Theo fell silent, as if he had only just noticed Dante’s presence in the room. He eyed him as if he were a wild animal and backed away. “The Cartesian Map,” he repeated. He held up the open chest and pointed to the underside of the lid, where I could just make out the five points etched into the shape of a canary. “Do you have any idea what this means?”
Cartesian? As in René Descartes, the philosopher who first wrote about the existence of the Undead? I had read his Seventh Meditation two years ago after finding it in my grandfather’s mansion, but I had never heard of a map. I gazed at the chest in Theo’s hands, as if seeing it for the first time. The five points in the shape of a canary suddenly made sense. The elaborate tangle of lines etched around each of the points had always vaguely looked like a landscape: a twist of etchings that looked like three rivers braiding together; a collection of straight lines that almost looked like a forest; a series of triangles that mimicked the jagged peaks of mountains. How could we not have realized?
“How do you know so much about this chest?” Dante asked in a voice so steady that it was frightening.
Theo took a step back. “Just stumbled across it in my studies.”
“Oh?” Dante said. “Is that why you felt you had the right to go through our things?”
“It’s not yours either. You only found it,” Theo said, though his voice didn’t have the same confidence it normally did. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s still up for grabs. And this is my house, you know. I received a letter from Monsieur, too.”
Dante’s face hardened. He walked toward him, saying nothing, and placed his hands on the chest. Theo glanced at Anya’s small shovel leaning against her bag on the opposite side of the room, as if the only way he knew how to deal with the Undead was with a weapon between them. It was too far away now. Dante’s cold hand brushed his, making him flinch. Theo shrank in his shadow and let go.
A look of relief passed over Dante’s face as he felt the weight of the chest in his hands. He stepped forward, pushing Theo back into the hallway. When he was out of the room, Dante shut the door.
“And who are you?” Dante said, gazing at Anya curiously.
“Anya,” she said. “I received a letter from Monsieur, too. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Dante looked to me, as if to ask if she were okay. I nodded, and Anya stepped toward him, studying his face. “You’re the first Undead I’ve met up close.” She squinted at something I couldn’t see. “Renée was right about you. You have a complex aura.”
I pressed my ear against the door, making sure Theo wasn’t listening, then turned to Dante. “What happened? I thought they found you. I thought...”
“They were close,” Dante said. “They split up the next morning. Half of them went south toward Massachusetts.”
My phone call, I thought.
“Still, your grandfather was on my trail for days. If I hadn’t stumbled past the camp of the Liberum and their Undead boys, who distracted the Monitors, I never would have gotten ahead of him. We can’t stay here long,” Dante said. “The only way I could get away from the Monitors was to make sure that the Liberum saw me and followed me most of the way here. That way, if the Monitors caught up, they would first have to face the Undead. I lost them both early this morning, but they weren’t far behind. They’ll be able to find us. Your grandfather, he’s figured something out. He knows why you came to Gottfried in the first place, and that you found the secret of the Nine Sisters in the lake. I heard the other Monitors talking about what it could be before they turned back.” Dante paused, as if parsing what he was about to say. “They mentioned something called the Netherworld.”
“The Netherworld?”
“It’s some sort of underworld,” Anya said. “I’ve read about these things. A mythic place. A place you can’t get to by normal means.”
“Eternal life,” I murmured, echoing the promise of the Nine Sisters. “Maybe we’ll find it there.”
Dante looked like he was about to say something, but when he met my gaze, he stopped himself.
“There’s something else,” I said, studying him. “Tell me.”
“I was just worried about you,” he said, though he didn’t look me in the eye. Before I could ask him again, he reached into his coat pocket and removed a creased envelope. I immediately recognized the handwriting on the address. Monsieur.
Dear Mr. Berlin,
You don’t know me, but I know you. Should you ever need a place of refuge, you may find one in Pilgrim, Massachusetts. When you arrive, you will know where to go.
Sincerely,
Monsieur
“I received it a week ago, wedged in the door of one of the cabins we stayed in. No postage. I first assumed he was a Monitor, trying to trap me, but that didn’t make much sense. The only way he could have known where I was staying was to have followed me; if he wanted to bury me, he could have done it far earlier.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry. I never planned on coming here, but when the Monitors were upon us in the woods, I didn’t know what else to do. We needed a place of refuge. The letter was all I had left.”
I touched the signature, feeling the indentation of Monsieur’s pen on the paper. Why was he helping us?
“And this one is for you,” Dante said, handing me an envelope identical to all the others. Written across the front in Monsieur’s neat handwriting was my name. No postage or return address. “It was wedged in the door of the tavern when I arrived.”
“He was here?” I said. “Today?” I ran to the window and pulled back the curtains to search the street, even though I knew that I wouldn’t find him. The town was empty, the buildings lining the road dark.
“He could have left it hours ago,” Anya murmured behind me.
The letter felt heavier than the others. I ripped it open, wondering if my note was longer. To my surprise, an airplane ticket fluttered to the floor. Anya picked it up.
She gasped, her eyes widening. “Paris?”
My heart skipped. I glanced down at the envelope in my hand. There were three other tickets, each leaving the next morning for Charles de Gaulle Airport. I flipped through them, checking for an accompanying note, but none was included.
“Is this real?” I asked, not sure if I should be excited. Every time I glanced at Monsieur’s handwriting, a wave of apprehension passed over me. What did he know that we didn’t?
“If this really is a map,” Dante said, holding up the chest, “it’s possible that it starts in France. After all, René Descartes was French.”
“So were the Nine Sisters,” I added. “The entire Monitoring society began in France.” Suddenly, the tickets started to make sense. Everything in the Monitoring community went back to Europe; that much I remembered from school. But what would we do once we got there? Paris was a huge city. Even if the chest was a map, it was only comprised of five points in the vague shape of a bird, with no other physical markers. The points could be anywhere.
Anya interrupted my thoughts. “You know who else is French?” she said somberly. “Monsieur. And these tickets are only one-way.”
The room fell quiet, all of us realizing that the trip, the tickets—even the fact of our gathering there, in that creaky room in Massachusetts—had been orchestrated for reasons we didn’t understand, and by a person we weren’t certain we could trust.
I felt my pocket, where my passport sat. Anya must have had one with her, too, since she had come from Montreal just as I had two weeks before—but did Dante?
“Do you even have a passport with you?” I said.
Dante nodded at the side pocket of his bag. “I came to see you in Montreal, didn’t I?”
My shoulders relaxed with relief.
“I think we should go,” he continued. “What other option do we have? We can either go to Paris tomorrow and face whatever it is that’s waiting for us there, or we can stay here, and do nothing while our time runs out.”
&nbs
p; On the other side of the door, Theo cleared his throat, letting us know that he had been listening.
“We could ask him,” Anya whispered. “He might have an answer—”
“No way,” I said. “He’s a liar and a con man. Besides, this doesn’t involve him.”
“There are four tickets,” Anya countered. “One has his name on it.”
“And we don’t have any better ideas,” Dante added.
I turned to him in disbelief. He couldn’t be serious.
“The plane leaves tomorrow morning,” Dante said softly. “We don’t have much time.”
I let out an incredulous laugh. “We just caught him going through my things. If we hadn’t found him, he probably would have stolen the chest. I know he’s lying to us about who he is. He could be anyone. He could be wanted for murder—”
“He isn’t a complete stranger,” Anya said. “We’ve already stayed with him for three days, and nothing awful has happened yet.”
I looked to Dante for help, but he leaned against the windowsill. “He did know about the Cartesian Map.”
“What if he’s lying?” I couldn’t understand why they weren’t listening to me. “What if he has no idea? Or worse—what if he does, and is trying to take the chest from us?”
Dante considered my point, then said in a calm voice, “So what?”
I blinked. Had I heard him correctly?
“He already knows we have the chest. He knows where we’re heading. He could try to take it from us either way. I think it’s better to keep him close. Keep an eye on him.”
“I agree,” Anya said.
Dante studied me. His eyes begged me to say yes. To trust in things I didn’t understand or have any reason to trust—just like I had trusted him, just like he had trusted me. To walk into the future with him and face what was coming, because that was our only hope. “Okay.”
When Anya opened the door, Theo was leaning against the door frame, polishing a bit of wood with sandpaper. He quickly slipped it into his pocket.
Sandpaper, I thought, catching my breath. But before I could point it out, Dante spoke.
“Does Paris mean anything to you?” he said.
A mischievous smile spread across Theo’s face. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 4
The Magician
R ENÉ DESCARTES DIED on a frigid winter’s evening in 1650. Candles flickered in the chambers. He wasn’t at home; he no longer had a home. Instead, he found himself far from his birthplace, in the house of the French ambassador to Sweden. He tossed in the guest bed, sweating through the sheets, his body weak with pneumonia. The bustle of the staff—pots clinking in the kitchen, the footsteps of the maids on the stairwell—was absent. They knew what was about to happen. But he didn’t look frightened; not of dying.
His thin hair was matted to his forehead. He coughed: a spatter of blood. Someone stepped forth from the shadows. A French nursemaid leaned in to blot his temples with a damp washcloth. While she was close, he uttered something in her ear.
“Quoi?” she whispered.
He coughed again. She pressed a handkerchief to his mouth, patting it dry.
“What, to you, is a second soul worth?” he repeated in French, his breath sour.
The nurse hovered over him. “Je ne comprends pas,” she said.
He blinked, his gaze trained on the ceiling. He was nearly blind, nearly deaf; his mouth was so parched he could barely speak. He had been traveling for months, but to where, no one knew. A farmer had discovered him weeks prior, wandering the French countryside, lost, confused, and speaking in tongues. When the French authorities realized who he was, they turned Descartes over to his friend, the French ambassador to Sweden, who whisked him away to his guesthouse in Stockholm, where Descartes could recover in peace. But his illness was persistent, and mysteriously untreatable. A strange lifelessness had overtaken him.
“An early death, a wombless rebirth?” he continued, his voice weak.
The nurse set down her rag and reached for the ink and paper on his bedside. “Que voulez-vous dire?”
He wheezed, his chest heavy beneath the sheets.
“The way follows the soul’s path after death,
With each step it is cleansed, with each point one less breath.
The nethers first call from their hollows by dark,
In the shape of a bird, with each sense the route has been marked.
Sounds, they fade to the ground, the earth’s music unsung,
Then taste, until food is but dirt on the tongue.”
His lips were dry. He pressed them together, resting his voice, while the nurse transcribed his verse.
“The nose, it next decays, death the only stench to stay,
The eyes follow, the jaws of the mountains a colorless gray;
Touch, the noblest, is last to decline,
The final remainder of life in this soul of mine.”
He swallowed and closed his eyes, as if he were traveling back into his past.
“In its world it is dust, in the hand it is coal,
At long last I found it, the ephemeral soul.”
The scrawl of the nurse’s quill grew still as he sank back into his pillow, a calm passing over him. She didn’t know what his verses meant; perhaps they were just the last musings of a man on his deathbed.
“Please,” he said, his voice cracking. “A glass of water.”
She set the pages down on his nightstand and picked up the metal pitcher, which was nearly empty. “Bien sûr,” she said, and left the room.
Five minutes passed.
She returned to an unnatural silence. His body lay twisted and limp on its side, the sheets tangled around him as though he had tried to reach something by the candle. Water sloshed out of the nurse’s pitcher as she rushed to him. His face was wan, its warmth already fading. A smudge of black grazed his cheek. Nothing more than a stray bit of ash, she thought. She checked his pulse, then ran to get the doctor.
According to legend, the nursemaid gave the doctor the verses she’d transcribed, and the doctor gave them to the French ambassador who had taken him in, and then to Descartes’s family. Word trickled down to the staff, and out to the circles in which Descartes had traveled. His last words were whispered at dinners and parties, in small groups behind closed doors. Those close to him knew he had spent the latter part of his life writing about the Undead—about how, after the body died, the soul left it and traveled to a mythical underworld, where it was purified before being reborn into a new body. The Netherworld, he’d called it.
In his Seventh Meditation, he’d described what he believed the Netherworld would be like: a hollow in the earth where millions of souls traveled to after they were cleansed, waiting in a swirl of particles to be reborn into a new human. He’d believed that if he could only find the way into the Netherworld, he would be able to then capture one of the purified souls, breathe it in, and live a second life. It didn’t matter whose soul he took, for once they entered the Netherworld, they belonged to no one, to anyone.
His deathbed verses were curious.
In its world it is dust, in the hand it is coal,
At long last I found it, the ephemeral soul.
To many of his friends, those final lines seemed to imply that he had found the Netherworld and taken a second soul. But his death contradicted them. He hadn’t disappeared; he hadn’t burst into life again. He had died in bed of pneumonia, and had been buried the following morning, per his wishes. Or so they thought.
Not long after his burial, rumors began to circulate. There were sightings of him. One person claimed they saw him in France. Another in the Netherlands. Another in Sweden. Another in Belgium. They dug up his grave, but all that was left inside was dust.
Had his bones dissolved in a trick of disease or parasites? Perhaps someone had robbed his grave. Or perhaps his final verses had been true. Perhaps he had found the Netherworld, and after burial had reanimated and dug himself out to live a second life.
&
nbsp; Scholars and fellow philosophers scoured his belongings, but found nothing they didn’t already know. So instead, they took to decoding his final words.
It was a map in riddles, they realized. If solved, it would lead to the Netherworld: a place where anyone could claim a second soul and live another life.
The way follows the soul’s path after death,
With each step it is cleansed, with each point one less breath.
The path to the Netherworld follows the path the soul takes when it leaves the body and is cleansed.
The nethers first call from their hollows by dark,
In the shape of a bird, with each sense the route has been marked.
The route lay in the shape of a bird, each point representing one of the five senses that is washed from the soul to purify it.
Sounds, they fade to the ground, the earth’s music unsung.
The first mark on the path represented sound.
Then taste, until food is but dirt on the tongue.
The second mark represented taste.
The nose, it next decays, death the only stench to stay.
The third: smell.
The eyes follow, the jaws of the mountains a colorless gray.
The fourth: sight.
Touch, the noblest, is last to decline.
The fifth: touch.
Or at least that’s what Theo claimed.
“People have been trying to locate the five points in his riddle since the eighteenth century,” Theo continued. “Over time, it came to be called the Cartesian Map, though no one believed Descartes had ever written it down. The riddle was all anyone had, and even that is a matter of belief. Maybe it never existed in the first place, and all Descartes did was ask for water. No one ever found the nurse’s transcript. Even more strangely, the French version is so similar to the English one that it, too, rhymes, as do many versions in other languages. To me, that makes the riddle all the more believable. Descartes always paid extreme attention to detail; that he would arrange his riddle to make even the rhymes translatable into many different languages is something I can imagine him doing,” Theo said. Then he added, “Though I suppose almost everything in French rhymes, since consonants at the end of French words are typically not pronounced.”