Immortown

by Lily Markova

  Marvelous. The sheer variety of embarrassing and painful ways in which I could have inadvertently killed myself in the past five days is marvelous. Has it really been only five days, though? It feels as if I had been here much longer—I’m almost used to Immortown and its morbid madness by now. And the life before—the acting, the mourning, the fire—already it all seems like a half-forgotten dream. Not a good dream at that. I do still want to escape, of course. . . . But going back. . . How do I escape from what awaits me back home?

  Here, I have Chase’s grumpy company, someone who doesn’t know who I am and what I’ve been through and just lets me be whoever I say I am; here, I have the vague chance to see Iver again, to look in his eyes and forgive him, to let him go; I have more compelling distractions than I could dream of (even if they tend to come in the form of someone attempting to murder me), and for the first time in God knows how long, I have a sense of purpose again. In a way, Immortown feels more like home—yes, a terrible, bitter, broken, long home—than home has felt after Iver.

  Overcome with a weird nostalgia for something I haven’t yet lost, I think back to the moment when I first knew I was here. Confident that I was on my way back to the gas station on the outskirts of Levengleds, I saw those blackened gates. . . . But that—

  I frown. That doesn’t add up. Again, I play the memory slowly: I was returning—or at least so I thought—to my car after visiting Iver’s grave, where. . .where I’d met Krystle. If at that time, I was still in Levengleds, then how is it possible that I saw her, a ghost?

  Oh my God.

  “Chase! We are tuned to the living world now and have no idea what is happening below our feet in Immortown, right? But on my very first day in Levengleds, I was in the cemetery and I spoke to Krystle, and I remember being a bit puzzled by the sudden lack of snow around. I think even then, I was already in Immortown—it was still fall in the grove, whereas in Levengleds, it had been snowing for days. . . .” My heartbeat slows down a little as the excitement of being about to solve a complex riddle gives way to confusion once more. “But how could I be seeing Iver’s grave? I was in Immortown—his grave obviously couldn’t be.”

  Chase squints intently into the middle distance as he processes this and says, after a pause, “Immortown doesn’t have a cemetery because Immer didn’t have one—as far as I know, the town’s chronicle was so short people hadn’t had enough time to start dying there, and after the holocaust, there was nothing left to bury. Now, Levengleds cemetery spread later around the memorials that the families of those lost to the fire had built on the site. So if you were tuned to Immortown—and you had to be, since you were talking to Krystle—you weren’t supposed to see the cemetery at all. I can only presume that you saw it just because you knew it should be there, so every time you looked at your brother’s tombstone, your vision automatically focused on it. My eyes didn’t adjust in a day either. At first, Levengleds and Immortown were kind of interlaced, kept blending into one.”

  Levengleds and Immortown interlaced. . . .

  “It was getting dark when I reached Levengleds, so I decided to stay in a hotel. . . .” I run my fingers along the spines of Iver’s books and then whip around so abruptly that the soles of my boots squeak on the laminate, disquieting Aria once more. “Chase, I spent that night—my first night in Levengleds—in the Last Shelter.”

  “Hold on a sec. Are you saying you’d been to the Shelter even before we met? When was that?”

  “Well, the night before I met you and. . .Dude, I slept at the Skarsens’—don’t look at me like that—so that would be. . .two days before. Yes, I first stayed at the Last Shelter two days before you and I met.”

  Chase frowns, straining to remember something. “Dude and I had a fight that night,” he says, uncertainly. “And he popped outside, taking care to snatch my backpack on the way out. As soon as I ran out, too, the hotel vanished so fast, as if it had been bursting to do that for hours, waiting for me to finally leave. It didn’t reappear until almost dawn. I was so exhausted by then I could have fallen asleep standing up.”

  But that means. . . I sway as a feeling of utter hopelessness floods me.

  “It stood right beside the gas station,” I say, my heart plunging. “The Last Shelter didn’t vanish—it just popped out too, to haunt Levengleds. When it returned to Immortown, I must have been still sleeping inside. . .”

  “. . .and Dude and I didn’t notice you because we were so tired and went to our rooms without re-lighting the candles. . .”

  “. . .and toward morning, I heard you two scuffling upstairs, and set off for the cemetery before dawn. I’d slept so poorly I could easily fail to register any change in the scenery, like the fact that the gas station and snow were gone.”

  A shadow crosses Chase’s face. “Three years ago,” he says darkly, “I found a book on the floor by my bed. It was called Quantum Tunneling so clearly had no business being anywhere near my room. I thought Aria must have left it there, and I was flicking through the pages last thing at night—that’s how I fell asleep: holding the book in my hand. Was still holding it when I woke up in Monet, an Immortown park. I didn’t give much thought to the book then—I was more worried about my likely being a sleepwalker. It all fits together now. If you look at where my house is in Levengleds, in Immortown, it would be right by the pond in that park.”

  “. . .where the ghostly Tom Lezero likes to read ghostly books.”

  Chase nods, squeezing his eyes shut. “How have I never realized this before? It seems so obvious now. You know, there was this one time, back in Levengleds—I went to the pub that I visited, like, every weekend since I turned sixteen or so—really lax ID-checking policy—but there was a library instead.”

  “And that didn’t bother you?” If one of Immortown towers sprang out of nowhere where my favorite bar should be, I’d probably have a few questions for the librarian.

  “If you’d lived in Levengleds longer than a month, you’d know it’s not exactly a town where people still get amazed at anything. I figured I’d just lost it like the rest of them.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I didn’t feel like reading, did I? I went to another pub.”

  I remember how shifty Levengleds seemed to me when Iver and I kept getting lost in the mazes of its side streets; how we could never seem to find some of the architectural oddities we liked twice; and how when I explored Immortown for the first time, I had the uneasy impression that quite a few of its buildings were inexplicably familiar to me.

  Before I can agree with Chase on this point out loud, our conversation is interrupted by the cheery theme tune of a sci-fi TV show: Aria’s phone is ringing. Chase puts his finger to his lips.

  “Hey, Yannis,” Aria says just as cheerily, one eye still on the book, but her expression soon changes. “Oh. Oh. Hang on a minute, I, um—I’ll try to get a better signal.”

  Instead, Aria opens her laptop and starts dashing off chat messages. Chase and I exchange looks full of moral qualms, calculations, then compromise, and promptly sidle closer to her.

  “SOS! Yannis is asking me out on a date. Like a DATE-date. Sarah, what do I do? I thought he only saw me as a friend. I’m freaking out here. Don’t want to hurt him.”

  “What’s the problem? You guys seem to have so much fun together. Don’t you like him that way at all?”

  “I don’t know. I just can’t.”

  “Oh come on. It’s been three years. Girl, you gotta move on. You deserve to get a life already.”

  After a minute of drumming her fingers anxiously on the desk, Aria types back, “I guess you’re right. Thanks. Love you!” She takes a deep breath and reaches for her phone again.

  “Sorry. . . . What were you saying? Yes, I think that would be nice. . . . Great, tomorrow at eight, then. The Molko? No, no, you know I love the place.” Aria throws her head back and laughs, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. “Yes. See you tomorrow. Bye!”

  She gets up, moves
over to the dresser, picks up the photograph, and a sad smile lights up her eyes as they linger on the face of the boy in it.

  “Wherever you are, I hope you’re happy.” With that, Aria slides the picture into the top drawer and locks it.

  “Chase—” I say, placing my hand on his shoulder.

  “Doesn’t matter anymore,” he says, turning away. “What matters is that if we were transported here by the ghosts of a building and a book when they returned to Immortown from their spooking-business trip to the living world—”

  To go back the same way we came here, we would have to be taken to Levengleds by an erased object.

  “—then we can’t get back. It’s impossible,” I finish the sentence for him.

  We both start at the ring of the doorbell, a trilling, tentative sound. Aria gives a jump too, twists her hair hurriedly into a knot, and wraps her bathrobe tighter around her. We follow her into the foyer. She opens the apartment door, which reveals a gaunt middle-aged woman with cropped dark hair touched with gray.

  “I am terribly sorry to bother you. . . . I’m looking for a young woman”—both her voice and her hands tremble a little as she hands Aria a newspaper clipping—“whose past is connected with this apartment, which is why I was hoping. . .she might have come by?”

  “I rented this place about half a year ago,” Aria says, a few seconds later, returning the article. “You’re the first stranger to knock on my door. I’ve never seen her. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, I should be the one apologizing. Forgive me for this intrusion.” The woman seems about to leave, but then she looks over her shoulder and says quickly, “May I take a look at the piano?”

  Aria’s cheeks flush. “I’m afraid there’s nothing left of it. I, uh. . .kind of accidentally set fire to the curtains, and while I was waiting for the fire department, half the room burned down. Sorry.”

  The woman nods, blinking rapidly, as if against blinding sunlight. “Thank you. Have a good day.” She takes one last look around the foyer, and Aria locks the door.

  “Okay, weird,” says Chase. “Wonder what that was.”

  I doubt he expects an answer, but still, staring in horror at the closed door, I reply, “Mom. That was my mom.”

  6.The Antirchitect

  Kai

  When India was just a three-year-old and the most unaffected and charming creature I knew—I was only five, so I hadn’t met too many different creatures—she would often ask me to read her a bedtime story. Her favorite was the fairy tale of the Snow Queen, most of which she did not understand, yet attentively listened to, trusting that the boy with a heart of ice was I.

  I myself liked to imagine that I was the Kai, the Snow Queen’s prisoner boy, and the thought that a splinter of Andersen’s accursed mirror distorting all things in existence might have gotten into my eyes, too, was intriguing—and frightening.

  It took me forever to fall asleep at night, my restless mind obsessed with the idea of creating a mirror that would fix everything, that would reflect neither good nor evil but the true essence of things so that one could look into it and see who they really were.

  I grew up, never having created anything worthy, and the little I’d managed to achieve I demolished with my own hands. India now kills herself in front of my eyes just to taunt me, or else asks venomously to borrow my heart when she runs out of ice cubes for her whiskey. Dozens of demons whirl around me day and night, but I prefer to pretend I don’t notice them. I don’t want to wallow in guilt. That won’t change a thing.

  The Snow Queen is standing by the window in her drawing room, employing all the affectedness she has in her to read aloud from yesterday’s newspaper—it takes a night for any news to reach us. I’m waiting patiently for her to finish, spinning in a swivel chair so that her face, the piano, the turquoise walls turn into a circle dance of patchwork.

  “. . .Freya Aurore’s footprints disappear in the town of Levengleds, where her car was finally located. Police say the search for witnesses able to confirm that the actress herself was seen in the town has been unsuccessful, and according to the information provided by her bank in order to air the investigation, Miss Aurore hasn’t used any of her credit cards in over a week. A theory involving auto theft is being considered.

  “Let us remind you that the cause of the fire in which Mitch Aské was injured is yet to be determined. The actor is still in a coma. Miss Aurore senior refrains from making any public comments, but one of the film crew members reports that on the night of the tragedy, Aurore and Aské stayed in the lighthouse to rehearse the final scenes of Moth Madness. There is no sufficient evidence of Freya Aurore’s death, so the hope that we will hear from her again is still alive.”

  Krystle curls her lips and tosses the newspaper into the fireplace, thus subjecting the pages to an endless cycle of shrinking into a smoldering ashen rose and immediate revival.

  “Sure, alive. . . .” Krystle’s smirk sharpens. “Freya, Freya, Freya. . . . Everyone is just obsessed with this Freya. Tell me, Kai: What is it that makes her so special?”

  I plant my feet on the carpet, and the spinning procession of color splashes assumes its old, familiar shapes. It never ceases to perplex me how, for all her beauty, Krystle is so unsure of herself. Always compares herself with others. Always seeks proof that she is second to none.

  “Krystle, where’s Iver? I know he wasn’t erased. I saw him outside my house.”

  She snorts bitterly, her eyes half closed. “Right. And here I thought. . . Wondered why you’d decided to come by. Ignored me for years. . . . Humph. Thought maybe you—you wanted to check on me for once. But of course not. You’re here for Freya’s sake.”

  “Krystle,” I say warningly.

  She looks away, her voice exasperated as she replies, “He doesn’t want to see her, Kai.”

  “Did he care to explain why?” This is just silly. They will run into each other sooner or later—unless one of them gets erased—so what’s the point in delaying?

  “What do you want with him?”

  “His sister, who happens to have been mourning him for a year, died. She could do with some family support.”

  “Since when do you care about family?” Krystle raises an eyebrow, flashing me a withering glance.

  “I’ve always put family above anything else.”

  She grimaces, comes over, and lowers herself before me, as though waiting for me to dub her a knight. “Shhh, you don’t want your paintings to hear that. I always thought nothing was more important to you than your attempts to create something grand. You killed us, Kai,” she says, grasping my hands and peering into my eyes, as if I were a child struggling to comprehend why I couldn’t kill people if I really wanted to. “Your entire family.”

  “You are not,” I say firmly, “my family.”

  “I was supposed to become a part of it.” Looking up at me, she somehow loses her impenetrable mocking mask. “You invited me to Immer, remember? You introduced me to your parents and sister.”

  I twist my wrists out of her grip, and my fingers instinctively reach for the ring, trying to turn it, which doesn’t escape Krystle’s notice. She raises her left hand to her face, the twin of my ring on the fourth finger glinting with reflected firelight. She had these identical rings bearing the first letter of our names made for us when we were still alive. I accepted the gift out of politeness, inwardly damning her for such fits of sentimentality and intending to “lose” it first chance I got, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it since.

  “Aww, look who’s come to visit.” Reluctantly, Krystle gets up and walks out of the room to answer the front door.

  I can sense her too, and sinking lower in my chair so that I can’t be seen from behind it, I strain my ears to hear the two of them talking in the hall.

  “Remy told me where to find you.” Freya’s voice is raspy, as if she had a cold. “I know Iver’s in town. I need to tell him something very, very important.”

  “Ive
r and I aren’t seeing each other anymore,” Krystle says flatly.

  “Well, then, the next time you don’t see each other, tell him our mother’s in Levengleds.”

  Distracted by a tingling sensation in my knuckles, I shift my gaze to my right hand. So this is happening at last. I should have found a way to remove it, should have sawn it in half many years ago. Freya’s and Krystle’s sparring voices seem to be drifting farther and farther away, while I stare at the pulsing, flickering ring, powerless. I’m not trying to free myself—not enough time for that. How dumb is this? After so much time, forgetting prudence. . . . Dumb.

  My poor India. . . . Will she ever forgive herself for the last words she said to me? I hope Remy will take good care of her; calling him here was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made—she wouldn’t manage on her own. Everyone will be better off without you, Kai. Maybe she’s right. Maybe, Immortown will crumble away once I’m gone. What will become of the rest of the ghosts? Will they be drawn off into non-being, or will they break through into Levengleds?

  Krystle returns from the hall and shrieks, and soon Freya rushes in too, to see what’s happened. Krystle thrashes around the room in complete confusion, wrenching open drawers and cupboard doors, desperate to find something that could save me. She knows full well there’s nothing she can do. Why bother with all the turmoil? Meanwhile, Freya stands frozen several steps away from me. I wouldn’t mind catching at least a glimpse of fright or regret on her face at my imminent final exit, but she seems merely preoccupied with her thoughts.

  I’m flashing on and off now, like a lightbulb acting up. My hands flicker and grow translucent. Hmm, this is curious. My sense of touch is weakening—I can’t feel the coarse texture of the armrests anymore. Freya’s face is more elusive than ever, growing blurrier and more distant by the second, and I’m trying to get enough of looking at it for the last time.

  Too bad I won’t get to witness Krystle’s fury when the ring returns without me, all that will be left of me—her gift, her hopes of owning me; my broken promise, my undoing. I guess I’ll have to content myself with knowing that in a moment or two, I will learn what happens to those who are erased, what happened to my parents, who were the first ghosts to be dragged away into the void. I feel myself being absorbed by obscurity, zooming out of the drawing room, as if my chair were endlessly rolling back. A hand reaches through the disintegrating reality and encircles mine. As though I had slipped off the edge of a cliff, it’s pulling me back to safety.