They stopped before an unassuming door tucked away down a dead-end corridor beneath a burned-out lightbulb. The shadows seemed thicker there. “I’ve never been through here,” Diana said. “I never even noticed this door before.”

  “I think there’s something about the door that makes it hard to notice. I walked past it twice the first time I came down here before I realized it was the one I wanted.” Ruby’s lockpicks were in Diana’s purse, and she took them out and got to work. After a few moments, the door clicked open, and they slipped inside. The hall on the other side was dark, but Ruby was prepared for that, too: there was a small flashlight tucked away in Diana’s purse as well. She clicked it on, then said, “Lock that door behind us. I’m sure the warden has keys, but slowing her down can’t hurt.”

  That done, they moved along the hallway, which had a pronounced downward slant. “Sanford’s vault is here?” Diana whispered. She wasn’t sure why she whispered, but this didn’t seem like a place for raised voices.

  “There are some storage rooms, including the one we want, and then, yes, there’s basically a bank vault.”

  “What did you steal last time you were here?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Ruby said. “But my client… he paid me, fair and square, but he said it was crucial that Sanford never find out who he was, and he beckoned me over and told me to look at this page in a book, and there was this… sort of drawing, or writing, or maybe both… and the next thing I knew, it was two hours later, I was sitting in my apartment with a half-empty glass of whiskey in front of me, and there were pieces of my memory just cut away.”

  The flashlight beam played across the floor. “I couldn’t tell you what my client looked like or where we met, and I don’t remember what I was sent to steal, either. I can remember everything else, sneaking in, cracking the vault, but there’s just this blur when I try to focus on my target.” She sighed. “That’s when I started to believe that all this nonsense about magic might be true.”

  “I wish I could cut out a few of my memories,” Diana murmured. The dreams were bad. The occasional flashes of that horrible night of sacrifice that seemed to superimpose themselves on the world in her waking hours were even worse.

  “You say that, but you’re wrong.” Ruby’s voice was flat. “It’s not a pleasant sensation. Come on. Not much farther now.” She opened a wooden door, and groped around on the wall past it. “There’s a light switch somewhere… here.” There was a click, and then a bulb on the ceiling flickered a few times before settling down to emit a weak, yellowish light. It revealed a long hallway, with open doors on either side, and a huge, closed metal door at the end, complete with a large round handle in the center, just like a bank vault.

  “Not today, old friend,” Ruby said, apparently to the vault. “Maybe another time. Here, we want the second door on the left, assuming Sanford hasn’t done any rearranging.”

  Ruby took a step forward, but Diana said, “Wait. Do you smell something?”

  The thief sniffed. “Yeah, it’s a bit like… rotten fish? But also kind of burned, and there’s something chemical there, too.” She looked down at the floor, and whistled. Diana looked down, and for the first time noticed the bare boards smeared with a shimmering grayish substance, like snail trails. Ruby wrinkled her nose. “Looks like you have a slug problem. Big slugs.”

  Diana breathed in, and the scent filled her nostrils, and a whirl of memories spun in her head: a black stone, robed figures, a terrified man bound in ropes, chanting – she groaned. “Ruby. We have to leave.”

  “What? We’re almost done.”

  Panic rose up in Diana like an animal trying to crawl out of her stomach through her throat. She seized the younger woman’s arm. “We have to go now.” Ruby turned to face her, frowning.

  And then the horrible thing Sanford had summoned in the circle came oozing out of a doorway on the right.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Guardian and the Scholar

  Diana was losing her nerve, which Ruby hadn’t expected – she’d been quite impressed with the woman’s performance so far. The reformed cultist had played her role beautifully, brazened right past the warden and Sanford’s assistant, and kept her nerve all the way down to the hidden parts of the Lodge. Why was she panicking now, when they were moments away from finishing their task? God, the expression on her face, Diana was terrified–

  “Look,” Diana whimpered, pointing down the hall. Ruby turned, and looked, and then flattened herself against the wall and started whimpering herself.

  There was a thing in the hallway, filling the corridor from side to side: a greenish-black, amorphous, oozing creature. Ruby’s first thought was that it resembled a tumor, but tumors didn’t have waving tendrils, gaping mouths, and eyes that bubbled up to the surface and then submerged again, like bits of meat in a boiling stew. The stench was stronger now as the thing squelched toward them, and a high-pitched, horrible sound emerged from its many mouths, sounding almost like words – “teck-ah-lee-lee, teck-ah-lee-lee!”

  Ruby’s mind froze. She’d known there were horrors in the world, but she’d never imagined anything like this, a fetid mass of malleable flesh full of grasping whiplike appendages and horrible wet mouths that spoke. “That – there was nothing like this here last time,” she managed to choke out.

  “Sanford brought it here. Summoned it. To be a guardian. To make sure no one could break into the vault again. I… I was…” To Ruby’s surprise, Diana stepped past her, holding up the gun, and advanced on the thing. Shooting it would be pointless, like shooting into a bubbling pit of tar, but maybe the noise would scare the monster away? As if anything could scare that, a nightmare brought to life!

  “Diana, we have to run, if it’s a guardian maybe it won’t chase us, maybe we can get away–”

  Diana took another step forward. “This foul thing… I helped bring it to life, or set it free, I don’t know, but… I have to destroy it. I have to try.”

  Ruby grabbed Diana’s shoulder. “Look. It’s moving away from you.” It was true – as Diana stepped forward, the leading edge of the thing receded, like lapping waves on the shore. Ruby had a flash of inspiration and backed away. “Diana, I think it recognizes you, or knows you’re part of the Order – look! When you approach it withdraws!”

  Diana cast a doubtful glance at Ruby, then took another step forward, and the monster pulled back further, piling up on either side of the hall, parting before her like a fetid sea. “It only wants me,” Ruby said. “You can go past and reach the storage room. It’s the second door on the right, the jar is on a shelf about halfway up the wall, you can’t miss it. I’ll… I’ll find my own way outside and meet you on the street.”

  “Ruby!” Diana said, but she was already on her way, darting for the door. Diana shouted in alarm, and Ruby risked a look back. Diana was blocking the hall, but the guardian didn’t give up its pursuit of Ruby: the oozing monster was going around her, crawling up the wall and onto the ceiling, clinging to the surfaces as it slid and lurched after the interloper.

  This was no good. Ruby wished she’d taken the gun – maybe it wouldn’t have hurt the monster, but it would have improved her morale, at least. “Teck-ah-lee-lee, teck-ah-lee-lee!” the thing squeaked behind her. Ruby made it to the door and unbolted it. Maybe the monster wouldn’t follow her far – if it was guardian of the vault, perhaps chasing her away was enough?

  She flung open the door and pelted out into the corridor… and the thing kept coming, making its horrible, keening chatter. How far would the creature go? Would it chase her through the house, into the street, out of Arkham, into Boston? How could she stop it?

  Then Ruby remembered: The Threshold of Salt. Diana said that glittering strip across the floor was a magical barrier, made to stop “experiments” from escaping. If Ruby could make it to that door, it might stop the guardian, and then she could get out of the Lodge, make her way to freedom–

  Ruby rounded a corner and slammed straight into Sarah Van Shaw, sending the warden sprawling. Ruby lost her footing but didn’t slow down, just scrambled ahead, climbing over the warden, driving her knees into Van Shaw’s abdomen as she went.

  The warden snarled at her and seized her ankle before Ruby could get away, her encircling fingers as hard as ancient tree roots. Ruby looked back and kicked, driving the heel of her shoe into the top of Van Shaw’s head, wishing she was wearing stiletto heels.

  The warden just grabbed tighter, and then the guardian came around the corridor and flowed up the wall and onto the ceiling. It hung suspended above them both, eyes and mouths drifting across its gelatinous form, and then it reached down with a dozen thickening tendrils.

  Ruby knew, she knew, that if that thing touched her, she would go mad – her mind would break like a cracked dam, and gibbering darkness would come rushing through. She’d been afraid before – of being caught in an act of burglary, of violent men, of being betrayed and turned into the police – but this was a whole different order of fear. This was the fear early humans had felt when a ravenous bear came shambling from the depths of a cave where they’d sought shelter. This was a fear of being consumed.

  “The shoggoth,” Van Shaw said, something like awe in her voice, and Ruby took advantage of her distraction to kick again, as hard as she could, and this time the warden’s grip loosened, and Ruby got free.

  She wasn’t fast enough, though. The creature – the shoggoth? – flowed across the ceiling and then oozed down to the ground, blocking the hallway ahead of her. The Threshold of Salt was in view, past the guardian, but Ruby couldn’t reach it – she didn’t dare try to jump over the thing. If she missed, it would be like landing in a carnivorous bog.

  Van Shaw groaned behind her, and Ruby swore and turned. She ran back the way she’d come, vaulting over the warden’s supine form.

  Where to go now? There was no point retracing her steps – that would just dead-end her at the vault. Ruby turned right where she’d only turned left before, and faced an unknown set of passageways, more bare plaster and wooden boards. She’d gotten directions to the vault when she first invaded the Lodge, but the rest of this place was mysterious to her. That could even work in her favor – if she didn’t know where she was going, no one could predict her destination, and maybe she could throw off the pursuit by taking random turns. This was the secret basement of a secret society, after all – surely there were more hidden passages, and more importantly, hidden exits?

  Whenever she reached an intersecting hallway, she chose a direction at random, winding her way ever deeper into the warren of the Lodge basement, racing past numerous closed doors. How could this space be so vast? The basement must honeycomb the entirety of French Hill! Or maybe space didn’t work down here the way it did in other places. She’d heard a story from another thief about breaking into an occultist’s mansion and finding a ballroom on the ground floor that didn’t have a ceiling – instead it had an open sky full of stars he described as “festering”. She’d assumed it was exaggeration, or hallucination, or both, but now… she wasn’t so sure.

  Ruby needed an exit, or at least a solid door she could put between herself and the shoggoth. She focused on the necessity of escape, using her fear as fuel to make her run faster.

  She pelted around another corner, then stopped short and turned back. Something had snagged her attention back there – something that seemed wrong…

  Ruby stepped toward an alcove shrouded in thick shadows. Having seen through a similar illusion twice before, it seemed her senses were growing more adept at noticing such trickery. There was a door there, hidden in the dark, once she stopped to look for it. The door was marked with a peculiar sigil, seemingly daubed on in charcoal: a triangle or cone shape with sprouting tendrils arcing off from the top. Maybe there was another mystic threshold here that would keep the shoggoth at bay.

  The door was locked, of course, but the locks down here were old – most of the security in this place was based on obscurity and the overall defenses of the Lodge above, not physical barriers. Ruby made short work of the lock with her picks, then eased open the door. There was nothing special about the floor beneath it, no sparkle of crystals in a strip on the floor, which was disappointing. The door only opened on another corridor that right-angle turned out of sight. Oh well. Putting a locked door between her and the vault guardian was a good thing, anyway.

  Her mind supplied an image of the protoplasmic monster simply oozing beneath the crack under the door, and she shoved the idea aside.

  Ruby re-locked the door and walked down the hallway, paneled in dark wood and floored with tile, an upgrade from the utilitarian passageways she’d seen so far. There were no doors lining this corridor, but there were symbols painted on the walls in black and silver and yellow paint, and the dark brownish-red of blood. The designs were doubtless mystical in nature, but they didn’t make her brains boil or her legs weak or her vision go blurry – whatever they were supposed to do, they weren’t supposed to do it to her, apparently.

  Ruby turned another corner and came upon a peculiar sight in the middle of the passageway: a straight-backed wooden chair. The chair sat facing a heavy wooden door festooned with chains, with an iron grille set about head high. The passage continued beyond the chair, the walls similarly etched with symbols.

  Ruby was about to go around the chair and continue on her way, wanting nothing to do with anything Sanford felt compelled to lock up so thoroughly. Then a woman’s mild voice emerged from the cell: “Have you come to pry further secrets from me, Sanford?”

  “Hello?” Ruby paused behind the chair, ready to take flight in an instant.

  A face swam into view beyond the grille. The cell was so dim Ruby could only make out a pale face framed by locks of gray hair. There was something around the woman’s neck, a heavy chain necklace, or… was it just a heavy chain?

  “Interesting,” the woman said. “Only Sanford comes here. He trusts no one else to speak to me. You are an intruder.”

  Ruby didn’t run. The warden had talked about locking Ruby up in a room – would she have ended up in a cell like this, eventually? “Are you a prisoner here?” she asked.

  “I am,” the woman replied.

  “I can try to let you out.” Ruby looked over the chains, but they weren’t held in place by padlocks or anything of the sort – they were welded into the iron doorframe, as if they were never meant to be loosened at all. She tugged at them, and the woman chuckled.

  “Even if you could remove the chains out there, and the chains in here, there is still the matter of the sigils on the walls, which bind me as well. Carl Sanford is a very thorough person.”

  Ruby tugged on a chain one last time, then let it fall with a rattle. “How long have you been here?”

  “For over a year now. Ever since Sanford discovered my… true nature and had me abducted from my office at the university.” She sounded amused.

  Ruby wasn’t shocked that Sanford had abducted someone and locked them away under here – nothing would shock her, coming from him, except maybe a selfless act of pure generosity – but she was curious about why. “Your true nature?”

  The woman cocked her head. “I assumed you came because you, too, wished to question me, and gain my knowledge. But if you are ignorant of my true nature… I was being self-centered. Solipsism is a danger when one spends so much time alone. You have come upon my cell by accident, then. I am curious – why are you down here, in this secret place, all alone?”

  Ruby found something about the woman’s manner oddly calming, and there seemed no harm in telling a prisoner the truth. “I broke into the Lodge to steal something from Sanford’s vault. I ran into some kind of… monstrous guardian, a thing like a bubbling blob of tar, but full of mouths.”

  “Sanford has acquired a shoggoth?” The woman went hmm. “The only ones extant on this plane are in Antarctica. Sanford would have questioned me first if he’d planned an expedition to that lost city, so I know he didn’t go in person. He must have used a ritual of transposition, and swapped some unlucky follower of his with the shoggoth you met. I’m sure it’s quite a young specimen, if it fell prey to such a stratagem and allowed itself to be bound. I wasn’t aware the creatures were still reproducing, though there’s no reason they shouldn’t bud occasionally, even with the cold temperatures slowing them down. How interesting. I have learned something new. Thank you. Lately it seems I only dispense knowledge.”

  “Who are you?” Ruby said. “How do you know about shoggoths and things?”

  The woman clucked her tongue. “What did I say about my boredom with dispensing knowledge? But, since you were kind enough to wish to rescue me, I will return the kindness. I don’t mind sharing what I know, when I am not compelled to do so under threat of torture.”

  The woman straightened, taking on a dignity at odds with her situation. “I am a scholar of the Yith. I came to this place, to this body, to look up certain volumes in the university library, in order to fill in a few small gaps in the understanding of my people – just minor details. I found enough of interest to occupy me for some months, however, and apparently my behavior differed sufficiently from that of my host… I see your confusion. By ‘host’ I mean the owner of this body I have borrowed. Carl Sanford heard rumors of my odd behavior, and suspected I might be a member of the Great Race. Most humans don’t know about us, but Sanford has wide-ranging interests. He took advantage of this frail body and abducted me, which any brute can do, but he also found mystical means to trap my mind, so I cannot return home to the library. Since I cannot return, the owner of this body is trapped too – she is in a borrowed body in my home, and is just as trapped as I am. I pointed this out to Sanford, but he has little fellow feeling for other humans, it seems.”

  “You’re… not human? You’re from another planet? An alien?” She thought of the Martians from the War of the Worlds, with their tentacles and beaklike mouths, and felt her gorge rise. What was worse, aliens that looked like aliens, or ones that could pass for human? She decided they were equally horrible in different ways.