There was no sound. But the door was wide open. I walked to it and stood. I looked up the stairs.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing.
I walked up. The door at the top was open as well. I saw the giant shrunken head. It was even creepier in the dark of night.
“Hello? Is anyone here? You left your front door open.”
Past the couches, the French doors were open as well. Beyond was a carpeted hall. Tasteful lighting. A few single doors. At the far end, in a round alcove, there was another double set, but like nothing I’ve ever seen, before or since. Vault-sized. Heavy. Made of variously protruding stacked stone cubes—volcanic red obsidian—each rough-hewn and capped in a carved symbol, sort of like a Chinese character. They looked like the doors to another world.
They swung open silently, as if I’d tripped an invisible sensor. Beyond was a chamber at least twice as big as the restaurant below, both in width and in height. It extended to the far corner of the building, and so had the same floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. They were covered in something: designs and writing, including some great swooping symbols near the top that were bigger than me. The far windows rose above the remnants of a brick wall, broken and jagged at the top, that fell at an angle to the floor. It was clear the glass and metal were modern additions built over the remains of a much older structure—old enough that not all of it had survived.
“Hello?”
“Good evening, Doctor.” The chef. Definitely his voice. Only I couldn’t see him.
I walked toward the room. “Hey, your front door’s open.”
I stopped at the threshold.
“Holy shit . . .”
It was enormous, almost like it was bigger on the inside, and it exploded out before me. There was a full-grown tree in the center. Its lush branches unfurled like sails into the open space, barely reaching half the distance to the high vaulted roof, ridged in curved iron girders. At the center, directly above the tree, was a small stained-glass dome decorated in colorful figures I didn’t recognize. At the base of the back wall to my right was a series of five brick alcoves—low archways really, not quite tall enough to stand up in—each locked behind a hinged metal gate. It looked like a Civil War–era factory. Or maybe prison. There was a single artifact secured inside each nook, except for the one at the center, which was obscured by a folding Japanese screen.
Above the squat alcoves was a three-tiered wall of books that rose straight to the ceiling, encased in slightly tinted glass. I’d been in enough academic libraries in my career to know a rare book depository when I saw one. I’m sure the panes were polarized to keep out damaging rays. The only access to the cramped interior was via a pair of narrow cast iron spiral staircases, one at each end. I’m sure it was climate controlled as well—cool and dry. The books inside were clearly old, like something out of a medieval castle. You could tell by the spines. And there were so many of them. But the coolest thing was the lighting. Behind the books, the entire back wall glowed. I couldn’t see the glare of any bulbs, just soft and evenly radiant panels, which unobtrusively lit the entire space.
There was so much to see. A run of gilding twisted across the girders and window frames like a swooping bird, or perhaps the orbit of a planet. An eternal story had been carved into it with hieroglyphs: it ended where it began. Talismans and totems from a dozen different cultures and tarnished copper mechanisms of unknown purpose were stuffed into the occasional gaps between the tomes of the library or else were encased in free-standing displays on the floor, which was draped in hand-woven rugs from Persia, Africa, and Tibet, one on top of the other. To my left was a man-sized terrarium hiding a rainbow of poison dart frogs—alive and perched on broad tropical leaves. To my right, an entire ox was suspended from the high ceiling, hanging by its rear legs from a long chain attached to a pulley on the vault girder above. Directly underneath the swaying animal was a squat brass pot filled with sand. The metal was etched in a repeating pattern. That same pattern had been drawn in the sand. As the animal swung back and forth with the motion of the earth, like an organic Foucault’s pendulum, blood dribbled from the puncture in its neck and traced a path across the sand. What it revealed was any-one’s guess.
The stone doors closed behind me as my host pulled jars of dried ingredients from a tall rack on the floor. I was busy staring, neck craned, at the high windows. The upper panes were huge and filled with some kind of writing, like nothing I have ever seen, while the lower panes were smaller and covered in scratchy handwriting, some in English. It looked like the white board in my old microbiology lab. Only it wasn’t ruled and organized. It swirled. The letters grew and shrank as if a madman had been using the panes for a manuscript. There wasn’t a spare inch to a height of six and a half feet—except for one small pane in the very center, directly in front of the tree, which had been replaced by a small, inward facing mirror. Directly back from it, inside the wall of books, a rainbow-feathered garment hung inside a clear glass case. It was a bulky pullover with no sleeves, like a parka made of bird-of-paradise plumes. Hanging directly above it was an unpainted tribal mask, while underneath was an oval drum. Both were intricately carved, each apparently from a single piece of wood. The drum’s membrane was cross-hatched in a geometric pattern that was worn at the center, presumably from long use.
“Here.” Étranger had poured the powdered ingredients he’d mixed into a leather drawstring bag. He held it out. “Taste this.”
He was standing behind a semi-circular kitchen that arced around the tree. I couldn’t see the roots or the base, but the bark was gnarled and twisted and ashen gray. The counter held flanking sinks and a built-in cutting board and stove and everything. It was raised slightly over the floor and faced the windows, like it was a giant podium on which he conducted the city.
I took the bag. “What is it?” I sniffed. Nothing. I inserted a finger and felt dry powder. I dabbed a little on my tongue.
I bent and retched immediately. I spat on the man’s rug. Part of me felt bad for doing so. Part of me was angry at him for making me. I’ve never in my life tasted anything so bitter.
I coughed. “What the hell?” I gagged again.
He retrieved the bag from my hands, pulled it closed, and handed me a napkin. I squeezed the running saliva from my mouth into it and wiped my tongue on the back side. He produced a glass from under the counter and filled it in the sink. He handed it to me and I drank as much as I could before needing to breathe. He motioned to a stool and I sat.
“Ugh.” I swiped my tongue against the roof of my mouth and drank again. I looked at where I spat. “What the hell was that? Tastes like poison.”
“Truth. How was your meal?”
“The meal?” I wanted to spit again. I took another drink instead. “It was excellent. Thank you.”
“Tell me, Doctor. May I ask you a personal question?”
“You just bought me a very expensive dinner,” I said after a long series of gulps. “The way I see it, you’re entitled to second base, at least.”
“Why are you in public health?”
I scowled. It was as odd as it sounded. And vaguely insulting.
“It’s an unusual choice,” he added.
“For someone with my background, you mean.”
“You disagree?”
“No. Hard to argue with that.” I finished the water.
He took the glass. “Another?”
I shook my head. “Can I ask you something?”
He parted his tattooed palms as if they were an open book.
“Why am I here?”
“You walked through the door,” he said.
“That I did.”
He placed his palms on the counter. He looked like he was deciding what to say. “You have access to resources I do not.”
I looked up at the leaves of the tree over my head. Fuck, it was big.
“How did you know? About the dead animals?”
“The natural world penetrates even the canyons of man.”
He pointed through the windows behind me, to the New York skyline in the distance. When I turned back, I saw the bird in the tree. It was small, like a sparrow. It hopped along a branch.
“You knew there was a circle, didn’t you?”
“No.” He didn’t flinch. “But I suspected. May I see?”
I reached into my bag and brought out my tablet and showed him the data I’d collected. He listened intently as I explained the issue.
“Do the words ‘Prepare the way’ mean anything to you?” I asked.
His eyes turned to mine. “What did you find?”
“Wasps. And a rat carcass. Across the river. Big sucker. Skinned. With a—”
“Crown of wax,” he finished.
I nodded.
He stood straight. “Can you show me that place?” He walked around the counter and reached for a coat draped over one of the stools.
“What? Now?”
He nodded and swung the coat around him. It was remarkable—somewhat like a Tibetan chuban but cut just above the knees. The two flaps of the front wrapped around each other like a robe and were held shut by three large buttons—one near the neck, one at the apex of the flap, and one farther down that he left unfastened. Each button was different. The top was carved metal. The one in the middle was a dollop of polished, shining amber. I couldn’t see the third clearly. It looked well used, as if he’d worn it on repeated trips around the world. The crooks of the elbows were permanently wrinkled and the hem was the tiniest bit frayed in spots. But the coolest thing was how whatever dye it had carried had long since faded to a mottled, splotchy gray-and-white, like an early morning fog, a bit darker near the hem.
I looked at my watch. “It’s almost 11.”
“Are you tired?”
I wasn’t. At all. I’d been going all day. But I felt like I could work another twelve hours straight.
“What the hell was in that powder?”
The stone doors swung open.
“Please.” He held out his hand. “There is not much time.”
I didn’t take the chef for the vintage car type, but he was. Idling outside was a late-60s Jaguar MK10. All black. Four-door. Tinted windows. Big trunk. Perfectly round headlights at the end of a long sloping hood. Milan was behind the wheel, looking casual and graceful, as usual. And patient. She had clearly been waiting, as if she expected we would come.
I got in and glanced to the bistro. The staff was getting ready to close. That big engine rumbled and we pulled away. It wasn’t long before we were on the freeway. That late, traffic wasn’t so bad. I was sitting in the back, next to the chef. After a few minutes, I realized he was looking at me in the dark. The lights from the street moved over him repeatedly as we drove, but they never quite rose high enough to light his face.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
Why public health.
I shrugged again. “It’s generally not something most people care about. You know how it is. People’s eyes glaze over.”
But the chef’s didn’t. He waited.
“I don’t suppose you know much about cholera,” I said.
“It’s very unpleasant.”
I laughed. Milan smiled at my reaction from the front.
“Yeah,” I said. “So it is.”
“It took someone close to you?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s just, I read this book. In college. I had no idea what I wanted to be at the time. I was on an athletic scholarship and just happy to be there. And terrified that I was expected to actually get a degree. Terrified that I wouldn’t, I guess. I always liked science but I never thought I was smart enough for it. So I took this class on ‘science and society’ because it sounded more my speed, and we read this book that talked about cholera.
“The author started by saying how science wasn’t just about describing the world. It was about explaining it. Not just that it’s such-and-such way, but why. If a person gets sick, he said, you can blame a bug. Chance, basically. That’s fair. But if a whole bunch of people get sick, and if they keep getting sick, over and over, and if a different kind of people who live nearby don’t get sick, can you really keep blaming chance? At some point, blaming the bug is just a description. Not a reason.
“Then he asked: Did all those poor people die of cholera, or because the class structure of European society prevented access to clean water by the poor?
“Seems academic, but it matters. How we explain the world matters. It matters to law and policy. And at the time, it really got me thinking. I’d never thought about things that way. Guys from where I’m from, you know, they’re always complaining about this or that, ‘institutional racism’ and everything, but I never thought there was a legit way to dissect society like that. Scientifically. Where it wasn’t just some guys bitching about things they didn’t really understand. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but I never realized there were actually people who understood that stuff. Not just an opinion but something epistemically and mathematically verifiable. And what that guy said made a lot of sense. It made sense of where I came from and why it is how it is and why some places are different and some places are the same.”
“And you wanted to change that?”
“I mean, yeah. I wanna do my part, same as anyone. But mostly I think I just wanted to understand, you know? I wanted an honest explanation that I could hold up in front of people and say ‘Here, this is why.’ Not just a description. An explanation. I felt I deserved it.”
“The truth,” he said, and without pause, “Would you sacrifice yourself for your daughter? Without hesitation?”
I laughed. “What?”
That’s how it was with him. The whole time.
I looked out the windshield. I honestly think we’d caught every single green light. It was a miracle. We were already in Jersey.
It was an easy question, but the severity of his tone got me. It was the phrase at the end, I guess—without hesitation. I felt like I should be extra sure before answering. Like he was going to call me on it later.
“Would I sacrifice myself to save my daughter? Of course. Without hesitation.”
He nodded, like he wasn’t sure what I was going to say but that that was the right answer.
“Why?” I asked.
But he didn’t have the chance to say. We pulled to a stop in front of a dour, hulking man with dull eyes and a hairline halfway up his scalp, the kind of guy who might have played offensive line in school and who had to shop at the Big & Tall store. He stood on the curb across from the abandoned school in jeans and a waist-length buffed leather coat.
Milan popped the trunk and everyone got out without a word. I felt like I had been cast in a play and had missed the dress rehearsal. I got out as well and stepped to the back.
“Whoa.”
The trunk of the Jag was like a mobile tool shed. Even the interior of the lid was covered with hand tools like pliers and screwdrivers. Two tanks of gas rested side by side on the floor next to a stack of folded towels, washed but stained. I saw bolt cutters and a long-handled fireman’s ax and duct tape and binoculars. Lodged along the curved interior wall was a baseball bat studded in nail heads. I picked it up. I couldn’t help it. Between the basketball team and school work, I didn’t have much time for anything else, but I’d played a little baseball in my day. I gripped it with two hands. You could really do some damage with that thing.
The big man glanced at me but didn’t say anything. I mistook his cool demeanor for machismo at first, but that wasn’t it. He was just always flat, like day-old soda. He took the bat out of my hands and put it back.
“This is Mr. Dench,” Étranger said. “An associate of mine.”
He slammed the trunk.
“Who are you people?”
“Exterminators,” the big guy said. He lifted the gas tanks from where he’d set them on the road and followed the others toward the school.
It was dark now. The little bit of light that had penetrated to the basement earlier was totally gone. Dench and Milan wore headlamps, and their beams swung about like crossing swords as we moved through the darkness. Étranger walked like he could see clear as day. He stepped lightly across the collapsed floor and was the first to reach the basement. When the rest of us arrived, he was standing in the dark before the altar with his hands in the pockets of his coat. I could barely see. I heard Dench set the gas tanks down. Milan handed him a pair of bolt cutters she had taken from the trunk, and I heard metal scratching metal as he tried to grip the padlock with them.
There didn’t seem to be anything for me to do, so I stood by the chef.
“You know what it means?” I asked.
He nodded. “The rat without its skin is a symbol of the underworld, a land of shadow and deception.” He pointed to the spires of the spent candle. “Whose Lord is crowned when light is extinguished.” He raised his finger to the deer skull. “In the time before civilization, the stag was revered as a majestic spirit. A swift and powerful animal—difficult to bring down with spears and arrows—with a coronet that rose and fell with the seasons. Chieftains and mages wore the antlers of the stag as a sign of potency.”
“So this is an altar to a king?”
“This is not an altar, Doctor. This is a totem. And a warning.” He pointed to the rat. “Whence comes the Lord of Shadows.” Then to the stag at the top of the bonelike lattice. “Who will rise and rule.”
“It’s been sealed,” Milan interjected.
The chef walked over and put his tattooed palms on the door. He held them there for a moment while whispering something. Then he stepped back and nodded and Dench cut the lock in one move. It fell with a clatter. Milan slid the heavy door to the side with a grunt and it rumbled in its rusty groove.
The room beyond was…
Wow.
Rusted chains hung from the ceiling of a perfect cube, a remainder from some earlier industrial use. Neon yellow spray paint made symbols on the walls and ceiling, including the ones I had seen before. Dead bodies slumped sideways against each of the interior walls. Their faces had been smashed and there was very little left to identify them. Their hair was gone and seams of liquefied rot ran across their chests, arms, and legs. Their flesh had grown soft and putrid in spots and split open like spoiled fruit. Mushrooms sprouted from the gaps, glowing green.
The others shut off their headlamps and almost immediately the fungi seemed to get brighter. They struck me as both whimsical and eerie. Iridescent hook-shaped stalks rose from inside the decaying bodies, which were nothing but silhouettes in the dark, and ended in broad caps that shone brightest at their centers. I stared in silence, half-expecting leprechauns or demented pixies to leap from the shadows and begin their soul-stealing reverie.
Then the stench hit. It had moved slowly in the still, cool air, and when it came, it hung over us like the heavy perfume of too many flowers. It was both acrid and pungent, like a dog waste bin left to bake in a hot summer sun. I covered my nose. But I couldn’t move from the gruesome scene. I was fixed.
“What do you know of toadstool rings?” Étranger asked me softly, eyes reflecting the green light.
“They’re an artifact of how fungi grow,” I said through my fingers. “They grow outward in a circle, depleting the nutrients in the soil and leaving a gap.” I waited. “That’s not what you meant, was it?”
He shook his head. “Early peoples noticed rings that sprouted from the earth where none had been the evening before. Children were warned to stay away, lest they step into the circle and be whisked away to the fairy realms. Those who did were lost. Or returned decades later not having aged a day, all their family and loved ones gone.”
Dench and Milan began dousing everything in gasoline while the chef watched. The smell of the gas on top of the rest made my stomach boil.
“A ring of dark light,” the chef explained. “Light that doesn’t come from the sun.”
“It’s an enzyme,” I added. “Called luciferase, actually. If you can believe that.”
“This has nothing to do with mechanisms and energy, Doctor. The dark light is born of sickness. And suffering. And death.”
Dench threw the rat carcass and twig lattice, complete with deer skull, into the room just as Milan dropped a match. The gasoline ignited brightly and with force, and I felt a blast of heat wash over me. The mushrooms shriveled in the heat and went dark. The larger ones started popping, which sent clouds of tiny yellow embers into the air, like fireworks.
“Who did this?” I asked softly, but the chef simply shook his head.
The fire grew. Flames rose and bent around the door, licking the ceiling. Smoke billowed. Étranger turned without a word and started for the stairs.
“If we had time,” he said as we followed him up the steps, “I imagine we would discover many of the properties that lie along your circle have been bought and sold recently.”
“What do you mean ‘if we had time?’”
When he didn’t answer, I turned to Milan, but she was on the phone anonymously reporting the fire to 911. I listened to her frantic voice as we walked out of the building and onto the litter-strewn field that surrounded the school.
“Hold on.”
But the chef kept walking, hands in his pockets. He didn’t even turn.
“Wait a minute!” I shuffled faster after him. When I turned to see if the others were following, I caught a glimmer from inside the school. A yellow flicker, rising and falling, backlit a few of the openings, giving the appearance of a hollow skull. I stopped to stare. It was unreal.
The fence rattled as the others made it over. I turned to join them, but the Jaguar rumbled to life before I made it to the top.
Red parking lights illuminated the dark street as the chef rolled his window down. “Thank you, Doctor. Your help has been immeasurable. There is much to do.”
As my feet reached the sidewalk, I got the distinct impression they were about to leave me on the side of the road.
“I wonder,” the man said, “if you would permit me to call on you again. There are places you can go that I cannot.” And just like that, he nodded and the car pulled away and left me the sole witness to a building fire.
It was only then, as the bright red taillights turned the corner, that I realized I had just stood idly while they burned all my evidence.
“Awwww SHIT!”