“The observatory.”
When we stepped inside, he used a key card and then pressed his thumb against a pad near the buttons. We started moving down and I could barely breathe.
“Shouldn’t we be going up? If we’re going to an observatory, don’t we need to see the sky?”
“It’s not that kind of an observatory.”
Soon we were stepping out into a brightly lit corridor, the end of which housed another bank of elevators. Inside the next elevator, we followed the same procedure, Finn using his keycard and pressing his thumb against the metal beside the buttons. The elevator went down and down and down. I had the feeling of traveling through time, traveling somewhere I was not supposed to go. Something about the process made me feel like I was engaged in a kind of religious ceremony. It wasn’t just me, though. Finn also had a solemn expression.
When the door opened, we walked down another dark hall to a large metal door. He took out a key card, then turned and looked at me.
“Do you have any memory of what’s behind this door?”
I strained to remember, but nothing came to me. “Did I work here?”
He nodded. “You didn’t just perform research on human test subjects.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I suggest you prepare yourself.”
I swallowed and nodded. He swiped his card and pressed his thumb. The door buzzed, and we stepped inside.
What I saw there defied logic. At first I almost thought I was looking at a painting—it was that unreal. I was in a dark room, a control room of sorts, and on the opposite wall was a bank of windows looking out into a vast sea of dark blue. In each window, floating in that bluer than blue liquid, was a monstrous creature, pinkish gray with shiny, almost translucent skin. They resembled manatees, but they weren’t. Long spindly ducts of flesh issued from their bodies like tentacles, and on their backs were terrible growths like stunted angel wings. Next to them was what looked like an air lock.
I backed away, my hand covering my mouth. “What are they?”
“Call them what you want. Old gods, Nephilim, demons.They don’t have names. We still don’t know what they are. Not really.”
I tried to look away, but my eyes drifted back to the creatures. They were real. I knew they were real. And on some level, I recognized them. Their smashed, swollen white faces. Their long twisted clawlike appendages, horrid tentacles. I knew them much more than I wanted to.
“This is the nymph stage,” he said. “Practically newborns.”
“The water. They come from the water?” I asked, breathlessly trying to remember all those terrible things I’d blocked out, trying to piece together too much at once.
“Oh, that’s not water,” Finn said, and a chill traced up my spine. “That’s just one of the paths that connects our world to theirs.”
“How deep does it go?”
“All the way,” he said, and then he swallowed. “It goes all the way down.”
Leaning in, filled with a mixture of disgust and horror, I stared at them. I began to realize what I’d first thought were tentacles were actually tubes affixed to them, pumping something in. Or were they taking something out? I tried to see where the tubes were going, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Glancing around, I saw that I was in some kind of command center with various control panels scattered throughout the room, but they showed no activity. It looked like the power had been shut down. Against a far wall was a collection of protective gear and a display of unfamiliar-looking instruments. Long, odd-shaped, and sharp-edged, the instruments appeared as though they were used on the creatures somehow. I walked over to the wall and examined an instrument that looked like anold-fashioned harpoon, barely able to imagine what they might use such a horrible thing for.
“What is this place?” I asked, indicating the apparently nonfunctional control panels.
“This is where we observe them. It’s how we control the barrier that separates their world from ours.”
The barrier, Hildegard College’s own Hadrian’s Wall—this was what Aspen had been talking about?
I took a step toward the creatures, a horrifying thought flashing through my mind. “If these are nymphs, where is the mother?”
Finn swallowed. “She’s down there… somewhere.”
I shuddered. “And the father?”
“We’ve never seen him.”
