Book of Night(41)

“Someone’s coming. Don’t move.” A voice from behind her, a boy’s voice. She wondered if he was actually there, or if he was the echo of a dream she’d been having before she woke.

She fought down the temptation to turn around. After a moment, she heard footsteps in the hall, the tapping of hard soles on the stone floor. Trying to slow her breathing, Charlie remained still until they passed.

After they faded away, she scrambled to push herself up. Her head swam. Whatever she’d been dosed with, it wasn’t out of her system yet.

“Don’t look behind you,” the voice said.

She stopped.

“If you don’t look at me, I’ll guide you out of this house.”

“And if I do?” she whispered.

“Then you’re on your own. They believe that you’re lying in a pool of your own blood, so they’re not concerned about you at the moment,” he said. “You might make it.”

“What about the guy I came in with? Can I get to him?”

There was a long pause. “He’s beyond helping.”

The meaning of that settled over her, but she wasn’t thinking straight enough to accept it. Getting up slowly, she balanced herself by holding on to the bookshelf. One of the volumes, a slim book with a red spine embossed in golden flames, was shelved puzzlingly sideways. Inferno, the title read.

She stared until she realized it wasn’t a book at all, but a lever.

On her feet, she could see that one wall of shelves had swung inward, a door to a hidden room left open. Even in her current state, she couldn’t help peering inside. It was another library, but this one held distinctly older and more valuable looking books. A sinister oil painting was hung against the far wall—a trompe l’oeil featuring a black goat on a wooden table, stomach sliced, shining entrails hanging out, a goblet and an arrangement of pomegranates beside it. With so much red, the artist had been at pains to separate the gleaming seeds from the blood.

Charlie took it in, especially the odd way it was hung. Farther from the wall on one side than the other, as though it were a door. That’s where the safe would be, behind the painting.

She took a step forward, over the threshold. She scanned the shelves. There it was, another volume with a red spine. The Book of Amor Pettit.

Her hand went to it, then she hesitated. “Do you mind?” Charlie felt as though she were in a fairy tale, with fairy-tale rules. Don’t look. But did that also mean she shouldn’t steal?

“It’s not for me to mind or not mind,” the voice said.

That was answer enough for her to slip it out from the shelf and into her bag, which she slung across her shoulders.

“Turn two steps to your left.” The voice came from directly behind her, close enough for the hairs on the back of her neck to rise, though she didn’t feel the heat of his breath. “You’re going to walk through the doors to the dining room. No one goes in there, so you should be able to walk to the servants’ stair in the pass-through area just outside the kitchen without anyone spotting you.”

“And then?”

“Never look back.”

It felt like still being in a dream, walking through the house with just the voice behind her. Into a hall where the shining glass eyes of mounted animal heads stared down at her. Gazelle. Ibex. Rhinoceros. Then past a parlor, where Charlie spotted a blond girl flipping through a magazine. The girl didn’t look up as Charlie slunk past her in the dark. When she got to the pass-through, she heard one of the household staff on the phone, ordering artichokes and organic spinach. There was a radio on in there, with Nina Simone singing about running to the devil, all on that day.

“Now what?” she whispered.

For a long moment there was no reply. Charlie started to turn, thought of Orpheus leading his girlfriend out of the underworld. Fairy-tale rules. She stopped.

There or not, the boy had sent her this way for a reason. He couldn’t have meant for her to go into the kitchen, since it was occupied. He specifically mentioned the stairs. She went up them, turning the corner into a long hall. She remembered the last time she’d been in a big house like this, how there was a second, more elaborate stair in the main entrance. Maybe he’d intended for her to get to the front door that way, while the rest of the household moved underneath her.

Or maybe Charlie was so drugged that she’d imagined him entirely.

She padded across the hall, bag clutched to her chest. In the direction of the parlor below, she heard a girl’s voice. “That’s not fair! I want to borrow him.”

And a boy’s voice, maybe the one she’d heard before. “He doesn’t like you.”

The girl laughed. “That’s not true. We have games we play that he would never play with you.”

And then Charlie was going down the stairs. Her head swam again on the way down, but she made it. She turned the brass latch and pushed. The door opened and then slammed behind her.

Loud enough that it wasn’t possible for it to go unnoticed.

Charlie started to run.

There were only woods surrounding the estate, so she plunged into them, not caring about the branches pulling at her clothing. Not caring that her head pounded and nausea turned her stomach.

She raced into the night, crashing through buckthorn bushes that tore at her skin, tripping over ferns. Behind her, she heard shouting, but it was far behind. Flashlights cut through the night. Charlie kept going, her head swimming.