“Yeah, Val,” said Anders, looking equally concerned. “We don’t start learning the group choreo until after lunch. That should give you a couple of hours to put your head together and get back on your feet.”
“Thank you both,” I said, still crying. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t seem to stop. Before either of them could say anything else I turned, grabbed my dance bag off the bench near the door, and left the room.
This was an unexpected reprieve. I was going to do as much with it as I possibly could.
For most people, going from well-lit dance studio to underground labyrinth full of weird smells and damp patches would seem like some sort of punishment. For me, it was a normal day’s work.
I descended the stairs as carefully as I could, wishing I had more for light than the bare bulbs overhead. They were bright enough when I was directly underneath them, but they were spaced out such that there were bands of darkness between them. I’d never appreciated the practical applications of interior decorating so much in my life. A couple of Tiffany lampshades and this whole hallway would have been lit up like Central Park at Christmas.
“Are we almost there?” I asked.
“Very nearly, Priestess,” said the Aeslin mouse on my shoulder. It was clinging to my earring with one paw, keeping itself stable as I descended. “The second search party did say, lo, we are going this way, and the rest of us did say, yea, though you walk through the hallway that was not on the map, you should fear no evil.”
“Gonna pretend you haven’t started parodying the Bible and just keep walking, if that’s all the same to you.”
“As you say, Priestess.”
It was sometimes difficult to tell when Aeslin mice were joking. They did have the capacity for humor, and could be amused by the damnedest things. I resisted the urge to turn and eye the mouse. If it was still holding my earring when I moved my head, I could wind up knocking it off my shoulder, and that would make the remainder of my descent a lot more interesting than it needed to be.
The stairs were in reasonably good shape, considering that I was now at least two levels below the street and still going down. The air was damp and tasted of mildew. “How did you find the hallway if it wasn’t on the map?”
“The wall appeared intact, Priestess, solid as stone and capable of withstanding any attempts to breach it. But the air flowed through it all the same, as from a crack the size of a valley.” The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear. “We sent the juniormost priest to see what was on the other side, and she stepped through the stone, and was gone. When she returned, she reported a great, wide hall, lit with these same bulbs, filled with these same shadows.”
“Was the false wall still there for her after she came back through? I mean, could she still see it when she looked?”
“The false wall never rippled or changed, Priestess. It was like smoke—visible to the eye, but invisible to the nose or paw.”
The mouse was describing hidebehind work. It had to be. They were experts at hanging an illusion on the smallest available hook, spinning scenes like spiders spun their webs. It was part of what kept them so well hidden. In a world where even the most secretive cryptids were being dragged, one by one, out into the light, most cryptozoologists had never actually seen a hidebehind. So far as I was aware, there were no pictures of them, only paintings and sketches done from rare eyewitness accounts. I’d spoken to the hidebehinds of Portland at great length—had even served as an impromptu marriage counselor for a couple who used to live under the supermarket downtown—and I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d ever seen one. They were that good at what they did, and what they did was disappear.
That left me with one big concern. “Will you be able to find your way back to the false wall when we get there?”
The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear again, this time in quick, staccato bursts: it was laughing. “It can be easy to forget, Priestess, that you are in some ways less attuned to the world around you than we are, for you do not need to be: in your divinity, you may face all challenges without flinching, without need to be prepared to scurry and hide. The air passes through the wall, and will ruffle my fur and carry the scent of such dangers as might await us beyond the veil that is no veil. I will lead you true, Priestess. You will be Proud of Me.”
“You’re riding my shoulder into the dark below a theater, where no one can hear us scream. Trust me, mouse, I’m already proud of you.”
I couldn’t see the mouse on my shoulder, but I could feel it puffing out its fur with satisfaction and delight. Sometimes it was easy to keep the Aeslin happy.