I didn’t call up to him, and he did not look down at me. I wondered if he was merely an image carried over from the day I had just endured, or whether he was actually present and aware inside my dream. Under normal circumstances that would never have occurred to me, but this was Messenger, and there was very little the boy in black could not do. He could freeze time and warp space.
And yet, I knew, he was as trapped as I was myself, as unable to escape. A fellow penitent.
I woke in darkness, rolled over, and stared up at the ceiling. What had Messenger done to earn this punishment? What did it have to do with the mysterious Ariadne? Was he even from my own time and space or was he a traveler from long ago or a long time yet to come? Was he the age he appeared to be, or was he older, maybe even much older? It was clear enough that I could not trust entirely the evidence of my eyes. This was a universe of illusion, of distortion and deception.
I thought of Oriax, pictured her, a beautiful young woman, but was she the mesmerizing, unforgettable, unequaled beauty I felt her to be when I was in her presence? Messenger had told her to let me go. Had she held some power over me?
What was Daniel? How had he known—if he did know—that poor Manolo was doomed? How had he known with a touch that Derek would be lost to sanity for at least a while?
What was the Shoals? And what, in the name of all that was either holy or rational, was this ridiculous Heptarchy and what’s her name? Isthil.
I held my mind to these speculations for fear that, without a task on which to focus, my thoughts would veer toward darker, more awful things. Derek. Samantha Early. The fate that must befall Kayla.
No. Had befallen her.
That’s what Messenger had said, though I wasn’t sure I’d heard him properly when he said it. I strained to recall his exact words but could not get my fingers around them. Yet I was fairly certain, fairly, that he had said that whatever Kayla’s punishment was, it had already been carried out.
This at least was a relief, for I could not imagine what buried fear I might find if tasked to enter her twisted mind.
Her motives at least I thought I could guess. Samantha Early had been a writer. So was Kayla, since she had the NaNoWriMo ribbon on her bulletin board. And if she was serious about it, if she saw herself as an author someday, she must have been devastated when Samantha Early, a girl Kayla despised as weak and weird, had suddenly shot from nowhere to publication.
Jealousy. That would have been it, or at least part of it. Jealousy coming at a time when Kayla was still coping with her father’s death and her mother’s renewed interest in the opposite sex. A time when Kayla would have been feeling vulnerable and alone despite her circle of friends.
That did not excuse the cruelty. Nothing excused, nothing ever could excuse, driving a girl to take her own life.
I wondered if Kayla had played Messenger’s game or refused. Almost certainly she would have played. She seemed arrogant enough to imagine she would win. If she played, had she won? If she won, had she learned anything from the experience? Had she become a better person?
And if she had lost the game and faced the penalty, what had she endured? What was the terror she pushed way down into the darkest ratholes of her memory? What had she feared from the Messenger of Fear?
And with that I was dangerously close to asking that same question of myself: What was my deepest fear? How had I been punished for whatever wrong I was supposed to have committed?
“Food,” I said to the darkness. “I am hungry.”
I climbed from the bed that was not my own bed, used the bathroom, and showered, finding shampoo and conditioner and even the lotion I liked.
I looked at myself in the mirror. My face seemed unfamiliar to me, haunted by too much weariness, too much terror, too much guilt. I lived in a world now where nothing was as it had been, where nothing could be counted as set and certain.
I saw it all in my eyes, in the dark swelling beneath them that was so pronounced it almost looked like bruising. But even as I took that in, I was surprised by the way I looked, for the gauntness of my cheeks, the dullness of my normally glossy hair—always my best feature—the furrows beginning to etch permanent lines into my forehead, surely all these physical signs of stress had not manifested in just the short time I had been with Messenger. It occurred to me that my troubles in life might not have begun just forty-eight hours ago when I woke beneath the mist. And as I considered this, it became obvious that of course I must have been in trouble much earlier, else why would I have attracted Messenger’s attentions?
“What did you do?” I asked my reflection. “What did you do, Mara?”
21
MESSENGER WAS IN MY KITCHEN. THIS FACT WAS deeply unsettling to me, for I had come in a very short time and on the basis of very little evidence, to imagine that this space, this false echo of my home or Kayla’s home, or whatever this was meant to be, was mine and mine alone. I had thought it was a sanctuary. If Messenger could simply appear in the kitchen, then he could equally appear in my bedroom. And if all of that, then was I safe from Daniel or Oriax or whatever other beings may choose to intrude uninvited?
Messenger saw my annoyance.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I intruded.”
“It’s okay,” I snapped. “I’m going to make some coffee if there is any coffee. Do you want some? Do you drink? Eat?”
“Coffee. Black.”
“Of course black,” I said.
I think he would have smiled then, had he been just a bit less Messenger.
There was coffee, a bag of it from Marin Coffee Roasters. I scooped it into the filter, added water, and started the machine running. Marin Coffee is my favorite coffee shop, and I sometimes go there after school to do my homework. . . . How did I know that? How had I, without trying, remembered sitting in that coffee shop? I could see it quite clearly. The front was often open to the fresh air. There were two rickety tables out on the narrow sidewalk, lots of tempting and fattening cookies and bars at the counter, a cooler in the corner, a bathroom at the back, big chalkboard menus high on the wall behind the baristas.
It was perhaps the clearest memory I had accessed, but it could hardly have been as familiar to me as my own home, none of which I could remember without confusing it with Kayla’s house. Certainly I should have recalled my mother’s face before I recalled a coffee shop.
The dream came back to me, the dream of the beach down by Santa Cruz, and I struggled to put it all in context. Samantha Early . . . Had she lived near me? Was I from northern California?
Oh, God. Did I know Samantha? Did I know Kayla?
The coffee machine sputtered its final drops and I poured the coffee into two cups, handing one to Messenger and looking for sugar for my own.
Messenger took a sip. It was the best confirmation I had yet had that whatever incredible powers he might have, he was in the end, human.
“Toast?”
“To what?”
“No, I mean I’m making toast. Want some?”
“Thank you, no,” he said.
I dropped two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster. I took my time about fetching butter and jam because I wasn’t sure I was ready to face Messenger yet. I didn’t know how to relate to him in these circumstances. He might be human, was human, but he was like no human I had ever met.
I wondered whether he had a place, like this one, a refuge where he went at the end of a hard day of torturing people in the cause of justice. I wanted to ask him, but at the same time I feared doing so, first because I thought it likely he would shut me down with his usual taciturn non-response. But also because part of me feared he might open up, tell me more than I wanted to know about him, and thus confuse even further my emotional reaction to him.
The odd thing, the thing that made me smile a bit wistfully to myself, was the realization that had he not been who and what he was, but just been a boy with that face and those eyes, sitting here drinking my coffee, I would probably still have been t
ongue-tied. I remembered so little about my own story, but I was certain that whoever I was, I had never been very good at making small talk with boys.
And then, as I spread butter onto a piece of toast, I saw it.
“What is this?” I stared aghast at the ink, blue and red, yellow and green, on my right arm, just above the end of my blouse sleeve.
I had caught only a hint of color peeking out, and now, without setting down the butter knife, I pushed my sleeve up to see it fully.
It was a tattoo. There was no swelling, no sense that this represented something applied by the usual methods within the last few hours. It was there, complete, healed, indelible.
It showed a boy, tied to a stake, with flames roaring around him.
“What . . . What is this? What is this? What have you done to me?”
I spun around, dropped the knife from numb fingers, held my sleeve up so that he could see it, pushed it toward him. I was torn between rage and a sadness at what felt like defilement.
I looked again at the tattoo. It was vivid, not quite real but still so detailed that it would never be mistaken for anything whimsical. It was the tattoo a sadist, a sick person, might have chosen and even then come to regret.
“What have you done to me?” I demanded as anger won out over sadness.
“It is not my doing,” Messenger said. There was sympathy there but not much, and no surprise at all.
“How did it . . . When . . . Why? Why?”
“All Messengers of Fear are marked in that way,” he said.
“It’s sickening!” I cried.
“It is meant to be.”
“But why? What is the purpose?”
He took a deep breath and a slow sip of coffee. He stood up and I thought at first he meant to walk away. Instead he shrugged off his long coat and laid it over the back of his stool. Then carefully, taking his time, he began unfastening the buttons of his storm-cloud-gray shirt. When he had unfastened them all, he slid the shirt off.
He had a stronger chest than I expected. His stomach was flat and muscular. His arms were lean and if not gym-rat big, were nevertheless respectably powerful. But those were all observations I would make at a later time, for at this moment, when he stood naked from the waist up, I saw my own terrible fate.
He was covered in tattoos of pain and horror.
It was all the awful, shattering, mind-numbing scenes that touching him had sent flooding into my mind. Screaming faces with bulging eyes and mouths so distorted they looked scarcely human. Twisted limbs, some so attenuated that they seemed barely attached and maybe were not. Blood, in drops like sweat and in streams and in spouting fountains. Sharp objects, ropes, guns, drowning water and roasting flames, whips and chains and medieval instruments of arcane construction but manifestly foul purpose.
All of it inscribed on his body.
I stared and he allowed me to stare without comment, without explanation, without seeking to soften the blow. I knew this was what he had come to show me. He had known what would be done to me, and he had known that when I found that despicable art emblazoned on my own flesh, that I would be so destroyed by the vision of my future that I might not be capable of going on.
I was to be slowly, inexorably turned into a tapestry of retributive justice, if justice this was.
He slipped his shirt on, buttoning as carefully as he had unbuttoned minutes before.
“Why?” I asked, no longer capable of the energy required to shout.
He finished dressing, and then he said, “The world, Mara, the world you knew, that I knew, the world we saw as the only world, rests on the edge of a knife extended out over a sea of flame. Tilt to one direction, and fall into the flame. Tilt the other direction, and the same fate awaits. Lose our balance even a little, and slip onto the blade itself and be eviscerated.”
“What are you talking about? Balance? What . . .”
“There are forces that badly want us to lose our balance. And there are countervailing forces that would see us maintain our precarious stance and survive. We, you and I, are tools of that second force. The task we are given is one small part of maintaining that balance.”
He took a sip of coffee, finishing the cup.
“Those are just words,” I said.
“Balance is everything,” he said, almost in a whisper, though as always with Messenger, I heard his every word as if it were spoken by lips pressed against my ear. “The balance between good and evil, between true and false, between pain and pleasure, between love and loss, hatred and indifference. However you name them, these balances are all that keep the world spinning.”
He moved around the counter and came to me. For a moment I thought he might touch me, and such was the spell woven by his words and, yes, by the inexpressible feelings he evoked in me, that I wished him to. Instead he used one finger to gently lift the sleeve and reveal the terrible thing beneath. He looked at it, solemn, sad and solemn, and said, “We are given great powers, though we did not choose to have them. And with power comes hubris—overweening confidence, arrogance. These marks, these terrible artworks, are our humility. They provide our balance.”
“I don’t want to . . .” I was unable to go on for the tightening of my throat. Tears blurred my vision. All I could see was my own body, my very self, marred forever, made into a living nightmare. No one would ever be able to stand to look at me. I would have to spend the rest of my life covered, concealed, ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror. I would never have a boyfriend, never get married.
I sobbed. I sat down on the tile floor, my back against hard kitchen cupboards, and sobbed into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that, feeling hopeless, so absolutely hopeless. I had not cried like that since my father died. I was lost. I was destroyed.
After a while the wracking sobs stopped, though the tears kept coming in waves, lessening, renewing, seemingly endless. I just didn’t care if Messenger heard me or saw me. I didn’t care because I was nothing. I was a stupid girl without a memory, weeping on the floor of a kitchen in which I did not belong.
Only when I was drained of not only tears but hope and self-respect, did the slightest glimmer of anything that was not black appear at the ragged edge of my thoughts.
He had survived it.
Messenger had been the Messenger of Fear for . . . I had no idea how long. But his chest, his stomach, his shoulders and back and tapered torso, had all been covered with tattoos of vile tortures, each the equal of mine, and perhaps the rest of him as well, and yet he lived. Yet he had not lost all humanity, I thought. Yet he still longed for his Ariadne.
Somehow the boy in black had survived, and, I was sure, still had hope.
Having hated him, raged at him, believed every foul thing about him, I nevertheless knew that he had hope. And I knew this because he had shown me. That was why he had taken me with him to Carcassonne. To show me that despite all the inconceivable fear he had witnessed and necessarily felt, still, he hoped.
My knees were stiff, my muscles sore, as I stood. Messenger was gone, but I knew I would find him.
I ate my cold toast, barely tasting it. I cannot say it restored all my strength, but it helped. Then I walked to the kitchen door, put my hand on the brass knob, took a shaky breath, twisted it, and stepped through to find myself once more outside Samantha Early’s home, where Messenger waited for me.
“You have something to tell me,” I said. “You’ve been preparing me.”
For just a second, so brief that I could never have sworn it was real, though I wished fervently to believe that it was, he seemed to feel sorry for me. It was gone in an instant, replaced by his more usual expression. But the sense that he had pitied me, that he knew what was coming and pitied me, scared me.
“Yes,” Messenger said.
“Then . . . I’m ready.”
22
THE END CAME DESPITE WELL-MEANING EFFORTS to stop it. One of the parents heard about what was happening to Samantha at school and called S
amantha’s mother.
We were there at the aftermath, Messenger and me. Samantha’s mother, a woman with thinning red hair and a weary, put-upon expression, found Samantha in the garage. The garage was like so many, a mess of folded lawn furniture, plastic bins of papers and old books, slumping cardboard boxes, a once organized, now haphazard peg board of tools. There was no car; the garage had obviously been turned over to use for storage.
A washer and dryer piled high with laundry.
Against one wall was a metal locker, red, closed with a combination lock.
“What are you doing in here, honey?”
Samantha looked up guiltily from the cardboard box she had been rummaging through. A small pile of objects sat on a table that had obviously once been used for arts and crafts, as it was spattered with paint and globs of dried glue and even scraps of tissue paper stuck in place. The objects included a tiny silver cup inscribed with words I could not see from where I stood. And there was what looked like a grammar school project, a storybook covered in construction paper and decorated with crayon drawings of a girl and a dog.
“Oh, I’m just, you know, looking for some stuff for my room,” Samantha said, pushing the storybook aside self-consciously.
“I heard you’re having some issues at school,” the mother said.
“Issues?”
“Sam, are you being bullied?”
Samantha shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”
“One of the mothers called me. Mrs. Jepson. She seemed to think you were being picked on.”
“No, Mom, I would tell you.”
“Would you? Because I can help.”
“I’m fine, I’m just, you know, redecorating my room.” She gestured at the stuff on the table. “I was looking for Miss Pooky.”
“Who?”
“Nothing.”
“Was that your bear? From when you were little?”