Page 44 of An Academy for Liars

“Wasthe best in your class,” said Emerson. “But you’ve unseated him. You should be proud of yourself.”

Lennon didn’t feel proud; she felt sick. She couldn’t stop replaying the moment when she’d overcome Ian, driven that blade through the back of his hand. The flash of hurt that froze his face in a painful rictus as he realized she’d betrayed him.

In the hours that followed, Lennon, along with the rest of the new inductees, was put to work. They scrubbed the grime between floorboards with a toothbrush, dusted and alphabetized the better part of the parlor library, folded the laundry of their more senior housemates. It was grueling, but worse than that it was humiliating because she did it all without complaint.

“I just don’t understand,” Blaine whined later that day, plunging a mop into its bucket for the umpteenth time. “We’re some of Drayton’s best students, and they waste our time with this?”

“That’s precisely why we’re doing it,” said Lennon. “They have to cut us down to size. Now keep it down before they give us more to do.”

Lennon was only relieved of her duties when it was time for her to attend her weekly lesson at Benedict’s house. She rode the elevator in Logos House down to Utah and brisked into Benedict’s study.

“I hear you had quite the night,” he said.

“I got into Logos,” said Lennon.

Benedict gave a small smile. “So I heard. Good for you. You earned that bed.”

“I don’t feel like it,” said Lennon. “I betrayed a friend to win it.”

“Even better,” said Benedict. “You’ll appreciate it more now that you’ve sacrificed your own virtues to get it. The victory will be all the sweeter—you’ll see.”

Lennon couldn’t help but hear an echo of Dante in these words—harking back to that conversation they’d had out in the hall during her first persuasion class, when she’d refused to force her will on Gregory.

“Any luck with the elevators?”

Lennon shook her head. “I’m starting to think it’s impossible. Like maybe I just can’t.”

Hearing this, Benedict’s charm gave way to something far colder. His smile dropped, suddenly, like a painting falling from the wall and crashing to the floor in pieces. “That’s not an option, Lennon. You know that. We’ll simply have to adopt a different, more experimental approach to your studies. Please sit down.”

Lennon sat on the edge of the couch, opposite the roaring hearth, as the fire, burning almost blue-hot, chewed hungrily at a log. It smelled of myrrh as it burned.

“I invite you to enter your safehold,” said Benedict, eyes on the dancing flames. “The same state you enter during your meditational studies. Go to the place where you feel safest, and I’ll guide you from there.”

Outside, it began to rain, a hard rataplan on the copper tiles of the roof. Lennon felt suddenly uneasy, reluctant to close her eyes in the professor’s presence. It was the same feeling of turning your back to an open door. Of walking alone through an empty parking lot in the dead of night. Of letting one leg dangle over the edge of the bed while you try to fall asleep.

“The object of this exercise is to remain within the confines of your safehold,” said Benedict. “It’s a purely defensive exercise. Thus,any attempt to persuade me will result in your immediate failure. For the next seven minutes, I will compel you to stand up and place your hand into the fire burning before us. If I succeed, you fail this exercise. But if you manage to thwart my attack, you succeed.” Benedict removed a pocket watch from a drawer in his desk. He set the time. “Whatever you do, you must keep me out. Do you understand?”

“I understand the exercise, but how exactly does this relate to my raising a gate?”

“If it works, then your question will answer itself. Are you clear on the rules of this exercise?”

“I mean…I guess?”

“Good enough. Let’s begin.”

Lennon squeezed her eyes shut. It took her some time to find her way to her childhood bedroom. It was very quiet that night. And her bedroom door was ajar so as to allow a glimpse of the dark hallway beyond the threshold. She closed it in anticipation of Benedict’s assault. But there was nothing.

The house was entirely quiet. Time passed differently within the room, but she was quite certain that more than three minutes of their allotted seven had passed. She had just begun to open her eyes when she heard it: a strange and hollow cry that came from outside her bedroom window. Lennon could only liken it to the sound of a distant coyote’s howl, carried by the wind.

What followed was among the worst assaults that Lennon would endure during her time at Drayton. Benedict was merciless. He bombarded the walls of her mind with unfathomable malice. She could feel his presence in the walls of the room, pressing against the windowpanes, howling through the halls. She locked the door of her metaphorical bedroom and drew the curtains shut across her windows. The walls of the room seemed as though they were caving inward, andher skull along with them. She had had migraines in the past, cluster headaches even, and a concussion once. But never,neverhad she known a pain like this.

Lennon felt herself stand up. She was ripped mercilessly from her safehouse bedroom and thrust back into the present reality. Her legs snapped straight beneath her so painfully she feared, for a moment, that her kneecaps had broken. There was a force upon her, as if she had weights on her ankles, and had sunk to the bottom of the sea. The remarkable and horrifying will of Benedict was fully forced upon her. And when she cowered before him, when her knees went soft and she began to tremble, he laughed at her weakness. Taunted her. “Come now, Lennon. You must’ve learnedsomethingat Drayton.”

Lennon staggered. Saw her own hand—hooked and straining, fingers bent at odd angles, as though broken that way—thrown out in front of her toward the hungry flames of the hearth. She tried in vain to retire to the recesses of her safehold, even as her left foot shifted slowly ahead of her right, and her right foot ahead of the left.

In a particularly cruel act of ventriloquism, Benedict forced her to her knees in front of the fire. She dropped from fully standing, busted both kneecaps open on the jagged stone as she landed, and thrust her hand into the flames. She screamed in agony, and as if in answer the elevator appeared on the far wall of the parlor. This one was strange in that it had two sets of doors. The first parted open to reveal the cabin. The second, on the back wall of the cabin, slit open to reveal a pastoral scene: a gray barn with a rusty tin roof overlooking a field of dying crops, the whole scene washed with a thick blanket of fog. Benedict cut Lennon free from the tether of his will.

Lennon kicked back from the fire and bent double over her singed hand, crying and begging for a mercy that Benedict had already afforded to her. But Benedict didn’t even look at her. His eyes, filledwith tears, were trained not on the elevator itself but on the scene through its second set of doors. The dead field and the barn beyond it.

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