“No,” she breathed. “Oh God, no! God no!”
She tried the door again just because it had to open, it had to, she couldn’t be here! And now it did. It had mercy on her. Effortlessly, no resistance—it even opened out where before it had opened in. She half ran, half fell through it and slammed it behind her, and everything was quiet again. She was in a silent room, a safe room: the familiar homely little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.
Oh God. Oh, thank God. It was over.
She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. A dry sob. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. None of it. Or it was real but it was over. She almost laughed. She didn’t care either way as long as she was safe now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep here after the meeting last night and it was all a dream. Whatever, this whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going forward either. She would stay in this stupid little windowless room with its crap carpet forever if necessary. She loved it. It was the most beautiful room she’d ever seen.
She had teetered on the edge of the rabbit hole, windmilling her arms for balance, but in the end she had not fallen. She had not. She had stayed in the safe sunlit world of grass and sky, and she would never leave it again. She had been so wrong ever to think about it. It had tried to take her, but she would not be taken.
Plum sank down on the couch. Her knees were two bags of water. She forced herself to think about what it meant. Someone had found out that she was a Chatwin, or something had found out, and they or it was trying to scare her. Or maybe it was one of those things where you automatically saw your greatest fear or something.
But what it felt like was, Fillory itself had reached out and tugged lightly on the invisible thread tied to the fishhook that was lodged firmly in her back, and it had whispered: Don’t forget. You belong to me.
But she had learned her lesson. Or at any rate a lesson: she would never try to enter the wine closet in anything but a straightforward and conventional fashion. The couch was so saggy and brokeback that it almost swallowed her up. She stopped thinking. She looked at her reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked last night.
But she wasn’t in the mirror. There was another girl there instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked and its skin gave off a soft unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue.
It smiled at her. Its eyes were the same color as its skin. It hung motionless in midair, a yard above the floor, slightly smaller than life size. The girl’s outlines were strange: sometimes she was slightly blurry, other times crisp and clear.
Plum sat up. She got to her feet, but slowly, and after that she didn’t move at all, because she understood that all moving was over with. She knew who this was.
It was the ghost of Brakebills. It had been the ghost all along. This wasn’t a friendly ghost. It wasn’t a mischievous poltergeist. This was a dead thing that hated the living. Once as a child, after a storm, Plum had seen a downed power line writhing like a lethal snake on a road, arcing over and over again on the wet asphalt, bright as a sun. This blue girl was like that. The insulation had come off the world, and Plum was facing the raw naked current.
The two girls stared at each other: the one who survived and the one who hadn’t. It smiled wider, like they were having a tea party.
“No,” Plum said. “It’s not me. You don’t want me.”
But Plum was lying. She understood. The ghost did want her. It had always wanted her. She was a Chatwin, and Chatwins lived on borrowed time. Plum wondered if it would hurt.
Bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—something had run into it from the other side. A shower of plaster fell. A man’s voice said something like “oof.”
Plum looked; the ghost in the mirror didn’t.
Boom! The wall exploded inward, throwing chunks of wood and plaster and stone in all directions, and Plum ducked, and a man came crashing through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off, though he still looked like he’d been hit with a sack of flour. White witchery sprayed out of both his hands like sparklers, so bright they made purple flares in her vision.
When he saw what was in the mirror he froze.
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh my God. It’s you.”
Plum didn’t think he was talking to her. Did he recognize this thing? It was almost like he knew it personally, which would be pretty weird even for him. He took a deep breath and pulled himself together.
“Don’t move till I tell you,” he said.
That was meant for Plum. She didn’t move, but she didn’t dare to believe that he could actually save her. All she’d done was drag him into the catastrophe too.
With an arm protecting his face Professor Coldwater reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out. It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first thought was, I must tell Chelsea that she won’t have to pay for the mirror.
That didn’t dispel the ghost, but it was definitely inconvenienced. It was still watching them, suspended in midair, but now it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned his back on it—the ghost threw something at them, Plum couldn’t see what, and he deflected it with one hand without looking. Then he placed his palms together.
“Get down,” he said. “All the way. On the floor.”
She got down. The air shimmered and rippled, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. At the bottom of it was the dull bass pressure-beat of the door exploding outward out of its frame.
“Now get up and run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Run! Go ahead, I’m right behind you.”
Plum ran. She could have stayed and tried to help, but that would have been compounding her stupidity with more stupidity. She did the hard thing and trusted him: she hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shockwave as Professor Coldwater detonated some final spell. The force of it lifted Plum off her feet for a second and made her stagger, but she found them again and kept on running.
Going back was faster than going forward had been. She was bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, nope, magic. One stride took her through the hell-room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the dining room crawl space, the library, hard left turn at the creepy-pear-tree-courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming shut behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.
She didn’t stop till she was back in the safety of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. He’d done it, he’d gotten them out. Never had anything seemed so certain than that she was going to die in that room, but now it was over. The bad thing, the horror, had broken out of wherever it had been hiding all her life, but he’d shoved it back down. For now.
Without a word Professor Coldwater set about resealing the passageway behind them. She watched him work, her breath slowly going back to normal, dazed but not so dazed that she wasn’t interested in the technical aspects: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.
She wondered where he’d learned how to do that. Not here. This time he left out the fancy signature angles. Say that for him: he learned from his mistakes.
Then he climbed out and closed the door. They were alone. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.
“How did you know?” she said. “How did you know where I was? Where the ghost was?”
“Not a ghost. A niffin. Very bad news.”
“What did it want?”
“She. She used to be human. And I don’t know. Did she say anything to you?”
“No. Can they talk?”
“I don’t know.” One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Nobody knows much about them. I’m not even sure I did anything to her. I just distracted her and got out of there.”
“But you looked surprised when you saw it. You looked like you recognized it. I mean her.”
“I know.” Professor Coldwater looked sadder and less triumphant than she would have thought. “I know I did. I wish she’d said something.”
“I don’t care if it recited the goddamn King James Bible.”
Dean Fogg rounded the corner of the L at speed. He didn’t look happy.
“Do you know how many alarms you two set off, blundering around in the subspaces like that?”
Professor Coldwater ticked off on his fingers, silently.
“Eleven?”
“Yes. Eleven.” Fogg seemed perversely unhappy that Coldwater had got the right answer. “What the hell were you doing back there? Purchas?”
Plum flushed. The prank—she’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It was so utterly pointless. Maybe that’s what the ghost was trying to teach her: it’s all pointless. Fate is coming whatever you do, so quit wriggling around, it’s only making you look more ridiculous than you already do. We’re all ghosts here, you just don’t look like one yet.
But she wasn’t having that. If that was true then what was the point of anything ever? She was going to wriggle a bit longer anyway. Who the hell cared how ridiculous she looked.
Plum squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.
“I was looking for a secret passage to the wine closet,” she said, loud and clear, “so I could play a prank on Wharton.”
“A prank.” Fogg was unimpressed with her existential courage. “I see. Coldwater?”
“Dean Fogg.”
“You didn’t perform the incursion protocols, any of them.”
“No,” Coldwater said. “I didn’t. There wasn’t much time. The situation was pretty urgent.”
“Did you at least try to terminate the damn thing? Or banish it?”
“I—” He bit something back. “No.”
“Why not?”
A muscle moved in Professor Coldwater’s jaw.
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Professor Coldwater saved my life,” Plum put in.
“Thank you, Purchas,” Fogg said, “and he also put the lives of everybody else at this school at risk. I took a chance on you, Quentin, and it was a mistake. You’re fired. Be out of your rooms by end of day tomorrow. Professor Liu can pick up the rest of your teaching.”
Coldwater didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink, but Plum flinched for him, the way you do when you see somebody else take a punch.
“All right. I understand.”
“Do you?” Fogg was so angry he was spitting. “Do you? Well, you always were a quick one! I would think you of all people would have caught on a little quicker, given that you witnessed firsthand the reason why these protocols were created in the first place. Purchas?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can finish out the last three weeks of the semester. Then you’re expelled.”
Fogg glared at them both in turn, then walked out of the room.
Plum so wished she could be cool about it. She didn’t think she was going to cry, she just had to sit down on one of the red leather couches and put her head between her knees for a minute while her vision grayed out around the edges. She really did love Brakebills. She loved it so much. She really did. She really had.
She felt the sofa squish as Professor Coldwater sat down at the other end. He blew out a long sigh.
“Well—”
“I’m so sorry, Professor Coldwater. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to put you in danger! I didn’t mean to get you fired!”
And now she did sob: once, twice, three times. They were going to turn her out into the cold, scary world. She wasn’t ready. It wasn’t safe. What was she going to do? How was she going to live now?
“I know. Please don’t worry about it.” He said it quietly. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this. And you might as well call me Quentin.”
“But what are you going to do? What am I going to do?”
“You’ll find something. It’s a big world. Probably bigger than you realize.”
“But I’m a failure! I’m a freak! I got kicked out of Brakebills, for God’s sake!”
The words barely had any meaning. They would soon, she knew, but right now it made her lips feel numb just to say them, as if the words were envenomed. She was expelled. She thought of having to say them to her parents and the gray came back.
“Something will come up, I promise you. Plenty of people have Brakebills degrees, but how many people can say they got kicked out? It’s a pretty exclusive club.”
She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t snort at that.
“But if you don’t mind my asking,” he went on, “what exactly were you doing back there? I sealed that corridor off for a reason. Even I couldn’t figure out where it went.”
“Oh, I told Fogg the truth. I really was pranking Wharton.”
“But why?”
“Well, he’s been kind of stingy with the wine lately. Plus it just seemed to me like there should be more, I don’t know, chicanery afoot around here. Generally. High jinks. It sounds silly now, but you know what I mean? To lighten the tone. Because basically who knows, we could all drop dead at any moment.”