Page 87 of Hell Bent

When Mercy was positioned by the basin with the ticking metronome set on the ground beside her, they crowded around the security desk at the front of the library, checked the Rose Walk for students passing by, then slipped outside.

“Quick,” said Dawes as one by one they made incisions on their arms.

“We should have done it across our palms,” said Tripp. “The way they do in movies.”

“No one gets infections in movies,” Turner shot back. “And I actually need the use of my hands.”

Alex hadn’t realized he had a holster and gun beneath his jacket. “I don’t think that’s going to do you much good in hell.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” he replied.

Dawes took a small bottle from her pocket and dribbled oil onto her thumb. She smeared it across each of their foreheads. This had to be the datura.

“Are we ready?” Dawes asked.

“Hell yeah!” said Tripp.

“Keep your voice down,” snapped Turner. But Alex appreciated Tripp’s enthusiasm.

Dawes took a deep breath. “Let’s begin.”

They each touched their fingers to the blood welling from their arms.

“Soldier first,” Dawes said. Alex daubed her blood onto each of the four columns marking the entrance. Dawes followed, placing her blood over Alex’s, then Turner, and finally Tripp.

He looked at the smudge of their mingled blood and stood back. “How will we know if—”

Tripp was interrupted by a sound like a sigh, a whoosh of air as if a window had been thrown open.

The heavy wooden door beneath the Egyptian scribe had vanished, leaving nothing but darkness. No glimpse of the library nave beyond, no sign of life or light. It was like looking into nothing. A cold wind blew through on a moan.

“Oh,” said Dawes.

They stood in stunned silence, and Alex realized that, for all of their talk and preparation, none of them had really believed it would work. Despite every miracle and horror she had witnessed in her time at Yale, she hadn’t been able to buy into a pathway to the underworld hidden right beneath their noses. Had some other group of fools once stood at this doorway awakened by their blood, on this same precipice, trembling and afraid? Dawes claimed the Gauntlet had never been used. But again Alex had to wonder, if that was the case, why build it at all?

“Alex is first, right?” Tripp asked, a quaver in his voice.

Her courage had shriveled at the sight of all of that empty. But there was no time to second-guess. She could hear people approaching down the street. Come get me, Stern, he’d said. Please.

Alex touched her hand to the porcelain box in her pocket and stepped through the door.

Nothing happened. She was standing in Sterling’s cavernous nave. It looked no different than it had before.

Dawes bumped into her, and they both stumbled out of the way as Turner and then Tripp came through.

“I don’t get it,” said Tripp.

“We have to walk the path,” Dawes said. “That was only the start.”

Single file, they made their way down the nave toward the Alma Mater mural: soldier, scholar, priest, and prince, shrouded in gloom. A strange, shuffling parade. They turned right at the mural and marked the arches beneath the Tree of Knowledge with their blood. Again, the corridor beyond seemed to dissolve, as if their reality had dropped away and left a gaping void. Again, Alex took a deep breath, the diver preparing to sink beneath the surface, and stepped through.

On their right, they passed the glass door through which Alex would enter, but it wasn’t her time yet. The soldier would close the circle. They moved down the corridor, past Death peering over the student’s shoulder, and into the vestibule full of Jost Amman’s woodcuts. Above them Alex could just make out the black iron silhouettes of the mermen with their split tails, monster and man, man and monster.

The cut on Alex’s arm had begun to close, so she had to squeeze it to get the blood to well up again. One by one they anointed the doorway beside the stone spider, beneath the inscription of Yale’s motto. Light and Truth. It felt like a joke when the door disappeared into flat black darkness.

“This is your station,” Dawes whispered, the first words any of them had spoken since they’d stepped back into Sterling.

Tripp’s jaw was set. His fists were clenched. Alex could see he was shaking slightly. She almost expected him to just turn on his heel and march right out of the library. Instead he gave a single, firm nod of his head.