Wildalone (41 page)

I finished the paper quickly and e-mailed it to Giles two hours before midnight. Then I left my room. If there was more than myth to any of this—and to everything else I had been asked to believe that day—then the man who had unlocked Procter Hall for me, the one who had called me a nymph before vanishing mysteriously, was two thousand years old.

Assuming he existed at all, he probably had all the answers I needed. And I was starting to suspect that somewhere, on the other side of those golf course hills, he was waiting for me already.

THE COURTYARD OF CLEVELAND TOWER
was strangely quiet. Mute, motionless night bided its time under eaves and arches; even the occasional window seemed dimmer than before. Maybe, with dinner long over on a Friday evening, everyone had escaped to other, less forsaken parts of campus.

Where would I begin to search for him—a man who, for all practical purposes, was a phantom? That clerk at the Porter's Lodge had taken me for a lunatic at the mere mention of a janitor/keykeeper. Now I could imagine her reaction if I added “teacher of Dionysus” to the list.
Oh, and by the way, he doesn't age. Probably can't die either. You might have seen him walking around . . . on hooves. No? Doesn't ring a bell?

Procter Hall was locked, as always. Then I remembered him saying something about descending down. About labyrinths.
Would your friends descend there with you or would you venture in alone?

There it was, the small staircase from which he had emerged the first
time I saw him. White stone, coiling down so steeply that just looking at it gave me vertigo. I had never checked where it led, nor asked anyone.

You are going to college, not on a ghost chase into the past. It can become a downward spiral very quickly
.

Down I went. Somewhere above, my steps echoed farther and farther up against the vaulted ceiling.

Basement. TV lounge with scattered chairs. Pool tables. Dartboard. An old, rust-colored couch. And a sign:

I followed a corridor through a maze of turns, past numerous closed doors until one made me stop. On it, instead of a peephole or a number, someone had carved two ivy leaves in fine detail, down to the web of veins and the tiny stem spirals. Seeing ivy on campus was commonplace, a reminder that Princeton was one of eight schools (the Ivy League) whose names topped the U.S. college rankings. But under these leaves, drawn on the wood in pencil, were six circles stacked in an inverted pyramid.

Grapes.

It had never occurred to me that the leaves of the ivy and those of the grapevine had identical shapes. That the only way to distinguish between them was the fruit.

I reached for the handle—

“You should never open a door through which you might not wish to enter.”

My body froze from that voice. I hadn't heard steps. Hadn't noticed when a heavy, dark shadow had sneaked behind me down the corridor. He wasn't supposed to exist, not outside the legends. But when I turned around, he stood right there. Unmistakably real. As if he had been walking by my side, holding the end of an invisible leash.

AMAZING WHAT RUNS THROUGH YOUR
head when you are terrified:

So that's how I go? In a basement? Not even a white dress—just jeans and a fleece hoodie? And are those sharp things in his chest pocket . . . darts?

He stares at me patiently. Says nothing.

The guy does have a goat expression. We'd make a perfect horror classic:
The Silence of the Goats.
Subtitle:
Stabbed to Death with Darts from the Debasement.

He lifts his hand.

I step back.

Did Elza die in a basement too? Maybe one day, in campus lore, we will be known as “the Missing Slavin Sisters”
—

“Don't be afraid of me. I won't harm you.”

Nice of him to say. Yet weren't you guaranteed to hear some version of this before you turned up dead in a ditch?

“Who are you, Silen? I mean . . . who are you really?”

“I could tell you. But of what use would it be, if you've already guessed?”

“Then how come your legs are not . . .” I stared down at where his shoes would have been if the overalls weren't too long and almost dragging on the floor.

“More goatlike?” His throaty laughter resonated off the walls. “They could be, if I wished. But that might elicit a few stares, don't you think?”

At the last words, his lower body began to alter in shape and texture, to morph—into that of an animal, black pelt and all—until he stood on hooves, smiling as if none of this had required the least bit of effort.

“So then you are indeed . . .” I couldn't say the name, astounded to be standing next to an actual creature from the legends—a satyr, in flesh and blood—and certain that my world would never be the same once he had confirmed my guess. “. . . the satyr Silenus?”

“Silenus, yes. Although I would much prefer to remain Silen to you. I have been called Silenus enough throughout the folds of time.”

The folds of time.
He had to have seen many more of them than I could imagine. And somewhere, in his not so distant memory, one of these folds held a secret that was now leaking into my brief human life.

“Did you know my sister?” The possibility made me forget everything else I should have asked (for example, what hid behind that door and why he thought I wouldn't want to enter through it). “I saw you in a yearbook from 1992. You must have known her.”

“Only a fool can claim to know the heart of someone like her.” He sighed and shook his head. “I was a fool once.”

Which meant that even the omniscient satyr had fallen under the dandelion spell, like everybody else.

“Will you tell me about her?”

His body took human form again, gradually, as if a dark and hairy snowman was melting and coalescing back into shape, changing pelt to trousers, hooves to shoes. Then he headed in the direction of the spiral staircase. A slow, gawky strut—feet didn't seem to be his preferred mode of getting around. From behind, he could have passed for any tired, clumsy, slightly overweight man . . . if the sound of a flute didn't follow him. I had heard him play that tune once, and now recognized it: Debussy's
Afternoon of a Faun
. To the Greeks, it would have translated as
Afternoon of a Satyr
. Fragile, dreamy notes rose like incense vapors to the ceiling, as if he meant to enchant the whole building, or at least put it to sleep.

We were still coming up the last few stairs when a door squeaked. Procter Hall had unlocked itself, welcoming us to its vestibule.

He let me go in first. The place was dark, but as soon as we entered, the chandeliers came to life as I had never seen them—the static electric lights turning into tiny flames, quivering inside the glass bulbs.
No sound can escape walls like these.
I had no idea what I was walking into.

“Overwhelmed?” He offered me his hand. I expected his skin to be deadly cold but it felt warm, like that of any human. “I am glad you are no longer terrified of me.”

What was the point of being terrified? He had powers beyond anything I could imagine (or comprehend, or escape from). And even though part of me still expected to wake up in my bed any second, I was starting to accept that none of this was a dream. That the hand holding mine was real.

“Real? Things become real only if you want them to be.”

He was reading my mind too. And, as if this weren't unnerving enough, he proceeded to lead me through the tables. Literally
through
them. I could see the chairs I had arranged so many times, the wooden surfaces I had wiped at the end of each shift, but now our bodies moved through the vast space as if the dining hall contained only air.

When we reached the other end, he let go of my hand.

“Events from the past should have no place inside the present. And yet you wish to allow them in?”

“She was my sister. Probably still is. Which makes her a part of my present, even if she really became . . .”
A maenad? Some crossover version of a wildalone?
I needed a sane way of saying it: “Is it true that she saved Rhys?”

“Truth is a very malleable thing, Theia.”

“But it's still better than secrets. I've been surrounded by secrets, all my life.”

“So now you need someone to reveal them to you. And what makes you think I am their rightful keeper?”

“If not you, then who is?”

He pointed to the enormous fireplace next to us. “What do you see?”

High up in the stone, the school's shield was carved within a net of foliage. Dense leaves whose curvy edges reminded me of a tree above a mountain lake, in a legend I had read months ago. “An oak tree?”

“Yes. What else?”

I recognized squirrels. Lizards. Butterflies and birds. But he kept waiting for something more. Then I noticed the face of another animal, peeking through the branches. Only a snout and a pair of piercing eyes: the school's mascot. “A tiger?”

“It is as much a tiger as those leaves on the door were ivy.”

They hadn't been, I was sure of it. They were merely disguised as a Princeton symbol if you didn't look too closely.

“Lynx.” He glanced up at the carving, as if talking to the animal hidden inside and not to me. “The most elusive of beasts: the guardian of secrets. Comes and goes like a ghost, sees without being seen. One of the god's sacred messengers.”

“The god?”

“Dionysus. Only his lynx can reveal secrets from the past. Through the animal's eyes, you can see events obscured by time as if they were happening again, right in front of you. But anyone who seeks out the lynx receives a boon or a bane.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“A blessing or a curse—this is what the past becomes, once you have seen it. Will you take your chances?”

I told him I would. If the only way to find out the truth was to risk a curse, so be it.

He averted his eyes, back toward the vestibule. Nothing stirred. For a second, even the flickers froze under the heavy rib cage of the ceiling. And there, real whether or not I wanted it to be, the animal appeared—paws touching the floor without a sound, every move flowing into the next with the agility of a young predator. Finally, the eyes poured their odd glare over us: bluish green, like the depths of a lake in whose waters a weeping willow had merged its reflection with that of the sky.

“Now let your cheek carry your question to his ear.”

I thought he was joking, but he nodded in the direction of the lynx.
Things are real only if you want them to be.
Numb with fear, I kneeled and reached out, at first only with my hand—

The speckled fur was so soft I could barely feel it, as if my fingers were sinking into just-fallen snow. The ears perked their tufts of black hair. The paws bared their nails, scratching the floor.

I leaned in, reassured by the faint echo of a purr, and whispered my question: a single word. The name of a girl who had the most unusual fate of anyone I knew.

Stung by the sound of it, the lynx jumped back. Stopped a few feet from us, piercing the hall with the sharp wisdom of his eyes. Then something began to change in those eyes, in their hypnotic stare, as if the entire vastness of time was being funneled through them, bringing back events long gone and forcing them to take shape all over again, right here in Procter Hall.

A lawn. Bare trees. Night, drunk on the opulence of moon. And a girl in a
white coat, walking quickly. Rushing across the grass, as if her time is running out.

She sneaks in through a French door, careful not to stir someone who has fallen asleep among empty bottles and scattered music sheets. Her face bends over him. A smile. She lifts his hand and slips a ring on it.

The guy wakes up. She tries to kiss him but he sees the ring and all becomes madness: his fury, the flash of silver thrown across the floor, their angry voices (carrying no words, as if muted by the depths of water). Under the girl's calm stare, he gropes among sets of car keys for a missing one, then shoves a helmet at her. But even after she has put it on, after an engine roars off into the night, a chill from her vanished smile refuses to leave the room . . .

The motorcycle ride unfolded in front of us—irreversible, final as only the past could be. But I didn't need to see anything else, I knew the rest already. Jake had said it with just a few words, on our drive back from Carnegie:

“
The same lightning doesn't strike twice in the same family.”

“What happened?”

“Rhys had an accident, years ago. Somebody got hurt and my brother blamed himself. Now he won't come near anything that has only two wheels.”

The accident. Rhys dying. And my sister deciding to give up her life for him. Deciding it for both of them—to always own his.

A screech of tires erupted through the hall. Then the air became empty again. Only a four-pawed shadow dissolved into darkness, out toward the vestibule.

“ARE YOU MORE AT PEACE
with the past, now that you have seen it?”

I had seen it, yes. But Elza's claim on Rhys was more than just a past. And I could never be at peace with any of this.

“What happened after the accident?”

“I helped your sister go through with it.”

“Through . . . with what?”

His mouth opened inside the beard. Closed again.

“Is it true, what they say about those rituals? That Dionysus takes sacrifices—a human life in exchange for immortality?”

He nodded.

“So Elza and Rhys . . . they are no longer human?”

Another nod.

I tried not to panic. Rhys as a daemon. Elza as . . . something I preferred not to think about. Wild creatures, bound to be with each other forever on the deceptively idyllic Princeton campus.