rollins. She disappeared! She’s here somewhere, and I came here for you, but now I don’t know what to do. “Orla Beevers.”
She almost added, “Do you know her?” But of course he did. Orla Beevers knew everything about Moira and did not at all approve of Moira’s feelings for Severin. He came from a poor fisherman’s family, not the high-society, moneyed clans that Moira was expected to marry into. Orla had no idea the lengths to which Moira would go, turning that crush into a proposal and then a secret marriage that would shock the entire city.
Could it scandalize the city more than monsters and cultists? She wondered if she would last long enough in the book to find out.
“She . . . she’s wearing a silver dress.” It was difficult to get a single word out. Adelle had suffered the jolt of being whisked violently through the dance by a hideous partner, then encountering a boy with no face, hearing whispers from nowhere, and finally falling directly into the arms of the most perfect young man in the world. It was enough to make her head spin like a merry-go-round, and she would have patted herself on the back if it wouldn’t have made her look insane.
“The dancers swept me up. I feel . . . I’m sorry. I feel very dizzy.”
“Worry not. I am here now to aid you.” He pressed his fist to his heart theatrically, and it drew a weak laugh from Adelle. He was trying very, very hard. “If finding Miss Beevers is your desire, then it shall be done.”
Adelle pressed her gloved fingers to her temple, feeling her head swim with confusion. She kept glancing at the place where the strange boy had been, like she couldn’t trust that exact spot.
“Actually, I think . . .” What do I think? I can’t think—that’s the problem. “I think it would be better if I got some air.”
Severin bowed at the waist, never returning her hand, and gestured to the front of the room, where the beautifully lacquered archway led to the door, and to the left of that lay the grand staircase.
“Bien sûr. You look quite pale, mademoiselle, and the air will set you to rights. Come with me—we will discover where all the fashionable ladies choose to faint.”
Under any other circumstances, she would have been endeared, but this was frightening. All of it was frightening, even Severin. Together, they skirted the dance safely, Severin rather forceful about it, guiding dancers and drunken revelers out of their way until they had a clear path to the stairs. Moira had never appeared. Adelle couldn’t help but wince. This was supposed to be their big night, and here she was, hand in hand with Moira’s beloved, and he was leading her away from the festivities. If Moira showed, he would be nowhere to be found.
It was all wrong. She was rewriting her favorite book in real time. But when she glanced at Severin, when he gently pulled her this way or that to deftly avoid a collision, she couldn’t bring herself to make it stop. How long had she wanted this? How long had this boy been just a dream?
And the dream, her dream, couldn’t measure up to reality. He looked just as good in profile as he did straight on, with a fine, arched nose and shapely lips any modern-day beauty guru would envy. Poor as she knew him to be, he was the only one in the entire ballroom who wore his fancy suit with ease.
They traveled up and up, and Adelle pointed the toes on her injured leg, hoping to take pressure off without alerting Severin to her injury. She wasn’t sure her pride could withstand being carried, fainting into a stranger’s arms, and then being carried again all in one day. Besides, the petticoats, cage, and pillows strapped to her butt probably added twenty pounds, something his willowy frame might not be able to handle. Severin didn’t comment on her subtle limp, but he did have plenty else to say.
“I find it hard to believe that we have never met, Miss Casey,” Severin told her. They passed the fourth-floor landing, but Severin did not stop climbing. “I would remember such stunning eyes.”
“Oh.” Adelle bit her lip. “I have a way of blending in with the wallpaper.”
As evidenced by her inability to get a date to any of the recent formal dances at school, leading her to bring him—or his imaginary counterpart—as her date. Usually Connie never wanted to go either, and they could spend the night giggling until dawn over movies, eating bowl upon bowl of microwave popcorn before falling asleep in a pile of sleeping bags.
“Impossible.” Severin clucked his tongue. “Unless the quality of the wallpaper at Byrne House surpasses that of every other great manor.”
“Then it’s a mystery,” Adelle suggested, hoping to avoid any pressing questions about her nonexistent Victorian lifestyle. Or manners. Or knowledge.
“Another mystery, how grand. I did not expect to end this evening in the company of a woman of mystery. Ah. Nous sommes arrivés. Let us see if this view is the cure for what ails you, Mademoiselle Mystère.”
He seemed so casual, so at ease—he too must be perfectly comfortable with their version of Boston falling to pieces. Did the men in robes not bother him? Or the tear in the sky? Why did nobody at the party seem to notice any of it? Severin at last let go of her hand, and at once she missed the warmth of it. The staircase continued upward, but narrowed, giving the impression that only an attic lay above. In front of them, two tall doors with velvet-cord curtains and patterned glass led out onto a balcony that ran the length of the mansion. Sliding forward with a hop, Sylvain unlatched the golden door handle and let the cold, galvanizing air pour in.
“After you.” He smiled.
Adelle paused. If her mother could see her going off from a large party alone with a boy she didn’t know, onto a balcony where nobody could find her, late at night, she would have a heart attack. This was stranger danger, definition of.
But I do know him. He’s not a stranger to me, not really.
Outside, the same dense, pea soup fog blotted out the stars. The front of Moira’s house faced south, and most of Boston was in a blackout, though a single lantern glowed timidly here or there in the sea of darkened brick buildings, markets, churches, and roads. Only the surrounding blocks housed the expected candles in the windows, though the street below lay empty. Straight down, in the grassy turnaround outside the house, Adelle watched the hooded Chanters patrol back and forth, their pale robes making them look like ghosts drifting to and fro in the mist.
To the east, the waves sloshed rhythmically in the harbor. Adelle was amazed she could hear them at that distance, but the city itself was as silent as a mausoleum. Following the sound of the waves, she tiptoe-limped toward the far end of the balcony, leaning most of her weight on the railing. Something odd in the water had caught her eye, and it gripped her with magnetic force, pulling.
She ought to have known better, with all that she had seen and felt since arriving, but she couldn’t help herself. It called out to her, seething and bright, the only point of light in the water other than the Deer Island Light, which glowed eerily green.
“What is that?” Adelle breathed. Her chest felt tight.
“Is it not marvelous?” Severin had appeared beside her, leaning casually against the railing and admiring the horror in the water.
“Marvelous? It’s . . .” Adelle was at a loss. She didn’t know what it was, or how to describe it. Why was he okay with it? “It’s awful.”
“Tell me,” he murmured, his back to the sea, his eyes fixed on her. “Tell me what you see.”
It is born.
The voice from before, from the Emporium and the tear, returned, slicing through her brain like an icy blade.
“A . . . monster, I think. But it isn’t moving, is it? Or maybe it’s breathing. It looks like it’s fleshy, alive, like an organ, like giant organs pulled out and arranged in a circle, organs without any blood. Or . . . or a huge squid, but open in the middle.” Adelle shivered. She couldn’t look away. “How can you call it marvelous? What is it?”
She felt terribly afraid then, like she had woken up from a deep sleep in a bed she didn’t recognize. This couldn’t be in the book. She would certainly have remembered a writhing mass of darkly bruised tentacles opening like a swollen mouth in the harbor.
Once, she’d gotten an ingrown hair in her armpit, and she remembered it stinging like a wasp when she shaved in the shower. Just a bump, but it grew, and when she finally got up the courage to dig out the hair with tweezers, it just kept coming and coming, unspooling from a bloody welt. At the moment of pulling it out she had almost gagged with surprise, and she felt that same shivering revulsion in her stomach at the sight of the thing in the water, a cosmically ugly behemoth docked beside the pier.
Her eyes flew to Severin. Maybe she didn’t know him. Or any of this. Maybe she didn’t know a single thing about this place.
Adelle gripped the railing harder, worrying she was in free fall.
“Most people call it the Wound,” Severin told her, his words filled with religious awe. “The Chanters are trying to appease it, thinking that if it takes enough people, it will be satisfied and leave. That’s how they make sense of it, how they make sense of everyone sleepwalking into the sea.”
Orla had mentioned the sea taking people, taking Caid’s family. Had they been some kind of sacrifice? She stared hard at him. “But that’s not what you think.”
“No,” Severin admitted, tossing the hair out of his face. He turned away from her to gaze at the pulsating horror of the Wound. “I do not think it will ever be satisfied. It is not a pit with an end; it is a door.”
“And all those people you mentioned, the ones who walk into it,” Adelle replied slowly. “You think they’re going through that door?”
Severin waved off her question. “No, no. The people going out mean nothing. What matters is what might come through the door from the other side.”
Adelle didn’t like the way he said it, with such wonder, such excitement, like he couldn’t wait to see what it would be. “How can you bear it? How can you just go on with your life? Why aren’t you afraid?”
“At first we did not go on with our lives,” Severin explained. “There were riots, and whoever was willing—the navy, militiamen, volunteers—went to attack it, but their guns and swords did nothing to it, and every ship they sent against it sank.” For the first time, he looked worn, sad. “Then the fog descended, encased us, and nobody could find their way through it. At last we were all alone, and it seems there is nothing to be done about it. It will stay until it wants to go. Fear dissipates, and this, all of this, becomes life.”
“That must have been so scary,” she whispered. He seemed awfully forthcoming, even effusive on subjects she should have known. Did he suspect her secret? Adelle’s stomach churned. Maybe he had already realized she didn’t belong. But if so, why be so friendly? So solicitous? Terrified she had already grown too suspicious, Adelle added, “You must think me so stupid and ignorant. My memory is completely addled. That carriage must have struck me harder than I thought. . . .”
“Oh, it does not bother me to speak of these things to you,” Severin replied, with what struck her as great pity. “Even if it is a kind of sadness. Would we know joy, Miss Casey, if we did not also know fear and malaise? No, we could not live in terror every day,” Severin replied with quiet resignation. “So now we simply live how we must. It takes fewer now, and the Chanters claim that they can control who stays and who goes. I don’t know if that’s true, but Boston’s high-and-mighty believe it, so it’s as good as law. The rich are safe and content, so I suppose the world continues on, yes?”
Adelle could feel his palpable regret. She wanted to give him some kind of consolation, to say, At least you have Moira and you two are together, but she was not supposed to know about his love story or his poverty, or anything about them. She almost wished she didn’t.
“Can you hear it?” he asked softly. “The Wound?”
She swayed, the tightness in her chest expanding, her head throbbing in time with her heart. “Whispers,” she said. “A thousand whispers all at once. I can’t make out what any of them are saying, but it’s calling to me.”
“Yes, it sings. Beautiful, haunting night music. Promises. Temptations.” Severin shook his head and sighed. “I often stop and think: it is amazing that I am alive in this time to see this.”
They were quiet for a moment, and that moment stretched on until she lost track of herself, of time.
“Adelle? Miss Casey?”
Close. So close, now. Closer . . . Take us. Take us . . .
Adelle couldn’t hear him or perceive him. Her focus had narrowed to the Wound itself, bright and grotesque, gleaming with its own internal light, its writhing tentacles beckoning like long, moist fingers. She had to go. The instructions were written in white lightning across her eyelids, burned into her, searing with insistence. How would she get there? Walking. Steady walking. However she could. But she knew only one thing: she had to go. It demanded that she go.
Those tentacles were not fingers at all but hooks, and they had dug in deep.
Adelle lifted her knee, propping it against the cool, slick railing while hoisting herself up. There was a bit of flat roof beyond, and then the sheer drop to the yard. That was all right—she would just keep walking, and if her legs snapped, then she would drag herself to the shore. The whispers were inside her, spreading out to fill every corner, cramming themselves into the tip of her nose, into her toes. They all said the same thing: that it was time to go.
Someone pulled on her. Someone called her name. They may as well have been on another planet, for all it mattered. The hooks yanked her forward, and she freed herself from the puller, swinging her legs around and landing with a thud on the roof.
Ouch, she thought, distantly, that hurt. Oh well.
Adelle put one foot in front of the other, heading east. A voice behind her, muted, said something she didn’t understand, in a language she couldn’t decipher or care about. Then there was a flash of red and a hand on her shoulder, and all at once the whispers were gone.
When it was quiet in her head again, she felt empty. Bereft.
Adelle crumpled to her knees, and then someone—no, Severin—spun her around and helped her back up again. She didn’t care that he was a stranger; she leaned hard against him.
“I don’t like it,” Adelle told him, cold all over. “I want to go back inside. Orla . . . I need to find her. She’s helping me look for a friend. I . . . I need to get away from that thing. Can we go back inside, please?”
“You must take care, Miss Casey,” he said sternly, guiding her back over the railing with trembling hands. “Do not look at the Wound if you can avoid it. You gave me a fright.”
“I gave myself a fright,” she murmured. “Please, can we hurry?”
“To the kitchens,” Severin proclaimed, taking her arm and stroking her hand. “Some warm chocolate will set you to rights. It always makes me feel better, yes? When I had a bad scrape, Maman always took me on her knee near the fire and gave me a cup of chocolate, and whatever was troubling me melted away.”
“That’s fine.” Adelle shivered. “That sounds nice. Anything. I just need to be away from it.”
As they returned to the doors, Adelle couldn’t help but look back. The Wound. What matters is what might come through the door from the other side. Adelle thought of the tear she had seen in the park, the one hovering over their beloved reading spot, and she thought of the scaly dead thing she had accidentally brushed in the grass.
Severin thought the Wound was a door, and that something might use that door. But something has already come through, she thought, clinging to Severin. Something is already here.
13
“DO YOU HAVE ANY rifles?” Connie asked, watching Mississippi load her pistol, Slick Rose, and then shove another six-shooter into her waistband. “I’m better with a rifle.”
“Farai? Oblige her.” Mississippi pulled the checkered bandanna up over her nose and mouth. They stood upstairs again in the church proper, pulling weapons and ammunition from a hidden door in the bottom of the priest’s lectern. While Farai fished out an old hunting rifle, Geo unlocked the confessional nearby. It had been hollowed out, the chairs and divider removed to make space for their tall-wheeled penny-farthing bicycles. All of the women wore wide-legged trousers under their hitched-up skirts. Geo returned with a bike for Connie, and smoothed her two tight braids back over her shoulders before adjusting her bandanna. She wore an old men’s coat, baggy, and a sleek black blouse with a cravat underneath. None of the women were as flashy as Mississippi, but she spotted a Virgin of Guadalupe necklace on Geo, easy to recognize for a Catholic.
