“Welcome home,” Rou said, almost chipper. Her hands twitched. I think she was imagining rolling out dough or putting a pot of soup on the stove.
“Home?” I glanced over at the figment standing in front of the asylum’s façade. I’d seen her before. She was missing an eye, and she looked up at the building with a melancholy so deep I was certain either she or someone she’d loved had been trapped inside the asylum’s maze.
It was then Jagger appeared at the ghostly outline of the front door.
He grinned, his sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight.
He had more wrinkles than I’d ever seen, as if he’d sprouted another dozen in the past twelve hours. His skin was thicker and grayer than usual too. Like a rhinoceros’s hide.
His eyes gleamed as he looked me over, sliding his finger along his obsidian knife.
I nodded at him. “I’m back.”
He laughed, and it sounded like the stone walls of a building collapsing.
Rou was right. He was gleefully happy.
“The Smiths left a message at Hell Gate.”
I swallowed. Waited. My heart made one hard, painful knock and then trundled back to its normal rhythm. They’d tried to kill us in our sleep. Finn, Darin, the Smiths—they’d tried to burn us alive. Was there more?
Jagger’s sharp-toothed smile grew. Could he feel the fear in me?
He pulled a wrinkled, charred piece of paper from his pocket and read in a menacing growl, “Stopped by. Sorry I missed you. Will try again.” His voice was filled with amusement. “Is it a death threat or a love note?”
He handed the note over, and I stared down at Finn’s slanted scrawl. He’d written the note. I’d know his handwriting anywhere. I crumpled the paper, hiding his words, and let it fall to the ground.
I wasn’t sure if Jagger expected an answer, but I gave him one anyway. “Death threat. Obviously.”
After all, it wasn’t the first.
He laughed.
I didn’t.
Which made him laugh even more.
48
The asylum moaned. The basement was carved into the bedrock, and the bedrock had absorbed centuries of misery and madness.
At Hell Gate, the stones in the basement whispered your words back to you. They chattered and spilled secrets and laughed with Jagger’s rockslide rumble. The stones at Hell Gate were mockingbirds carved from rock.
The asylum was different.
Hell Gate was a home; the asylum was a prison.
The basement was dark. The asylum was destroyed in 1919, and the basement’s knob-and-tube electric wiring had been eaten long ago by generations of adventurous mice. Every few seconds, I caught the telltale scramble of claws over stone as mice, rats, or very large insects darted away at the echo of my footsteps.
Centuries ago, Wards Island had been a swampy, marshy place, with schist boulders rising from undulating terrain. It was separated from Randalls Island by Little Hell Gate. It hadn’t taken very long for people to connect the islands with fill and top them off with layers of sediment so they were flat and tillable.
Little Hell Gate was still there at the top of Ward’s island. There was a salt marsh, a wooden footbridge—even a wooden boardwalk ,where you could feel the wetland breeze and watch the silver marsh grasses wave in the wind.
The asylum was positioned so the people inside could glimpse Little Hell Gate from their iron-barred windows. Maybe that was why Jagger had acquired it. He enjoyed a good joke.
Hell Gate had always been an obvious mouth to hell. The Dutch knew it when it wrecked their ships and yanked sailors in a violent whirlpool portal to their deaths. It was why they’d called it Helle Gadt.
Little Hell Gate was less overt in its maliciousness, but the destination was still the same.
