A rusty hinge screeched as Mr. Barrett shut the door behind him. Me and Mom and Dad hugged. Talked for a little while, and then they returned their attention to the television. A regrettable incident, as far as they knew, but small, and settled now. The smell of our living room had never been so comforting.
And I needed to go get some blankets.
Fifty
Solomon
“She should be fine until the morning,” said Anchal, our neighbor from two doors down. She emerged from Radha’s bedroom, holding a blanket. Anchal was a sleepsider, able to make anyone doze off no matter how stressed out or addled they were. Anchal spent an awful lot of time helping people rest in difficult moments.
“You’re amazing,” I said, and hugged her.
“He’s going to be okay, yeah?” Anchal asked. “Our little boy?”
“We’re going to find Connor,” I said. “Nothing will happen to him.”
“Give these to Radha when she wakes up,” she said, and handed me a plate of cheesy biscuits. I set them down on the table, beside dozens of other delicious foods brought by neighbors.
Anchal nodded at Ash on her way out, but clearly did not recognize her. Between an oversize hood and some of Radha’s makeup, expertly applied, the Refugee Princess had rendered herself invisible before we returned to the Underbridge. We’d gone back to be with Radha, hold her hand through the agony of this moment, but apparently she’d been so stressed—and so hell-bent on storming out to slaughter every Destroyer in sight—that her friends had intervened and talked her into accepting Anchal’s help first.
I sat on a floor cushion, beside Ash. The smell of Radha’s hut had never been so comforting. What did it smell like, wherever Connor was? Was someone being nice to him?
Images flooded me, against my will. Ugly dark rooms. Harsh words. Disgusting food, or none at all.
My spine shivered. My bones throbbed. Ash looked up at me sharply. My own anger had risen fast, and spread to her. I smiled and focused on breathing. Ten breaths later, I asked her, “Can you find him? See him? Wherever Connor is right now? And show me him?”
Ash looked into her hands. They were empty. It was a long time before she said, “I can try.”
“I can help,” I said, hoping it was true. Strong emotions had helped her remember the Night of Red Diamonds. Emotion is the key to memory. Maybe it could unlock vision as well. “What kind of feeling would be most helpful?”
“Let’s start with calm,” she said.
But calm did not work. Five minutes of slow peaceful breathing produced nothing but images of the riversea rushing by, herbivorous dragons munching chestnut tree leaves.
Ash asked, “How about anger?”
I let myself drift back into the nightmare images. Connor in chains. Connor screaming. People laughing at his pain.
That worked better. Ash blinked, and we were gone from the little hut.
A massive movie theater. Abandoned now—the place smelled of mold and dust—but packed with people. Ultramarine armbands; posters that said “Destroy All Monsters.”
Ash’s voice echoed in my ear, in the real world. “This is his headquarters.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
More scenes of hustle and bustle. Thick red carpet had been torn up in spots, and was worn thin in others.
“I can’t place it. And I don’t know if Connor and Niv are here. The things I see—I can’t control what I see, or when, or why.”
Giant crates were stacked along the wall. The seal of the Darkside Police Department was emblazoned on the side of each.
Ash said, “Gifts, courtesy of Commissioner Bahrr.”
Of course. “The Shield is nothing without Bahrr,” I said. “But it doesn’t go both ways. If the Shield falls, Bahrr will be just fine. To take Bahrr out—we need your mom. We need to go to the Palace as soon as possible. You need to speak with her. Convince her. Make her—”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
The images kept coming. Me and Ash, in weird clothes, sitting inside of a giant metal box that smelled of leather and gasoline. Eating weird food: fried brown ovals. Both exhausted, both looking bleary-eyed and rough. Was it the other side?
“I am kind of hungry,” she said, pulling us out of the vision.
“We should go get breakfast,” I said. I grabbed the little radio, and we walked out into a weirdly warm day.
Fifty-One
Ash
“Welcome to this weird, beautiful day,” Ms. Jackson said, through my car radio, her gravelly smoker’s voice soothing as ever. “Seventy degrees out, sun shining like summertime. They’re saying it might get up to seventy-five. Doesn’t seem right, for the end of October. Global warming, beloveds. We’ll enjoy our nice days for as long as we can, I guess, until the rising seas swallow us up.”
Solomon and I sipped our McDonald’s coffee and picked at a pile of hash browns. Seven thirty in the morning and we were both exhausted, both looking bleary-eyed and rough. We’d driven around until McDonald’s opened, and then we’d found a quiet place with no people.
“We have to tell Connor,” I said. “We have to get him the hell out of there.”
Solomon’s eyes widened. “Oh my god,” he whispered. “Oh my god, Ash. You don’t think—”
“Hey,” I said, reaching for him.
“Oh my god,” he said again, and lowered his face into his hands. When he spoke again, I could hear how hard he was working to keep from crying. “All this time, I—”
“Mr. Barrett is a monster,” I said. “Okay? His behavior is not on you.”
“He always made me feel like I was less than Connor. Back then I kept thinking I was being punished for something. So I assumed Connor was safe. . . . What an idiot I—”
“Stop,” I said. It was so hard to think and speak rationally about something so irrational, something that made me feel so full of rage and nausea.
I took out my phone, dialed Connor’s number. No answer.
“It’s a school day,” I said, and laughed. “I forgot all about school.” I must have been way more exhausted than I’d initially thought, because I laughed a lot longer and louder than the joke deserved.
“Almost eight,” Solomon said. “So he’s probably at the high school already.”
“We’ll get him,” I said. “When school lets out, we’ll be waiting for him. Okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked out the window, to where the movie theater used to be. Everybody in town had a ton of happy memories of that place. I felt something die inside when it closed two years ago. “Can we go over to the old Greenport School?”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re missing your purple dinosaur?”
“Yeah.”
I let him eat the last hash brown, then started up the car. Outside the McDonald’s, three mummies stood around looking bored.
“What are those?” I asked Solomon.
“Mummies,” he said, like that was totally normal.
I watched them. Waited for the sun to come out from behind a cloud and reveal them as nothing more than our own harmless local meth heads.
Was I losing my mind? Was the trauma of learning what had happened to Solomon so extreme that my hold on reality had been broken? Was I falling under the spell of his world?
When we got to the Greenport School, four girls our age were sitting on skateboards and smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. I didn’t know them, though they looked familiar in that way everyone does in a small town.
“Hey, Solomon,” one of them said. “You got your guitar today? Gonna play us something?”
“Nah, sorry,” he said.
I waved awkwardly. So did they.
His allosaurus awaited us, looking rough. Paint mostly peeled off, rusted over everywhere. But he hugged her like she was the prettiest sight he’d ever seen.
I lay on my back on the gravel beside him. I tried to explain Sheffield’s Induction Ceremony. I wasn’t sure why. Exhaustion, mostly. My brain wasn’t workin
g right. Made me talk a mile a minute. But then Solomon said, “He’s a very good student.”
“Who’s a student?”
“Sheffield. He’s like Mr. Barrett’s, what do you call it? Protégé. His power comes from him. Sheffield is nothing without Mr. Barrett, but it doesn’t go both ways. Why the hell is he still on the team if he doesn’t play anymore? Mr. Barrett probably sees something of himself in him.”
I sat up suddenly. He was right, of course.
Maybe there was nothing I could do about Mr. Barrett. Maybe he was too big and too well-respected for me and Solomon to hold him accountable.
But Sheffield . . .
I wasn’t sure how, yet, but Sheffield was the weak link we could use to break the chain.
“I need to get that film developed,” I said. “From the football team shoot. Want to come?”
Solomon stared off into the woods. Sound came, from a little transistor radio he had been carrying in his back pocket.
“What a beautiful day for Halloween,” Ms. Jackson said. “My favorite holiday of the year.”
“Solomon?” I asked, but if he heard me at all, he did not respond. I looked off to where he was staring, as if there might be something there to explain where he’d gone.
The woods had closed in on the school in the years since it shut down, tall grasses and shrubs and vines inching forward to encircle it. That ramshackle forest cut like a river through the whole town, or rather the town had been carved into the woods. Trailer parks and rows of identical duplexes and gorgeous old mansions all nestled in it.
“I used to be so scared of the woods,” I said. “Anything at all could come out of them.”
“Only animals,” Solomon whispered, and it was like he wasn’t really there. “The real monsters—they’re all human.”
Fifty-Two
Solomon
“Girl?”
Something had happened to Maraud. I squatted down and touched her cheek, and felt cold steel instead of warm pebbly skin.
“Who did this to you, girl?”
She was a sad, broken, rusty piece of metal, with most of her face flaked off. Smaller than me.
I staggered back, clamped a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out.
Maraud was not a monster at all, but some ancient toy that no one loved.
“This isn’t real,” I whispered—and looked around—and saw that we were gone from the Underbridge—that we stood outside some miserable broken-down building, covered in graffiti, where a couple of kids did drugs in the shadows.
There were no whales in the sky. No brontosaurus necks arcing high overhead.
“Solomon?”
It was Ash—but not. This person was stronger, in some ways. No wicked spell held her back. No faraway look glazed over her eyes.
But she was weaker, too. Not a princess. Not an othersider. Just a person. Like anyone else.
And the woods were empty. No monsters lived there.
I held out my hands, and felt how empty they were. Nothing lived in them. No magic.
As far back as I could remember I could feel it inside me, even if it took me years to figure out what it was and how to use it. Now there was nothing.
Once, when I was a hungry little kid—before the Palace, before Radha—sleeping wherever I could find a safe place, eating only what I could scavenge—I’d had the most wonderful dream.
A table was spread before me. Covered in candles; so long it disappeared into the distance. Piled high with food; a thousand plates of weird and wonderful dishes. Some were real, like the sweet-spicy–smelling wyvern kebabs I’d never been able to afford, or the cheap roasted chestnuts that kind fellow citizens would buy for me from time to time—but some were not, like a strange giant circle of dough that had red sauce and melted cheese on top of it, or tiny, little pale pink sausages crammed into strange little loaves of bread, or pink oranges that were actually orange.
At first I’d been afraid to eat it. Clearly it was meant for someone way more fancy and wealthy than me. But I took a handful of pomegranate seeds, and no one stopped me, so I went to town. Spent hours, it felt like, eating all that food.
I ate it until I woke up.
And I lay there, in the dark warm basement where I’d been lucky enough to fall asleep, and felt how I had nothing. No food in front of me. Nothing in my stomach. Nothing but pain and hunger.
Never in my life had it been so painful, to wake up into cold, drab miserable reality. And it never was again—until that moment, when I looked around and saw that I stood in a world with no magic, no dinosaurs, no monsters. How could humans survive in a world so ugly?
“This isn’t real,” I whispered again, and shut my eyes and focused on the red light of the sun that filtered through my eyelids, praying that when I opened them I was home and safe again.
Fifty-Three
Ash
Red light turned Solomon to stone, a statue carved from a massive ruby.
“I thought light would ruin the picture,” Solomon said, looking up at the bare amber bulb. “Overexpose it.”
“It’s a safelight,” I said. “Its light comes only from parts of the visible spectrum that photographic chemicals—especially those on the paper—are almost completely insensitive to.”
“Almost,” he said, dipping a finger into the stop bath. “So something is lost.”
I swatted his finger away. “Shhh,” I said. “Let me concentrate.”
I still didn’t know why we were there. What I hoped to achieve, looking at these photos. Why we were hiding in my basement instead of finding a way to punish Mr. Barrett. The only thing I knew was that I had to expose Sheffield somehow, and for the moment these images were the only tricks up my sleeve. To fight Sheffield, I had a plan. I had hope. To fight Mr. Barrett I had neither.
My parents were at work, but Mom had called me. Apparently, Mr. Barrett had phoned in the morning, to let them know Solomon had not been at home. And to imply that I hadn’t been completely truthful with them. My father had said, You really should have been there, George.
Connor hadn’t responded to any of my texts or calls. It was still only ten in the morning, and school let out at quarter to three.
The darkroom was my sanctuary. The only place I felt connected to something bigger than myself. Something all-powerful. I’d get a little sliver of the same sensation sometimes, taking pictures, when everything was right and I was connected to that essential thing—a shiver up the spine, a tingle all through my skeleton—but it was fragile and could come and go as it pleased. Only here could I really revel in it, tune everything else out. Dip my fingertips into warm water, move the squares of white paper back and forth, watch the world emerge. Taking pictures felt like capturing reality; printing them felt like creating it.
“Who’s that?” Solomon asked, watching a boy slowly take shape in the tub of developer.
“Just watch,” I said.
The darkest spots came in first. His black hair; the shadow he cast on the wall. And then the warmer grays, the shape of his smile and the arc of his shoulders and his jug-handled ears.
“Tom,” Solomon said, when he saw what football player he was, sounding peaceful and calm in a way I could not imagine.
“How are you so chill right now?”
“Because I know my brother is going to be okay.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard him call Connor his brother before. I didn’t ask him how he knew he was okay. I tried to focus on feeling what he felt. Believing what he believed.
He sat down on the floor, and began to strum the guitar.
And, somehow, it helped. Calmed me down.
I plunged Tom into the stop bath, and then the tub of fixer. And then I moved on to the next negative.
I placed a piece of photographic paper under the enlarger. Focused the bulb and switched it on. Justin’s face frowned up at me. I switched the bulb off, and the paper was blank once more. I shut my eyes again, and slid the paper into the bath of developer. The
steps were familiar, mechanical. I ran my fingers across the smooth, glossy wet square, felt its potential, all the images it could come to carry.
Photography was magic.
Keeping my eyes closed, I remembered what I had seen when I looked through the lens. How different my visions had been, lately. The scenes I could summon up. Specific things, not the abstract senses of guilt or shame or anger I’d been seeing before.
If it worked when I took the pictures, could it work when I developed them?
“Hey, Solomon,” I said, and the strumming stopped. “Did we ever figure out what my ability was? On the other side?”
“Seeing things you shouldn’t be able to see,” he said. “Visions. Secrets. The past, and the present.”
I turned around to look at him, sprawled on the Totoro beanbag chair he had once been swallowed up in, and now dwarfed. But the look on his face, in the dim red light, was the same. Excitement over things I couldn’t get my head around.
Maybe he lived in a different world. A crazy one. It didn’t mean he couldn’t be happy there.
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“You think of an image you want to know more about,” he said. “Concentrate on it. Let it grow. Show you its connections to other things.”
I shut my eyes. Imagined the photo of Justin. The pouty look on his face when I told him what to do.
A tremor went through my chest. Like a second heart, beating beneath my breastbone. Like something was flowing through me, from some other place (the other side), some other me.
I smelled old popcorn, spilled soda. Body odor. Burning.
Eyes still shut, I focused on the dark clouds around Justin. They bubbled and swelled in my mind’s eye, and I began to try to . . . push them. Show me what I wanted to see.
His worst moment, I thought. His Induction Ceremony.
I opened my eyes and watched it take shape on the paper. First, the dark spots. Shelves stuffed with giant sacks of dog food. Distant people. And then the lighter pieces: Justin standing with his arm out, dropping a match. Bright flames blooming.
Destroy All Monsters Page 18