I’ve seen Haiti?
—Lethe Days Diary of Naomi Farwell (Timothy Dwight College ’89)
17
Winter
Alex had spent the rest of Sunday night in the common room with Mercy and Lauren,
Rimsky-Korsakov on Lauren’s turntable, and a copy of The Good Soldier in her lap. The dorm seemed particularly raucous that night, and there were repeated knocks at the suite
door—all of which they ignored. Eventually Anna came home looking glum and
somnolent as ever. She gave them a flat “hey” and vanished into her bedroom. A minute
later, they heard her on the phone to her family in Texas and had to cover their mouths, shoulders heaving and tears squeezing from their eyes when they heard her say, “I’m pretty sure they’re witches.”
If you only knew.
Alex slept dreamlessly but woke in the night to find the Bridegroom hovering outside
her bedroom window, the wards keeping him at bay. His face was expectant.
“Tomorrow,” she promised. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since her journey
to the borderlands. She would get to Tara, but Mercy had needed her first. She owed more
to the living than to the dead.
I’m handling this, she thought, as she downed two more aspirin and fell back into bed.
Maybe not the way Darlington would have, but I’m managing.
Her first stop on Monday morning was Il Bastone, to pack her pockets with graveyard
dirt and to spend an hour skimming the information she could find on glumae. If Book and Snake—or whoever had sent that thing after her—wanted to try again, this was the perfect
time to do it. She’d freaked out in public; she was under the gun academically. If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to.
Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else?
If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If
she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.
And yet Alex was weirdly comforted by how different her story would be now from what it might have been a year ago. Dying of hypothermia after getting wasted and breaking into a public pool. Overdosing when she tried something new or went too far. Or
just vanishing. Losing Len’s protection and disappearing into the long sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, the rows of little houses like stucco mausoleums in their tiny plots.
But if she could avoid dying right now, that would be nice. It’s the principle of the thing, as Darlington would say. After arguing with the library for a few hours, she found two passages on how to combat glumae, one in English, one in Hebrew, which required a translation stone and turned out to be less about glumae than golems. But since both sources mentioned the use of a wrist or pocket watch, the advice seemed sound.
Wind your timepiece tight. The steady tick of a watch confuses any creature made, not
born. They perceive a heartbeat in simple clockwork and will look to find a body where there is none.
It wasn’t exactly protection, but distraction would have to do.
Darlington had worn a wristwatch with a wide black leather band and mother-of-pearl
face. She’d assumed it was an heirloom or affectation. But maybe it had a purpose too.
Alex entered the armory, where they kept Hiram’s Crucible; the Golden Bowl looked
almost bereft for lack of use. She found a pocket watch tangled up in a drawer with a collection of pendulums used for hypnotism, wound it, and tucked it into her pocket. But
she had to open a lot of drawers before she found the mirrored compact she wanted, wrapped in cotton batting. A card in the drawer explained the mirror’s provenance: the glass originally fashioned in China, then set into the compact by members of Manuscript
for a still-classified Cold War op run by the CIA. How it had made its way from Langley
to the Lethe mansion on Orange, the card didn’t say. The glass was smudged, and Alex wiped it clean with a puff of breath and her sweatshirt.