Mercy

  ‘She was really, really nice,’ he murmurs, fiddling with his watchband again. ‘Patient, you know? And kind, even though she was one of those people that doesn’t need to be. I really liked her. We spent a lot of time together doing the last big inter-school concert before she, uh, disappeared. Me being one of the only, uh, semi-functioning tenors from Port Marie, you see.’

  He swallows convulsively, fresh pain still evident in his voice. ‘St Joseph’s didn’t send anyone that year, so you probably wouldn’t remember it. But it was a big, big deal around here. You know I was one of the last people to see her alive?’

  I watch with interest as he swallows again, wipes a non-existent speck off one lens of his glasses, and shoves them back on so hard that the nose pads push into the corners of his eyes, making them water some more.

  ‘I can tell she was nice,’ I say carefully. ‘She had a lot of friends, you can see from all the photos. There are dozens. I didn’t know you could have so many friends.

  I certainly don’t.’

  Ain’t that the truth, says that little voice wryly.

  161

  Spencer’s voice, when he finds it, is windy, bereft.

  ‘We just got each other, you know? She listened all the times I needed to vent — and they were plenty. I mean, he treats me like shit in front of everyone — it’s practically a school tradition these days, you know, the public baiting of Spencer Grady, because if the teachers do it, it must be all right — and I listened when she needed to get something off her chest.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I say casually, casting Carmen’s eyes downward so that he won’t see the sudden hot gleam in them. ‘About what? Was she upset about something before she, uh, vanished?’

  ‘More like someone,’ Spencer replies with a faraway look on his face.

  I want to leap into the gap he’s created so badly I have to bite my tongue to stop any words forming. But somehow I bide my time, taking another small sip of my unpalatable drink, dumping more sugar into it, stirring vigorously. As suddenly full of nervous tics as Spencer is himself.

  Come on, come on.

  I’m almost afraid he’s not going to say any more when he blurts out suddenly, ‘Mr Masson was trying to convince her to turn professional. Forcing her, more 162

  like. It wasn’t something she really wanted to do. She wasn’t sure if that was the direction she wanted to go in. He was putting real pressure on her to leave Paradise High and go for an opera scholarship with a prestigious performing arts school; next stop, the Met Opera House or something like that. The extra coaching sessions he’d arranged for her before the inter-school concert were really wearing her down — before school, after school, lunchtimes, during spares. And it confused things with her, uh, boyfriend, Richard, she said. She felt like she was being pulled in too many directions at once, and she wasn’t even sure if she loved singing enough to make the kind of commitment Mr Masson wanted from her. He kept saying he’d make her a star.’

  Though Carmen’s outward expression is unreadable, I’m electrified by what I’m hearing. Mr Masson? That tired-looking, short-sighted little man with the wild hair and stubby fingers who cares way too much about adhering strictly to the tempo? Is Ryan aware of any of this?

  ‘The concert that year was Mr Masson’s pet project,’

  Spencer adds helpfully as he drains the last of his coffee, licking his lips as they meet the sugar hit at the bottom of the cup. ‘It really mattered to him — he personally 163

  chose every piece. Lauren was like his — what’s that word? — protégé.’ The boy paints imaginary quote marks in the air.

  ‘He had her doing everything from operatic arias to Andrew Lloyd Webber and kept telling everyone that she had what it took to go all the way to the opera houses of North America, Milan, Austria. The music A-league. It was like he was obsessed.’

  I push my coffee cup to the side discreetly, and Spencer, being sensitive to giving insult to anyone, immediately does the same.

  ‘We should do this again,’ he says hopefully. ‘It’s been really nice.’

  I realise that really nice is his default position; it’s how he wishes the world, and everything in it, to be.

  And something close to tenderness wells up again in my borrowed heart. As much as I do tender, anyway.

  ‘Yeah, it has,’ I agree neutrally as I steel myself and touch his bare wrist where it rests across from me on the table.

  Just a brief hold, a moment of light pressure, but it’s enough to bring out a cold sweat on Carmen’s forehead as I flame into contact with him, feel that building pressure behind the eyes, search quickly for impressions 164

  of Lauren in his mind. The burning sensation in my left hand snakes rapidly up my forearm like a living thing.

  Mercifully, it burns out as soon as I let go. Everything confirmed. Brenda was right: Spencer had been sweet on Lauren, and crushed like a leaf twice over when she’d turned him down, then promptly disappeared.

  Unlike Richard Coates, Spencer has barely registered my brief touch.

  ‘I was going to walk home …’ I trail off, hoping he won’t insist on keeping me company, even though it’s getting dark out. Or, worse still, insist on that lift I lied about. ‘Are you okay getting back to Port Marie?’

  ‘I’ll get Dad to pick me up,’ he says, a dull note creeping back into his voice. ‘Don’t sweat it. Maybe I’ll see you around?’

  I stamp down hard on my evil inner voice even as I force Carmen to reply cheerfully, ‘First thing tomorrow morning, yeah? Maybe they’ll even let us sit together again. What are the chances? It’s been way fun.’

  An answering grin lights Spencer’s usually solemn features.

  I leave the café waving inanely, still no good at doing normal. As I watch him wave enthusiastically back from behind the window, I know I’ve changed in some way I 165

  can’t quite yet define. Because in the past, I would have eaten guys like Spencer alive with no regard for hurt feelings, and laughed as I spat out their bones.

  Night has begun to mantle the streets of Paradise. I hurry away from the Decades Café, keeping as much as possible to the bright arcs mapped out by the streetlights, although there is barely anyone about. The wind is blowing so hard now that no one’s likely to make eye contact with me anyway, without getting a face full of desiccated leaf debris.

  When I reach the outskirts of the Daleys’ property, I pull out Carmen’s tacky pink mobile phone and speed dial Ryan’s number. Maybe I only imagine that her fingers are shaking a little.

  ‘Help,’ I say softly when he picks up. ‘I’m outside the house and hoping you’re in there or I’m in big trouble.’

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ he says in his deep, familiar voice that always sets off that strange longing in me for some kind of normalcy, safe harbour, however fleeting. ‘I’ll come get you.’

  The wind shifts, carrying the scent of me to Stewart Daley’s dogs. Their sudden, unbridled rage seems almost welcoming, as Ryan ushers me quickly into the warmth 166

  of his parents’ house, every downstairs lamp lit as if to welcome me back from a long journey. The Prodigal Whatever-I-Am.

  ‘Mum’s upstairs, and Dad’s been held up at work,’

  Ryan explains as he shuts the front door against the howling world outside.

  He looks so good to me that I have to struggle to keep my tone light. ‘Enough time to catch you up on what I learnt today?’

  I head down the hall, shrugging out of Carmen’s utilitarian grey marle hoodie as I go, knowing he’ll follow. I hug the knowledge to myself, before logic kicks in. I mean, the guy’ll follow anyone to the ends of the earth if it means he might learn something new about his sister’s whereabouts. And Carmen’s no beauty, and I can be a little … difficult. I admit it. So who am I kidding?

  ‘For you, sweetheart?’ Ryan grins at me crookedly

  — I know because I dart him a quick look from under Carmen’s surprisingly long lashes — ‘There’s always ti
me.’

  Maybe I’m just imagining Carmen’s heart skipping a beat.

  You hearing this? I tell her, wanting some kind of affirmation that I’m not overreacting to something that 167

  isn’t there. Of course, there’s no reply. There never is.

  As we come up on the landing, I glance down the hallway and see Mrs Daley’s wraith-like shadow moving against the brilliant white lamplight in her bedroom.

  Wordlessly, Ryan and I enter Lauren’s room together.

  He turns on every light he can find, as if to ward off evil spirits, before shutting the door. I place Carmen’s hoodie down on the bed, walk over to Lauren’s desk and dump Carmen’s satchel on top of it.

  ‘The night she was taken was like this,’ Ryan says almost ruefully, propping himself up against Lauren’s dresser. ‘Almost blowing a gale by 10 pm; fifty knots —

  at least — out on the water. No one would have heard a thing. When it gets like this now, Mum insists on lighting up the entire place. Dad and I do it automatically these days. We used to try to talk her out of it, but she’s almost got us believing it, too.’

  Understanding dawns on me. ‘It’s so that Lauren will be able to find her way home in the dark,’ I say softly.

  ‘Something like that.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘Like that makes any kind of sense. Hit any dead ends today? I sure did.’

  I listen impatiently as he tells me about his fruitless search of the Port Marie Evangelical Church, before I lay out eagerly what I learnt from Spencer. When nothing in 168

  Ryan’s face changes, I know he knows it all already, and I’m hit by a wave of disappointment so hard I have to sit down on the edge of Lauren’s bed.

  That’s what you get for trying to impress the boy, I think bitterly.

  ‘I remember checking Masson out,’ Ryan says with a frown. ‘He’s got a wife and two small boys, one with some kind of learning disorder. They live out by the burnt-down old cannery near the waterfront, and their place is tiny. It’s not a church either. Like I told you, I checked out the Paradise High choir crowd and they came up clean. We could look at Masson again,’

  he finishes doubtfully, ‘but it’d probably be a waste of time.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, because there’s nothing else to say.

  There’s a sharp tap on the door and Ryan and I shift away from each other guiltily, even though we aren’t actually touching each other, or even close enough to touch.

  ‘Dinner, children,’ Mrs Daley says tiredly before moving away.

  ‘After you,’ Ryan mutters, holding the door open a minute later, frustration in his voice.

  169

  Chapter 17

  Ryan, Louisa Daley and I make polite, but limited, conversation at dinner before Louisa insists that we run along now, refusing to let either of us help with the dishes. As I leave the room behind Ryan, she furiously scrapes leftover food into the waste bin while she tries not to let us see her cry. Just business as usual, then.

  Disappointment has turned Ryan in on himself again, and we part company outside Lauren’s bathroom door without a word said, without a new plan for tomorrow, which leaves me feeling strangely restless, dissatisfied.

  Inside her bedroom, I switch off all the lights and pace the pristine carpet for a while, so wired I can’t possibly sleep. I go over all of the angles, the dead ends, and it’s none for none every time.

  170

  Lauren’s eyes in her photos seem to follow me around the room. Even in the absolute dark, I can make out every image that contains her — photos of sleepovers, choir friends, pen friends, endless parties forever frozen in time. Her ash-blonde hair seems to glow, much as my own reflection does when I pace past the mirrored dresser for the umpteenth time. I have just over a week left to make a difference in Ryan’s life before I’m bussed back to whatever dismal place Carmen comes from, or vanish out of this life altogether, into another. And I can’t see how either is possible. To resolve things; to leave him.

  Maybe Carmen herself is just filler. Some kind of corporeal way station. I don’t want to believe that. I’d like to think that I’m supposed to take something out of this life, or, rather, put something back — for somebody, if not for me.

  I throw myself down on the bed, finally, thinking that sleep will evade me this night, and wake suddenly, hours later, paralysed and choking.

  There’s a tall figure standing at the foot of the bed, and I can’t move a muscle to speak, lift a finger, run.

  Is he doing it to me? Or is it her fear that’s holding me down?

  171

  I discover that the only things I am able to move are Carmen’s eyes. I watch the man drift in place, as if his feet do not touch the ground. So tall, the ceiling almost cannot contain him.

  Very little scares me, and yet the shining one — who is so like me he could be my brother, my twin — stands over me with judgment in his eyes, a living flame cupped in his left hand, and I am very afraid.

  ‘I don’t believe him,’ he says, as if refuting something I have just said aloud.

  Light shines out of every pore of his body as if he’s made of it. His voice is at once so terrible, so beautiful, like thunder advancing from a great distance, a bright bugle call, that I cannot believe Ryan can be sleeping mere metres away and not hear him.

  ‘ You can’t have changed.’ The stranger’s tone is incredulous. ‘It isn’t in you; you were always so adamantine, so … inflexible.’

  I want to scream at him to stop speaking in riddles, but it’s as if I’m fixed to the bed by a force-field of energy so powerful I cannot make my corded neck work. It is almost worse than my fear of heights, this feeling of utter entombment, Carmen’s skin and bones a living shroud in which I am tightly bound. The sensation of being buried 172

  alive is at once so powerful and so terrifying that I feel tears spring to her eyes, roll down her frozen features.

  Don’t do this to me! I wail inside her head as sweat breaks out upon her skin, drenching the pristine white sheets on which we lie. Carmen’s eyes wheel in fear as we, together, struggle to focus on the being at the foot of the bed.

  The burning man moves so swiftly, so imperceptibly, that he’s suddenly beside me, on Carmen’s left, close enough to touch, if touch were permitted me. Light seems to leak from him in wisps, in errant curls that blur, then fade, into the cool air of Lauren’s bedroom.

  His is raiment of such a bright white that I am blinded as to detail, can only perceive him in outline. Yet I know I have seen him before — even before the other night, when I glimpsed him poised silently beside the roadway.

  And I realise that once I knew him when I was truly alive and inhabiting my own skin. How I know this, I cannot be sure.

  Bending low, he whispers in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘I wanted to see for myself how you have

  “changed”. It seems that he has overreached himself, as usual, in his description of you. I see no indication of a shift.’

  173

  He turns away from me, as if aggrieved, or disappointed. Prepared to vanish back into the vortex he stepped out of.

  There is a slight lessening of the strange pressure that binds me to Lauren’s bed and I gasp, despite myself,

  ‘Uri?’ Something subterranean and unheralded in me, recognising something in him.

  The tall figure stiffens, turns back quickly. Bends again to inspect me, as if I am a curio, an oddity, from another age.

  His voice is like a muted roar, like waves breaking across all the world’s oceans in tandem, a thunderclap to split the skies. ‘What — did — you — say?’

  I know I should feel fear; I have been cautioned —

  by Luc, more than once — to be fearful. But that does not even begin to describe what is in my heart.

  The being, Uri, raises his left hand, the living flame cupped in it, the better to see her, the better to see me within. Plays it across Carmen’s unremarkable features, her slight figure stretched out beneath the covers of Lauren??
?s bed.

  His lip curls. So puny, so mortal. I can almost read his thoughts.

  I could always read his thoughts.

  174

  ‘ Uri,’ I cry again, as if I am drowning. ‘I know you.’

  And for a moment, it is as if an invisible hand is at my throat, crushing Carmen’s windpipe until the room turns black at the edges, purple in my sight, the outline of the physical world wavering.

  I am suddenly fearful that it may be possible to die in another’s body and I choke out, ‘You — don’t — scare

  — me. You — never — did.’

  ‘Liar,’ says the figure of power. ‘I can smell your human fear. The intervening years have made you weak.

  Perhaps he was right. You have changed, if only to become even less than you were.’

  There are those strange emphases again, and I struggle to draw breath into the girl’s livid body and at the same time comprehend his meaning.

  He laughs harshly. ‘How would we have been able to keep you from him at every turn, if that were not the case?’

  He laughs again at that. And, subtly, the energy in the room, the strange, sapping power, increases, until the air fairly crackles with it, and I am made rigid, as if electrified by live current. Helpless with longing for movement, for air, for what once was. We were friends, I am sure of it. We laughed; we were equals.

  175

  ‘We ruled the world,’ he says softly, as if he has read it from my mind, and I know it for the truth.

  ‘Bully,’ I manage to gasp out.

  ‘Traitor,’ he replies swiftly, menace in his voice.

  The word makes no sense to me, my recall having inconveniently hit a wall.

  For an unguarded moment he relaxes his absolute dominion over me and in that instant, I reach out and grab his hand, like someone going under for the last time.

  It is white, his skin, like marble or alabaster, without flaw, and smooth as fired glass or porcelain. Unlined on any surface.

  I turn his palm over, and see that Carmen’s small hand is lost in it, when the burning begins. Quickly it engulfs her left arm, her torso, all of her, until we are incandescent, rigid in fiery glory.