Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  “You said we’re trying to find an object hidden by Van Gogh, right?” Liam said as we settled into two seats on the train. “What makes you think it’s in Paris?”

  I really didn’t know who to trust in the crazy world of Aolians, but Liam wasn’t a part of that world. I trusted him. He came all the way to Paris with me.

  I drew my Van Gogh notebook out of my bag. “I found a hidden message on a sheet of paper at the MoMA. It was in French, and it took me a while to translate it, because it was all in one big, long sentence.” I flipped to the right page and handed it to Liam.

  Liam studied the notebook. “Why didn’t you ask me for help?”

  “It does sound a little far-fetched to say I found a secret message hidden on a page that thousands of people see each year, yet it’s gone undetected.”

  “Yeah, that does sound a bit crazy.”

  I winced at the word crazy, but Liam didn’t notice as he studied the code, my translation, and my extra map of Paris with streets marked. I tried not to think about how Dune had the exact same information.

  “How did you find this address?” he asked. “I never would have thought that where the knight and good meet would be streets. I have no idea what Candlelit Winter means.”

  “We’ll just have to see when we get there.”

  “Sounds good.” Liam yawned and laid his head back against the seat.

  It was 11:00 in the morning here, and I’d had only three hours of sleep last night.

  “How much sleep did you get?” I asked.

  “How can anyone sleep when a pretty girl is leaning against his shoulder?” Liam said without opening his eyes.

  My face grew hot, and I tried to think of a witty reply, but sleep deprivation muddled my thoughts. In the end I laughed, like he was making a joke.

  Smooth.

  He looked as tired as I felt.

  The city outside my window wasn’t what I expected. Graffiti covered most of the surfaces, and the homes were crammed together. When we left the airport, we were the only ones in the train car, but at each stop more and more people filed in.

  We reached stations within Paris.

  “Liam, we need to switch trains.” I gently shook his shoulder and hated waking him from his nap.

  “What?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Oh, yeah.”

  “I want to walk by where Van Gogh lived first,” I said. “It’s close to where I think the clue is leading us, within walking distance.”

  “I’m here to do whatever you want to do,” Liam said.

  We had to switch trains two more times before we got to the right area, and we left the Abbesses Station.

  Now this was the cobblestone charm I was expecting. All the buildings were only five or six stories tall. Tiny shops lined the sidewalk on the first level of what otherwise looked like apartments, but apartments that were built over a hundred years ago. We passed a flower shop, fruit markets, and a pastry shop.

  “Van Gogh lived at 54 Rue Lepic,” I said when we found the right street. “It’s strange to think that Van Gogh lived here, that he walked these streets just as we are doing. Sometimes I wonder if I think of him more as an angel or some other kind of ethereal being instead of a man. Are people like him too amazing for this world? Maybe he was designed for something else, something better.”

  “Maybe we are all designed to be as amazing as Vinny, but only very few are willing to embrace our true potential.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I like how you call him Vinny, it makes it seem like we’re old friends.”

  Fifty-four Rue Lepic was a building that followed a curve in the road. The façade was made of white stone and metal-scrolled banisters crossed dainty curtained windows. A small plaque was affixed to the wall beside the beautiful, dark-blue door.

  “In this house, Vincent van Gogh lived with his brother Theo, 1886 to 1888,” Liam translated. “I wonder if it looks different from when he lived here.”

  “It’s hard to tell.” I brushed my fingertips along the name Vincent on the plaque, leaving a barely visible fingerprint. “From the other paintings he did of Paris, I think it’s very similar.”

  My phone dinged. I hadn’t realized I would have service here. I dug it out of where I’d shoved it deep in my bag to protect it from pickpockets.

  It was a text, but from an unknown number.

  Paris is just a bit too hot in the summer, don’t you think?

  I stared at the words, and a sliver of fear crept down my arm to my spine. It could only be one person. Not only did Dune know where I was, but also it seemed like she was already in Paris. But how could she? We just got here.

  “Aya, are you all right?” Liam asked. “What is it?”

  It took me a few seconds to register his words. “That woman, the one who attacked me in New York? She’s here.”

  Liam frowned. “How could she be?”

  “I don’t know, but we have to go, now.”

  I wanted to linger, to bask in the space Van Gogh once filled, but we couldn’t.

  The park wouldn’t take long to walk to, but every step toward that goal brought trepidation and anxiety.

  “According to the map,” I pointed to the place. “There is a park at the intersection of two streets, Rue de la Bonne and Rue du Chevalier de la Barre.”

  Cars zipped by, the sound of their passing echoed off the buildings around us. I wanted to run, to meet my fate with outstretched arms, but at the same time I was terrified. What if we didn’t find anything? What if I was totally crazy and there was nothing here from Van Gogh to find? Is this how his neurosis started, by him believing in things that did not exist?

  “The clue said where the knight and good meet.” I hoped the fact that I found a place that matched the clue would mean it was there.

  Liam glanced at my map. “Those are right behind the Sacre-Coeur Cathedral, which is the highest point in the city.”

  The streets were steep, and several times we had to walk up long, sharp-angled staircases before we emerged to a stunning view of the cathedral.

  “I had no idea it would be so beautiful,” I said. “So many things you have to see in real life to appreciate. Photographs just don’t do them justice.”

  “Just think of the onion rings you could make out of that.” He pointed to the bulb shaped dome on top of the cathedral.

  “Somehow I don’t think the Parisians would appreciate you eating their cathedral,” I said. “It was finished after Van Gogh left Paris. I am always surprised when buildings like this survived World War II.”

  “So many wonderful things didn’t survive.” Liam still gazed at the dome.

  “You’re not still thinking about eating that, are you?”

  Liam laughed.

  I sighed. “I’ll have to save being a tourist for some other day.”

  We hurried around the front of the church to where the two streets, on which I pinned all my hopes, intersected. I glanced back once more at the stunning view of the Sacre-Coeur, with its white stone and Middle Eastern-looking design. My heart pounded too fast as we approached the park. I poked fun at Liam to hide my anxiety. “I’m sorry, Liam, but it looks like you’re not allowed in here.” I pointed to the sign on the gate that had a tiny Yorkshire Terrier with an X over the top of it. “No dogs allowed.”

  “I think they can make an exception for me just this once.” His smile lit up his face in a way that took my breath away. He pushed open the gate and did a little after you gesture. “Parisian gardens aren’t like American parks or even English gardens,” Liam said. “The grass is often fenced off, as are the flower beds. You can enjoy nature, but in a separate, distant sort of way.”

  It was a perfectly ordinary park, but with the flowers surrounded by a fence a foot and a half tall.

  “Look for anything that has to do with candles or Theo.” I laughed out loud at how ridiculous it sounded.

  He headed down the walk, and turned right, while searching along the straight path. I was slow, method
ical. I didn’t want to miss anything.

  But there was so much, even in the confined area of the park, yet so little besides foliage. Massive trees towered over the patches of green lawn. Shrubs lined the outer walls. We kept searching, occasionally passing one another. In another thirty minutes I found Liam.

  “Nothing?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. Everything besides the tiny picket fence was living, nowhere to hide a clue. “Nothing here is permanent. I don’t think Van Gogh would have hidden something if it had the chance of getting destroyed if a gardener decided to change the shrubs.”

  “You’re right. Is there anything that could be left intact after a hundred years?”

  “I don’t think there is anywhere else or us to look.” I peered one last time around the perimeter of the park, trying to see what could have been here, when my gaze fell on . . . the wall. “The only thing that would last a hundred years?” I closed the distance to the stone, hopping over the picket fence in the process. I slithered between two shrubs so I could touch the surface. The sun-bleached stone was cool under the shadow of the shrub in the heat of the day.

  “The wall? Brilliant.” Liam followed behind me and crashed through the brush.

  I squeezed through a dense bush and a limb snapped back. I tried to grab it but it hit Liam square on the nose. I gasped in horror. “Sorry!”

  Liam’s eyes watered and he rubbed where it had slapped him. “I didn’t teach you that. I think the student has finally become the master.”

  “Oh, brother.” But I laughed, too.

  As we crept along the wall, I began to lose hope. I really didn’t know what we’d find, the book Prism or the Aveum. But if there was a clue here and I didn’t find it, I had no doubt that Dune would rip this place apart until she did. But what if I’d misunderstood the clue? What if it were somewhere else entirely? Would Dune figure it out and find it?

  I wasn’t going to give up now.

  Someone yelled at us from across the park. “What did they say?” I asked.

  “Something about reckless teenagers destroying the trees.” Liam waved the words away.

  “Is that all?” I snickered. “Ouch.”

  “What?”

  “Just a nasty branch made a huge gash in my arm.” I pulled up my sleeve to survey the damage.

  “What is that?” Liam asked, a shocked look on his face.

  My skin, how could I have forgotten? Idiot, idiot!

  I jerked my sleeve back down. “Oh, nothing. It was just a little scratch.”

  “That was not a scratch. What was that? Did you get a full arm tattoo I didn’t know about?” Liam tried to grab my arm, but I twisted away.

  “No really, it’s just all the scratches I’ve gotten from these branches.” My phone dinged again, and I pulled it out and looked before I thought. It was that same unknown number, but this time the text was blank.

  She was toying with me. A red haze filtered into my vision. I wouldn’t let her do this to me. I wouldn’t let her torture me. How did she know where I was? But the answer lay in my hand. I jerked back my arm and sent my cell phone sailing over the park fence. It hit the pavement outside with a satisfying crunch.

  “What was that?” Liam yelled. “What is going on with you?”

  “It was a text from Dune, I’m not going to risk her being able to track my cell phone.”

  I closed my eyes against the red and the anger that I didn’t know if I would ever live without. I longed to dissolve into tears, cry this red from my body so I could be myself again. But now red was power. It was the only defense I had left.

  “I think it was a mistake to come here.” Liam rubbed his eyes with his palms. “I think this obsession with Van Gogh has gone too far.” His voice went soft. “I’m worried about you.”

  He didn’t know the half of it, but he didn’t live with the color pressing in every single moment of the day.

  “You can go, but I’m staying here.” The words sounded stronger than I felt. I couldn’t imagine being alone with my madness.

  “I’m not leaving you.” He meant it.

  “We can’t talk here. Help me search the rest of the wall, and then we can go. But I need you to know everything. You deserve to know everything if you want to stay with me.”

  Liam looked into my eyes for a long moment before he nodded. “Let’s keep going.”

  We made it halfway around the park and, with every meter we covered, my hope sank a little lower. We came to a portion of the wall that was covered in thick-green ivy, growing behind a section of tall evergreen shrubs. I put my palms against the ivy-covered wall to slide through. One step and then another, and then when I put my hand against the wall, there was nothing there to hold it.

  27

  When we have had a talk about those strange days spent in discussion in run-down studios and the cafés of the Petit Boulevard, you will understand the full scope of this idea of my brother’s and mine.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  My fingers disappeared into an invisible nook hidden by the shadow of the ivy. My heart leapt. The ivy’s stems were surprisingly strong as I clawed at them, and I could initially only tear the leaves from their place, leaving only living, fibrous prison bars. My movements were frantic and heavy.

  What if it wasn’t here?

  What if it was?

  Finally, I cleared the ivy away.

  Granite stone lined the domed nook that could barely have fit Liam’s and my stuffed backpacks. Streaks of black ran down the interior of the arched opening, where a hundred years of rainwater had seeped through the minute spaces between the bricks.

  Inside was a statue of a small boy sitting on a stool.

  “It’s here,” Liam said behind me. “It’s really here.”

  A book lay open in the boy’s lap, and he hunched to study the words that were too high for me to see. In his other hand he held a solitary candlestick, the stone flame burning so close to the base that if it were real, it would sputter out at any moment.

  “We haven’t found anything yet,” I said to mask the hope that flooded me.

  Besides the statue, nothing else was in the space. I tried to imagine how Van Gogh would hide something here? I reached out with the part of me that held color and searched for red, but I might as well have been reaching out to the barren night sky for all I found there. If there had been color here once, it was long gone now. I brushed my fingers along the statue and the bricks of the space, and was met with the cool, moist stone. The statue had at one time been on display but was now shrouded by a mask of flickering leaves.

  “Can you see anything that I can’t?” I asked.

  Liam shook his head.

  I began to lose hope, but we’d come so far. Maybe there was something else in the park. Maybe Van Gogh had left it somewhere else.

  I stooped to see the name of the book the boy read, but the letters had long ago melted into the cover, and the shadows made them impossible to read. I flipped around my backpack and tore a page out of one of my notebooks. I pressed the paper to the book’s title, and rubbed the long, flat edge of my charcoal against it.

  Liam drew close to me as I brought the paper into the light.

  “Theologie?” Liam asked. “The study of religion?”

  “It’s not about what he’s studying. It’s a name. Theo, that’s the name of Van Gogh’s brother. The clue has to be here!” I turned back to the nook.

  “Wait,” Liam said, “let me see that paper again.”

  I brought the page back into the light.

  “What is that?” He pointed to a circle at the edge of where I’d rubbed my charcoal. Inside was the same mark, the interlocking crescent moons.

  “I don’t know.” I stooped down to see what it was. “Nothing is visible in the stone, but it’s clearly there on the page.”

  Liam had to kneel to see under the book. “Maybe that’s the point. Let me see the page.”

  I handed it to him and he found where the circle lined up
with the letters of the title.

  “It should be about here.” He pressed the stone.

  Liam gasped, and the exact same time a solitary brick on the side of the nook popped out a half an inch, in a shower of dust and debris.

  “You did it!” I yelled, my excitement like electricity through my body. I wiggled the brick the rest of the way out of its space, and groped in the hole, my Dechrua bracelet scraping along the stone. My fingers brushed a smooth, cold surface that I drew out.

  A perfect, white cylinder about ten inches long with slightly tapered ends slid into the palm of my hand. It was made out of glass or ceramic. I squinted at the word chiseled in its surface.

  Dirus.

  Below the word was the same symbol.

  I stared at it. “I can’t believe we found it. A part of me really thought I was crazy, and there was nothing to find.”

  “I can’t believe that has been hidden in a public park for the last hundred and twenty years and no one found it.”

  “What does that mean?” I pointed to the word.

  “Hmm, I don’t know that one.”

  “Dirus,” I shook my head. “I don’t remember reading it in any of Van Gogh’s writings.”

  I shoved the brick back into place, and we walked—well, Liam walked and I floated—toward the entrance of the park. I couldn’t stop peeking at the thing in my hand.

  “We did it,” I said.

  “Yes, we did.” Liam’s radiant grin reflected my feelings.

  “We’ll have to figure out how to open it.” I felt like dancing. I felt like flying. “I don’t think anything could bring me down.”

  But then I stopped dead and pulled Liam behind a thick-evergreen shrub.

  “What in the—”

  “Shhh,” I whispered. “She’s here. The one I told you about, she’s here.”

  We peeked around the shrub. Dune stood outside the main entrance of the park. Three men and two women, dressed in all black with only brief slashes of color, stood in a protective circle around her.