The Library of Shadows

When Este enrolled at Radcliffe, she’d expected to spend far more time studying and far less time spelunking through secret doors. Mateo climbed down first, rung by rung on a ladder housing who knew how many termites, and she followed him into the dark.

Stagnant air welcomed them at the bottom of the ladder. The narrow hall was cool and damp, much too close to a crypt for comfort. Mateo peeled a candlestick from the wall and dragged a box of matches from his pocket. He handed them to Este to strike.

“Why do you carry these around with you everywhere?” she asked as the matchstick friction turned to flame. She lit the wick and blew out the match before returning the box to Mateo.

“Old habit,” he said, pocketing it. He smiled, illuminated, and faded in and out of transparency with the wafting flame. “There’s no better way to read than by candlelight.”

“Even if it makes you see-through?”

“No one can interrupt me if they can’t see me.” He tapped his forehead like he had singularly outsmarted Einstein, and Este couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

Being around Mateo was becoming a little too second nature. They fell into step with each other, and, in the dark, it was all too easy to believe they could have something they couldn’t. Sometimes it was hard to remember he was dead at all.

The passageways were their road map to traversing the Lilith without getting spotted by the Paranormal Investigators. They popped out from behind a statue on the fourth floor right as Dr. Kirk led the tour up the stairwell, and they sank into a hallway disguised behind a bookshelf when Mateo stepped a little too close and Posy’s Ghostbusters gear started trilling. At one point, Este was pretty sure she overheard Arthur trying to convince Dr. Kirk to team up with Mr. Liebowitz to put on a black-box production of The Phantom of the Opera.

They wiggled out a loose brick between the second and third floors (empty), peeled open a wall panel behind an original Rembrandt (dusty and empty), and Mateo dared Este to stick her hand inside an early-Hellenistic clay amphora (not empty—she got a fistful of expired Halloween candy—but also not helpful).

By the time they exhausted the list, Este’s feet ached, the moon had risen to its peak, and the pages were still missing. She could’ve collapsed, both with exhaustion and disappointment.

“Come on. I’ll walk you home,” Mateo said when they landed back on the first floor.

He angled toward the doors, but Este hesitated in the warmth of the lobby. “Can you, you know. Leave?”

Mateo took a single, definitive step out of the library. And then another. The hold he had on his form must have slipped a bit because he feathered out at the edges. “The farther I get from the Lilith, the weaker I’ll become, even in the dark. But yes. It’ll be nice to get some fresh air.”

Around them, the night was alive. Students roamed from building to building, clinging to what felt like the last warm night of fall. Her boots crunched fallen leaves against the sidewalk, and with every step, Mateo’s scuffed leather oxfords faded a little more.

They took the long way underneath the bent boughs of black birches, their bright yellow leaves like stars against the dark sky. Mateo coursed through the courtyards without missing a single stepping stone. He’d had a hundred years to walk this path a thousand times. He must have seen generations come and go, but maybe some of them had seen him, too.

Quiet, Este asked, “Did you ever talk to him? My dad?”

And quieter, Mateo answered, “I did.”

It had been three years but past tense still didn’t sound quite right. Her dad was supposed to be defined by active verbs. He was the kind of dad who read her bedtime stories and taped the pages back together when she wore the books too thin. A dad who planned scavenger hunts around the house, who made dessert for breakfast and breakfast for dinner.

Instead, all that was left of him were the modals, the woulds and coulds. Your dad would have loved this, her mom said when they drove through the wide-open desert, nothing to slow them down but the tumbleweeds. I wish your dad could be here to see this, her mom sighed as they toed the ledge of a Cape Elizabeth cliff, snow crunching beneath their boots and a frozen tide lashing against the crags. The worst was Este clutching the Radcliffe acceptance letter to her chest, saying, It’s what Dad would have wanted, knowing he’d never see her here.

“Only once,” Mateo said. “Dean spent a lot of time at the library. I thought he could help me, and maybe I could help him but . . . well, you know how that worked out.”

They neared the Hesper Fountain, and the rest of the world dimmed. Mateo had turned half-transparent as they strayed farther and farther from the Lilith, but there was no one else on this side of campus to see. This, he shared with her alone.

Sometimes she felt like the only person in the world who knew the ache of losing someone who couldn’t come back, like the gaping hole it clawed out in her chest was a cavern that could never be crossed, but standing in the shadow of the school’s founder, Este realized she and Mateo had more in common than she ever thought possible.

She stalled at the base of the fountain. “Do you miss them?”

Mateo glanced up at the carved face of his father. “Oh, yes. Terribly. But sometimes I think I’m grateful that they didn’t have to see what I became.”

“A pain in the ass?”

Mateo sighed and rolled his eyes, something like a smile glazing over his mouth. Needling him took some of the tension out of the air. His shoulders hung looser, and Este was able to breathe a little easier.

“My mom passed first, and during those in-between months, my dad spent every night in the spire, writing and reading, counting the stars. He never stopped loving her. That’s why it’s called the Hesper Fountain.” Mateo wasn’t looking at her, or even at the fountain, but overhead at the stars. “On her birthday, he points to Venus, the evening star.”

Este ran her fingers against the fountain’s smooth marble. Chiseled out of the stone, Latin words circled along the trim. “What does it say?”

Mateo inched closer to her. The outline of his hand brushed over hers as they traced the shape of the letters. Her breath hitched as he said, “‘There is life, there is death, and there is love.’”

Somehow, Este knew what would come next.

“‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.

And for the tiniest fraction of a second, Mateo looked at her with an expression she’d never seen on him before. Surprise and something softer. Like the first time someone remembered your favorite song or ordered you a chocolate shake because they knew you liked to dip your fries in it. The look of knowing someone and being known right back.

Este jostled backward and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, suddenly feeling far too warm for mid-September. “My dad wrote that to me once. He must have remembered it. I have a photo of him standing here, shaking your dad’s hand.”

“Really?” Mateo asked.

She slid her phone out of her back pocket and thumbed through her photos until she found a scan of the framed picture in her room—out of focus and with a glaring sunspot in the corner, her dad sported a cheesy grin that made her chest tighten. “It’s one of my favorite pictures of him.”

A seriousness settled into Mateo’s tone. “I need you to go shake my dad’s hand.”

“That’s sweet but I don’t really need to recreate the photo. It’s so dark right now, and besides, are photo ops really our highest priority?”

“Not for a picture, Logano. For the pages.” Mateo’s grin was a sunbeam. “And it’s a two-person job.”

Much to her annoyance, Este hiked one leg over the fountain’s wall and then the other. The pennies beneath her feet jingled as she sloshed toward the statue, biting down a stream of curses as the cold water soaked into her jeans, squidged in her shoes. Jets surged and ebbed on a schedule Este couldn’t predict. One wrong step, and she got a mouthful of stale fountain water.

When Este’s hand wrapped around the stone carving, she didn’t know exactly what she expected. An electric shock? To hear her dad’s voice boom from beyond the grave? For Robin’s mouth to open and shoot tranquilizing darts into her eyeballs? If there was one thing she’d learned about Radcliffe—nothing was as it appeared. She winced in anticipation, but nothing happened. The statue looked the same, Este felt the same, and the water jets sprayed the same.

“Hold it more firmly,” Mateo instructed, which was easy for him to say since he didn’t have a jet shooting ice water into his spleen.

She tried that, flexing her grip strength until her fingers ached, but nothing changed. ”Now what?”

“Pull it down.”

On a hinge, the statue’s hand crooked downward, and the lever set off a chain reaction like a Rube Goldberg machine—a metallic groan as a drain at the bottom of the fountain slid open, a gurgle as the water whirled down. At this angle, Robin’s hand pointed to the cobblestones beneath Mateo’s feet.

“The water from the fountain is diverted through a subterranean pipe system,” Mateo said, aligning with the tilted hand. “Hold on, it might take a second.”

For a moment, everything was still. Then, one of the bricks in the pathway jutted up high enough for Mateo to get his fingers around it.

Este let go of Robin’s stone hand to hop down and get a closer look, but no sooner than Robin’s hand slotted back into place did a jet spray her in the face. Sputtering, she felt for the grip again, her eyes pinched closed to keep the water out.

Mateo laughed, open and wild. “What part of hold on wasn’t clear? You have to keep his hand pulled down or the brick will sink back into the ground. And the water will be redirected back to the fountain.”

Strings of drenched hair stuck to her lips. “Now you tell me.”

Once again Este shook the statue’s hand, and Mateo pried up the stone. Grimacing, Este clambered back down the statue, and it took all her flexibility to keep from getting supersoaked again. A heaviness sloped down his shoulders as he shook the brick and a single, tightly scrolled piece of paper landed in his half-opaque palm.

“Is that it? The missing page?” she asked.

Mateo scowled. “It’s supposed to be pages. Plural.”

Este pinched the paper’s edge—the page was weathered and cracking, like it might spontaneously disintegrate. If Ives found out how much her hands were shaking as she scrolled open the fragile parchment, Este would have gotten kicked out of her gig as an archival assistant faster than she could say European book cloth.

Mateo held her phone for her, angling the flashlight so that she could read. Printed in bold ink, there was a headline: Radcliffe Legacy Goes up in Flames. Nothing else, the rest of the piece had been torn off, but the article from Sheridan Oaks Daily was dated October 16, 1917. In the bottom corner, a handwritten call number was smudged, and a thin stripe of blue ink underlined the title with a miniature arrowhead pointed toward the other side.

She flipped the paper over. Pressed into the back of the article was a trail of blue ink that read:

I’ve tasted sweet. I’ve tasted bitter. Life, it seems, is both.

To find the truth, I tasted death to read the words unknown.

What burned, come dawn, will not be lost. What buried roots will grow,

and when the ink fades, we will see what only love returns.

Este laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “Iambic heptameter breadcrumbs. That’s what he left us.”

“It almost . . . No, that couldn’t be.”

“You might as well tell me,” she snapped. It wasn’t his fault her dad was leading them on a wild goose hunt, but her nerves had been exposed. She was a walking root canal. “It’s not like we have any other leads.”

“It reminds me of something written in The Book of Fades.” Mateo scratched his temple, looking as lost as she felt.

Este squinted. “You think my dad Duolingo’d the language of the dead?”

“Sometimes you say things, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know that?”

It was her dad’s handwriting, his initials. She’d practically almost drowned trying to retrieve it. There was no reason not to investigate it further.

“Show me,” she said. “In the book.”

As they ran back to the Lilith, ribbons of light streamed through the tree canopy, night silver. When they surged through the senior lounge’s green door, Aoife, Luca, and Daveed slumped into their usual seats, reading a text on metaphysics, preening in a handheld mirror, and balancing four books on his head, respectively. Stacks of books she recognized from her dad’s circ history were piled in the center of the coffee table.

“Any luck?” Luca asked as Este settled into a plaid armchair next to the fireplace, kicking her legs over one of the wooden arms to dry off.

Mateo stomped his foot on the ground, and one of the floorboards popped up as if it were spring-loaded. He reached inside for The Book of Fades and tossed it toward Aoife. “Godrich, will you read the epigraph for us?”

“Can we not fast pitch that book? My entire high school career depends on it,” Este huffed, but in Aoife’s defense, the book was caught with remarkable dexterity.

While the other ghosts huddled around Aoife’s chair, Este didn’t bother moving. The words would still be invisible to her. Although she made a mental note to pry up that board if Mateo ever tried to double-cross her again.

As Aoife read the epigraph, no one breathed—but that was normal for ghosts. With each word out of her mouth, Este’s jaw dropped a little farther because every line was the same as the poem her dad had written on the back of the news article.

“Thank you for that incredible dramatic reading.” Mateo nudged a panel among the bookshelves. Behind it, there was a chalkboard. “Este,” he said as he juggled a piece of chalk, “why would your father steal from a book he couldn’t read?”

She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. Her father had died more than twenty years after attending Radcliffe. He hadn’t been sick—his devastating stroke was the handiwork of a clot he couldn’t have known possible when he was a student. “He . . . wouldn’t?”

“Exactly.” Mateo scribbled words across the chalkboard, drawing circles around them and lines in between them: sweet, bitter, truth, death. It looked like the evidence board in a harried detective’s office. All he was missing was red string. “Dean Logano found a way to read The Book of Fades without dying.”

“Wish I could say the same,” said Daveed.

Aoife, with her eyebrows pinched together, asked, “How do you know?”

“Because my dad wrote that epigraph on the back of this news clipping.” Este smoothed the headline on the table. “He must have been able to translate it somehow.”

Mateo scrubbed a hand over his face, leaving behind a cloud of dust. “It just doesn’t make sense how he’d been able to do it.”

Aoife took his place at the helm, and Mateo opted for pacing the perimeter of the room. While the ghosts analyzed the ancient text’s lettering, scanning for any clue, Este read and reread her father’s handwriting on the back of the newsprint. His hand had trailed over the words, blurring the ink, like he’d been writing quickly.

Gingerly, Este flipped the paper back over. Her fingertips ran the length of the headline, all the way down to the call number in the corner. “What’s shelved in SB617?”

Aoife didn’t stop writing on the chalkboard when she answered, “Poisonous plants.”

Este lurched out of her seat so quickly Luca flinched. She pawed through the pile of texts on the coffee table, but none of the call numbers matched. “Where are they shelved?”

“Shouldn’t you know that?” Luca asked. “Don’t you work here?”

Este’s frown lines rivaled the Grand Canyon. “Been a little preoccupied.”

“Second floor, west wing,” Daveed said. “Why?”

She barely squeezed out a quick “Be right back” before she was out of the room and into the hallway and racing down the stairs so quickly her feet threatened to fall off.

As she passed the archives, three ghastly voices stopped her cold. The Fades’ song hummed in the shadows. Ice clogged her veins, and she stood frozen. If you hear them singing, just run—don’t listen and don’t look back.

Este crammed her fingers into her ears and darted between the light from the sconces until she made it downstairs to the second floor. The call numbers melted together as she spun through the stacks. In SB617, she pinpointed a thin blue book titled Herbal Remedies and Antidotes—she recognized it immediately from her dad’s list. The glossary led her to a spread that included illustrations of the vine’s anatomy in lieu of any photos.

This genus in the family Convolvulaceae is commonly known as bindweeds. Similar to morning glories, these plants are responsive to light, and once rooted, they will grow persistently. Este flipped the page to follow the paragraph. Rivea asterannis contains elements now known to be detrimental to humans but had previously been used in rituals. If ingested, an antidote can be concocted from the following herbs and spices . . .

Este clutched the book to her chest to keep her heart from pounding straight out. This was it. This was the tie she’d been missing. Before she went back to the lounge, she had to make a pit stop.

Let it be known to Mr. Donohue that she did, in fact, pay attention in class. To understand the true meaning of the blooms, she needed to understand their history. She deserved extra credit for cracking open the R volume of the Oxford English Dictionary and skimming the onionskin pages.

First, she found the entry for its root word—rive: verb, to cleave, to split, to separate. Like the ghosts, souls torn from their bodies and stranding them in an infinite in-between. She ran the pad of her fingertip downward over rivea’s fine-print definition: noun, from rive, the new dawn light; the moment when night ends. Below, there was a separate entry specific to rivean ivy. Noun, Rivea asterannis, vine with highly toxic night-blooming flowers; often used in ancient ceremonies to communicate with the dead, this flower symbolizes life and death.

The door slammed open as Este burst back into the senior lounge. The ghosts froze, every motion halted midair. Aoife’s chalk screeched against the board as her hand slid downward. Mateo’s eyebrows shot up so high they got lost behind his curls.

Este tapped her fingernails against the book’s hard cover. “I think I know how my dad read The Book of Fades, but I’m going to need Ives’s keys.”