Beautiful Darkness(53)

“Crap.” I gripped the torch's wooden handle between my teeth and kept going.

“This sucks.” Link was muttering behind me as his torch burned out.

Liv was behind him. “Mine's out, too.” We were in complete darkness. The ceiling was so low, we had to duck beneath the muddy rock.

“This is really freakin’ me out.” Link had never liked the dark.

Liv called out from behind us. “Eventually you're going to reach the …”

I hit my head against something hard and splintery in the darkness. “Ouch!”

“… Doorwell.”

Link must have pulled his flashlight out of his pocket, because a flickering circle of light hit the round door in front of me. It was some kind of cold metal, not the splintering wood or crumbling stone of the other doors we'd seen. It looked more like a manhole cover in the wall. I pushed my shoulder against it, but it didn't budge.

“What now?” I called back to Liv, my standin for Marian on all Caster-related issues. I heard her flipping pages in her notebook.

“I don't know. Maybe push harder?”

“You had to check your little book for that?” I was annoyed.

“You want me to crawl up there and do it for you?” Liv wasn't happy either.

“Come on, kids. I'll push Ethan, you push me, Ethan pushes the door.”

“Brilliant,” Liv said.

“Shoulder to shoulder, MJ.”

“Excuse me?”

“Marian Junior. You're the one who wanted an adventure. You got a better idea?”

The door had no handle or valve. It fit into a perfect seam, a circle of metal in a circular doorway. Not even a slit of light escaped through the cracks. “Link's right. We don't have a choice, and we're not going back now.” I wedged my shoulder against the door. “One, two, three. Push!”

When the tips of my fingers touched the door, it swung open as if my skin was somehow the genetic recognition, the key that opened the door. Link smashed into me, and Liv tumbled on top of both of us. I cracked my head against what seemed like stone as I hit the ground. I felt so dizzy, I couldn't see anything. When I opened my eyes, I was staring up at a streetlamp.

“What happened?” Link sounded as disoriented as I was.

I felt around the edge of the stones with my fingertips. Cobblestones. “I just touched the door, and it opened.”

“Amazing.” Liv stood up, taking it all in.

I was lying in a city street that looked like London or an old town right out of a history book. Behind me, I could see the round doorway, at the road's end. There was a brass street sign next to it that said WESTERN DOORWELL, CENTRAL LIBRARY.

Link sat up next to me, rubbing his head. “Holy crap. This is like one of those alleys where people got hacked up by Jack the Ripper.” He was right. We could have been standing in the mouth of an alley in nineteenth-century London. The street was dark, lit by only the dim glow of a few lampposts. The alley was framed on both sides by the backs of tall brick row houses.

Liv stood up and made her way down the deserted cobblestone street, looking up at an old iron street sign: THE KEEP. “That must be the name of this particular tunnel. Unbelievable. Professor Ashcroft told me, but I never imagined. I suppose books couldn't really do it justice, could they?”

“Yeah, it looks nothin’ like the postcards.” Link pulled himself to his feet. “All I wanna know is, where'd the ceilin’ go?” The curved arch of the tunnel's ceiling was gone, and in its place was a dark evening sky, as big and real and full of stars as any sky I'd ever seen.

Liv pulled out her notebook and started writing. “Don't you get it? These are Caster Tunnels. They're not some supernatural subway system, so Casters can creep around under Gatlin borrowing library books.”

“Then what are they?” I ran my hand along the rough brick on the side of the nearest building.

“More like roads to another world. Or, in a way, a whole world all to themselves.”

I heard something, and my heart jumped. I thought Lena was Kelting, reconnecting with me. But I was wrong.

It was music.

“Do you hear that?” Link asked. I was relieved. For once, the music wasn't coming from inside my head. It was coming from the end of the alley. It sounded like the Caster music from the party at Ravenwood last Halloween, the night I saved Lena from Sarafine's psychic attack.

I listened for Lena, felt for her, remembering that night. Nothing.

Liv checked her selenometer and wrote something else in her notebook. “Carmen. I was transcribing one yesterday.”

“English, please.” Link was still staring up at the sky, trying to figure it all out.

“Sorry. It means ‘Charmed Song.’ It's Caster music.”

I took off, following the sound down the alley. “Whatever it is, it's coming from down here.”

Marian had been right. It was one thing to wander through the damp tunnels of the Lunae Libri, but this was something entirely different. We had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. I already knew that much.

As I walked down the alley, the music grew louder, the cobblestones smoothed their way into asphalt beneath my feet, and the street changed from Old World London to modern-day slum. It was a street you could find in any big city, in some forgotten run-down neighborhood. The buildings looked like abandoned warehouses, iron grating covered the shattered windows, and the remnants of broken signs blinked fluorescent light into the darkness. There were cigarette butts and trash all over the street, and a strange sort of Caster graffiti — symbols I couldn't begin to understand — on the sides of the buildings. I pointed it out to Liv. “Do you know what any of that means?”