I had a less pleasant memory: my last visit to Bernini’s office. His cool termination of my services. The way he let me get all the way to his door before he called my name and asked for his key back.

But that was perfect, wasn’t it?

He had his key back.

A door I didn’t know about, in a room without a key.

I thanked God for the anal-retentive, type-A, worst-case-scenario worldview of young lawyers, as I pulled my copy of Crime and Punishment off my bookshelf, opened it to the middle, and let the spare key to Bernini’s office fall into my hand.

Perfecto.

Beyond the hidden door was a staircase that spiraled within a tall shaft. We took it down: Miles, then Sarah, then me, the air cooling as we wound downward. At one point, there was an indentation in the wall, the size of a stone. I peeked in and saw a tiny view of the city, through two small holes at the far end of the nook. I realized that we were inside the turret of the law school’s west corner; I was looking out through the eyes of a gargoyle. The staircase continued down below ground level and eventually let us out into a cellar, which threaded us into the tunnels.

We followed the map, using a small compass of Sarah’s from her father. He was a tycoon of some kind at a Boston investment bank that had started three hundred years ago as a maritime trading company. In a nod to the past, they gave nautical compasses to their new executives, and he had given his to Sarah when she graduated from medical school. This was the first time she’d taken it out of its leather pouch, which gave her a perverse satisfaction, under the circumstances.

The steam tunnels seemed darker now. Somewhere outside, a cold front was pulling the temperature down to minus four-a cold so extreme that all life seemed to pause-and the maintenance lights, usually so bright, were pulsing dimly as the campus struggled to heat itself. The only sound was the occasional hiss or drip far down the tunnel, and of course the slap of our feet, which we tried to keep to a minimum. I thought of the Puppet Man. Sarah was next to me. Miles lagged behind, his leather satchel over his shoulder. He was the only one who seemed totally at ease. He might as well have been strolling to a Phish concert.

I looked at the map in my hands and thought with a shiver: two of the three people who contributed to this are dead-Frank Shepard for about two hundred years, Chance Worthington for about two days. I was the only one whose name was still ticked in the Alive column.

We passed under Creighton and Worley. We knew we were under the Michaelson Chemistry Labs when the vapors hit us through the air vents overhead, and we passed a trash heap of old beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, all shattered and discarded-a tribute to two centuries of clumsy students. We arrived below Embry House and took fork after fork to place ourselves directly below the Steel Man. I tried to hear the thumping of music as we passed beneath that famed party room-I imagined the beautiful people dancing in the style of my generation, rugby players and sorority sisters grinding against each other five floors above us.

And then, at the end of our map, we saw a door. It was one of many in a small deserted hallway. We were in a branch of a branch of a branch of the tunnels. No one would ever come this way unless they knew exactly what they were looking for.

We almost passed it.

It would’ve been an ordinary door, identical to dozens of utility closets and electrical rooms we’d already passed, except for the subtle glyph above the door frame:

Two small eyes-orange pupils and black irises-staring down at us.

I gave the knob a turn, and the door opened.

33

“Where are we?” Sarah whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“This is where you saw the ceremony?”

“No. This is nothing like that. Too small. Too… homey. The place I saw was like a cathedral.”

“Well, where is that?”

“I have no idea.”

The place we were in looked like a junior common room in one of the dorms, in a state of bad neglect. There were several couches with cracked and worn leather. There was a rug in the center of the room that had never been fancy, but now it was threadbare. The air was stale. I shut the door behind us and switched on a dim lamp. Old photos covered the walls, hard to make out through thick layers of dust.

On the wall opposite us were two doors.

“I guess we try those,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Sarah whispered.

“Why not?”

“No lock on the door, out there in the hall. Don’t you think that’s weird? Why wouldn’t they lock their door?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we just got lucky for once.”

“I doubt it. The only way you’d come through that door is if you were looking for it. I think this room is the lock.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “I just wouldn’t go touching everything.”

“Look at this,” Miles said.

We turned around.

On a small end table, he’d found two statues; miniature kings standing side by side, carved out of limestone. The pedestals put them at eye level with us.

They were intricately detailed, with lined robes and faces. You got the feeling they were meant to be brothers. One looked kindly, the other cold.

“Look,” Sarah said. She was next to me, pointing at a plaque on one of the pedestals. It had an inscription in foreign letters. It looked like Greek.

“Miles, do they take your Classics degree back if you actually use it for something?”

“You mock,” Miles said, “but what would you do without me?”

He leaned over the plaque and ran his finger across the raised letters.

“It’s a parable,” he said. He laughed. “About two brothers, sworn to guard a crossroads. Not just any crossroads. One path leads to glory beyond your wildest dreams. The other leads to… oh.”

“What-death?”

“I wish. It’s from Paradise Lost. ‘To bottomless perdition, there to dwell, in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.’”

“Penal fire?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s the crossroads between heaven and hell?”

Miles nodded.

I looked at the far wall.

“Two doors. Two paths. How do we choose?”

Miles put his finger back on the words. “According to the parable, you can ask each brother which way to go. But there’s a hitch. By law, one of the brothers must always lie. The other must always tell the truth.”

“No hint on which one’s which?”

Miles read the rest.

He shook his head.

“That’s all it says.”

“What does it matter?” Sarah whispered. “They’re statues. How are we supposed to ask them anything?”

I looked at the two men. Each had one arm raised over his heart, the other down by his side. At the base of each statue was a small rectangular stone that rose slightly above the stones around it.

“Okay,” I said. “We push that stone. That’s how we ask. Does it say anything about chances? How many chances do we get?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“We should be careful.”

“You’re right,” Miles said. He reached out and pressed the stone in front of one statue.

“Miles!” Sarah cried.

The stone sank down under his finger. We heard the clicking of chains, and then, suddenly, the statue’s arm began to move. Where the forearm met the elbow, there was a joint, disguised by the grooved folds of his robes. His arm actually rotated, like the hand of a clock, toward the statue’s right. He came to rest pointing toward the right-hand door across the room.

“Well, it works.”

“That was stupid,” Sarah snapped. “This isn’t a game. Stop acting like it is. Someone could get hurt.”

“We had to try. What’d you want to do, talk about it until we lost our nerve?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said again, poking him in the chest with her finger.