by Emily Henry
“See?” Levi said. “Nick just used the Lord’s name, and you know he’s not doing that in vain.”
“No way in heck,” Nick said. “Ma’s probably got me bugged.”
Even Droog gave an anxious wag of the tail, like she understood and agreed.
My instinct was still to tell them to stay, that I didn’t need them, but that wouldn’t work any more than Arthur shutting us into the cellar had.
They were mine too, and I was theirs.
I turned back to the doors and swung the ax into the wood. Beside me, Sofía slammed the sledgehammer into the other door. Nick’s shovel speared through the space between us, cracking the place where the doors met, and together we swung, pounded, and smashed the door apart enough that I could reach through the hole and knock the metal pipe out of the handles.
Remy shoved the doors open, and we scrambled out with our tools still in hand, makeshift weapons.
The forest was in chaos: massive branches blowing across the ground, trash and bits of wood and shingles everywhere, wind so strong we couldn’t run straight, and an electrical charge in the air that I knew wasn’t coming from me.
My legs felt weak and my ankle was on fire, but I promised myself this was the home stretch as I broke into a sprint. Lights flickered in every one of the cabin’s windows, and the front door was open, clapping the side of the house.
I stopped just inside, grip tightening on the ax, and surveyed the first floor. All the windows were open, everything within gusting around. The bookshelves along the wall were half-empty, their contents spread across the blue floral couch and the bulky coffee table and the floor.
The five of us stood for a beat, scanning the mess in the flashing lights of every bulb and lamp in the house as Droog trotted forward, sniffing madly. “Spread out,” I said. “Be as fast as you can.”
We veined out through the house with great effort as the gusts fought to push us off course. I pulled myself up the staircase by the rickety banister, and on a step near the top, a flash of red caught my eye. A four-by-six photograph, pinned against the step by the force of the wind.
I glanced over the banister into the room below with new understanding. The books spread across every surface, pages whipping wildly, were photo albums, all of them.
I reached for the picture in front of me, and my stomach tightened. Everything in me tightened, though now there was no energy bound up in me.
In the photograph, a tow-headed girl with bushy, over-sprayed bangs sat at a cherry-red piano, fingers braced against the keys, her smiling face turned over her shoulder toward the camera, but not so much that you couldn’t read the hot-pink Puffy Paint bubble letters arcing across the back of her black T-shirt:
MOLLY.
My ears started to ring. My heart felt more like a thrumming engine than a beating thing, resting between pulpy pulses.
Molly.
Not an alien at all.
A human.
THIRTY-FOUR
A PERSON.
The little girl who’d lived in the Jenkins House.
Who’d owned that red piano.
A person, a person, a person.
My heart thundered.
What did it mean?
Why did he have this girl’s picture? Was it stolen, like the drawings?
Trophies? I thought, followed by ARTHUR!
I stuffed the picture in my pocket and ran up the steps, rivulets of pain tracing up my ankle. Through the flickering light, I spotted Arthur’s bony frame just inside the first doorway. I choked out a wordless sound of relief as I ran to him, but he didn’t react to me.
I froze just inside the room, feeling like I’d missed the top step, when I saw why.
There were only two things in the room: a piano on the right wall and the massive hunk of metal in the middle, easily fifteen feet wide and five feet tall, a mess of twisted, melted, welded metal.
Right there in the middle of the floor, on the tarp where it must have been built—it never would have fit through the door, and it was so heavy the floor bowed a bit under its weight.
A Fibonacci spiral.
I felt like the fabric of the universe was coming apart around me, like all this would float away and I’d be suspended in endless darkness.
“It’s just like the one he was planning to build,” Arthur murmured under the terrible noise of the storm.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Mark bent over the table in the kitchen, late afternoon light spearing through the windows over the sink, catching in his hair and dappling his shoulders as he worked and sketched out the blueprint.
He was getting scrap metal from the mill.
A co-worker was teaching him how to weld.
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not Mark’s. It’s a weapon. It’s—”
“Empty,” Arthur rasped. “Nothing but a spiraling tunnel. I crawled all the way to the center.”
My ears and throat and stomach suddenly felt like they were full of cotton. I swayed in the doorway, unsure whether it was the wind or my own imbalance making the world rock.
It had to be a weapon.
It had to be.
It had to.
“Just a stupid fucking sculpture,” Arthur said. “Just Mark’s sculpture.”
I moved deeper into the room, touched the dense exterior of the spiral. The way all its parts had been chopped up and redistributed gave it the look and feel of a fossil, something ancient, rough edges and sediment preserved for centuries but still solid enough you could push it off a short cliff and it might hold together through the fall.
Tears rushed into my eyes as I followed the spiral back to its end, the three-foot-high opening of the tunnel that twisted into the center of the sculpture.
I looked out the window, wiping my eyes. The woods below looked like they were raving, boughs lifted high and seizing low, snapping and flying and stabbing where they hit.
“It doesn’t do anything?” I croaked, turning to Arthur. “Why would he do this? Just to torture us?”
Not a weapon. Just some kind of sick game.
There was no weapon.
There was no alien.
There was no greater purpose.
We’d been wrong about everything, except that Wayne Hastings was dangerous.
Molly. A person. What had he done to Molly?
We’d misread everything, probably imagined half of it. We’d been exposed to something, maybe even an actual satellite, that night, and our subconsciousnesses had gone wild, filling in all the blanks, pulling bits of what we’d seen at the Jenkins House apart and teasing them into a full-blown story.
Arthur’s mouth hung open as he tried to find words. “I thought . . . This is really it, isn’t it? We’re not heroes. We’re not chosen. We’re just . . . us, like we’ve always been.”
The desolation in his voice and face was unbearable.
I couldn’t push down the feeling anymore that I’d disappointed him, that his whole life had been one disappointment after the next, just like Mom’s, and all the love I had for him could never make a dent in his pain.
I’d tried not needing him.
I’d tried letting him and the others help.
I’d tried being there so he could lean on me.
I opened my mouth—to say what? That we needed to go? Arthur knew that. He knew we were standing up here, risking our lives for nothing, and it struck me deep in my belly that I could drag him downstairs again with me, shut him up safe in the cellar with the others. But I could do nothing to make him want this life we had.
A downed power line snapped against the window, and the flickering lights finally went out, leaving us only with the sky’s eerie green light.
I turned away from him. “Arthur . . . we have to—”
His strangled cry cut me off.
I spun back as a dark figure slipped through the doorway and slammed Arthur backward into the wall. The two silhouettes tumbled to the ground, and as Arthur tried to scuttle away, the man snaked an arm around his throat, hauling him back while his other hand kept its grip on his hunting gun.
“What are you doing in my house, boy?” the man roared, his arm tightening so there was no way for Arthur to answer.
He shook Arthur again, his voice slurring out of him along with a sweet, grainy scent.
I braced the ax over my shoulder and ran around the massive spiral, but the man clumsily lifted the rifle barrel in my direction, and Arthur coughed something resembling my name.
“Drop it,” the man said. “Now.”
The ax handle slid clear of my hand and clattered to the floor. The man’s gun dipped and leveled as he surveyed me through the dark. “Vandalism wasn’t enough anymore?” he said in a low, furious voice. “Spray-painting my goddamn walls and knocking over my fence starting to bore you? You kids think you’re some fuckin’ angels of vengeance?”
Wind upended the lamp on the piano, sent it smashing into the wall then spinning across the floor. The man’s grip must have loosened, because Arthur snatched the gun and tumbled clear of him on the floor.
“You think I need you to remember what happened?” the man growled, lunging after him. “Every day here is a penance.”
I spun, searching for the ax. It had blown—a blade, blowing around a room—under the curve of the spiral, the handle just barely protruding. I clambered after it, snatched it, and stood as Arthur scuttled back toward the window, shakily holding the gun.
Downstairs, someone was shouting, calling our names, but that didn’t stop the man. He crawled toward us.
I braced the ax against my shoulder like a baseball bat as Arthur pushed himself up against the wall beside me.
Wayne Hastings labored to his feet and lurched toward us, a disconcerting sob racking his huge form. “And that hasn’t been enough? You won’t even let me die in peace?”
Die?
The sickly green light from the window poured around Arthur’s silhouette, catching the edges of the man’s weather-beaten face as he took one more shambling step forward.
And then the light hit him, full force, and if the gun was loaded, we must have been very lucky, because when Arthur dropped it, no bullet snapped out.
“You,” Arthur said.
His voice was all wrong.
Light, high-pitched.
It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t thick with the hate that was filling me up at the sight of Wayne Hastings and his rain-drenched tangle of gray hair, his flannel sleeves and rain-speckled denim overalls.
The expression on the man’s horrible, leathery face melted into stark confusion.
The moment held us captive, three flies caught in amber, and maybe this spell wouldn’t break for hundreds of years until scientists found us frozen beside this behemoth Fibonacci spiral.
But then something cracked overhead, a new strand of light unspooling through the ceiling as part of the roof tore away.
Wayne’s cold, dead eyes ricocheted up to it, then back to us.
“You need to get out of here,” he said, a voice as papery as the skin of a garlic clove.
Arthur took a dazed step, and my grip tightened on the ax handle. “I know you.”
Wayne’s mouth twisted hideously. “Everyone knows me.”
“I know you,” Arthur said again. “Your face. I know it. I keep feeling like—you’re her father. How is it possible you’re her father?”
I shifted between my feet. “What are you talking about?”
Was he having some kind of breakdown?
There were steps pounding up the stairs now.
Arthur’s gaze flashed toward me. “Molly. He’s Molly’s father.”
“What?”
“I recognize him. It’s not memories, exactly, or visions. I just . . . It’s a feeling. I recognize him. I know how she feels about him. I feel it.” He looked toward the scar on his hand, and my eyes followed.
It was happening so slowly that at first I thought I was imagining it, but after another second, I was sure: The wine-colored scars were retracting.
I didn’t understand. If Molly wasn’t an alien, if she was a person, then none of the rest of this stuff—our so-called powers—could be real.
But the veinlike welts were retreating, and Arthur was feeling something.
When I looked back to Wayne, what little pinkness he’d had in his cheeks had drained. He was staring at Arthur. “You . . . you knew Molly?”
“It’s her,” Arthur said to me. “His daughter is the consciousness.”
My rib cage felt like a trapdoor yanked open, my heart plummeting into my stomach.
Right then, the others burst into the room, Droog at their heels, tools-turned-weapons raised. Nick ran right toward Wayne, shovel wound up for a swing, and Remy was right behind him with a butcher knife.
Arthur threw himself between them and Wayne as the old man tripped back in surprise. “It’s not a weapon!” Arthur screamed. “He’s not building a weapon for an alien!”
“That’s exactly what I saw in my vision!” Remy gestured toward the spiral. “That’s it!”
“But it’s not a weapon,” Arthur insisted, and as if in agreement, Droog ran right toward the man and sat on his feet, crying faintly.
Levi seemed unsure. So did the others, and I was with them.
Maybe Molly hadn’t been an alien. Maybe she’d been a person, and he was her father, but that didn’t account for the stolen drawings, the creepy bunker, the march along the barbed wire fence with his gun. And if we had been infected with bits of her consciousness, she was still gone, still warning us about this man.
“He’s still a killer!” I said. “He still killed Nick’s dad, and hurt Mark—he still killed Molly!”
A strangled gasp escaped Wayne. “Kill . . . Molly?”
“No,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “Put the weapons down. I’ll explain.”
“What is there to explain?” Nick cried. “This man is dangerous!”
“Nick.” There was a spark in Arthur’s eye. “The song.” He jerked Wayne’s hijacked rifle toward the piano. “Play the song.”
Nick stonewalled him. It was so like Art, to make demands with no explanation.
For all we knew, the tornado was headed right this way, and even it wasn’t, Rothstadt was.
But it was also like Arthur to put the pieces of something together, to have a master plan.
“Trust me,” Arthur said. “It’s what you have to do. It’s the last piece.”
Nick stared at him for a long moment, but no one spoke and Arthur didn’t back down. Finally, Nick handed the shovel he’d been holding to Levi, and gave Art, Wayne, and the spiral a wide berth as he made his way to the piano.
His fingers floated onto the keys so lightly they didn’t make a sound. After a moment of just feeling them, he sat on the bench, and his joints curled and stretched to the end of the ivory keys.
His shoulders relaxed, melting into a new shape in the last beat of silence before his hands sank, coaxing sound from the instrument.
A note rang out, quivering until it faded entirely before he played another, and then he fell into a slow, tender rhythm.
We stood in an anxious clump around the spiral, Wayne backed into the corner with a stricken look, like not even he could believe how stupid this was, and Droog curled up against him. I thought dogs were supposed to be good judges of character, but she was nuzzling into him, pushing at his hand with her snout.
We needed to get down to the cellar, I kept thinking. It was all I could focus on at first.
But then, as before, the song did something to me. It was just so familiar, so haunting and tragic and preternatural.
Arthu
r had to be right; it had to mean something.
We fell into a kind of daze, and Wayne backed into the wall, pale as a ghost. As Nick sank into the melody, my chest felt full and my throat tightened.
The song was more than happy or sad or scared; it was everything, all at once, a full lifetime of events and the feelings that went with them collapsed into notes.
I pulled out the picture of Molly at the piano.
I closed my eyes as the sound pushed through me and the memory of that star-swept black spread over me, the choir of voices singing out from the streaks of light as they dove toward the warm darkness below.
This song. This, I thought, had been what was emanating off the body of light I could just barely remember from Molly’s consciousness. This song was the sound of her, screaming across the sky. It held her whole life between notes, untranslatable to words.
I held my breath as Nick approached the final note, and I knew he must be thinking that when that sound finished its quivering, faded into the hum and roar of the storm, the last spark of her would go with it from us, and from the world we lived in.
We would no longer be connected, to one another, to her. We’d say goodbye to the glory and mystery and connection that Black Mailbox Bill/Albert had craved at any cost, and we would just be us: the six of us again. The Ordinary.
Nick relaxed into the final chord and it hung there, like I’d known it would, and I wasn’t afraid for the moment it would end, but I was sad, because I would miss it.
I closed my eyes, wanting the sound to overtake my other senses, to become a smell and a feeling—maybe a temperature and a humidity, the feeling of the air itself—and a taste and a color.
It stretched out, thick as honey waiting to drop, and behind my eyelids, I saw white light rushing past.
Somewhere, far from here, I felt myself hurtling through the starry black, and I heard voices singing the word, and I felt the chill beating against me, and I waited.
The sound was there, there, there, there, and then, at last, it was not.
Slowly, I released my breath. The world had gone quiet. Perhaps the storm had moved on.