A cool breeze bothers the air and the candle-flame snaps and bends. There are many candles set throughout the space—some on the floor and some on a desk and some on the filing cabinets. They illuminate the bricked chamber, maybe twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide, with several pillars interrupting it and two dark doorways channeling from it.
She lies in the center of this space. She stares at the candle, so she does not have to see what surrounds her. The massive pentagram chalked on the floor. The strange bones—some of them still clotted with dirt—arranged neatly at each tip of the five-pointed design. The bones are riven with ciphers, and the rib cages have obsidian blades run through them, and the skulls have black candles fitted onto their domes, and the wax dribbles and melts down their sides like flesh taking form. They came from the graves beneath the Rue, and they appear at first like the skeletons of men, but the skulls are warped strangely, one with nubs on the forehead, another with a shovel of a jawbone, another with eye sockets so big you could fit a fist through them.
One skull is missing. The one that would occupy the point of the pentagram directly above her own head.
The cold of the stone floor seeps into her back. Her wrists and ankles are bound, but even if they weren’t, she wouldn’t move. She is surrounded. How many are men and how many women, she doesn’t know. They wear black robes and masks. Wolf masks and bird masks and bear masks and deer masks with antlers branching out the top. All except one. He is dressed in red and shuttles among them and speaks sometimes in English and sometimes in what she recognizes from school as Latin. She knows his voice. Last night, at the shelter, when she slept, he is the one who seized her, pulled a bag over her head, dragged her into the night.
In the place of a mask, he wears something like the Mirage. What appears to be a virtual reality helmet. A fat visor covers his eyes. Metal mandibles curve down the sides of his face. A red light pulses at the temple. Wires dangle from the helmet like dreadlocks. Some snake into the ceiling and others connect to his gloves. These are made of metal and circuits and kinked with wires and backed by swipe screens, and they make his hands appear five times their size. When he taps and slides a finger across the back of them, the screens along the wall sputter and move from static to halogen-bright to midnight-black.
Then there are the hounds. Two of them. Hairless and pale, black-gummed and needle-toothed. Their eyes are the bluish white of a hard-boiled egg, the eyes of the blind, but she knows they see. They pace the floor, winding among the masked figures. When they lick their chops, their saliva snaps like the electricity flowing into the room.
Yes, it’s easier not to look. It is better to study the flame instead. If she looks at the flame, she doesn’t have to see the darkness. The darkness that oozes off them—the same as the man in the woods behind Benedikt’s. A shawl. An aura. Whatever you want to call it. A pollutant that infects the air around them. The flame. She needs to look at the flame. The flame happily blinds her.
What else can she do? Nothing. Here is the thing she hates most about being a kid: you don’t have any agency. Everybody tells you what to do, and you do it or else. Her current condition is an exaggerated version of this, infantile in her total helplessness as she lies in wait for this room full of masked strangers to do with her as they wish.
The red priest carries a chalice. He offers a sip to each in attendance, an unholy communion. They raise their masks to taste. Every now and then, she catches a word she knows. Cloven and leviathan and abyss and doorway and Zero Day and hail. That is what they say before each of them drink: Hail.
From the desk the red priest selects a metal disc, a miniature gong, and approaches Hannah. He does not intrude upon the pentagram, but circles its perimeter, pausing at each corner to strike the gong. The sound—like the howl of a metal-throated wolf—lingers in the air. He waits until it stills to strike again. The hounds follow him, listening keenly. When the gong sounds for the fifth time, he reverses his cycle around the pentagram and removes from each skeleton the obsidian dagger or spearhead that pierces it, tossing them aside with a clatter. The cords trail behind him wherever he goes. Everything feels mismatched, too old, too new, a rupturing of worlds.
The red priest tips his gaze to study her. His face is barely seen beneath the visor, but he appears young to Hannah, with long orange hair curling out from the helmet. She sees bruises and scabs, too, as if his body were spoiled. “This is your aunt’s fault, you know. That nosy cunt is the reason you’re here.”
“I’m sorry. Please.” Hannah doesn’t want to ask—not knowing seems somehow better—but she can’t help herself. “What are you going to do to me?”
“That depends on whether you tell us where to find the skull.”
“I told you. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything.”
A fly crawls from his nose and another few from his mouth when he opens it now. “So you say.” He taps one of the command screens on his gloves, and the televisions zap again, revealing an Internet browser, TOR. His fingers tock-tock-tock, typing out domain names, negotiating pop-ups, entering commands and encrypted logins and passwords. The wall of televisions changes rapidly. Some of the screens flash the same browser image; others stream with red code, everything shuffling quickly, like a hurried Rubik’s Cube, until all at once a vast picture takes form. A single image pieced together by the many screens. A red triangle. With an eye inside of it. Maybe it is the candlelight or maybe it is the shuddering screens—bothered by bursts of pixels—but the eye appears to gaze around the room, to find her there in the pentagram.
Then the red priest kneels beside her. His gloves sizzle with electricity. He runs one of them along her face, beyond her ear, and there fingers the lightning port. A joint axis permits another input. He reaches behind his own head—and jerks his hand, as though plucking a hair—unplugging one of the cables. This he fits scrapingly into her. “You think this place is scary,” he says. “Just wait.”
She remembers what Juniper said before. About how there are worse things than death. Hannah says, “Help me. Please help me. Please, please, please.” She speaks quickly, in tune to the rhythm of her pulse, swinging her head around, taking in the masks leaning toward her, not really believing that any one of them will help her, but stupidly hoping a kind face hides among them. “I don’t know where the skull is. I swear I don’t know.”
“Let’s make certain.”