The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  “A very good place to wait,” he said.

  The gate closed behind them, the perimeter around the villa secure. “Wait for what?” Janie asked.

  “For your friends.”

  Then the realization burst on Janie like the giant white blossoms opening on the hibernating tree in the Physic Garden, when the apothecary forced it to bloom. She had been too focused on her fears about Benjamin to see the truth: Magnusson had shown her the map on purpose. She felt sick. She forced herself to ask, “What do you want my friends for?”

  Magnusson shrugged. “I collect talent.”

  “Talent?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s how a good business works. You recruit the best minds. I have a hunch your friends can do remarkable things, as you can.”

  “So I’m the bait,” Janie said, horrified. “In a trap.”

  “To put it crudely.”

  “They aren’t coming,” Janie said. She meant it as a bluff, but then realized it was true. If Benjamin was dead, then no one knew where she was. No one would come to her rescue.

  “Where is your confidence, Janie?” Magnusson asked. “Your friends are more resourceful than you think.” He put an arm around Sylvia. “Now, let’s get this wilting flower a cold drink.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Splintered

  Jin Lo and Marcus Burrows were up all night in Vinoray’s laboratory, grinding roots and measuring binding agents, trying to re-create Benjamin’s telepathic powder. The Pharmacopoeia was open to the pages about clairvoyance, but there were no instructions for what Benjamin had done. They read, they thought, they argued, they broke their own rules of safety and methodical experimentation. They mixed concoctions, drank them down, and struggled to access each other’s minds, but nothing worked.

  Jin Lo finally lay down on Benjamin’s unmade cot, exhausted from her journey to Manila and dizzy from drinking failed concoctions. As her head touched the pillow, she heard the tiniest crinkling sound. She reached carefully beneath the pillow, remembering the story about the princess and the pea, and came away with a small, square, glassine envelope with a little powder in it. She was too tired and too curious to get up and find a glass of water, so she put her finger into the envelope and put a few grains on her tongue.

  There was a moment of recognition, of feeling that she could taste every single thing that she and the apothecary had done wrong in the last twelve hours. She tasted their missteps and wrong turns. She was filled with admiration for Benjamin. It was like standing in front of a great work of art. That stubborn, willful, sometimes infuriating boy would do great things in his life. She closed her eyes to savor the great esteem and awe she felt.

  And then she was reeling. The world spun.

  She was in a room with a thatch ceiling and walls that heaved, as if they were breathing. A man in a loincloth and a faded red T-shirt stood nearby. He had the head of a sea eagle, and his long, curved beak was sharp and pointed at the end. He was saying something in a language Jin Lo didn’t understand, and he raised his arms in excitement and screeched an eagle’s screech. His arms became wings. Then his screech became a howl, and his head became the head of a wolf. He lowered his muzzle and smiled so Jin Lo could see his pointed teeth. He said, “Nice try, John Frum.”

  Then the wolf became a thin old woman with her belly spilled open. The wolf-woman tried to put her intestines back in as they slipped through her hands. It was like trying to stuff live snakes into a small bag.

  And then the old woman really was putting snakes in a bag. They writhed and coiled around her wrists, which were no longer an old woman’s wrists but a boy’s again. One snake opened its enormous jaws at Jin Lo and hissed, flicking a long, forked tongue. And still the room spun.

  Then the vision faded, and Jin Lo was back in the apartment in Manila, on Benjamin’s low cot. She sat up, swung her feet to the ground, and waited for the dizziness to fade.

  Marcus Burrows was frowning at a Bunsen burner, his anxious brow lit by the blue flame, waiting for something to boil.

  “I found him,” Jin Lo said.

  * * *

  An hour later, they were poring over a map of the south Pacific spread out across the table. They had made a list of what they knew about different types of kava and their degrees of hallucinogenic power. They had a theory that the old woman was the one Benjamin and his father had saved in Vietnam, and was being remembered by Benjamin in the hallucination. It was statistically unlikely that there were two. They made notes about the location of cargo cults that believed in John Frum. They put pins in the map as markers. Jin Lo flipped through a book, an anthropological study of the Pacific Islands, with illustrations of the different types of clothing worn.

  “In Espíritu Santo,” the apothecary said, “the American navy cleared airstrips through the coconut groves that were the people’s main source of survival. They mowed down the trees that fed the islanders. When there were fewer trees, the islanders’ desire for cargo became more urgent. We brought them scarcity, and little squawking boxes, and longing for material things. And now they wait for John Frum.”

  Jin Lo turned the page in her book, looking for the woven grass loincloth she had seen in Benjamin’s vision. She had gotten very comfortable being alone, with no one to speak to except the occasional cat. She wasn’t used to all this talk. But she had noticed that the muscle in the apothecary’s eye had stopped jumping now that they had a firm purpose again.

  “There are splinter groups, of course,” he said. “There are always splinter groups in any religion. People argue over doctrine.”

  Jin Lo turned another page and found a drawing of a man in a skirt or loincloth: a rectangular flap of woven grass in front, with a twist of cloth to secure it in the back. A necklace of red flowers hung around the man’s neck. “This one,” she said.

  He leaned over to look. “You’re certain?”

  Jin Lo looked at her friend’s mild, weary, lined face. Would she have said it, if she weren’t certain? Did he not understand her at all? But no, he was only being very thorough and methodical, as always. “Yes,” she said.

  “Very suitable for a hot climate,” he said, studying the loincloth.

  “You want one?” she asked.

  “I fear I don’t have the figure for it,” he said. He took a pin from the map, where they had last guessed Benjamin’s island might be, and he moved it to the island of that particular loincloth. As a skylark, Benjamin could easily have been carried there by the cyclone.

  “We go?” Jin Lo asked.

  “We go,” he said.

  CHAPTER 35

  A Dream

  Magnusson woke from a terrible dream in which an old woman tried to stuff snakes into a bag. He was breathing hard and sweating. He was a strong believer in the predictive power of dreams, the idea that the unconscious mind knew something about the future. But what did it mean, the woman struggling with the snakes? And had they been snakes? He couldn’t remember. He felt queasy, dry-throated and ill.

  He had been thinking about Marcus Burrows and his son before he fell asleep. They would come for the girl, of course. They would feel responsible.

  He had once seen two snakes fighting when he was a boy in Sweden. He had almost forgotten, but the dream had brought it back. They were huggorms, poisonous adders. But they didn’t bite each other, their best weapon off-limits as if by mutual consent. One was defending a female who lay coiled nearby and watched with passionless, baleful eyes. The two males reared up in the air and tried to push each other to the ground. Magnus had thought of his own wrestling bouts with his cousins and felt grateful that he had arms to wrestle with. The snakes pushed each other’s bodies and writhed and reared up while the female watched. Finally the intruder, exhausted, slunk away.

  But what did it augur, this dream of the woman with the snakes?

  There had been something else in it, he now remembered. A dark-skinned man in a loincloth, with the features of a South Sea Islander. But why wouldn’t he dream of
his own Malay miners?

  He shook his head to clear it of sleep. Perhaps the vision he had seen was not a dream. It had a peculiar lucid reality to it, in spite of the hallucinatory strangeness. He knew the children had a way of communicating. Perhaps he had found the channel through which they contacted each other. But why would he be allowed access? Was it only because he was close, because Janie was sleeping in a nearby bedroom?

  He struggled with the question, trying to make sense of it.

  PART FIVE

  Precipitation

  1. (chemistry) the condensation of a solid from a solution during a chemical reaction

  2. (meteorology) rain, snow, sleet, or hail that falls to the ground

  3. the action of falling or being thrown down headlong

  4. the fact or quality of acting suddenly and rashly

  CHAPTER 36

  John Frum,

  He Must Come

  Benjamin found himself alone on a mat in a darkened hut. He didn’t know how much time had passed. Hours? Days? Weeks? He felt weak, but he pushed himself to sitting and tried to stand. The room started to wobble, and he sat back down. The sour taste and the soreness in the back of his throat suggested that he had vomited, but when? He waited for the room to stop moving, then stood very slowly. His legs felt atrophied, and could barely support him. He looked down to see if they had shrunk. Dropping his head made the world spin as if his skull were a snow globe, his brain rotating freely inside. But his legs looked the same as they always did. He was wearing his khaki shorts and the shirt he had arrived in, filthy with dirt and kava and other things he didn’t want to think about.

  He had to get out of here.

  He had come to a decision.

  He took two shuffling steps toward the door, then two more. Before he reached it, the door flew open, blinding him with bright sunlight. He jerked up his hand to protect his eyes and nearly fell over.

  “John Frum!” cried the prophet in the faded Coca-Cola T-shirt, Benjamin’s irrepressible discoverer and poisoner. “You sleep good!”

  Benjamin cleared his throat. The way was clear. If he were John Frum, and acted like John Frum, then he might have some authority. He would be a god. He could get people to do what he wanted, and then they would stop seizing and drugging him and putting him in dark huts to hallucinate. He had to claim his rights, his destiny. Do the next thing. Be John Frum. He stepped outside and lifted his head painfully.

  “I am John Frum,” he said.

  The man cried out with joy. “John Frum!”

  “I am come,” Benjamin said.

  “He is come!”

  “I will bring cargo.”

  “Cargo!” the man shouted.

  “I have to throw up,” Benjamin said, and he leaned into some nearby bushes. He wondered what the plants were, as he fed them the contents of his stomach. His father would know. They might be useful. He apologized silently to the plants, wiped his mouth, and straightened.

  “Water,” he said hoarsely to the man.

  “Water, John Frum!” the man answered, and ran off into the trees.

  Benjamin, left alone, stretched his legs, then shook them out one at a time. He wanted to touch his toes but didn’t trust that he would be able to stand up straight again. He did a little dance from one leg to the other. He held a tree for support and rotated each ankle. When he looked up, the prophet was back, holding a coconut shell. Benjamin reached for the shell and drank, feeling the water cool the back of his parched and burning throat.

  The prophet watched with approval, then shifted from one leg to the other, rotating each ankle. He was imitating Benjamin’s improvised stretching routine.

  “What’s your name?” Benjamin asked him.

  “Toby Prophet,” the man said.

  At first Benjamin heard “Toby Profit,” but then his mind got itself round the name as it must be intended. “Is that your real name?”

  The man said a name so long that it would be impossible for Benjamin to say or remember.

  Benjamin laughed, which made his ribs hurt. “Okay, Toby. Can I have some coconut meat?” he asked, pointing to the shell, and to a tree. “Fresh coconut?”

  Toby Prophet disappeared through the trees and brought back a coconut. With a long curved knife, like a smallish machete, he stripped off the fibrous outer shell and chopped off the top. Benjamin thought of the delicate Malay dagger he’d seen on the cigar-smoking man’s desk, and wondered where Janie was now.

  “Drink,” Toby said.

  Benjamin drank the sweet coconut water. It wasn’t cold, but it was delicious. When the liquid was gone, Toby cut the shell in half with his sharp knife. He scraped out a strip of white coconut meat in demonstration, then handed the shell and the knife back to Benjamin.

  Benjamin sat on the ground and tried it himself, awkwardly, unused to the curved blade, trying not to slice his thumb off. The coconut meat was soft and sweet, and he chewed happily. He was keeping food down, and they had trusted him with a knife. Things were looking up. He was going to get out of here. He just had to think clearly, and be godlike.

  “Where are the boats?” he asked. He hadn’t seen one on the island.

  Toby Prophet looked blank.

  “Boat,” Benjamin said, and he mimed himself paddling a canoe, with the knife as a paddle. Then he held the coconut shell in his hand like a boat bobbing on the ocean.

  “Far away,” Toby said.

  “Why far?” Benjamin asked. “You need to fish.”

  “Woman in boat is tabu,” Toby said.

  “Okay,” Benjamin said, not understanding.

  After a long explanation using Benjamin’s coconut shell and some of his own language, Toby Prophet made it clear that women couldn’t be in the same piece of water that a boat was in. It was part of their religion, a sacred prohibition, a tabu. But women needed to be in the water daily, for cleaning things, and therefore the boats had to be kept far from the place where women lived.

  “Ah,” Benjamin said. “Can I see one?”

  “Woman?” Toby asked, with what seemed to Benjamin like false innocence.

  “Boat,” Benjamin said.

  The man narrowed his eyes. “No boat.”

  “For cargo,” Benjamin said.

  “Cargo come,” the man said.

  “Of course it will,” Benjamin said. “I just might need a way to—go get it.”

  But Toby Prophet was having none of this. His face shut down in suspicion: no more joyful smiles for Benjamin. “No boat, John Frum,” he said.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Benjamin grew stronger. He could turn his head without the world spinning, and his legs no longer felt like they might fold beneath him like a newborn colt’s. He saw versions of his little leg-stretching dance everywhere he went. Men were trying it out, practicing, criticizing each other’s technique.

  Benjamin refused all offers of kava, and no one forced it on him. But he liked the two boys who made it, with their chewing and spitting. They looked no older than eight or nine, and they were sly and mischievous, not set in their ways. They were called Tessel and Salvation. They hadn’t been alive during the war, when the navy brought jeeps and radios and Coca-Cola, so they didn’t talk about cargo. Benjamin wasn’t sure they even believed that he was John Frum. They ran free in the wonderland of their island, shinnying up trees for coconuts and swimming in blue water. What use did they have for squawking boxes?

  The boys’ ability to climb the coconut trees was so impressive that it seemed superhuman. Benjamin tried to climb one, and earned himself laughter for his un-godlike failure to get even a few feet off the ground. Both Tessel and Salvation could reach the top in a few seconds, like squirrels, and shinny down with a fat coconut tucked beneath one skinny elbow. They loved to be praised for their skill, and Benjamin’s praise was real. They reminded him of Pip, in their agility. Pip could probably have climbed those trees.

  The boys also spoke English better than any of the others. Missionaries
and sailors had brought English to the islands long ago, and the boys’ brains were like sponges. Benjamin found the two of them alone, drawing pictures in the sand. Tessel was an inch taller and the acknowledged leader.

  “Tessel,” Benjamin said casually. “You’re a good swimmer.”

  “Very good,” Tessel agreed.

  “Are you good at paddling a boat?”

  “Very good.”

  “Do you like to go out in a boat?”

  Tessel eyed him warily. “Yes.”

  “Do you fish?” Benjamin asked, trying to deflect the boy’s suspicion.

  Salvation, still drawing in the sand, chanted, “No boat for John Frum.” He sang it very quietly, as if reminding himself—and Tessel—of something they’d been told.

  “Well, I understand that,” Benjamin said, musing, looking out at the water. “But where are the boats hidden? I never see them. I mean, we have some nice boats where I come from. Sailboats, motorboats, canoes. I just wonder if yours are as nice.”

  “Very nice,” Tessel said proudly, indignantly.

  “Can’t be as nice as ours.”

  “Yes. As nice.”

  “I’m not sure,” Benjamin said. “I just want to see them. See if they’re nice.”

  Tessel and Salvation looked at each other, some wordless communication passing between them. Tessel craned his skinny neck to see if anyone was watching.

  “No boat for John Frum,” Salvation repeated warningly.

  But Tessel seemed less sure.

  CHAPTER 37

  Funny Business

  Pip and Opal had been holed up in the Copley Square Hotel for two days, waiting for her grandfather to summon them. They ordered eggs Benedict and lemon meringue pie and root beer floats from room service. They read magazines, and Pip taught Opal the principles of blackjack. She was good at it.

  “This is math, you know,” he said.

  “I’m terrible at math,” she said.