Page 26 of An Academy for Liars

They went quiet for a while after that, watching the tiny leaves of the live oak trees shift and whisper high above them. Lennon could feel herself spilling out into everything around her, and everything around her bleeding into her. If dissociation was the feeling of being removed and disharmonized from reality, this was the opposite. And Lennon was relishing that feeling—wholly relaxed and satisfied by her own oneness with Sawyer and the trees and the dirt packed hard beneath her back—when the elevator first appeared, with the trill of a bell. Its doors materialized in the garden shed, replacing the single plank of rotten wood that had been affixed to its hinges just moments before.

“Holy shit,” said Sawyer, sitting up. He looked at Lennon to confirm that she was seeing the same things. “What the hell is that?”

The golden doors of the elevator opened to reveal an empty cabin, mirrored on all sides. A soft lullaby spilled out into the courtyard, which Lennon recognized as a made-up song her mother used to sing to put her to sleep.

Lennon stood. “I think it’s for me.”

Sawyer, still sitting, caught her by the sleeve as if to drag her back. But Lennon brushed him off, moving toward the elevator. As soon as she stepped inside, the doors snapped shut, and the cabin lurched into ascent.

The cabin might’vebeen climbing for several minutes, or several hours for all Lennon knew. But as the elevator began to slow—its gears grinding to a halt with a screech—she realized that her legs, locked at the knees, had gone almost totally numb beneath her. As she squatted and shook her feet, trying to get the blood flowing again, the doors opened behind her with a sigh and a hiss, and a cold wind swept into the elevator cabin. Her ears popped.

What lie beyond the open doors, through a scrim of fog, was not Drayton as she knew it. It was darker, colder, the grass crusted with frost, the trees winter-bare. The wrongness of it all put a pit in her stomach, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling with the creeping sensation that something wasn’t right…that she was in danger.

In that moment, something became very clear: this was notherDrayton.

Lennon pressed the button on the control panel, over and over again, willing the doors to close and take her away. “Shit. Shit.Fuck.”

It was no use. After several minutes of panicking, she disembarked and stepped out onto the grass. Lennon turned away from the elevator for a split moment to take in the scene at hand, and when she turned back, it was to the discovery that the golden doors she’d stumbled through mere moments before were gone. She lifted a hand and slapped herself, hard, and when that didn’t jar her awake, she pinched her forearm hard enough to leave a bruise. Still, the scene before her, the inexplicable…theimpossible, remained.

In the distance, through the bare branches of the magnolia trees, Lennon spotted Logos House. As she approached it, she saw that its door was open to her. She entered, treading carefully, taking pains not to touch or disturb anything. There was something about the place that forbade interaction, as though this was a museum exhibit, sectioned off by invisible lengths of velvet rope, and she a patron passing through it.

Upstairs, the door to each bedroom was shut, except for the one on the far end of the hall. In that bedroom, there was a young boy sitting on the floor, with his bruised and bony knees collected tightly to his chest.

“It’s you. From my dream.”

The boy raised his head, and when they locked gazes, she saw that his eyes were filled with blood. Lennon heard a great roaring—like the sound of swarming flies and a thousand TVs turned to channel zero.

She staggered back, turned to face an exit that was no longer there. The door had just disappeared into a featureless wall.

The boy stood up. He held something loosely in his fist; she could see it flickering through the cage of his fingers. Something small, like a baby mouse or a spider. Without really knowing why, Lennon moved to accept it, extending her hand. The boy gave her his gift: a brown moth with tattered wings.

It twitched in the flat of her palm.

In the dark between blinks, an elevator appeared behind the boy. It opened its doors, and music spilled out into the windowless room. Chords of some classical concerto that Lennon should have known by name but didn’t. Her gaze went from the elevator to the boy to the moth that now lay dead in her hand. She staggered, took two large steps forward, toward the elevator, dropping the moth in her haste to make it through the door, and collapsed on the floor of its cabin. She was aware, suddenly, of the fact that she could barely breathe. The last thing she saw as the doors drew closed was the boy, crouching on the floor, the moth cradled in his cupped hands.

Lennon woke tothe gentle crackling of a fire. From somewhere off in the red-washed dark, hushed snatches of conversation: “The elevator appeared out in the garden. According to Sawyer, she said it was for her, walked through the doors, and they closed behind her.”

“How long was she gone?”

“No more than fifteen minutes. Sawyer beat on the doors, called for help, but they wouldn’t open. I did the same. Then at random the elevator bell rang, the doors parted, and there she was, slumped against the far wall of the cabin. Barely conscious.”

“You did the right thing,” said Dante. “Bringing her here to me.”

“She could’ve gotten herself, or someone else, killed.”

“I know,” said Dante. “But we can address that. How many people know what you know? How many people saw?”

“Well, there was Sawyer, Kieran, me, Blaine. A couple people at the party may have seen as well. I don’t know. It was all happening so fast.”

Lennon’s head felt too heavy to lift. She shifted her gaze left andsaw two figures standing in the shadows near the hearth, just beyond the reach of the flame’s light. There was Emerson with a crust of blood beneath her nose, squinting at Lennon through the bright glare of her glasses, and Dante standing close beside her.

“Give me a moment alone with her,” she heard Dante say.

“Sure.” Emerson left the office, and Lennon could have sworn she heard the soft click of the door locking shut behind her.

Lennon managed to sit up, bracing a hand on the back of the couch. The room pitched, this way and that, in a sickening wave of vertigo. Dante strode out of her line of vision and returned a few moments later with a small metal wastebasket. He set it on the floor between her feet.

“I’m fine,” said Lennon, waving him away. “I’m not going to—”

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