Ellory frowned, taking a picture on her phone. It was probably nothing, but she was here to follow her instincts, and every nerve was alight with suspicion.
The aseptic cream walls, intermittent bronze and gold frames, pristine glass display cases, and ambient museum lighting lent her entire walk a dreamlike quality that was hard to shake free of. All she saw around her were white faces, which wasn’t exactly unusual, but something about their serious expressions as they bore down on her from their massive portraits made goose bumps climb her arms. She didn’t know if it was her own insecurities or their stone-faced demeanors that screamed,You don’t belong here! Get out. But she heard it as easily as she could hear her own breathing.
Inhale.
Get.
Exhale.
Out.
Ellory paused in front of a plaque explaining the existential-quantifier symbol and fought the urge to hug herself. She recognized this terror. It was the same way she’d felt at Professor Colt’s house, seconds before she had seen the tattoo. That sense of being Icarus soaring too close to the sun, heat cleaving the beeswax fromher feathered wings to drop her to her doom. But, instead of being intimidated, Ellory dug her nails into the palms of her hands and breathed past the stone in her stomach. At this point, she was more afraid ofnotknowing. Whatever her mind was trying to protect her from couldn’t be worse than this limbo between her reality and the possibility thatmagicunderpinned it.
“Morgan.”
Hudson was beckoning from halfway down his side of the hall. He’d shed his jacket, and the way he said her name put Ellory on instant alert. He stood before a glass case that held a framed certificate of accreditation, browning with age. His skeptical eyes were not on the faded letters and curling edges of the paper but on the wall behind the display.
“There’s a door,” he said, before she could question him. “Look there.”
The wall was the same sterile white as the rest of the hallway, but as she peered through the glass, she noticed an unevenness that had been invisible to her before. There was a ridge in the flat surface that shouldn’t have been there, so far from the nearest corner. The glass magnified it until she could see nothing else. Frowning, she moved from left to right; the door disappeared unless she was looking directly at it, the seam fading into the wall without the display case before it.
“How did you even notice this?” she asked, stepping back. Even that shift in position made it impossible to see the door she now knew was hidden there.
“I’m thorough. And the fact you asked me that makes me think I should check your half of the museum, too,” said Hudson. “Hold this.”
Ellory took his jacket, and he gripped the glass case, rocking it experimentally. At any other museum, it might have been boltedto the floor to prevent thefts or accidents, but the funds devoted to Warren University apparently hadn’t been spent on this collection. Hudson was able to shove the case across the floor until he made a space wide enough for them to fit through. The place it had once occupied was a perfect square of cleanliness in the middle of a dusty floor. Standing in that square made the outline of the door stand out more, though it had no visible hinges or even a knob. Her pulse was setting off fireworks beneath her skin. Her erratic heartbeat made her fingers curl into her denim pants, letting the feel of the fabric ground her in this moment.
What kind of museum stashed an invisible door behind a large glass case?
How many people had gone through it?
And how many ofthosepeople had emerged alive?
As if thinking the same, Hudson slid in front of her like a broad-shouldered shield. “I don’t see any sign of an external alarm,” he said, rubbing a muscle in his side. “But I suppose we’ll have to take our chances.”
Under his hands, the door swung inward with a creak. A cloud of dust escaped into the hall, chased by the stench of stale air and mildew. Hudson coughed twice before bringing an arm up to cover his nose, and Ellory copied the motion as she followed him into the dim room that was roughly half the size of a lecture hall. It took her eyes precious seconds to adjust, seconds during which she heard Hudson’s footsteps echo deeper inside, but when she could finally see again, her lips parted in surprise.
They had stepped into an abandoned shrine to the supernatural. There was a grimy glass case containing an old newspaper article about the opening of the School for the Unseen Arts. There were dingy marble statues of the three birds from the founder portraits: acrow whose forehead bore a sun with a line bisecting it; a hummingbird with spread wings, its stomach engraved with a triangle resting atop a cross; and an owl in flight, carrying a circle that had a cross coming out of the underside and a half circle resting on the top. The first symbol looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d seen it before.
Scratched plaques on the statues read, INCANTATION, EVOCATION, and DIVINATION. Written on the back wall, above the art, were two more words: MEMORY and CREATION.
Ellory passed displays on alchemy and vodou, on Santeria and wonder-working, on extrasensory perception and obeah. She passed dust-coated books about magic and mysticism, as well as a framed photograph of the New England Society for Psychic Research, 1953, with younger versions of Howard McElking, J. Brett Troy, and Richard Lester Odell standing front and center. By the time she made it back around to the door, her brain was racing with the implications of this discovery. Warren Universitydidhave occult origins—and, for whatever reason, they wanted to bury those origins.
Bury but not destroy.
Memory. Creation.
What did thatmean?
“We should go,” said Hudson. “The museum closes for lunch soon.”
“How do you know that?” Ellory asked absently, still staring at the marble statues. Invocation, evocation, divination—were those the unseen arts? Had someone been using one or all of them to mess with her memories? Or, worse, to create new ones? Was her tattoo some sort of declaration that remembering gave her power? “Have you been here before or something?”
She didn’t see Hudson roll his eyes, but she couldhearit in his tone. “I read the hours on the sign out front. And something about breaking into a hidden room thatobviouslywasn’t meant to be found made me want to keep an eye on the time. I guess I’m strange like that.”
“You go ahead and make sure the coast is clear. I’ll catch up in a second.”
“Morgan—”
