“Whatever,” she muttered, and fished her keys from her pocket, slipping one from the ring and setting it on the table.
“Thank you.” Alex winked. “Now we can be friends again.”
“Psycho.”
“So I hear,” said Alex. But crazy survived. Alex snatched up the key. “After you, Dawes.” Dawes passed through to the hallway, keeping a wide distance between herself and Alex, eyes on the floor. Alex turned back to Salome.
“I know you’re thinking that as soon as I’m in the temple you’re going to start making calls, try to get me jammed up.” Salome folded her arms. “I think you should do that. Then I’ll come back and use that wolf statue to knock your front teeth in.”
The Bridegroom shook his head.
“You can’t just—”
“Salome,” Alex said, shaking her finger. “Those words again.”
But Salome clenched her fists. “You can’t just do things like that. You’ll go to jail.”
“Probably,” said Alex. “But you’ll still look like a brother-fucking hillbilly.”
“What is wrong with you?” Dawes spat as Alex joined her at the nondescript door that led to the temple room, the Bridegroom trailing behind.
“I’m a bad dancer and I don’t floss. What’s wrong with you?” Now that the wave of adrenaline had passed, remorse was setting in. Once a mask was off you couldn’t just slide it back into place. Salome wouldn’t be calling the cavalry, Alex felt pretty sure of that. But she felt equally certain that the girl would talk. Psycho. Crazy bitch. Whether she would be believed was another thing entirely. Salome had said it herself: You can’t just. People here didn’t behave the way that Alex had.
The more pressing concern was how good Alex felt, like she was breathing easy for the first time in months, free from the suffocating weight of the new Alex she’d tried to construct.
But Dawes was breathing hard. As if she’d done all the work.
Alex flipped a light switch and flames flared to life in the gas lanterns along the red and gold walls, illuminating an Egyptian temple built into the heart of the English manor house. An altar was laden with skulls, taxidermied animals, and a leather ledger signed by each of the delegation’s members before the start of a ritual. At the center of the back wall was a sarcophagus topped with glass, a desiccated mummy pilfered from a Nile Valley dig inside. It was all almost too expected. The ceiling was painted to look like a vaulted sky, acanthus leaves and stylized palms at the corners, and a stream cut through the center of the room, fed by a sheet of water that toppled from the edge of the balcony above, the echo overwhelming. The Bridegroom drifted across the stream, as far from the sarcophagus as he could get.
“I’m leaving,” Salome shouted from down the hall. “I don’t want to be here if something goes wrong.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong!” Alex called back. They heard the front door slam. “Dawes, what did she mean if something goes wrong?”
“Did you read the ritual?” Dawes asked as she walked the perimeter of the room, studying its details.
“Parts of it.” Enough to know it could put her in touch with the Bridegroom.
“You have to cross into the borderland between life and death.”
“Wait… I’m going to have to die?” She really should start doing the reading.
“Yes.”
“And come back?”
“I mean, that’s the idea.”
“And you’re going to have to kill me?” Timid Dawes who, at the first sign of violence, had curled into a corner like a hedgehog in a sweatshirt? “You okay with that? It’s not going to look good for you if I don’t make it back.”
Dawes expelled a long breath. “So make it back.”
The Bridegroom’s face was bleak, but that was sort of his look. Alex contemplated the altar. “So the afterlife is Egypt? Of all the religions, the ancient Egyptians got it right?”
“We don’t really know what the afterlife is like. This is one way into one borderland. There are others. They’re always marked by rivers.”
“Like Lethe to the Greeks.”
“Actually, to the Greeks, Styx is the border river. Lethe is the final boundary the dead must cross. The Egyptians believed the sun died on the western banks of the Nile every day, so to journey from its eastern bank to the west is to leave the world of the living behind.”
And that was the journey Alex would have to make.
The “river” bisecting the temple was symbolic, hewn of stone mined from the ancient limestone tunnels beneath Tura, hieroglyphs from the Book of Emerging Forth into Night carved into the sides and base of the channel.
Alex hesitated. Was this the crossroads? Was this the last foolish thing she would do? And who would be there to greet her in the beyond? Hellie. Maybe Darlington. Len and Betcha, their skulls crushed in, that cartoonish look of surprise still stuck on Len’s face. Or maybe they’d be made whole somewhere on that other shore. If she died, would she be able to cross back through the Veil and spend an eternity flitting around campus? Would she end up back home, doomed to haunt some dump in Van Nuys? So make it back. Make it back or leave Dawes holding her dead body and Salome Nils to share the blame. The last thought wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
“All I have to do is drown?”
“That’s all,” said Dawes without a hint of a smile.
Alex unbuttoned her coat and drew off her sweater, while Dawes shed her parka, drawing two slender green reeds from her pockets. “Where is he?” she whispered.
“The Bridegroom? Right behind you.” Dawes flinched. “Kidding. He’s by the altar, doing his brooding thing.” The Bridegroom’s scowl deepened.
“Have him stand opposite you on the western shore.”
“He can hear you fine, Dawes.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Dawes made an awkward gesture and the Bridegoom drifted to the other side of the stream. It was narrow enough that he crossed it with a single long step. “Now you both kneel.”
Alex wasn’t sure if the Bridegroom would be so quick to follow instructions, but he did. They knelt. He seemed to want this little talk as much as Alex did.
She could feel the cold of the floor through her jeans. She realized she was wearing a white T-shirt and it was going to get soaked. You’re about to die, she scolded herself. Maybe now isn’t the time to worry about giving a ghost a look at your boobs.
“Put your hands behind your back,” said Dawes.
“Why?”
Dawes held up the reeds and recited: “Let his wrists be bound with stalks of papyrus.”
Alex put her hands behind her back. It was like getting arrested. She half-expected Dawes to slide a zip tie around her wrists. Instead, she felt Dawes drop something into her left pocket.
“It’s a carob pod. When you want to come back, put it in your mouth and bite down. Ready?”
“Go slow,” said Alex.
Alex bent forward. It was awkward with her hands behind her back. Dawes braced her head and neck and helped her fall forward. Alex hovered for a moment above the surface, raised her eyes, met the Bridegroom’s gaze. “Do it,” she said. She took a deep breath and tried not to panic as Dawes shoved her head underwater.
Silence filled her ears. She opened her eyes but could see nothing but black stone. She waited, breath leaking from her in reluctant bubbles as her chest tightened.
Her lungs ached. She couldn’t do this, not this way. They’d have to come up with something else.