Hi! I’m in URGENT need to find a specific jeweler who specializes in bespoke 19k gold pendants. His name is Xavier and he used to have a store in one of the jewelry buildings on Washington Street. Can anyone help??? This is time sensitive. Will pay generously $$$ for a lead/referral!!! You can reach me at: [email protected]
Taylor
For three days, Taylor is undone. Nothing makes sense; the threads of her life—her memories, experiences, assumptions—are fraying.
With each passing hour, she comes further apart, sinking into a tangled pile of her disappointments, her failures, her inaction.
On the fourth day, she awakes with a sudden urgency. The Knox’s three nights of preparation are over; tonight is the ensuing initiation. The sacrifice.
Rising from the fog, Taylor sits at her sewing machine. As she fires it up, she studies the collection of Knox emblems tacked onto her fridge. It reads like a story of the past couple of months: the top hat she drew from memory after breaking into Vivian’s apartment, the last letter Taylor’s mom ever wrote her, the Knox’s employment offer, and then the warning note:“Go back to being a nurse.”
She takes a large swathe of black silk and the damaged phoenix mask from Liam, and she begins to sew. Running the cloth through the machine, repairing the mask by hand. Everything, itseems, comes down to this: past and present and future tying together in each stitch she makes, in each accidental needle prick she suffers. Memories of her mom rising as she pulls her needle through the fabric and abating as she finishes yet another seam. Vivian, whirring in the sewing machine, an unending pulsation. And Taylor herself, the conduit, the cord.
Throughout, she keeps arriving at this: It is she who must go to the Knox tonight, to save Vivian. A determination steels in her, a feeling—however irrational it might be—that if she can save Vivian, she might somehow fix the other holes in her life.
Taylor walks quickly in the black silk cape, the train flowing behind her like a gothic bridal gown. Adrenaline courses through her like fluid in an IV. It’s a little after midnight, the sky also clothed in darkness.
In her hand she clutches both the repaired phoenix mask and a bag of wigs Sam dropped off earlier at her doorstep.I’m going to a costume party. Do you have any wigs I can borrow?, she’d texted him, pretending not to be home when he knocked a few minutes later.
There’s an eeriness on the streets—a sense of something quietly brewing—as if the city itself knows that initiation night has arrived. The police, too, know. Taylor anonymously messaged them on the Boston Crime Stoppers tip line before leaving her apartment:I’m reporting that a crime will occur this evening at the Knox secret society building in Beacon Hill during their initiation ceremony. It will involve the use of the drug opium and a human sacrifice.
But will the police take it seriously? Rachel said they blew heroff when she approached them about Vivian.I wouldn’t be surprised if the Knox has the police department in their pocket.
So Taylor also left Sam a note under his door, keeping the message simple:I’ve gone to the Knox to check on something.But then she added a pretty dire request:If I’m not back by 4:00 in the morning, please go get the police. For REAL.
She first approaches the Knox from its front facade; it’s dark, imposing. The long curtains in the front parlor drawn as if the whole building has gone to sleep for the night. But Taylor knows that can’t be further from the truth.
She then turns to wind through the streets, now arriving near the back of the building. A couple passes holding hands, and she waits until they fade into the distance. Then she reaches into the wig bag to grab a random one but is dismayed to find they are all brightly colored: orange, purple, blue, red.Shit.Of course Sam would lend her colorful ones for acostumeparty. She’s about to discard the whole lot on the curb, but on second thought, she grabs one at random and shoves it into the deep pocket of the black sweatpants she’s wearing beneath the cape.
Slipping the phoenix mask over her face, Taylor darts up to the back door to quickly cover the security camera with a towel. It’s hard to believe she last used this door as an employee only four days earlier.
Cupping her ear against the door, she listens: silence. She straightens and counts down from five to one, trying to slow her madly beating heart. Then she turns her key in the lock. Whisking open the door, she steals inside.
The usual overhead dim bulbs are not turned on, and it takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust. She holds her breath, waiting. Then she lets out a long, slow exhale. She is alone. She could laugh, she’s so relieved.
She needs to make her way upstairs and find Vivian before the sacrifice. It’s the only thing she knows for sure, and she lets it steel her against all the unknowns: which room Vivian’s in, where the sacrifice will take place, what it entails…
Taylor swallows, willing her nerves to settle. She creeps down the hall, now familiar after the two weeks she’s spent there, and passes by the area with the painted dot symbols. Something to do with geomancy, surely. She never did figure out what the numbers on the opposite wall mean, but it doesn’t matter. Much of the Knox, she realizes, she won’t ever know. She doesn’twantto know.
Suddenly, she hears distant voices.Shit.She stops short, waits. The voices are getting louder. It’s two, maybe three men talking. Why would someone be coming this way? There’s nothing back here, except the exit from whence she came. She glances behind her, wondering what to do.Shit!
Her heart pounding, she remembers the morning she ran into Jerry and Eduardo in these halls.The servants’ quarters connect to the Knox building in the basement, so we just go down and up.And the time she ran into Rose coming from there, carrying the tea mugs. Taylor can hide in there, wait it out.
The entrancehasto be somewhere along here. She presses against the walls, spreading out her trembling hands.
The voices are getting closer. She catches a few words: “the scrolls…Oliver and Rose…”
Suddenly, in a small miracle, her hand latches on to a groove.
She pushes against it, and a door releases, swinging inward. She slips through—it’s dark—and immediately whips around and kneels, grasping the bottom of the door with her fingers to pull it just shy of closed.
Then Taylor has a terrifying thought:What if they’re coming in here?
She strains to listen. There’s a low, continuous beating that sounds mechanical in nature. But no voices.
Several minutes pass, or what feels like it. Her fingers are cramping, her back hurts. Finally, it feels safe to ease open the door. But her fingers slip, and the door closes completely. For the life of her, she can’t figure out how to reopen it.
She’s locked in.
