MASON’S BASEMENT SMELLS like a straw doormat that’s been left out in the rain too long. It’s also pitch-black. Vidocq takes a glass vial from his pocket and blows on it. The room fills with light. Who needs a flashlight when you have your own personal alchemist?
Paint is peeling off the basement walls and ceiling in jagged sheets. Thick roots grow down from the lot above and creep across the ceiling and walls, like black and brittle arteries. A knot of roots has rotted away the plaster from one wall, leaving exposed lath. The furniture sits exactly where I last saw it years earlier—tables, chairs, and a sofa woolly with mold.
In the center of the room is what remains of the magic circle. Some of the chalk is still visible where it’s melted into the rotten floorboards. The burned stubs of candles are still lying around the circle, like the last people in here left quickly and never came back.
I can’t get hold of any one feeling. It’s like my brain and my guts and my heart are stuck in a speeded-up, old-school king fu fight. Different parts of me want to run off screaming in different directions. One part of me wants to puke quietly, but thoroughly, in a far corner of the room. Another part of me wants to rip the place apart, board by board, brick by brick. The weakest, smallest part of me, the one I seriously don’t want to hear from, is nothing but apologies and regrets. Sorry, Alice. You told me not to come here, but I did. Then everything else happened.
One part of me that’s left is the ten o’clock news. That’s the part I hold on to. The cold camera eye. Just take in the scene and report the facts. These ruins aren’t my private apocalypse. They’re the haunted-house ride at Disneyland. Digital spooks and Dolby stereo moans. About as scary as a basket of kittens.
“What are we looking for?” asks Vidocq.
I shrug.
“No idea.”
We move around the room, looking for a clue or a sign that points to something more than damp wreckage. I move furniture and trash away with the toe of my boot. I don’t want to touch anything.
“I don’t know if we’re going to find anything interesting in here. Mason always hinted that he had a hidden room where he kept all his important stuff, but none of us ever found it.”
Much as I don’t want to, I lean against a mildewed wall. My head is suddenly spinning. Voices and faces shoot through me, like streaks of lightning. I can even feel echoes of the Circle, all of them, even my younger self, trapped in here. I’ve heard of dark magicians doing this. Sometime in the past, Mason hermetically sealed the room from the rest of the world with a kind of barrier hex. He didn’t want what he was doing to leak out into the aether. It might let other magicians know that he was horse trading with Hellions. A lot of scary things passed through this room. A lot more than the few beasties that dragged me Downtown. Some I can see and feel, but others are just blurs that I can’t get a fix on. The inside of their heads is all hunger and knives, like insects. I’m not sorry that I can’t get any farther inside. I’d been getting used to sensing other people’s thoughts and feelings, but the intensity of this place makes the experience new and weird again. Suddenly I don’t want to be here anymore.
“Ha!”
Vidocq is in the corner of the room with one hand pressed up against a the ceiling and the other pressed into a small divot in the wall. The opposite corner of the room scrapes open, dragging on the junk that’s accumulated in the door mechanism over the years. “I said that I would show you how a good thief earns his keep!” Vidocq says happily. With his bottled light, he leads the way into the hidden room.
The hidden room is in a lot better shape than the other. There’s a lot of power in the hidden room. It’s protected by much more powerful spells than any of the rest of the house. Every inch of the walls, floors, and ceiling is covered with multicolored runes, sigils, and angular angelic and Hellion scripts.
Vidocq is studying the place with grim intensity. He runs his fingers over the wall and they come away black. He sniffs the dust on his hand, touches a blackened finger to his tongue.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Ivory black,” he says. “Made from burned bones and animal horns.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s a traditional pigment. It goes back thousands of years.” He moves his light over the walls and holds it up to the ceiling. “This symbol? Painted with cinnabar—a mixture of mercury and sulfur heated together. Cobalt and aluminum chloride, also heated, make this blue. Here is antimony yellow. This particular red comes from boiling the iron oxide found in blood. All these hues, these colors, were made skillfully with chemicals and great heat.” He holds up his light and turns three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the whole room. “Everything in here was born in fire.”
“Bring the light over here, will you?”
Vidocq carries the light to where I’m standing. There’s strange writing on the wall, but it’s not Hellion. It’s something I’ve never seen before, like cuneiform that’s been gashed into the wall with a meat cleaver. A symbol painted in bloody iron oxide covers the rest of the wall. It’s a circle that wraps around and around its own interior, folding in on itself. It’s a labyrinth, an ancient symbol of the deepest, darkest secrets and Final Jeopardy–hard knowledge. Something shimmers at the center of the labyrinth. I dig my fingernails into the soft plaster and pry out the treasure.
It’s a Zippo lighter. On the front is a kind of cigar-chomping hot, rod devil’s head done by an artist who signs his name “Coop.” I turn the lighter over and click open the top, looking for a message, an inscription, or anything that might point us to what Mason was doing down here. There’s nothing. I flick the Zippo closed. It’s just a lighter. Vidocq takes it from me and examines it closely under the light. In a minute, he shakes his head and hands it back to me.
“Maybe your friend Mason is a person who enjoys practical jokes?”
“He likes a good ‘fuck you,’ but I don’t remember him being much for jokes.”
“Then, we are missing something.”
I toss the Zippo up and down in my hand a few times, enjoying the weight of it. “What’s a lighter for?”
Vidocq scrapes his feet on the dusty floor. “To give us fire.”
I hold the lighter up, click the top open, and strike the flint once. The room fills with light. Way too much light. It leaks from the walls and the floor. We have to wrap our arms over our eyes to keep from going blind.
Something brushes my arm. Dirt swirls from the floor as wind explodes around us, getting stronger by the second. For a minute I wonder if I’m hallucinating, feeling some stranger’s memory. Then Vidocq stumbles into me, blown over by a sudden gust, and I know this is all real.
I move my arm down as my eyes adjust to the light. It’s pure white and keeps moving, like ripples on the bottom of a swimming pool. The walls look like stretched skin and something is trying to come through them. We can see the silhouettes of faces and arms as they reach for us, straining at the thin wall flesh. The bodies writhe and twist, unable to hold a shape very long as they press in on us. Arms like roiling packs of snakes. Bodies like the skeletons of fish and birds. Faces that seem to be all teeth, all nails, or screaming from the ends of arms, where the creatures’ hands should be.
Vidocq shouts, “Can’t you take us out of here?”
“We need a shadow, but the light’s everywhere.”
Vidocq flings open his coat. Vials containing his potions, rows and rows of them, are sewn into the lining. He pulls out one after the other and hurls them at the grasping hands. I get the skinhead’s Luger from my pocket and fire off a few rounds at the silhouettes. They don’t even seem to notice.
I grab Vidocq’s sleeve and pull him toward the door, firing the Luger until it’s empty. Vidocq keeps throwing his vials. Every now and then, an arm or a monstrous face