It was a bra.s.s nameplate, dark from tarnish. It had a screw-hole in either end, and it was through one of those holes that the ring itself pa.s.sed. I squinted at the barely readable engraving.

Joseph Corwan, Esquire & Gentleman of the Colony of Rhode Island.

b. February 28, 1662 d. April 12, 1771 "Well, Ann?"

I didn't catch it at first. "This is just like the nameplate under the portrait in the living room only it's the original one, isn't it? This one's real old but the one there now looks new."

"That's because it is new. But surely that's not all you find noteworthy about the plate."

The dates, I noticed. "Wait a minute..." Born in 1662 and died in 1771! "The dates are f.u.c.ked up, Miss Kezzy! According to this plate, Corwan lived to be..." Five minutes later, I figured, "A hundred and nine years old!"

"Mind like a steel trap."

"But that's impossible, Miss Kezzy," Hannah said. "No one lives that long."

"Actually, a handful of people have lived that long, but it's very, very rare," Kezzy said.

I was already smelling something fishy. "Somebody changed the dates. This plate was replaced with the new one, and the new one says that Corwan died in 1711."

"Precisely. And can you surmise why?"

My head was ticking. "Curwen and Corwan are two different people, you said so last night, said that they were distantly related. And a minute ago you said that Curwen, not Corwan, died in 1771. So..." I stared at her. "You lied?"

"I obfuscated the truth," Kezzy said, still fussing in the visor mirror, "for a number of reasons, the most paramount of which is discreetness. An epitaph claiming that a man lived 109 years might raise some brows, so that's why the phony plate was put in its stead. And, yes, I lied about Corwan's relationship to Curwen. They were actually both the same man."

The car's tires hummed over the road. The sun was setting.

"In 1692, Corwan moved from Salem to Providence, and he did so with some haste," Kezzy went on. "You see, he was a warlock."

Me and Hannah huddled closer.

"A few too many indiscretions promulgated his exit from Salem, after which he immediately changed his name to get shed of his previous reputation. Joseph Corwan became Joseph Curwen once he was settled in the Stamper's Hill area of Providence. And there he lived for decades in relative anonymity."

"But you said he was a warlock," I said. "That's, like, a devil-worshiper, right?"

"Yes, it is, or at least that's what the peasant sensibilities of the day ascertained. In truth, though, it was not the devil that Joseph Curwen lived to serve for multiple decades. It was instead something far worse than devils, and Curwen was able to perpetuate his blasphemous reverence only by an inexhaustible knowledge of Abdul Alhazred..."

"The guy who wrote that book," I remembered. "Al Azif. You were reading the translations last night."

"Yes, Ann. You and Hannah will too eventually. Once you have received the proper predilections to understand it. Joseph Curwen was one of history's most significant sorcerers. From Al Azif he learned, among other things, the secret of transferring his consciousness into the bodies of others, mostly kin, which is how he was able to walk the earth for so long. Another secret he learned was that of 'Rendering of Essential Saltes', quite a fascinating feat. He spent decades enlisting the services of graverobbers, who would pilfer the bones of some of the world's greatest thinkers and warlocks. Utilizing the proper spells and laboratory treatments, Curwen was able to reduce the bones down to their essential salts, and with those salts he learned perhaps a great secret indeed, 'The Secret of Raising Shades.'"

"Raisinga"" Hannah began.

"Shades?" I finished.

"Shades as opposed to blinds?" Hannah asked.

Kezzy shook her head. "You'll understand in due time." She rolled down the window and smiled up at the moon. "For the next hour or so, let's be still in our own thoughts and contemplate the enormity of our blessings. You see, girls, tonight... we're going Monstering..."

So that was the light at the end of the Alpha House rainbow. First Old Manning, then b.u.mming, Kenneling, Rednecking, Chimping, Fathering, and now...now...

Monstering.

I'd been right about the truth behind Alpha House. It was an occult sorority, a coven or something. But did I believe it?

I didn't know a"that's the funny thing. Any other time, of course I wouldn't believe it, but now...there was something in the air, a vibe, I don't know. I was prepared to believe anything.

After a while, Kezzy explained the rest. Curwen paid guys to dig up the bones of other sorcerers, and then did stuff to the bones to get these "essential salts," and then with these salts he could bring back the dead. He'd bring these dead warlocks back to life and then torture them for information, for their secrets. I don't know what the process was, just doing egghead stuff in a laboratory and reading special spells from the book. Human sacrifice had plenty to do with it too but somehow I knew that Kezzy wasn't going to sacrifice me and Hannah. I could feel that in my heart, I knew it when I looked up at the stars.

But the thing holding Curwen back had been the book itself, this Necronomicon, which was originally the book that guy Al-hazred wrote, Al Azif. A lot of the translations were f.u.c.ked up on purpose by the people who transcribed the original copies. Curwen had to find a way of getting the real translations of the most important parts of the book.

He raised the "Shade" of Abdul Alhazred.

See, Alhazred was supposedly eaten alive in broad daylight by an invisible demon he accidentally called up with the jive in the book. Most of his body disappeared right in front of everybody while the demon swallowed it but, see, you know how when you eat a piece of fried chicken, some little crumbs fall on the floor? That's kind of what happened, only the "crumb" was Alhazred's hand. Then some guy on the street picked the hand up and ran off with it, and from that time on, the bones of the hand were sold back and forth from one collector to another. Eventually, like, a thousand years after Alhazred was killed, Curwen managed to buy those bones from some guy in Europe. Then he brought Alhazred back to life and tortured him until he agreed to translate the critical pa.s.sages correctly. And once Curwen got all the info he needed, he dissolved Alhazred's Shade in acid.

There were a lot of secrets in Al Azif, but the biggest one wasn't how to raise Shades or keep your spirit alive in other people's bodies. What Curwen ultimately learned from Alhazred was how to "Solicit the Gate by Where the Spheres Do Meet." See, it wasn't the devil that Curwen worshiped, it wasn't demons. It was a bunch of these f.u.c.ked up things from another dimension with names like Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth and Cthulhu. Anybody who learned Al Azifs secrets as good as Curwen did, they could actually go to this other dimension, they could see the cities there, and sometimes they could even...

Bring things from there to here.

There was a long line of people who followed in Curwen's footsteps but they weren't warlocks, they were sorceresses, and they still exist to this day. Can you guess where they operate from?

That's right. Alpha House.

After about three hours on the road, we were really deep in the boonies. Scrubland, hills, and more scrubland. Earlier a sign said Pawtucket Road, and I think we stayed on that a long time. This must be the farmland Curwen owned so long ago, and when we saw this old foundation sitting up on one of the low hills, Kezzy told us that's where Curwen's original farmhouse had been before it got burned down by a bunch of p.i.s.sed off locals. The farmhouse was just a disguise; it was really his laboratory and temple, where he did all his experiments and rituals. There'd even been a pa.s.sage under the house that led to this whole network of tunnels and rooms underground but the villagers blew it up, thinking that no one would ever be able to find them again. They were wrong about that.

It was past ten o'clock when Zenas turned the Rolls down this dirt road that went through the woods. Then he stopped.

"Heerweis, folks."

f.u.c.k, I thought.

"Wait," Hannah said, "we've seen that before, haven't we?"

"Is the dim bulb burning a bit brighter these days?" Kezzy sn.i.g.g.e.red.

"It's that shack from the painting in Kezzy's room," I said.

Kezzy's a"correction, f.u.c.kin' Kezzy's eyes widened. "Pardon me, Ann?"

"I mean, Miss Kezzy's room," I said. Barbie doll battle-ax....

That's what we were looking at, that s.h.i.tty little wood-plank shack, the same as the one in the painting. The only difference was the windows were boarded up now, and the place was crawling with ivy and was half-swallowed by the trees all around it. "But in the f.u.c.kin' painting there aren't many trees. It's just sort of sitting in the middle of all this f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.tty-looking land," I said.

"Your powers of observation just keeping getting more and more refined, Ann, along with you language. But it's because the painting was rendered in the mid-1700's; since then many trees have reared up in the 's.h.i.tty-looking' land. All of this land was once the Curwen estate, and it still is in a sense. His endowment was quite large and was left to Alpha House. We pay the taxes. We ensure that this land is never sold to a developer. And this bungalow? It was once an ancillary building for the farm workers' quarters. It's importance is immeasurable, because, like the farmhouse, it contains an access to the tunnel-network underground."

"And we're going there," I said more than asked. "Now."

Kezzy grinned in the moonlight. "Yes. We are."

Hannah grabbed me, shivering. "So what's, what's...Mon-stering?"

"We're gonna have to f.u.c.k a monster..."

Kezzy just kept grinning.

We all got out, and Zenas a"still in his maid's suit, by the way a" got a bunch of stuff out of the trunk. But Kezzy just stood there looking at the shack in some kind of quiet joy. The moon glowed down, and all around us we could hear crickets peeping. After giving us each a lantern, Zenas unlocked the front door and led the way with a real bright flashlight. He had a knapsack on, and I could see that corner of the big book of transcriptions sticking out.

The shack was empty inside. There were inches of dust on the floor but you could see a trail of footprints in it. It was obvious that year after year, for all this time, the pledges were brought to this place. In a back room, I saw some old wash tubs, and a platform. Zenas fiddled with something, and then the platform slid to the side. In the s.p.a.ce beneath was an open manhole. A draft gusted up, and we all almost gagged.

"Don't mind the smell, ladies," Kezzy said. "It will abate in short order."

f.u.c.k, I thought. It stunk.

"Yawl ready?" Zenas drawled.

Kezzy nodded, then leveled her gaze on me and Hannah. "Consider yourselves possessed of an utmost privilege. Very few people have ever made the journey you are about to..."

Hannah kept shivering, but for some reason I wasn't scared at all, not even when we all climbed down an iron ladder through this cement tube straight down until we came to some brick steps which led down even further.

It really did stink a"like rotten stuff, meat and vegetables, maybe, all mixed with the smell of wet dirt. But Kezzy was right; the stink didn't last. Now the draft seemed to flow against our backs, like somewhere else there might be a vent drawing the old air out. The more we walked, the older the pa.s.sage seemed to get, and the more narrow. I could see by my lantern that the walls were really old brick covered with this gross fungus or moss. There were dripping sounds, and the floor felt slimy beneath my sneakers.

"Yuck," Hannah kept saying. "Yuck, yuck, yuck!"

"Oh, don't be such a milquetoast," Kezzy said.

Then came more steps that went down in three slants. Our footsteps echoed and our lights bobbed. Eventually we came to a big brick-walled room that was lined with stone archways that when you held your lantern up in them, all you could see was blackness that seemed to go on forever. But some of the archways had old wooden doors that had been touched up or repaired over the years.

"How, how deep are we under the ground, Miss Kezzy?" Hannah stammered.

"You don't want to know..."

But I asked, "What's behind these doors, Miss Kezzy?"

"Storage rooms, ante-rooms, several of Joseph Curwen's initial laboratories, and the like."

An abrupt spattering sound rose, and Hannah screamed.

"Aw, naow, durn't get'cher dander up," Zenas said, his back to us. He had that hog of a c.o.c.k out and was p.i.s.sing on a wall. "Just tekin' myself a pee."

"You're so genteel," Kezzy frowned in the lantern light. "What do they do without you at Harvard Yard."

"Hah-vud.,.huh?"

"Just shut up and finish p.i.s.sing, you inarticulate manimal." Kezzy pointed to one of the doors. "Ann, look in that room there, and show Hannah."

The old door clicked open and we stuck our heads into a very musty blackness. I raised my lanterna"

Hannah screamed again, this time so loud I swear her hair stood on end. f.u.c.k! I thought. The brick-walled room contained a pile of skeletons so high it almost went to the ceiling. Kezzy was laughing when Hannah finally stopped screaming. "Blood is as essential to a warlock as bricks are to a mason. Curwen sacrificed many dupes for their blood and other attributes when his experiments called for it. Mostly illegal immigrants who took jobs on his ships. Among other things, Curwen owned a very successful shipping business. He also used the burliest of these men to subdue the Shades once they were resurrected."

So far, I think Hannah had just let all the Curwen/warlock stuff go in one ear and out the other, but now her eyes looked a little zapped after seeing that room full of skeletons. There must've been a hundred of them in there.

Another door took us through the most normal-looking room yet, like a study or an office, with a desk, a table, bookshelves and old furniture. A bunch of old oil lamps sat on the floor, and on the wall hung a chart with a human body on it showing all the muscles and veins and stuff. There was another chart full of squares, with letters in each square, like H, and He, and Pb, and Ca. I think I remembered it from a high school chemistry cla.s.s, which the only reason I pa.s.sed was because I blew the teacher a couple times. But the bookshelves here were all empty and full of cobwebs.

"The contents of Joseph Curwen's entire occult library have been removed, for safe-keeping, to a" "

"The Alpha House library," I said.

"Correct, Ann. Along with many other invaluable oddments, doc.u.ments, and correspondence." She grinned at us again, but it was more like grinning to herself in some private glee. "All of his secrets have been pa.s.sed on to us." Her eyes flashed. "All of them. We are the Keepers of those secrets, the Custodians."

"Oh, you mean like a janitor," Hannah said. "So I guess you keep all the books clean, huh, Miss Kezzy?"

Kezzy glared. "Hannah, it's your very good fortune that the phenomenally anserine are allowed to live."

"Anser..."

"Just be quiet, Hannah," I said and elbowed her, but I didn't know what the word meant either.

After that, Kezzy took us down another pa.s.sage but stopped. She faced us and put on one of those surgical mask thingies like you see doctors wear on TV show. Then she handed one to me, Hannah, and Zenas. "Don these," she said.

Hannah squinted. "Who's...Don?"

Kezzy put her fingers through her hair. "Hannah. If you had your brain removed and replaced with Spam, you'd likely be smarter."

"Spam? Ooo, yuck! I hate that stuff!"

"'Don we now our gay apparel?'" I said and pinched her. "Put the mask on! I think where she's taking us next will stink!"

"Oh..."

We put them on, then...

Kezzy opened another door in one of the archways.

We walked into this big room full of pillars that had a stone slab in the middle. n.o.body needed to be told what this place was. Dozens of people, I told myself, no, HUNDREDS a" butchered in here... More archways lined the place, and some had cage-doors but I didn't see anything behind them, The mask worked a little but I could still smell something awful. I just forced myself to hack it and got diverted when I roved my lantern around while looking down at the floor. There were these irregular slabs, maybe slate, laying around in different areas. They had holes drilled in them. Immediately I thought, Airholes...

Kezzy said, "It's normally cacophonic in here a" "

"Caco a" what?" Hannah whined. "Miss Kezzy, do you mean we have to suck more c.o.c.ks?"

Kezzy looked fit to scream. "Zenas, if she says one more stupid thing...I want you to sodomize her with such vigor that her a.s.shole turns inside-out."

"Wal, naow, thet wurn't be no problem at all."

I grabbed Hannah tight by the collar. "Just shut up..."

"When I say cacophonic I mean noisy," Kezzy said through her mask. "We quell such bothersome noise a"known as The Cauterwaulinga"with a Spell of Muteness. I will remove that spell for a moment, just so you girls get the idea. Prepare yourselves," and then Kezzy yelled, "In nomen of Yog-Sothoth, ego levo vestri mutus!" and in that split second, me and Hannah fell to our knees screaming. Suddenly the stone room was full of a sound like a waterfall in h.e.l.l. Things were howling, moaning, wailing. High-pitched and low-pitched mewls that couldn't be human and couldn't be from any animal I'd ever heard of. Even when we covered our ears, that barely cut the sound. I was crying it was so awful, but when I looked up at Kezzy and Zenas, they were both smiling at us.