Then footsteps, coming closer.

Zachary tries to hold his breath and fails.

The footsteps stop next to his chair and someone whispers in his ear.

“You didn’t think I’d let her talk you to death, did you, Ezra?”

“What is going—” Zachary starts to ask but Mirabel shushes him, whispering.

“They might be recording. I got the lights but the audio and the cameras are a different system. Rescue mission proceeding more or less as planned, thank you for being distracting.” A movement against his arms breaks the cords on his wrist and Mirabel pulls the chair back so she can free his feet.

She must have good night vision, in the darkness she takes his hand and he knows his palm is sweaty but he doesn’t care. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes back and if there are sides to whatever all of this is he feels pretty good about siding with the king of the wild things.

In the hall streetlight sneaks in through the windows, just enough to see by.

Mirabel leads him down the stairs and around to the basement stairs and Zachary is mildly relieved to know where he is going even though he can’t see all that well. Shadows upon shadows with an occasional glimpse of purple-pink from Mirabel’s hair. But when they reach the basement they don’t exit to the ice-covered garden, Mirabel leads him in the opposite direction, deeper into the house.

“Where—” he starts but Mirabel shushes him again. They turn down a hallway, losing the lig

ht from the garden and falling back into darkness and then somewhere in the darkness Mirabel opens a door.

At first Zachary thinks maybe it is one of her doors, but as his eyes adjust he can tell they are still in the Collector’s Club. The room is smaller than the ones upstairs and windowless, lit by an old-fashioned lantern set on a pile of cardboard boxes and the light flickers over walls covered in framed paintings, like a disused miniature gallery.

Dorian is slumped on the floor near the boxes, unconscious but obviously breathing and Zachary feels something in his heart unclench that he didn’t realize had been clenched in the first place and he is mildly annoyed by the implication of that but then he is distracted by the other door.

In the center of the room stands a door in its frame with no wall surrounding it. It is fastened to the floor somehow but there is open space above and to each side, more cardboard boxes visible behind it against the far wall.

“I knew they had one,” Mirabel says. “I could feel it in the back of my head but I couldn’t find it since I didn’t know where it was. I don’t know where they took it from, it’s not one of the old New York doors.”

The door looks ancient, with nails set in studded patterns along the edges, a heavy round knocker clenched in the jaws of a tiger and a curving handle rather than a doorknob. A door more suited for a castle. The frame doesn’t match, the finish shinier. An old door set in a new frame.

“Will it work?” Zachary asks.

“One way to find out.”

Mirabel pulls the door open and instead of the far wall and the cardboard boxes there is a cavern lined with lanterns. This in between has no stairs; the elevator door waits opposite, farther away than should be possible.

Zachary steps around to the back of the door. From behind it is a standing frame. He can see Mirabel through it, but when he comes back to the front there is the cavern and the elevator again, clear as day.

“Magic,” he mutters under his breath.

“Ezra, I’m going to ask you to believe in a lot of impossible things but I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from using the m-word.”

“Sure,” Zachary says, thinking that the m-word doesn’t explain everything that’s happening right now anyway.

“Help me with him, would you?” Mirabel asks, moving toward Dorian. “He’s heavy.”

Together they lift Dorian, each taking an arm. Zachary has played this game with many an overly intoxicated companion but this is different, the sheer dead weight of a completely unconscious rather tall man. He still smells good. Mirabel has the superior upper-body strength but together they manage to keep Dorian upright, his scuffed wingtip shoes dragging along the floor.

Zachary glances at one of the paintings on the wall and recognizes the space depicted within it. Shelves of books lining a tunnel-like hall, a woman in a long gown walking away from the viewer, holding a lantern much like the one currently sitting nearby on a cardboard box.

The painting next to it is also a depiction of a familiar underground not-library: a slice of curving hallway, figures disrupting the light from around the bend and casting shadows over the books but remaining out of sight. The one below is similar, a nook with an empty armchair and a single lamp, darkness flecked with gold.

Then they pass through the door and Zachary’s view of the paintings is replaced by a wall of stone.

They carry Dorian across the cavern to the elevator.

Behind them there is a noise and Zachary belatedly thinks he should have closed the door. There are footsteps. Something falling. A faraway door slam. Then comes the chime of the elevator’s arrival and safety feels like worn velvet and brass.

Tags: Erin Morgenstern Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net