The Initiation (21 page)

“I'll remember that. And so should you, Master Cantell.”

“You see? Another veiled threat!”

“Not veiled at all,” Sherlock said.

“We will visit Dr. Crudgeon, you and I,” he said, dramatically twisting the toe of his shoe onto the cigarette. “Wipe the cobwebs out of your hair and make yourself at least somewhat presentable. You know how Headmaster appreciates decorum.”

“S
HERLOCK!”
I
SAID, AS NASTILY AS
I
COULD
given that I was whispering. “What are you doing in there? You scared the wits out of me!” He was pressed between my favorite navy blue skirt and a top I'd given up on because it showed my middle. “Get off my shoes! Those are expensive!”

He stepped out of my closet. “I'm glad you're better,” he said.

The thing about friends—real friends—is that you pick up a conversation as if you've never left the other's side. Sherlock and I had crossed that threshold at some point. We didn't spend a lot of
time dancing around the topic at hand. In this case, there were many topics to address, and we both understood our time was short.

“What were those stains on my fingers?” I asked.

“I need your assistance,” he said.

“I heard you were expelled.”

“Suspended,” he said, correcting me, “until Monday. Most unfortunate. An interesting punishment that makes so little sense except to draw attention to itself. Why do you suppose Crudgeon wants me off campus for the next four days?”

“And my clothes. Why'd you smell my clothing? That was strange, FYI, but I'm going to give you a chance to explain yourself.”

“And I would if I could, but I can't. September twenty-first. Nine-two-one-seven-three-seven. The numbers below the sundial on the note placed anonymously into James's pocket? You see? Sunrise on September twenty-first—that's today—is six thirty-seven a.m.”

“I don't see . . . no.”

“Nine-two-one. September is the ninth month. The twenty-first day: two-one. Today. Sunrise is . . . was at six thirty-seven. The note calls for exactly one hour later: seven three seven. Seven thirty-seven a.m. I have”—he checked his wristwatch, an old battered thing—“twenty-one minutes to be in disguise.”

“Disguise?”

“I'm suspended. I can't very well walk around campus looking like this.”

“Walk around?”

“I have these,” he said, producing some balls of hair. “Borrowed them from the theater department.” The pieces uncurled in his hand. A beard and mustache, I was guessing. “But I know little about the application of cosmetics. It's something I must study, apparently. Could you?”

“I'm in my pajamas, in case you didn't notice,” I said. “I have an exam this morning.”

“It's early yet.”

“Did you sleep in there?”

“Maybe just a catnap,” he said.

“I don't like boys sleeping in my closet.”

“It's wildly uncomfortable, if you must know. I can't see it becoming a thing.”

“Get out of there this instant.” I pulled him out. “Stay here. I have to warn Natalie and Jamala there's a boy in our room. They're showering.”

I took off, in part to clear my head. I warned off my roommates, borrowed a neighbor's robe, and returned to the room.

“What about your costume?” I asked as I used some watered-down glue to stick on his facial hair. I used both eyebrow pencil and gray eyeliner to give
him fans at the edges of his eyes and worry lines in his forehead. I made his cheeks slightly hollow—not tricky on such a skinny boy—and his mouth to turn down into a frown.

“Theater department. I hung it up in your closet. The college professor, mad-scientist look.”

“I sleep too heavily.”

“Natalie snores,” he said.

“Tell me about it.” I cut him off before he actually did, though I could listen to that accent of his for hours. “It's an expression!”

“Ah-ha! Right! Eleven minutes.”

“Don't do that! You're making me nervous. I'll have you looking like an ogre.”

“Just as long as the ogre doesn't look like me, I'm all set.”

“Voilà!” I held up my hand mirror to his face. He scrunched his nose, squinted, frowned. Smiled. Turned his head this way and that.

“Excellent job, Moria.”

“Of course it's excellent,” I said.

“Careful now. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.”

I wanted to kick him. Instead, I held up my hand. “My fingers. You were interested in the stains.”

“
The
Name of the Rose
,” Lock said. “Great book. You should read it. Monks. Murder. What
could be better? Headmaster warned us, warned us all, not to touch the Bible. It wasn't ink on your fingers, it was some kind of amnesia drug.”

He told the same story I would later hear he'd told James. The more I heard the more vulnerable and afraid I felt. I didn't appreciate blacking out for an entire twelve hours. Ick.

“You're better now, that's what counts.”

“But why smell my clothes? That was perverted! And crawling around to look at my shoes? What was that all about?” I asked.

“James,” he said. “It's about James. I will explain, I promise. But now, if you'll turn your back, I need to change into my suit.”

A visiting professor with full facial hair walked across the school lawn toward Main House as the tower clock neared 7:37 a.m. James was standing at the base of the school sundial looking lost. Technically, the sun had risen exactly an hour earlier, but at the moment of the autumn solstice—an hour past sunrise—the sundial cast its shadow forward, down its steps and onto the surrounding marble pedestal. There, a single gray, rectangular stone was inlaid, seemingly out of place until the moment arrived.

“Morning,” the older guy said.

James nervously regarded the passing stranger, several yards off. “Morning.”

The professor nodded and continued on his way.

In front of James, an unusual phenomenon was occurring. The sun caught the ancient symbol—the X and the P—atop the sundial, throwing a most unexpected shadow onto the errant gray stone. It formed a perfect cross intersected by what looked like a key.

But more unique, the shadow covered up enough of the odd stone to leave only a discolored area of the stone showing: an unmistakable arrow pointing to the chapel.

Seconds later, the images crept forward and dissolved, absorbed by the grass.

Sherlock stayed the course, still heading for the Main House. At the last moment, as James opened and then pulled the heavy door closed, Sherlock sprinted for the chapel. His mustache flew off his upper lip. He pulled the chapel door open only inches and slipped inside, immediately crossing the vestibule, and ascending the stairs into the balcony. He saw James turn and look back toward him. Believing he'd been spotted, Sherlock nearly called out. Then it occurred to him to pivot and look behind him. There, the chapel's enormous rosary window glowed as if
divinely illuminated. Its colors shone like never before. Sherlock couldn't take his eyes off the window exploding in colors.

Perhaps a minute passed before a shaft of light broke free from a disc of glass at the window's perfect center. The beam strengthened and shifted, traveling with the movement of the sun, first a knife blade then a full-fledged spotlight. Its brightness caught the millions of flecks of dust in the air, swirling like snowflakes. It bored across the distance of the chapel, above the nave, concentrating its focused, blazing energy onto a center wooden panel behind the altar along the chancel's curving back wall.

As quickly as it had arrived, it was gone.

Sherlock watched as James looked down. He heard him gasp as James spotted the inlay of the key in the floor stone. Sherlock had a decision to make. Worried for James, he moved quickly down the stairs, and up the nave.

“You're meant to open it,” Sherlock called out, disguising his British accent in favor of a gravelly Brooklyn drawl.

James watched the older professor shuffling toward him. “I saw you outside! Who are you?”

“A friend. The center panel will open, I think you will find.” Sherlock stopped far enough away to maintain his anonymity. Another yard or two
and James would certainly spot the boy beneath the disguise.

James didn't appreciate the company. “What's it to you?”

Sherlock didn't answer at first. “It won't be easily found,” Sherlock said in his own voice. “The key is the key.”

“Is that you? Seriously? What the heck?”

“The door will lead to the organ pipes.” Sherlockian voice again. “A play on words, you see? Music has keys. If you will allow me, I'd like to help.”

“You don't quit.”

“No, regrettably. Not in my nature. It's for Moria I'm doing this, not you, James, if that's of any consequence. Not sporting the way they dealt with her. I'd like to get this all behind us. Please,” he added, finding the word difficult to say.

“I don't need help.”

“I never said you did. I'm offering it.”

“Well,” James clearly didn't know what to say to that. “You look stupid dressed like that. I can't believe you said hello to me and I missed it was you.”

“I'm rather enjoying myself.”

“You're weird.”

“A majority opinion, to be sure,” said Sherlock.

“You think it's the Bible? In there?”

“I'm not sure. I think . . . no, I know . . . that this is where the clues end.”

“Father didn't want me finishing them.”

“Say again?”

“Said he needed time, more time. He didn't say what for.”

“On the odd chance we're successful . . . wait here one minute, will you?” Sherlock returned with two pair of white cotton gloves used by altar boys to clean the chapel silver and handbells. “Why are you being nice to me?” Sherlock asked.

“You're annoying, but you're helpful. I need you.”

Sherlock nodded.

“I believe what you told me in the tunnel. I'm on a mission, here, Holmes. It may or may not include you. For now it does. That's me being honest, in case you don't recognize it.”

Sherlock laughed aloud.

“How . . . why do you think . . . how can you always be so sure of yourself?” James sounded at once both impressed and upset.

“I lay no claim to anything found,” Sherlock said. “The clues were intended for you, James, not me. They end here. Now. Through that door.”

“Okay, then. Let's get this over with.”

F
AILING TO FIND A LATCH TO OPEN THE WALL
panel, Sherlock stepped back to examine it from a distance.

His frustration palpable, James commented again that he was ready for “it to be over.”

“Sadly, my boy,” Sherlock said, “I sense it's only just beginning.”

“How do we open it?”

Sherlock moved the wrought-iron candle stand aside and placed his weight onto the toe of his shoe. He had to point his toe like a dancer in order to deliver his weight only onto the keystone. It moved
down under the pressure. The wood panel sprang open. The size of a narrow door.

“That was a lucky guess,” James said.

“An educated guess, but yes. Tread carefully, my friend,” cautioned Sherlock. “We've arrived to the end of the road, and sometimes that takes the shape of a cliff.”

Inside the cloistered space, hundreds of metal organ pipes stood like soldiers from short to tall. Row after row of them. Stair-step landings provided access to the rows of pipes on either side. The only light came through acoustic fabric panels that during services allowed the organ music to reach the chapel's interior. A quick look around failed to reveal much of anything.

“Maybe more of a dead end than a cliff,” said James.

“Look for a key or tree branches carved into one of the wind boxes or perhaps the pipes. I'll take this side, you take that.”

“More clues?” James groaned.

“They didn't make it easy for you.”

“Me? I doubt that.”

“Yes, you, James. Legacy. The family Moriarty.”

Less than a minute passed. “It felt better when I hated you,” James said. Sherlock joined him to see the key-and-tree emblem engraved below the air
hole in one of the medium-sized pipes.

Sherlock dropped to his knees and grappled in the semidarkness. The wind box beneath the marked pipe had been customized.

“It's hinged. Stand back,” Sherlock said.

James stepped aside.

Sherlock yanked the organ pipe. It moved like a lever, and as it did a section of the landings on the stairs lifted and opened. Flickering yellow light came out of it.

Sherlock sniffed the air. “Ah,” he said. “That explains it.”

“Explains what, exactly?” James sounded frightened or excited. It was hard to tell which.

“Your sister's clothing . . . last night when she disappeared . . . I saw her today and smelled it in her hair . . . at least I thought I did. It proved to be in her clothing. I deduced she'd been taken someplace closed. I thought perhaps a church in Boston, one that uses incense. I was wrong. It's here. That's the smell.”

“They took her here?”

“To question her, I imagine, which makes this place all the more dangerous to you, James. I have protected myself to some degree. We must accept that the clues may not lead to a prize. I suggest we turn around while we still can.”

Something struck Sherlock's head. A club or metal pipe. It hit him from behind. The yellow light dimmed. Sherlock saw the papier–mâché face of a raven head and beak. Then, his mind went blank.