Immortown

by Lily Markova

  “My sister was in a coma. I couldn’t bear to just sit around helplessly in the hospital. ‘We’re doing everything we can, but. . .’ India used to tell me that what I drew mattered. That I could change the world. Change anything I wanted.” Kai gives a bitter laugh. “And so I went home and I kept painting her, as if I were possessed. I painted her alive and well. Happy. I just didn’t know what else to do—there wasn’t anything else I could do. I mean, I had drawn this town for us once, and it was built so quickly it seemed inconceivable—supernatural, almost—so much so that I myself was beginning to believe that things I drew could come true. . . . But they didn’t. She died.”

  My demons are sitting side by side on the ground, enveloped in a purple haze. Iver throws pebbles into the pond, and they sink without making a ripple or splash. Mitch keeps dipping his hands in the cold water as if trying to relieve burns.

  “I was infuriated by how foolish I’d allowed myself to be,” says Kai almost softly, but I’m not deceived—this quiet self-hatred is more disturbing than any blatant raging could be. “I took everything I’d ever created—portraits of India and Krystle, my parents and friends; oceanscapes and Immer plans; and I piled them in a heap, poured some kerosene on it, lit a match, and let it drop. They were nothing, they meant nothing. They couldn’t change anything. When I looked out the window, I saw that the entire town was ablaze. I could hear fire devouring the house too, closing in on my room. I didn’t care. Subconsciously, I think, I was perhaps even glad: I wanted the world’s heart to stop beating along with hers. I thought only of India. I was just standing there and watching her face in one of the portraits burn, and then the ceiling collapsed on me. When I woke up. . .everything was as before. And India was there, next to my parents and Krystle, waiting for me to come to. Only my family knows the fire was my fault.”

  “Where are they now? Your parents?” I ask, pulling my scarf up to cover my nose for a moment against the perpetual smell of smoke that plagues Immortown.

  “Erased.” I think I heard Kai’s voice break, a dry little crack, but he goes on, immediately regaining his self-command. “One day, India and I were returning home from the bar only to have the house fade away right in front of our eyes. Our parents were inside. When the house reappeared, they weren’t.”

  “That is cruel,” I say barely audibly.

  “That was a long time ago. Tell me your story now.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  Little Iver turns and looks at me expectantly. That story I haven’t told anyone except our mother, right after everything happened. I guess it’s time to let it go. I guess I’ve been telling Kai my story for a while now, ever since I found myself in the world he had painted.

  My memories. My Guide to Quick and Affordable Going-Insane.

  “When we were kids, I used to listen to Dad’s old CDs for hours. He’d left before Iver was born,” I say, anticipating Kai’s question. “When I heard that one of his favorite bands was giving a concert in our town, I talked Iver into sneaking into the club. I was sure I’d meet Dad there. We were tiny and agile; nobody looked down at their feet, nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to us. . . . At some point, the pyrotechnics went haywire. Smoke was gushing from the stage and into the dance floor, and naturally, everyone freaked out. The jostling and the stampede were horrible; several people died. Iver was just. . .trampled down. I don’t know who got us out of there. . . . At that moment, I imagined it was Dad, of course. Iver survived. But because of the shock, he lost his voice and never spoke again.”

  And I never cried again. I just couldn’t. Only on set, when I wasn’t myself, could I manage to cry for one of my roles—but for myself, never. Even last year, on the twenty-ninth of November, I didn’t shed a tear. Nor did I on the thirtieth, when the reality and finality of what my brother had done began to truly dawn on me.

  The demon boy is eyeing me earnestly, his gaze too heartbreakingly mature for a nine-year-old, and I address him, not Kai, when I speak again. “If it hadn’t been for me and my stupid idea, that would never have happened. If only we could swap places. . . I am so sorry.”

  The child smiles, and the next moment he’s right before me, his arms wrapped as high as he can reach around my coat, his forehead resting against my stomach. I stroke his hair but don’t feel anything but the cool air beneath my fingers. Iver draws back and waves to me, and a gust of wind scatters the shadow of my brother over the pond. I want to cry, but I can’t.

  “Immortown healed him,” I hear Kai saying. “Iver can speak again.”

  Just not to me.

  “Then we grew up, and he killed himself,” I finish, straightening my shoulders. “Strangers buried him, and I buried myself, in my work. Grasped at every opportunity not to be myself. I think I’d never acted so well as I did after his death.”

  “Sometimes, to truly create, you have to have been truly destroyed. I can make it so that Iver comes to you, if that’s what you want. I’d only need to draw a little.”

  “No. I don’t want to make him. He can take all the time he needs to be ready. You know, the moment I knew he was really gone, if someone gave me a match big enough, I’d put it to the world and watch it burn to the ground, too.”

  I turn to face Kai at last and give him the same rueful smirk I’ve seen curl his own lips so many times. “I am just as sick as you are after all. I think I do understand you now, Kai.”

  “And that is all I’ve ever wanted from you.”

  My smirk twists into a slightly more wicked one. “What you did back in the Shelter—the worst make-out session of my life,” I sigh, and when he laughs, I know I’m not the only one in Monet park tonight whose chest feels strangely emptier, lighter.

  ***

  Chase, with his cheeks puffed out and an imprint of the cushion’s embroidered patterns gracing his face, is sitting on the sofa and sulkily watching Dude, who is laughing his head off without making any actual sound.

  “You’re okay,” I say, breathing out in relief, as I lock the front door behind me.

  “What happened to me?” he demands. “I remember being on my way back to the hotel, and I kind of passed out for no reason. . . .”

  He doesn’t remember, then. I was hoping he wouldn’t.

  “Kai borrowed your body to trick me into telling him whether we can escape the town or not.”

  Chase’s face contorts with part revulsion, part horror. “They can do that?”

  “Apparently. . . . We’re their first living guests, so I don’t think any ghost has had the chance to test-drive this ability before. It seemed to come as a surprise to Kai himself that his plan had worked—although, of course, a more pleasant surprise than it is to us. He says if you hadn’t been feeling so low, he probably wouldn’t have been able to take over you.” I don’t really want to remind Chase of the Aria situation that had weakened his immunity to sneaky ghosts, so I change the subject. “Kai also said that. . .”

  I explain to Chase how exactly Immer came to be burned down, omitting the India part—just the main point. He and I are in this together, so I guess we should share with each other any information that might help us find our way out of here, even if that means betraying Kai’s trust.

  “So they’re not ghosts really, more like after-images, characters locked inside Kai’s paintings. What if we burn them?” I suggest. “Not them, the paintings, I mean. What if Immortown stops existing once they’re destroyed?”

  “You can’t destroy anything in Immortown, remember?” says Chase, depriving me of hope again. “Besides, if the last time Kai tried to burn them, it turned out that bad, there’s no guarantee we won’t arrange an apocalypse. The ghosts won’t even notice, and I personally don’t feel like becoming grilled Chase. Geez, my face hurts like—” he complains, pressing his hand to his cheek, but before I can answer, someone knocks on the door. “Now, which of those bastards would still bother to knock?”

  “I’ll get it,” I say, secretly happy that, whoever the well-ma
nnered bastard might be, they just saved me some really awkward explaining.

  Following Krystle, the smell of burning drifts into the lobby—it hasn’t rained since morning.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” she says, bursting out laughing at the sight of our tense faces.

  Chase conceals his unease under a scowl. “How generous of you. What do you want from us, then?”

  “Oh, I only want you to start packing your things.” Krystle shifts her playful gaze from me to Chase and back to me. “It’s time to go home.”

  7.Falling Planes

  Freya

  Large drops of salty water shower over us every time yet another frenzied wave crashes against the pier. I spent the entirety of last night in the Drunk Dead—Krystle had insisted that an event as rare as returning home from what was supposed to be eternal damnation called for a celebration, so now I’m grateful to the icy torrents for the bracing lucidity they bring.

  I wish I could say our secret-farewell party went swimmingly, but Chase ditched me just an hour after it had started and probably passed the rest of the night moping in the rocking chair in Aria’s room. Meanwhile, I was, as is my habit, stupefied by the crowdedness and on the brink of blacking out, and so I ended up hiding in the corner behind India; she had procured a laptop and a pair of headphones from Levengleds and was enjoying a marathon of “my” movies. Every once in a while, she would look back and say something encouraging, like, “It’s so odd, seeing you laugh on-screen and knowing you’re already dead.” It was nice of Kai not to spread the word about what had transpired at Krystle’s. Krystle herself, by the way, was having all the fun in the world and seemed to be more excited about Chase’s and my impending departure than we ourselves were.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” I ask Chase.

  “Not sure. We’ve got to try—what do we have to lose?”

  I fancy I can hear bittersweet music over the roar of the elements. I have nothing to lose here indeed. Or do I? Could I really convince myself that there is nothing for me in Immortown, a town that reminded me that dying is inevitable and living, truly living, is imperative; a town where art matters and death doesn’t?

  “Why are you helping us, again?”

  Krystle is standing a little way ahead, at the very end of the pier, arms crossed over chest. Her long dark raincoat with a high collar fastened tightly around her neck billows and flaps in the wind.

  “For Iver,” she says simply. “Believe it or not, I care about him. He wants you to get back home. The truth is, when I first met you, I thought you were acting weird—”

  I was acting weird? I nearly choke on a suppressed retort. When I first met Krystle, she was in the business of sneaking up on people in a cemetery, making fun of their brothers’ suicides, and dropping bombs about dating the dead. But I resist the temptation to voice this to her—something tells me Krystle won’t be as lenient with effrontery as Kai was. Whatever her deal with Iver is, I doubt she will be hard-pressed to change her mind about tolerating my ongoing alive-ness.

  “—you seemed to be able to see his grave,” she continues. “Ghosts tend to remember how they died, even if they don’t want to accept it; you actually believed you were still in Levengleds. So I shared my suspicions with Iver, and we decided to wait until we were certain whether you were alive or dead. And then you saved Kai. . . .”

  When Krystle showed up in the Last Shelter, Chase and I met what she had to say with extreme skepticism. What she had to say was “Thanks to you, we now know that things that disappear aren’t just erased for a couple of hours from the portrait of Immortown. They penetrate into Levengleds.” But, due to our corporeal nature, Chase and I are too heavy for such objects to take us along, I told her. “What if the object is really big?” Krystle said. “So big that two people would be as good as weightless next to it?” Even the hotel can’t disappear while Chase and I are inside, I told her. “Think bigger,” Krystle said.

  The waves grow more and more furious; we have to hold on to the railings to prevent ourselves from being swept off our feet. The ocean. Oceans are pretty big.

  I can’t get rid of this anxiety fueled by the storm. Krystle, it seems, interprets my gloominess as an indication that I’m having misgivings.

  “It’ll work,” she says pressingly. “I often come here at night, to die. It’s one enchanting sight, the erasure of an entire ocean. Once, I saw the waves flicker to life again mere moments after they had disappeared. There was a man walking his dog on the beach; they were moving right along the water’s edge. The vision lasted less than a second, and the ocean went out again. But I could still sense them—they were in Levengleds, unaware that they had just taken a trip to a ghost town. At the time, I thought I had merely imagined them too vividly. . . . Listen. When the ocean painted by Kai is erased and merged with the real one, you have to be here. For now, we can only wait.”

  I still feel apprehensive. As if something is wrong, something’s missing.

  “He’s not coming, is he?” I say quietly.

  I know the answer—I just needed to say it aloud so I could finally and fully realize the torturous truth. I felt closer to Iver when we were separated by six feet of earth and by what seemed to be an unyielding boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. I am going to cross that boundary once more, and once more, he won’t give me a chance to say good-bye.

  “Iver is worried that if he shows himself to you, you might do something rash and stay here for him,” Krystle explains. “You have to understand: Even if you decide to stay, he won’t come. There’s no point in sticking around any longer.”

  We wait until sunset, but nothing happens. Krystle says it can take months before the ocean is erased again. When it happens, we will only have about five minutes.

  ***

  Shutting out Immortown dampness, I concentrate on the crumbly snowdrifts and light frost of Levengleds. Frozen maple leaves crunch underfoot as I wend my way between tombstones toward Iver’s grave.

  “I promised I wouldn’t come to you again,” I say with a humorless laugh, brushing the snow off his photograph.

  Last time, I craved to see him so badly that my subconscious switched my vision to Levengleds cemetery every time I looked Iver’s way, even though that autumnal sunrise belonged to a completely different world. If Krystle hadn’t noticed me then and realized I could see both towns, Iver probably wouldn’t be avoiding me now. . . .

  I lay the bouquet of red carnations I obtained from a Levengleds florist at my brother’s feet. On white, they look even more beautiful.

  “I’m not saying good-bye. I will keep you safe in my memory for as long as I live, and maybe longer, so that you won’t fade away.”

  For a while, I still hope that a melodic voice will call my name and I will turn around and see Iver, but no—it’s just me and the silence here. When I’m ready to leave, I notice a familiar word out of the corner of my eye. Spurred on by a twinge of intuition, I approach that monument and wipe away its snow hat.

  To dearest Terry Vox,

  whose ashes do not rest beneath this stone

  10/10/1963

  The young woman in the full-length portrait is wearing an impish smile. I make a beeline for the Last Shelter, my feet sinking so deep in the snow I nearly lose my boots a few times before finally remembering to tune back to Immortown. Chase is keeping watch at the pier now. He knows I went to the cemetery—I hope he won’t go looking for me and will leave for Levengleds alone if I don’t make it in time. I can wait for the next erasure of the ocean—it’s not like it’s going anywhere (not permanently, anyway). Testing my theory, on the other hand, brooks no delay.

  The hotel lobby is quiet and dim. Chase and I spend most of our time on the beach these days and haven’t checked on the Shelter in almost a week. I light the candles and look around. Across Dude’s favored mirror, scrawled in solidified red wax are the words “Come back?” The dusty velvet drapes are pulled back from one of the windows, and
a portion of space in front of it vibrates, bending the pale rays of daylight that seems reluctant to filter in as it is. Slowly, I draw closer. Dude expresses no intention of mutilating me this time.

  I try to recall the image of the girl from the monument in complete detail. A heavy mane of black hair, full lips, and almond-shaped dark eyes; tall—or at least such was my impression—and muscled. I exhale deeply, summoning my courage.

  “Terry?”

  The contours of a human figure grow sharper. A minute later, standing in front of me and looking out of the window is Terry Vox.

  “Thank you. How did you know?” she writes with her finger on the misted glass. I wish I could bring back her voice too.

  “I figured if no one has ever stayed in the Shelter, then there was nobody here on the day of the fire apart from the staff. I’d come across a badge with your name on it once, and when I saw your picture, I thought: ‘What if the receptionist was so responsible that she wouldn’t leave her workplace even in death?’ ”

  “Why did he leave? We had so much fun together.”

  “Who, Chase? We—we’re going back home. You do know we haven’t died yet. You heard everything.”

  Terry lowers her head and shuffles up the stairs. I guess she hangs around room 23 rather than 16 nowadays. My elation at prolonging, and likely improving the quality of, someone’s death ebbs away. Except for me (it’s only fair to disregard me here, considering my rather strained relationship with Dude), Chase is the only person Terry has had any meaningful interactions with over the past three years. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that trying to murder him might have been Dude’s idea of spending some quality time with someone who was perhaps the closest thing she’s had to family in half a century.