I reached out to touch Leah’s shoulder. She jerked, then relaxed when she realized it was just me. Her eyes were wide and dark. Looking into her face instead of at her resolute back, I realized she was as terrified as we were. Maybe more, because she knew more.
“You came here?” I whispered. “You and Elden came here as children?”
She nodded. She held out her hand and gripped thin air.
“You held hands.”
She nodded. Yes.
I could see them, hand in hand, running everywhere… but no, that was wrong, they wouldn’t have been running after all. Leah could run, but Elden had clubbed feet. She would walk with him even if she wanted to sprint ahead to the next thing, the next surprise, the next secret place, because she loved him.
“Did he have a cane?”
She raised her hand and showed me a V. So, two canes.
Everywhere together except for one place. Leah was never a one for books, Woody had said. Elden was the reader of the two.
“He knew about that secret door in the room where the clothes were stored, didn’t he? He read about it in the library. Probably he knew about other places, too.”
Yes.
Old books. Perhaps forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the made-up one Lovecraft liked to write about. I could see Elden poring over just such a book, the ugly boy with the clubbed feet, the boy with lumps on his face and a hump on his back, the one who was forgotten except when there was a cruel practical joke to be played （I knew all about those, Bertie and I had played our share during my dark period）， the one who was ignored by everyone except his little sister. Why wouldn’t he be ignored when his handsome elder brother would eventually take the throne? And by the time Robert ascended, sickly limping Elden, bookworm Elden, would probably be dead anyway. Such as he didn’t live long. They caught a bug, coughed, took fever, and died.
Elden reading the old dusty books, either from high shelves or from a locked cabinet he pried open. Maybe at first just looking for power to use against his bullying brother and sharp-tongued sisters. Thoughts of vengeance would come later.
“It wasn’t your idea to come here, was it? Other parts of the castle, maybe, but not here.”
Yes.
“You didn’t like it here, did you? The secret rooms and the rising platform, they were okay, fun, but this was bad and you knew it. Didn’t you?”
Her eyes were dark and troubled. She made no sign, yes or no… but her eyes were wet.
“Elden, though—he was fascinated by it. Wasn’t he?”
Leah only turned and began walking again, making that twirling come on gesture with one hand. Back straight.
Resolute.
5
Radar had gone ahead of us a little way, and now she was nosing at something on the floor of the passage—a scrap of green silk. I picked it up, looked at it, tucked it into the holster with the tin cup of matches, thought no more about it.
The way was wide and high, more tunnel than passage. We came to a place where it split in three, each bore lit with that pulsating green light. Over each entrance was a keystone carved in the shape of the thing I’d last seen in two pieces on the floor of the residence wing: a squidlike creature with a nest of tentacles obscuring the horror of its face. The monarchs were a blessing; that thing was a blasphemy.
Here’s another fairy tale, I thought. One meant for adults instead of children. No big bad wolf, no giant, no Rumpelstiltskin. That’s a version of Cthulhu over those arches, and is that what Gogmagog is? High priest of the Elder Gods, dreaming his malevolent dreams in the ruins of R’lyeh? Is that what Elden wants to ask another favor of?
Leah paused, started toward the lefthand passage, stopped, started toward the center passage, and hesitated again. She was looking ahead. I was looking down at the floor, where I could see tracks in the dust going into the righthand bore. That was the way Flight Killer and his entourage had gone, but I waited to see if she’d remember. She did. She entered the righthand passage and started walking again. We followed. The smell—the stench, the mephitic odor—was worse now, the hum not louder but more pervasive. Flabby, misshapen mushrooms, as white as a dead man’s fingers, were growing out of the cracks in the walls. They turned to watch us pass. At first I thought that was my imagination. It wasn’t.
“This is terrible,” Eris said. Her voice was low and desolate. “I thought Maleen was bad… and the field where we had to fight… but they were nothing to this.”
And there was nothing to say to that because she was right.
We walked on and on, the way always trending downward. The smell was worse, and the hum got steadily louder. It was no longer just in the walls. I could feel it in the center of my brain, where it seemed not to be a sound but a black light. I had no idea where we were in the world above, but surely we’d passed beyond the palace grounds. Far beyond. The tracks thinned and disappeared. No dust had fallen this far down, and there were no dangling cobwebs. Even the spiders had deserted this godforsaken place.