Prologue
Juniper's POV
The cold Manhattan air hit Juniper in the face the second she pushed through the frat house door, cutting through the vodka still humming pleasantly through her body, and she welcomed the shock of it because the inside of that house smelled like beer-damp carpet, sweaty bodies and somebody’s overcompensating cologne for the better part of three hours.
Music kept thumping behind her in a muffled bass while clusters of Columbia students spilled out across the sidewalks, laughing at a volume that suggested none of them had given a shit that it was almost two in the morning.
She shoved both hands into the pockets of her jeans and tipped her face toward the dark Manhattan skyline rising past the campus rooftops, the steam curled upward from the street grates as the group stumbled past.
“I’m telling you,” Daniel huffed, his breath clouding in the cold, “there is absolutely something haunted under Pupin Hall.”
Olivia snorted around the cigarette pinched between her fingers. “Everything at Columbia is haunted, Dan. Tuition alone should qualify as supernatural activity.”
Juniper laughed and reached up to fix the pink ribbon headband that had slipped backward through her curls again. The humidity earlier in the evening had turned her hair into complete chaos, thick auburn coils falling halfway down her back in a kind of dramatic volume she had given up trying to manage before they even left Olivia’s apartment, and at this point she decided she liked it that way.
“You know what I mean,” Daniel insisted as they crossed the street toward campus, he was only three drinks in and feeling visionary. “Like actual weird shit, secret archive stuff, dead professors. You know, occult garbage hidden behind the boiler room.”
He turned to face them with his eyebrows up, walking backwards with more confidence than Juniper could ever have if she was drunk. “That just sounds like academia, Daniel.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I am historically informed,” she corrected, and felt very pleased with herself for the distinction. “And for the record, we’re all drunk, idiot.”
Olivia jabbed her cigarette in Juniper’s direction with theatrical seriousness. “That tone right there, JayJay, is exactly how every horror movie starts before somebody gets sacrificed in a basement by guys in robes who definitely all minored in philosophy.”
Juniper grinned without slowing her pace. Her black lace corset bustier looked completely reasonable in Olivia’s apartment mirror three hours ago, but out here under the campus lamps she cursed for not bringing a coat as she rubbed heat into her arms.
“There really was a collector connected to the school, you know,” Daniel continued as they crossed the courtyard toward Pupin Hall. “My roommate was telling me about him last week. Mid 1920’s, maybe later. Supposedly he donated all this bizarre occult stuff to the university before he died, and most of it just got shoved into storage and forgotten about.”
Juniper turned her head toward him, intrigued by the story. “What kind of occult stuff, exactly?”
Olivia groaned theatrically as she looked at Juniper with that same old look she gave every time she watched anything about murderers and their mysteries. “There it is. She heard the word occult, and her survival instincts packed a bag and left town.”
“I’m literally a history major, Liv. It is literally what I am putting myself into debt to learn.”
“You are literally the reason ghosts stay employed in this country.”
“Literally.” Daniel mocked them both without fail and they turned toward him in unison, death stares intact.
“Shut up!” They both yelled and turned back to each other, laughing.
Pupin Hall loomed at the far edge of the courtyard, all gray stone and dark windows beneath the low cloud covered sky. Juniper had been inside that building dozens of times for late lectures and overheated study sessions and once, memorably, to cry quietly in a stairwell after a humiliating midterm, but tonight with her drunk and Daniel’s little story, she was intrigued and it made everything feel more ominous.
Most of the windows were dark, and when she followed Daniel and Olivia to the backside of the stone building, they stopped at the heavy metal service door that Daniel said his friend left unlocked for them.
Juniper stepped inside first, because that was usually how it went between the three of them, and the stale warm air wrapped around her immediately, carrying the smell of dust, overheated pipes, and the chemical sting of cleaning supplies. The hallway stretched ahead, seeming somehow longer than she remembered them being during daylight. They took the stairs in laughed strides and stopped at the top of the second floor.
Daniel pulled out his phone and clicked the flashlight on with the confidence of a man preparing for his own funeral. “If wedie in here, I want it on record that this was Juniper’s idea.”
She ignored him completely and kept walking. Locked rooms lined the hallway behind panes of cloudy glass, and through them she could make out the rough silhouettes of equipment and filing cabinets and the bulky shapes of desks. She noticed one door near the far end of the corridor that was sitting partially open, and pushed it the rest of the way and walked in, Daniel and Olivia right behind her.
The room had wooden crates that sat stacked behind a big desk that was covered in even more boxes and older, smaller crates of stuff. a desk lamp sat on the desk that was coated so thickly in dust that she almost couldn’t see the green underneath it. There were old boxes along the wall that had inventory labels curled up from not being touched in decades.
Olivia coughed hard against the back of her hand. “Jesus Christ, Juniper, it smells like somebody embalmed a library in here.”
Juniper barely heard her, because one crate near the back wall was sitting partially broken open, and the faded label across its side read Marchetti Estate, Misc Artifacts, 1928, she walked over and started going through it.
“What’s in it?” Daniel asked from his post in the doorway, refusing to come any farther into the room. “Anything worth stealing?”
She crouched beside the crate, and put her knees on the cold tile. “Not unless you like a hundred year old junk.” She pulled out a small stack of papers and sat them on the floor next to her knee. “There’s mostly papers in here.”
She moved an old leather roll kit that was tied shut with a leather string, and at the bottom corner of the box was a smaller box. It was a stained metal with gold designs all over it, and it reminded her of the box from the Hellraiser movies.
Concentric movable panels covered its surface, carved with rows of symbols that she didn’t recognize from any language she had ever studied, and she had studied a frankly embarrassing number of them.
She lifted it carefully out of the crate with both hands, and the weight of it surprised her. It was almost as light as aluminum, practically weightless in her grip. “Oh my God, Liv, it literally looks like the Hellraiser box.”
Olivia took another step backward toward the hallway. “Alright, I wanna go, this is boring now and I’m thirsty.”
As she moved her finger along the groove of the gold line that ran to the symbol in the middle when something inside the object clicked, a small mechanical sound. Another click answered beneath her fingers a moment later, this one was deeper inside the body of the box. Then something sharp pierced the side of her finger from beneath one of the panels, a thin wicked little bite of pain that made her jerk.
“Ow, what the fuck?”
The box slipped from her hands, and time slowed dramatically, like a playing record being pulled to a stop. But the blood from the prick of her finger defied the gravity of everything else around her until it landed on the surface of the falling box.
When the box landed on the floor, the seams running along its surface began to glow with a thin red light that spread outward in slow capillary lines until all were connected. Then it went dark before pulsing back to life and glowing brighter, turning into a deep red and surrounded her until she couldn’t see the room or her friends anymore.
Suddenly, it stopped glowing in an instant, the red light gone before she could process what just happened. She closed her eyes to try to adjust them to see the dark room. The air was warmer and she heard the low sound now of her friends muffled voices, relief flooded through her as she opened her eyes again.
Warm light slowly lit the room up around her, as her brain stuttered trying to replay what the hell just happened, because the light was wrong somehow, dimmer than it should have been and the wrong color, a tired yellow instead of white, coming from a single bulb under a green-shaded banker’s lamp on a leather-topped desk, a brass inkstand, a silver cigarette case with a cloisonné panel in the lid, a telephone with a candlestick neck and a separate earpiece dangling on a hook.
Dark wood paneling stretched up the walls to a coffered ceiling, and heavy velvet curtains hung drawn across tall windows. This was not Columbia, she understood with a slow terrible clarity, and it was not 2026, and the part of her brain that was supposed to provide a comforting alternative explanation had gone completely silent.
Juniper turned around to get Olivia and Daniel and get out of there as voices came from the other side of the door, but fear shot through her body, sending pins and needles to the tip of every limb as she realized the voices she heard weren’t her friends. The sound of footsteps and voices faded to one; slow and measured as the floorboard creaked softly when whoever it was stopped just outside the door.
