by Sarah Porter
“I knew there was something wrong.” She’s silent for a moment. “But you saw Ksenia? And she talked and everything?”
“We talked. But I didn’t know then what I could do to help her, and—honestly, Mar, I got too scared to do the right thing. That’s why I have to try again.”
“Did she seem okay?”
“No. She seemed really, really sad.”
Another moment of hovering quiet. We should climb out of this tree, go inside, bandage her face and maybe make cocoa. Her little arms are so chilled and shivers trickle through her back. Oh, how could she ever have concealed such aching doubts—that she’s not as smart as I am, that somehow our parents might love me more—doubts that left her vulnerable to that mimic’s trickery? And how did I never once suspect she might believe anything of the kind?
“Then I bet they stole Olivia too,” Marissa finally says. “And Felix! Whoever took Ksenia has them too.”
“You’re right, they do.” I kiss her forehead. “I can’t promise to rescue all of them, Marissa. I don’t even know where to look. But I’m going to fight as hard as I can.” I tip back slightly to look in her deep eyes, and I know I can’t ask her to lie to our parents. Not even by omission. Now that she understands what’s at stake, she might decide on her own to preserve her silence, just for a few more days, but I won’t be the one to insist she compromise her honesty. It’s bad enough that I’ve compromised my own.
I try to smile. “Are you ready to climb down? I’ll go first, so I can catch you if you slip. Okay?”
I release her and swing my legs over the branch, then drop to a slightly lower perch. For the last eight feet, though, I’ll have to shimmy down the trunk as best I can.
“Lexi?”
“Yes, Mar?” Never in my life have I loved anyone as absolutely as I love her now. A spiny, delicate pain seizes my heart.
“You’re so brave! You’re like a great hero. I don’t think I’ll ever be like you.”
“I’m the one who should be more like you,” I tell her, and slide down the trunk to the lowest branch that looks strong enough to support me. “How brave were you tonight? You fought a monster that looked just like you, and you didn’t even panic.”
She was too brave, actually, letting that false Marissa lure her out into the tree.
Then I hear something inexplicable, and freeze with my arms wrapped tight around the trunk.
A muted, rhythmic clopping: the unmistakable sound of horses walking at a stately pace through the garden just below us. But I can see the expanse that emits the sound, and it’s completely vacant; just predawn blue clinging to the grass and a row of midnight irises. Marissa must hear the horses too, because she squirms to face the other way and then leans out, far enough to make me nervous, with one hand still curled around the trunk.
“Josh?” Marissa says, her voice soft with wonder.
A sensation like frozen oil saturates every inch of my body. And at the same time, there’s a deep, pooling sickness inside me, from the awareness that I feel this way at hearing my old best friend’s name.
“Marissa!” I hiss. “Stay where you are.” And I slide down the trunk, gripping with my legs but descending as fast as I can. Dew soaks my feet as I alight. The hoofbeats have ceased, but I still can’t see anything there except the twilit lawn. Mist scrolls through the tufting grass, binds the flowers in milky tendrils. I glance up at my little sister, amazement brightening her eyes as she peers at something invisible to me. “Mar? I can’t see him. Is he alone?”
She shakes her head. “There’s a white girl with him, wearing bloody lace. She’s horrible. And their horses look like clouds with legs.”
“Listen, Marissa: you can never trust Josh again. I’m not sure if he can help it, but he’s—become part of something evil. If you ever see him when I’m not with you, you have to run away.”
“Oh, like you get to talk about trusting anyone!” the emptiness proclaims. And then Josh—how should I put this?—he phases into the world the way a dream brightens against the dimness of sleep. Only a few yards away from me, he sits on a marvelous horse sculpted from eddies of fog. He’s dressed incongruously in pajama bottoms and a truly absurd sweater featuring a gaudy sequined starscape, and a few fine sparks hover in the glitter smeared around his dark eyes. His hair is an appalling mess.
I still don’t see the girl Marissa mentioned, though I do believe I’ve met her before. I’m careful to keep my back to the trunk.
“In that case, Josh,” I say, “I assume you had nothing to do with the attack just now on my sister?”
A quick rounding of his eyes. A suppressed flurry of guilt on his face. I see. The situation is even worse than I thought—and after his awful, uncanny attempt to entrap me, I thought things were unspeakable already. I’ve cherished a hope that possibly I could save Josh as well as Ksenia, but now I understand; he’s just too far gone.
I can remember a time when Josh was wonderfully kind and playful with Marissa. When she was in the hospital from a burst appendix he visited every day, made up songs for her that had her laughing to the point of tears. But it seems that time is done. Not right, Ksenia said. He’s not right.
“You didn’t leave us any choice! Lexi, we know what you’re planning!” His head turns toward Marissa, and his eyes are full of innocent appeal. “Marissa, can you imagine if one person was your whole heart? Practically your whole body? You couldn’t just let somebody steal that from you, could you? One heart is all you’re ever going to get!”
“Steal is a verb that only applies to inanimate objects, Josh. The one I had in mind is rescue.” My voice is so hard that I think it could cut glass.
Even after all the horror, after what he’s done to Ksenia and all those children, after what he’s tried to do to my family, Josh still has it in him to look astonished at the concept. To look indignant, hurt, and deeply affronted. “Kezzer is happy with me.”
“When I saw her, she seemed like she was dying in slow motion.” At that a girl’s metallic laughter splits the rising light, and though I still can’t see her I notice four faint impressions in the grass, dimples where the blue dawn thickens into ink. A kind of buckling passes over Josh’s face; his eyelids narrow and his gaze flinches away. Oh, so he knows exactly what I’m referring to, no matter how he denies it.
“What-ever,” Josh snarls. “Lexi, I hate to say it, but I think you’re full of shit.” He turns his horse, ready to gallop away from here. The four small hollows that reveal his companion’s presence, though—those stay where they are.
There’s a line of trees and flowering shrubs along the back of my parents’ property: the golden wands of forsythia, poplars lancing into green. And all at once something I didn’t see before comes into focus: tucked among the trees there are at least a hundred faces, all of them gazing at me.
Among them, the false Marissa. Xand. Lila. My favorite English teacher, Ms. Briggs. The more I look, the more familiar faces seem to rise up from the ranks, and yet I know not one of them is real. I’m looking at an army of duplicates, churned out by some infernal Xerox machine. What on earth is Josh up to? And if each of these doubles targets its original, the way Marissa’s double just tried to kill her …
We’d be looking at a massacre. Why, though?
“Are you really planning to murder all those people, Josh?” I ask.
His horse stops, though his back is to me now. “None of this was my idea, Lexi! I just wanted everyone to let me and Kezzer be happy. And anyway, you’re the one who offended Prince!”
God—it’s to get back at me, then? For escaping, and for wanting to help my friends?
Josh digs his heels into his cloudy mount, and it leaps up and then levitates, floating clear of the shrubs and the neighbors’ garage, before he and the horse both vanish in midair. There’s a new, clanking round of laughter from the unseen girl in the bloody lace—Unselle, that was what the false Marissa called her. She must be the one with the whipped-cream curls and the animal’s
head that raked my calf with its teeth; that’s the only thing those comments about my blood could mean. I can tell by the dents in the grass that she hasn’t gone anywhere. I look around for Marissa, still in her perch in the oak, and from something in the fixity of her gaze I’m certain she and Unselle are facing off in silence.
“Mar-isss-ah!” the voice comes at last—a voice that can only be from nowhere, abrasive and inhuman as it shreds the blue air. When I met Unselle before, I only heard her speak in borrowed tones, in voices pilfered from Josh and Ksenia. Her true voice is hideous. “It is your sister’s blood I have sipped, drippy-drop on white teeth. Alexandra comes sneakitting to our realm, and I will taste her nearness there, as anywhere. You dream she will be spared? Your dreams are poisonous lies!”
The shadow-prints on the lawn deepen for an instant, and then vanish. I know her horse must be flying away from us, probably following Josh.
When I glance back toward the forsythia, every one of those familiar faces is gone. Where?
“Lexi?” Marissa calls, and comes clambering down the tree. She dangles from the last branch and I reach for her, catching her as she tumbles into my arms. The first rays of dawn gild her soft brown cheeks, drenched in tears. “Lexi, I know you want to help everybody. But I don’t want you to go to—where that girl comes from. I’m so scared, and you won’t be safe!”
Of course it won’t be safe. I’ve been kidding myself, believing that it could be relatively easy, and that Ksenia and I will make it home unscathed.
Until Josh visited me from his nowhere and tried to drag me into it with him, safe was precisely what my life had been; for the most part, at least. I broke my arm, once, in a fall from a skateboard. I came down with a pretty bad case of pneumonia when I was six. On my ninth birthday a policeman clapped my mother in handcuffs, in front of me, for absolutely no reason, and my heart almost burst with the terror of what he might do to her; he only let her go once she threatened, in very exact, legal terms to sue. But really, that’s all I’ve known of danger before this nightmare descended on us, and it seems like it’s about to get much, much worse. How can I possibly warn our town of the creatures invading us now? What language could I use to describe them, that anyone here would be able to understand?
I’ve never had to make such a choice before: to willingly place myself, my future, and my family’s happiness in jeopardy. And yet, within the past hour, that choice has only grown more urgent.
“Nothing essential is safe, Mar-Mar,” I tell her, and pause to kiss the tears from her cheeks. “You shouldn’t have to understand that yet, but someday I know you will.”
The sun is rolling up through the shrubbery, and I know today is my day to understand that particular truth. Because how many people will die, and how many others will be lost forever, if I don’t?
minds slap shut like books
I carry Marissa into the house, where our mother is just coming downstairs dressed for the gym. And what possible lies, what evasions, are left in me, as I watch her register her two daughters, both of us in pajamas made filthy by clambering around in the oak, and Marissa with her clawed cheek, tear-streaked as she clings to me? My face must give away a whole novel’s worth of grief and dread.
“Lexi,” Mom says, with terrible emphasis, and runs down the stairs to hug Marissa and me. For a flash I almost wonder if it would be easier to live like Ksenia, without the weight of so much love and expectation; then in the next breath I know it’s a cruel thought, and that Ksenia was ready to die, if she had to, so that I could keep a life she envied bitterly. This much I know: when she told me to run, she didn’t give a damn about the consequences for herself. Only for me. And probably those inhuman creatures, her captors, understood that perfectly.
“We saw Josh,” Marissa tells our mom, through a fresh wave of tears. “But he might be bad now.”
And there it is. Once my parents grasp the truth—if such a perverse and distorted truth is something they can grasp—I’m fairly certain they’ll go to any extreme to keep me from tumbling deeper into that nightmare. Did I just sacrifice Ksenia forever, only because I was too proud to ask Marissa to keep quiet?
“Josh? You mean, Lexi’s friend who vanished? Joshua Korensky?” Mom asks. Her mouth tightens; almost everyone in our town adored Josh, but my mother regarded him with a certain skepticism. Anyone who tries so hard to be charming is worth watching closely; that was her answer when I asked why she didn’t like him. “Lexi, is that really what happened?”
I try to respond, but for a moment it’s like it was when I answered her phone call in the woods, when I had just returned from nowhere; my voice evaporates before it can shape words. And what can I say?
And anyway, you’re the one who offended Prince! That’s what Josh told me. Whatever those creatures are up to, it’s personal. Until this instant, I’ve been holding on to a last trace of denial, but it’s gone now.
Anyone I love is a target. They’ll hurt my family to destroy me, and they’ll destroy me to shatter Ksenia’s resistance, once and for all: a waterfall of wounds. By warning me, she showed them the best way to crush her. They won’t hesitate to take advantage of everything she revealed.
“Mom, you’re all in serious danger.” This is what I have to say; it’s the only thing that matters. I hesitate. “The whole town is. Please just get Dad and Marissa out of here!”
“Sweetheart, slow down! If it’s really Joshua you’re worried about, I’m sure your father and I can handle anything he gets up to.” She gives me a little shake, but her expression is full of anxious tenderness. “This isn’t like you.”
“It isn’t like how I used to be,” I agree. “But I’ve changed recently. You’ve seen it, and you’ve been worrying.”
She catches her breath. “Yes.”
“Then please just believe me when I tell you that I’ve changed because I had to. I—” On a leafy street, in a drowsy yellow house, I stumbled onto something monstrous. My spirit had to swell, and it had to change its contours, to meet the enormity on its own terms. All right, saying that to her would go poorly. But that’s the truth spelled out inside me. “There’s a lot I haven’t told you. But right now we’re facing an emergency.”
She looks sharply at me and I can see all the objections in her eyes: the classes she’s supposed to teach, the graduate students she has to advise, Marissa’s school. Spring break is still three days away, and how can she possibly go anywhere before then? “Do you think Joshua might—what, start shooting somewhere? Do you know something? If you do, we have to call the police.”
I almost laugh, or sob, but in a way she’s not so far off. Calling the police won’t help anything, but maybe it won’t hurt much either.
“It’s not just Josh,” I tell her—and then I give in. I’d rather not think of it as lying, so hopefully it’s fair to say that I translate the truth into something she’ll understand. “Those people Ksenia saw him with are real. They’re a really crazy, sinister cult, and I think he’s been brainwashed.”
He’s not right, Ksenia said, but all at once I understand that brainwashed isn’t the correct word for it. Something in him warped when he disappeared; it’s as if a hand reached in and twisted just where he was weakest, most vulnerable. I’m so startled that I almost drop Marissa, and she slips down and lands lightly on the floor.
Joshua Korensky is enchanted. Enchanted! Even Marissa is getting too old to believe that such a thing could be possible, but I find that I do. I’ve seen too much recently not to believe it. It’s contrary to my upbringing to think in such irrational terms, and until now I’ve avoided the obvious conclusion—but what is Kay, and what was that flying horse made of condensed fog, if not magic? God, what are those creatures keeping my friends imprisoned?
My mom is talking to the police, and I can’t even hear her over the whirlwind of my own thoughts. And that’s when my mother’s voice and my own astonishment are interrupted by a series of piercing screams; they’re coming from just outside.
“I am,” I say. “I’m the only one who has enough information to deal with this mess.” If anyone should stay inside, it’s her, but I know she’ll never accept that. Before she can do anything to stop me, I slip out and race across the lawn, my mother following just behind me. The scream has subsided into a terrible, childish keening, coming from just around the side of the house, where Marissa and I climbed down from that oak tree fifteen minutes ago.
The sun is higher now, enough to streak the lawn with deep blue bands of shadow, enough to spark the dew with minute prisms. The oak’s bark looks like countless tiny, golden islands adrift on midnight rivers. And there on the bark is a child’s soft, mauve-brown mouth, and that mouth is crying out.
Nowhere has followed me home in more ways than I ever could have imagined. Nowhere has seized control of every molecule, of the living substance of my world.
I can hear my mother panting to a stop just behind me, and the shocked intake of her breath.
“Lexi!” the mouth in the tree wails. “Lexi, I know you saw me! But you just ran away!”
I recognize that voice now. It’s little Olivia Fisher’s voice: the daughter of my parents’ friends, who died at just five years old, devastating her family. Except that of course her death was a charade, and she’s still alive in that not-place.
Where I saw her, just after I encountered that not-Ksenia with the spidery, pleating limbs; that’s when Olivia showed up, holding hands with the creatures who had followed me, and I heard her call my name.
Where, as she’s just reminded me, I panicked at the sight of her, understanding that her fate could so easily be mine. Where I bolted, and left her trapped. Heat rages through my cheeks, my eyes weigh me down, because the mouth in the tree knows the most shameful moment of my life so intimately.