But Cyrus gave me his yellow-toothed smile and said, “Yep.”
“Nat?” I said. “He didn’t... how...?”
The warm weight of a hand on my shoulder startled me out of my shock. Tom was leaning over me. “What are you two talking about?”
“Cyrus passed the switchel ring on to my brother and me,” I said. “And apparently when Cyrus died, Nat banished him.” I looked at Cyrus. “Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
“What you two told each other is your business,” Cyrus said. “But he did it because I asked him to. Told him to, is more like it. It was the condition.”
“Condition for what?”
“For teaching you all I taught you. Both of you. For giving you the canteen.”
My mouth was dry. “Are you saying you did all of it just so Nat could banish you when you died?”
“My health was never good,” Cyrus said. “You knew that. I never liked thinking about death. But I never seemed able to help it, either. And then I came here, the first time.”
“And?”
“And? Isn’t it obvious?” Cyrus asked. “Here, death is whatever I say it is. That’s not so worrisome, is it? It’s not even like death, really. More like eternal life.” He put his feet up on the coffee table. His yellow-nailed big toe poked out of a hole in his left sock. “I never intended to pass the canteen on. I was the last of my line, you know, except for my idiot asshole cousins, and I didn’t like the idea of it leaving the family.”
“But then you needed someone to banish you,” I said.
“Yep.”
“And so you cut a deal with Nat.”
“Yep.”
“And he never told me.”
“Like I said, that’s your business,” Cyrus said.
“But...” I could feel the heat rising in my face. My fingers and toes were numb. “Did Nat understand?” I found myself fighting back tears. That Cyrus had misled me into thinking the switchel ring was a portal to the afterlife was enough of a betrayal. It was impossible to imagine that Nat had done the same, that he’d known all along this was a prison. But Nat must have asked him why he wanted to be banished. Why would Cyrus insist on being forced into the afterlife, when he could just go voluntarily at the moment of his death? He wouldn’t. This so-called condition would have made no sense unless Nat knew the truth.
“Did Nat know?” They were the only three words I could get out with my voice under control, but Cyrus knew what I meant.
“Well, if he did or he didn’t, it’s not for me to talk to you about things Nat chose not to,” Cyrus said. I wanted to claw at his face. That old cliché about knowledge being power, it was practically Cyrus’s religion. He always used it to control us. Doling it out in bits and pieces, just enough to keep us compliant, like food to hostages.
Tom, still standing beside me, took off his hat and rubbed the back of his neck. “But Cyrus, how did you get out that first time? When you were alive?”
There was the croak-laugh again. “Not the first time you’ve come around here after a way out. So you know that’s a valuable bit of information, isn’t it? I bet I could get a lot of bidders, in this place, on a way out.”
Tom crossed his arms. “And? What do you want?”
“A sammich,” Cyrus answered. “And a glass of switchel.”
I sighed. “Is the kitchen the same as before?”
Cyrus nodded. I stood up.
“You’re seriously making him a sandwich?” Tom asked.
“You heard him. He won’t tell us until he gets one.” I went into the kitchen. For the life of me, I could not imagine why Cyrus wouldn’t at least create it cleaner. Maybe it felt more like home this way. He’d said himself he didn’t want to feel dead. But personally, I couldn’t think of anything more depressing than spending an eternity living the way Cyrus did when he was alive.
The refrigerator door, the bread box on the counter, the handle on the silverware drawer: everything had that layer of grease over it that I remembered, like Cyrus fried a lot and it was always spattering everywhere and he never wiped anything down, which was exactly the case. Tom came in while I was slathering bread with mayonnaise.
“Need any help? Because it’s no fun out there.”
“Sure, you can open this.” I handed him a jar of pickles. Heaven forbid Cyrus ever receive a sandwich without a pickle. You don’t even want to know. “Even in this...” I waved the butter knife around me “...whatever it is, the jars stick. Got to hand it to Cyrus. If this is all the product of his imagination and memory, he sure is detail-oriented.”
“He’s not really going to tell us for a sandwich is he?”
“Hell no. He wants something. I have no idea what, but I guarantee we won’t like it.”
“But if we do it, will he keep his word?”
I considered this. “Yeah, I think he would. I’ve known Cyrus to withhold plenty of information.” I nodded toward the living room, and the conversation we’d just had there. “As you can tell, and some of it crucial. But never to outright lie.”
“Well then, that’s something. And I’ve never even gotten this far before,” Tom said. “He usually turns me away at the door. I guess it pays to have connections.”
I laughed. “If you mean me, don’t think he’s going to help us out of some sort of sentimental attachment. It was Nat Cyrus loved.”
“But did you love him?”
I stacked the sandwich together and frowned up at Tom, who was giving me a look that took me a moment to identify as pity. “Of course I loved him. He was my brother.”
“Not Nat, Cyrus. Because you’re looking at him like a little girl just dying to get a smile from her harsh and disapproving father.”
My laugh sounded awkward and unconvincing. “Projecting, maybe? Did you have a harsh and disapproving father of your own?”
“A harsh father and a disapproving mother,” Tom said without a trace of embarrassment. “Which is why I know that look so well.”
“Well, Cyrus was no father to me, I can tell you that. I have a father. And he’s quite a gentle soul.” I opened the fridge and took out the pitcher of switchel. “And yeah okay, he’d have to be, to stay married to my mom. But that’s not the point.” I got glasses and started washing them in the sink. I sure as hell wasn’t drinking out of anything that filthy, whether the dirt was real or not. All the while Tom stayed quiet, turning his hat in his hands and looking at me in that inscrutable way of his that, for some reason, had me constantly trying to fill the silence. “The point is, I do not need Cyrus’s approval, but I do need his help, so let’s bring him his lunch, shall we? Do you want switchel?”
He took a sip from one of the two glasses I’d already poured, and it might as well have been raw sewage for the look on his face. “That is disgusting.” He looked around the kitchen. “Hasn’t he got anything stronger?”
“Probably beer in the fridge.”
“Think he’d be offended if I got my own drink? Gemma won’t let me when I’m in her house.”
“No, I just told you, help yourself.”
Without waiting up for him, I went back into the living room. “Your sandwich, sir,” I said to Cyrus. He showed no sign of noticing the sarcasm, only nodded. “Switchel?” he asked.
“Hold on, I left it on the counter.” I passed Tom on my way back into the kitchen. He was carrying a glass of something brown that smelled an awful lot like whiskey.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“Mouth’s getting awfully dry out here!” Cyrus called.
I rolled my eyes and Tom raised the glass of switchel he had in his other hand. “I’ll take this one to him, you go get yours.”
When everyone had their drink (had I seen any sign of that whiskey in the kitchen I’d have put a shot of it in my switchel) I said, “Now how about you tell us what you really want, in exchange for telling us how to get out of here?”
“Nothing much,” Cyrus said. “Just my knife.” He took a bite of
his sandwich and chewed, intentionally slowly I thought. When this pause for dramatic effect, or irritating effect, was done he said, “My pocket knife. It was my remnant.”
Tom, who had been standing by the window, turned around at this. “And you’ve never found it?”
“Oh, I know just where it is,” said Cyrus. “Drayne has it.”
“And Drayne is...” I said.
“The fiend. The one who sent me here the first time. The one I banished.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Afraid to get it yourself?”
Cyrus narrowed his eyes in a way that made it clear I was going to suffer for that one, somewhere down the line. He crunched his pickle loudly, with his mouth open. I tried not to let him see me grimace.
“I’m sure you’ve noticed,” Cyrus said, “that the people we’ve banished aren’t real happy to see us, always.”
“I noticed,” I agreed.
“Well, fuck ‘em, most of ‘em,” Cyrus said. “I’m not here to make friends. But Drayne is a powerful enemy to have. And he has my knife.”
“What’s the big deal about your knife?” I asked. “I never knew you to be particularly sentimental.”
“Oh, I’m plenty sentimental when it comes to dear old me,” Cyrus said. “Don’t feel much like getting stabbed to death.”
“How can you be stabbed to death? You’re dead already.” I thought of Tom, talking about the body in his grave. Maybe I never did that well in science, but I understood enough of the basics to know that a body could not be in two places at once. “Your body isn’t real.”
“You need to get over this obsession with real and not real.” Tom had moved to study a painting that looked like a grandfather, father, and son on a fishing trip. “Those words are relevant to your world, not this one.”
“But it can’t just be anything goes,” I said. “There has to be some sort of, I don’t know, physics here. Some sort of rules.”
“Sure,” Tom agreed. “When someone punches you, it hurts. But only because our minds are trained to believe it does.”
“Yes and no,” Cyrus said. “If their will is stronger than yours, it’ll hurt whether you know better or not.” He pointed a chubby finger at me. “You want a rule, here’s one, the only one that counts here: battle of wills. That’s the law of the land. And you’re right about me already being dead. Plenty of the shitheads here have tried to kill me, and it doesn’t work. But what you’ll find about most people is, they’re more afraid of pain than they are of death.”
My hand went up to the bandage on my cheek. I’d believed in that pain, all right. And I supposed Gemma had cured it because she’d used her will, but also familiar things—believable things—to treat it. “So it’s a jointly created reality,” I said. “Everyone controls it, with the strongest minds controlling it the most.”
I waited for Cyrus to tell me I was clever, to grasp such a strange concept so quickly, but he only nodded. “Pretty much. With one exception.”
“Which is?”
“Things that aren’t conjured. Things that were real when they came here.”
“Remnants.”
“Stab someone with a knife you’ve created in your mind,” Cyrus tapped his head, as if I might not know what a mind was, “and it’s painful, but it can only hurt them so far. Stab them with a real knife, and that’s another story.”
“But why would that be?”
Cyrus shrugged. “It’s a physical object in a non-physical world. So which laws does it obey? The laws of the world it’s in, or the laws under which it was made? You can’t change the nature of that knife just by moving it. Knives stab. It’s what they do.”
“But it’s still not stabbing a physical person,” I said.
He shrugged again. “I ain’t God Almighty. I can’t tell you everything. But I can tell you I saw Drayne kill a lady with my knife once. Trust me. It was real. Whether her soul was actually destroyed, or she was just forced into the afterlife, I don’t know. But I don’t like the sound of either one much, myself.”
So desperate to avoid the unknown that he’d groomed a child for the sole purpose of banishing him when he was dead. And now that the banishment wasn’t working out just right, he wanted to send us to fix it for him. Cyrus was nothing but a coward. He looked small and old, suddenly, in his saggy chair. It was like when you’re a kid and you see one of your teachers someplace out of context, at a restaurant with their family, maybe, and it’s the first time you realize they’re people.
“So Drayne would like to stab you.” Tom came to stand beside the couch, hands in his pockets. “As would many of us, if you want to know. But he hasn’t caught you yet.”
“He’s been trying since he got here,” Cyrus said. “And I’ll tell you what, it’s disturbing my eternal rest. I want the threat eliminated.”
“Meaning you want your knife back so he can’t hurt you?” I asked this hopefully, even though I knew better. Tom muttered something, and judging from his tone, he knew where this was going just as well as I did.
“Oh, I want my knife back all right,” Cyrus said. “But before you bring it back here, I want you to kill him with it.”
EIGHT
* * *
I was so frustrated with the delay (not to mention danger) Cyrus was causing us with this little errand that it was all I could do not to spit in his face. But I knew arguing would only make things take that much longer. So I just sulked while he gave us some basic directions, like, “When you get to the lake of tar, don’t go in it,” and, “If you see a guy with horns running on all fours, steer clear of him.” Helpful stuff like that.
He also refused to help us ward ourselves against detection on our way, the way Gemma had, on the grounds that was “all a bunch of woo-woo crap.” I reminded him that there was no such thing here: if we believed it, it was true. “But I don’t believe it, see?” he countered. “Because it’s crap.” So in the end Tom and I did our best to ward ourselves on our own.
Once we left Cyrus’s plot behind I asked, “You didn’t see anything on his bookshelf did you?” We were walking through a rain forest, complete with rain. Luckily, the overgrowth was thick enough to keep us from getting entirely drenched. “Any sort of spellbook-looking-thing that we could just steal and skip this?”
Tom shook his head. “All novels. The kind Maisie’s daughter Lila was always reading, with pictures of pirates manhandling women on the covers.”
“Romance novels? Cyrus reads romance novels?”
“I guess so. Although I’m not sure if he can really read them. I have books, but the only parts I can actually read are the parts I have memorized. I can’t fill them in with anything I don’t already know.” He took off his hat to shake off the water it had collected, then put it back on.
“So he just has them to surround himself with familiar things, all the things he loves...” I trailed off. All but one. “Except he hasn’t got his remnant either. Like you.”
“Seems like most of the people I’ve met here don’t,” Tom said.
“Because of what you said about the swamp?”
He nodded. “That and most people don’t look for them immediately. They’re distracted, I suppose, by being forced against their will into a drinking vessel.” I didn’t answer, just ducked my head beneath a vine he held up for me. “By the time they get their bearings, the swamp has had a chance to swallow their remnant up, or whatever it does,” Tom went on. “Or somebody took it. People go scavenging there sometimes.”
“Why would anyone want someone else’s remnant?”
Tom shrugged. “Sounds like Cyrus’s was pretty useful.”
“But I can’t imagine who would want your watch. I bet it’s still in the swamp someplace.”
“Hence my going there every day to look for it,” he said shortly. It was the first time he’d sounded hostile in a while. I guessed it had been too long since my last apology.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must be hard not to have it with you.”
Tom eyed me sideways. “It is. It’s the only thing that connects me to who I was there.”
I frowned at this. “You have yourself, Tom. You are who you were there.”
He seemed to have no answer to that. We passed out of the rain forest into a flat, dry expanse of cracked red clay. The sun was orange and swollen above us. Just looking at it made me feel overheated and worn out. “How long do you suppose this walk is?” I asked. “Because I might need to rest first.” Without much regard for the word might, I stopped and sat down on a red rock that, in the real world, would have been a lovely spot for a lizard to sun himself.
Tom turned around and shook his head. “You don’t need rest.”
“Maybe you don’t. But remember what Cyrus said about physical things and the laws under which they were made? Well, I’m a physical thing, and I need rest. And a drink, by the way.”
He shook his head again and held out a hand to help me up, which I ignored. “Cyrus was talking about his pocket knife, not you,” he said.
“What’s the difference?” Tom raised his eyebrows and I could almost see the jokes about sharp and small flitting through his mind, so I added, “In this context, I mean.”
“The knife is a purely physical thing. But you have a body and a spirit. You’re like the knife, but you’re also like me. And the spirit side is stronger.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“Because if you were behaving like a physical object, the swamp would have tried to take you when you landed in it. And even if it didn’t, you would have passed out from dehydration and exhaustion by now.”
He had a point there. It was impossible for me to measure how far or long we’d walked since I arrived, but I was sure it was farther and longer than a cup of tea and a cookie should have been able to cover. For that matter, I hadn’t had to pee in all that time, which had to be some kind of record. But then I remembered something else: Tom, bent over with his hands on his knees, panting. “But you got tired,” I said.
“What?”
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 9