At last, George seemed to come to a decision. He turned and loped off toward Prescott College. I wasted no time scurrying back to the gate. So what if I wasn’t following the precise directions in the letter? I’d done every step, despite the delay, and I couldn’t risk being late again. Who knew how many atomic clocks they had in there?
The giant double doors at the threshold of the Rose & Grave tomb were weathered to a dull bronze sheen. A large brass knocker shaped like an open book hung at face height; its aged brass pages were engraved with an “R” and a “G.” I took a breath.
Here goes nothing.
No sooner had I lifted the knocker than the door flew open. I glimpsed a shadowed face, maybe a pair of hands, then someone threw a burlap hood over my head, grabbed me by both of my arms, and pulled me inside.
I screamed. Of course.
“Silence, Neophyte.” More hands surrounded me and I was lifted off my feet. “You are treading on sacred ground,” a man intoned from somewhere in the vicinity of my right knee.
I wiggled my useless legs. “I’m not treading on anything,” I mumbled through the hood.
Someone actually had the gall to slap me on my butt. “Shush.”
“That had better be someone I know, or I’m suing for harass—”
“I said, ‘Shush!’ ”
“Hands off, hood hound.” I bucked my body as my captors carried me down a short flight of stairs with a series of bone-jarring bumps.
I heard a chuckle near my left shoulder blade. “Tapped a live one here, Lancelot.”
Lancelot?
All talk ceased as the team turned left, halted, then flipped me right-side-up and set me on my (understandably) unsteady feet. Two hands on my shoulders shoved me down onto what felt like a wooden bench, and a third whipped the hood off my head.
I opened my eyes and gasped.
Not from shock, I’d like to point out. The room was still too dark to see much of anything, but what it lacked in illumination, it more than made up for in choking clouds of smoke. I coughed and spluttered, recognizing on my second or third wheeze that the tiny orange sparks invading my field of vision were the lit ends of cigarettes. There were dozens of them. My eyes began to water and I heard a few muffled coughs at my back. Okay, so I was not alone here.
You indoor-smoking bans, look upon that which you have wrought: a generation of twenty-somethings with zero tolerance for secondhand smoke.
“Neophyte!” The sparks trembled for a second, then seemed to freeze in air. “You seek to be Initiated into the Sacred Mysteries of Rose & Grave, to devote the Resolve of your Bone, the Passion of your Blood, and the Power of your Mind”—
And the patience of my ears, I thought, to listen to this cheesy crap. Who writes this stuff?
—“to our Order. This be your wish?”
“You bet!”
Someone poked me. “Say ‘Aye.’ ”
“Aye,” I repeated, hoping I didn’t sound like a pirate.
The sparks began dancing again. “Do not speak in haste, Neophyte. For after this night, there is no turning away from the Path of Rose & Grave. Your mere admittance into our Tomb, your presence here in the Firefly Room”—
So that’s what those cigarettes were supposed to represent. Cute.
—“has shown you more than is permitted to any Barbarian, but even these Mysteries are but tiny sparks alongside the Lamp of Knowledge. Are you willing to Witness this Light and be brought into its Flame, though it may blind you?” (You could totally hear the capital letters in his voice, by the way.) “Choose carefully, Neophyte, for there is no turning back.”
Um, okay, Morpheus…“Yeah, I’ll take the red pill.”
“Huh?” said the voice. Someone else sniggered.
“Sorry,” I said. “I mean, ‘Aye.’ ”
The fireflies all did a nosedive and were extinguished, and for a second, impossibly, the smoke in the room became thicker. Then a light bloomed in the room and an old-fashioned oil lamp floated toward me. “Then come with us, Neophyte Haskel, and be Reborn.”
I stood up and walked toward the light. As I got closer, I saw it was being held by a figure entirely shrouded in his long black cape and hood, looking for all the world like the Ghost of Christmas Future. He withdrew his fist from his robe, and in slow motion opened his hand to reveal a shiny golden key lying in his palm. I reached for it.
Suddenly, several people grabbed me at once and dragged me away from the robed figure. I heard a door open, felt a blast of icy wind, and then I was being propelled roughly up a flight of stairs.
“Not for you!” they cried, following it up with an uneven chorus of, “You’re not worthy! You’re not ready! You can’t come in! Get out, get out, get out!”
“What the hell…?” I kicked my legs furiously and wrenched out of their grip, flailing through the darkness until I fell to my knees on hardwood floor. Ow! Was this part of the initiation? If so, then I think I must have missed a step. I heard shuffling behind me, and then, as if from far away, a voice sounding the alarm.
“Quick, quick, catch her! She mustn’t infiltrate the Inner Temple.”
I blinked furiously and peered through the darkness, hoping to discern some shape, some path, some giant lit-up sign saying EXIT in large red letters. Inner Temple, huh? How about a nice, relaxing Outer Veranda?
No luck. I pushed to my feet and began walking, hands out in front of me so I didn’t break my nose. A few faltering steps later I hit a wall. I kept my fingertips along the edge as I moved forward, feeling the delicate texture of silk wallpaper, the edge of carved picture frames, and then, at last, a hinge. A door, but did it lead out, or farther in? Carefully, I ran my hand along the inside wall, past the threshold, hoping to discover a light switch.
But instead, my fingers touched something smooth and round affixed to the wall. It felt like a ceramic ball beneath my palm. I let my hand glide down, over the front of the object, and felt a few bumps, some indentations, three holes, and a jagged edge—
Oh. My. God. A human skull.
A hand clamped down over my wrist.
I tried to scream, but before I drew breath, someone covered my mouth and dragged me into the room.
“Be quiet, Amy! Or they’ll catch you.”
He released me and I spun around to see my captor. Like the others, he wore a dark robe with a hood pulled low over his eyes. He carried a tiny penlight, which he was shining up to his face like kids do to tell ghost stories. I couldn’t have recognized him, even if I’d been trying.
“Nice costume. Who are you?”
“You screwed up in there, Amy, and they aren’t going to let you in.”
What? Whoa! Why didn’t Malcolm warn me about this? And what had I done to screw up? This whole Rose & Grave thing was turning into a bona fide fiasco. I didn’t know who these people were, what was happening to me, or why. Quill would have been infinitely easier than this. Did the Diggers have anything to do with my failure to get tapped by the literary society? I hadn’t considered it earlier. I was too excited by the prospect of Rose & Grave. But if the Diggers were going to spend the evening screwing with my head before kicking me out, then I’d want some answers from Glenda Foster about why I was wandering through a drafty stone tomb rather than sitting pretty right now in Quill & Ink’s one-bedroom.
“Fine,” I said, lifting my chin. “Then just show me the way out.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“They will try to silence you.”
My mouth went dry, and for a second I believed him. After all, I’d just had my digits inside a dead man’s eye sockets. These people used human skulls as light fixtures; maybe they should be taken seriously. And then I remembered Malcolm and his clumsy letter delivery that afternoon. These weren’t omnipotent officials, they were college kids. If something happened to me, they wouldn’t get away with it. Lydia, at least, knew where I’d gone tonight.