Page 54 of Hell Bent

Table; amethyst

Provenance: Unknown

Donor: Unknown

Records first appear c. 1930 after construction of the new Peabody.

Please see closed collection notes.

—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by Pamela Dawes, Oculus

17

The following night Turner met Alex and Dawes outside of the Peabody, by the statue of a triceratops that Wolf’s Head had accidentally animated back in 1982. Once the cameras were down, slipping into the museum was a matter of timing the rounds of the security guards. She mentioned the potential psychiatry connection to Turner and the professors who had bad-mouthed Dean Beekman, but he didn’t seem impressed.

“You get names?”

“Ruth Canejo, but not the others.”

“You find out anything about aging poisons?”

“Yes and no,” Alex said, trying to keep the edge from her voice. It had only been two days since Turner had demanded her presence at the second crime scene. “There’s something called a Wizening Stick that makes you look older if you chew on it long enough, but the effects don’t last more than a few hours. And there’s a poison called Tempusladro, the thief of time. It ages you internally.”

“That sounds promising.”

“No, it only ages your organs, speeds up the clock. But the whole point is that the victim looks like he died of natural causes. Young and dewy on the outside, shriveled on the inside.”

“Then keep searching,” Turner said. “Find something I can use. I need you and your demon boyfriend for the work I can’t do.”

“Then help us bring him out of hell.”

Turner’s face shuttered. “We’ll see.”

Alex had badgered him into meeting them by promising him that, once they had two more murderers to walk the Gauntlet, she’d leave him alone. She was surprised he’d agreed to come.

They shuffled past the main entry and down the stairs. Turner looked up at the dead eyes of the security cameras uneasily. They were still recording, but the magical tea in Dawes’s thermos would keep the cameras from capturing anything but static. “You have a real gift for turning everyone around you into criminals, Stern.”

“It’s some light trespassing. You can say you heard a noise.”

“I’m going to say I caught you two breaking in and decided to pursue.”

“Would you both be quiet?” Dawes whispered furiously. She gestured to the thermos. “The tempest won’t last all night.”

Alex shut her mouth, trying to bite back the anger she felt toward Turner. She wasn’t being fair, but it was hard to care about what was rational or right when she and Dawes were stuck fighting what felt like a losing battle to free Darlington. They needed allies, but Lethe and Michelle Alameddine weren’t interested, and she hated feeling like she was begging for Turner’s help.

And the Peabody was one more place where Darlington’s presence was too close—the real Darlington, who belonged to New Haven as much as he belonged to Lethe or Yale. Alex had been to the Peabody with him, a place that had rendered him surprisingly quiet. He’d shown her the mineral room, the stuffed dodo bird, the photos and letters from Hiram Bingham III’s expedition to “discover” Machu Picchu, where he’d found the great golden crucible currently tucked away in Il Bastone’s armory.

“This was my hiding place,” he’d said as they walked past the Age of Reptiles mural, “when things got bad at home.” At the time, Alex had wondered how bad it could have been, growing up in a mansion. But now that she’d been in Darlington’s grandfather’s head, seen his memories of a little boy lost in the dark, she understood why that boy would come here, to a place full of people and noise, where there was always something to read or to look at, where no one would think twice about a studious kid with a backpack who didn’t want to leave.

The basement was dark and warm, full of plumbing that rattled and belched, noisier than the quiet upper floors, where the exhibits had been packed up and stored in preparation for the upcoming renovation. Their flashlight beams floated over exposed pipes and boxes stacked to the ceiling, odd bits and pieces of scaffolding leaning crookedly against them.

At last Dawes led them into a room with a strange, musty smell.

“What is all this?” Alex asked as Dawes ran her flashlight over shelves of jars full of cloudy liquid.

“Pond water, hundreds of jars of it, from all over Connecticut, all from different years.”

“What is the point of this exactly?” asked Turner.