At first I was only watching because it was there in front of me to look at, but after a bit I started to wonder why they had apparently put the Scholomance entrance in the middle of a tourist trap. There’re enclave entrances in New York, in London, in most of the biggest cities of the world, but that’s because people build enclaves where they already live, and mostly they live in cities, so they have to put up with all the inconvenience and difficulty and mana-expense of building entrances there, where collisions with the mundane are a constant danger.
But the Scholomance was meant to be far away from any other enclaves and hard for maleficaria to find: why hadn’t they tucked it into a truly obscure corner of the world? I understood even less when we tracked down the coordinates and found they were in the middle of an actual museum: an old historical estate, and not even very historical; the place had been built in the 1900s, after the Scholomance had already been open for more than ten years. It had to be deliberate, but it made no sense.
Our coordinates had been rounded off to three places, so we had to hunt through the whole sprawling estate: it could have been anywhere inside the grounds. And we couldn’t even skip the queue for tickets and slip in through a wall when no one was looking; there were just too many people ambling through the picturesque nearby streets, taking selfies against the outer walls. Even if we’d found ourselves all alone for a moment, we couldn’t have counted on it lasting: every few minutes another one of the carts came careering around the turn.
So instead we waited on the queue and bought tickets just like everyone else, and then went through a long droning tour of the preserved house, hearing about the self-important owner and his architect and their fascination with Tarot rituals and initiation rites and primitivism—by which they’d clearly meant nature unspoilt by anyone who didn’t look like them; Aadhya rolled her eyes at me and silently mouthed what a dickhead—and all the lavish parties he’d hosted in the gardens. We kept trying to look for a place where someone might conceivably slip away, a door that might lead you out of the world, but the annoying nine-year-old boy in the group got to literally every single one before we could do, yanking on old brass doorknobs and opening antique cupboards while his beleaguered mother kept asking him wearily not to touch things.
When the tour finally spilled us out into the gardens, I was ready to believe that Ophelia had actually sent us out here as some sort of diversion, but when I suggested as much, Liesel said, “She would have sent us somewhere further away and more remote!” which was true, so we grimly set off to wander through the gardens, trying to find the entrance to the world’s most secret and hidden enclave of mystical power, hard on the heels of an entire tour bus of people with their guide carrying a waving flag of Hello Kitty at the head.
The grounds were dazzlingly beautiful, enormously lush, et cetera. Also it was hot as Satan’s tit, to put it in the most colorful terms possible, and what primitivism seemed to mean was that the paths went in loops, meandered aggressively, and the whole thing was full of stairs that pretended they’d been worn naturally into the rock and were therefore uneven. We kept trying to avoid the worst crowds, and as a result managed to go in circles three times in a row, which we only realized when we kept coming past the same distinctive moss-eaten staircase. I was overheated, sleep-deprived, wretched, and when we hit the same bloody staircase a fourth time, I started giggling and couldn’t make myself stop, and had to be taken to the café and revived with cold water and strong coffee.
Liesel was enraged by then herself—I reckon she didn’t much care for primitivism—and she stormed back to the ticket booth, got a map of the grounds, and after I got hold of myself, she led us on a systematic exhaustive tour of the place, and even insisted on our waiting in the painfully long queue to go down into the initiation well. The pamphlet told us it was part of some trumped-up mystical initiation rite of Freemasonry that the owner and his mates had liked to perform. It sounded to me that they hadn’t had enough hazing in university, and in order to justify more of it to themselves as grown men, he’d had to build himself a palace and dress it up as some ponderous mystic rite that none of them really believed in, as if they could cart themselves back in time to a pagan era they’d mostly made up.
I wasn’t in a mood to be fair to them, and also on some level I’d stopped thinking of finding the gates. In my head I was just on a horrible grade school trip that was happening to me as if I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t imagine the Scholomance being in this adult Disneyland sort of place, so I wasn’t wondering why it was here, what any of it was for. I dragged myself through the queue in sullen sweaty annoyance, and into the actual well, which wasn’t literally a well: it was a tower that someone had hollowed out of the ground instead of building into the air, with a long spiral stairway going down around the empty space in the middle, people leaning over the sides to take photos up and down and across.