It was loud, here in this central hub. Green Eyes had said the whole intent of this place was to break things down. The cacophony of noise would be intended to erode at sanity. It was loud enough to make my vision distort, to startle the wits out of me when a sudden crash rang through every drain and sewer here. intermittent enough to distract.
Noise aside, I was glad to find a dry spot to sit down, on a spot just above a broad, stagnant gutter choked with debris. It looked like a gargoyle had once sat here, oddly enough, but had broken away. I sat, leaning against the wall, my shin securing my position by pressing against the base of the gargoyle’s statue.
Perhaps a little too visible here, but it was a place to sit down.
“We’re in!”
My head turned. A voice. A recognizable voice.
“My gut was right,” another voice said, her voice quiet. “I was never that big on trusting my gut, but now…”
That second voice was Rose.
“As haunted houses go, this is pretty flipping cool,” a small boy’s voice, excited.
Evan.
I craned my head around, looking.
I saw a flash of Rose’s face in the gutter, before a drop fell from above. The water rippled.
“We’ve got access,” Rose said. “That’s the key thing. I’ll show you to the library in a second, then we got to start with the rituals.”
Somewhere else nearby.
Sources of still water.
I couldn’t quite see it, but I could hear it.
Except I wasn’t hearing it with my ears.
It resounded through me.
“I just don’t get why you didn’t do this ritual earlier,” Alexis said. Her tone was vaguely accusatory. “Or how you didn’t do it earlier.”
“I don’t know,” Rose said.
“Something to do with this Blake Mags mentioned?” Tiff asked.
My heart pounded.
They didn’t know me?
‘Mags’ knew me?
My throat was dry. I almost forgot to watch my back.
Except the stab in the back didn’t come from the Drains.
“There was a reason for it,” Rose said. “Had to be. And I’m sure we’ll find the clues here, given time to look. All I know is, I fucked up my awakening ritual on purpose, last time around. This time, right here, right now, I’m gonna do it right.”
9.02
She fucked it up on purpose?
My thoughts were slow to get going as I tried to dredge up memories. Promises she’d made, that had no real power behind them.
A promise to help me, to work with me, even.
The fact that she’d used Ty, Alexis and Tiff to prepare her summonings, but hadn’t been able to do it herself. I’d glossed over it because she’d told me the ritual hadn’t worked.
Why?
How many times had I thrown myself into life or death situations, and all this while, she’d been holding back? Keeping hands off? I’d scratched, fought, and bled for power and she’d just turned it down?
Why?
When she would have made the decision… it would have been after we’d argued. When she was frustrated, new to the mirror.
All because she’d wanted to be able to lie to me?
When I’d made promises to her, to get her out of the mirror somehow, she’d said she felt bad about it. Because she’d known the promise she was making in exchange had no weight to it.
I was clenching my fists, and the strain was making the two halves of my one broken hand grate against one another.
It’s this place. There’s a reason I saw it. This place wants to grind me down, and it thinks giving me a glimpse like that is going to help do it.
Which isn’t entirely wrong.
I couldn’t let my agitation push me into doing something stupid.
This was the initial foray. It was liable to get a lot worse, if what Green Eyes had said was true. I had to get a grip on it now, if I wanted to be ready for whatever hit me later.
I grabbed the plank from where I’d laid it across my lap and stood, very carefully, making sure to have three points of contact with solid surfaces at all times. One foot on the gutter, one on the gargoyle, my good hand on the wall. I might still fall if something broke away, but it was less of a certainty.
The ledge here was steadier and gave me enough room to walk, so my shoulder didn’t scrape the wall, but I was more careful than I had been on first entering the drains.
There weren’t many light sources, and the ledge, at times, was only a thin line of light where the moist and rounded-off edge caught the light shed by some distant bulb. A patch of stone, the edges lit up in a similar way.
Movement through this place was agonizing. Slow, treacherous, and no matter how careful I was, there was no guarantee I wouldn’t fall prey to some trap, trick, or attack.
This was a place that made people feel small. When I’d been in the tree with the Others beneath me in the Hyena’s woods, I’d compared myself to a prehistoric ape.
Here, I was degraded even further than that. Calling myself an ape was maybe being too arrogant.