Page 111 of Dead Beat

“Shit,” she blurted, sitting up abruptly. “Who built the hedge maze?”

“What?”

“The hedge maze in the back of the house,” she said, already shaking off the blankets and pulling on her underwear, her bra.

“Why are we putting on clothes? That seems like a terrible idea.”

“Darlington, just answer me.”

“My great-grandfather, actually. He had it commissioned before he died. It fell apart when my grandfather got sick. I never got around to fixing it up.”

“You should have.”

“Why?”

He’d shoved up on his elbows, and he was staring at her like she was out of her mind.

“Get dressed.”

“Why?”

“Because we have to get out of here.” Alex looked around the room, feeling her skin pimple with gooseflesh. “Your great-grandfather didn’t best his demon and I know exactly where it went. The demon became Black Elm, Darlington. It’s this fucking house.”

Again, tonight he came, standing outside of Il Bastone. The thing was here for hours.

My bear kept it at bay for a while, but it seems to grow stronger and more sly.

It had my father’s cleaver in its hands. But I’ve been fleeing that voice, that ghastly accent my whole life.

It came as my mother, the old cow. It said I broke her heart and I’ll admit I wept. Her voice undid me, that old song she used to sing to get me to sleep. Shchlaf, kindlein, schlaf. Sleep, little child, sleep. The shepherd’s dog shall come and bite my bad little child.

But then it took a new shape. I do not know his name. I didn’t want to know. I thought it would keep me from remembering his face looking up at me from the slab, the poison—one drop, two drops, three. It pooled in the cracked corner of his lips.

If I had known. If I had only known. This is the refrain I cannot stop hearing. I even thought to go see Nownes, to ask him to pray with me. Would he have laughed or offered me comfort? I’m not sure I could endure his pity.

Hector came to the door. He wants me to go with him to Harkness Tower, to help prepare him. I should have done it. It is my duty as the scholar.

I know that. I know I’ll have to leave Il Bastone eventually. My professors have only so much patience. I cannot plead illness forever. The pantry is empty of food. So why not go now when something might be done, when some plan might be pursued?

I tell myself these things. Then I push the curtains aside and I see the thing across the street, waiting in the lamplight. I see that old face, his lips still wet with poison. I cannot go. I cannot face him. So I close the curtains and I crawl beneath the covers and I sing. Sleep, little child, sleep.

—Lethe Days Diary of Rudolph Kittscher (Jonathan Edwards College ’33)

40

It felt as if the house had swallowed him, as if its walls were bending as they breathed, its floorboards pulsing, suffused with blood.

How many times had he thought of this place as a living thing—a body that had lost circulation to its limbs, a master that needed to be served? It had been his hiding place, his salvation, the stone around his neck. It had been the instrument of his torture in hell.

Cosmo was sitting on the kitchen counter, perched beside the sink, occupied with the slow drip of the faucet. I need to get that fixed, Darlington thought, then caught himself. When was there something at Black Elm that didn’t require fixing, that didn’t tug at his time and his attention? Briefly he’d been free, living in the dorms, a student like anyone else. But of course he had returned. The house needed him. It always had.

His rational mind was pulling apart what Alex had said. Was it even possible? If a place like Savin Rock could have a ghost, if a monument like the Thunderbolt could return as a Gray, then it must have some kind of soul. Each of the pilgrims had returned with a demon in tow, even if the pilgrims’ salt guardians had altered the terms of their torment. Kittscher had become a nighteater. Reiter had become a vampire. Hector had killed himself before his demon could have its way. And then there was Daniel Arlington II, his great-grandfather, who had been allowed to live but only under a curse, forced to feed his demon, forced to proffer up his young to be devoured.

Yet he had never given in completely. He had remained human. Because of Cosmo.

“You stayed to protect Daniel Arlington.”

Cosmo stared at him with his mismatched eyes, scarred and strange, a soldier if there ever was one. This was his great-grandfather’s salt guardian and his as well. Like Alex’s snakes, Tripp’s albatross, Turner’s oak. The cat had been at war with the demon for nearly a century, standing guard over every Daniel Arlington since he had been called forth from Hiram’s Crucible.