by Layton Green
“What? I’m a bit groggy, but fine. I’m . . .” she trailed off. “I saw some things.”
“So did I. Terrible things.”
“Why don’t we get out of this place before we start yapping?” Jake said. “Everyone all right? No broken bones or twisted ankles?”
We all nodded.
He picked up his backpack. “Good. Then let’s—” he broke off midsentence as he pawed through the backpack, turning it upside down and then letting it fall out of his hands.
It was empty.
Asha looked even more stricken than Jake. She started a feverish search of the floor. “You must have dropped it. We have to find it.”
Jake lit the candles with his lighter. We combed the chapel but found no sign of the letterbox.
“It’s not here,” Jake said in disbelief. “They snatched it while we were out.”
Asha slumped against the wall, and Lou put his hands to his temples. “My head feels like it’s been hit with a baseball bat.”
“I felt odd soon after we walked in here,” I said.
“They must have drugged us.”
Jake slammed a fist into the wall. “Cowards!”
Before we left, we searched the chapel a final time for a trapdoor, a hidden passage, anything we might have missed.
There was nothing but bones and dust.
Jake and Asha looked numb as we filed outside. The horizon gleamed with first light, and in the semi-darkness we noticed a shape slumped in the bushes beside the steps. We hurried to Josef and turned him over. The caretaker’s head sagged in Jake’s grasp.
Jake checked his pulse. “He’s fine. Although he might’ve been hit by a baseball bat. There’s a huge knot on top.” He reached into his backpack and took out a bottle of water, then poured some on Josef’s face and massaged his temples.
The caretaker stirred. “Vhat happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
Josef squinted in confusion, trying to think through the fog of his newly awakened state. I knew the feeling.
“Here,” Jake said, moving Josef’s hand to the bump on his head. “You must have tripped and fell.”
“Yes,” he murmured.
We offered to take him to a hospital, but he shrugged us off and wandered away, holding his head and muttering to himself.
We trudged back to our hotel through the early-morning calm of Kutna Hora’s cobblestone streets, stunned by the loss of the letterbox. We went our separate ways as soon as we reached the hotel, the events of the night careening through my mind like a derailed locomotive.
Exhausted, I stumbled into bed and held Asha tight. I thought I might never let her go.
Asha and I pulled ourselves out of bed at noon. We found Jake and Lou smoking in silence in the common room. Everyone had the same haunted look I knew was in my own eyes, and Jake looked like he hadn’t slept.
“You saw something, too?” Asha asked them. “Both of you?”
Lou stared out the window. Jake took a long drag on his cigarette.
“Jake?” Asha repeated.
He began pacing the room. “It’s not important.”
“Maybe it would help if we all shared what we saw,” Asha said.
“I said it’s not important.”
Asha and I exchanged a glance. “Did they take the camera?” she asked.
“Nope,” Jake said. “And I’ve got the photos.
Lou voiced the obvious, still staring out the window. “They won’t do us much good now.”
As I looked at the agonized faces of my friends, I realized something had happened to me in that tunnel. An anger had bubbled over, one born of pain and fear and frustration, one which had started to emerge the first time the Druids had appeared in the woods and made me feel weak and helpless. An anger which had reached a crescendo when Asha had been injured on the bus, and which had gone beyond the breaking point in Kostnice.
What they had done to me in the chapel had been terrible beyond words, unforgivable. I didn’t even care how they had done it.
I just knew someone had to pay.
I pounded the wall with my fist. “Damn them.”
Asha looked at me in surprise.
“I want to do something,” I said, fists clenched. “I just don’t know what.”
“That’s good, Counselor,” Jake said softly. “Now you’re getting in the game.” He took another long drag and blew the smoke out. “And I do know what to do. I’m gonna figure out where the next location is, I’m gonna go there, and somewhere along the way I’m gonna get the letterbox back and settle a little score with the people following us. You might call it my new mission in life.”
Asha was chewing on her lip and looking at her hands. Lou turned back to the window as Jake stood to leave.
“As soon as I figure out the next location,” he said, his voice low and menacing, “I’m leaving.”
-45-
Jake disappeared for the afternoon. The rest of us lingered in the common room, afraid to venture off alone, hovering over our coffees like monks who had taken a vow of silence.
After dinner at the hotel, Asha and I drifted to the patio. Leaves sprinkled the ground, a smattering of stars hovered overhead.
I sat on a wide stone bench with my back against a tree. Asha sat in front of me, encircled in my arms. Although I wanted to forget what I had seen and done, I felt the nearly insatiable urge to communicate one feels after a traumatic event.
“I killed someone, Asha.”
She whipped around to face me.
“At least I tried to. Last night in the chapel or . . . an underground tunnel . . . I really don’t know where I was. But I was following you and it happened so fast and—”
“Wait,” she said. “Slow down. Start from the beginning.”
My words poured forth in a cacophony of purged guilt and memories. I worried she would judge me for what I had done, but the thought of not telling her the truth seemed more abhorrent than any consequences my words might have.
Asha’s face had gone white by the time I finished.
“Do you despise me?” I asked.
She traced a finger down my cheek. “You thought you were protecting me.”
I looked away. I knew the end was justified; it was the means that bothered me.
She crossed her legs and rested her chin in her hands. “I was never in a sack, and I never called out to you inside the chapel.”
“Then who—it sounded just like you. And the head in the sack, except there was only sawdust . . . .” I put my head in my hands. “Didn’t you hear me calling? What were you doing?”
“Let’s finish your story first. Someone obviously led you away from us so they could . . . .” Her face twisted into a furious expression. “I would have died if it had been you and I was watching. I’m glad you did what you did.”
She looked down at my clenched fists. “It’s over,” she whispered.
“I thought you were dead. Before I killed him, I thought you were dead. I’ll never forget the feeling.”
She stroked my arm and drew me close. “You didn’t kill anyone,” she said gently. “You do realize that? You were tricked and drugged and nothing you thought you saw really happened.”
“But why? To get me out of the chapel? Why not just drug me or hit me? Why put me through that?”
“I don’t know. They’re evil.”
“I know I was drugged, but that shadow thing . . . something was there, Asha.”
“Okay,” she soothed. “Okay.”
“You believe in spirits. Do you think it was an evil spirit?”
Her left hand twitched and moved to her knee. “I don’t want to think that way. I don’t want you to think you saw an evil spirit.”
“But you think it’s possible.”
This time her hands moved to her brow, steepling against her forehead. She kept her face covered for long moments before meeting my gaze again, her eyes a whirlpool of emotion. “There’s something you need to know. About my past.”
> My own fears receded, replaced by a dormant queasiness.
She let out a long breath. “I was a child prodigy.”
I looked up, unsure what I had expected to hear but sure it wasn’t that. “What kind of prodigy?”
“I could talk to people,” she said softly, her voice drifting away from the present. “That is, people who had passed away. Spirits.”
I blinked. That was most definitely not what I had expected to hear.
“You were a medium?” I couldn’t hide the relief in my voice. I had worried she was married or a fugitive or involved in something shady with Mr. Sofistere. “What’s wrong with that? And why do you no longer . . . .” I remembered her constant searching, her obsession with all things spiritual. “Something happened, didn’t it?”
She nodded, eyes and voice lowered. “I spoke to my first spirit when I was twelve. For five years I helped people speak to their loved ones, and I was even on talk shows. It felt like a circus. And then,” she swallowed, “my brother died. He died and it all went away.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I never heard another voice, never communicated with another spirit. It’s like I was cut off from that world at the moment I needed it most. I wanted to hear from him so badly, Aidan. Just one little word, an impression . . . but there was nothing. As if it had all been in my mind. And that’s what everyone thought, the doctors and even my parents. That it was all in my mind. That’s even . . . that’s even what I’ve come to believe.”
“That’s why you’ve been searching so hard for evidence of the supernatural. To find your brother, but also searching for proof that . . . .”
“You can say it. Searching for proof I wasn’t crazy. That I never heard anything but the voices inside my own head.”
I took her hand, and she looked down. “There’s something else,” she said. “Ever since my brother died, I haven’t really felt with my heart. I know things in my head, but it’s as if there’s a black hole inside me, sucking my emotions away.”
“Did you . . . have you tried to get professional help with this?” I asked gently.
“My parents made me go to a shrink for a year. You can imagine how that went. Either I was crazy or a liar, because how could their little prodigy fail to talk to the one person everyone needed to hear from most? We never recovered. I went to school overseas, my mom died a few years later, and my dad and I barely talk. He still doesn’t believe me.”
“And now?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I mean if I might be crazy, if I can’t feel and love like I should . . . being alone has been the far easier route.”
I swallowed and looked away.
She smiled and draped her hands on my shoulders. “Then I met you.”
Her smile was laden with a deep sadness, though I detected a tinge of hope pulling at the corners.
But maybe that was my own projection.
“I was afraid I’d never be able to love, and didn’t want to hurt you. And yes, I wasn’t sure of my feelings after we made love. But ever since I saw my brother at the castle, I’ve started to feel again. Really feel. I can’t promise I’m back to normal, but there’s something there—and not just in my head.”
It was enough for me. Maybe someone else would have required more than a glimmer of hope from the person he loved, but after the story I had heard, after everything we had been through, it was enough for me right then.
I squeezed her hand, and the light in her eyes dimmed. “The chapel,” she said, as if to herself.
I gathered her into my arms as the chill of the night crept over us.
“When the candles went out,” she began, “I reached for your hand and whispered your name. You didn’t respond. I figured you were looking for a candle. I started to call out, but then I saw a light. It was soft and white, brighter than the glow of candlelight, and I remember thinking that it gave me a peaceful feeling. I walked towards it, caught up in the moment but in the back of my mind wondering where everyone was.”
Her face creased at the memory, and she took a moment to continue. “I walked for too long to still be in the chapel. The light moved with me, and I kept following it. I felt funny, like my head was spinning, but as I said, I was in the moment. When the light finally stopped moving, I realized I was at the end of a tunnel. A tunnel just like yours. Low ceiling, stone floor. When I turned around, I saw my brother.”
“My God, Asha. Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”
“I’ve seen your face all day. I knew you’d seen something horrible. I wanted to wait until the right time.”
“What happened?”
“I cried out to him, and he moved towards me. I couldn’t tell if he was walking or floating. It was almost as if he was . . . doing both. He reached out to me, just like he did at the castle. I opened my arms and then—”
She choked up and looked away. “He started to float backwards, against his will. It was as if something was pulling him back. He kept reaching out to me, opening his mouth but with no words coming out. Oh, Aidan!” she cried, burying her face into me.
I stroked her hair and she looked up through moistened eyes. “I started running but I couldn’t reach him. He kept floating backwards down the tunnel. I ran and I ran and then—he was gone. The light went out and I was alone in the darkness. I felt tired and disoriented. I drifted asleep and when I woke up, I was back in the chapel.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I wished I had something better to say.
“He’s so lost, Aidan. I have to figure out how to help him.”
I held her under the stars. She clung to me and shivered. Eventually I led her to the room, where she lay on the bed like an automaton, staring at the ceiling. I flipped the lights and slid in beside her.
“I’ve always wanted so much to believe in God,” she said. “But if there’s a God, why wouldn’t my brother be in heaven? He was ten. He wouldn’t be some thing drifting through a void. His expression—he needs my help, Aidan. I know it as surely as I’ve known anything.”
She took a deep, quivering breath. “If there is someplace else, maybe he needs me to lead him there. I used to get that from some of the spirits: that they were lost and needed help finding their way. Lots of mediums do. I was just too young to understand any of it, and too afraid to ask. I was always afraid, you know. You see these movies and television shows where the mediums are always at peace with the spirit world. I never was. It terrified me, talking to people who weren’t alive.”
I slipped an arm around her. She was quiet for so long I thought she was asleep, and then her voice startled me. “Why haven’t I seen him before? Why now? There must be something about the letterbox that calls to him or lets him appear. Is the letterbox some sort of bridge to lost souls?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did.”
She murmured her last words that night to me dreamily, yet with perfect clarity, like a final revelation on a deathbed. “I can’t believe in a God who would take my brother away and let this happen to him. I just can’t.”
-46-
I slept fitfully, rising out of bed as the last tendrils of darkness slithered out of sight. After tracing a finger down Asha’s cheek, I made my way downstairs. To my surprise, I found Lou, not Jake, sitting in a chair in the Spartan lobby, drinking coffee out of a plastic cup.
“What’re you doing up?” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep. You?”
“Same.” I poured a cup of coffee, sat beside Lou, and told him what had happened in the chapel.
His eyes got wider and wider. When I finished, his head bobbed slowly up and down. “It’s amazing the places you can smoke in Eastern Europe. The movies, the mall, airplanes. It’s a national pastime. I’ve seen people ashing on no smoking signs.”
“Thanks for listening.”
Lou frowned and tilted his head back. “I’m thinking. Genius requires time.”
I groaned. Lou never stopped.
“Did you try to touch the shadow thing?” he asked.
“I was too weak at that point. And I didn’t particularly want to touch it.”
“So you don’t know if it was corporeal?”
“It was there, Lou.”
“I’m sure something was there. We were just drugged and don’t know what it was. Did it have horns and a pitchfork? A little red cape?”
“It’s not funny.”
His laughter sounded forced. “Did Asha see anything similar?”
“No.”
Lou waited for me to elaborate, then spread his hands. “That’s quite a story she’s got there. Her brother again?”
I gave a short nod.
“I understand you two are connected and all that, and have your little secrets. Whereas I, your best friend for a decade, have been relegated to the role of secondhand acquaintance.”
I couldn’t help but give a short laugh, though I had the feeling he was trying to divert attention from his own story. “So what happened to you in the chapel? Did you see something?”
Lou shrugged. “It was ridiculous. Hilarious. If I hadn’t been drugged, I’d have laughed out loud.”
I didn’t respond. He sighed and lit a cigarette. “Why should I care, anyway? I saw a light, same as you. I went to check it out. It seemed further away than it should’ve been, but it’s hard to judge distance in the dark. I didn’t think too much about it, until I realized that—”
“You were in a tunnel-like passageway just like mine.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Asha, too?”
I nodded.
“The passage stretched in either direction and I couldn’t see the light source. When I started back the way I came, I heard the voice.”
“Voice?”
He laughed again. It came off hollow and affected. “It was coming from the opposite end of the passage. A little girl’s voice, speaking a particular urban dialect of Brazilian Portuguese.”
Goose flesh started to prickle my arms.
“A remarkable resemblance to Kika’s speech pattern. Kudos to whoever engineered it.”
I already knew Lou was bothered by the strange occurrence much more than he was letting on. Lou would never admit that the things happening to us might be supernatural in origin, and his defense mechanism, as it had been ever since I had known him, was to make light of whatever confused or frightened him. I didn’t fault him; it was just his way of dealing with the world.