Page 43 of Dead Beat

Turner slid on his coat, then he stopped, his arm only halfway through the sleeve. “What did the demon say? About the sun?”

Darlington tried not to show his discomfort. “He said I follow Lethe like—” He tracked Turner’s gaze to the staircase, the centerpiece of Lethe, made of heavy dark wood and worth more than everything else in the house put together. It was emblazoned with sunflowers. “Keep fast thy hold,” he recited, “for by such stairs as these must we perforce depart from so much evil.”

“Dawes!” Alex shouted. “Dawes, come here!”

Together they ran their hands along the sunflowers that scrolled along the polished wood, tapping and knocking, looking for a loose board or a hollow sound.

“You think there’s something in the stairs?” Dawes asked as she and Tripp joined them, adding to the strange rhythm of knocks and plunks.

No one answered because the answer was always the same: I hope. I hope.

“What else happens in that passage of the Inferno?” Alex demanded.

“You’re actually asking me to hold forth on a classical text?”

“That’s right, Darlington. Talk Dante to me.”

With pleasure. “Each book in the Divine Comedy has thirty-three cantos. Virgil leads Dante out of hell in the last canto of Inferno. He’s panting and tired and Dante is clearly shaken by everything he’s seen. He’s afraid that they’re just looping back into hell, that there’s no way out. But Virgil explains that they’ve passed through the center of the world and it only seems like they’re backtracking because everything has reversed.”

“The landing,” Dawes said. “It’s where the staircase changes direction.”

Darlington lunged up the stairs to the landing and shoved aside the threadbare rug. He knocked his knuckles against the floorboards, his worry growing. Were they all just playing Kittscher’s game, grasping at hints that led nowhere?

“Wait,” Alex said. “Dawes, did you already clean the compact we used on Reed?”

She shook her head. “I hadn’t gotten to it yet.”

Alex and Dawes charged into the parlor leaving Darlington, Tripp, and Turner to stare at each other.

“You ever feel like you went to bed and woke up on the other side of the looking glass?” Turner asked.

“Every day,” said Darlington.

“I miss dreaming,” Tripp said.

“You don’t dream?” Turner asked.

“Nope. I just close my eyes and then I open them again.”

Alex rushed back into the room—accompanied by Alban Reed.

“Shit!” Tripp barked.

“It’s me,” said Dawes from within the glamour.

“I know, but still!”

He reached out to poke Dawes’s cheek, and she batted his hand away. “Stop that.”

She stood a few steps down from the landing and leaned over it, then clicked play on the recorder.

“Alban Reed … I’m the Lethe board president.”

Dawes released a bleat of surprise as one of the floorboards disappeared. It didn’t dissolve. It simply wasn’t there anymore, a black gap. The house seemed to sigh around them, as if Il Bastone had been keeping a secret for far too long.

“So, who wants to put their hand in there?” Turner asked as they hovered on the steps, staring at that little slice of darkness.

“I’ll do it,” said Tripp, and before any of them could stop him, he shoved his arm into the gap.