I was consumed by curiosity, wanting to ask Messenger just what he meant by Isthil. Had I even heard that correctly? But this new arrival—not to mention Messenger’s eternal taciturnity—made follow-up questions impossible.
Daniel’s voice was like Messenger’s in that it seemed as if he, too, was whispering in my ear. But Messenger was serious and soft-spoken, while Daniel’s voice carried a hint that he might just possess a sense of humor.
“Have you dealt with the Early matter yet?” Daniel asked.
“We have begun,” Messenger said.
“Ah, so you’re being nonlinear,” Daniel said. “I remember a time when you were a prisoner of Flatworld, Messenger.” That was perhaps some sort of joke, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t understand it.
Daniel’s voice grew more professional. The pleasantries were over. “Where is she in her progress?” The “she” was clearly me. Daniel indicated me with an outthrust chin.
“She’s calmed,” Messenger said.
“Memory?”
“I don’t want to overload her.”
“Ah,” Daniel said. He dropped to a squat, which let him look me in the eye. “So you have no real idea what’s going on. No idea why you’re here.”
I shook my head.
“And you are frightened, nervous, but also excited, I see.” He frowned and tilted his head sideways. “You are Messenger’s student, not mine, but I will tell you by way of reassurance that it will all become clear to you. In time.”
Messenger stiffened a bit at this reassurance. I think he wanted me uncertain.
“We had a visit,” Messenger said significantly.
“Oh?”
“Oriax,” Messenger said.
The two of them exchanged hard looks at that. I would have expected a leer, a wink, a raised eyebrow, but there was none of that. No sense that they were referring to what had to be the most beautiful young woman either of them had ever or would ever encounter.
“That’s very quick,” Daniel said. “Very quick. Who do you think she’s after?”
“She came to us while we were on the Samantha Early matter.”
“Oriax is not known for her directness,” Daniel said. “So it’s most likely something else. Someone else. Though, of course, she could be counting on us believing that.”
“Can I ask a question?” I said. My voice sounded squeaky in my own ears.
Messenger turned to look at me, and Daniel’s face went blank. He pulled back, making it clear that I was to speak only to Messenger.
“You will have a great many questions,” Messenger said coldly. “But you will learn by observing. Later you will learn by doing. At this moment you will learn by remaining silent.”
If I expected to find some sympathy from Daniel, I was mistaken. Messenger had shot me down, and Daniel had merely waited for it to be over.
But I was tired of being frightened and kept in the dark. I was going to ask my question. And later, when I had other questions, I would ask those, too.
“What is Oriax?” I asked.
The question surprised Messenger. One eyebrow rose fractionally. “Not who? You ask ‘what’?”
“She’s not human,” I said, surprising myself with my certainty. It had only just then come to me. The way they spoke of Oriax revealed if not fear from the two males, at least wariness. They saw something in her that I had not, which meant they knew more than I, and what they knew was that Oriax was not merely a beautiful woman with unusually small feet.
“She’s quick,” Daniel said to Messenger.
“Yes,” Messenger admitted. Coming from him, it did not sound like a compliment. “The time will come when you understand Oriax and her kind. That day will be terrible for you, and worse for someone else.”
Daniel was gone. No poof, no flash of light, no explosion, just, suddenly, gone. And the car was moving again. Liam and Emma were crying again and talking about the “poor doggie.”
“We love each other, why is that so damn hard?” Liam moaned. “Why can’t we just be together?”
“Wait, is this the right way?” Emma looked around, turned to look back, looked right through me, right through me as if I were not there.
And I understood her concern, for a mist was creeping over the road. It was the color of yellowed teeth. It was the same mist that had seemed to creep across my body. It moved at a speed that was all out-of-sync with the rushing speed of the car. The mist was leisurely but relentless. And as it caressed the vehicle, it was not parted or blown aside by the passage of that now frail-seeming machine.
The car was running. I could hear the engine; I could hear and feel the vibration of tires on pavement. But there could be no sense of speed because the mist blocked all evidence of passing landscape.
Finally Liam took his foot off the gas pedal and the car grew quieter, rolling now rather than being propelled. Slower and slower, tires making a hollow sound.
Without warning, Messenger and I were no longer in the backseat but stood beneath a blasted mockery of a tree, a tree that looked as if it had never borne a leaf.
The mist did not touch us but surrounded us at a distance, hemming us in, leaving a gloomy, unreal space no more than fifty feet across. The mist was also above us, blocking any hint of sky. I felt the tickling of panic. Somehow amid all the evidence of overturned laws of physics, all the unnatural flouting of the unseen but omnipresent laws that define our world, it was this, this creeping, sentient mist that most impressed upon my strained senses and raw emotions that I was in a place that was fundamentally at odds with reality. When the basic rules, up and down, fast and slow, before and now and after, were so casually suspended and upended, how was I to ever feel a moment’s safety? Daniel had said I would understand, eventually. But why should I trust him any more than these proofs of the instability of space and time?
The car with Emma and Liam nosed into that strange and unnatural circle and came to rest.
The two teens stared. At us. At us.
“They see us,” I said.
Liam tried to start the car again, but the engine would not catch. I could see them debating, worried, unsettled by this place and by the two people who now awaited them.
Finally Liam climbed out. He had a large flashlight, one of the black metal ones that police use to both shine a light and serve as a bludgeon. Liam held the light threateningly, as if contemplating that latter use.
“Who are you?” Liam demanded.
Emma stood at his side.
“Emma, I thought you were going to stay in the car! Get back in the car!” Liam cried.
“I . . . I don’t think I got out,” Emma said, her voice abashed, whispering but with her whispers magnified, bounced back at her by the mist.
She stood close to her lover, took his free arm in hers, forming a united front. They took strength from each other and together were stronger than either alone.
“Okay, who are you and what is going on?” Liam demanded, pushing his voice to a lower, more determined register.
“I am the Messenger.”
“We’re not looking for trouble,” Emma said. “We just want to get out of here.”
“That will not be possible,” Messenger said. “Yet.”
Liam pushed away from Emma, preparing himself for a fight. I liked the way he looked. He was scared but resolute. He was determined to protect Emma. And she was just as prepared to defend him. Someone had once said to me that the thing to understand about love was that you were two people who had each other’s back. That you were two against the world. Someone had said that. But who? The memory had just been there, it had just appeared, as if my memory were my own to command, but when I searched for detail, I was frustrated. It was almost as if some counterpart to the mist was inside me, in my mind, defining what I could know and what I could not.
But then that mental mist retreated, oh so grudgingly, showing me just a little more.
I gasped, for I could see him now. My father. I could see him in memory,
and with that single picture, that yellowed photograph, came other facts.
He is white, my father. It’s my mother who gave me her Chinese physiognomy. I took very little of my looks from his genes, but I had taken on more of his personality. He’s a soldier, my father, a professional soldier. United States Army. A captain. A stocky man with wide shoulders and hair turned gray too early. A serious man.
And he’s dead.
The realization opened in my memory like some dark flower that greeted not sunlight but the blackness of night.
They had handed the folded flag to me. The officer in charge of the burial had been solemn and correct, compassionate but distant, and I had thought, even then, even as a child of nine, that the officer must do this a lot. How many times had he walked the folded, dark blue and white triangle of flag to a wife or a husband or a child?
I was drawn out of my sad reverie by what Messenger was saying. It was a phrase I would hear again: “You have done wrong. You must first acknowledge the wrong, and then you must atone.”
“What?” Emma demanded. “What do you mean, atone?”
“Do you acknowledge the wrong you have done?”
“The dog?” Liam said. “We didn’t mean to do that—that was an accident.”
I wanted to jump in and point out that hitting the dog the first time was an accident; running over it again was just to cover up the fact that they had been together. But I had begun to feel that I was watching something of great importance. I wanted to see what Messenger would do next, though as I thought about it more, I began to dread it. What if Messenger killed them?
But Messenger just stood and waited. Emma and Liam shifted uncomfortably and made a few halfhearted attempts to justify themselves. But it was clear that they, too, were fully aware that they had indeed done wrong.
Guilt is a parasite on the soul, a worm that begins small and grows, grows, feeding on every moment of fleeting happiness. It stabs at you when you laugh. It cuts when you recognize beauty, receive affection, experience joy. It reminds you at the very worst moments that you have done wrong and are not worthy of happiness.
I did not then ask myself how I had come by this knowledge. How should I know so well what shame and guilt can do? But at the moment I was still weak from the memory of my father, mourning, I suppose, for a man whose place in my mind had been reduced to a still photograph and a handful of dusty facts.
And, too, I was fascinated and repelled by the place and situation I found myself in. So I did not ask how I knew what guilt could do. I was like a doctor who, recognizing a disease, has forgotten medical school and his practice and retained only that barest dry and useless knowledge.
“Okay, we’re sorry,” Liam said finally. “Really. Okay? I panicked. You don’t understand.”
“My apprentice will understand,” Messenger said, “And thus, so will I.”
Liam and Emma both looked at me. It was only after they had stared expectantly for a few seconds that I realized Messenger was talking about me.
“Apprentice?” It came out squeaky, that single word. I almost laughed. I wanted to laugh. Because, after all, this was really just some kind of dream or hallucination or . . . or something.
What it was not, what it could not be, was me as Messenger’s apprentice. The very idea was like a steel cage being erected around me, like I was watching the bars being put in place, confining, defining, controlling.
I felt like prisoners must feel facing the judge who pronounces their sentence.
“No,” I said. I shook my head violently. “No,” I said again.
Messenger’s face wore a look I had suspected it might be capable of, but had not truly seen until this moment. His expression was one of compassion. He was not glorying in my fear; he pitied me. He understood what he had just told me. He understood what I was feeling. He could see the panic rising in me like the mercury in a boiling thermometer.
“No, no, no,” I said.
And that’s when I saw through the mist. The mist did not part—it did not cease encircling us—but it became less opaque so that I saw a tableau. I saw two people. One was Messenger. The other was me.
And I heard my own voice distorted by wracking sobs of what I believe was remorse, though I had no memory of it. Sobbing. Holding myself with my arms across my chest. My head was bowed. My face was distorted by emotion present and emotion past. I had, I felt, been sad for a long time.
In this tableau Messenger never spoke—he just stood there before me, wearing the same expression of compassion he had revealed only moments before. I was the one speaking, though words so distorted by anguish would have been hard for a person unfamiliar with me to make out. But I could hear and understand them clearly. They were words that sealed my fate. Words that trapped me without hope of escape.
“Yes,” I sobbed. “Yes, yes, I will. I will. I will do it. I have to do it. I will atone.”
“If you choose this fate, you must speak these words: You will be my teacher.”
My sobbing self spoke them. “You will be my teacher.”
Messenger said, “I will be your student.”
And my anguished self repeated them and wiped tears away. “I will be your student.”
“And when I am judged ready, I will faithfully execute my office.”
“And . . . and . . .” The me I saw, that living memory, strained to recall the exact words. “I will . . . I mean, when I am judged ready, I will faithfully execute my office.”
“I will be the Messenger of Fear.”
The tableau faded from view. I looked at Messenger and it was as if he looked through me, saw all the way down into my soul and knew things about me that I refused to acknowledge but that he understood.
I looked at his coat with its skull buttons. I looked at the terrible ring, the distorted, screaming face. Most of all, I recalled the moment when I had touched him and had been flooded with images so unsettling, so disturbing, that even the pale memory freezes my blood. I guessed, or perhaps at some point in my forgotten past he had told me, but in any event I understood then, understood that there was no escape, that I had no choice in the matter, not any longer. My fate was settled.
And the words came from my own mouth now, not from the image from memory but still as if spoken in a dream.
“I will be the Messenger of Fear.”
8
NONE OF THIS LAST HAD BEEN SEEN OR HEARD BY Liam and Emma. No time had elapsed for them since Messenger had said, “My apprentice will understand, and thus, so will I.”
The two frightened kids waited for me as though I was to question them.
“My apprentice will lay her palm against your cheek, and if you do not resist, it will be quick and not unpleasant.”
Would I? I supposed I must. But what I wanted to do was yell at Messenger to give me everything, not to just dole out bits and pieces of myself in whatever amount was necessary to manipulate me. To tell me everything, about himself, about this impossible reality, if reality it was.
I was trapped, yes, but that did not compel me to be docile. Even a very good trap often has an escape route.
I was equivocating, beginning to feel my way toward escape, though a few minutes before I had been ready to accept my fate. There is something rebellious in me, something that does not readily accept limitation.
But then, I pondered the scene that had just been revealed to me by Messenger. I had been sobbing. That was me—me, Mara—and I had been sobbing with terrible remorse. What could possibly have happened to cause me to sob my heart out that way? What had happened?
What had I done?
Messenger, my teacher. Me, his student.
I will be the Messenger of Fear.
What did that mean?
One thing was clear as I drew a mental cloak over my defiant urges: right now it meant obeying him. Until I figured out what was happening.
Somehow, by some means I could not begin to guess at, I was in a very different reality with rules that included be
ing able to move effortlessly from place to place, to freeze time or speed it up. To simply know things that should be unknowable. To intrude on thoughts that were not my own. A place of sentient mists and stunning women and, above all, the boy in black, the Messenger with his mysterious manner and strange dress and too-intimate voice.
I had not forgotten—no, far from it—the visions I had seen on making physical contact with Messenger. I cautioned myself that however calm and controlled he seemed now, he was a creature whose mind was filled with dark scenes of unspeakable wickedness.
He was, in short, dangerous.
Time had passed since Messenger had warned Liam and Emma that I would be touching them, but if the two of them were impatient, they gave no sign. They waited, not frozen, but like a GIF, a loop, eyes blinking, mouths breathing, their fingers intertwined, the ginger boy and the dark girl.
Messenger waited too, and watched, interested by how I was digesting all this new information. It angered me, that calm way of his, that solemn but compassionate watching and waiting. The patience of him.
But what was I to do? This was his world, and I was sworn to be his student. Later I would find the way out, oh yes, as you see, already I was thinking of escape, even while suspecting that my thoughts were as open to him as the page of any book.
Flushing at that unsettling notion, I broke my trance and laid my hand against Liam’s faintly freckled cheek and against Emma’s at the same time, standing between the two of them, an intruder in their relationship. But that rude and too-familiar physical transgression was nothing compared to what I next experienced. For into my reeling mind poured the whole history of Emma and Liam.
I saw Liam’s first memory. He was on his back, looking up, and into his field of vision came a woman. She seemed tired, her eyes dark, hair straggling, but she smiled like a Madonna when she saw him.
His mother. I was seeing Liam as a baby, seeing his mother. I saw images of his father as well, a large man, with big hands and a look of perpetual skepticism. I saw his pets, his friends, his room, the posters on his wall as he grew older.