For the first time, I felt like the library wasn’t a safe place to linger. I finally had a direct piece of communication, and I needed to put it to use. Those numbers were coordinates, and I was fairly sure they would lead me somewhere on campus. I just needed to find it.
Replacing the book, I left the library and headed into themain house. Without my phone or computer, I would need to find something with a map function, and knew there was a computer in Dorian’s office. Thankfully, it wasn’t password protected, and I was able to look up the coordinates with ease. Zooming out, I saw that they put me squarely at the apiary.
Momentarily, my heart sank. I couldn’t go rummaging around the apiary with a bee allergy. Then I remembered that Finn had said Isabelle used to steal his honey to mess with him. That meant that Robin may have been allergic to bees, but Isabelle was not. Useful to know before I plunged headfirst into a beehive.
I was about to leave the office when I had a sudden thought: I could reach out to anyone with the computer. I could contact 911 and be rescued in an instant. But then I thought better of it. If I called the police, I would be calling them on myself. Sometimes no rescue is possible—not when you’re the problem.
Despite the darkening sky, the apiary looked especially gorgeous that day. I tucked in my clothes to cover any naked skin, grabbed Finn’s bee veil and gloves, and started poking around. After a quick visual scan of the area, I zeroed in on the little bee houses. Would it be possible to hide something inside one of them? It seemed like that could disrupt honey production, but what if it wasn’t inside the hive? What if it was underneath the house?
Getting on my hands and knees, I inspected the first house, even going so far as to put my face to the ground to see if there was anything underneath. It wasn’t until I searched the third house that I found it. Something small and metallic was affixed to the underside with duct tape. Reaching, I slid my nails under the edge of the tape and tore. When I pulled it out, I saw that it was another key. A glimmer of excitement lit up my nerve endings as Istared at the key. It was embellished on the bell, like the peacock key that opened the storeroom on the second floor of the library. Only in this case, the embellishment was a rendering of an owl. I was almost certain this would open the door I’d been unable to open at the back of the storeroom.
Cautiously hopeful, I climbed out of the protective gear and stowed it back where I’d found it, my heart racing with excitement. This was it. I knew it. Thunder groaned across the sky, and the atmosphere sizzled with electricity as I slipped the key in my pocket. As I hurried back toward the library, fantastical scenarios played out in my head. Opening the secret room to find Charles waiting there with a glass of champagne ready to inform me everything would be fine and he’d just wanted to play a little game.Did you like my treasure hunt, darling?
Dark clouds, heavy with rain, began erupting just as I made it under the covered walkway that led into the old monastery. The library was empty, and as I started up the stairs to the closed wing, I felt especially unsteady and nervous. Upstairs in that lonely corridor, rain lashed against the stained-glass window, drawing my attention to the image of Mary and the olive branch. Only, what if it wasn’t the Virgin Mary? And what if it wasn’t an olive branch?
Slowly I walked toward it, taking it in as if for the first time. All it took was a perspective shift, and the woman was no longer the Virgin Mary, but Mary the Prophetess, cloaked in blue, staring back at me as if she could see through space and time right to this moment. I took a step closer, and reaching out, I traced a finger along the outline of the plant she cradled. This wasn’t necessarily an olive branch, was it? With those flecks of yellow, it could just as easily be silphium. It had been here all along right in front of me, a message encoded within a seemingly ordinarywork of art. What else, I wondered, had I missed? What messages still lurked just outside of my line of sight?
A streak of lightning flashed, bringing the image to shocking life, and as the thunder rumbled in its wake, I turned and hurried back to the antechamber, opening the door and rushing inside. I switched on the light and made my way through the maze of file boxes until I reached the door at the back of the room. When I slipped the key in the door and heard the ward lock turn, a giddy relief washed over me. I was close now; I could feel it. Floorboards creaked beneath me as I stepped into the darkened space, and I caught a whiff of extinguished candle.
Inside, I was met with an astonishing sight. It was a large room, big enough to hold at least forty people fairly comfortably. Through the light filtering in from the antechamber, I could make out what at first appeared to be stalactites and stalagmites, but which, upon closer inspection, were glass bottles. Multicolored, and by the looks of them, very old, they hung from the ceiling just like the ones in my basement, but here they were matched by similar bottles secured to the floor, each rising up to meet its twin. The entire installation spooled out in matching concentric circles, their openings aligned as if they were exchanging energy somehow.
A quick search for a light switch proved fruitless, so carefully, I walked around the bottles until I came to an enormous altar. It was strewn with candles and various quasi-religious paraphernalia—stone gods and metal goddesses, twig structures and prayer candles. It felt cluttered and haphazard, but it gave me a bad feeling. There was nothing overtly diabolical, no pentagrams or Baphomets or anything like that, but whatever this was used for, I knew in my bones it wasn’t good.
At the center of the altar was a set of books, one of whichlay open like a holy text. Leaning over it, I could just make out images on the open pages, but the light from the antechamber wasn’t enough to see any detail, so I grabbed a match from over by the candles and lit it. Under that flickering illumination, the chilling illustration became clear. It was similar to the drawings I’d once seen in the codex in the scriptorium. The left-hand page featured the woman in the blue robes, Mary the Prophetess, but where the images in the other book had been meticulously rendered, this had none of that beauty. It was inexpertly executed and had a squalid malevolence to it. And then there was the right-hand page. It showed the horrific details of a bloody massacre—a blindfolded victim and hordes rising up from the underworld coming to collect her. What followed on subsequent pages were depictions of bloodshed, of monsters, and of unthinkable torture and pain. The final page showed a crude depiction of a man in a robe feeding a yellow plant to horrific beasts. Below the image, the text readLes Terribles. The Terrible Ones.
I knew that phrase. I’d heard it in my dreams, but I’d also seen it once before.Help!Paloma’s email had begun. And then it had gone on to describe being kidnapped, having her memory erased, and nightmarish creatures she had called the Terrible Ones.
A wave of disgust washed over me, though I couldn’t say exactly why, and I took a step back from the book. I didn’t want to be in this space anymore. It felt toxic, spoiled somehow. Satisfied this was what I meant to find, I started from the room, but then stopped and turned around slowly. Something had caught my eye. There was something else on the altar, wasn’t there? Among the carved wooden figures and the candles was something I’d passed over initially. Since discovering who I was, I had been focusing solely on Charles and the code. I’d all but forgottenabout the relic, had thought it was no more than a red herring, but there it was, sitting on the altar between a bundle of foul-smelling dried herbs and a statue of what might be Anubis.
It was much smaller than I imagined it would be, only a bit bigger than the palm of my hand, and where I had imagined graceful figures, the thirteen bodies were twisted, distorted, with holes for eyes, large, terrible sunken things. In the center was Janus, but it was also something else, wasn’t it? It had two faces, but it also bore horns, and it had a hostile wickedness to it that made me finally certain that whatever magic or science was practiced at Hildegard, there was some arm of it that bled fiercely into the occult.
Time was running out—I’d been in that room far too long already—but I was now faced with a dilemma. Take it with me and risk angering whosever space this was, or leave it and assume it held no deeper importance? A beat and then it was decided. I slipped it in my pocket, bolted from the room, and locked the door behind me.
4.3BLACK HELICOPTERS, PROJECT BLUE BOOK, AND MK ULTRA
Thousands of government-sponsored experiments did take place at hospitals, universities, and military bases around our nation. Some were unethical, not only by today’s standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted. They failed both the test of our national values, and the test of humanity.… So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and another generation of American citizens, the United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families, and to their communities.
—PRESIDENTBILLCLINTON,OCTOBER 3, 1995
Back in my cabana, I locked the door, covered all the windows, and set the relic on the coffee table, half expecting it to magically transform itself into a marvel that would explain everything, but it just sat there.
Retrieving a magnifying glass from the desk, I lifted the artifact and examined it, looking for any kind of markings or defects, anything that might serve as some kind of clue, but there was nothing. I turned it upside down, looked at it from the side, and took it into the windowless bathroom in a misguided attempt to see if it had any kind of luminescent qualities. I even shook it, and while it did seem like there was a faint rattle inside,that got me no closer to understanding what to do with it. So I just sat and stared at it for what seemed like hours, hoping some epiphany would come. It never did.
There was still so much I was missing. I felt like I was close to some kind of solution, but that it was just out of reach. Then it occurred to me that since the very beginning, everything that had happened to me at Hildegard had felt like a video game. I would discover a clue that would lead me to a location where I would discover either another clue or a locked pathway. Then I would receive yet another clue that would lead me to a key that would open that lock, and so on. Now that I was almost certain that I had done this to myself, I had to assume that I’d left those clues for myself. It stood to reason, then, that if I searched through any clues I had yet to solve, that they would lead me to the next step toward whatever I was supposed to find.
One thing that bothered me was why I had made Robin allergic to bees when Isabelle was not, but as I sat there staring at the relic, the answer came to me. It was so simple I’d almost missed it: I hadn’t wanted to find the missing owl key, and thus the relic, until I had recovered enough of my memory to know that I was Isabelle. For some reason, Isabelle could go in the apiary, but Robin couldn’t. I had essentially locked that part of the path until I had enough information to use it wisely. But the problem was, now that I had what I’d been looking for, I had no idea what to do with it. Then it occurred to me: I hadn’t figured out I was Isabelle on my own. Whatever clue was supposed to lead me there had been skipped over when Guillaume attacked me. Aspen and Lexi told me who I was. I hadn’t been the one to figure it out. No clue had led me here, which meant there was still a clue out there for me to find, something that I was supposed to have foundbeforethe owl key. I was almost there,but not quite, and my inability to cross that threshold was nearly driving me mad.
Frustrated, I walked outside and sank into a chair, staring up at the sky. Dusk was coming in fast, but the moon was already visible, an alabaster crescent ushering in the night. As I stared up at it, I was reminded of the strange feeling I’d had when I’d first foundThe Book of Widows—that vague, eerie feeling I was being watched.
I sat up suddenly, my memories unspooling back to the island, back to the night Aspen had drugged me and I’d gotten lost in the woods, and finally all the way back to my time in New York.
There I was again, sitting at the desk, feeling someone standing behind me, and when I’d come back to my senses, I’d found I’d drawn four symbols. These four symbols:
Since I’d first seen the tiles, I’d sensed that they were vaguely familiar but had quickly dismissed that instinct. Moon symbolism, after all, was fairly common, but now it was clear to me. I’d drawn them back in New York when I was in some kind of hypnotic state. They’d been important enough for me to carry them through from my time here as Isabelle to my life as Robin. They were a message to me; I was sure of it. I just didn’t know what they could mean. The widows’ keys were used for divination. I knew that much. You selected three tiles, probably tossed them in the air (or something similar), and saw what order they landed in. Then you consulted the text to see what the combination meant. But I had drawn four symbols, not three.
Thumbing through the book, I tried to make sense of it, but nothing came to me until I landed on an entry I’d noticed beforebut glossed over. There was a single mark in it. Someone had underlined the wordtoad.
