I was almost there.
I squinted when the sunlight hit the mouth of the hole. I hadn’t hauled my body out yet. But the tunnel was so dark that my eyes were having a hard time adjusting to even the smallest amount of light.
When I was only halfway out, I dropped onto my stomach with my eyes still closed, the black dirt pressing against my cheek. Exu was calling loudly, probably angry that I was taking a break. At least that’s what I thought.
I opened my eyes to see the sun glinting off a pair of black-laced boots. Then the bottom of a matching wool robe came into focus.
Great.
I raised my head slowly, prepared to see a Keeper towering over me. My heart began to pound.
It looked like a man—in a way. If you ignored the fact that he was completely bald, with impossibly smooth grayish-black skin and enormous eyes. The black robe was tied at the waist with a long cord, and he—if you could call it a he—looked like some kind of miserable alien monk.
“Did you lose something?” he asked. The voice sounded so much like a man’s. Like an old man, sort of sad or maybe kind. It was hard to reconcile the human features and voice with the rest of what I was staring at.
I pulled against the rock opening, yanking my legs out from the tunnel, trying to avoid bumping into whatever he was. “I—I’m trying to find the way to the Far Keep,” I stammered. I tried to remember what Obidias had said. What was I looking for? Doors? Gates? That was it. “I mean, the Gates of the Far Keep.” I got to my feet and tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go.
“Really?” He looked interested. Or maybe sick. Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was really even a face I was looking at, so it was hard to tell what the expression meant.
“That’s right.” I tried to sound confident. When I stood tall, I was almost his height, which was reassuring.
“Are the Keepers expecting you?” His strange, dull eyes slitted.
“Yes,” I lied.
He turned abruptly on his heel to go, his robe swinging after him.
Wrong answer.
“No,” I called out. “And they’ll torture me if they find me. At least that’s what everyone seems to think. But there’s this girl—it was all a mistake—I’m not supposed to be here—and then the lubbers came, and the Order broke, and I had to jump.” My words died out, once I realized how crazy I sounded. There was no point trying to explain. It barely made sense even to me.
The creature stopped, tilting his head to the side, as if he was considering my words. Me. “Well, you’ve found them.”
“What?”
“The Gates of the Far Keep.”
I looked past him. There was nothing around but shiny black rock and clear blue sky. Maybe he was crazy. “Um, I don’t see anything but mountains.”
He turned and pointed. “There.”
The sleeve of his robe slid down, and I caught a glimpse of an extra fold of skin flapping away from his body and disappearing under the robe.
It looked like the wing of a giant bat.
I remembered the crazy story Link told me over the summer. Macon had sent him into the Caster Tunnels to deliver a message to Obidias Trueblood. That much I’d already put together. But there was another part, about how Link was attacked by some kind of creature he ended up stabbing with his garden shears—it was grayish black and bald, with the features of a man, and deformed black bands of skin that Link was convinced were wings. “Seriously,” I remembered him saying. “You don’t want to face that thing in an alley at night.”
I knew it couldn’t be the same creature, because Link said the monster he saw had yellow eyes. And the one standing here was staring back at me with green eyes—almost Caster green. Then there was the other thing. The whole gardening-shears-to-the-chest thing.
This couldn’t be him.
Green eyes. Not gold. I didn’t need to be afraid, right? He couldn’t be Dark, could he?
Still, it wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before—and I had seen more than my share.
The creature turned around, lowering his arm that wasn’t an arm. “Do you see them?”
“What?” The wings? I was still trying to figure out what he was—or wasn’t.
“The Gates.” He seemed disappointed by my stupidity. I guess I’d be disappointed, too, if I were him. I was feeling pretty stupid myself.
I searched in the direction he had pointed a moment ago. There was nothing there. “I don’t see anything.”
A satisfied smile spread across his face, as if he had a secret. “Of course you don’t. Only the Gatekeeper can see them.”
“Where’s the—” I stopped, realizing I didn’t need to ask the question. I already knew the answer. “You’re the Gatekeeper.” There was a River Master and a Gatekeeper. Of course there was. There was also a snake man, a whiskey-drinking crow that could fly from the land of the living to the land of the dead, a river full of bodies, and a dragon dog. It was like waking up in the middle of a game of Dungeons & Dragons.
“The Gatekeeper.” The creature nodded, obviously pleased with himself. “I am that, among other things.”
I tried not to fixate on the word thing. But as I looked at his charcoal-colored skin and thought about those awful wings, I couldn’t stop imagining him as some terrifying cross between a person and a bat.
A real-life Batman, sort of.
Only not the kind who saves anyone. Maybe the reverse.
What if this thing doesn’t want to let me in?
I took a deep breath. “Look, I know it’s crazy. I left crazy behind about a year ago. But there’s something I need in there. And if I don’t get it, I won’t be able to go home. Is there any way you can show me where the Gates are?”
“Of course.”
I heard the words before I saw his face. And I smiled, until I realized I was the only one smiling.
The creature frowned, his huge eyes narrowing. He put his hands together in front of his chest, tapping his crooked fingertips. “But why would I do that?”
Exu shrieked in the distance.
I looked up to see the massive black shape circling above our heads, as if he was prepared to swoop down and attack.
Wordlessly, without looking up, the creature held up his hand.
Exu descended and landed on the Gatekeeper’s fist, nuzzling his arm as if reunited with an old friend.
Maybe not.
The Gatekeeper looked even more frightening with Exu at his side. It was time to face facts. The creature was right. He had no reason to help me.
Then the bird squawked, almost sympathetically. The creature made a low, throaty sound—almost a chuckle—and raised a hand to smooth the bird’s feathers. “You are lucky. The bird is a good judge of character.”
“Yeah? What does the bird say about me?”
“He says—slow on the switchbacks, cheap with the whiskey, but a good heart. For a dead man.”
I grinned. Maybe that old crow wasn’t so bad.
Exu squawked again.
“I can show you the Gates, boy.”
“Ethan.”
“Ethan.” He hesitated, repeating my name slowly. “But you have to give me something in return.”
I was almost afraid to ask. “What do you want?” Obidias had mentioned that the Gatekeeper would expect some kind of gift, but I hadn’t really put much thought into it.
He looked at me thoughtfully, considering the question. “Trade is a serious matter. Balance is a key principle within the Order of Things.”
“The Order of Things? I thought we didn’t have to worry about that anymore.”
“There is always Order. Now more than ever, the New Order must be carefully maintained.”
I didn’t understand the details, but I understood the importance. Wasn’t that how I got into this mess in the first place?
He kept talking. “You say you need something to take you home? The thing you desire most? I say, what brought you here? That is what I desire most.”
“Great.” It sounded simple, but he might as well have been speaking in riddles or randomly written Mad Libs.
“What do you have?” His eyes glinted greedily.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and pulled out the one remaining river stone and Aunt Prue’s map. The whiskey and the tobacco—Exu’s stash—were long gone.
The Gatekeeper lifted his hairless brows. “A rock and an old map? Is that all?”
“That’s what brought me here.” I pointed at Exu, still perched on his shoulder. “And a bird.”
“A rock and a crow. That is difficult to pass up. But I already have both of those things in my collection.”
Exu pushed off from his shoulder and flew back up into the sky, like he was offended. Within seconds the crow disappeared.
“And now you have no bird,” the Gatekeeper said matter-of-factly.
“I don’t understand. Is there something specific you want?” I tried to hide the frustration in my voice.
The Gatekeeper seemed delighted by the question. “Specific, yes. Specifically, a fair trade is what I prefer.”
“Could you be a little more specific than that?”
He tilted his head. “I don’t always know what will interest me until I see it. The things that are the most valuable are often the ones you don’t even know exist.”
That was helpful.
“How am I supposed to know what you have already?”
His eyes lit up. “I can show you my collection if you would like to see it. There isn’t another one like it anywhere in the Otherworld.”
What could I say? “Yeah. That would be great.”
As I followed him along the sharp black stones, I could hear Link’s voice in my head. “Bad move, man. He’s gonna kill you, stuff you, and add you to his collection of idiots who followed him back to his creepy cave.”
This was one time I was probably safer dead than alive.
How fair and balanced was that?
The Gatekeeper slid through a narrow crack in the wall of slick black stone. It was bigger than the hole, but not by much. I moved along sideways because there wasn’t enough room to turn around.
I knew this could be some kind of trap. Link had described the creature he encountered as an animal—dangerous and crazed. What if the Gatekeeper was no different, just better at hiding it? Where was that stupid crow when I needed him?
“We’re almost there,” he called back to me.
I could see a faint light ahead, flickering in the distance.
His shadow passed in front of it, momentarily darkening the passage as the narrow space opened into a cavernous room. Wax dripped from an iron chandelier bolted directly into the glossy stone ceiling. The walls sparkled in the candlelight.
If I hadn’t just crawled through a whole mountain of the stuff, I might have been more impressed. As it was, the closeness of the cavern walls just made my skin crawl.
But when I glanced around, I realized this place was more like a museum—with an even crazier collection than what you’d find if you dug up the Sisters’ whole backyard. Glass cases and shelves lined the walls, filled with hundreds of objects. It was the randomness of the collection that intrigued me, like a child had done not only the collecting but the cataloging. Intricately carved silver and gold jewelry boxes sat next to a collection of cheap children’s music boxes. Shiny black vinyl records were piled in towering stacks next to one of those old-fashioned record players with a funnel speaker, like the one the Sisters used to have. A Raggedy Ann doll curled in a rocking chair, a huge green jewel the size of an apple resting in her lap. And on a center shelf, I saw an opalescent sphere similar to the one I had carried in my hand the past summer.