Another Kingdom

by Andrew Klavan

  I phoned her again and texted her again. No answer. Well, it was only fifteen minutes since I’d tried her before. The last thing the world needed was more paranoia.

  I thought of the last time I’d seen her, on the video call. Lying on her bed on her tummy. With her little girl’s body. With her white stockinged feet kicking up behind her. And Marco. Pimpy Marco, with his vulpine smile, sitting next to her. His hand on her ass. The bastard.

  My eyes filled. The meds—they were making me emotional. But also it was unbearable to think of her as she was when we were kids—Tell me one of your stories, Aus—gazing at me from her lonely ocean inches away. To think of her then and to think of her as she was now, with some man always around to use her and abuse her, and her messed-up, lost, empty “video artist” life.

  Had she known? About Mom and Dad and Rich and Orosgo? Had she listened to them from her hiding places behind the paneling? Is that what drove her crazy? Because she was crazy, there was no question about that. With her nutty conspiracy theories. Aliens seeking to take over the world with the help of their international human cabal.

  I looked at the phone, still in my hands. It couldn’t be about that though, could it? Her conspiracy theories. Her crazy videos. Ouroboros: Dark Dreams of Reality. That couldn’t be why Rich had had to talk Orosgo out of killing her. Could it?

  She is getting too close to the truth, Marco had said. We are very close to exposing the whole conspiracy.

  I remembered how he had said that, and I remembered how he had lifted his hand off my sister’s butt just long enough to point to the books on her shelves, the books and the purple crystals and the pyramids and …

  I straightened up in bed, so quickly my guts seemed to shift within the hollow, wounded place in my belly. The scar there sent up a bright, metallic flash of pain. I grimaced, my hand on the place where the sword had gone in.

  I thought: wasn’t there something else on those shelves? Yes. A manuscript, tied together with twine. A stack of papers with ragged edges. I thought: ragged edges. As if the pages had been torn out of something.

  I remembered the book I had found in the cabinet in Sean Gunther’s house. A bright-red binding and gold inlaid letters spelling out the title: Another Kingdom. But inside, there was nothing—nothing but shreds of paper, as if the pages had been torn out.

  Could those have been the pages on Riley’s shelf?

  No. No, of course not. That made no sense. It was ridiculous.

  But even as I thought that, I was bringing up the video app on my phone. I searched through the app for Riley’s video series.

  I stared down at the phone, openmouthed.

  There was nothing there. No videos. Not even a sign there had once been videos that had since been removed. The kooky chat rooms where people went to discuss the videos—those were gone too. Even the Wikipedia page about the videos was gone.

  It was all gone, all of Riley’s work, as if it had never existed. The only thing that came up was the Wikipedia page for Ouroboros, the word Ouroboros. I clicked on it.

  “An ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail,” it said.

  I already knew that. Or I had known it at some point. But now that I saw it on the page, I remembered it. I remembered it, and it reminded me of something else too. But what? I searched my foggy brain.

  Then it came to me: the painting! Of course. The painting of Wisdom in the Getty Museum, the one just above the painting in Gunther’s snapshot of Ellen Evermore, the one I’d been looking at just before my last transition.

  There had been cherubs in the painting—little angels—putti. They fluttered around the seated Wisdom figure. One held a mirror representing self-knowledge. One pointed at a book, his finger hovering over the word kingdom.

  And one—one held a snake coiled in a perfect circle. A symbol of eternity. Ouroboros.

  Riley? Is that what the clue meant? Was Ellen Evermore trying to tell me that she had passed the book on to Riley? Had she torn the pages out of the binding at Gunther’s house and given the manuscript to my sister to keep it safe from Orosgo until I could track it down?

  With trembling fingers, I called Riley again.

  No answer.

  There was no answer the next day either. And no one came to visit me in the hospital, not Rich, not my parents, not anyone—though Jane Janeway sent me an animated Get Well e-card with valentine hearts that rose on the page like bubbles. She had heard about the stabbing on the news, she said. She said she had tried to come see me, but the police wouldn’t let her in.

  So for the time being, only the cop at the door kept me company. I knew now he was there to guard me, not arrest me. I knew that because Detective Lord and Detective Graciano had told the news media I wasn’t a suspect. They hadn’t named me, and they hadn’t revealed I was the same man who had been stabbed at the Getty in an apparently random and unconnected incident. They just said they had interviewed the man and woman in the security photo taken at Gunther’s gate and they were no longer considered suspects. The reporters didn’t ask much more about it.

  That was it. I’d been cleared. Cleared and forgotten. Just like that. Just as quickly as Riley’s videos had vanished.

  How powerful was Orosgo anyway? How high, how far, how wide did his influence reach?

  THE NEXT DAY, some of the gang from Hitchcock’s dropped by: Schuyler and Chad Valentine and Wren Yen. Wexler didn’t come because—said Schuyler—it would’ve harmed his burgeoning reputation as a Hollywood dickhead. But Schuyler knew that wasn’t why I looked disappointed when they came in, why I stole a glance around her massive presence to see if anyone else was coming through the door behind her.

  “She had to go to New Zealand,” she told me gruffly. “It was all of a sudden. Alexis is meeting a director there. You know what she’s like.”

  I nodded. I pretended it didn’t matter, that it was fine.

  “She said to say hello,” Schuyler added grudgingly. “She says she’ll try to call. She says she’s afraid of disturbing your rest with the time difference and everything.” I nodded again. Then she confessed the whole truth: “She says to send her love.”

  Later, when it was time for them to leave, Schuyler let Chad and Wren go out before her. Then she leaned in very close to me. Her cherubic and furious face was terrifying at that distance.

  “What the fuck is going on with you?” she said in a hissing whisper. “First your head is practically caved in, then it’s suddenly fine. Then you’re wanted for murder. Then you …”

  “I wasn’t wanted for …”

  “Then you get stabbed,” she said. “Stabbed! At the Getty? No one gets stabbed at the Getty, Austin. It’s a fucking museum!”

  I started back against the headboard as she lifted one hand to me, clawlike, as if she was going to rip my face off. I really think she would have done it, too, if I hadn’t looked so weak and pitiful. But her hand sunk down then, though her eyes went on burning with rage.

  “She’s been crying,” she whispered. “You understand me. She thinks I don’t hear her but she’s crying because she’s so worried about you. And if you feel good about that, so help me God, I will kill you right here and now.”

  Well, I did feel good about it a little, but I felt bad about it too. I didn’t want to make Jane cry. I just wanted to possess her body and soul and fill her womb with a new generation. Even just to see her and chat would’ve been nice.

  “Asshole,” said Schuyler.

  And she turned her elephantine bulk away and thundered to the door.

  “Tell her I’m fine, Schuyler.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, giving me the finger as she stormed out of the room.

  When she was gone, I called Riley. There was no answer. I called Rich. I got his voicemail. I left a message.

  “Get the hell over here,” I said.

  BUT RICH DIDN’T get the hell over, even though I called him several times again. Another day went by and then another. There was no sign o
f him.

  I was starting to feel better now, starting to get stronger. The stitching on my ribs was still ugly, the shaved spot white and pale, like my flesh was rotten. But the wound no longer gave me that bizarre feeling it had given me at first, as if I were empty in there, as if my innards were rattling around in a space too large for them. Schuyler went to my apartment for me and brought me some clothes to wear: track pants, sweatshirts. I started taking twice-daily exercise walks along the hallways. I was even off the intravenous antibiotics, so I could walk without carting my IV pole around.

  The cop who was guarding me—whichever uniformed patrolman happened to be on duty that particular day—would walk along behind me. Whenever I’d glance back, he’d be there, following me, his eyes scanning the nurses and doctors and patients and visitors who passed along the halls.

  “Who are we looking for?” I asked him.

  Stone-faced, he shook his head, said nothing.

  That’s how I knew they hadn’t found Sera yet, that Sera was still out there somewhere, still after me.

  SOON, I WAS cantering up and down the stairs in the stairwell. The cop still followed me. I could hear him panting above me on my way down, below me on my way back up. I would do the routine once in the morning and once in the evening. My wound burned a little as I worked up speed, but the painful throbbing was gone.

  On my tenth day, my last day at the hospital, when I returned from my evening jaunt, I stepped into my room and found Rich there waiting for me. He was standing at the window across the room, his back to the door, his hands in the pockets of his sky-blue slacks. His bearded face was reflected on the pane, where night had fallen.

  He must’ve seen me reflected there too. He turned around before I even spoke. His suit was impeccably pressed. His golden tie seemed to flow naturally from his golden beard. Only his eyes betrayed anxiety, laced with red, ringed with gray.

  We looked at one another silently for a moment, then I went into the bathroom to get a towel. I wiped the sweat off my face as I stepped back out into the room. I noticed I didn’t hesitate anymore when I went over a threshold. I wasn’t afraid of being whisked back to Galiana, or at least I wasn’t thinking about it. After ten days here in the hospital, the whole Galianan experience seemed completely unreal to me. I had even begun to wonder if maybe the lie I’d told the police was true: maybe it was Sera who stabbed me. Maybe that first thought I’d had on waking here in the hospital—that Galiana had been some sort of coma dream—maybe that was true as well.

  I lowered the towel. I looked at Rich.

  “Where is she?” I said. He pretended not to understand me, and I said, “C’mon, man. Riley. Where is she?”

  He averted his eyes. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, is she alive, damn it?”

  “Damn it, I don’t know!”

  He turned his back on me again, looking out the window. I moved over to the bed. I threw my towel down on it angrily.

  Rich muttered, “What did you expect, Austin?”

  “I didn’t expect anything,” I said. “Because until now, I didn’t realize my parents and my brother were agents of an international conspiracy to—”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “Well, to what? To do what? Install space aliens in government? Are the aliens real?”

  I meant this as a bitter joke. At least I thought I did. At this point, I wasn’t entirely sure. I found myself waiting tensely for his answer.

  After a moment or two, he snorted. “Thank God for the aliens,” he said. “It’s the aliens that saved her.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. No aliens, then. Well, that was something, anyway. My sister’s videos were such a crazy version of Orosgo’s crazy plans that even Orosgo wasn’t crazy enough to take them seriously. That’s how Rich had managed to keep her alive. Until now, at least.

  My brother still didn’t turn around. He kept on staring out the window through his own reflection at the night beyond.

  “He wasn’t always like this,” he said after another little pause. Our eyes met on the pane. “Serge. It’s only recently he’s gotten like this. You know, with old age coming on. The prospect of the end.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” I told him. “He didn’t create Sera overnight. That took time. God alone knows what he did to that child.”

  He didn’t answer right away. I took that for an admission.

  “Even great men have flaws,” he said finally.

  I laughed. Mirthlessly. “Jesus Christ, Rich.”

  He swung around to face me. His voice was firm and angry, but his eyes … I could see all his doubt and decency in his eyes. Whatever Orosgo had drawn him into, Rich knew he was in it too deep.

  “Is it so wrong to believe that things can be better than they are?” he asked me. “A world without war, where no one’s bigger or better than anyone else?”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was my successful, brilliant big brother. The guy wrote books, for crying out loud. He was interviewed on TV. He gave speeches about his big ideas on how to change the world. People paid to hear him. Me, I was a Hollywood nothing. I hardly even followed the news day to day. How could I tell him about what I’d seen on the streets of Eastrim, the heretics and traitors in their cages, the guards torturing them to death while the degenerate, bloodthirsty crowds cheered them on?

  Iron seduced them into rebellion with promises of a perfect country … where each is equal in all things to another,” Tauratanio had told me.

  They tried to kill the wisest queen in all the world in the name of that illusion, Magdala had said.

  But what did it all mean, here, in Los Angeles, in real life? I didn’t know.

  Still, Rich reacted as if I’d spoken out loud, as if I’d accused him of something. “Well, what do you do for anybody?” he said irritably. “Huh? Mr. Show Biz. I mean, you think what I believe is so terrible. What do you believe?”

  The question drew my gaze to him. I was still thinking about Shadow Wood and the forest king and queen. I remembered how they said to me that Queen Elinda had sent me to them because they needed fighting men of brave heart and right belief. Me, ha ha. Austin Lively. A fighting man of brave heart and right belief.

  So … what did I believe? It was a good question.

  I met my brother’s eyes and he met mine. “What’s in the book, Rich?” I asked him. “Another Kingdom. Why does he want it so badly?”

  He made a little noise of frustration, shaking his head. “He’s obsessed with it. I don’t know. It’s like … he thinks it has some sort of power or something.”

  “Power? What sort of—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s old, Austin. He’s old, and he’s afraid of death.”

  “Oh, he’s afraid of more than that, brother. I mean, has he told you his whole story about the all-night conversation in the dacha with the cowl guy?”

  I couldn’t interpret the gesture he made in response. It either meant he’d never heard the story or he’d heard so many stories he couldn’t recall one over another. I’m not sure.

  “Do you know where it is?” he asked me. “The book. Do you know where the book is?”

  The image of Riley flashed in my mind again. Riley lying on the bed, Marco sitting beside her, gesturing toward the bookshelf. Was the manuscript there really Another Kingdom?

  Well, if it was, I wasn’t going to tell Rich, that was for sure. Whatever else happened, whatever happened to me, I had to find my kid sister before Orosgo’s people did—any of Orosgo’s people, including my mother and father and Rich himself. I had to get to her first to make sure she was safe.

  I made a helpless gesture. Shook my head.

  “Are you sure?” Rich said. “I mean, don’t fuck around about this, Austin. Serge can be a good friend but …”

  I sneered. “But what? But cross him and he kills you? Don’t do what he says and he kills you? I
thought you’d convinced him to spare me and throw Sera under the bus.”

  He started to answer but thought better of it. He turned away again, back to the window, back to the night.

  “It’s a big bus,” he said quietly. “If Sera should happen to turn up and murder you, and then …” His voice trailed off.

  “And then if Sera gets arrested or killed by the police.” I finished the thought when his voice trailed off. “It takes care of a lot of problems. Is that why you came here tonight? Is that what you came to tell me?”

  Rich didn’t answer. He just stood looking out at the darkness.

  I gave another derisive laugh. “The Orosgo Age,” I said.

  THAT WAS MY last night in the hospital. The doctors had wanted to keep me another day, but I had to go. I couldn’t reach Riley on the phone or by email, and I couldn’t just sit there and wait for her to turn up dead. I was still a bit weak, but I felt strong enough to do what I had to do. I talked the docs into springing me.

  I fell asleep that night around ten o’clock. I had a dream—a terrible dream. I dreamt I was in the hallway of a gothic mansion. I dreamt I was in a sword fight like in some old knights-in-armor movie on TV. I dreamt I killed a man, ran him through with my sword, and watched at close quarters as the life and the hope of life drained from his face. But then, dreamlike, the next moment, the dying man was me. It was me with the blade buried deep in my body. It was me feeling all the soul-light flickering into blackness. I knew the last thing I would ever see was the triumphant face of the man who’d killed me, filling my vision. The last thing I would ever hear was his roaring, victorious laughter …

  I woke up with my heart hammering, my pillow soaked with sweat. I lay staring up at the ceiling. The lights in the room were off, but the light from the hall came in through the open door and everything was visible in the gray shadows.

  My dream came back to me—in fragments, but vivid enough for me to piece them together. Was that what had really happened to me? A sword fight in a gothic manse? Or was it an assassin outside the museum? Either scenario was too crazy to be real. And yet, if either scenario was unreal, then what did that mean about me? About my brain? About my sanity?