“The city—？”
“The city of the dead. Yes. In the third circle.” Dr. Berghast pressed a knee to one corner to hold the map flat and in this way freed a hand, and then he drew his long finger across the map, to the white of its outer edges. “Here,” he said, “is where I believe the Room to be. It was too far for the others to travel to. But not for you.”
“Wait. How’re we supposed to know it?”
“The spirits will not go near the place. You will see a white tree that bleeds. You must go into the Room. You must bring me what you find there. You must bring me the glove. And this,” he said, withdrawing a small leather-bound notebook, and a nub of a pencil, “is for you to record what you encounter, where you go, everything. There is something I have not told you yet. The talents who used to come back from the orsine … they had little recollection of it. What they’d seen was all confused, all mixed up. We began using these notebooks to keep track of what they saw.”
He put the parchment and the notebook and the pencil in a small cloth satchel, passed it across to Charlie.
“Be careful, both of you,” he continued. “That world will play tricks on you. You may think you see your loved ones, those you’ve lost, and wish to follow them. Many have been led astray, in the trying. They are shades only; they are not the ones you loved and lost, but only the memories of them. They will not know you.”
“If they’re just memories, they can’t hurt us,” said Charlie.
“The spirits are very dangerous,” Berghast said sharply. “When they gather together they take the form of a fog. You must not let yourselves be caught in it. They are drawn to movement, to heat, to quickness, anything that reminds them, however briefly, of the sensation of life. It is a pure and absolute need: a need that devours. They will leech the life from you. Stay clear of them. And there are not only the spirits of the dead in that world. Remember that our world, and that other”—he raised his eyes to regard the orsine with a curious longing—“each is a house of doors. Everything is always only passing through.”
He leaned back and blew out the lantern so that the chamber was bathed in the blue light. Shadows filled his eyes. “I do not know how long you can stay in there. Time moves differently in that world. For the others, with the artifact, it was a few hours of our time at the longest. But for you … a day? Two days?” He seemed to grow bigger in the darkness. “Know this: observe your fingers, your hands. If the fog has affected you, they will begin to shake, the color will go from them. When that happens, you must start back at once.”
“If we don’t?”
“You will be lost.”
The skin-like surface of the cistern hummed and glowed its eerie electric blue, and Marlowe’s little hands glowed the same. And then Marlowe, who still had said nothing, took the knife from Charlie and crossed the grotto floor and crouched at the edge of the steps. He punched the long blade through. A dark stain seeped up out of the cut and Marlowe sawed a long cross in the surface. His entire body was shining now, glowing and translucent.
“Yes,” murmured Dr. Berghast, “good.”
The little boy paid him no mind. When he was done he dropped the knife onto the floor and took hold of the roots like a kind of rope and waded down the steps, into the shining incision; his trousers darkened, then his shirt, and soon he was soaked to the shoulders. And then, with a quick look up at Charlie, the waters closed over his head and he was lost to view.
“Jesus—” Charlie hissed in surprise. The kid had gone under so quickly.
He hurried to the edge, scanning the dark surface, the weird light coming up from beneath, but he could see nothing. Marlowe was gone.
“You must hurry, Charles,” called Dr. Berghast from the darkness. “Else you will lose him. Do not forget the knife. You’ll need it to cut your way back out.”
Something about the orsine made him hesitate. It wasn’t fear, exactly. But as he stepped in, he gasped sharply. The water—if water it was—gripped his ankles with its cold. It felt almost like it was taking hold. The leathery flaps on the surface folded under his weight. He screwed up his face, he took a deep breath. He could not see Berghast because of the blue shining from below.
“Hold on, Mar,” he muttered. “I’m coming.”
And his clothes billowed up around him, and he went down into the water that was not water. And after a time he could no longer feel his feet nor his legs nor his hands nor his arms, and still the steps went down, and soon he could feel nothing at all.