The Faculty Club

32

I found the lever, more like a clutch, somewhere in the upper bowels of the fireplace. The room was perfectly silent in the middle of the night. My cheek was pressed against the marble, while my hand groped around inside the mantel. I heard it before I saw it-releasing the clutch led to the popping open of a tall panel by the desk. Sarah clapped her hands. “Perfecto,” I heard Miles say, his voice echoing into a larger place.

Just this morning, we were sitting in Sal’s, trying to think of a door they wouldn’t be watching. We had a map-the one Chance and I had concocted with the help of the late Frank Shepard. We knew where we had to go and what we had to do, which was why Miles’s leather satchel now contained a crowbar instead of postmodern gibberish. We just needed a starting point, a way down into the tunnels. Preferably one they wouldn’t be guarding with a team of assassins. Which meant, strangely enough, that the best door for us would be one we didn’t know existed.

Where to start? There was the hatch under my bed, extra handy if you were inclined to murder me in my sleep. Not to mention it was the first place I’d think of, if I were dumb enough to go after them (which apparently I was). No thanks. There was the elevator in the old house on Morland Street, but I’d been blindfolded, and anyway it was a natural second choice. There was Humpty Dumpty’s library passage-but we didn’t have his keys. There was the plant manager’s office-wired with a burglar alarm. There was the sewer by Nigel’s house. They sure as hell were aware I knew about that. I thought of the Puppet Man, coming toward me on his gangly spider legs, that long silver fang in hand.

There had to be a better way.

I’ve said it before-the brain is an amazing thing. Sometimes it tries to help you, even if you’re too stupid to notice. I found myself struggling to ignore a sudden, pointless memory: leaving Bernini’s office for the first time, walking away down that old hallway.

Stop it, I told myself: focus on the problem.

What did Bernini say, seemingly to himself, as I’d walked away?

V &D perhaps?

And what next…

That other voice, unexpected, much, much colder-a voice I now assigned to the priest with the twisted, yellow-eyed stare.

We’ll see, he’d said.

Where had he come from? No one else had been in Bernini’s office with us. No one had passed me in the hall.

It was suddenly clear.

There was another door in Bernini’s room. Well hidden and, as far as they knew, totally unknown to us.

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.