Chapter 6
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Nasty, privileged bitches like you make it hard for me to control my temper,” agent LaTonya Booker said. Almost as large as a linebacker, she leaned toward Phiale, the threads of her pantsuit straining. “We know the exact time the photo of the girls with the sword was taken — right after you were recorded leaving your dorm headed toward the mound … a sacred site I’m under oath to protect. And you’re saying you don’t know anything about any desecration?”
“T-that’s right.”
A laptop beeped shrilly. “She’s lying again,” said agent Doug Fafner, tall and skinny with acne and round glasses reflecting the glow of multiple computer screens.
Parked in the school lot, the Smithsonian’s mobile interrogation unit looked like a vanload of amazing discoveries from the outside, featuring images of a boy enthralled with an arrowhead and a space shuttle flying over a triceratops skeleton — certainly not a rolling star chamber to enforce the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“You should talk to Sienna instead of me. She’s in the photo — and in the Seance Club. I don’t have anything to do with raising the dead … almost never.” Phiale’s gaze focused on a small devil’s ivy next to a digital EKG reader; its leaves were mostly brown and shriveled, although droplets reflecting faint sparks around the base of its pot pointed to recent watering.
Booker snapped her fingers. “Girl, over here!” The agent sighed and laughed. “What’s all this about raising the dead? We’re just trying to solve a simple grave robbery you dipshits obviously committed. Why’s your pal Skipper Windi googling about Middle Mississippian emerald jewelry? And whether it can give people second sight? Andhow much it’s worth?”
* * *
Phiale struggled to open a tartar sauce packet because her hands were still shaking from that morning’s third degree. She always ate lunch with Windi but hadn’t seen her all morning. On the lam, no doubt. Now I’ve got to sit here eating by myself like a loser.
She was taking a bite of a fish sandwich when she noticed Rapp staring at her over a bin of stewed apples from the other side of the buffet line. By the time she’d finished chewing, he was sitting across from her.
“I asked for food of my Fatherland, but the lunch frau prepared this.” He picked through strands of sauerkraut served with breakfast sausages, then glared at the girl. “Your only friend hasn’t bothered to show up for classes today. Where is she?”
“I have no idea, sir.” It was the truth, although she wouldn’t have told him anyway. Belle had made them promise not to run their mouth to anyone in authority — not even about what Mr. Owen was up to, because of all the attention it would draw.
“Was she acting strange on the field trip yesterday? Did she say she needed to get something?”
“An emerald?”
“Yes! You saw her take it!”
“No, the Smithsonian lady said Windi was googling how much she could get for it.” Idiot! Why’d I bring up the emerald? Keep it together.“She thinks we’re the grave robbers.”
“Oh, nein, nein. They need to be looking into Mr. Owen and his coven.”
An out-of-breath woman in a hairnet rushed up to the table. “Just caught a student in the cooler … shoving a whole chicken up her … toga … slipped past me … ran out the back door with it … shouted ‘charge the Theater Club!’”
Rapp frowned. “From what I’ve gathered, they’re conspiring with the Fire Safety Goddess on some sort of presentation … or ceremony, as she called it. Heathens, the lot of them.”
* * *
Belle saw a great opportunity to regale the children of a degraded culture with the treasures of ancient Greece when the goddess of Heraclitus (in part) said she was planning a burn trailer demonstration at the school. So the fairy retrieved a box of costumes she’d stowed away in a forgotten tunnel under the auditorium following a spring 1925 production of “The Flame of Heraclitus” (the play where the labyrinth planter came from). Belle beamed at their pristine condition thanks to her protection spell against mold and moths. While she could’ve just wagged her wand to materialize passable replicas, she felt the actual link to that era was the bee’s knees.
One of the chiton tunics was worn by Thalia, along with a bay laurel crown and leather sandals, as she walked at a stately pace toward the burn trailer with a sliver tray holding the chicken carcass.
The fire department had pulled the trailer and a pumper truck into the back lot near the Butterfly Garden, and the academy’s students formed a wide circle around it. Inside the trailer was a typical dorm room: bed, desk, chair, strewn clothing, overstuffed trash can and Hunger Games: Catching Fire poster of a young archer surrounded by flames. Not so typical was an altar with stag antlers attached to the front and a large offering bowl along with a saucer of red amaranth leaves on top. Fire hoses snaked through the grass.
Two other Theater Club members, also clad in ancient Greek attire, flanked the trailer, facing it with their palms to the sky. “Oh, mighty Artemis, accept this burnt offering to the delight of your everlasting soul,” they chanted in unison from a script Belle had written.
Thalia placed the chicken in the altar bowl, and all three girls stepped back. As Di emerged from the truck wearing a tunic and crown of flowers, they prostrated themselves before the trailer. The firefighter seemed even taller than usual, almost floating across the ground, her metallic eyes glinting in the sunshine. (Phiale, a face in the crowd, fought an urge to fall to the pavement herself in supplication.)
Di climbed into the trailer and turned to the girls with a serious expression. “Hanging out in your room on a festival day? Feeling too lazy to take that burnt offering outside? Think twice before you char it in your dorm room.” After a moment of awkward silence, she cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” Thalia said. She stood and ascended into the trailer, pulling out a long-stemmed lighter from her belt. Di handed her a can of accelerant, which the girl lightly sprinkled on the chicken.
“A generous application of holy fluid is necessary,” said the firefighter, squeezing her hand over Thalia’s, squirting it all over the altar and the mess around it.
“I am now prepared to receive my nourishment,” Di said. Thalia pointed the lighter at the chicken and clicked the trigger. Nothing. She tried again and again, stabbing at it with each attempt. Prepared for such a mishap from living in cursed places so long, Belle wiggled her foot back and forth on a stick to create a spark at a distance.
The fire roared, and Di and Thalia quickly stepped out of the trailer. “Behold the speed at which the pyre consumes everything you hold dear — and likely you as well,” said the goddess, glowing in the conflagration. A column of black smoke rose into the empyrean.
Phiale watched forms wink in and out of the roiling flames: a volley of arrows, a snarling bear, a man’s face twisted in agony. Then her gaze wandered across the lawn to the garden and its shed, which made her wonder whether she’d wound the hose back up the other day like she was supposed to. As she stared at reflections in the outbuilding’s dirty window, her mind again conjured recognizable shapes, like a girl’s face … specifically Windi’s face.
After the demonstration, Larry doused the blaze and Di changed back into her fire gear to help clean up. The girls had trickled away to after-school clubs (or for a nip of nectar in Belle’s case); but Phiale headed to the shed, where she peeked in the window to ensure the hose was coiled around its reel (it was) and the image of Windi had been illusory (it hadn’t).
The Skipper was looking up at her like a cornered animal wedged between a lawnmower and stack of terra cotta pots — until she recognized her friend and grinned with relief. The door was padlocked from the outside, but Phiale could open it because she had the combination saved to her phone.
“You must have climbed through the window — or somebody locked you in,” she said as Windi hugged her in the dim, dusty light.
“No.”
“Eh … how’d you get in here?”
“My life’s in danger,” she said. “I had to go underground … literally.”
“You stole an emerald, didn’t you? Off that mannequin.” Phiale held up her phone with the picture she’d taken and zoomed in on the pendant.
“Not too sly was I?” she admitted, pointing to her purse on a potting bench. Phiale started for it but Windi grabbed her. “No, don’t touch it. It shows you things you don’t want to see … like me lying on a stone slab … a Monarch hovering over, ready to plunge a knife in my heart.”
“Why don’t you just give it to Rapp like he wants?”
“I’m not going near that creep anymore … I’m sorry, that’s bad, I shouldn’t call him that … no — I’m done with butterfly cults … I’m the one who took the risk — it’s more mine than his.”
“He’s our principal. You can’t keep hiding from him. Anyway, do you remember the dragon saying he’s after a gem? Do you want that nasty thing coming for you?”
“It’s more mine than his, too.”
A sudden whiff of smoke filled the shed as Di appeared in the doorway, hulking and dirty. “I don’t know who they are, but you’re being watched,” she said.
Phiale looked out the window and saw agents Booker and Fafner peeking from opposite sides of a large oak 50 yards away. “It’s the Feds.”
Windi leapt up and grabbed her purse. “I’ve got to go.” She twisted a rusty bucket sitting next to the door until it clicked and then lifted it, along with several floorboards stuck to the bottom. Phiale peered into the hole and saw a ladder, which Windi descended into the darkness until just her head was visible. She looked at the other two and pointed to a small flashlight clipped to the side of Di’s helmet. “My phone’s battery ran out this morning. Can I borrow that?”
“No need,” Di said. She radioed the chief that she had a few other things to take care of and to go ahead back without her. “We’re coming too. You two go down first — I’ll bear the light.”
Phiale glanced once more out the window and saw the agents now walking toward the shed. So down she went, past dirt, roots and rock. At the bottom, she looked up in time to see Di struggling to shut the trap door. Then the light from her helmet danced as her boots loudly scraped the rungs in the otherwise hushed space. Was there still supposed to be a crack of light at the top?
A system of underground pathways had existed in New Harmony since the Rappite days, when Father Rapp had them dug as a way for him to keep an eye on his flock. (He could also appear seemingly out of nowhere — for a touch of the supernatural.) The most recent beam restoration and passage clearing happened in the 1980s as part of an “Under Utopia” tourism scheme using federal fallout shelter funds. But having drawn more attention from Department of Justice auditors than paying visitors, the project was abandoned.
The network as a whole was largely forgotten over the next four decades, but the Butterfly Club knew about it. (A map of the tunnels drawn by Father Rapp himself more than 200 years earlier was a cherished Butterfly Club secret.) Windi and other members occasionally used the passages as shortcuts and to avoid bad weather on outings.
As Phiale filled Di in on the gem heist and interrogation by the museum heavies, they passed several offshoot tunnels — along with several doors.
“Where are we supposed to come out, Windi?” Di asked.
“The labyrinth.”
“I don’t think we’re headed the right way,” Phiale said.
“How would you know?”
“I can sense the river getting closer.”
They reversed course with little protest from Windi, who wasn’t confident navigating the tunnels to begin with. (Di tried to check their location on her phone but couldn’t get a signal.)
After nearly 10 minutes of Windi supposedly getting her bearings and then losing them again, Di stopped in a patch of light from a slanted air vent.
“This is getting ridiculous,” she said, stuffing tobacco under her bottom lip. “We just need to try a door and apologize later if we wind up in somebody’s cellar. Then we should figure out what to do about that emerald — and get those agents off your tail.”
“I heard Sienna told the Feds she just happened to come across the girls with the giant’s sword — and ran off before she could see who it was,” Phiale said. “Surely the government already has some kind of file on the Seance Club.”
“I bet so. After y’all came back from the field trip, I heard on the scanner that one of your classmates got transported back to Evansville — to a psych ward.”
“The ones who weren’t in the Seance Club chalked it up to some kind of laser light show — a hologram. Guess not all of them could believe that.”
“Also …,” Di said glaring at Phiale, “Belle is not supposed to leave New Harmony.”
“I doubt I could stop her from doing anything.”
“Just call me next time. She’s in too much danger when she’s away.”
“Hey,” Windi interrupted. “Is somebody singing?” They stopped to listen.
“I can hear something now, like an orchestra,” Phiale said.
Then, from somewhere close in the tunnels, agent Booker shouted: “This way! I think I heard one of those mother fu—”
“Shhh!” the other hissed. “We’ll scare them off again.”
The three of them set off around a corner — and nearly knocked over a dwarf in a leather trench coat.
“Hello, ladies,” he said, smoothing his receding hairline. “Alberich’s my name … getting ready for my cue to go up.” He pointed to a nearby ladder and hatch to where the opera music was coming from. “Have to flirt with some Rhinemaidens, get paid.”
“Whatever, creep,” Di said as she climbed the ladder and pushed open the hatch with the girls in tow.
“Wait! You can’t — we’re rehearsing!”
When Phiale surfaced onto the stage, Flosshilde was on a downward swing — headed straight toward the girl in a shimmery, sequined aqua blue dress, her face twisted in a scream: “Woglinde!”
Just in time, Thalia (with the help of a much stronger stagehand) pulled a rope to raise the high-momentum singer and prevent a collision of water nymphs. “Humans are emerging from Nibelheim!”
“They are trespassers,” proclaimed her sister, also out for a swim while suspended from the rafters. “Thieves after our gold!”
“Are they willing to renounce love for it?”
“Sorry people, just a routine fire inspection,” Di said. “Everything looks fine. Congratulations.”
“I tried to stop them,” Alberich said, poking up his head. “And two more just showed up.”
“Oh, shut up you troll,” Woglinde said from above.
“Get your freak ass out our way!” agent Booker shouted from below.
Tracking mud across the stage toward the exit, Phiale and Windi smiled and waved as they followed Di past a backdrop decorated with bubbles, fish and seaweed. Clamshell footlights glowed along the edge of the stage.
“Who are they, then?” asked the third sister, Wellgunde, perched on a river rock, pointing to the students.
“Eh … my interns,” Di responded.
“I’d like to see one of them carry me out of a burning building,” Flosshilde said with a deep, hearty laugh. “You need to schedule these things in advance next time, loser!”
“How dare you insult mighty Artemis,” Thalia said and jerked as hard as she could on the rope during an upswing, causing the singer to strike her head on a wooden beam.
* * *
Di grilled venison for the fire crew and two girls that evening, having dispatched the agents with a deadly glare at the front door of the station when they dropped by to see why she’d gone with the students into the tunnel. Phiale stuck to corn on the cob and baked beans, though, having read about Artemis changing some perv hunter into a stag after she caught him watching her and her nymphs bathe — his own dogs devoured him. The girl also showed off her newfound archery skills in front of Windi and the firefighters.
As the two students walked back to the academy after nightfall, their plan to get Windi out of her Butterfly Club mess started shaping up sooner than expected — when they noticed four pale green lights dancing toward them along the sidewalk. Windi grabbed her friend’s arm and pulled her into a stand of trees at the edge of Tillich Park.
“Monarchs,” she said. “They’re collecting luna moth eggs for a ceremony. The glowy paint under their eyes is supposed to help them find the clutches. They shimmer in the dark somehow.” She pulled a canvas sack with a cartoon Dalmatian in a fire helmet from her purse and handed it to Phiale. “Give the stone to them; I’ll stay here in the bushes. Good luck.”
As Phiale approached the Monarchs in gray cloaks with their hoods up, one of them shouted: “Look! A Violet at night — her blooms are closed for sure.”
“Is she scared?” asked the other, swaying as if drunk.
“Where’d your friend skip off to, Fail-a-lee? She has something that doesn’t belong to her.”
“Tell Rapp she’s done with your cult,” Phiale said, handing over the sack. “Here’s the gem. Make sure to touch it — you won’t believe how smooth it feels.”
Looking inside, one of them proclaimed, “Father will be pleased!” Then they turned with a flutter of capes and headed toward the school. They hadn’t gotten far when Phiale heard a shriek. She smiled, wondering what the cursed emerald had revealed.
***
The night was breezy and warm as moviegoers filed into a small downtown theater for that week’s Throwback Thursday Terror feature: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the 1920s poster featured a gypsy dancing with a goat standing on its hind legs). Passing the brightly lit ticket booth, Phiale pointed out a long narrow bruise on the back of Windi’s leg.
“That’s probably from sleeping with a hoe last night.”
“What? Oh, yeah, the garden shed.” Phiale laughed. “You’re probably looking forward to your own bed. Prop your chair against the doorknob so nobody with a key can get in.”
From the glow of the main strip, they turned onto a residential street where only one of the overhead lamps worked, and the trees rustled like leathery wings in the wind. “What do you think the dragon would do with Belle if he got ahold of her?” Phiale asked.
“No idea. Rapp doesn’t talk about Gabriel … at least to Skippers. Those weirdos you gave the emerald to probably know.”
Phiale shuddered when she remembered how it felt to be within striking range of those footlong fangs. “Ms. Owen might know something about the snake at least. She saw it too.”
“Don’t tell her about it turning into a dragon, or she’ll have you committed — speaking of, wonder who it was that slipped her lid after the Indian seance.”
“Don’t have a clue. Mr. Owen shouldn’t make club outsiders do things like that. They were more concerned about student well-being at my last school.”
Regardless, Phiale was glad she finally had somebody discuss things with … even if those things were monstrous — along the lines of how she felt like she might finally be settling in somewhere … even if it that somewhere was deeply unsettling.
Back at the residence hall, she said goodnight to Windi in the stairwell as they went to their separate floors. Phiale opened the door to her room and gasped.
Her mattress had been stripped and tossed onto the floor, along with the contents of her dresser and closet. The top of her desk had been swiped clean except for two things. One was a framed photo — its glass smashed — of her and her parents in front of a Mayan temple sculpture depicting a priest holding a severed head (her mom was researching the site). The other was something she’d never seen before — and it felt like a backhand to the face. Phiale stood frozen, staring at a plastic mastodon skeleton with a plaque attached to the base. It read, “Smithsonian Institution: Our past, our shared future.”
Check out Chapter 7 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X)
Rob Robill 