Chapter 36

People stream past them into the hallway, chattering explosively, some of them still coughing a bit. Todd Burns leads the new admits out—“Professor Maynard will be along in a second”—and receives glares from a number of people. Charles turns to look for Piper, but then Julian starts striding in the opposite direction from the others. Or from all but one of the others.

“Rachel!” he calls out. She’s hurrying away, backpack clenched in one fist like she didn’t want to stop even just long enough to sling it onto her back. “Rachel!”

She turns over her shoulder, slowing but not stopping. Her face is pale, her expression frightened.

“It’s okay,” Julian says, holding out his hands as he walks quickly but non-threateningly towards her. “Remember us? I’m Julian and this is Charles. We’re the ones who’ve been looking for Lu Fairchild.”

Rachel hesitates. She glances up the hallway, towards the retreating backs of people headed for lunch. “Have you—have you found anything out?” she asks, voice low and wary.

“We’re working on it,” Julian says. “Listen, Rachel—what happened back there?”

Her guard immediately goes back up. “I don’t know.”

“Did you see who threw the smoke bomb?”

She says nothing.

“Why would they do it?”

“This department’s pretty messed up,” she says tightly. “It could have been any of them. They bugged each other’s offices, remember?”

“But this is something a little different,” Julian says quietly. “Isn’t it?”

Rachel looks away. Charles looks sharply at Julian, caught by something in his tone.

“I have to go,” Rachel says, but before she can finish, Julian pulls a piece of paper out of his bag.

“Do you know what this is?”

Charles looks. It’s the printout of Lu’s fic with the dancing men messages decoded.

Rachel falls silent. She blinks at the paper several times, then looks up at Julian and nods.

He exhales. “And do you know what these messages say?”

“Yes,” she whispers. Then, urgently, but keeping her voice down, she says, “Is it true? Is she really still—is she okay? Is she going to come back soon?”

“What does “still working” mean, Rachel?” Julian asks. His gaze is intent. “What is she helping you with?”

Slowly, Rachel shakes her head.

“What did you ask her to do for you,” Julian says, “before she disappeared?”

Rachel’s mouth trembles. She looks, Charles thinks, very frightened.

“I can’t,” she says, barely audible. She shakes her head violently. “I can’t. I—I—”

“It’s okay,” Charles intercedes—whether to reassure her or stop her from leaving, he couldn’t say. She’s shaking, glancing around and behind her like she’s planning an escape route. “It’s okay. It’s just—here’s the thing. We just found something out about this fic.” He sneaks a quick look at Julian, who hesitates and then gives a little nod. “We found out that this fic was posted from a computer on campus.”

“Lu’s still on campus?” Rachel blurts this out, loudly, the words echoing through the hall.

Julian motions for her to keep her voice down. “We’re not sure. Do you think there’s any way someone other than her could have posted this fic?”

Rachel swallows and shakes her head. “She gave me the key to the dancing men code before she left. I mean, I didn’t know she was going to leave. She just gave it to me and told me not to show anyone else but keep it in case I needed it and I haven’t told anyone about it so—I guess maybe if she’d sent the fic to someone else they could have posted it for her, but—”

Julian nods. Charles’ heart has rocketed up to his mouth. It was Lu. She posted it. She’s here, or at least she was a few days ago. Julian starts to say something else, but then his eyes flicker up the hall, behind Rachel. Charles follows his gaze.

Christopher Maynard is standing outside the open house room, watching them. When he catches Julian and Charles’ gaze, he turns and walks rapidly away.

“Rachel,” Julian says, low and urgent, “if Lu were still on campus, hiding somewhere, where would she be?”

For a moment, Rachel looks helplessly baffled. Then something changes in her face. She says, voice sure and solid, “In the walls.”

“This used to be the arts building,” Rachel says, leading them down a wide hallway and off into another, narrower corridor, then another. “Forty or so years ago. There was a theatre that they turned into a big lecture hall. I took a Feminist Fiction class there. Lu was my TA. That’s how I got to know her. We read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ You know, the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story, about the woman who’s diagnosed with hysteria and her doctor husband locks her in her bedroom?”

“I know it,” says Charles. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears. “She starts seeing a woman in the wallpaper. Creeping around.”

“Yes,” says Rachel. “In the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. Lu read us this passage from it. I memorized it.” She takes a breath, then recites, “‘The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.’”

“A woman in the walls,” Julian murmurs.

“Yes,” says Rachel again, and then opens a narrow door at the end of the hall. To Charles’ surprise there is a concrete stairwell behind it.

“This building’s a mess.” Rachel beckons them into the stairwell. “There are like five different staircases and a lot of them skip floors—like, this one, you can’t get to the first floor from it, it just goes from the basement straight to the second floor, and then up again from here.” The door shuts behind them. She leads them up another flight of stairs, three narrow switchbacks and then an unlabeled door, and more stairs stretching above them. “Sometimes this one’s locked, but usually they don’t bother…” She tries the door. It swings open.

“This is the third floor,” she says, peering out. “The religion and philosophy departments are up here. And some shitty classrooms with chalkboards instead of whiteboards.”

They emerge into a silent hallway, with stone floors and diamond-paned windows like the floor below, but shabbier and emptier. Rachel hurries them past closed classroom doors and a student seated on the floor, headphones in and backpack resting against the wall.

“So because there was a theatre in this building,” she says in a low voice, “actually more than one I think, there were all these little rooms and hallways—backstage areas, you know, costume storage and dressing rooms and tunnels to get under the stage and stuff. And places to store instruments and building materials. And when the arts departments got a new building and they moved humanities here, I guess they didn’t bother to like…completely redo everything. They just shut up the entrances to the weird backstage areas and storage rooms and stuff. I guess we’re probably not supposed to go back there, but there are a couple places to get in and it’s sort of a tradition for the senior English majors to take the new majors there their first Halloween, light candles and read Edgar Allen Poe and stuff.” She takes a breath. Now that she’s on a mission, she’s stopped shaking. She glances around, then opens the door to a supply closet. Charles and Julian peer inside. Rachel pushes aside the mops and buckets to reveal, in one of the walls, a half-sized door, like something that might lead to a crawlspace.

“Rachel,” Julian says softly as she reaches toward the brown-painted knob. “Let me go first.”

She hesitates, then steps aside. Julian ducks down. With a squeak of old metal, the knob turns. He has to give the door a few good tugs to free the warped wood from the frame. When it swings open, Charles smells a rush of cold stale air, thick with dust.

“How hard is it to navigate back here?” Julian asks, peering into the darkness.

Rachel bites her lip. “It’s pretty confusing,” she admits. “There are a lot of dead ends, and in a couple places it connects up to a stairwell. If you don’t have it memorized, it’s easy to get lost.”

Julian considers. His eyes flick to Charles’ for a moment. Charles can tell he is itching to enter, to get on the move. “Are you comfortable going in with us?” he asks Rachel.

Fear flares in her eyes for a moment. Then she looks at the open door and the darkness beyond. Charles can guess what she is thinking, because he is thinking it too, every muscle and bone and vein of his body vibrating with it: Lu could be in there.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I’ll go.”

“Thank you,” says Julian, holding her gaze, and then ducks down and steps through the door.

Inside, the ceiling is high enough that they can just barely stand without hitting their heads. The hallway—or tunnel, Charles isn’t sure which is more accurate—is narrow enough that they need to walk one by one. Its walls are cheap exposed wood, flat thick boards stamped here and there with numbers and letters, screwed into sturdier two-by-fours every several feet. Sawdust covers the floor and spiderwebs hang in the corners. Above, there’s a single bare bulb with a chain hanging down. “Try it,” Rachel whispers, and Julian does. The light flickers on.

“If you just go straight for a bit,” she says, “you’ll get to one of the main passageways.”

Their footsteps are muffled by the dust and low ceilings. Charles strains his ears for any sound.

After a minute or so, they duck through an open doorframe and emerge into a room about the size of two professor’s offices stuck together. A couple of folding chairs are stacked against the wall, their seats cracked through. In one corner, there’s a dusty cardboard box. Rachel crouches down and opens it up.

“We use these when we take the freshmen down here,” she says, and hands them each a penlight. “More atmospheric than phone lights. Try them, make sure they still work. They’re, like, ten years old I think.”

Charles clicks his on. A weak circle of light appears on the opposite wall. At its periphery, Julian looks strange and dark, a figure mostly in shadow. He turns his on, too, and the same thing happens to Charles.

“Come on,” says Rachel. She’s keeping her voice low, though there’s no sign yet that anyone else is here. “There’s more this way.”

Cramped passages, boxy rooms; bits of scrap wood, battered cardboard, empty light sockets; spiderwebs and a thick coating of dust. There are places it’s clear that no one was really meant to use as passageways, narrow gaps in the backstage warren made by torn-down boards or dusty curtains.

“Listen,” Julian whispers, suddenly stopping. Footsteps, from somewhere nearby; the sound of a voice or maybe two.

Rachel shakes her head. “We’re close to the hallway. That’s just people going to class.”

Charles’ heart takes a minute to slow down. He’s just started to feel the creeping in of doubt, disappointment lurking hard on its heels, when they hear something else, something closer and louder.

“No,” says a voice, somewhere, somewhere on the other side of a thin plywood wall, or maybe the floor, or the ceiling? “No—”

Feet scuffling. A bang, a thud: silence.

“I’d advise you,” somebody says, words coming through clearly even in the hushed, dust-choked air, “not to move.”