“There’s something I want you to do,” Robert said.
#
Rob explained what he wanted. He thought at first that he was going to have to teach them something, but it turned out that they knew the trick already. He ripped off two strips of cloth from his shirt.
“Is he alive?” Josh whispered, quivering as Robert wrapped the cloth around his eyes.
“Sure,” Robert said.
He put his hand on the back of Josh’s neck and pressed his thumb against his temple.
“I hit him right there. He’s going to sleep for a little while.”
He patted Josh on the head like he was a puppy, then he blindfolded Andrew.
He led them to the house. They felt mud under their feet, then sand, then hard floor. A door closed and they descended a flight of stairs.
Another door opened.
“Speak of the devil. Come in, Robert. Why are they blindfolded?”
“So they won’t run away.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought about tying their feet.”
A hand came to rest on top of Josh’s head. The new voice kept talking.
“I suppose it doesn’t make any difference.”
Josh exhaled sharply and pulled the cloth from his eyes.
They were in a small room with concrete walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. A man in a blue bathrobe was duct-taped to a chair and a man with messy white hair and blue eyes was standing next to him. The white-haired man stepped back, blinded. Robert pointed the gun at him.
“I’m pointing Mike’s gun at you,” Robert said.
He hit him in the side of the head and he fell to the ground.
He turned towards the man in the chair.
“I know you keep promises,” he said. “If you show me everything, I’ll let you go.”
The man in the blue bathrobe just stared into space for a moment. Then he nodded his head. Robert nodded back excitedly. He put the gun down on the ground, pulled a set of car keys out of his pocket, and started cutting through the tape.
The man got up slowly. His joints popped; he crossed his arms in front of him, massaged his shoulders.
“Put him in the chair,” he said.
Robbie lifted up Luke by the shoulders and put him in the chair. He picked up the duct tape and wrapped it around Luke’s body.
He stood up and turned around. His smile vanished when he saw Thomas holding the gun.
“I’m going to give you fifteen minutes to leave my property.” Thomas said.
Robert’s eyes widened. He leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “You promised…”
Thomas met his eyes. The anger drained from Robert’s face.
“Okay.”
He slowly backed out of the room and closed the door. Andrew and Josh both heard his heavy footfalls coming up the stairs.
Andrew and Josh were huddled together in a corner of the room. The light bulb was swinging back and forth behind Thomas’ head, and his beard seemed to swallow his face in the darkness.
He stuck the gun into the waistband of his bathrobe.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
#
The kitchen looked like it was still under construction. The walls were white and empty, and the floor was covered with rough wooden panels. Thomas led Josh and Andrew to the sink; there was dirt on their clothes and Josh’s hand was still covered with blood. They washed off and sat down.
Thomas poked his head into one of the cabinets. Josh leaned over and whispered to Andrew.
“Is he going to try to kill us too?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
Thomas emerged with a cardboard box in either hand. A few minutes later he put two hot bowls full of raisin oatmeal down on the table.
They looked at them skeptically at first, but they hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch and soon they were shoveling food into their mouths.
“I’m going to have to have a long talk with both of you,” he said. “One at a time. Just as soon as you’re done.”
Thomas took Joshua into the library once they were finished eating. Andrew stayed in the kitchen. He played with his spoon and looked out the window, wondered if he was making a mistake, if he should run. Josh reemerged a few minutes later.
“Your turn,” he said. “It wasn’t too bad. We can still make a break for it if you want.”
Andrew took a deep breath.
“No, I want to talk to him. What did you talk about?”
“He wanted to know if the information that led us here came from you. That was it, I didn’t give him any details. Then he told me some other stuff, we can talk about it later.”
“All right,” Andrew said. He took a deep breath. “If you hear me yelling, then get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Coming here was stupid.”
Somehow that seemed to be an appropriate end to the conversation. Andrew went into the library and closed the door behind him.
The library was the biggest room in the house, bigger than the basement and the kitchen put together. There were metal bookshelves everywhere and a table between them that was identical to the one in the kitchen. Thomas was sitting down. There was an open chair. Andrew stayed where he was for a moment before he took it.
There was a book lying on the table. It was open to a pencil drawing of the spider they’d seen outside. On the bottom of the right page was a diagram, a triangle and a rectangle. Thomas saw Andrew looking at the book. He got up, closed it, put it on the shelf, and sat down again.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “You really do look just like Paul.”
Andrew sat up a little straighter in the chair.
“What did you tell Josh?”
Thomas nodded.
“He wanted to know why there were so many monsters here. I told him that I made a lot of stupid mistakes in my youth, and that I liked to keep them all in one place where I could keep an eye on them. He was particularly interested in a lot I own a mile or so away from the main property. I told him it was mine and that he should stay away, nothing else.
“My turn now. How much do you know about me and him? I mean Paul, not your partner.”
Andrew didn’t answer right away. “I saw something once. Somebody left him on the side of the road during a rainstorm.”
Thomas looked away. “I have a long-standing arrangement with the local police that nothing that happens on my property concerns them. A lot of large annual bribes. My assumption is that the person who abandoned him knew how much I value my privacy and expected me to make the body disappear. It was a complete coincidence that I was checking the drainage ditches that night and found him before he drowned or froze to death. I gave the child to a friend who ran a home for orphans, and she raised him.
“He was two years older than you are now when he sought me out. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation, but basically I made a deal with him. The things kept here will need to be watched over long after I’m dead. I offered to teach him everything I knew about magic if he would take my place when I got old.”
Andrew waited for him to keep going, but he was quiet.
“What? What happened?”
“He didn’t stay,” Thomas answered. “He learned what he could and snuck out in the middle of the night a few years later.”
Andrew glanced down at the table.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Thomas closed his eyes. His entire face seemed to disappear.
“Outside, in the kitchen.”
#
Andrew sat back down next to Josh in the kitchen.
“I’m offering protection,” Thomas said. “To either or both of you. Stay here and work for me and I’ll keep you safe from what’s happening outside.”
Andrew looked at Josh. Josh stared at the table. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the pa
rt of his shirt that was still clean, put them back on and looked up.
“No fucking way.”
Andrew closed his eyes but he could still feel Thomas looking at him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want this.”
He looked up and saw Thomas looking out the window.
“I see,” Thomas said. “All right.”
He left the room. Andrew and Josh could hear him talking to someone on the phone.
#
They waited on the front porch. It was eight o’clock when the cab arrived. The driver didn’t say anything except to ask them where they wanted to go.
The streetlights shined through the windows as they returned to civilization. Andrew saw part of the graveyard go by and disappear as they turned a corner.
Josh leaned over and whispered.
“Let’s never do anything like this ever again.”
He waited for an answer. Andrew was staring at the back of the driver’s seat.
“Why did you turn him down?” Andrew asked.
Josh laughed quietly. He was still shaking a little bit.
“He can’t even protect himself. Isn’t that why you said no?”
Andrew shook his head.
“Then why not?”
“I still need to take care of my grandmother.”
They were quiet again for a while. Andrew looked down at his hands.
“I wonder what’s going to happen when we get home.”
#
Thomas poured himself two glasses of wine and sat down. The pool was lit up by a spotlight on the roof of the house, but the rest of the world was invisible, flat blackness in every direction. The water was blue and still.
Of course they said no. It seemed obvious, now that the moment was past. Nobody in their right mind would say yes to something like that, no matter how young they were.
He finished both glasses and went downstairs. The door to the chamber swung open as he approached it.
“Good to see you, Thomas.”
Thomas stood over Luke silently.
“My chief regret…” Luke said, “…is that you kept hidden from me what it was like to open the portal. It must have been like touching the hand of God. I wonder if I could manage it myself.”
“Your eyes. That’s how you do it. Opening and closing.”
Luke nodded his head but didn’t say anything.
“I’m amazed the ritual didn’t kill you,” Thomas continued.
“It didn’t.”
“If you open up the portal everyone will die.”
He meant it to be an accusation, but the words were dead before they even passed his lips. They stared at each other. Thomas looked into Luke’s eyes and saw a tiny reflection of himself in each one.
“You’re a smart man,” Luke said. “The most learned and powerful magician alive. I don’t mind telling you, ego doesn’t come into it. I’m sure you’ll find some way of shoring up your defenses after I’ve left. All you have to worry about is the present.”
Thomas kept staring.
“Come on now,” Luke said. “It’s not as though you’ve never made a deal with the devil before.”
#
Luke looked over his shoulder as the front gate closed behind him. Then he walked back to the car. It wasn’t hard to find, he’d left the headlights on. He opened the driver’s side door, pulled a small pad of yellow paper out of the inside pocket, and drew a pattern on it. He slapped his hand down onto the pattern.
He saw the triangle on Andrew’s front door. He pushed through it, past it. Andrew’s grandmother was sitting in her chair in the living room, looking out the window. Her hands were clenched together in her lap, and her arms were like one long loop hanging from her neck.
Luke opened his eyes, whistled a short tune, kissed the tip of his finger and pressed it against the ignition. The engine roared to life and he drove away.
#
Mike the Kid woke up. He touched his face. There was mud on his forehead. He turned around and saw the spider. It was the last thing he saw.
CHAPTER 16
#
They gathered in the laundry room about an hour after lights out and found Anna sitting on top of an industrial drier with her legs dangling over the edge. She was tiny, just over five feet tall and skinny like a wild dog. Any of the seven she’d called for tonight could probably kill her with their bare hands.
One of them gave her a glass jar. It was mostly empty— just covering the bottom was a liquid that shone like a mirror. A hundred broken thermometers, each one bought or stolen or fought over. This was what they’d been waiting for.
“Sit down,” Anna said. They sat down in the empty spaces between the machines. She looked them over. They were all murderers, a couple of them several times over, and they had generally committed their murders for stupid or unfathomable reasons. If she hadn’t been so picky, she could have gotten this done a month earlier.
She hopped down from the drier.
“Everybody take off your shoes.”
They were all missing at least one toe. A few weeks ago, she’d told them that she could show them how to live forever. She remembered when she’d first mentioned it, watching their eyes light up one by one.
“All right, now stay where you are.”
She walked over to a far corner of the laundry room. There was an impression in the concrete behind one of the washers left over from a sloppy construction job. She took out the things she needed, seven sections of steel pipe, a mirror, a flashlight, a piece of paper covered with writing. She laid everything out in front of her, and unfolded the piece of paper. Inside was a small white pill, which she swallowed.
She took the knife, cut her finger, and let a few drops drip down onto the floor.
“Somebody kill the lights.”
She turned on the flashlight, arranged everything on the ground, with the mirror in the middle. Everyone sat down and closed their eyes, except for Anna. She poured the mercury onto the mirror. For a moment, there was nothing but darkness. Then, suddenly, a single point of blue light appeared in the air above the center of the circle. Anna could see the seven murderers again, lost in their visions, every blow struck or blood shed by anyone in their family since the beginning of time, slowly moving backwards.
Anna covered the top of the dryer with salt, climbed inside, and pulled the lid down on top of her. Outside, the glass plate shattered into a million pieces, and a moment later one of the women stopped breathing.
Anna could hear the rush of the air catching fire, quickly drowned out by the sound of the other six screaming, broken from their trance by pain. The fire came back, again and again, the waves overlapping each other. She waited until the sounds had stopped, then she stood up. The seven murderers had vanished. There was a gaping hole bridging the wall and the ceiling, surrounded by tiny pieces of burning insulation. There were no sirens, no lights. The building was dark.
She started running.
#
“The nine of clubs,” Andrew said. His eyes were closed and the palm of his left hand was resting on top of a piece of paper.
Josh was on the other side of the attic holding a playing card up to an equilateral triangle they’d carved into the wall with a razor. He changed cards.
“The jack of spades.” Andrew stood up and rubbed his eyes. “Looks like we got it right this time.”
Josh got up too. They were both silent for a moment.
“Yeah,” Josh finally said. “I guess we did.”
It only made it worse. This had always been a moment of celebration, something worth being in a good mood for.
Andrew sighed. “How much time do we have left? Fifteen minutes, right? Anything else we can get done?”
Josh closed the book he was looking at and opened the one underneath it on the pile. He’d marked his place with a piece of purple paper he’d torn off the edge of some handout he was supposed to bring home to his parents.
&n
bsp; “Maybe you want to see this?”
Andrew walked over and crouched down. “What does it say?”
“It’s not all decoded yet. Something about living nine times. Like dying and coming back.”
Andrew looked away. “Sounds kind of heavy.”
“Yeah, I guess. We’ll be careful though.” He waited a second and laughed. “Like we always are, right?”
Josh flipped through the pages while Andrew got up and walked over to the window. It’d snowed last night for the first time this year. It was just a thin layer of dust, and it’d melted right away, but the sky was gray and the trees were like skeletons, and it was looking more and more like winter.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore,” Andrew said.
Josh looked up from the book. “What are you talking about?”
“We almost got killed out on that farm.”
Josh didn’t know what to say; Andrew kept talking.
“We got the monster, and I don’t think we have to worry about those people that let it loose. Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.”
Josh closed the book and had to pull at himself to keep from opening it again, going back to the words and just forgetting everything else.
“What else are we supposed to do if we just forget about all this?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, me neither. Most of the other kids at school are scared of us and they all think we’re freaks. What do you want to do, try out for the soccer team?”
“You got any other ideas?”
“There’s another play starting up soon. We could go do crew or something.”
“Those kids are losers.”
“We’re scary freaks, apparently. Maybe we shouldn’t be so judgmental.”
“How am I supposed to go from ‘how to live forever’ to carrying microphones and fake bushes around?”
The bell rang.
“Come on,” Josh said. “Let’s go be late for class.”
“If we’re going to keep doing this stuff, can you promise me that we really are going to be careful?”
“Sure, Andrew. Come on, we need to go.”
They ran down the stairs, nodded to each other, and separated.
#
When Andrew got home he could smell chemicals in the air; his grandmother had been cleaning. He hung up his coat and went into the kitchen. She put her washcloth down and wrapped her arms around him, rested her chin on top of his head for a moment.
White Rabbit Society Part One Page 14