“Good luck to you both,” the beard said as they passed. “Your father was a good man.”
“Cy,” Antigone said when the men were well behind them. “This place is wild.”
“I know,” Cyrus said. He watched another row of animal skulls go by. “I kinda like it.”
Antigone brushed back her hair and looked at Cyrus. “Yeah, but it’s weird that Dad was here and he never said anything about it.”
Cyrus shrugged.
Antigone looked away. “Those girls with the guns were even younger than you. Like that’s safe.”
Cyrus grinned. “Dad gave me a BB gun when I was six.”
“And then took it away when you shot yourself in the forehead.”
“Nope. Wrong. Try again. He took it away when I tried to shoot the neighbor’s cat.”
“And that’s better?”
“And,” Cyrus said, “he gave it back one month later. I didn’t lose it until I fell off the cliff when I was nine.”
Mrs. Eldridge’s hand cold-clamped tight on the back of Cyrus’s neck.
“Unkindest thing I ever did to Katie Smith was vouching for you with big Mr. Greeves. If I’d been smart enough to keep my trap shut, you’d have been bundled up and shuffled back where you belong. But you’re here now, so come on.” Letting go, Mrs. Eldridge snapped back around and clicked on. “Standing for Katie’s kids.” She shook her head, approaching a corner. “And as pups to Billy Bones, no less. You should never have let that old liar into the motel, Cyrus Smith.”
They rounded the corner, and Cyrus stopped in his tracks.
“Oh my …,” said Antigone.
A two-story wall of windows overlooked green lawns running down to the unending blue of the Great Lake, perfect mirror to the sky, striped gold by the sun. A flock of brightly colored boats huddled safely inside a long stone jetty, while others, sails clinging to the wind, carved through distant water. Small buildings dotted the lawns, and on a long, flat stretch of grass, a pale-blue plane touched down.
“It’s beautiful,” said Antigone. “Let’s go down to the water.”
Cyrus watched the plane stop and its pilot jump out of his craft. Two men were walking quickly toward it. The pilot pulled off his helmet and shook out his — her — thick strawberry hair. And she couldn’t be that old.
“Come on!” Mrs. Eldridge stamped her foot. “Now!”
Cyrus and Antigone followed Mrs. Eldridge through glistening clean halls and down crowded stairs. Door after door, room after room, they saw fewer and fewer people as they went, and the floors grew dustier all the time. Downstairs and downstairs and the rooms lost their windows. The doors they passed were rough and oily and sealed with heavy padlocks. The halls were cluttered with odd shapes, covered with filthy canvas sheets, and the few paintings still hanging on the dingy walls were muted with years of airborne accumulation.
Mrs. Eldridge brushed against a canvas tarp and sent up a small weather system of dust as she moved through an open arch.
Following her, Antigone began to sneeze.
Cyrus stopped. “Remind me why we have to stay all the way down here?” He sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
“Get in here, Cy,” Antigone said.
Cyrus moved through the arch into a broad room with an extremely low, blue glass ceiling propped up by intermittent stout pillars. Iron spiral stairs squatted in a corner.
Mrs. Eldridge was still moving.
Antigone looked back at her brother. “It’s a pool, Cy. That’s the smell. We’re under a pool.”
“Are you sure?” Cyrus asked. The water wasn’t pale and bright like the pools he’d seen. And there were walls in the water, paths that twisted and turned and doubled back on themselves. It was an underwater maze.
While Cyrus watched, a blindfolded woman, barely bubbling, slid by in the dark water three feet above him, her hands tracing the walls at her sides.
“Wow,” Cyrus said. “Tigs, how cool is that?”
Antigone shivered and grabbed Cyrus’s arm. “It’s freaky, Cy. Now c’mon. Mrs. E didn’t stop this time.”
Through another arch, and at the end of a long, curving corridor lit with naked bulbs, they found Mrs. Eldridge waiting beside a dark, empty mouth gaping in the wall. A thin metal pipe ran down the wall beside the doorway, ending in a small box with a rusty button. She pushed it, and a light turned on.
“Down these stairs, you will find the Polygon. Now maybe you’ll go home. This is no place for you.”
They were standing at the top of a stairwell, twisting down. The light Mrs. Eldridge had turned on was out of sight, but its glow rose up around the bend.
“Enjoy,” Mrs. Eldridge said crisply. And she began to leave.
“Hey!” Antigone yelled. “That’s it? You just drop us off at some dungeon stairs and leave? What are we supposed to do now?”
Mrs. Eldridge turned back, her lined face grim with shadow. “For the last two years, I kept my promise to your mother. I watched over you. I have no wealth, but I kept the lights on in the Archer. I paid for the waffle mix. And in the end, none of that mattered.” Her face softened. “The Order has you now. It was always going to. It’s in your bones.”
“But what do we do?” Antigone asked.
“Do?” Mrs. Eldridge smiled. “You do what Acolytes have struggled to do for a thousand years — survive and achieve. But for now, try to rest. Someone from the staff will find you. With Skelton dead, Greeves will select you a new Keeper.”
When Mrs. Eldridge was gone, Antigone looked at her brother. “Cy, we really need to find Horace, and we really need him to be alive.”
“Well, we’re here now,” said Cyrus. “Let’s go down.”
Antigone shrugged, brushing back her hair. “As long as you’re first.”
Cyrus laughed. “Feeling brave?”
“Yeah,” Antigone said. “If anything sneaks down after us, I’ll protect you.”
“Great,” said Cyrus. “That’s a relief.”
He began his descent, dragging one hand on the stone wall. Antigone followed him down and around, down and around, passing only one lonely oversize lightbulb on the ceiling.
Antigone sneezed, and Cyrus glanced back. “Too dank for you? You could handle the Archer but not this?” His foot slapped on water and skidded off the stair. Flailing, he knocked his sister backward and landed on her legs.
“Ow.” Antigone grimaced. “That hurt. Why so coordinated, Rus? That one was on you.”
“Don’t call me Rus, Tigger.” Rubbing his right elbow, Cyrus sat up and pointed at the wall. Water was oozing through the joints in the stone and trickling down the stairs. The steps were skim-coated with moisture, and tiny grooves had eroded into the stone where miniature waterfalls slid down from step to step.
“Oh, great,” Antigone said. “We’re supposed to sleep down here? We’re going to wake up with mushrooms growing under our fingernails.”
Cyrus levered himself back to vertical and began moving carefully down the wet stairs. “You know,” he said, “I kind of get the feeling that some of these people don’t want us around.”
Antigone laughed. “What tipped you off? The insults or the dungeon?”
“Nobody offered us lunch.”
Cyrus stopped and Antigone stepped down beside him.
“Ugh.” Antigone grimaced. “Yuck.”
Below the stairs, there was a small landing, a second lightbulb, and a large door. The landing was swirling with black scum-topped seepage. The walls were a forest of strange molds — orange rippling things that looked like they were part brain and part lettuce, long dangling things like spider legs, blue fuzz, white rings, brown everything else.