That was all I could take of the house for that day. The sun spilled in through the windows, ridding the dark hallways of their gloom 48
and beckoning me outside. At first I thought I’d take a stroll through the gardens, only to discover they were filled with more creepy statues. Some of the sculptures were the winged men and women that I’d seen in the house, but others looked like mad scientist experi-ments. In the back of my mind I knew they were creatures of myth: chimeras, griffins, Stymphalian birds, but they only looked like monsters to me.
The gardens stretched for what looked like a mile until they disappeared into a dense pine forest. Abandoning the idea of exploring the grounds, I headed to my truck and escaped into the foothills for my first hike in Colorado.
At 5:30 a.m. I sat in the middle of my bed. All the lights were on and I’d turned the hallway lights on too. Radiohead was cranked up so loud that I doubted I’d hear myself even if I shouted. My eyes burned, and it wasn’t the blasting music that made my teeth rattle. I couldn’t take this. How was I supposed to live in a place that wouldn’t let me sleep and was slowly convincing me that poltergeists had rented out the room right above mine?
Something in the house had to be causing the noise. Supernatu-ral, electrical, whatever it was I had to find it and stop it. If I didn’t, I would be driving back to Portland within a week. Still bleary eyed, I grabbed my video camera and headed into the hallway, watching the screen as I walked. Sure enough, when I reached the statue at the corner, the picture began to wave and then turned to static. I kept walking, gazing at the screen as it flickered back to life like nothing strange had happened. Each time I neared another statue, the screen gave out again. I was passing through the balcony of the foyer, heading toward the west wing, when the screen skipped and went black.
Not static this time; no image at all.
I checked the camera, its glowing red light telling me it was still on, still working. The black screen crackled and went still, crackled 49
again. I stood still, staring at the image. The crackle came again and again in a steady pulse. Each time it happened, the camera vibrated in my hand like I was standing next to a speaker putting out a loud, super-low bass line.
I looked up to see where I was. The double doors of the library loomed in front of me. My mouth went dry. The library. The place Bosque told me I couldn’t go.
I took a step forward. The camera jumped in my hand. I swore as I dropped it. It clunked on the floor. When I picked it up and examined it, it didn’t seem to be damaged. That same steady crackle pulsed on the black screen.
I backed against the rail of the balcony’s landing and slid down until I was sitting. I’m not sure how long I was there, staring at the tall wooden doors.
He told me not to go in.
Screw it. I can’t live like this.
I left the camera on the cold floor and pushed myself up. When I tried the handle, I found the door was locked. No surprise there. I bent over, examining the door. Getting in wouldn’t be a problem; I could pick the lock easily. When I stood up to get what I needed to open the door, something else caught my eye.
At first glance it appeared to be decoration, an ornate carving that covered the thin gap between the two doors. As I examined the strange object, I saw that it contained some sort of bolt mechanism.
A second lock. And one I had no idea how to get open. I rammed my fist into the door, but swore to myself I’d find a way in. Maybe I’d invite my online pals to the first-ever battering ram building party of the twenty-first century.
When I got back to my room, my phone was buzzing. The clock on my nightstand read 7:00 a.m.
Must be Uncle Bosque.
I picked up the phone.
50
“Don’t.” The voice was almost too soft to hear.
“What?” I said.
“Don’t.” The whisper came once again before the line went silent.
I brought up my call log. No call had been registered.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I put the phone on my bed and backed away from it like it was a hissing snake. Then I turned around and dug through the pile of laundry where I knew my sketchbook had been buried.
51
eigHt
W
smArt girls Are Hot. Especially when their brilliance helps you break and enter. Rachel had the weird lock figured out the next day. More and more people were showing up on facebook—lots of girls. I must be cuter than I thought. Everyone wanted to know what was in the library, including me. That was good. I needed the encouragement.
A few people were worried, and I didn’t blame them. I wasn’t looking forward to facing the wrath of my uncle if he found out what I was up to. My online friends made some good points about staying out of forbidden rooms. But I also couldn’t handle trying to forget about the creepy night noises that kept me awake.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but life at Rowan Estate was slowly killing me. Victoria’s shouts of: “OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN
THE DOOR!” drowned out all rational warnings from my other friends.
I brought my laptop to the kitchen, reading through the latest comments while I made scrambled eggs. No good breaking family law on an empty stomach. What Rachel had discovered was unsettling, but not enough to rid me of an appetite.
Scarfing down eggs doused in hot sauce, I felt more alive than I had in days. I was going to get inside that library. I would know what had been harassing me ever since I got here. So what if the lock was 53
the nine circles of hell. Dante was a great artist, his works labeled classics, and his depiction of hell was symbolic, not literal, right?
The Inferno theme fit with my uncle’s décor. The stairs leading to his office were set in an archway that was lined with sconces of the seven deadly sins. Put that together with the torture paintings and the maybe-demon statues and it might just be that Bosque had a medieval-hell fixation or something. And I could hardly put the blame on my uncle. What if this stuff wasn’t his at all? This was a really frickin’ old house. Any of this oh-so-precious but creepy junk could have been here from the time of its construction.
Sufficiently fortified by eggs and Tabasco, I headed to the to library doors. I had my sketchbook with me, where I’d copied down Rachel’s notes. I’d brought my camera along as well, though I har-bored serious doubts about its usefulness if I did get inside.
Squaring my shoulders and convincing myself one last time that this was indeed a good idea, or at least not a disastrous one, I began to turn the dial. Each one clicked as I moved them into the correct order. The circles of hell descending toward Lucifer’s abode. Limbo.
Lustful. Gluttonous. As I thought about the levels of torment, I shivered. Miserly. Wrathful. Heretics. The air around me grew colder like I was descending with Dante and Virgil to the frozen lake and the icy breath of Lucifer himself. Violent. Fraudulent. Traitors. Where do mis-behaving nephews belong?
The sound of clockwork gears turning sent me stumbling back two steps. A final loud click and the door was unlocked.
My fingers shook as I gripped the handle.
I had to do this.
I leaned forward, letting gravity push the handle down. The door opened, swinging inward. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.
My breath stuck in my throat. After all the nightmares and refer-54
ences to hell, I’d expected the locks on the doors to be guarding something horrific. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The library was larger than any room I’d seen in Rowan Estate outside of the ballroom. It was also one of the most beautiful spaces I’d laid eyes on. Built-in bookshelves lined the walls on each side of me, stretching two floors up. A balcony ran along each wall, accessi-ble by identical, tight spiral staircases that rose from the main floor to the center of each balcony, giving access to the upper shelves of books. The wooden columns separating the bookshelves were covered in ornate carvings. Some symbols looked vaguely familiar; others
I’d never seen.
The outside wall of the library was divided by an enormous fireplace. The mantel was at least two feet above my head and the fireplace itself was wider than three, maybe four of me put together.
A portrait hung above the mantel, and I didn’t want to look at it because I worried it was more of the grotesque art that lined the mansion’s walls. When I did finally force myself to stare at it, I was pleasantly surprised . . . for a little while.
This painting wasn’t anything like the others. It was a simple, if austere, portrait of a man standing behind a woman who was seated in the chair. They gazed at the empty library, solemn faced. Despite the lack of violence in the portrait, I found myself needing to look away. The picture turned my stomach as if I’d eaten stones for breakfast instead of eggs. Despair pressed onto my chest, stealing my breath. What was it with the art in this place? If it didn’t make you want to vomit, it depressed the hell out of you.
I didn’t look at the painting again, instead focusing on the jewel tones streaming in through the stained glass windows that lined the outside wall on either side of the fireplace. The colors captured sunlight and made it dance, washing the library with kaleidoscopic hues.
55
Turning in a slow circle, I tried to detect anything sinister about the place. Nothing.
The library held books, simple furniture, and in one corner a tall cabinet and a grandfather clock. When I tried to open the cabinet, I found it locked and decided to leave it that way. Strange as it was, I was tired of picking locks.
Maybe leaving it alone would get me sent to a slightly less horrible circle of hell.
My adrenaline from working to get inside the library had been spent. And there was nothing here. My life in Vail suddenly felt like one sick practical joke. And I was pissed.
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nine
E
Here’s A good rule: Don’t make and post web videos when you’re paranoid, sleep deprived, and angry.
I broke that rule big time. I still can’t believe I did it.
fortunately the people that had been hanging out with me online were the forgiving sort. Lucky me. Seriously.
I had to make it up to them. Some of the comments were so sweet I thought I should write personal thank-you notes.
Dear Emily, Roses are red, violets are blue, I would go crazy if not for you.
On second thought, that was just creepy. I’d stick with the videos.
I’d considered fessing up about the weird phone calls as part of my mea culpa, but I was already walking on the edge of crazy cliff and I needed to keep my friends. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to share anything that might scare my helpers away.
With my sketchbook in hand I went back to the library, deter-mined to find out what about it made it off-limits. Ignoring the painting, fireplace, and cabinet, I headed for the bookshelves. Though it was unlikely I’d see a book with forbidden written on the spine, maybe I’d find something.
58
Glancing at the titles gave me no clues other than that a sometime owner of this place liked turn-of-the-century books. I pulled Westward Ho! off the shelf, leafing through its pages.
Someone hadn’t taken very good care of this book. A few of the pages were covered in ink.
Wait a sec.
I laid the book open on the floor so I could get a better look at the defaced pages. The pen marks on the page were deliberate—and exquisite. A pattern, but a pattern that made what?
I grabbed another book, Songs of a Wanderer. It took less than a minute to find the ink designs scattered through the pages of the text.
Again the drawings were linked as if they connected random phrases and letters on the pages. But if they were linked, it couldn’t be random. Could it?
Wondering if my discovery might be a fluke, I left the books and went to the opposite wall of bookshelves. I ran up the spiral staircase and took three books from various locations on the wall. All three had the same markings hidden inside.
Who could have done this? And why?
I needed to think about what my next step was. Besides, I’d already come up with my homework assignment for the day. What’s better than thank-you notes?
Thank-you sketches.
Posting the library sketch garnered some flattering remarks about my artistic abilities, probably more than I deserved, but not much in the way of problem solving. I took the suggestion to look under the Persian rug in front of the fireplace seriously. Rowan Estate is the sort of place to have trapdoors, but this rug wasn’t hiding one. I didn’t blame people for their interest in the portrait, but nothing about it seemed off. That’s not completely true. Though I’d seen the portrait 59
a few times, it still left me feeling like someone was trying to drill a hole in my chest. Stranger still, if I looked at it for very long, I started to hear a sound, like someone very far away was crying.
To me that was steering back toward crazytown, which I didn’t want to do, so I decided against any focus on the portrait. Besides, I was getting kind of obsessed with the marked-up books. I spent the afternoon pulling books from shelves and searching for marked pages. It didn’t take long to discover that not all the books had been altered, but a hell of a lot of them were. When I had a stack of a hundred books, I took a break, looking at my tiny towers of clues.
I had no doubt there were more patterns hidden in the stacks, but there was no way I’d get through all of them. I’d never make it through the books I’d already stacked up.
It was time for a little help from my friends.
60
ten
F
i’d never been more glAd that I had my own
bank account because otherwise I would have had to do some serious explaining about the gigantic postage bill I ran up sending packages all over the country.
Waiting to hear back from friends about the books was hard. I did some more hiking, sent out personal thank-you sketches to Liz and Victoria since they’d been taking such good care of me, and hunted down some more patterns from books I hadn’t sent out.
I was excited and frustrated. I hoped that the books would enlighten me as to what was hidden in the library—and I was more and more convinced that what I saw, a beautiful room full of books, was not why Bosque wanted to keep me out of the room—but I also knew that given the number of books left to go through, I’d never get the whole story. I just hoped I could get enough of it to find some answers.
fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. The clues poured in so fast I could barely keep up. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in school. Also a good thing: everyone helping me seemed to be avoiding work and school themselves.
My bare walls were no longer bare; instead they were covered with pages from the texts, clues, and notes being sent from too many places to count.
62
But it still didn’t make sense.
first there were names: Alistair, Nightshade, Cameron, Rowan, Marise, Lumine. The more information about these people we gathered, the stranger the clues got. At first I thought it was a family chronicle, but the dates didn’t work out. People don’t live to be 283.
They just don’t.
With that set of clues leading to a dead end, I focused on the others. These phrases appeared to be part of a history. Alistair’s name came up again, but in the context of his participation in a war. The factions in conflict were unlike anything I’d come across in my history classes: Conatus, Searchers, Keepers, Guardians. I didn’t know what to make of them. And the war centered around a woman (I assumed she was a woman) named Eira. Again, this was no part of the wars in medieval Europe I’d heard of. I even went back to my Western Civ texts to try to find some connection, but there was nothing.
The final group of clues I didn’t even want to deal with. It put me right back in creepy, hellish territory. Witches. Lots of stuff about witches. And elements. Not the periodic table of elements you mem-orize for chem class. These were old-school elements: ea
rth, air, water, and fire.
I was right back to where I’d started: frustrated, angry, and tired.
Maybe I was on a wild-goose chase. I wasn’t supposed to be in this library, and what I’d found hadn’t led me to any of the answers I’d hoped for. Part of me was tempted to call it a day, lock up the library, and hope my uncle never found out I’d been in there. It couldn’t be too much longer before he got me into that school. And the thing that went CRASH in the night would have to get tired of tormenting me eventually.
Why was I doing any of this?
I’d started a blog post apologizing to everyone for wasting their time when I came across something new. It was a clue from a book like the others, but it was not like the others.
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Records you seek are behind time’s wheel.
Not a name. Not a history. Not witches.
This wasn’t a clue; it was direction.
Time’s wheel. Something else I hadn’t heard of, but the phrase was simple enough that I was sure I could figure it out. And I didn’t have to do it on my own.
I said it out loud, as if to reassure myself that this was the right way to go.
“Records you seek are behind time’s wheel.”
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw I had a new text message.
Stop.
I looked to see who it was from. The message vanished. It had been there. A text that only read Stop. And now it was gone.
Maybe the ghost haunting my phone was a friend. Maybe it was an enemy. Either way, I wasn’t stopping. Not now. I was closing in on something vital, closing in fast.
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eleven
A
i doubted i would HAve figured it out on my own.
from the triskelion to the face of the grandfather clock, the library was filled with wheel-like objects. It turned out the clock was in fact just a clock. The triskelions were part of window decorations, which meant behind them were the grounds of the estate. I only wanted to start digging up my uncle’s garden as a last resort.