Chapter 31: Chapter 29: A light in the dark

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> “Delaware has ratified and I am confident we will reach nine by the end of next year. There is now the matter of what to do with the last Guild seat.”

Somehow I made it down the stairs, through the Egyptian section, and out a side door with no one the wiser. I quickly caught a cab that had just crossed the park, and we sped away from the Museum.

The Raid was finally over, but any thoughts of escaping from Beatrice’s clutches had been squashed in an instant. If I somehow still made it to Paris, what was I going to say to Duncan?

> “Hey, sorry I don’t want to be with you, my secret evil alchemy mentor has me locked down in a two-year contract, but I’ll touch base with you when it’s over?”

Maybe I just wouldn’t go at all. The one silver lining of this disaster of a night was that the rest of the bachelorette was likely canceled. I pulled out my phone and was greeted with a wall of text messages from the other girls at the lecture.

“Anyone seen Lisa?”

“Weheres lisa.”

“Cant find Stacy or Jen either”

“No one picking up their phones.”

“Just talked to security. Lisa knocked down several suits of armor! They’ve taken her to local precinct”

“Wtf she wasn’t even that drunk”

“Stacy’s there too. She took an abstract painting off wall”

“I don’t understand. I was with lisa in the foyer. she was fine”

“What about jen.”

“Nothing”

“Where’s jen”

“havent seen her but security didnt mention her”

“Shit shit shit”

“Someone call the airline ill go over to see if i can get them out”

I put down my phone and tried to convince myself it would all be fine. People got drunk all the time at famous museums and knocked over priceless artwork, right? That wouldn’t even merit a mention on the bottom of Page Six. And maybe they wouldn’t remember that I was the one who gave them the notes.

But I couldn’t lie to myself, couldn’t try to brush away what I’d done, and I buried my face in my hands and began to sob.

“goto do…”

The thought crackled in my head like static and I looked up to see if it had come from the driver’s phone or someone standing outside the car.

“Go … door.”

This time I recognized it as Beatrice’s voice, but I could barely pick out the thought from my own.

“Beatrice?” I shouted in my head.

“Lost him for now but…”

“Lost who? What are you talking about?”

“Spotted … Guild. Need to ge…”

“Beatrice? Beatrice!”

She didn’t respond. I started to text her but then immediately stopped. If she could have texted me, she would have.

“Excuse me?” I said to the driver. “Sorry, going to be a different destination.”

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I had the cab drop me off several blocks away from the door in Long Island City. If the Guild was following us, I didn’t want to lead them right to the door. But none of it made sense.

“Beatrice?” I said in my head. “I’m close to the door.”

“Good. Meet me there.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you go to the door now, if they’re following you?”

“I was always going to go now.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Was trying to let you go. Didn’t need to get you more involved.”

“But…”

“But then I saw him. From the balcony overlooking the foyer. Gilbert.”

“Who’s Gilbert?”

“A member of the Guild. He’s the one who sent the enforcer after me. Thought we had a truce.”

“Did he see you?”

“Don’t think so. But didn’t want to come here underequipped, since I gave the Medoblad back to you.

“Oh. Got it.”

I turned the corner and saw Beatrice already standing next to the door, confirming that the piece of tape I had placed there weeks ago was still there. She was holding the door knobs and considering the empty socket in the door where one of the knobs would hopefully fit.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. So, you’re just going to put one of these in and magically the door will now open?”

“Pretty much. But to where, I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“These aren’t just door knobs, Jen. They’re the key to a portal. They’re made of vervorium.”

My eyes widened.

“What? So, wait, the door will open to somewhere else?”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Yes. That’s why I couldn’t open the door before with the knob that was already here. The question is, which one is the right one?”

She took one of the door knobs, fitted it into the socket, and slowly turned it as she pushed on the door. It didn’t move.

“Hmm, not that one. Let’s try the second one.”

Beatrice removed the first knob and replaced it with the second one and again turned the knob and pushed.

This time, however, the door slowly slid open, just a crack, and all I could see behind it was darkness.

Beatrice peered into the opening and pushed the door inward another few inches, before gingerly moving her arm across the threshold and then withdrawing it.

“Hmm. Doesn’t feel like my arm went anywhere.”

“Same thing happened with my finger when I played Polly’s shell game. It was like I was sticking my finger in an empty tube.”

“Well, we’ll just have to take the plunge and see what happens. Ready?”

I nodded.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

Beatrice opened the door all the way, stepped into the darkness, and vanished from view.

I waited for her to re-emerge and tell me it was all clear but she didn’t and I stood on the precipice alone, deciding whether to move forward into the unknown or run back to try to pick up the pieces of my other life.

The decision, just as when I agreed to be Beatrice’s novice, was an easy one. I had run from so many things in my life and knew that if I ran from this, I would never get the chance to come back.

I held my breath, closed my eyes, and stepped through the doorway.

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I couldn’t breathe.

That was the first thing I noticed.

I also couldn’t see and couldn’t tell if my eyes were opened or closed.

It was as if someone had blindfolded me, spun me around, and tossed me into a tank of water. Up and down had no meaning and my hands and legs searched for purchase on a solid surface but just thrashed in the ether.

Then, off in the distance, a small flicker appeared. I held my hand up to it but it was far away and I still couldn’t see anything else. The light grew larger, as if my body was being pushed toward it by some unseen force, until finally I saw it.

A doorway.

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I tumbled forward onto a hard wooden floor and gulped in a huge breath. Beatrice was standing above me, fist cocked as if she was ready to knock my head off.

“Sorry, you took so long to come through that I thought Gilbert had gotten you.”

She opened her fist and I grabbed her hand to pull myself up, taking in our new surroundings.

The room was dark but for the light coming from Beatrice’s phone flashlight, which was on the floor. It was a small room, maybe seven steps across in length. Pairs of boarded-up windows framed doors on all four walls. Beatrice let go of my hand and pushed the door we had come through closed with a shove. A familiar brown door knob with white mottling was in the socket on this side as well, but two of the three other sockets were empty.

“Where are we?” I asked. Beatrice ignored me and pulled the door knob, grasping it free from the socket, before handing it to me.

“Hold onto this. Now we can go back through later without someone else coming through from the other side. And we’re in Minneford Lighthouse in the middle of Long Island Sound.”

“W-what? Really?”

I opened the map on my phone and the cursor zoomed in on a barely-there island not far from the Throgs Neck Bridge.

“Yes, I was disappointed too. But maybe one of these doors leads to somewhere cooler.”

I walked over to the door with a knob and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.

“That one’s no good. Can’t even free the knob; it’s rusted over,” said Beatrice. “Hopefully on the other side too.”

“Oh. What is this place?”

“If I had to guess, some sort of waypoint. A way to travel to and from multiple locations.”

“Incredible,” I said.

“Yes and no,” said Beatrice. “Why would someone go to all this trouble to hide a gateway from an abandoned warehouse to an abandoned lighthouse? There has to be something else through one of these other doors.”

She fit both remaining knobs in the empty sockets and motioned me over to one door while she tried the other.

“Won’t open,” I said and removed the knob. I looked over to see Beatrice pushing her door open a tiny crack before closing it shut.

“I’ll take that one back,” she said and I handed it to her. “Don’t want to mix them up.”

“Good thinking. So, we going to go through this one?”

Beatrice considered the door for a moment, a somber look on her face.

“I suppose. But that trip through the first door nearly made me vomit. Hopefully it won’t be so bad the second time.”

She opened the door again, this time all the way.

“Come right through after me.”

“OK,” I said as Beatrice stepped across the doorway and disappeared into the darkness once again.

I walked quickly to the doorway and joined her.

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I was falling this time. My stomach lurched as if I was plummeting down the tracks on a roller coaster, the familiar darkness enveloping me. I waited for the light to appear but I just kept falling and falling. Seconds, minutes, hours crept by. How many, I didn’t know. There was no anchor point in this void, no horizon off in the distance. I tried to call out to Beatrice but if words actually came out, I wasn’t sure.

Finally, though, a shimmer of a speck of light appeared above me, gradually getting larger and I realized I wasn’t falling down, I was soaring up towards it.

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The ground was hard and cold when I fell through the doorway and Beatrice was again waiting, her phone flashlight providing the only light.

“That was … unpleasant,” I said, getting to my feet. “Where are we now?”

“Don’t know,” said Beatrice, closing the door and trying, but failing, to remove the door knob. “No service, no GPS, but from the looks of it, somewhere underground.”

She shone the light in a circle, revealing carved out walls of stone and a path of jagged rocks leading down a dark corridor. The door was set into one of the walls but the path leading away from the corridor was blocked with a mass of rock.

“Looks like we’re in an abandoned mine,” I said. “Do you think we traveled farther this time? It felt like an eternity in there.”

“Maybe, but let’s keep moving,” said Beatrice. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

She pointed her phone in front of us to illuminate the path and we began to walk. The air was cold and damp, and I cursed myself for not bringing a shawl to the lecture. We must have looked ridiculous, two women in cocktail attire walking down an abandoned mine shaft in high heels. The path took a slight curve to the left and abruptly ended in a small chamber, not much bigger than the interior of the lighthouse. Beatrice slowly moved the flashlight over the left wall to reveal several sconces carved into the surface.

I walked over to the nearest one, my heels kicking up water pooled on the ground, and peered inside to find a red stone the size of a tennis ball resting in the interior. Its surface was smooth like marble and as I slowly withdrew it, the stone suddenly began emitting a soft glow that illuminated part of the chamber.

“Wow,” I said. “How did it light up?”

Beatrice shrugged but reached her hand into another sconce on the opposite wall to pull out a similar stone, which also lit up at her touch.

“Maybe from the warmth of our bodies? Haven’t seen something like this before.”

She put her stone back in the sconce and it cast a dull light out into the chamber. I did the same, and the combined glow of the stones revealed a larger sconce in the back wall. This one didn’t have a stone inside. Instead, a large leather-bound book was propped up next to a wooden box.

We ran to the back wall at the same time and nearly collided. Beatrice slowly removed the book from its resting place and opened to the first page, a look of excitement spreading across her face, before we were greeted with familiar handwriting written in green ink:

Rita van Asch, 1787

Beatrice flipped through the pages to reveal dated entries just like the 1777 diary we already had.

“Ugh,” she said, slamming her fist against the wall. “For a second, just a second, I thought that we had hit on the mother lode, that this was where the Guild had hidden its Compendium. Instead, it’s just another diary.”

“Maybe there’s still something valuable in there?” I offered. I was disappointed too. We had made it all this way, messed up so many lives, traveled so far, only to be rewarded with another dusty book to read and a stupid wooden box.

“Maybe,” Beatrice said, putting the book back down in the sconce before picking up the box. It was simple: no ornate flourishes or intricate designs, just six pieces of wood stuck together with a metal latch on the front.

“You take the book, and I’ll carry the box,” Beatrice said. “I also want to take one of these light stones, could be usef-”

Beatrice began to cough uncontrollably and a second later, I did as well. We both turned in horror to the entrance of the chamber to see smoke flowing out of a small metal object. I grasped my chest as I stumbled forward onto the cold, wet ground and tried to bring my hand up to cover my face, but the smoke was overpowering and I fell into a third black void.