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“It’s been hard,” I confessed. My voice wavered.
“Did something happen?” she asked. I didn’t answer, which was answer enough. “Damn it. Helen, you can bail out at any time. We can go. You just say the word.”
“I can’t leave,” I said. “Not yet.”
“She hasn’t found the center,” Simon said cheerfully. My head whipped toward him.
“What did you say?” Mom asked.
Simon smiled. “She’s got to find the center. That’s the only way out,” he said. Then he frowned. “I... I have no idea what that means.”
But I did.
It meant that Harrow had a hold on him as well. It meant that it wasn’t safe here for Simon. For either of them.
14
AFTER LUNCH, DESMONDshowed up at my door, wearing an expression of arch superiority. “I am a genius,” he informed me in a lofty tone, flourishing a hand in the air for emphasis.
“I knew that, actually,” I said, letting him in. “Why are you a genius today, specifically?”
“I decoded more of Nicholas’s journal,” he said. “I was hoping to look at the real thing, actually. Some of the pictures weren’t the best, and the symbols get a bit blurry at the edges.”
“It’s over here,” I said, and went to grab it from its hiding place.
“Sweet. And here’s what I’ve got,” he said, handing me a spiral notebook. I sat on the edge of the bed and eagerly read through the pages he’d translated. For the first couple, it might as well still have been in code—it was all references to people Nicholas knew and rival occult theorists he took vicious pleasure in deriding. The next set of entries was more interesting.
A disaster. Three attempts to project herself into the vast dark, and three failures. Dr.Raymond begins to doubt. He isconfident in the procedure, but if Annalise cannot guide the girl to the vast dark, it will be all for naught.
“The girl? What girl are they talking about?” I asked.
“Keep reading,” Desmond said, scrunching up his face like he didn’t want to have to explain. He hovered nearby as I continued.
My spirits are much improved. Annalise has traversed the boundaries between worlds once more and is now confident in her ability to guide Mary’s consciousness such that she may look upon the dark god. Dr.Raymond is nearly ready to perform his marvelous procedure. A few weeks more, and the truth of other worlds will be within our grasp.
“Okay, why don’t I like the sound of that?” I asked.
“Maybe because Victorian-era doctors thought putting cocaine in baby bottles was a great idea and washing your hands was a waste of time?” Desmond suggested with a grimace. “I’m guessing whatever procedure they’re talking about, they didn’t run it by an ethics committee either. If I was Mary, I wouldn’t stick around to find out what they were up to.”
“The god of the vast dark,” I murmured, remembering the illustration of the shape in front of the stars. Almost exactly what I had seen. “Desmond, if there was a god in the basement, you would tell me, right?”
“We keep the interdimensional gods in the attic,” Desmondreplied with a grin, but it faltered. “I mean, obviously not. Because there’s no such thing.”
What did Nicholas mean by a god, anyway? Maybe it wasn’t a question of divinity but power. A being that could alter reality itself—I could understand calling that a god.
“Dr.Raymond helped design Harrow, right?” I asked. “Something about the effects of architecture on the mind?”
“Yeah. He wrote a book about the general principal, but Eli warned me it is, in his words, ‘so dense as to be incomprehensible, and coming from me that is quite the condemnation,’ ” he said, tucking two fingers into an imaginary vest pocket and blinking owlishly as he did.
“You do a good Eli,” I told him with a smirk.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Desmond replied. He leaned against the post at the end of the bed, crossing his ankles. “I think the basic idea is that he thought a building could be designed to change your thought patterns, just by living in it. Make them more orderly or more chaotic. He wanted to apply his theories to prisons—like, to make the prisoners more law-abiding and obedient.”
What was a cage but another kind of prison? Perhaps this meant the strange patterns of Harrow were somehow designed to contain the Other.
That was all Desmond had translated. I handed the notebook back to him with another murmur of thanks. He took it, then stepped over to my desk where I’d left the journal. He tapped the cover. “Can I take this with me? I might be able to get more done by dinner,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” I told him. “I really don’t have anything I can do for you in return.”
