The Dragon's Tooth (12 page)

Bubbles slowly percolated in the scum pool.

“There must be some kind of floor drain, or the stairs would be all full up.” Cyrus crouched and looked at the water.

“Cy.” Antigone tapped him with her foot. “Look at the door. It’s locked. And it has an old flyer nailed to it.”

Cyrus began unlacing his shoes.

“Oh, sick.” Antigone laughed. “Are you really?”

“What else are we supposed to do?” Cyrus asked. “Go back up and cry to Rupert Greeves or Mrs. Eldridge or that kid from the hall? They’re not getting rid of us now.”

He stuffed his socks inside his shoes and dipped a calloused toe into the dark liquid.

“And?” Antigone asked.

Cyrus shrugged and stepped into the shin-deep water. In the middle, he bent and fished around with his hands.

“The door, Cy. I care more about the door.”

“Then come on in and check it out,” Cyrus said. “Yep. Floor drain.” He tugged. “But somebody’s … shoved … in … an … old …” His hands geysered up with a dripping black strip of cloth and oil. “Sock.” He squinted at it, wiping his forehead on the back of his arm. “Orange stripes.”

Antigone wrinkled her nose. Laughing, Cyrus threw the sock up onto the stairs.

“Cy, that is really one of the sickest things I’ve ever seen you do.”

“You aren’t around when I skip school and hit the creeks.” Shoving his hand back into the water, Cyrus pulled up a long tangle of hair and drain scum hooked over his finger.

He held it out to his sister.

“No! Stop it, Cy!” The water was already bubbling quickly, glugging around Cyrus’s ankles. He tossed the hair carcass against the wall and turned to face the door.

A single step rose up just beneath the heavy oak door. An iron strap had been bent around the handle and through a ring in the stone wall. An old lock reconnected the strap’s two ends.

Antigone splattered through the last shallow water and wiped a coat of dust off the flyer on the door. The paper was old and soft with moisture. Two corners pulled free and curled.

“What’s it say?” Cyrus asked.

“At the top it says ‘Infestation Quarantine.’ ” She stood on her toes. “And it’s stamped ‘July 11, 1927.’ There’s something else written here, but I can’t read it.” Dropping back to her heels, she stepped away from the door. “You try.”

Cyrus leaned forward and cocked his head. “Ulip Spitters? No. Whip Spitters? Whip Spiders!” He looked at his sister. “The place was infested with Whip Spiders?”

Antigone crossed her arms. “I am not going in there. I don’t know what a Whip Spider is, and I don’t want to.”

“Oh, please,” Cyrus said. “This is from more than eighty years ago. And the door’s locked anyway.” He grabbed the iron strap and gave it a rattle. The ring in the stone wall shook. Dust dribbled to the wet floor. “Huh. Maybe …” Grabbing the door handle with one hand and the wall ring with the other, Cyrus tugged. The ring slid out so easily that Cyrus staggered back into the stairs as the door swung open. The hinges were silent. The motion was fluid.

Sucking air between her teeth, Antigone peered through the doorway.

“That was too easy.” Cyrus picked himself up. “Careful, Tigs. Somebody wanted it to look locked.”

“Which means what?” Antigone stepped into the dark. “There’s something in here worth finding?”

She felt around the edges of the doorway until she found what she was looking for. A button clicked, and six more large lightbulbs buzzed and sputtered.

The room was sprawling. The ceiling was low but pocked with vaults. Squat columns were scattered throughout. All the stone had been painted white, but large portions dangled off in leprous flakes. The floor was dusty white linoleum, savagely peeling at the seams. White triple-stacked metal bunks were scattered against the many walls.

And there
were
many walls—angled out, angled in. Cyrus couldn’t even guess at how many there were. A lot.

Strangest of all, a network of suspended plank pathways began just inside the door and ran throughout the room at least a foot above the floor. All of the planks were dangling from the ceiling by ropes and chains. None of them were dusty.

Cyrus tested the first plank with his foot. It swung slightly.

“What are they for?” Antigone asked.

“Walking?” Cyrus said. “I don’t know.”

Antigone looked down. Beneath the plank, painted in black on the linoleum, there was a triangle of lightning bolts around the same black stylized ship they’d seen on some of the boys’ white shirts.

“Weird,” she said.

Cyrus moved out onto the plank and it sagged gently. “There are all sorts of exercise posters on the walls, too. At least, I think that’s what those are.” He pointed. “The same two guys in short ties and high pants over and over again. Wrestling. Kicking each other in the head.”

“Cyrus,” said Antigone. “Cyrus …”

Cyrus reached a Y on his plank road. He went left.

“Cyrus! Turn around!”

Surprised, Cyrus turned. Just behind him, a strange-looking boy was standing at the first Y in the planks. He was wearing a tight white tank top tucked into a pair of army-green, much-too-large, much-too-pocketed fatigues, cinched around his waist with a rope. His paper-pale arms were knotted with muscle and tied with blue popping veins. His short hair was the color of dust and unevenly cropped around his skull. His face was smooth and young and unsunned, but somehow it didn’t match his eyes.

Cyrus stared into the boy’s eyes, and the boy’s eyes stared into his. What Cyrus saw, he didn’t know. What he felt was layer upon layer of ancient. The boy’s faint green irises looked like they had been beaten and polished more than the smoothest river rock, like they could see by nothing more than starlight—and they no longer cared to see at all.

Cyrus stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “I’m Cyrus.”

The boy looked at his extended hand.

He took it, and Cyrus shivered at the chill in his grip.

“Nolan,” the boy said, and he turned and swayed deeper into the room on the plank paths.

Cyrus looked back at his sister, questioning.

“Go,” she mouthed silently, pointing after Nolan. She was already hurrying forward.

“I think he’s the one Skelton was talking about when he was dying,” Cyrus whispered.

The two of them stopped, watching Nolan disappear around a pillar.

Antigone looked at her brother. “What do you mean? Skelton just said something about beekeepers.”

“Right. And then he said, ‘Trust Nolan.’ ”

Antigone’s eyebrows shot together. She tucked back her hair. “He did not. He said
no one
, not
Nolan
. And why would you trust anyone somebody named Billy Bones told you to trust.” She shifted her weight, and the plank swung beneath them. Antigone scanned the pillared room. “I’m not trusting some weird kid who lives down here.”

Nolan’s voice drifted around the columns. “I knew Skelton. Perhaps he trusted me. I never trusted him.”

Antigone blushed. Cyrus bit his lower lip.

“Come,” Nolan said. “Voices move oddly in the Polygon.”

Cyrus followed the planks deeper into the room, with Antigone close behind him.

“It’s not that you don’t look trustworthy,” Antigone said loudly.

“I know how I look.” Nolan’s voice was quiet but all around them. “Stay to the right.”

The suspended paths reached a large junction. Six routes splayed in different directions, winding around pillars and between rusty beds, disappearing around corners.

Cyrus paused. “Tigs, can you hear water?”

“Yes, you can,” said Nolan. “Pass through the showers.”

“Um, excuse me?” said Antigone. “Wouldn’t this be faster if we just walked on the floor?”

“No,” Nolan said. “The floor is not safe.”

Cyrus and Antigone bounced forward into an area with no paint. The floor was still linoleum, at least where it hadn’t been torn up, but the pillars and walls and ceiling were all dark, moist stone.

“What’s not safe about it?” Cyrus asked. “What are we talking about?”

A chuckle reached them, doubling and tripling off the angled walls, and then reaching them again. “The Whip Spiders. Why do you think I have this place to myself?”

“They’re still here?” Antigone scanned the floor. “That was over eighty years ago.”

“It was,” Nolan said. “Whip Spiders can hatch many young in eighty years. Stay on the paths.”

The sound of water grew louder, until Cyrus and Antigone rounded a corner and stood looking at the showers.

Two miniature aqueducts ran from wall to wall above head height. Stone spouts lined both sides of both aqueducts, spilling water to the floor in four falling curtains. On the floor, the water collected in a central trough and drained through a hole in the wall. Where the plank path passed beneath the showers, the spouts had been plugged with wine corks.

Cyrus and Antigone moved carefully through, catching only a few drips on their shoulders as they did.

They had reached the end, or at least one of several ends, of the room. The plank pathway led straight into a dark, jagged hole in the wall.

Nolan leaned out of it, slowly stretching his arms against both sides. “Come in, if you’re going to.” He yawned and ducked back inside. “Or don’t.”

Cyrus hesitated, looking around. A leggy shape flashed out of a corner, clattering toward him across the grimy floor. Antigone grabbed his arm as the thing disappeared under the plank beneath them.

“Right,” said Cyrus. “Well, we’re not staying out here.”

nine

WHIPS AND VISITS

C
YRUS SAT ON
cold stone. Beside him, Antigone was bouncing her leg nervously. Nolan’s room was a bizarre assortment of elements. But, for a crowded crypt through a hole in the wall, it was surprisingly tidy and warm.

The room was circular and had clearly been intended for use as a tomb. Seven stone beds—for statues, hopefully; for corpses, maybe—had been set in arched and pillared alcoves all the way around. Oddly, all of the visible stone had been slathered with a thick coat of bright yellow paint. One of the alcove beds now held a vivid red cushion with tassels and a brown corduroy pillow. Another held a rickety, tightly packed bookshelf and two reading lamps with green shades. The third held an old pint-sized refrigerator, humming loudly, a hot plate, and a toaster oven old enough to match the Archer’s waffle iron. Nolan had buried two pieces of bread beneath mayonnaise and cheddar from the fridge, and he was now crouching on the floor watching the mixture bubble in the toaster oven. The smell made breakfast seem like long, long ago, and Cyrus’s stomach was humming audibly. The fourth alcove held neatly stacked wooden boxes full of odd-looking tools. The fifth held a stuffed two-headed eagle missing half of one flapping wing, and a square pile of mismatched blankets. The sixth was a nest of books, papers, a small lap desk, and a stack of tightly folded clothes. A similar load had been scraped out of the seventh, which now held an impatient Antigone and a curious Cyrus.

The floor was covered with a pair of Turkish rugs, one missing a burnt corner, the other boasting a large bleach spot near its center. A cluster of three ship lanterns hung from the middle of the yellow ceiling, and the decapitated head of a large grandfather clock, with pendulum and weights attached, was balanced on rough timber legs between two of the stone beds.

A tangle of electrical cords bound up with string ran out of the hole in the wall and up toward the ceiling.

Cyrus stared at the toaster. He hadn’t actually eaten that much at breakfast before Maxi had arrived, and the previous night hadn’t involved much sleep. He yawned, blinked slowly, and tried to ignore the hungry knife in his gut.

He passed his yawn on to his sister, and she stretched her arms above her head. “How long have you been sleeping in this tomb?” she asked.

The strange boy rubbed his smooth jaw. “Not a tomb,” he said quietly. “A Resurrection Room. They are different. In theory.”

Antigone slapped the stone bed beneath her. “You’re telling me there’s not a body inside here?”

“Maybe once,” Nolan said. “Not anymore. Not for a long time.”

“You’ve checked?” Antigone asked. “You really pried up the lid?”

Nolan stared at the slowly melting cheese. “I was looking for a friend.”

“In a coffin?” Antigone shivered. “That’s crazy.”

“My friend is dead,” said Nolan. His voice was flat. “Where else would I look?”

Cyrus laughed. Antigone elbowed him. “And you’re really okay if we stay in here with you?”

“No.” Nolan leaned farther forward and peered into the toaster oven. “But I’m willing. For a time.” He pointed out the room’s rough entrance. “You wouldn’t survive out there.”

Cyrus looked through the hole at the plank paths. The Polygon was silent. Empty. He looked back. Nolan might be crazy, but it didn’t matter. Right now, he was toasting cheesy bread.

Antigone tucked her feet up in front of her and pressed her back against the wall. “Are you part of the Order?” she asked.

Nolan smiled slightly. “I am a spider in a corner. I watch. I listen. I live on what I find.” He looked up. “On what finds me.”

“Um.” Cyrus glanced at his sister. She widened her eyes, and he turned back to Nolan. “Does Rupert Greeves know that you’re down here?”

“Rupert Greeves.” Nolan sighed. He sounded tired. “He can find a spider when he has need. He found you a nanny among the cobwebs, didn’t he?” He looked at Cyrus and then back at the slowly toasting bread. “He is already lost in your troubles.”

“What?” Antigone dropped her feet back to the floor and edged forward. “What do you mean?”

“Your brother was taken,” Nolan said quietly. “I heard you speak with Greeves.” He glanced at her surprised face. “I do not need to be seen to listen.” The toaster oven sparked and its interior light flickered off. Sighing, Nolan thumped it lightly. Cyrus jumped forward, touched the toaster, and then sat back down. The light returned, along with the quiet hum of heat. Nolan’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Cyrus. Cyrus blinked and said nothing.

“What else do you know?” Antigone asked.

Nolan inhaled slowly and turned his worn eyes away. “More than I care to. Maxi and his master are hyenas. Their pursuit will not end. But Greeves will stand or fall with you when the time comes. He’s cut from old stone.”

Antigone shivered, rubbing goose-bumping arms. “Greeves is the one in charge of this place?”

Nolan slid his stare onto her. “No. He’s Ashtown’s Blood Avenger. The Avengel. He protects and—when needed—he avenges.”

Antigone dropped her brows. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Nolan’s mouth twitched into a small smile and then grew into another yawn. “If an Explorer from Ashtown freezes on Kilimanjaro or is burned in New Guinea or is imprisoned in France, Rupe sets out after the remains. If a member commits treason against the Order, Rupe’s the one after him. If the Orbis—the circle of Sages—identifies a threat, Rupe hunts him—or her—or it—to ground. He is both hound and tiger.” He slid a glance back over his shoulder, as if his own words wearied him. “And I am one who knows.”

Crouching on the floor, Nolan flipped open the toaster oven, twisted a cloth around his hand, and pulled out the toasted bread. The cheese on top had browned and bubbled, and the edges were crisp. “Hot,” Nolan said. “Careful.” Banging the little glass door shut, he set the toast on the stone between Cyrus and Antigone. Cyrus breathed in slowly, letting the smell taunt his stomach.

“Thanks for this,” Antigone said, and she poked an edge with her finger. Cyrus nodded in agreement.

Nolan moved across the small room and settled back into his low crouch, pale, gnarled arms wrapped tight around his knees. His smooth, river-rock eyes were on Cyrus and Antigone as they took their first tentative bites.

“So you think Rupert will find Dan?” Antigone asked.

Nolan ran a hand over the cobweb hairs on his jaw. After a moment, he shook his head slightly.

Cyrus stopped chewing. Antigone wiped her mouth.

Nolan shrugged. “But then Maxi Robes might not be running. He wants what he wants.” He looked at Cyrus and his worn eyes flickered interest. Then, as it faded, he stood. “You have much to see and much to do if you ever want to move out of my Polygon. But you’re tired.” He stepped toward the door. “Sleep. I won’t be gone long.”

When Nolan had stepped through the hole and the sound of creaking planks had faded away, Cyrus looked at his sister.

“Tigs,” he said. “We just ate cheesy bread in a crypt.”

Antigone nodded. “I want to know how Horace is doing. What do you think happened to the driver?”

“Gunner?” Cyrus shrugged and moved across the room to Nolan’s alcove. He squeezed in onto his back and propped his feet up on the painted yellow stone wall.

Gripping the keys at his neck, he hooked one finger around his soft snake necklace and pulled her free. For a moment, Patricia’s silver body was visible, lapping his fingers, but then she found her tail and was gone. It was hard to believe that she was real. He liked having her—another living thing in his life.

He held his hand flat, letting the weight of the invisible keys dangle from his palm. Feeling them with his other hand, he found the sheath and flipped it open. The tooth became visible, dangling in the glowing light of the ceiling lanterns, suspended in the air beneath his palm. Cyrus felt the now-familiar chill creep through him. What was this thing? What did it really do?

He glanced back at the toaster oven he had just resurrected. Shivering, he flipped the invisible sheath shut again, and the tooth disappeared. Closing his hand gently around Patricia’s body and the invisible keys, he let his mind grind through the past two days. Normal life at the Archer—at least normal for him. And then a man in a yellow truck, and Mrs. Eldridge with her shotgun. Gunner and the fast car. Gunner. Guns. Guns that spat fire and bullets that fell from the sky. Maxi’s smile full of worn teeth and Milo’s Pizza. He wanted one of Milo’s pizzas. He wanted all of Milo’s pizzas. The river and darkness and cables and Antigone throwing up. Flying bicycles crashing into a fountain.

“Tigs?” he said quietly.

He turned his head. Antigone was curled up tight on her side, arms around her legs, her chin against her knees. Her brows were down and her eyes were squeezed shut. Cyrus blinked slowly, and he didn’t want the blink to end. Warm darkness.

He could see the big man named Rupert—Blood Avenger, Avengel. A towering wall of portraits and a pale boy beneath them. Nodding. Shaking his head. Nodding.

He and his sister were Acolytes in the Order of Brendan. Whatever that meant. The O of B. He’d signed the hay-bale book. Cyrus Lawrence Smth.

Dan was gone.

Asleep, lost in a tangle of darkness, lost in dark water, holding his breath, he swam through an underwater maze behind a blindfolded woman. The water faded, and he was moving toward the light of a too-familiar dream.

The California house had pale wood floors, polished to glistening. Cyrus was in the kitchen. He could smell his mother’s lemon soap, and the counters were freshly cleaned. Antigone was in the living room, curled up on the couch, staring through the wall of quivering windows, watching distant spray jump the point on Elephant Island. Cyrus knew what was going to happen next. He waited for it. The kitchen door burst open, and his father slipped inside, smiling, brushing back wet hair, slapping his arms.

He handed Cyrus a note. “Give this to your mom for me, will you, Cy?” He sounded like Dan, but unafraid. “I have to run a friend to the island. And tell her we might have an extra at dinner.”

Antigone twisted around on the couch. “You’re going out in this?”

“That I am,” their father said. “But not for long. Back soon.”

Cyrus took the note and nodded. His father’s heavy wet hand slapped his shoulder and then ruffled his hair. “Look after Tigger for me.” Then he fired a kiss across the room at Antigone and slid back out into the wind. The door didn’t latch behind him, and the wind threw it open, banging it against the fridge. Cyrus slammed it.

That was it. His father was gone. Forever.

And then, for the first time in two years, the dream changed. Antigone didn’t get up and pace the room in worry. She was frozen on the couch. Time didn’t jump forward to his mother’s panic and the cold food and the storm breaking and the light of a heartless moon. Instead, the door blew back open.

Cyrus slammed it. It blew open again, and he slammed it again. It blew open again, and he pressed his back against it, pushing with both legs until he heard the click of the latch.

It blew open again. How long this went on, the dream Cyrus couldn’t say. Time had stopped. Antigone was frozen. Only he and the door and the storm moved on. Finally, frustrated and confused, he stepped back and watched. Rain was whipping around the doorway, but not one drop entered the house or spattered on the floor.

Cyrus walked out the door and into the swarming, stinging rain. His father, enveloped in rubber rain gear, was frozen midjump into the passenger side of a truck. Suddenly, the dream moved in. His father landed on the seat and slammed the door. The truck began to pull away. The driver was big and … blurry. He wouldn’t take shape. His profile should have been visible, but it was a smear of blankness. Cyrus squinted and cupped his hands around his eyes, but it wasn’t a question of seeing. Somewhere in his mind, dusty, hidden deep beneath piles of the forgotten, stored with memories he never knew he’d collected—things said in third grade, the color of his first gum ball, his mother rocking him and singing in a strange language—there was an image of that driver. And something had stirred it. Something wanted to dig it back up and have a look.