blood became ink and flowed back up the table, coursing along the paper to where Zeb’s hands rested. He screamed when the ink entered him, zigzagging up his arms in a scrawl, line upon line, word upon word, a palimpsest that blackened his skin, slowly crawling in looping cursive up to his elbows. He wept and shuddered and wailed his anguish—but kept his hands flat to the paper.
The ink climbed higher, to his bent shoulders, up his neck, over his chest, and in the same instant entered his head and his heart.
This was the most dangerous part of the ritual, when all of Aurelian would be most vulnerable and the Grays would be most eager. They came faster through the walls and sealed windows, rounding the circle, looking for the gateways Alex and Darlington had left open, drawn by Yarrowman’s need and the iron-filing pungence of fresh blood. Whatever worry had plagued Alex, she was enjoying herself now, hurling handfuls of graveyard dirt at Grays with unnecessarily elaborate gestures that made her look like a professional wrestler trying to psych up an invisible crowd. Darlington turned his attention to his own compass points, cast clouds of bone dust at approaching Grays, murmuring the old death words when one of them tried to rush past. His favorite Orphic hymn began O spirit of the unripe fruit, but it was almost too long to be worth diving into.
He heard Alex grunt and glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her engaged in a particularly acrobatic banishing maneuver. Instead, she was on the ground, scrabbling backward, terror in her eyes—and Grays were walking straight through the circle of protection. It took him a bare moment to understand what had happened: The markings of the southern gateway were smudged. Alex had been so busy enjoying herself, she’d stepped on the markings and ruptured the southern side of the circle. What had been a narrow door to allow the flow of magic had become a gaping hole with no barrier to entry. The Grays advanced, their attention focused on the pull of blood and longing, drawing nearer to the unsuspecting Aurelians.
Darlington threw himself into their path, barking the quickest, cruelest death words he knew: “Unwept!” he shouted. “Unhonored, and unsung!” Some checked their steps, some even fled. “Unwept, unhonored, and unsung!” he repeated. But they had momentum now, a mass of Grays that only he and Alex could see, dressed in clothes of every period, some young, some old, some wounded and maimed, others whole.
If they reached the table, the ritual would be disrupted. Yarrowman would certainly die and he might well take half of Aurelian with him. The magic would spring wild.
But if Beinecke was a living house of words, then it was one grand memorial to the end of everything. Thornton Wilder’s death mask. Ezra Pound’s teeth. Elegiac poems by the hundreds. Darlington reached for the words … Hart Crane on Melville, Ben Jonson on the death of his son. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” His mind scrambled for purchase. Start somewhere. Start anywhere.
“A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown.”
Good Lord. When taxed with staving off the uncanny, how did he somehow resort to Foley’s poem about a skeleton having sex?
A few of the Grays peeled off, but he needed something with some damn gravitas.
Horace.
“Winter will come on
And break the lower sea on the rocks
While we drink summer’s wine.”
Now they slowed, some covered their ears.
“See, in the white of the winter air,” he cried. “The day hangs like a rose. It droops down to the reaching hand. Take it before it goes!”
He lifted his hands before him as if he could somehow push them back. Why couldn’t he remember the first verse of the poem? Because it hadn’t interested him. Why try to know the future, which cannot be known?
“Winter will come on!” he repeated. But even as Darlington pushed the Grays back through the ruptured gate and reached for the chalk, he looked through the glass walls of the library. A horde was assembling—a tide of Grays visible through the glass walls, surrounding the building. He was not going to be able to fix the markings in time.
Alex was still on the ground, shaking so hard he could see her trembling even from a distance. When the magic got free, it might kill them both first.
“Take courage,” she said again and again. “Take courage.”
“That’s not enough!”
The Grays rushed toward the library.
“Mors vincit omnia!” Darlington cried, falling back