A tiny girl with huge eyes and a pixie mouth, like the Japanese comic books, hovers underneath another symbol and the arrow shaped rune points to a guy with a not-quite straight nose and no hair. Under the last, drawn in less detail, rougher, faster, is a girl with braids and a wide button nose. I don’t know who she is, but I can guess. Miriam’s daughter, who has been missing for over a week. I take a picture of the wall, working the camera with one hand.
Glancing once more at the writing on the note, I shove it in my bag with the Nikon, and slide out of the room as the girl checking the bathroom rounds the corner. She shakes her head at me. I nod once, and leave.
*
Memory isn’t at the fountain, or under any of the trees nearby. I twist the zoom lens onto the camera body, pan over the quad, and this time I’m not surprised when the scenery changes. Fuller trees fill my vision, and the chapel. A hand with glittered fingernails twists an ancient ceramic doorknob. I don’t question what I see or even the strangeness of it anymore.
This girl, with eyes that let her brother see through them when she is asleep and me when she is awake, is magic. No, not Magic. Faye is the one who believes in mysterious things. And Wisdom is Sophia in Greek, the same meaning as Sonja, Anders told me a week ago. My brain tumbles. I push the stray thoughts aside, refocus on what I know is real.
The door doesn’t open for Memory. I watch through her eyes as she picks her way around, toes of her boots careful on the dirty stairs down into the cellar doorway. This time the knob turns, and the door opens.
“Cherry, wait!” I glance back at the cop car, and then casually walk across the quad, hands in my pockets, calling no attention to myself, an easy pace toward the trees that shield the tiny church. No one calls my name, and no sirens wail over the campus. When I round the bend in the tree line I break into a sprint, one hand on my camera bag to keep it from banging my side, following her boot prints in the grass, and I’m halfway there when I slow to breathe. I look up, see the front door through the trees, closing shut behind a tall figure.
“Mem!” I call, but it’s too late.
I run the rest of the way, duck below a tree branch, and up to the church. I tug on the handle, swearing when the door doesn’t budge. My eyes are pulled to the top of the door. The symbol, Faye’s perth rune, isn’t visible, but I know it’s there. I move around the outside and down the cellar steps, to the one I saw Memory open. A mark is carved high on the door, and I grab my camera, pull up the last picture I took. It’s from the girls’ dorm room wall, Memory’s profile under the same rune, the one she called Muninn. It’s the same one that’s been etched behind my eyes since I kissed her.
The door is locked. I wrench on the knob, but it’s tougher than it looks, and the frame has a lip too deep for me to jimmy a blade into. I leap up the stairs, to the window I’d popped open the other day, and shove it open. “Memory,” I call into the dark, bu
t there is no answer.
My head fits into the frame, but not my shoulders. I stare at the dust that covers the floor of the room, wait for my eyes to adjust, but I see no footprints. No crescent sweep of the door disturbs the layer of gray, either. “Dammit,” I mutter, and then again, louder, when I rap my head on the window frame.
I know she’s inside. I saw the door open, I know I did. I raise my camera again, but no matter how I focus, I still see the door in the stone wall in front of me. Nothing. It’s like Cherry isn’t even in this plane of existence anymore.
Heart slamming hard, I circle the building to the next door, where the earth has eroded away from the wall. The vines have recently been pushed away from the top, revealing a rune in the wood. This one matches Julian’s profile on Memory’s wall. Huginn.
The rusty knob is chest high, and doesn’t turn. I wrench it hard, drive my shoulder into the door as I do, but the lock holds fast. The next has no symbol, the door worn smooth by time or weather, and is also locked, but at the fifth I stop. The marking is familiar. I don’t have to examine the pendant I lifted from Sonja’s bracelet to know that the rune matches, but I look anyway. They both are arrows, pointing up, the way the drawing on the wall pointed at me. The others were Thought, Memory, Wisdom, and Magic. The only one left is War. No way I’m a match to any of the others. I grab the knob and twist—
—and I’m pulled into darkness and cool, stale air.
24
Mythology
I’m in a cavern. Dark, silvery light from a tunnel on the opposite side bounces off the mica in the rocks. I look behind me, place my hand on cool stone. The wood door is gone. There are no hard benches, no early American rafters, and no whitewashed walls. The sweltering June heat is still on my skin, warm on my jeans, but not here. Here the air cool and dusty dry.
“Julian?” I whisper, and when my ears pop, anxiety settles in, sharp in my belly.
I’m underground. Like my dream, the walls are high on all sides, and I want to pinch myself, to see if I’m still dreaming, but I know I’m not. My dreams don’t have smells in them; the mineral scent of the rocks, a faint whiff of kerosene. I raise my hand to my nose and sniff the artificial rose in the industrial soap from the dispenser in the girls’ dormitory.
“Julian!” My voice is swallowed, carried upward into to the dark. I know if I look up I won’t see a ceiling, so I don’t, because I don’t want to remember it.
I grab my cell phone from my little bag; there’s No Service Available. I look at the time, and count backward, calculating the minutes it took to get from my dorm room to the chapel; there’s no elapsed time, but I mentally scan back anyway, looking for gaps in my memory, the black holes of unconsciousness from passing out or being put under, like when I got my wisdom teeth out last year.
I slide my feet on the ground as if I’m blindfolded, watching each step by the dim light of my phone, toward the tunnel on the opposite wall. Shoe prints make a path in the dirt, modern soles leading to the rough arch. None lead away. The tunnel slopes downward, shallow stairs cut into a limestone hallway, the light brighter with every turn in the jagged rocks. I move forward, trailing my hand on the dirty walls. Some stones are dry, some damp with mineral sweat. I round a sharp corner, and throw my arm up against the glare from the room that opens beyond the tunnel. As my eyes adjust to the contrast of bright and dark, I force myself to take a long, deep breath.
I’m in an antechamber of another cavern, a small “room” with natural thrusts of rock, opening up to a vast cave that rises above and below, with a waterfall trickling from the unseen ceiling and disappearing through the hole it has carved through the floor. The room is lit by a single white light, a Coleman lantern, painful against the black shadows thrown around the cave.
“Memory!” Julian shouts.
I spin around. My brother is bound by modern handcuffs around his wrists and ankles, locking him to heavy iron chains set into the wall and floor. Macabre shadows mask his face, making his bones stand out, sharp and skeletal.
“Julian! Oh, my God. I knew it, I knew you weren’t at the hospital!” I run to him and wipe his hair from his forehead where it lays limp over his eyes. There’s a gash over his eyebrow that has dried, crusty with blood and grime.
“Hospital? I’ve been down here for—how long has it been?” He looks to his left. A girl with black hair unraveling from braids huddles on the ground, staring up at me with dull eyes. She’s thin as a rail but I recognize her under the dirt caked on her face and hands. Her clothes hang loose over her shoulders as she claps her chained wrists around her knees.
“Sonja!” I tug at the chains around my brother’s wrists. Blood smears my hands where he’s struggled against the metal shackles. “Jules, you’ve been gone for two days. Anders told me you got stung by a bee.”