Immortown

by Lily Markova

  I guess now is a great time to exercise my drawing skills.

  ***

  “Hate parties,” mutters Freya, stumbling on the threshold and nearly tumbling over. Tsk. I forgot to lock the door again. “You. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Have you?” I swallow, attempting to obstruct her view of the sketch behind me.

  She seems different, somehow. The same elusive features, same dark fire for hair, and thrice-cursed green eyes, and yet, I can’t shake off the feeling that this isn’t her, that this is her look-alike, even though I can’t sense what’s changed about her.

  “Oh, this looks very much like my hand,” she says in surprise, as she rises on tiptoe to cast an unashamed look over my shoulder. “And yours.”

  And she takes my hand in hers.

  The drawing couldn’t have worked this fast. . . . It had to be finished; I had to make it reflect my desires with the fullest intensity for them to come true. That’s why my paintings never change things for the better: First, you’ve got to really want them to. The one time I let myself believe I could do something good, they perverted my intention, like the devil that grants all your wishes only to make you rue their fulfillment.

  I stand unmoving, afraid I might do something wrong. Frighten her off or let her get too close. But Freya smiles, her trustful, starry eyes peering into mine. No one has ever looked at me like this before, so naively, so sincerely, as if. . .in love? Except, perhaps, Krystle—before she was toast. After the fire, we’ve all moderated our romantic vibes.

  “Won’t Chase get bored there without you?” I ask.

  “Chase? Who’s Chase?” she says innocently, still holding my hand. Then she buries the fingers of her free hand in my hair, and raising herself on tiptoe again, she. . .kisses me.

  No, I can’t, this isn’t her, this is half a gallon of Amnesia that is stroking my cheek. I step back from her. Then again. . .I have never been noted for being perfectly righteous. Once more I let her touch my lips and carry my mind back to the faraway past where I was still alive and quite happy about it. Okay, stop. In the morning, having sobered up, she’ll want to kill me. Or herself. I tilt my head back so I’m out of her reach, and she rests her forehead against my shoulder.

  On second thought, maybe we don’t need to sober up at all until Freya gets used to us being. . . In my head, I crumple up the remnants of my conscience, throw them in the trash, bring her closer, and kiss her back.

  And still something’s wrong. . . .

  “Alex. . .” she whispers against my mouth.

  “WHAT?”

  What? What blasted Alex might that be? All right, fine, Freya definitely needs to sleep it off, and as for Alex, I’ll deal with him tomorrow. Might as well hold off on drawing for a while, though. Maybe there is a chance this can be real after all.

  ***

  It’s nearing afternoon. The steady drizzle outside renders the view out the window anemic like a blank sheet of paper. I can sense someone familiar walking past the house. . . . Right, Aria and her new friend. Her mood seems much better now—right after Chase went missing, looking into her mind felt like staring into the black abyss that replaces my ocean each time it’s erased.

  Those two should have told each other when they had the chance. Fast-forward three years, and now, what’s left of the “roseate feeling” is just a crusty scar. Admittedly, Aria believes that Chase fled Levengleds without even bothering to say good-bye, when the truth is, he drowned—or so he claims—so his body was never found. If I were him, I’d at least deign to explain to her why they can’t be together. Say, something to the effect of, “My love, I don’t exist, sorry I kept that from you for so long.”

  “She looks so worn out.” India is sitting on the side of my bed, not even attempting to banish the gleam of greedy excitement from her eyes as she watches Freya sleep. “She makes such a lightweight drinker.”

  Yep, somebody had better steer clear of mirrors today unless we want to shutter another one.

  “She does, doesn’t she?” I say, drawing the curtains against the bleak day, careful not to let India notice neither my smirk at a relevant recollection nor the scowl that promptly supplants it as the recollection in question progresses in my mind. “Do we have an Alex here? Some Alex Freya might have talked to last night?”

  India shrugs. Freya flinches, and without waking, screams, “No! Mitch!”

  My already disagreeable mood darkens further. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  It’s not like I can go around disposing of every guy whose name she calls while unconscious. . . . Except I can, of course, but that’s beside the point.

  India bites her lip, looking thoughtful for a moment. “Ah. I think I know who your Alex is: the other main character from her new movie, played by Mitch Aské.”

  So they’re the same guy, at least. I make sure my tone suggests nothing other than the utter ridiculousness of the notion, when I say, “They’re not together, though, are they?” I don’t remember sensing that Freya had a crush on someone when she first stepped into the Drunk Dead.

  “No, Freya says there’s nothing like that between them.”

  “And the hotel guy, Chase?” I manage to sound as though I’ve never been more bored in my life, one hell of an achievement, considering I’m the only bartender in a town full of depressed people.

  India shakes her head and says, her tone bitter, “She’s the one, isn’t she?”

  Oh, well, cover blown.

  “She might be,” I say, just to tick India off.

  “Don’t do that, Kai—she’s mine.”

  “I beg to differ. Or did she kiss you too last night?” I can’t help gloating over the effect this has on India’s expression.

  “WHAT?”

  My sister’s loud squawk wakes Freya, who, in her turn, emits a sound like a hybrid of a groan and howl. Her hand knocks against the book I left under the pillow.

  “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” she mutters, in a tone enviably sarcastic for someone suffering a hangover, and she quotes from memory, “ ‘All art is quite useless.’ ”

  This would be the perfect epitaph for me, only there’s no one to attend to the decoration of my tombstone—just as there is no tombstone, I expect. India gives Freya a glass of water, which she polishes off in one gulp before falling back on the pillow, holding the glass to her forehead.

  “Let me guess—you’re never drinking again,” I sneer.

  “Argh, what are you doing here?” Having noticed me at last, Freya pulls the blanket up to her eyes.

  “For your information, this is my room.”

  “Oh no. Waking up in unexpected places on a regular basis is an alarming symptom, according to Fight Club.” Freya dangles her legs off the side of the bed and freezes, apparently struck by a vertigo attack. “I need to get back to the hotel, right now.”

  “I’d take a shower first,” India says with a guarded expression, jerking her head to make Freya look down.

  “Really? You. . .painted stuff on my legs?” she says, sounding only faintly resentful.

  “Never fall asleep at a party,” I say, shrugging. “You’ve been out forever. I was bored.”

  “You’re all sick here,” announces Freya with a sigh.

  “Last night, you fitted right in.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Being the gentleman that I am, I’d prefer not to tell her just yet, allowing Freya’s imagination to torment her with its own ideas of how exactly her drunk self has failed her. I would do my best to help out by dropping mocking but infuriatingly vague hints, of course—but India deprives me of this chance at fun.

  “You kissed him,” she says, tone thick with sympathy, as though nothing worse could possibly ever happen to anyone.

  I didn’t realize Freya’s eyes could get this big. Dropping her face into the pillow, she bellows out the kind of words that would deeply offend any bedding item. Then she half sits up and asks, still addressing the pillow
, “And I’m in your bed because. . . ?”

  “No.” I decide to spare her. “Just a kiss. . . . You clearly wanted more, though.”

  “India, I’ve changed my mind: Please kill me at your earliest opportunity.”

  “I mean,” I add, changing my own mind regarding sparing her, “it was the worst make-out session in my life, as you proceeded to call me somebody else’s name, but still. . .”

  “Last thing I remember, I was dancing, and then the floor was sort of. . .gone,” Freya reports contritely.

  “That’s Amnesia for you,” India says.

  “All right, then.” Freya gathers what strength the cocktail’s wicked after-effects have relinquished their grip on, and staggers toward the door. “Nothing personal, but I think I’m going to throw up now. Hope we never see each other again.”

  I press my hand over my heart, feigning hurt. “What about assuring me you’d love for us to remain friends?”

  The door closes behind her rather undramatically, but I can hear quiet swearing from the stairs. India bounces up and down on my bed, clapping her hands in glee. “Oh, yeah! She hates you.”

  “Not for long,” I say. “Watch and learn.”

  I catch up with her by the front door. “Hey, Freya.”

  “Please, just shut up,” she says imploringly. “I don’t want to know anything else.”

  “Are you sure? What if I told you Iver was still in Immortown?”

  Freya stops dead in her tracks, reels for a moment, and whirls around. “You wouldn’t joke about this, right?” she says, in the tone of one preparing to attack.

  “He just doesn’t want to see you. Don’t know why. But last night, I noticed him sneaking around the garden—probably wanted to glimpse you after all, even if from afar.”

  “Is it true?” Freya sends India, who I know is lurking somewhere behind me, a look full of undisguised pain. “You knew he was here? You all knew?”

  India mumbles in a wimpy attempt to justify herself. “Freya, I. . . He asked. . .”

  Not listening to India’s excuse for an explanation any longer, Freya turns to leave again, but then looks back. “Thank you, Kai. I really appreciate it.”

  Once my sister and I are alone, I grant India the most charming smile I am capable of.

  “I look forward to the day you’re erased,” she says with restraint that is so uncharacteristic of her. “I mean it. Everyone will be better off without you. Maybe this whole Kai-damn place will vanish when you go, too.”

  Freya

  “Freya, wait!”

  Oh, God, not her. I stop walking and struggle to keep my voice level when all I want right now is to shout, take it all—every individual frustration boiling inside me—out on her. “India, I get what you want, but we will never be friends. Quite apart from how our first meeting went. . . Look, my brother is more important than anything else to me. At the party, I asked you a direct question, and you lied to me about his being gone. I can’t, and don’t want to, trust you. Please, leave me alone.”

  India bursts into hysterical laughter. “Well, thank goodness you can trust my brother, because he is such a dependable person! Did you know that if it hadn’t been for Kai, your brother wouldn’t have ended up stuck here in the first place? Krystle wouldn’t have been able to prey on him, and the Aurore siblings could have been sipping Christmas mulled wine in some Levengleds pub now.”

  “And how is that Kai’s fault?” Not that I care, anyway. He’s not that much better than his sister: If Kai had warned me about Iver at the party last night, I might have been able to catch him there and then.

  “I say this knowing he’s eager not to miss a single word here.” India nods to their front door, which she left open in her haste as she ran after me. “It was Kai, Freya. He burned Immer down. It was Kai who incarcerated us all here, and he is the one who won’t let us out. He created this town, and he undid it, along with many innocent people.”

  I am done with the Skarsens and their family issues. Without a reply, I head off to the Last Shelter. Each new step I take echoes as a sharp discharge of pain in my temples.

  It turns out Chase isn’t in the hotel. The lobby looks deserted, apart from the violin suspended in the air above the red sofa and responding with harrowing grating noises every time the bow swoops down as if to saw the strings in half. If Dude could play worth a damn, the melody, which is still recognizable, would sound ultimately plaintive. He clearly misses Chase.

  When the bow rises above the violin, my headache quiets down, only to explode like a firework whenever it lands again. I think I see now why they drink so much in Immortown—the fragment of the party that I can recall was great. I haven’t had so much fun in a long time. But now I’m sober, and hungry, and crushed. I feel as though I’d died and had been resurrected, which might as well be well-founded, considering that even if some drunk bastard did kill me last night, I wouldn’t even remember.

  With what feels like a superhuman effort, I tune my vision to Levengleds and, followed by two wordlessly reproachful demons, reach Aria’s university with the help of Chase’s map. Well, at least I can see Levengleds, which means I’m still alive. The entrance to the main building is barred with a giant metal quill and pencil crossed like two swords: It’s Sunday. I’ve completely lost track of these things. So Chase isn’t here either, but I think I know where I’ll find him.

  The lacquered vertical-plank walls, the brimming bookshelves, the curved-leg bed. . . . Everything has remained the same in this cozy room in number eight, Caulfield Street. The only thing missing is a malachite-tracery piano by the window. Upon closer examination, I notice that part of both the wall planking and laminate flooring in the corner the piano used to occupy is a slightly different shade, as if the room was partially renovated after the instrument had been removed. I never asked Mom how exactly she had disposed of Iver’s possessions. We haven’t, in fact, talked about him at all. It’s on me, of course; back then, whenever someone mentioned his name in my presence—incidentally, in an “oh, by the way” passing—I would freak out. I simply hated it when the subject was broached.

  Aria is slouching at the writing desk, the one my brother used to work at. She looks as though she’s just woken up too. There is an unfinished bowl of cereal on the windowsill. With her hair uncombed, in her glasses and ankle-length plush bathrobe, Aria is absorbed in Steppenwolf, a pencil clamped between her teeth. Some of its pages are dog-eared, their margins strewn with notes in graphite: This was one of Iver’s favorite books. Every now and then, she takes the pencil out of her mouth and underlines a phrase she likes or adds something to my brother’s comments. He probably wouldn’t mind this strange kind of dialogue, and yet it doesn’t feel very nice to see someone treat his books as though they no longer belong to anyone.

  Slumped in a rocking chair by the back wall, Chase is glowering at the photograph in his hands. It is of him and Aria, still teenagers, walking on a beach, their T-shirts and jeans and hair soaked despite the lack of rain; they’re both grinning.

  Chase notices me and sets the frame back on the dresser. “I’m sorry. I lost sight of you last night, and then some guys started bugging me with questions about why they could still sense my mood so clearly despite the fact that I’ve been ‘dead’ for years, and ghosts aren’t supposed to be able to sense other ghosts. . . . By the time I got away from them, you were already sleeping, according to India Skarsen, so I decided not to bother you. You okay?”

  “Nausea, memory loss,” I enumerate on my fingers, “self-loathing, dead brother dodging me. . . . This place is the best. You?”

  He shrugs, and his eyes flick to Aria for a moment. I recount the events of the party to him, omitting only a few. . .inconsequential details.

  “Well. . . .” replies Chase, after I repeat to him what India said about Kai. “Rumors of his paintings and what they can do have been reaching me too. . . . As for his causing the fire, I’m not surprised. I think everybody here would breathe more freely if he go
t lost.”

  Chase reclines in the chair, and I reflect on how we might be looking to any passing ghosts right now. I remember watching Chase walk straight through a wall when his eyes were trained on Levengleds while my attention was still on Immortown. Considering that in the ghost town, there is just an empty side street in place of this Levengleds house, somebody might start wondering how come Chase and I are hanging out in the air so comfortably. Ghosts can’t fly. (I used to think they could—I mean, I used to think they, first of all, didn’t exist, but if they did, they’d be able to do cooler things than just drink all the time without the joys of being hungover.)

  I wonder if it would feel as though I’m flying if I returned to Immortown right now—we should be several yards above the ground.

  “Chase, if I were to switch back to Immortown now—”

  “No! You’ll plummet to the ground!”

  Chase springs out of the chair, his elbow brushing against the dresser. The photograph totters resentfully, attracting Aria’s interest. With a contemplative “hmm,” she returns to reading.

  “Forgot to mention,” says Chase hastily, stealing another glance at Aria. “One morning, I woke up in my hotel room but, being still a bit stupid from sleep, didn’t immediately remember I wasn’t home. So I opened my eyes expecting to see Levengleds, and let me tell you, that was one effective pick-me-up. . . . My rump still hurts when it rains. Thank God my room is only on the second floor, and not on some fifth.”

  So much for timely warnings.

  “Anything else I should know in order to maintain my status as an illegal ‘alive’ a bit longer?”

  “Well. . . .” Even though I was only joking, Chase wrinkles his brow—so he did neglect to divulge some other survival tips. Great. “When switching from one town to the other, try not to get stuck in a wall. In theory, there won’t be enough time for you to suffocate provided you get back to the first town straight away, but you still won’t appreciate the feeling.”