Badlands

Elise Beausoleil with her literary ramblings; Wilton Cole and Marchand Decasse and their thieving schemes. So many had come here, prying, threatening to expose him and the many riddles of Faerwood, so many had never left.

Swa

“Are you ready?” Swa

“I am.”

“Tonight it is the Fire Grotto. Do you remember it?”

“Of course.”

Swa

NINETY-EIGHT

5:47 AM

THE WALLS IN the basement were damp and clammy. The flicker of the gas lamps drew their shadows in long, spindly forms.

Hand in hand, Graciella and Joseph Swa

They eventually came to a long corridor. At the end of the passageway were bright yellow lights. As they approached the stage Graciella’s heart raced. She thought of the night her mother phoned, the long dreadful night two months earlier when her world had been turned upside down. There had been so much Graciella wanted to say to her mother, years of confusion and frustration to unload. But by the end of the conversation she found that the hatred that had lived in her soul like a terrible fire for so long had simply vanished. Her mother had been not much older than she was when she’d had her baby, and she had given her up for adoption for all the right reasons. When Graciella hung up the phone she had cried until dawn. Then she had gone into her closet and opened all the boxes she had received over the years on her birthday and Christmas. She’d known who they were from all along.

Eve Galvez had loved her. That’s why she walked away.

That night, via her cell phone, Eve had sent her a number of photographs. Photographs of Graciella at two and three and four years old, all taken from far away. Graciella playing lacrosse. Graciella hanging at the Mickey D’s on Greene Road. The final photo was of this monstrous place. The last thing her mother had said was that there had been a girl named Caitlin O’Riordan, and that a man, a man who called himself Mr. Ludo—the man who lived here, the man she now knew as Joseph Swa

When the story of her mother’s murder hit the newspaper, and all the flowers that had so recently been planted in Graciella’s heart were ripped from the ground, she knew what she had to do. She made a promise to her mother’s memory that she would finish the job.

But now that the end was in sight, she did not know if she could go through with it.

THE STAGE STOOD at the far side of the room. It was about fifteen feet wide. The floor was highly polished; there were velvet curtains drawn to the sides. A spotlight over the center of the stage cut through the blackness like a knife through necrotic flesh.

Joseph Swa

Between them, the Fire Grotto awaited.

NINETY-NINE

5:51 AM

JESSICA PUSHED ON the walls, but they would not move. She tried lifting one of the panels from beneath the chair rail, but it didn’t budge.

There are things you should know about this house. Every room has a secret entrance and a secret exit to somewhere else.

She flipped on her Maglite, consulted the schematic the girl had given her. There were lines and notations all over the page. Once she found her bearings, she saw that in this part of the hallway, above the cold air return, there were a pair of dentils in the crown molding marked in red. Jessica pointed the Maglite at the ceiling. She saw that two of the dentils were a slightly lighter stain than the others. She pulled over a chair, stood on it. She pressed the dentil. Nothing happened. She then pressed the other, yielding the same result. She pulled both of them left, right. No sound, no motion. She pushed the two dentils in the center toward each other, and she suddenly heard the wall begin to move. Seconds later, it rose to the ceiling.

Jessica jumped down from the chair, gulping the air. She drew back to the wall, unholstered her weapon. In front of her was a short hallway with narrow stairs leading up. She climbed the stairs, and found a dead-bolted door at the top.

She slowly turned the lock, opened the door, and stepped through.

The room was pitch-black. She felt along the wall, found a light switch. Overhead a bronze chandelier blazed to life, illuminating a room time had forgotten.

She’d found the Great Cygne’s prison.

ONE HUNDRED

5:54 AM

GRACIELLA STOOD ON the stage beneath hot, glaring lights. To her left was the Fire Grotto, a steel and smoked-glass cage about three feet by three feet by four feet high. The front had a door that opened out toward where the audience would be, if there had been an audience. The entire apparatus was on a short four-legged steel table with caster wheels. Hanging from the back was the hoop, a three-foot-diameter aluminum hoop attached to a cone of silk fabric.

It looked exactly like the drawings Karl Swa

Remember the hidden latch.

Joseph Swa

His son Joseph waited a few seconds, then looked out into the darkness.

“Behold the Fire Grotto,” he said. He turned to look at Graciella. “And behold the lovely Odette.”

He reached over, opened the front of the glass-and-steel cage. He gestured to Graciella. She was supposed to get in. She looked inside, her memory overlaying the schematic drawing on the box itself. She glanced to the lower left corner. There, painted the same color as the smoked glass, was the hidden latch.

She stepped into the cage. In her hands was the item the old man had given her. She’d held on to it so long, so tightly, she’d almost forgotten she had it.

ONE HUNDRED ONE

5:54 AM

THE ROOM WAS LARGE, high-ceilinged, cluttered with oversized furniture from another era. Every inch of wall space was covered with yellowed news clippings, photographs, posters. Every surface seemed to yield memories of years spent in isolation.

In the corner was a large hospital bed, covered in grimy sheets. On the dresser was an absinthe fountain with two spigots. Next to it were filmy crystal glasses, sugar cubes, tarnished silver spoons.

Jessica crossed to the window, parted the velvet curtains. There were bars on these windows too. In the moonlight she could see she was on the third floor, just above the spiked railing that led around the rear porch. Jessica glanced at the bed. Attached to each brass post were a pair of rusted handcuffs. On the nightstands were a series of easel frames, aligned like timeworn headstones. In the photographs, a young man stood in various poses, all mid-illusion—linking rings, releasing doves, fa