by Daniel Marks
And with that, Manny thrust her hips and slipped backward into the blackness.
“Ohhhhhh, aaaaaand haaaang ooooooon!” Her voice echoed from the chasm, the last note stretching into a terrified scream.
“Sweet Jesus,” Nick said.
“Oh, what are you, scared?” Velvet teased, rubbing her arms. “Should I go first so you’ll want to get to me? Or do you need me to push you?”
Logan went next, shouting a high-pitched “Yahoo!” as he dropped out of sight.
“It’s gonna be fun, Nick. Don’t be a pussy,” Luisa said, and scooted down the incline without another peep.
Nick straddled the cowhide and looked up at Velvet, his worried expression shifting into something else. “How about I’ll go first, if you flash me a boob.”
Velvet rolled her eyes. “You think this is a good time for a negotiation?”
He shrugged.
She sighed and reached up toward her shirt seductively. Nick’s mouth dropped open, and just as he leaned forward with anticipation, Velvet rushed up to him and gave him a big shove, shifting the leather sled over the tiniest hump.
“Velvet?” he asked, hanging there for a moment, quivering. Then he was splitting the air as he slipped through space.
Velvet fastened the weights as they’d been instructed, jumped onto the flat of leather, and kicked off. The slide was much steeper than she’d expected and she fell forward clawing at the edges of the leather, squeezing her thighs around the wooden rail in a ridiculous attempt to slow her descent.
She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes. Her hair flapped around her face as she plummeted, and her stomach seemed to have detached and was making its way up through her other organs in some mad, self-serving attempt to be free of her body.
She fell through a cascade of pebbles, which caught in her mouth and hair, and a couple of times, the whole leather sled seemed to take flight for a moment.
She arrived with such speed that the echo of her voice, a scream she didn’t recall making, showed up a second after she reached the bottom. That sound gave way to another—welcome voices hooting and hollering and cheering the ride.
“What a rush!” Logan shouted.
She hopped off and threw her arms around Nick. “Wasn’t that fantastic?”
Nick’s jaw tensed. “Um.”
Velvet didn’t let him finish. Instead she quickly withdrew and socked him in the shoulder like a buddy before the others had a chance to question her affectionate embrace. “You can thank me later.”
She sped off after Manny and the twins, leaving Nick to catch his breath and his footing.
Manny had been right about one thing. The slide had ended in very close proximity to Mr. Fassbinder’s shop. As soon as they turned the first corner, Velvet recognized the cobblestone street. The street had been left mostly dark, from the ongoing quake and push of shadows, but a single globe of gaslight three blocks ahead lit up the advisor’s office, the Paper Aviary, and the alley that sat in between them.
The group trudged forward, and a familiar shape stepped from out of the darkness and into the cone of flickering light.
He stood close to the alley’s mouth, which told Velvet that the tentacles had moved on. The boy might have been as tough as stone, but no one who’d been coiled in the shadow’s grasp ever wanted to put themselves in danger of it again.
“Over here,” he called, waving them closer.
“Ah, Kipper, darling,” Manny said, clutching his shoulder dramatically. “Have you found our origamist?”
He shook his head slowly. “Shop’s closed. I’ve hammered on the door for ten minutes, and nothing. I figure he’s probably found shelter somewhere else. Or, you know …”
Velvet did know. Kipper had stopped short of implying that Fassbinder had escaped with the rest of the Departurists.
“Oh, dear.” Manny scowled. “That is disappointing.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Velvet said.
Manny studied Velvet intently. “How do you know?”
She shook her head. She guessed she didn’t want it to be true. “I don’t. He was just so adamant about helping us find Clay. Why would he do that if he wanted to depart himself?”
“Perhaps it was a ruse,” Manny suggested.
“A what?” Logan asked.
“A ruse,” Velvet repeated. “A trick to mislead us from the truth.”
“Oh.”
Velvet didn’t want to even think about what that meant. Mr. Fassbinder was her friend, he’d been like a father figure to her. She’d even fantasized that in a perfect world, they’d all still be alive and Mr. Fassbinder would sweep her mother off her feet, making her fall madly in love with both his quirky style and his knowledge of film.
She refused to believe that he was a traitor.
But just as she was about to rebut Manny’s statement, Nick appeared from the darkness of the alley. She flinched. What was he up to? Nick pulled her aside while Kipper and Manny continued their heated discussion, seemingly oblivious.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked.
“I went to search for this.” He held out the black box.
“Mr. Fassbinder’s gift?”
Nick shrugged. “It fell out of your pocket when you ran from salon tonight. I’d almost forgotten that I brought it with me when I followed you to the crack, but all this talk of origami reminded me.”
Velvet snatched it from his hand and tore it open. In her haste, the paper bird waiting inside fell to the ground and opened slightly. A strip of crimson poked out from a ruptured fold. Velvet squinted and crouched next to it.
She began to slowly unfold it, careful to avoid tearing the heavily creased paper. What she saw there chilled her to the bone.
The paper drifted to the floor, and Manny snatched it up.
Velvet knew exactly what the station agent was seeing.
She didn’t even have to look at her face to know that the woman was putting two and two together. And it wasn’t nearly the mathematics running through Velvet’s head. Mr. Fassbinder had lied about where he obtained his paper. He used the same paper as the one from the effigy, the ones in the memories she’d snatched from the banshee’s head.
With the same red panda logo.
He’d lied about everything, and Velvet’s heart was plummeting.
“What’s this, Velvet?” Manny asked.
Velvet’s voice was beyond shaky. She couldn’t control it. “It’s an origami bird that a friend gave me.”
“The origamist.” The station agent nodded, urging Velvet to continue.
Velvet’s mind was in a blender. Ideas, plots, predicaments, and motives whirred inside. Kipper had said that Clay had never left the Latin Quarter. The banshee had shown her that the Departurists were led by a master origamist. There was no one more masterful. She’d suspected.
She didn’t want to believe.
“Mr. Fassbinder is Aloysius Clay.” The words fell out of her mouth like bricks.
“Why would Clay do that?” Kipper scowled at her, judgment in his gaze. “Why would he send us on a path of discovery that would lead us right back to him? Why would he want to be found out?”
Mr. Fassbinder had seemed to connect with her on so many levels—their mutual love of film, of animals, birds in particular. There had been an easiness to their talks that had made her feel comfortable. Loved. Like when she’d spend time with her mother apart from her rambunctious brothers.
Why would he give himself away? Did he want her to know the truth on some level? He’d talked about the departure with such understanding, too. She couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“Maybe he didn’t care—he was confident we wouldn’t be able to stop him,” Velvet announced finally.
She picked up the unfolded bird, the paper crinkled so completely that the opened folds looked like goose bumps on the sheet.
The realization struck her suddenly. “He loves the intricacy of his ruse. Just like the intricacy of his origami cr
eations. There’s no one better than him at the art of mimicry. He doesn’t even look as Miss Antonia described. He’s completely different. Arty, even. He’s disguised himself in every way.”
“An egotist,” Manny agreed, nodding.
An ego is right, Velvet thought. The man had tricked her completely, getting her to believe he was her friend when really he had been using her as part of his plan somehow. She felt violated.
Livid.
And in moments like these, only one thing could help.
Revenge.
The display of The Birds scene in the front window of the Paper Aviary was destroyed. The big picture window lay in shards on the cobblestone, along with the black crows and even the miniature Tippi Hedren, crumpled and torn.
Velvet glanced in Nick’s direction, stone-faced and purposeful. She was back in the game, focused. Nick nodded and followed her as she crawled up over the ledge of the broken window and down into the shop. The great spiny globe lay against one wall, rattling and wheezing and chirping along with the slow rumble of the earth beneath them.
She glared at the thing, and the dream came back, only this time with clarity.
The monk parakeets had been Clay’s biggest clue, his great big cinematic metaphor. The one any self-described film aficionado would have figured out to begin with. Mr. Fassbinder was the one who was trapped. Purgatory was the prison.
It was like the whole philosophy of the revolution in one great big art project. But how did he become so embittered? Was it simply Jerry’s death, or was it something else? It still didn’t make any sense, and Velvet refused to buy the insanity plea that everyone else would certainly jump on.
Tables lay on their sides, and with every step farther inside, origami birds were crushed into the ashy ground. Velvet stomped through a swinging door into the back. Clay’s workroom. Stacks of newspaper and reams of stolen printer paper lined the edges of the room, with a single desk and chair in the center. Laid across it, and totally still, was the figure of a man. As Velvet approached, her eyes grew wide with horror and she froze. What she saw struck her like a bat straight to the gut.
“Is he dead?” Nick asked, and crossed the gap to the desk.
“Is who dead?” Kipper leaned in with wide-eyed curiosity.
Bonesaw.
Velvet’s killer lay as silent as the grave on Clay’s desk—brought to purgatory completely whole, pasty pink, through some sick means only the origamist was privy to. Regardless of the means, her secret—their secret—wasn’t going to be a secret anymore.
“What’s this, then?” Manny strode into the room. She crossed to the body quickly and scanned Nick’s and Velvet’s stunned faces for an answer. Then she reached out to touch the body.
“No, don’t!” Velvet shrieked.
Manny pulled her hand away as though she’d very nearly patted a blazing fire. “What, then? What’s happening here, Velvet? This”—she pointed at the body—“is certainly not Aloysius Clay.”
In the corner of the room, Velvet noticed a thin mattress piled with more paper. The bed was empty. Clay was gone.
Velvet stood up and approached the prone figure and the station agent. “Bonesaw. He’s my kuh-killer,” she stuttered.
“Your killer? I don’t understand. How could that be? Killers don’t come to purgatory. Their path is a certainty.”
“I don’t know,” Velvet said, pale arcs of tears clearing the ash from her face.
Velvet closed in on the body. She noticed a clean line across Bonesaw’s left thigh. No blood on his clothing. No knife wounds. On instinct, Velvet balled her fist and brought it down on the figure’s abdomen.
It caved in with a plume of dust, crinkling around her wrist.
Manny leaned over it, too, squeezing the “flesh” of its face and watching as the tightly folded paper ruffled and creased.
“It’s another one of those damn effigy things!” Kipper yelled.
“It’s a message,” Velvet muttered. It had all come together in those short, tense moments. Mr. Fassbinder—Clay—had followed her through the crack to the farmhouse, to the shed. He knew her secret, and that’s how the banshee knew. Clay had made it his secret, too. But what was this creature for? She turned away from the hulking paper mannequin. A joke?
“You have something to tell me?” Manny asked. “You thought you knew this thing. You called it Bonesaw?”
“I’d hoped you hadn’t heard that,” Velvet said, knowing the question could lead only one place: to a connection between Fassbinder and her killer, and to the crack outside in the alley.
Nick slipped his hand into hers and whispered, “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere.”
Manny’s eyes narrowed. “Velvet?”
“He killed me.” She slapped her hand against the paper carcass. “Not him, obviously. This is some kind of trick, Mr. Fassbinder’s paper fraud,” she spat.
“What do you mean, he killed you?”
“He looks just like the guy who murdered me, Manny. His name is Ron Simanski, and he was a serial killer in my hometown. Aloysius Clay found out.” She hesitated. “Somehow.”
“How exactly? And don’t hold back. As you can see”—she threw her arms up to note that the building was still shaking, the floor sending ripples up their legs as they stood there—“things aren’t getting any better.”
Manny was right. Secrets weren’t going to help anything.
Velvet took a deep breath, squeezed Nick’s hand, and vomited her entire secret into the room—the extent of her haunting of Bonesaw, how she’d saved girls in that tiny shed, but not all of them. Those visions she kept to herself, kept them locked away in the deepest recesses of her mind like nightmares.
“I see.” Manny stared off, deep in thought, ruminating on the information, or at least Velvet hoped that was what she was doing. For all she knew, the station agent could have been planning her eternal damnation. But then Manny spun around and stared at each of them intently, including the twins, who stood at the swinging door, mouths open with shock at the revelation of Velvet’s crime. “Well. There’s not much we can do about that right now. I’m going to keep it in my head until we’ve resolved all this madness. If we …” Her voice trailed off.
“It’s not so bad!” Nick added. “Velvet’s saved a lot of girls from this guy!”
Velvet’s heart sunk. It was one thing that she’d done it, but revealing that he knew, too? Not good. She let her hand slip from the boy’s grip.
“She’s actually a hero, don’t you think?” he implored.
Manny glowered. “So you knew?”
Velvet reached out and stroked Nick’s arm. He was shivering with fear, and even her touch didn’t seem to help. He’d meant well, but now he’d implicated himself.
“It was an accident that Nick followed me,” Velvet said, and sighed. “He wasn’t even aware—”
The woman held her hand up, ceasing the conversation. “I don’t need to hear any more about this. For now we must figure out what the purpose of this effigy is. You’ve said it’s a message. Do you believe it is simply to show you that he’s on to your scheming?”
Scheming.
Velvet winced at the word, at the idea that the station agent thought less of her, thought she was a criminal.
“I think …” She didn’t want to finish. She wasn’t even sure what it meant, but she knew where the answer would lead. “Mr. Fassbinder—Clay—passed through into the daylight. The crack we used to get up to the station tonight is in the alley on the other side of this wall. I think he wants me to follow.”
“Ah.” Manny nodded. “But what if it’s a trap of some sort?”
“It probably is,” Velvet agreed. “This whole thing has been leading up to this point. The banshee, the crystal balls, the shadowquakes, the trapped souls. The revolution. But it feels right that I should follow him.”
Manny nodded.
Nick gulped.
“He’s at the farmhouse, and there’s no question whose body
he’s walking around in.”
“Then, you’ll go,” Manny said, but her eyes were narrowing cruelly. “But don’t you forget your goal. Stop this shadowquake. Bring back Clay. Any score you feel needs to be settled between you and Aloysius is secondary to that. Understand?”
Not to mention Bonesaw, Velvet thought. She was hoping that that part had been taken care of naturally. That he’d bled out on the shed floor.
Dead.
Velvet nodded and stormed from the room. “Come on!” she called back to Nick.
He followed behind her down the crumbled alley, over piles of rubble and to the crack, which was barely discernible on the now quake-fractured wall. The others were still at the mouth of the alley, but nearing.
“Holy crap.” Nick stared at the passageway, discouragement clouding his expression.
“Where are you guys going?” Logan shouted, clambering over the mounds of crushed brick.
Velvet shuddered. For the first time, she didn’t want her team with her on a mission. She couldn’t risk their safety. Not this time. “Stay here, Logan. And make sure your sister doesn’t follow.”
The boy scowled but stilled himself. “Fine.”
Then she turned to Nick and held out her hand. He slipped his into her palm and squeezed. “You stay, too. Stop the others from following,” she said. “This is my battle.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t ask me to do that. I can’t.”
The sound of rocks scattering turned his attention toward Luisa, who’d joined her brother, the same look of confusion on her face. In that moment, Velvet slipped through the crack.
Chapter 25
The moon hung high over the glen, shining through the web of leaves and branches in thin white bars. Dim light played across the carpet of glistening pine needles. The moment would have been serene and welcoming, if Velvet hadn’t just shared a secret that doomed her soul to an eternity in purgatory, and maybe Nick’s, too. Despite the station agent’s affection for her—and she didn’t doubt that for a second—Manny wouldn’t be able to keep this secret from her superiors.