Ninth House

² Last Fall

Daniel Arlington prided himself on being prepared for anything, but if he’d had to choose a way to describe Alex Stern, it would have been “an unwelcome surprise.” He could think of a lot of other terms for her, but none of them were polite, and Darlington always endeavored to be polite. If he’d been brought up by his parents—his dilettante father, his glib but brilliant mother—he might have had different priorities, but he’d been raised by his grandfather, Daniel Tabor Arlington III, who believed that most problems could be solved with cask-strength scotch, plenty of ice, and impeccable manners.

His grandfather had never met Galaxy Stern.

Darlington sought out Alex’s first-floor Vanderbilt dorm room on a sweating, miserable day in the first week of September. He could have waited for her to report to the house on Orange, but when he was a freshman, his own mentor, the inimitable Michelle Alameddine, who had served as his Virgil, had welcomed him to Yale and the mysteries of Lethe House by coming to meet him at the Old Campus freshman dorms. Darlington was determined to do things right, even if everything about the Stern situation had started out wrong.

He hadn’t chosen Galaxy Stern as his Dante. In fact, she had, by sheer virtue of her existence, robbed him of something he’d been looking forward to for the entirety of his three-year tenure with Lethe: the moment when he would gift someone new with the job he loved, when he’d crack the ordinary world open for some worthy but barely suspecting soul. Only a few months before, he’d unloaded the boxes full of incoming freshman applications and stacked them in the great room at Black Elm, giddy with excitement, determined to read or at least skim through all eighteen hundred-plus files before he made his recommendations to the Lethe House alumni. He would be fair, open-minded, and thorough, and in the end he would choose twenty candidates for the role of Dante. Then Lethe would vet their backgrounds, check for health risks, signs of mental illness, and financial vulnerabilities, and a final decision would be made.

Darlington had created a plan for how many applications he’d have to tackle each day that would still free his mornings for work on the estate and his afternoons for his job at the Peabody Museum. He’d been ahead of schedule that day in July—on application number 324: Mackenzie Hoffer, 800 verbal, 720 math; nine APs her junior year; blog on the Bayeux Tapestry maintained in both English and French. She’d seemed promising until he’d gotten to her personal essay, in which she’d compared herself to Emily Dickinson. Darlington had just tossed her folder onto the no pile when Dean Sandow called to tell him their search was over. They’d found their candidate. The alumni were unanimous.

Darlington had wanted to protest. Hell, he’d wanted to break something. Instead, he’d straightened the stack of folders before him and said, “Who is it? I have all of the files right here.”

“You don’t have her file. She never applied. She didn’t even finish high school.” Before Darlington could sputter his indignation, Sandow added, “Daniel, she can see Grays.”

Darlington had paused, his hand still atop Mackenzie Hoffer (two summers with Habitat for Humanity). It wasn’t just the sound of his given name, something Sandow rarely used. She can see Grays. The only way for one of the living to see the dead was by ingesting the Orozcerio, an elixir of infinite complexity that required perfect skill and attention to detail to create. He’d attempted it himself when he was seventeen, before he’d ever heard of Lethe, when he’d only hoped there might be more to this world than he’d been led to believe. His efforts had landed him in the ER and he’d hemorrhaged blood from his ears and eyes for two days.

“She managed to brew an elixir?” he said, both thrilled and—he could admit it—a little jealous.

Silence followed, long enough for Darlington to switch off the light on his grandfather’s desk and walk out to the back porch of Black Elm. From here he could see the gentle slope of houses leading down Edgewood to campus and, far beyond, the Long Island Sound. All of the land down to Central Avenue had once been a part of Black Elm but had been sold off in bits and pieces as the Arlington fortune dwindled. The house, its rose gardens, and the ruined mess of the maze at the edge of the wood were all that remained—and only he remained to tend and prune and coddle it back to life. Dusk was falling now, a long, slow summer twilight, thick with mosquitoes and the glint of fireflies. He could see the question mark of Cosmo’s white tail as the cat wended his way through the high grass, stalking some small creature.

“No elixir,” said Sandow. “She can just see them.”

“Ah,” said Darlington, watching a thrush peck half-heartedly at the broken base of what had once been the obelisk fountain. There was nothing else to say. Though Lethe had been created to monitor the activities of Yale’s secret societies, its secondary mission was to unravel the mysteries of what lay beyond the Veil. For years they had documented stories of people who could actually see phantoms, some confirmed, some little more than rumor. So if the board had found a girl who could do these things and they could make her beholden to them… Well, that was that. He should be glad to meet her.

He wanted to get drunk.

“I’m not any happier about this than you are,” said Sandow. “But you know the position we’re in. This is an important year for Lethe. We need everyone happy.” Lethe was responsible for keeping watch over the Houses of the Veil, but it also relied on them for funding. This was a re-up year and the societies had gone so long without an incident, there were rumblings that perhaps they shouldn’t dip into their coffers to continue supporting Lethe at all. “I’ll send you her files. She’s not… She’s not the Dante we might have hoped for, but try to keep an open mind.”

“Of course,” said Darlington, because that was what a gentleman did. “Of course I will.”

He’d tried to mean it. Even after he read her file, even after he’d watched the interview between her and Sandow recorded at a hospital in Van Nuys, California, heard the husky, broken woodwind sound of her voice, he’d tried. She’d been found naked and comatose at a crime scene, next to a girl who hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the fentanyl they’d both taken. The details of it were all more sordid and sad than he could have fathomed, and he’d tried to feel sorry for her. His Dante, the girl he would gift with the keys to a secret world, was a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he did. But he’d tried.

And still nothing had prepared him for the shock of her presence in that shabby Vanderbilt common room. The room was small but high-ceilinged, with three tall windows that looked out onto the horseshoe-shaped courtyard and two narrow doors leading to the bedrooms. The space eddied with the easy chaos of a freshman year move-in: boxes on the floor, no proper furniture to be seen but a wobbly lamp and a battered recliner pushed up against the long-since-functional fireplace. A muscular blonde in running shorts—Lauren, he guessed (likely pre-med, solid test scores, field-hockey captain at her Philadelphia prep school)—was setting up a faux-vintage turntable on the ledge of the window seat, a plastic crate of records balanced beside it. The recliner was probably hers too, carted along in a moving truck from Bucks County to New Haven. Anna Breen (Huntsville, Texas; STEM scholarship; choir leader) sat on the floor trying to assemble what looked like a bookshelf. This was a girl who would never quite fit. She’d end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church. She definitely wouldn’t be partying with her other roommates.

Then the other two girls shuffled out of one of the bedrooms, awkwardly hefting a banged-up university-issued desk between them.

“Do you have to put that out here?” asked Anna glumly.

“We need more space,” said a girl in a flowered sundress Darlington knew was Mercy Zhao (piano; 800 math, 800 verbal; prizewinning essays on Rabelais and a bizarre but compelling comparison of a passage in The Sound and the Fury to a bit about a pear tree in The Canterbury Tales that had garnered the notice of both the Yale and Princeton English departments).

And then Galaxy Stern (no high school diploma, no GED, no achievements to speak of other than surviving her own misery) emerged from the dark nook of the bedroom, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and black jeans totally inappropriate to the heat and balancing one end of the desk in her skinny arms. The low quality of Sandow’s video had caught the slick, straight sheaves of her black hair but not the severe precision of her center part, the hollow quality of her eyes but not the deep inkblot of their color. She looked malnourished, her clavicles sharp as exclamation points beneath the fabric of her shirt. She was too sleek, almost damp, less Undine rising from the waters than a dagger-toothed rusalka.

Or maybe she just needed a snack and a long nap.

All right, Stern. Let’s begin.

Darlington rapped on the door, stepped into the room, smiled big, bright, welcoming, as they set the desk down in the common room corner. “Alex! Your mom told me I should check in on you. It’s me, Darlington.”

For a brief moment she looked utterly lost, even panicked, then she matched his smile. “Hey! I didn’t recognize you.”

Good. She was adaptable.

“Introductions, please,” said Lauren, her gaze interested, assessing. She’d pulled a copy of Queen’s A Day at the Races from the crate.

He extended his hand. “I’m Darlington, Alex’s cousin.”

“Are you in JE too?” Lauren asked.

Darlington remembered that unearned sense of loyalty. At the start of the year, all the incoming freshmen were sorted into residential colleges where they would eat most of their meals and where they would eventually sleep when they left Old Campus behind as sophomores. They would buy scarves striped in their residential college colors, learn the college’s chants and mottos. Alex belonged to Lethe, just as Darlington had, but she’d been assigned to Jonathan Edwards, named for the fire and brimstone preacher.

“I’m in Davenport,” Darlington said. “But I don’t live on campus.” He’d liked living in Davenport—the dining hall, the big grassy courtyard. But he didn’t like Black Elm sitting empty, and the money he’d saved on his room and board had been enough to fix the water damage he’d found in the ballroom last spring. Besides, Cosmo liked the company.

“Do you have a car?” asked Lauren.

Mercy laughed. “Oh my God, you’re ridiculous.”

Lauren shrugged. “How else are we going to get to Ikea? We need a couch.” She would be the leader of this crew, the one who’d suggest which parties to go to, who’d have them host a room for Liquor Treat at Halloween.

“Sorry,” he said with an apologetic smile. “I can’t drive you. At least not today.” Or any day. “And I need to steal Alex away.”

Alex wiped her palms on her jeans. “We’re trying to get settled,” she said hesitantly, hopefully even. He could see circles of sweat blooming beneath her arms.

“You made a promise,” he said with a wink. “And you know how my mom gets about family stuff.”

He saw a flash of rebellion in her oil-slick eyes, but all she said was, “Okay.”

“Can you give us cash for the couch?” Lauren asked Alex, roughly shoving the Queen record back into the crate. He hoped it wasn’t the original vinyl.

“You bet,” said Alex. She turned to Darlington. “Aunt Eileen said she’d spring for a new couch, right?”

Darlington’s mother’s name was Harper, and he doubted she even knew the word Ikea. “Did she really?”

Alex crossed her arms. “Yup.”

Darlington took his wallet from his back pocket and peeled off three hundred dollars in cash. He handed it to Alex, who passed it to Lauren. “Make sure you write her a thank-you note,” he said.

“Oh, I will,” said Alex. “I know she’s a real stickler for that kind of thing.”

When they were striding across the lawns of Old Campus, the red-brick towers and crenellations of Vanderbilt behind them, Darlington said, “You owe me three hundred dollars. I’m not buying you a couch.”

“You can afford it,” Alex said coolly. “I’m guessing you come from the good side of the family, cuz.”

“You needed cover for why you’re going to be off seeing me so much.”

“Bullshit. You were testing me.”

“It’s my job to test you.”

“I thought it was your job to teach me. That’s not the same thing.”

At least she wasn’t stupid. “Fair enough. But visits to dear Aunt Eileen can cover a few of your late nights.”

“How late are we talking about?”

He could hear the worry in her voice. Was it caution or laziness? “How much did Dean Sandow tell you?”

“Not much.” She pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her stomach, trying to cool herself.

“Why are you dressed like that?” He hadn’t meant to ask but she looked uncomfortable—her black Henley buttoned to the neck, sweat spreading in dark rings from her armpits—and completely out of place. A girl who managed lies so smoothly should have a better sense of protective cover.

Alex just slid him a sideways look. “I’m very modest.” Darlington had no reply to that, so he pointed to one of the two identical red-brick buildings bracketing the path. “This is the oldest building on campus.”

“It doesn’t look old.”

“It’s been well maintained. It almost didn’t make it, though. People thought it ruined the look of Old Campus, so they wanted to knock it down.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“The books credit a preservation campaign, but the truth is Lethe discovered the building was lode-bearing.”

“Huh?”

“Spiritually lode-bearing. It was part of an old binding ritual to keep the campus safe.” They turned right, down a path that would lead them toward the ersatz-Medieval portcullis of Phelps Gate. “That’s what the whole college used to look like. Little buildings of red bricks. Colonial. A lot like Harvard. Then after the Civil War, the walls went up. Now most of the campus is built that way, a series of fortresses, walled and gated, a castle keep.”

Old Campus was a perfect example, a massive quadrangle of towering stone dorms surrounding a huge sun-dappled courtyard welcome to all—until night fell and the gates banged shut.

“Why?” Alex asked.

“To keep the rabble out. The soldiers came back to New Haven from the war wild, most of them unmarried, a lot of them messed up from the fighting. There was a wave of immigration too. Irish, Italians, freed slaves, everyone looking for manufacturing jobs. Yale didn’t want any of it.”

Alex laughed.

“Is something funny?” he asked.

She glanced back at her dorm. “Mercy’s Chinese. A Nigerian girl lives next door. Then there’s my mongrel ass. We all got in anyway. Eventually.”

“A long slow siege.” The word mongrel felt like dangerous bait. He took in her black hair, her black eyes, the olive cast to her skin. She might have been Greek. Mexican. White. “Jewish mother, no mention of a father, but I assume you had one?”

“Never knew him.”

There was more here but he wasn’t going to push. “We all have spaces we keep blank.” They’d reached Phelps Gate, the big echoing archway that led onto College Street and away from the relative safety of Old Campus. He didn’t want to get sidetracked. They had too much literal and figurative ground to cover. “This is the New Haven Green,” he said, as they strode down one of the stone paths. “When the colony was founded, this was where they built their meetinghouse. The town was meant to be a new Eden, founded between two rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates.”

Alex frowned. “Why so many churches?”

There were three on the green, two of them near-twins in their Federal design, the third a jewel of Gothic Revival.

“This town has a church for nearly every block. Or it used to. Some of them are closing now. People just don’t go.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“Nope.”

“Yes, I go,” he said. “It’s a family thing.” He saw the flicker of judgment in her eyes, but he didn’t need to explain. Church on Sunday, work on Monday. That was the Arlington way. When Darlington had turned thirteen and protested that he’d be happy to risk God’s wrath if he could just sleep in, his grandfather seized him by the ear and dragged him out of bed despite his eighty years. “I don’t care what you believe,” he’d said. “The working man believes in God and expects us to do the same, so you will get your ass dressed and in a pew or I will tan it raw.” Darlington had gone. And after his grandfather had died, he’d kept going.

“The green is the site of the city’s first church and its first graveyard. It’s a source of tremendous power.”

“Yeah… no shit.”

He realized her shoulders had gone loose and easy. Her stride had changed. She looked a little less like someone gearing up to take a swing.

Darlington tried not to sound too eager. “What do you see?” She didn’t answer. “I know about what you can do. It isn’t a secret.”

Alex’s gaze was still distant, almost disinterested. “It’s empty here, that’s all. I never really see much around cemeteries and stuff.”

And stuff. Darlington looked around, but all he saw was what everyone else would: students, people who worked at the courthouse or the string of shops along Chapel, enjoying the sun on their lunch hour.

He knew the paths that seemed to bisect the green arbitrarily had been drawn by a group of Freemasons to try to appease and contain the dead when the cemetery had been moved a few blocks away. He knew that their compass lines—or a pentagram, depending on whom you asked—could be seen from above. He knew the spot where the Lincoln Oak had toppled after Hurricane Sandy, revealing a human skeleton tangled in its roots, one of the many bodies never moved to Grove Street Cemetery. He saw the city differently because he knew it, and his knowledge was not casual. It was adoration. But no amount of love could make him see Grays. Not without Orozcerio, another hit from the Golden Bowl. He shuddered. Every time was a risk, another chance that his body would say enough, that one of his kidneys would simply fail.

“It makes sense you don’t see them here,” he said. “Certain things will draw them to graveyards and cemeteries, but as a rule, they steer clear.”

Now he had her attention. Real interest sparked in her eyes, the first indication of something beyond watchful reserve. “Why?”

“Grays love life and anything that reminds them of being alive. Salt, sugar, sweat. Fighting and fucking, tears and blood and human drama.”

“I thought salt kept them out.”

Darlington raised a brow. “Did you see that on television?”

“Would it make you happier if I say I learned it from an ancient book?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Too bad.”

“Salt is a purifier,” he said, as they crossed Temple Street, “so it’s good for banishing demons—though to my great sorrow I’ve never personally had the honor. But when it comes to Grays, making a salt circle is the equivalent of leaving a salt lick for deer.”

“So what keeps them out?”

Her need crackled through the words. So this was where her interest lay.

“Bone dust. Graveyard dirt. The leavings of crematory ash. Memento mori.” He glanced at her. “Any Latin?” She shook her head. Of course not. “They hate reminders of death. If you want to Gray-proof your room, hang a Holbein print.” He’d meant it as a joke, but he could see she was chewing on what he’d said, committing the artist’s name to memory. Darlington felt an acute twinge of guilt that he did not enjoy. He’d been so busy envying this girl’s ability, he hadn’t considered what it might be like if you could never close the door on the dead. “I can ward your room,” he said by way of penance. “Your whole dorm if you like.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes,” he said. “And I can show you how to do it too.”

“Tell me the rest,” said Alex. Away from the dim cavern of the dorms, sweat had formed in a slick sheen over her nose and forehead, gathering in the divot above her upper lip. She was going to soak that shirt, and he could see she was self-conscious about it by the way she held her arms rigidly to her sides.

“Did you read The Life of Lethe?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I skimmed it.”

“Read it,” he said. “I’ve made you a list of other material that will help get you up to speed. Mostly histories of New Haven and our own compiled history of the societies.”

Alex gave a sharp shake of her head. “I mean tell me what I’m in for here… with you.”

That was a hard question to answer. Nothing. Everything. Lethe was meant to be a gift, but could it be to her? There was too much to tell.

They left the green and he saw tension snap back into her shoulders, though there was still nothing his eyes could see to warrant it. They passed the row of banks clustered along Elm, looming over Kebabian’s, the little red rug store that had somehow thrived in New Haven for over one hundred years, then turned left up Orange. They were only a few blocks from campus proper now, but it felt like miles. The bustle of student life vanished, as if stepping into the city was like falling off a cliff. The streets were a mess of new and old: gently weathered townhouses, barren parking lots, a carefully restored concert hall, the gargantuan high rise of the Housing Authority.

“Why here?” Alex asked when Darlington didn’t answer her previous question. “What is it about this place that draws them?”

The short answer was Who knows? But Darlington doubted that would cast him or Lethe in the most credible light.

“In the early eighteen hundreds, magic was moving from the old world to the new, leaving Europe along with its practitioners. They needed someplace to store their knowledge and preserve its practices. No one’s certain why New Haven worked. They tried in other places too,” Darlington said with some pride. “Cambridge. Princeton. New Haven was where the magic caught and held and took root. Some people think it’s because the Veil is thinner here, easier to pierce. You can see why Lethe is happy to have you on board.” At least, some of Lethe. “You may be able to offer us answers. There are Grays that have been here far longer than the university.”

“And these practitioners thought it would be smart to teach all this magic to a bunch of college kids?”

“Contact with the uncanny takes a toll. The older you get, the harder it is to endure that contact. So each year, the societies replenish the supply with a new tap, a new delegation. Magic is quite literally a dying art, and New Haven is one of the few places in the world where it can still be brought to life.”

She said nothing. Was she scared? Good. Maybe she would actually read the books he assigned instead of skimming them.

“There are over a hundred societies at Yale at this point, but we don’t concern ourselves with most of them. They get together for dinners, tell their life stories, do a little community service. It’s the Ancient Eight that matter. The landed societies. The Houses of the Veil. They’re the ones that have held their tombs continuously.”

“Tombs?”

“I’m betting you’ve already seen some of them. Clubhouses, though they look more like mausoleums.”

“Why don’t we care about the other societies?” she asked.

“We care about power, and power is linked to place. Each of the Houses of the Veil grew up around a branch of the arcane and is devoted to studying it, and each built their tomb over a nexus of power. Except for Berzelius, and no one cares about Berzelius.” They’d founded their society in direct response to the growing magical presence in New Haven, claiming the other Houses were charlatans and superstitious dilettantes, dedicating themselves to investments in new technologies and the philosophy that the only true magic was science. They’d managed to survive the stock market crash of 1929 without the help of prognostication, and limped along until the crash of 1987 when they’d been all but wiped out. As it happened, the only true magic was magic.

“A nexus,” Alex repeated. “They’re all over campus? The… nexes—”

“Nexuses. Think of magic like a river. The nexuses are where the power eddies, and it’s what allows the societies’ rituals to function successfully. We’ve mapped twelve in the city. Tombs have been built on eight of them. The others are on sites where structures already exist, like the train station, and where it would be impossible to build. A few societies have lost their tombs over time. They can study all they want. Once that connection is broken, they don’t accomplish much.”

“And you’re telling me this has all been going on for more than a hundred years and no one has figured it out?”

“The Ancient Eight have yielded some of the most powerful men and women in the world. People who literally steer governments, the wealth of nations, who forge the shape of culture. They’ve run everything from the United Nations to Congress to The New York Times to the World Bank. They’ve fixed nearly every World Series, six Super Bowls, the Academy Awards, and at least one presidential election. Hundreds of websites are dedicated to unraveling their connections to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group—the list goes on.”

“Maybe if they met at Denny’s instead of giant mausoleums, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

They had arrived at Il Bastone, Lethe House, three stories of red brick and stained glass, built by John Anderson in 1882 for an outrageous sum and then abandoned barely a year later. He’d claimed he was being chased out by the city’s high tax rates. Lethe’s records told a different story, one that involved his father and the ghost of a dead cigar girl. Il Bastone didn’t sprawl like Black Elm. It was a city house, bracketed closely on both sides by other properties, tall but contained in its grandeur.

“They’re not worried,” said Darlington. “They welcome all of the conspiracy theories and tinfoil-hat-wearing loons.”

“Because they like feeling interesting?”

“Because what they’re really doing is so much worse.” Darlington pushed open the black wrought-iron gate and saw the porch of the old house straighten slightly, as if in anticipation. “After you.”

As soon as the gate shut, darkness enveloped them. From somewhere beneath the house, a howl sounded, high and hungry. Galaxy Stern had asked what she was in for. It was time to show her.