The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which, to be honest, she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought there were any actual books in them. What the hell would they shelve up here?
It looked tiny from below, and it was tiny—in fact, now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those medieval folly houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees. The books looked real, though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold—some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.
And like a few of the books in the Brakebills library, they weren’t quiet or inanimate. They poked themselves out at her from the shelves as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this was like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.
No, thank you. She liked her books to wait, decorously and patiently, until she chose to read them herself. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the end of the balcony—it was practically a cat door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking a long time, but it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.
This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact, it was one—as near as she could tell, she was actually inside one of the walls of Brakebills. It was a wall of the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clatter of silverware, and she could actually look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. They were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary. The sight of it made her hungry. She felt a million miles away, even though she was standing right there. She almost felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for the time when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.
And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. For the League.
Though, God, how long was this going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof. The night air was bone cold. She hadn’t been up here since the time Professor Sunderland had turned them into geese, and they’d flown down to Antarctica. It was lonely and quiet up here after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees. She had to stay on her hands and knees because the roof was so sharply raked, and the shingles were gritty under her palms. She could see the Hudson River, a long, sinuous silver squiggle. She shivered just looking at it.
Which way to go? There was no obvious path. She was losing the thread. Finally Plum just jimmied the lock on the nearest dormer window and let herself in.
She was in a student’s room. Actually, if she had to guess, she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though obviously she’d never seen it, because her crush had remained in a theoretical state. What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. She began to suspect that somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was fucking with her.
“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”
Well, fuck away, she thought, and we shall see who fucks last. She half suspected that she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! Actually, that would be kind of cool.
The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She decided that she wasn’t going to fight against the dream logic of what was happening; she was going to play it out. Steer into the skid. To leave by the front door would have been to break the dream spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a little door at the back of it.
She couldn’t help but notice, by the by, that his closet was full, practically packed solid, with boxes of those pencils. Why, exactly, had they thought he was going to freak out at the loss of two pencils? There were like 5,000 of them in here. The aroma of tropical wood oil was suffocating. She opened the door and stooped through.
From here on out, her travels ran entirely on dream rails. The door in the back of Wharton’s closet took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. They were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as spatial. It was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.
She watched herself leave the courtyard. That was her in a nutshell, Plum thought: standing there and watching her own life go by. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself, or if this was more of a two-way-mirror deal. She frowned. The causality of it became tangled. This much at least was clear: if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.
The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, a curiously reduced Brakebills. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long, straight hair and bad teeth.
Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only momentarily, incuriously, as she passed. No question what they were up to.
“Another League,” she said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”
Then the next door opened on a room that she thought she knew—no, she knew she knew it, she just didn’t want to think about it. She had been here before, a long time ago. The room was empty now, but something was coming, it was on its way, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. It was the thing: the thing that she could not and would not think about. She had seen this all happen before, and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Now she knew it was coming, and it was going to happen anyway.
She had to get out, get out now, before the horror started all over again.
“No!” Plum said. “No, no, no, no, no.”
She ran. She tried to go back, the first time she’d tried that, but the door was locked behind her, so she ran ahead blindly and crashed through the next door. When she opened her eyes again she was in the little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.
Oh. Oh, thank God. She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. Or it was real, but it was over. She didn’t care, either way she was safe. This whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going to go forward either. She was safe right here. She wasn’t going to think about it. Nobody had to know.
Plum sank down on the ragged couch, boneless. It was so saggy it almost swallowed her up. She felt like she could fall asleep right here. She almost wondered if she had when she opened her eyes again and looked at the reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked earlier. Of course she wasn’t in it: magic mirror. Right. Plum was relieved not to have to look at her own face right now. Then her relief went away.
Another girl stood there in the mirror instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked, and its skin gave off an unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue. Its eyes were utterly mad.
This was horror of a different kind. New horror.
“You,” the ghost whispered to Plum.
It was her: the ghost of Brakebills. She was real. Jesus Christ, that’s who was fucking with her. She was the spider at the center of the web.
Plum stood up, but after that, she didn’t move; all moving was over with. If she moved, she wouldn’t live long. She’d spent enough time around magic to know instinctively that she was in the presence of something so raw and powerful that if she touched it, it would snuff her out in a second. That blue girl was like a downed power line. The insulation had come off the world, and pure naked magical current was arcing in front of her.
It was beyond horror: Plum felt calm, detached. She was caught in the gears of something much bigger than her, and they would grind her up if they wanted to. They were already in motion. There was nothing she could do. Part of her wanted them to. She had been waiting so long for her doom to catch up to her.
But then: bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—it sounded like something had run into it from the other side. A little plaster fell. The bump was followed by a man’s voice saying something like “Oof.” Plum looked.
The ghost in the mirror didn’t.
“I know,” it whispered. “I saw.”
The wall exploded, throwing plaster in all directions, and a man crashed through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off. White witchery sparked around both his hands like Roman candles, so bright it made purple flares in her vision.
Always keeping one hand pointed at the blue ghost, he walked toward Plum till he stood between her and the mirror.
“Careful,” he said over his shoulder, relatively calmly given the circumstances.
He reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out.
It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first reaction was: I must tell Chelsea that she doesn’t have to worry about paying for it.
Breaking the mirror didn’t dispel the ghost—it was still watching them, though it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned around to face the wall behind Plum and joined his hands together.
“Get down,” he said.
The air shimmered and rippled around them. Then she had to throw her forearm over her eyes, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity, it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. She didn’t see but she heard and felt the door behind her explode out of its frame.
“Run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Go on, I’m right behind you.”
She did. She hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shock wave as Professor Coldwater threw some final spell at the ghost. It lifted Plum off her feet and made her stagger, but she kept on running.
Going back was faster than going forward had been. She seemed to be bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, no, it was just magic. One stride took her through the hell room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the crawl space, the library, the creepy-pear-tree courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.
They stopped just short of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. She wondered if he’d just saved her life; at any rate, she definitely felt bad about having made fun of him behind his back. He resealed the passageway behind him. She watched him work, dazed but fascinated: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily, like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.
She couldn’t help but notice that this time he caught the resonance pattern, the one she’d used to break the last seal, and corrected it.
Then they were alone in the Senior Common Room. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.
“What did she say to you?” he said.
“She?” Plum said. “Oh, the ghost. Nothing. She said ‘You,’ and then she didn’t say anything else.
“‘You,’” he repeated. He was staring over her shoulder—he’d already gone absentminded again. One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Hm. Do you still want to go to the wine closet? That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Plum laughed in spite of herself. The wine closet. She’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It seemed too pointless to go through with it. Everything was too sad and too strange now.
But somehow, she thought, it would be even sadder not to go through with it.
“Sure,” she said, aiming for jaunty and almost getting there. “Why not. So there really is a secret passage?”
“Of course. I steal bottles all the time.”
He drew the rune word on the next panel over from the one she’d used.
“You don’t count the half panel,” he said.
Aha. The door opened. It was just what she thought: a doddle, not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.
She squared her shoulders and checked her look in a pier glass. The hair was a little wild, but she supposed that would be part of the effect. She was surprised, and almost a tiny bit disappointed, to see her own face looking back at her. She wondered whose ghost the ghost was, and how she died, and why she was still here. Probably she wasn’t here for the fun of it. Probably she wasn’t a nostalgic alumna haunting Brakebills out of school spirit. Probably she needed something. Hopefully, that thing wasn’t, you know, to kill Plum.
But if it was, she would have done it—wouldn’t she?—and she hadn’t. Plum wasn’t a ghost. It was actually worth telling herself that: Having seen a real one—and she hadn’t even thought they were real, but live and learn—she knew the difference now, really knew it. I didn’t die just then, she thought, and I didn’t die in that room. It felt like I did, I wanted to die, but I didn’t, because if I had died then, I would have died. And I don’t want to be a ghost. I don’t want to haunt my own life.
She’d just closed the secret door to the wine closet behind her—it was concealed behind a trick wine rack—when Wharton came bustling through the front door with the rumble and glow of the cheese course subsiding behind him. Her timing was perfect. It was all very “League.”
Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling from the fingers of the other. Plum regarded him calmly.
“You’ve been short-pouring the Fifth Years,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You have my pencils.”
She watched him. Part of the charm of Wharton’s face was its asymmetry. He’d had a harelip corrected at some point, and the surgery had gone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at some point but just kept on trucking.
Also, he had an incredibly precious widow’s peak. Some guys had all the luck.
“It’s not the pencils I mind,” he said, “so much as the case. And the knife. They’re vintage silver, Smith and Sharp. You can’t find those anywhere anymore.”
She took the case out of her pocket.
“Why have you been short-pouring the Fifth Years?”
“Because I need the extra wine.”
“Okay, but what do you need it for?” Plum said. “I’ll give you back the pencils and all that. I just want to know.”
“What do you think I need it for?” Wharton said. “I give it to that fucking ghost. That thing scares the shit out of me.”
“You’re an idiot,” Plum said. “The ghost doesn’t care about wine.” For some reason, she now felt like an authority on the subject of what the ghost did or did not care about. “The ghost doesn’t care about you. And if it did, there’d be nothing you could do about it. Certainly not placate it by giving it wine.”
She handed him the case.
“The pencils are inside. Knife, too.”
“Thank you.”
He dropped it in the pocket of his apron and set the two empty wineglasses down on a shelf.
“Wine?” he said.
“Thank you,” Plum said. “I’d love some.”