“I can’t see anything!”
“Here! Follow my voice!”
Paddling with abandon, one of her swim strokes made contact with hard rock. She felt Curtis’s hand grasping hers,
and she was hauled to the bank of the pool. Water poured from her hair; her skin was a million pinpricks of icy cold. She was racked with shivers.
“Septimus!” hollered Curtis, once he’d gotten the girl to safety. A series of frantic splashing noises was sounding from the middle of the chamber.
“Help!” shouted the rat. “The lantern!”
Curtis dove back into the pool. He reemerged, sputtering, minutes later. Septimus was clinging to his back, badly coughing water. The rope was still tied to his belly and the lantern still gripped in his paws, though it was now quite extinguished.
The three of them, prey to the cold subterranean air, succumbed to violent shivers, and they began to push their bodies closer together in order to kindle whatever heat they could create. With fumbling fingers, Curtis opened the lantern door and felt at the soaked wick. Prue grabbed the waxed cotton pouch that housed the matches; she was amazed to find that the cloth had kept the box of matches dry. She handed Curtis the box and he, with some difficulty, managed to get one of the matches alight. The wick of the lantern, however, was soaked beyond hope.
“Here,” said Prue, “let me try.” She grabbed the lantern and, pulling a small tin of kerosene from the knapsack, emptied the lantern of the water that had collected in the tank. Refilling it with the kerosene, she soaked the wick and set a lit match to the fabric. To her relief, it caught flame; a warm pulse of light came from within the glass.
In these brief, flickering cadences of light, the cavern in which they sat was revealed to them: the walls, brick and stone covered in ages-old layers of lichen, rose up from the dark pool to an arched apex, where a sizable hole—the one they’d fallen through—had been broken. One thing was imminently clear: the chamber had been built by human—or animal—hands. The three of them followed the glow of the lantern as it revealed more of the room; it illuminated, in slow mosaic, the brickwork of a forgotten century, from the hands of forgotten masons, before falling on an arched doorway, just yards from where they sat.
CHAPTER 15
A Place of Salvation and Solace
The record player was dug up from its tomb in the hallway closet; the speakers, rescued from their tenure in purgatory as end tables, were wheeled to face the room. A favorite LP, Betty Wells’s All-Time Favorite Two-Steps, was unearthed from the cabinet and placed, spinning, on the platter. The lonesome tones of a sole pedal steel guitar moaned, and Joffrey Unthank took Desdemona Mudrak by the hand and danced her, amorously, to the middle of the office.
“What is this?” asked a surprised Desdemona, who’d just returned from the girls’ dormitory to report that the map Unthank had been looking for was not, in fact, in number twenty-three’s footlocker. She’d expected unmitigated rage; she got country music.
“Baby,” Unthank cooed, “just follow my lead. Step. Step. And step back. Step. Step…”
“Yes, I know this two-step,” said Desdemona. She’d played Annie Oakley in a Ukrainian biopic, shot in Odessa; the cast had been taught the dance by an American expat. “But my question is why.”
Her boyfriend of thirteen years looked her directly in the eye and said, “I did it.”
Desdemona’s eyes went wide. She nearly stepped on his toe as they shuffled about the room. “Have girls returned?” she asked.
“No, no, no,” he said. “All that—that’s gone now. Done with. That’s the past.”
“And so what is future?” she asked, eyeing him warily.
“This.” Never losing a beat, he ushered their marching dance steps to the desk, where the schematic for the Möbius Cog lay. Desdemona barely had a chance to look at the thing, with its hieroglyphic-like scrawls and enigmatic diagrams, before Unthank led her in a pretzel-like swing that left her on the other side of the room.
“What is that?” she asked, catching her breath.
“I don’t know,” Unthank said gleefully. “But I’m gonna make it.”
“Darling,” chided Desdemona, “I’m very confused.”
“No worries, baby,” said Unthank. “In fact, when we’re living off the fat of the land, there won’t be a single worry to your name. I should clarify: living off the fat of the Impassable Wilderness, that is.”
“What is this? What has happened?”
He spun her around so that they were both facing forward; they did a promenade around the dentist’s chair in the middle of the room. “Let’s just say I received a visit from the ghost of Christmas future. And we’re gonna have a full stocking next year.”
“Still, I am not understanding.”
“Baby, come this time two months down the road, we’ll be living high on the hog. Old Wigman’s gonna be begging me for favors when all the cards have been dealt.”
“Stop with metaphors!” shouted Desdemona.