An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 12

During the next week, Ellory and Liam started texting from sunrise to sunset. True to Hudson’s word, the phone in the jack-o’-lantern had indeed belonged to Liam ( Boone , he’d explained with a roll of his eyes, wiping pulp off his screen. It’s a long story .), and his initial message had escalated into never-ending conversation. Divorced from the blinding force of his generic handsomeness, Liam was still every bit as charming, funny, and interesting. He sent her songs and memes, jokes and photos of restaurants he wanted to try. In turn, she mostly sent him reminders to study, because her flirting skills had always been poor. Somehow, he seemed to find that endearing, and their banter rolled onward.

If Hudson Graves knew she’d been communicating with his roommate, it didn’t show as he leaned against the wall, waiting for her. His gaze was on his phone, ignoring the eyes that roved over him as people passed. None of the students approached, however. Ellory and Hudson were, after all, meeting at the campus founders’ museum, a location Ellory hadn’t even known existed before Hudson had texted her and would never have gone to otherwise. She could barely believe they’d squandered a building on a museum devoted to long-dead white men, but if there was one thing rich people knew how to do, it was waste money.

“Hey, Morgan,” Hudson said, pocketing his phone. “Ready to go digging?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she confirmed. “Do you actually think we’ll find anything in here?”

“Oh, absolutely not. But I’m bored and we’re both free, so why not?”

Ellory snickered, following him inside. A weary student was behind a desk in the small lobby, playing a handheld game. He didn’t even look up as Ellory and Hudson passed, and she got the feeling that they could have walked back out with half the museum’s items in their arms and he wouldn’t have blinked. The museum itself was smaller than Ellory had expected from the size of the building; it was one long hallway, with portraits, plaques, and the occasional preserved item against the back wall. There was another door—a fire exit that led outside—but no obvious way of getting to the rest of the floor.

“Hardly encouraging,” Hudson observed.

“Suck it up, Encyclopedia Brown. You did say there would be digging involved, so dig.” Ellory reached out to clap him on the arm, then thought better of it. “You take left, I’ll take right, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

His eyes burned into her back as she walked away, but she ignored it. Just like she was ignoring the fact that she had no idea how to interact with him in this provisional space between what they’d been before and what they were now. Were they partners? Colleagues? Enemy soldiers in a temporary ceasefire? She’d seen parts of him that she couldn’t forget, yet she didn’t know him any better than she had in August. Not really. They weren’t friends by any definition of the word, but it was still Hudson here with her instead of Tai or Cody. It was Hudson who had been the first to take her seriously. It was Hudson who had offered to help her—no dismissal, no psychoanalysis, minimal snark.

Once, she had been able to rely only on his contempt. Now his faith in her was the one thing keeping her sane as she faced the possibility that ghosts were real, she could see them, and they might be a sign of magic leaking into the natural world.

It was uncanny, and not because of the spirits. Her world had tilted so quickly that she was dizzy with it. At least she had a mission to focus on, something easier to investigate than the mystery of Hudson Graves.

Information was as bare as the hallway walls. The founders of the school—Howard McElking, J. Brett Troy, and Richard Lester Odell—had three large gold-framed portraits with the existential quantifier between them. Their interest in the occult and former membership in the New England Society for Psychic Research wasn’t mentioned, not even in a single line. They were noted to be an architect, a philanthropist, and a mathematician respectively—which at least confirmed Hudson’s interpretation of the symbol—but that was all.

The most peculiar thing about them were the birds; each man gazed severely from the oil painting that captured their pale cheeks and silver sideburns, each with a bird perched on the shoulder of their suits. McElking had a crow, its black talons piercing the fabric of his brown jacket. Troy had a doctor bird—or hummingbird, as she remembered Americans called them—a tiny thing with ruby neck feathers and a straw-like beak. Odell had an owl with black button eyes gazing from a snow-white face and brown body.

They also sat by arched windows displaying different time periods. McElking and his crow sat during a bright, sunny day. Troy and his hummingbird frowned from beside a clear night, the clipped-nail curve of the moon lining the windowsill in silver. Odell and his owl were seated at night as well, but there was no moon visible; instead, their sky was a gorgeous patchwork of off-white stars.

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 from her 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 of not knowing. Whatever her mind was trying to protect her from couldn’t be worse than this limbo between her reality and the possibility that magic underpinned 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 bolted to 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 of those people 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: a crow 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 University did have occult origins—and, for whatever reason, they wanted to bury those origins.

Bury but not destroy.

Memory. Creation.

What did that mean ?

“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 could hear it in his tone. “I read the hours on the sign out front. And something about breaking into a hidden room that obviously wasn’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—”

“I just need a second .”

Maybe he heard her porcelain words for the fragile things they were, because he didn’t argue further. As soon as he left the room, panic crashed over Ellory in tidal wave tremors. She collapsed to her knees, burying her face in her hands to wait it out. She had held herself together well, too well, because she cracked apart in seismic pieces now. Her body was a prison of short breaths and a roiling stomach, of sudden chills and heavy sweat. She wanted to lie on the floor, but it was filthy and unwelcoming. Her mind screamed at her to breathe. Her nerves simply screamed and screamed and screamed…

Until now, part of her hadn’t truly believed her episodes were a sign that magic was real. It was easy to put forth a theory when it felt unlikely, easy to dig into the past when it had been laid to rest. If magic was real, if magic was the reason for her lapses of memory, then it was not only extant but actively being used against her. And until she knew who, how, or why, she was in danger.

Ellory’s throat closed. She gripped her curls tightly and counted her breaths. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

It took five rattling minutes before she felt steady enough to get to her feet. Seven before she was able to stuff the last of her macabre theories into a box at the back of her mind. Ten before she felt normal enough to go and find Hudson.

“Want to grab dinner?” he asked. If he cared how long she had taken or about the patches of dirt smeared against the knees of her pants, it wasn’t enough to take his mind off food.

“Sure,” said Ellory. “You’re paying, since I was right.”

“Wow.”

“You can pick the place.”

“Your generosity knows no bounds…”

***

It wasn’t until they were sitting across from each other in a diner that Ellory realized how odd this was. Or, rather, how odd this wasn’t .

Hudson had chosen a diner called Little House, which was every bit as cozy as its name implied. If not for the window booths and wrought iron marble-top tables scattered around, she would have thought that she was in someone’s dining room. The floors were dark wood, and the walls were deep blue, with what looked like family photos for decoration. Brown lanterns dangled in a line from the center of the ceiling, and a bloodred curtain hid the back—where Ellory assumed there was a kitchen and bathrooms—from the front. The waiters were wearing all black with deep blue aprons that matched the decor. She half expected someone’s grandmother to breeze in and set a fresh pie on the center of their table.

Ellory hadn’t even known this place existed, and yet, when Hudson had pulled into the parking lot, she had been struck by a sense of familiarity. She steered them toward this booth tucked away in one of the back corners, with a view of the street instead of the cars. She’d absently ordered without even looking at the menu. And it wasn’t until now that the strangeness of it finally hit her.

After all, she was having a strange year .

“I feel it here, too,” she said. “I don’t recognize this place, but I feel like I do.”

Hudson set down his own menu, which he’d asked to keep in case he wanted dessert. Apparently, Little House had phenomenal desserts. “Are you sure you haven’t been here before?”

“I’d remember being here in the last three months. Everything looks new to me, but I know things I shouldn’t know. Like what’s on the menu.”

“I thought you’d looked it up in the car.” Hudson looked down, like he expected to see her phone somewhere on the table. Ellory showed him both hands, her phone safely tucked away. He frowned. “I’ll admit that’s bizarre.”

“More bizarre than the museum?”

“The museum was not in itself bizarre,” he said. “The fact that they hid an entire wing in it was.”

“I was thinking the same.” It would be one thing if the room had been demolished. To be taken seriously as an Ivy League institution, Warren would want to hide its occult origins. But they had created a tomb, a forgotten memory waiting to be found by those who knew where to look. “Are we going back after lunch?”

“That would raise some suspicion, even from the most apathetic student worker. No one ever goes in there, let alone twice in one day.” Hudson rubbed his face, and Ellory was suddenly reminded that, every time she saw him, he looked more and more exhausted. “I think it’s best if we take what we saw and do some independent research.”

“I don’t know if there are any other books on Warren’s supernatural history. Even the one I read was pretty bare,” Ellory admitted. “Maybe there’s something in the library? It’s haunted, after all, so maybe—” She sat up straighter as an idea struck her. “Do you think we should try talking to the Graves Ghost?”

Hudson’s mouth twitched. “Of course you want to talk to the Graves Ghost.”

Ellory had been thinking of ancient texts and digitized newspaper articles, but the Graves Ghost was possibly as old as the library itself. If she could communicate with it the way she had with Miss Claudette years ago, maybe it would tell her something as impossible as its existence. Maybe it would point her in the direction of books that could help. It spent more time in the Graves than any librarian did, after all.

“I think that maybe we should start with living people,” Hudson deadpanned. “For example, maybe my logic professor can tell us more about the symbols we saw. I can ask her over fall break.”

“Fine,” Ellory said magnanimously. “I’ll need that week to get the materials for a séance anyway.”

He rolled his eyes, probably sensing that she had never been to a séance and was going to have to google what materials she would need. While American children feared the boogeyman, Ellory had grown up with stories of duppies. The spirits could be malevolent or benevolent, and the former type had been used by her parents as a cautionary tale, especially after she’d come home claiming to see one. She’d memorized all the tricks to keep them away—the herbs, the chants, the number of the local obeah man. She’d never seen herself growing up to summon a duppy of any kind, but desperate times…

At least the Graves Ghost didn’t seem wicked.

For now.

Then the rest of Hudson’s words sank in. “Wait. You’re not going home for fall break?”

“I don’t usually go home for fall break,” said Hudson as the waitress returned with their food. A bacon cheeseburger for Hudson, with a mountain of golden fries, and Southern-style shrimp and grits for Ellory, with a side of honeyed corn bread that smelled fresh from the oven. Ellory was momentarily distracted by her first taste of the creamy, perfectly flavored grits coating soft pink shrimp, but she still managed to make an inquisitive sound. “I like the quiet,” Hudson continued. “Or as quiet as it gets with Boone underfoot.”

“Did you two always live close to each other or something?” she asked, thinking again of their easy camaraderie.

“Boone? I met him in freshman year. Liam’s the one I grew up with. We’re both from Darien.”

Ellory blinked. “You…don’t seem particularly close.”

“Yes, well,” Hudson said, contemplating his burger, “that’s why you shouldn’t date someone you live with.” He took a large bite, chewed aggressively, and swallowed. “And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Ellory said, stifling her curiosity about what Hudson thought of Liam flirting with her every time they saw each other. “Where’s Darien? I’ve never been.”

Hudson launched into a story about his childhood in the coastal Connecticut town, the large houses and the endless blue of Long Island Sound. Ellory was again struck by how normal it felt to be sitting here with him, eating some of the best food she’d ever tasted while watching Hudson Graves smile, really smile, a smile that made his cheeks dimple and his eyes crinkle. Beneath the table, their feet touched, his Doc Martens lightly pressed against her years-old Nikes, and the booth felt like a hug. Intimate. Safe.

It was peculiar. It was familiar.

It was…lovely.

She told him about her aunt and growing up in Astoria, the place to which she would return for fall break to remember the world that existed outside the concentrated glitz and sinister glamour of the Ivy League: their rented apartment, their stacks of bills, her multiple jobs, her nosy neighbors. Instead of feeling self-conscious or judged, she blossomed under Hudson’s clear interest in her small, silly stories. By the time the waitress brought the check, it was dark outside, and Ellory had several texts from Tai asking where she was and if she and Graves had gone on a date. The idea of such a thing didn’t rankle as much as it should have, and it was that more than anything else that finally made discomfort twist in Ellory’s gut.

“All right, so fall break,” she said as Hudson swirled a signature onto the receipt. “You’ll talk to the logic professor about the symbols. I recognize one of them, but I don’t remember from where, so maybe that will spark something. Meanwhile, I’ll gather what we need to safely summon the Graves Ghost. Anything else?”

“Just don’t be surprised if nothing comes of all this, Morgan,” he replied, tucking his credit card back into his wallet and his wallet back into the inner pocket of his jacket. His jaw worked like he was choosing his words carefully. “Unsolved disappearances are one thing. The supernatural is quite another. These are the kinds of questions that end only in disappointment or danger.”

“If that day at Bancroft turns out to be a folie à deux, I promise to let you I told you so me right to my death.”

Hudson’s eyes were shadowed with a dark intensity that gave her pause. “Well. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”