She put the key in the hole and turned. It unlocked with a click, similar to the sound the front door made when Logan unlocked it. Nora walked inside and waited for me to take in the room—a dome ceiling that reminded me of the Sistine Chapel, with paintings of naked people sitting on clouds in a blue sky. I tried to make out the faces, but couldn’t really, so I figured they must be actual saints. The room itself, covered with wall-to-wall books, was smaller than the library Logan had shown me, but somehow seemed to contain more things. There were eight white busts on top of pillars that circled the library.
“I guess The Eight really loves to read,” I said, looking around.
“These are photo albums.”
“What?” I walked up to one, pulling it out of the shelf.
That was when I noticed the gold numbers on the spines. This one said 1924. I opened it carefully, not wanting to leave any grease from my fingers on the pictures. They were all covered in plastic, as if to preserve them.
“There were women in the group even back then.” I looked up at Nora.
“We were the only society to do that.” She smiled proudly.
I shut the book and put it back in its place. I wasn’t going to know anyone who attended in the twenties. My father had been the first of his family to attend college in the United States. His mother always joked that he was too much of a genius for their city, even though their city had its share of intelligent individuals, but of course, Abuela Maria would think her son was the most intelligent of all. Not to knock him, despite all of his questionable choices, my father was extremely smart and business savvy. I moved to the years he would’ve been here—seventies. The first page I opened, there he was, standing with seven other people—The Eight of that year. Beside him, Ella Valentine.
Maybe it was because I’d just seen a portrait of them together, looking like they were a couple, but seeing the young, college version of themselves together hit me hard. They weren’t even touching, but I could just tell they were together. I reminded myself of what she’d told me—they had actually been dating before he met mom. I kept turning the pages. In some pictures, they wore cloaks, in others they were serving food to the homeless, picking up trash around the park, reading to children. I kept turning the pages. My attention stayed on the next picture. It was a couple I’d seen before, maybe at one of my parent’s Christmas parties. They were laughing, looking at the camera, but it was the background that caught my eye. It was my father and Ella Valentine back there, looking like they were caught in the middle of an argument. I shut the book and opened another one, and then another one, and then moved on to the one labeled Alumni—1999. I’d been a toddler then. This photo album was thinner and showed mostly photos of various parties that occurred that year. I didn’t find my father until I reached the tenth page, but there he was, holding Ella Valentine’s hand.
My heart was in my throat as I looked at the picture. I shut the album with a thump and looked up at Nora.
“This is disgusting.”
“My father is this one.” She opened up the book and pointed at the familiar couple I’d seen in the other book. “This is not my mother, who he’s still married to, by the way.”
“Geez.” I shook my head. “Disgusting.”
“I promised I’d draw up the societies for you so that you could see how they’re connected,” she said, pushing the books aside and grabbing a sheet of paper. Up top, she wrote Blackwell and drew two lines underneath it—one that said Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and the other said Dr. Henry Blackwell.
“They were a couple when they were here. They married their senior year,” she explained. Beneath Elizabeth Blackwell, she wrote The Eight. “She’s the octopus lady. She was a marine scientist who worked tirelessly in the original Hydro Lab, which is now falling apart. You’ve seen it, it’s right by the waterfall behind where you did the blindfold test.”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “That was an actual building?”
“Very long time ago.” Nora smiled. “Which is why it’s said that’s the body of water with the octopuses. She threw them out the window there.”
“That’s a weird thing to do.”
“I think they took away her funding, but I’m not sure. Point is, she built this society and modeled it after her favorite creature—eight legs, eight members, intelligent, camouflage, etcetera.”
“Dr. Henry Blackwell started The Swords. He was a mad scientist. Where his wife was a marine scientist, he experimented on people. It is said, he bought the old church not only because of the cemetery, but because once upon a time these lots were combined and that was where the crazy owner of this house killed all of her lovers. Her husbands she made seem like natural causes or accidents. The lovers didn’t get that lucky.”
I shivered. “This house is totally haunted.”
“Both of them are.”
“I barely like sleeping in the dark, so I’m going to pass on the horror stories for now,” I said. “I have an overactive imagination and watch too much crime television so I feel like anything and everything is going to happen to me.”
Nora laughed, pointing at the paper. She drew two arrows beneath both societies that met at the bottom and wrote The Labyrinth Initiative.
“No way.” I gasped. “It’s connected to both?”
“Yep. Think of it as a shell company,” she said. “So T.L.I. actually files under non for profit. This part is what we all know. This . . . ” She drew another line beneath that and wrote Mentorships and Sugar Babies. “Is the part we’re still trying to figure out, but it’s pretty obvious to those of us who have been around, and it’s definitely obvious after seeing these albums.”
She walked away and pulled three albums off the far-end bookshelf, placing them in front of me. Unlike the black leather-bound albums around the room, these were red and black. My hand shook slightly as I opened the first one and shut it right away.
“What the hell is this? Porn?” I looked up at Nora, wide-eyed. I didn’t want to see naked pictures of my father.
“Relax, members are all clothed,” she said.
“Relax,” I repeated, opening the album back up. “Relax?”
I couldn’t imagine anyone relaxing as they flipped through this album. One picture, in particular, made me pause and stare, a disgusted taste in my mouth. Three men in suits sitting in chairs while three naked women lay on the floor with their legs spread open, touching themselves as the men looked on. One man had reached down to seemingly help the girl, mid-picture. That man was my father. And that girl looked a lot like Lana. I slammed the book shut again.
“I can’t look at this. I’ll be sick.” I placed a hand on my queasy stomach. “Why don’t you show this to people before they go through initiation? This would be the exact kind of hazing that would scare people away.”
“We need you in.” She shrugged, a small smile touching her lips. “You’re a Bastón, you were always meant to be in The Eight.”
“I don’t know if I want any part in this. If I’m expected to walk around naked for these old guys—”
“No,” Nora said quickly, eyes wide. “These were things we recently discovered. You’d never be part of this.” She tapped on the books, then picked one up and opened it to the very first page, which I’d completely bypassed. Written in script was: Labor Union.