The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant

by Joanna Wiebe

  “How can it be you?” I haven’t yet caught my breath when I try to scream at her, “Who are you?”

  “Look closer,” she begins, smoothing her skirt. “That’s your prosperitas thema, after all. It’s ambitious, to say the least. Too bad for you, you’re not ambitious enough to rise to it.”

  “I got here, didn’t I? I figured this much out.” I counter, my veins filling with electricity. “It barely took me two weeks to learn, on my own, the truth about this place.”

  “The truth? Coming from a girl who’s been asleep for over two years just to hide from the truth.” She smiles as Liszt turns gay and light. Surrounding her are more than fifty years of valedictorians, also smiling in their portraits. “Enlighten me.”

  “I know everyone’s dead. I know they’re vivified here. I know the villagers would rather be killed than sent to this hellhole.”

  “And? Do you know about this?”

  Hiltop snaps her thin fingers. The doors to the hall fly open with a gust of wind that sends me careering helplessly backward. I gain my balance and peer at the doorway. Panicked whispers sneak in from the darkness, beyond where I can see. And then two people float in from beyond the doorway. Followed by another two. And another.

  Except they aren’t people at all. They’re translucent apparitions.

  Dressed in cap and gown, they march into the hall.

  Then, all at once, they stop. In unison, the ghostly graduates turn silently my way, their shadowed, decaying faces gawking, their long teeth yellow and exposed in their mouths, dark like coal. Deep, sorrowful gashes crease their faces. And their eyes. Empty sockets flickering as they follow my every flinch.

  “Fifty candidates attend the graduation ceremony,” she calls over the wind. As the last apparitions enter, the doors slam shut. “Only one walks out, free to roam the world at will. Did you know that?”

  Returning her glare, I boldly nod. “Yes, I know all about the Big V.”

  Her grin thins. “Someone told you.”

  “No one told me.”

  I can see that she doesn’t want to believe I was capable of figuring things out on my own, as if her demonic mind can’t allow me to show any signs of intelligence. So I decide not to tell her that I know our blood needs to be on this island to vivify us. Because it might wake a bigger beast than I can handle, and because I don’t want to tell her that I know our vials are kept in the wall behind her—the wall I need to get into.

  She saunters toward me, staring at me on my knees. With a violent shove I didn’t see coming, she sends me onto my back and swiftly lowers her small foot onto my chest, pushing firmly down on me, so firmly I sputter while trying to exhale. For the most endless moment, she holds me there like a beetle whose leg she’s caught under her shoe.

  “Did you know about me, Miss Merchant? Do you know who I am?”

  “You,” I stammer, “are a surprise.”

  That pleases her, and she lets up on me, turning to walk toward the wall of drawers.

  “The Zin boy didn’t tell you about me?” she calls back. “I know he tried, sweet little lovesick moron. The literary game you played outside this very hall. The book he left on your bed. If it wasn’t for his father’s utility, your pathetic boyfriend would be dead. Again.”

  “Ben didn’t do anything or tell me anything. I promise.”

  Spinning back to me, Hiltop feigns a gleeful grin and pulls her hands to her chest, mocking me, mocking Ben.

  “Oh, love!” she cries. “How wonderful that you would protect him now when he has never protected you. He’s more worried about his dead sister than he is about you—even though you still have the chance to live! Dear, sweet Ben had nothing but time to simply tell you the truth about me. He lived next door to you. He had limitless access to you. And yet he gave you only hints and chose to protect Jeannie. What kind of love is that?”

  “Don’t act like you know about love,” I hiss. “Ben trusted that I could figure everything out in time, and I did.”

  “Not everything,” she tsks.

  Suddenly, she dashes at me and, holding my fists, straddles me. Her impossibly hot hands slide to grip my wrists as she pins me to the floor. Under her unnatural weight, I can’t budge, not even to kick, a fact that infuriates me and delights her.

  “You don’t know this,” she says.

  And then Hiltop’s transformation begins.

  The plump, firm skin on her youthful face droops and runs like a mudslide. Deep wrinkles etch like streams around her eyes and mouth. Her irises turn from daylight to the inky night sky. My breath catches as I witness her grotesque transformation: she has, without a sound, morphed from a shy student to the hideous secretary I encountered on orientation day.

  My lips form a curse that goes unspoken. I can’t utter a word.

  Her metamorphosis continues, accompanied now by her dark, pointy smile. Her face swells; her cheeks balloon. Dark, curly brown fur spreads over her aged body in patches that swiftly interlock, as the fingers that hold me become claws, and the hands paws. To my horror, her nose and mouth extend and become a snout, mouth wide open, gray tongue hanging above my wide eyes. Her dark eyes are small black beads lit by an unseen fire. She has transformed from the secretary into a dark poodle.

  “If you’d read the book,” the poodle says, “you’d know who I am. The name you know Hiltop by is merely an anagram.”

  My mind is unraveling now. I shake my head, shake away this unreal reality. The book this ungodly thing is referring to is Doctor Faustus. I’ve known it all this time. I just haven’t wanted to.

  Her next visage is a Nazi soldier. And then a hoofed demon with horns.

  But it is not until she becomes him—the man I’d expected to see the moment I was yanked from the duct—that I truly know who Hiltop P. Shemese is and am ready to call this thing by name.

  As I find myself pinned under Villicus, I whisper, “Mephistopheles.”

  I squirm, wheeze, and dodge his fiendish glare. Villicus seems to be deciding whether to squish me now or prolong the agony. He stands and retreats, training his eyes on my face as he backs away. A treacherous grin spreads across his dry face, cutting with the power of an earthquake through cold stone.

  Villicus leers at me. “You know my name.”

  My body, head to toe, is shuddering—not with fear, as he would believe, but with whatever efforts my father is making back home to rouse me from my coma.

  “Mephistopheles,” I shout, glaring up at his grimace. “You’re Mephistopheles.”

  “Prince of Darkness. The Great Exchanger. Problem Solver for the impatient, entitled, and bored.”

  “But you’re fiction, a fable,” I whisper, staggering to my feet again and thinking of the story Doctor Faustus. Of the book Ben tried to slip to me. The book he said was the biggest hint he could provide. The book about a foolish man named Johann Faust who traded his soul to a demon named Mephistopheles in exchange for twenty-four years of magical powers, infinite intelligence, the admiration of his peers, and beautiful women. When his time was up, Mephistopheles claimed Faustus’s soul. “You’re just a character in a story.”

  “A story?” He backs away, still watching me. Quivering even in the heat, I nod. “Is this a story?” he shouts. With the flick of his wrist, he throws an enormous flame my way. It tears through the ghostly graduates, eliminating them, and lands at my feet.

  Shrieking, I stumble away.

  The fire swells, burns, but doesn’t spread. “Is that fiction?”

  “Stop!” I scream.

  He leaps into the air—up, up, spreading his arms wide like a bird in flight. He shoots up to the ceiling, dragging his fingertips along the enormous beams as I watch from the ground, cringing, waiting for an end I can’t escape; I can only anticipate it. Death at the hands of Mephistopheles. I stare up at him, unable to tear my gaze from a floating, hovering demon.

  “I am not fiction. Hell does not cease to be because you fictionalize it. No more than dark ceases to be because you
flick on the light,” he growls from above. “It’s time you started believing in Hell and all of its demons, Miss Merchant. You’re separated from them by the thinnest layer. You’re so close to them—” he throws himself down, directly at me, halting inches over me “—they’re practically touching you.”

  His draping cloak strokes me. I cringe, shielding my eyes. But with one swipe of his hands, he throws my arms away from my face.

  “You! Wrapped in your shield. You, the worst offender, protected by your coma from the truth you don’t want to face. You fictionalize what you can’t handle. As though that might erase reality!” His voice rings through the room, and he bounces away from me, lurches toward the wall of drawers. “You don’t know the life you’ve surrendered just to mourn your mother! When you could be so much more, Anne. So much more.”

  My breath is barely coming now. My eyes are strained and sore, locked in his wicked glare. Mephistopheles is real. He’s been making exchanges for decades on this very island. And for hundreds of years prior to that.

  “You gluttonous fools want what I can give,” he continues. “Since the Dark Ages, well before Marlowe, Goethe, and so many others relegated me to fiction, you’ve wanted me. You know you should resist me, but, oh, how I entice you! I have the power to give any person exactly what they want. The problem for this world is when I take what I want in exchange.” He cocks his head. “The world needs to believe I returned to Hell with just Faust’s soul and never came back for more. But ask yourself, why would I go back there when I am so good at what I do here?”

  Waltzing in time back in the direction of the wall of drawers, he casually recounts a handful of the exchanges he’s made over the years.

  The Salem witch trials: he details how he watched them string those girls up to extract their confessions. “That exchange was my first love story. The son of a village elder named Donnan couldn’t get the girl. So he called on me. Asked me to publicly torture her. In exchange, he was enslaved to me for sixty-six years, during which time I had him gather over one thousand innocents to be tried and tortured as witches.”

  The sinking of the Titanic: Villicus made an exchange with a deckhand named Tom Finnegan, who wanted to destroy a first-class passenger who’d spit on him. This exchange ended with the Titanic snapping in two. “Pity Tom’s escape boat sank, too.

  “You see, before I came to Wormwood, I had my hands full. The Great Depression. The Hindenburg. And my masterpiece.”

  I know “his masterpiece” before he says it. Gigi essentially told me. And the medals in his office spoke volumes.

  “World War II,” I whisper.

  “Guten! Yes, that was my finest work. It took an impressive series of exchanges to bring that war to life, exchanges beginning as early as the eighteen hundreds. Of course, it was not until a man named Adolf Hitler approached me that I really hit my stride. Amazing what one bitter failed artist is willing to do for success. Yes, every gun, every battle, every murder, even the Weimar Republic was the result of an exchange with me. At the end of it all, I fled on a boat that arrived on this very island. And a new opportunity was born.”

  With his back turned, I dart my gaze to the door, to escape. The hall is so long, so vast, so impossible to cross if I risk bolting now he’d be on me in a flash. And although I could heal from the wounds he’d inflict, I’d still feel the pain—all the pain.

  “You call manipulating people an opportunity?” I cry.

  He whirls back to me. “If you searched your soul, Miss Merchant, you’d find that you do, too.”

  “You had Molly killed.”

  “All part of the exchange.”

  “She’d rather die than go to Cania.”

  “Alas, she’d have to die to go to Cania. Death is the only option for breaking my rules. She simply opted to die without the chance to attend my fine institution thereafter. You see, the rule is that anyone who crosses the red line is mine. Rules are rules. Dear Ted caught wind of Miss Watso entering the Zin premises, which, you’ll note, is beyond the red line.”

  “So you killed her!”

  “Every day, her grandfather and mother made a decision to keep her on this island. They could have sent her to Kennebunkport, where the most frightened villagers fled. But they wanted her with them. And they had to stay because they are contractually obligated to invite me to their island each morning.”

  My head whirls. “That’s what they do for you? That’s why you pay them?”

  “We have very basic rules in the world of demons and angels,” he says, sounding more like a headmaster than ever. “I must be called by name to enter the earth and walk among you. Faust, Donnan, Tom Finnegan, Hitler—they all called on me. Mephistopheles! And I appeared. The soldiers that brought me here called me by name each day, and I appeared. The day a renegade German boat raided this island and the daughter of the Abenaki chief was killed in the crossfire, I vivified her—and they called me back each day thereafter.”

  This is what Gigi was rambling about yesterday, I realize. The village girl who set off a series of miracles and horrors that now shape my world.

  “We made an exchange then. I would fill Wormwood Island with the power to vivify all who die on it if the villagers would lease the land to me, calling me by name every day. They agreed to secrecy, because I operate best in the shadows. After the pact was signed, all the bodies buried here—the soldiers, old husbands and wives—were vivified, and the US Navy abandoned Wormwood, leaving me and the villagers.”

  “Which suited you fine!” I storm. “You could have total control of them.”

  “Control? Miss Merchant, I only did as they asked me to. And I asked for so little. I just wanted to stay here until I could work out my next gig.”

  I shake my head, amazed at what lengths people will go to and what evils they will overlook to get what they want. The shortsightedness of it!

  “In time, the villagers began to question my righteousness. Such is the natural human response to indulging in what one wants—this need to withdraw, punish oneself for giving into temptation, and turn to a virtuous life.” He has scaled the wall of drawers. He hovers midway up the wall, a dozen feet of air between him and the floor; a drawer is open. “They told me they wanted me to leave. They destroyed the remains of those I’d vivified. I was nearly forced from the first permanent home I’d had—so when a government official called on me for a favor, I had him abolish whaling for the Abenaki. Their means of feeding themselves disappeared.” He smiles. “They came around to me then. They agreed to look the other way on the condition that I stay out of their village and compensate them handsomely for their troubles. The next time a wealthy person called on me, I asked not for his soul but for his riches. It just so happened that the first such person to call on me begged to have their dead child vivified. And thus Cania Christy was born. And soon, my empire shall expand.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Another school. Your father will take over as lead recruiter for Wormwood Island, and Dr. Zin will be moved to a new location.” Anticipating my reaction, he sneers. “I know your thoughts, Miss Merchant, as a parent knows a child’s. I know you’re planning to escape me. But I have different plans. And mine, as you might imagine, trump all others.”

  “It won’t work!” I cry halfheartedly, knowing that it will. Because, thus far, it has. “I’ll kill myself before I let you use me to trap my dad.”

  “I’ll bring you back!” he flares bitterly. “And then I’ll end you when I’m damn well ready. Just like I end everyone when I’m damn well ready.”

  A vial glints in his hand as he closes the drawer next to him. Everything in my body shrieks for me to run. But I can’t. I’m positive he’s got my vial in his clutches. What he plans to do with it, I can’t imagine, though I’m sure he won’t be burning it—that would end his hold over my dad.

  Scurrying along the wall, he swiftly pulls another vial out of a drawer.

  Before he can explain his intent, the doors fly ope
n again.

  Someone storms in, racing, soaking wet. He stops just feet from the fire.

  “Pilot!” I scream, beyond overjoyed to see him. All this time, I’ve been holding my breath, wondering how I’ll do this alone. And now, seeing him, I exhale so hard I nearly slump to the floor. I won’t have to fight Villicus alone. I almost smile.

  “Am I late?” Pilot asks, huffing.

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s not asking me.

  twenty-six

  CIRCLING VULTURES

  “I APOLOGIZE, GUARDIAN,” PILOT SAYS TO VILLICUS. “I just returned to my dorm room and found your instructions.”

  “We will address matters of punctuality in our next one-on-one.”

  Then Villicus and Pilot turn their gazes on me. And just like that, I can’t breathe again.

  Ahead of me, Mephistopheles waits to kill. But, at this moment, I see nothing but Pilot. Pilot, my only friend. Pilot, complaining that he’ll always be the disappointing son. Holding tissue flowers to his chest and grinning. Denying any interest in being valedictorian—knowing its reward is life—and telling me not to try for it either.

  Pilot has a Guardian after all. Villicus. Which means Pilot—pious Pilot—is, in fact, in the race for the Big V. And has been all along.

  “Don’t give me that look, Anne. We’re all competing. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  Pilot strolls toward the fire, which burns without spreading, and stops feet from me. I can’t move. This betrayal is colder than all the sheets of ice I ran through tonight. Colder than the chills that consumed my body every morning since I arrived here. The coldest.

  “So you always wanted to be valedictorian?” My tone gives away my repulsion.

  “Naturally,” Villicus answers on Pilot’s behalf. “The moment I saw the darkness surrounding this boy, I knew only I could be his Guardian. And I swiftly determined his PT.”