The tree had not rotted. It was unchanged, as sturdy as before, but black with damp and with night.
This was where he had felt the first sting. Gansey stretched out his arm, examining the back of his own hand in shocked wonder. He took another step, faltering. This was where he’d felt them on the back of his neck, crawling along his hairline. He didn’t smack the sensation; it never helped to brush them away. His fingers, though, twitched upward, resisting.
He took another uncertain step. He was a foot away from that old, unchanged black tree. That long-ago Gansey had stumbled to his knees. They had crawled over his face here, over his closed eyelids, along quivering lips.
He had not run. There was no running from them, and in any case, the weapon had done its work already. He remembered thinking that it would only ruin the party by reappearing covered with hornets.
He caught himself on his hands, only for a moment, and then rolled on to his elbow. Poison razed his veins. He was on his side. He was curled. Wet leaves pressed against his cheek as every part of him seemed to suffocate. He was shaking and done and afraid, so afraid.
Why? he wondered. Why me? What was the purpose of it?
He opened his eyes.
He was standing, hands fisted, looking at the place it had happened. He must have been saved to find Glendower. He must have been saved to kill this demon.
“Dick! Gansey! Dick! Gansey!” Henry’s voice carried across the yard. “You’ll want to see this.”
There was a cave opening beneath the house. Not a grand, aboveground opening like the cave they’d entered in Cabeswater. And not the sheltered hole-in-the-ground entrance they’d used to enter the cavern Gwenllian had been buried in. This was a wet, wide-open maw of an opening, all collapsed ramps of dirt spread over concrete bones and bits of furniture, the ground splitting and part of a basement falling into the resulting pit. The freshness of it made Gansey warily suspect that it had opened as a result of his command to Chainsaw back at Fox Way.
He had asked to see the Raven King. He was being shown the way to the Raven King, no matter what earth had to be moved to make that happen.
“It really is a helluva fixer-upper,” Henry said, because someone had to say it. “I feel like they should possibly renovate this basement if they want to get a good sale price. Hardwood floors, update the doorknobs, maybe put the wall back.”
Gansey joined him at the edge of the chasm and peered in. Both of them shone the lights on their phones into the pit. Unlike the fresh wound of the opening, the cavern below looked worn and dry and dusty, like it had always existed beneath the house. It was merely this entrance that had been invented in response to his request.
Gansey looked out the window at the Fisker parked out front, mentally aligning himself with the highway, with Henrietta, with the ley line. Of course, he already knew this house was on the ley line. Hadn’t it been said at the very beginning that he had only survived his death on the ley line because someone else was dying elsewhere on it?
He wondered if there had ever been an easier way to get to this cavern. Was there another natural opening elsewhere along the line, or had it been waiting all along for him to order it to reveal itself?
“Well,” Gansey said eventually. “I’m going in.”
Henry laughed, and then realized that he was serious. “Shouldn’t you have a helmet and a manservant for expeditions like that?”
“Probably. But I don’t think I have time to go back to Henrietta for my equipment. I’ll just have to go slowly.”
He didn’t ask Henry to come along, because he didn’t want Henry to have to feel bad when he said that he wasn’t coming along. He didn’t want Henry to feel that Gansey had ever expected him to do such a thing along with him, to climb into a hole in the ground when the only thing Henry really feared was holes in the ground.
Gansey removed his watch and put it in his pocket so it would not catch on anything if he had to climb. Then he cuffed his trousers and considered the entrance once more. It was not a terrible drop down, but he wanted to be sure he could get back out of it if he returned and no one else was there to help him out. With a frown, he fetched one of the chairs that had not been destroyed in the collapse. He lowered it into the blackness; once he righted it, it would give him the few extra feet he’d need to scramble back out.
Henry watched all of this and then said, “Wait. You’re going to junk up your nice coat, white man. Take this.” He shouldered out of his Aglionby sweater and proffered it.
“So you’re literally giving me the shirt off your back,” Gansey said, swapping him for his coat. He was grateful. He looked up to Henry. “See you on the other side. Excelsior.”