“Well, if we couldn’t make your time here comfortable, the least we can do is make your exit a bit more bearable.”
Bearable, Zoe thought. What a funny word when she was never going to see her father or brother again. There was nothing very bearable about it. “Thanks,” she said.
Zoe’s father gently put the sneaker back on her foot, stood, and turned to Caroline. He took her hand in both of his. “Thank you again,” he said.
“I’m glad to help.” Caroline nodded and briefly laid a hand on his shoulder. She looked at Zoe. “And you, young lady, have a fast and unexciting trip home,” she said, and walked out of the room, leaving Zoe and her father alone.
“You’ll be safe now,” said Zoe’s father. He let out a low sigh. “So, now it’s really time for you to go.”
“Dad-” Zoe started.
Her father cut her off. “Listen, we’ve had way too damned many good-byes at this point. Agreed?”
Zoe smiled a little and nodded. “Agreed.”
“Then all I’ll say is this: have a safe trip home, and I don’t want to see you again until you’re white-haired and wrinkled.”
“Okay,” she said, wanting to say more, but nothing would come.
“Now get out of here before I get disgusting and start tearfully good-byeing all over.” They held each other for a moment, and then he pushed her gently away. “Go on,” he said.
Zoe gave him a quick peck on the cheek and ran from his room, not looking back. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.
Zoe made it to the beach without anyone paying the slightest attention to her. A pack of Hecate’s black dogs passed her on the boardwalk. One stopped to sniff the air as it passed, but didn’t turn around before moving off to catch up with the others.
She went down to the beach, all the way to the waterline, turned right, and kept walking. The sea left white foam trails on the sand ahead of her, like the snowy peaks of distant mountains.
A chilly wind that blew in off the sea had replaced the rain from earlier in the night. There was no one else on the beach. Even the broken-down amusement park looked deserted.
The drainpipe that Mr. Prosper had told her about was there by the waterline, but still half submerged. The idea of wading an unknown distance up to her waist in seawater and whatever else might be floating or skittering in the pipe wasn’t very appealing, so she decided to wait awhile and let the tide continue to pull back from the shore.
She really envied Absynthe right then. Absynthe smoked, and when you smoked, you always had something to do. When you were outside with a cigarette, people knew why you were there. You weren’t waiting for a ride home or standing nervously on the corner, hoping your date hadn’t stood you up. No, you were taking a moment to indulge your nicotine addiction. Besides, smoking always gave you something to do with your hands, she thought. Zoe thrust hers deep into the pockets of her father’s coat. Maybe I’ll start smoking again when I get home. Mom would love that.
There was nothing to do now but wait. She didn’t want to attract attention by pacing, so she sat in the damp sand behind the ruins of a collapsed pier a few yards from the pipe.
She was so tired from running around being afraid. Zoe thought about what her father had said about her and her mother. That they were alike. That no one could tell them anything. She thought again about her mother. What was she thinking? What did she do when she realized that Zoe was gone? Did she call the cops or was she playing it cool, expecting Zoe to come home snarling and high on something some strange boy had given her at a party she was too young to be at? Wouldn’t she be surprised if she knew the truth.
Or did she know anything at all? Did time work the same way in Iphigene as it did back in the world? Maybe only an hour had passed back home. She felt a quick jolt of relief at the notion that she might not have to explain any of this when she got home, but it would be frustrating after having seen what she’d seen and done what she’d done that, at home, it amounted to little more than the running time of a couple of sitcoms. She felt a twinge of guilt, too, but dismissed it. Guilt was just a natural by-product of thinking about her mother at all. . in any world. Zoe took a breath of cool salty air to clear her head. Don’t lose it now, she thought. Not when the way out is so close.
A few minutes later, she checked the pipe again. A few inches of water still pooled at the bottom. Fuck it. She couldn’t stand waiting any longer. She splashed into the pipe and plunged into darkness.
The dark gave way to a thin gray light as her eyes adjusted to the interior of the pipe. The pooled water reflected the moon and stars far enough inside that she could keep moving in something like a straight line without too much trouble. After two or three minutes the light changed. The anemic glow was now in front of her, not behind. She kept walking, slower now, straining her eyes to see where it was coming from.
She found an old wooden door. A couple of steps leading up to it had been chiseled into the drainpipe. Dim light leaked from where the bottom of the door didn’t quite meet the floor. Zoe walked up the steps and stood before the door. It was warped and pulpy from the dampness in the pipe. She didn’t need to see the crest in the door’s center to know where it led, but the image of twin snakes supporting the moon on the back of a great black she-wolf confirmed it. This was Emmett’s door, the one he used to get from Iphigene to the world.
Zoe thought about Valentine fighting the wolf men. How he’d kept her behind him, protecting her. He was probably in there right now, she thought, somewhere behind this door. She put her hand around the doorknob and just held it for a moment, feeling the weight of the cold brass against her palm. Then she slowly turned the knob. She heard the latch give. The door swung open.
Inside was a small, tidy room, like an oversize closet. There were shelves and bins holding stack of neatly folded men’s clothes. This is where he gets ready to travel back to the record shop, she thought. She went to one of the bins, touched the shirts and jeans, and picked up some of the black Nikes. Next to it, like a sick Halloween joke, lay a pile of human faces. Men’s. All the same. Emmett’s disguises, Zoe thought. She reached out a hand and touched one. It was warm and soft, like real flesh. There was even beard stubble along the chin. If this is real skin, she thought, where did Emmett get it? She thought again of what Mr. Prosper said about the other people who’d tried to find their way to Iphigene and failed. Is this what’s left of them? She pushed the thought out of her head.
Zoe picked up a shirt, took off her coat, and dropped it on the floor. She put the shirt on over her hoodie. It was made of worn red flannel and was much too big for her. She took a clean pair of pants from an adjoining bin and slipped them over her jeans. There were belts hanging from a peg on the wall. She used the straight razor to cut a new hole in the leather, allowing her to pull the belt tight and keep Emmett’s pants reasonably on her hips. She put the coat back on and looked around.
A broom stood near the exit to the drainpipe. The door had hidden it when she’d come in. Zoe picked it up and opened the door that led into Hecate’s palace.
She remembered that the palace had once been Iphigene’s city hall. She expected something like the basement of Show World High, a collection of dull cinder-block corridors dotted with anonymous storage rooms and covered at the top by white acoustic tiles. An elephants’ burial ground for wobbly desks and steam-powered PCs. What she saw, however, took her breath away.
The interior of Hecate’s palace resembled a vast subterranean cavern with tunnels branching off in all directions. The walls weren’t smooth like cinder blocks, but were sliced from soft soil and sloped gracefully to the loamy floor. Arthritic-looking fingers of roots trailed down the walls in twisted bundles, tangling themselves in outcrops of limestone and glistening quartz.
Though the palace seemed to be underground, the ceiling overhead was the night sky and it luminesced with the same stars she’d seen over Iphigene. The moon hovered over it all, shimmering high in the star field. The light was a quivering milky blue that drained the color from all objects, leaving them and everything that moved in the cavern looking as if they were made of mist and ice.
Zoe took the broom and pulled her collar up. She felt like an idiot sweeping the packed dirt and stone floor, but reasoned that if there was a broom around, someone must use it. She made her way around the wall,
