by Dean Koontz
During a twenty-minute break between two fifty-minute practice sessions, the young musicians always socialized. Naomi was usually a fiend for socializing. She could spin through a chattering crowd with all the energy of—but with far more refined social graces than—a whirling dervish. On this occasion, however, she was subdued, as distracted by her Melody dilemma as she was when participating in the orchestra rehearsal.
At the end of the second session, after she packed up her flute, as Naomi made her way up the inclined center aisle of the auditorium, toward the lobby, Melody was suddenly walking at her side. No wind. No oak. Only Melody.
Surprised, Naomi said, “How did you just happen?”
“Please, m’lady, let’s keep moving,” Melody said. “I can see Walter right now, with remote viewing. He had no choice but to park at the hateful red curb. You don’t want him to be ticketed.”
“Remote viewing?”
“I can’t turn a pumpkin into a horse-drawn coach.”
That statement didn’t halt Naomi, although she gaped at Melody, speechless, as they continued along the aisle.
Speaking softly that others nearby might not hear, Melody said, “I can’t transform a chameleon into a tiny human being, either, but then, m’lady, please remember that I never claimed to be a sorceress or a white witch.”
Her mind racing back through the conversation in the guest room, twelve days previously, Naomi supposed this might be true.
Melody continued, “I only said that you are the one and true heir to a kingdom of bright magic. In your kingdom, you will regain magical abilities. But I am not of royal blood. Those of my humble station in the kingdom have only certain psychic abilities, such as remote viewing, some clairvoyance, and a little psychokinesis, which is the ability to move small objects—like your book—with the power of the mind.”
At the head of the aisle, Melody stepped out of the way of the departing musicians, into the pathway behind the last row of seats.
As Naomi joined her, the woman raised a handsome compact piece of luggage that she had been carrying at her side. “I am herewith consigning this attaché case into your care, m’lady.”
Anyone else would have called it a briefcase, and the use of the elegant word attaché—not to mention herewith—gave Naomi a little shiver of pleasure, renewing her sense that a fabulous adventure must be approaching.
As Naomi accepted the attaché case, Melody said, “It contains items of a most magical nature that you will need on the glorious night we travel. You must guard them until then and allow no one to see them.”
“May I look in the case?”
“Later at home, yes. Not now. However, you must not unscrew the lid from the reliquary—that is the jar. The precious items in the jar must never come into contact with air until the moment they are needed. Otherwise, all will be lost.”
“You can trust me to be responsible with it,” Naomi said softly.
“You must swear to keep this secret, m’lady.”
“I do. I swear.”
“The lives of multitudes depend on your discretion.”
“Yes. Multitudes. I swear.”
“Finally, m’lady, you must put aside doubt. I’m not offended to be doubted. But when the time comes to make the great journey, you must have full confidence in me. One who doubts will not be able to fly between the worlds. One who doubts will not be able to return to her throne. If you doubt, you will be lost, you and your family, too, and all the people of your kingdom—all will be lost.”
Worriedly, Naomi said, “It seems all can be lost so easily.”
“So easily, m’lady. So very easily. Your doubt could kill us all. Find the courage to believe. Now go quickly before your coachman endures the indignity of a citation from some gendarme.”
Coachman, indignity, citation, and gendarme gave Naomi shivers just as attaché had done. Of all the fabulous qualities that set magical beings apart from ordinary humanity, their vocabulary and unusual phrasing were almost as thrilling to Naomi as their special powers.
“One question,” Naomi said. “When do we fly between the worlds?”
“All I dare say is soon, m’lady.”
And then Melody did a most disconcerting thing. Their heads were close because they were speaking conspiratorially. A strange look came into the woman’s eyes, and she kissed Naomi on the lips.
The kiss was light, not a massive lip-mashing experience, but instead like the brush of a butterfly. It wasn’t merely a kiss, but also something else for which Naomi had no name. Having just inhaled before being startled by this intimacy, Naomi exhaled in surprise—and felt Melody suck in her exhalation, seemingly with intent, like a hummingbird sipping the nectar from a flower.
Melody’s stare compelled Naomi to meet it, to sink into those molasses-brown eyes as if into dark waters. Just when it seemed that something shocking and even terrible might happen, the woman said, “My sweet lady, go quickly now. The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours. Quickly, go!”
Naomi hurried out of the auditorium and across the lobby, where only a few young musicians lingered.
Opening one of the outer lobby doors, Naomi glanced back, but Melody apparently remained in the auditorium.
At the red curb, Walter Nash waited with Mother’s SUV. Naomi often rode in the front passenger seat, to chat with Mr. Nash, but this time she climbed in back because she didn’t want to talk. She desperately needed silence and privacy to consider and reconsider what had just transpired.
The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours.
Naomi had no idea what those words meant, but it seemed as if they must mean everything. It was a perfectly fabulous thing to have said to you by someone, especially by someone mysterious who could fly between worlds.
The kiss had been bizarre, even freaky, and the look in Melody’s eyes had been so intense you half expected it might set your face on fire. But in retrospect Naomi realized that she couldn’t interpret the meaning of the kiss-and-sip or of the stare by the standards of this world. Melody came from another world altogether, from a place of psychic and magical powers. The culture of that world must be as different from this one as this one was different from the culture of a tribe of red-haired dwarf cannibals in a remote South American jungle, supposing there were any red-haired dwarf cannibals. Over in Melody’s world, a lady-in-waiting might pay her deepest respect to her princess by just such a kiss-and-sip as Naomi had received.
The ride home seemed as slow as if they had been dragged in a sledge over dry ground by half-dead horses.
Once there, carrying her flute case and her small purse and the magnificent attaché, Naomi flew from the SUV, raced up the back stairs to the second floor, and hurried along the hall toward her room. At her door, she realized she might burst in upon Minnie, and if old Mouse was indeed there, she would be curious about the attaché case and its contents.
Naomi took a detour to the guest room, where she put her purse and flute on the carpet. She quietly closed and locked the door. She placed the attaché on one end of the deep window seat and knelt on the floor in front of it.
The case appeared to be covered in some kind of snake skin or maybe alligator. Of course it might have been crafted not in this world but in the world of her kingdom, where a dragon might have provided the hide.
Even though she was now several days closer to twelve than to eleven, and even though she was precocious, Naomi found herself for once in a situation where her galloping imagination seemed tethered, pawing at the ground with its hooves, stirring up nothing but dust. She had no slightest idea what “items of a most magical nature” might be in the attaché case, and she couldn’t fantasize anything.
She popped the latches. Opened the case. Within rested a four-inch-deep white box that filled most of the attaché, cushioned all around with crumpled tissue paper.
Handling the box as if it contained a treasure both sacred and of immeasurable value
, she lifted it out and set it beside the case. Four pieces of Scotch tape fixed the lid in place. She slit them one at a time with a fingernail and opened the box.
Within were ten coins in a small Ziploc bag. Quarters. They had been painted black.
Nestled in soft cushioning paper stood a little glass jar that might once have contained olives. It currently held five dry, round, brown discs only slightly larger than—and approximately twice as thick as—the black quarters. They rested on a bed of cotton balls.
She had been sternly warned not to open the jar. The contents must not come into contact with air until the very moment they were needed.
Otherwise, all will be lost.
In a second Ziploc bag were a tube of epoxy, a ball of string, and a pair of scissors. These things looked suspiciously ordinary. Naomi wondered if they might have been included by mistake, although Melody didn’t seem like a person who would accidentally include such things instead of, say, a wizard’s monocle that revealed the future.
The final items were the most interesting and quite mysterious. Cushioned in nests of tissue paper were five chicken eggs. Each bore a name printed with a red felt-tip pen: JOHN, NICOLETTE, ZACHARY, NAOMI, MINETTE.
Picking up the egg bearing her name, Naomi discovered that it was light, empty. Each end featured a small hole. The yolk and white had been drained from the shell.
When she turned the egg, a whispery sound arose within. Holding it to her ear, she listened intently, but she couldn’t identify the contents, though it sounded rather like a loose scrap of paper—or maybe a dead insect with brittle wings.
To what purpose these objects might be put and what spectacular effects they might create, Naomi couldn’t guess. But they were for sure magical. It seemed to her that at any moment they would begin to crackle and glow with eldritch energy. Eldritch meant eerie, weird, and spooky all in one. It had been her favorite new word back when she was about to turn eleven and leave the unspeakable awkwardness of ten behind her forever. She hadn’t used it in a while, but it seemed the perfect word now.
Reluctantly, she returned the items to the box, exactly as she had found them. She put the box in the attaché case, which she closed and latched.
Melody had explicitly warned that these magical items must be hidden away until the night that she would lead the Calvino family to a new world. Naomi considered a dozen places to conceal the attaché in the guest room, but none of them seemed safe enough.
Even when the room wasn’t in use, Mr. and Mrs. Nash cleaned it once a week. They were so thorough that if they had served some Egyptian pharaoh, his mummy would be in perfect condition three thousand years later. They would find the case.
Finally, in the walk-in closet, Naomi climbed a stepstool and placed the precious item of luggage flat on a high shelf. She buried it under spare blankets that were wrapped in plastic to prevent dust from collecting on them when they weren’t in use.
No one was scheduled to visit in the near future. Mr. and Mrs. Nash wouldn’t disturb the blankets until they needed them for an overnight guest.
Near the door to the second-floor hallway, as she picked up her flute and her purse from the carpet, she thought again of the strange kiss and of the penetrating stare that went so deep into her eyes that she could almost feel it frying her gray matter somewhere around midbrain.
Doubt began to creep into Naomi’s mind again, even though all would be lost if she doubted. But then she remembered the cryptic warning—The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours—and she thought of her levitating book and of the green grapes disappearing into the mirror, and she was slammed right back into the breathtaking wonderfulness of it all, so that her tummy fluttered and the nape of her neck tingled.
Naomi stepped into the hall. She went to her room.
At the play table, Minnie looked up from her LEGO project. “I saw this clown once wearing a blue beret with a red pompon.”
“Put-down humor is simply not your forte, my darling sister. You shouldn’t embarrass yourself by attempting it.”
“No, I mean there really was this clown in a hat like that.”
Putting her purse and flute on her desk, shrugging out of her blazer, Naomi said, “If you say so.”
“Was Mr. Hummelstein at orchestra practice?”
“He’s the conductor. He’s always there.”
“Has he trimmed out his ears yet?”
Flopping on her bed, Naomi said, “No, they are still two great thickets, you expect a flock of ducks to be startled out of them.”
“Did you play your solo?”
“Yes. Twice.”
“Is that all?”
Mentally reviewing the contents of the attaché case, Naomi said, “All what?”
“There wasn’t a standing ovation, applause like thunder, no crowd of admirers with fresh roses at the stage door?”
Naomi thought about eggs. They were very symbolic objects. What might an empty egg represent?
Minnie came to the bed. “What’re you up to?”
“What do you mean? I’m lying here exhausted.”
“You’re up to something,” Minnie said, frowning down at her.
“My paranoid sister, if you aren’t careful, you’ll grow up to be the Lord High Inquisitioner and Torturer to some crazed dictator.”
“You’re up to something, all right.”
Naomi let out a long-suffering sigh.
“Something’s going to happen,” Minnie said.
“Well, maybe something wonderful will happen.”
“No. Something very bad.”
“Here comes Miss Gloomy Bloomers again.”
“Something’s wrong with this house,” Minnie said, looking toward the ceiling. “It started with the mirror.”
“You painted the mirror black.”
“Maybe that wasn’t good enough.”
Minnie went to the window and stood staring into the twilight.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Naomi said, “The frost is on the briar rose.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said, “but doesn’t it make you feel just totally delicious?”
“No. I’m scared.”
Naomi went to the window and put a hand on Minnie’s shoulder. “There’s nothing to be scared of, sweetie.”
Gazing at the fading sky, Minnie said, “There’s everything to be scared of.”
“Sometimes it looks that way when you’re eight. But when you’re eleven, you have a whole different perspective.”
44
FOR A WHILE, EVERYTHING MOTORED ALONG ON CRUISE CONTROL, not exactly normal but not in-your-face bizarre, and then Zach began to dream about Ugly Al again—though with a difference. These new mind movies were megatons worse than nightmares. They were so radically real that Zach woke up to throw up more than once, barely making it to the bathroom in time.
The dumb-ass cliché carnival wasn’t a locale anymore. These dreams were set in their house or outside on their property, and though they were horror-movie stuff, they didn’t have a bonehead horror-movie feel. They felt like documentaries.
In the first of them, Zach climbed into the stupid playhouse high in the stupid cedar, where he never went in real life because it was a girl’s kind of place. Snow was falling, rungs on the ladder jacketed with ice, and he was bare-chested and barefoot in jeans. He could feel the snow spitting against his face, the slippery ice under his feet, feel it cracking and hear brittle chunks of it clinking and rattling down through the dark branches. Never before had he felt things so intensely in dreams: the texture of everything, the cold, his feet numb yet stinging from prolonged contact with the ice.
He could smell everything too, which never happened in other dreams. He smelled the cedar as he ascended through its boughs. He smelled the wet wood of the playhouse—and the blood when he went inside.
In throbbing lantern light, Naomi’s severed head stood in a puddle on the playhouse tabl
e. Stepping out of shadows, Ugly Al said, “I have lots of uses for her fine little body, but I didn’t need her head. You can have the little slut’s head.” Zach tried to back away, couldn’t. Ugly Al shoved the head into his hands. Zach could feel the slickness and fading warmth of the blood, her hair tickling his wrists. All this did worse than terrify him. He was grief-stricken, such anguish, he was sobbing, his throat felt raw from sobbing. His sister was dead. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if it was only terrifying, but Naomi was dead, and a stake through Zach’s chest couldn’t have hurt as much as this loss. He wanted to put the precious head somewhere safe and cover it so that no one could see brilliant Naomi like this, beautiful Naomi reduced to this, but Ugly Al gripped Zach’s hands and forced him to bring the head closer to his face, closer, saying, “Give her a nice wet kiss.”
The dreams got a lot worse after that.
Zach knew that he should tell his parents, because the dreams were so godawful intense and so strange that maybe he had a freaking brain tumor the size of an orange or something. He intended to tell them, but then the dreams got sick in a different way from how they had been, still violent but also way perverse. Disgusting, demented syphilitic-monkey things happened in these supercharged nightmares, things Zach could never in a million years tell anyone about because they would think that he must be a walking pus bag, that he must be rabid-bat deranged if he could even imagine such grotesque stuff. In fact, he didn’t think he was imagining any of it, he felt like he was receiving this filth, as if it were being downloaded into his brain like a movie from the Internet, but he knew he’d never sell that idea to the psychiatrists.
On the night of October eighteenth, any lingering thought he had of sharing his nightmares with his father and mother was vaporized like a teaspoon of water at ground zero in a nuclear blast. Something happened that so shamed him, he had no option but silently to endure this torment until it either stopped or he went into full brain melt.