I don’t know if you’re supposed to freeze things like peanut butter and batteries, and I know for certain that I don’t want to drink three-year-old frozen milk, but I know why he does it. He does it because he’s lived through a dozen or more major hurricanes. His house was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. He barely made it out alive. He escaped out of one of the windows in an inflatable raft and was picked up in a helicopter. He lost his dog in the flooding. So he moved closer to the rest of us and bought a little house and filled it with freezers.
Of course, when hurricanes come, the power goes out, and what he’ll probably have are eight freezers filled with rapidly decaying old food, but that’s not the point. I don’t know what he saw when the waters rose around him, but whatever it was, it made him want to get eight freezers. Some things are so bad that once you’ve been through them, you don’t have to explain your reasons to anyone.
I was thinking about this as our big black cab pulled into the Wexford square, bumping up along the cobblestones in front of Hawthorne. I could have let my parents go and get my things for me—I could have left London and never looked at the place again. But that felt wrong. I would go to my room. I would get my own things. I would face this place and everything that had happened here. I might get stares, but I didn’t care.
Anyway, I could tell from a quick look around and a check of the time that that wasn’t going to be an issue. It was seven in the morning on a Saturday. The lights in Hawthorne were mostly off. Aside from two people crossing the green and walking toward the refectory, I saw no one. Everyone was still in bed. There were two news vans around, but they were packing up their equipment. The show was over.
Claudia opened the door as we approached. I would leave as I had arrived just ten weeks before, with Claudia in the doorway, waiting for me.
“Aurora,” she said in her softest voice, which was the same kind of voice most people used to bark orders over malfunctioning drive-thru microphones. “How are you?”
“Fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
She introduced herself to my parents with one of her mighty, bunny-crushing handshakes. (I’d never seen Claudia crush a bunny, to be fair, but that’s the approximate level of pressure.)
Claudia had been fully briefed on the situation, and mercifully, she wasn’t going to belabor things.
“There are boxes upstairs,” she said. “I’d be more than happy to help you.”
“I’d rather do it myself,” I replied.
“Of course,” she said, with what I took to be a nod of approval. “Mr. and Mrs. Deveaux, why don’t you come through to my office? We’ll have some tea and a little chat. Aurora, you take as long as you need. We’ll be right here if you need us.”
“Remember,” my mom said, “no lifting, no bending.”
This was because of my stitches. My wound wasn’t that bad—just a flesh wound, as they say—but I still had a large trail of stitches across my body. I’d been given a set of instructions on how to move around for the next few days while it all healed up. I hadn’t actually seen my wound yet—it was under lots of bandages and tape. But from the size of the bandages, and from what I could feel, it was about a foot and a half long. I would, I was assured, have a wicked scar that ran from just under my ribs on the left side to the top of my right thigh. I’d been ripped by the Ripper. I was a walking T-shirt slogan.
Hawthorne really felt empty during the day. I could hear the heat whistling in the pipes, and the wind outside the windows, and the creak of wood. Maybe it felt more empty than normal because I was leaving. I was no longer part of this place. There was the familiar smell of my floor—the leftover sweetness of shampoos and body washes floating out of the steam of the showers mixed with the strangely metallic smell that always emanated from the dishwasher in the kitchenette. I touched the doors as I walked down the hall until I reached our room.
The promised boxes were stacked on my side of the room; some were piled by the closet, and more were on the bed. It looked like Jazza had started the packing process—some of my books had been carefully packed into one box on my desk, and my uniform shirts and skirts had been carefully folded and placed in another box.
I wasn’t here to do any heavy packing—I was here only for a few personal items and some clothes for a few days. I decided to do it as quickly as possible—a handful of underwear from the top drawer, my two favorite bras, some sweats, the contents of my small dish of jewelry, and my Wexford tie. The last item I clearly didn’t need, but it was a symbol of my time here. I would have my tie. I shoved all of these things into a small bag. The rest of my Wexford life would come later—the books I hadn’t finished reading, the labels I never used, the sheets and blankets and uniforms.
The last thing I took was the ashtray shaped like the lips from Big Jim’s. I put this on Jazza’s bed, along with a few Mardi Gras beads. I took my little bag and left our room.
I walked down the Hawthorne stairs for the last time. On the last step, I hesitated. I stared at the flyers on the bulletin boards and the recently filled pigeonholes full of mail. Claudia’s voice was fully audible, even though her office door was closed. She was telling my parents about hockey opportunities in Bristol.
“ . . . once her injuries are healed, of course, but the padding does cover quite a lot . . .”
I turned in the direction of the bathroom. I could leave now and never see that room again, but something drew me toward it. I walked down the hall. I reached out and ran my hand down the wall. I passed the common room, the study rooms . . .
The bathroom door was gone. From the way the hinges were bent, it looked like it had been smashed down. The glass of the mirrors was completely gone; only the silver backings remained. There was also a crack in the floor—a long one, at least five feet, and maybe a quarter of an inch wide at points. It ran jagged from the center of the room in the direction of the bathroom stall, breaking every tiny tile in its path. I walked along it, up until the point where it slipped under the door. I pushed the door open.
There was a woman standing there.
Maybe I still had some of the painkillers in my system or something, because I should have jumped or screamed or registered some surprise. But I didn’t.
This woman was old. Not in age—she looked like she was maybe twenty or thirty or something, it was hard to tell—but in time itself. She wore a rough blousy shirtdress.
Over that, she had a heavy, rust-colored skirt that went to the ground, and over that, a stained yellow apron. Her hair was as black as mine and was drawn away from her face with a scarf. But it wasn’t just her clothes that told me she was old—it was the way light reacted to her. She was there, she was solid and real, but there was a strange cast about her, like she was standing in a fog.
“Hello?” I said.
Her eyes widened in terror and she backed up into the corner, squeezing herself between the toilet and the wall.
“I won’t hurt you,” I told her.
The woman pressed against the tiled wall with her hands, which were worn and red and marked with cuts and strange patches of black and green.
“Seriously,” I tried again. “It’s okay. You’re safe here. My name is Rory. What’s yours?”
She seemed to understand this, because she stopped clawing at the wall for a minute and looked at me unblinkingly. She opened her mouth to speak, but only a rasping sound came out. A slow hiss. It wasn’t an angry hiss. I think that was just what her voice sounded like now. It was a solid conversational start.
“Do you know where you are?” I said. “Do you come from here?”
In reply, she pointed to the crack in the floor. Even the act of pointing to the crack distressed her again, and she began to cry . . . except she couldn’t cry. She just heaved and made a noise like air slowly leaking from a bike tire.
“Aurora?” Claudia called. “Are you down here?”
I had absolutely no idea what to do about this situation. But the woman was clea
rly distressed, so I did what I had seen Boo do—I reached out to her to try to calm her down before Claudia came into the room and this conversation was over.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s okay—”
As soon as I made contact, I felt a crackle, like a static shock. I couldn’t move my arm. Something was running through it, something that felt like a current, something that made me stiffen in position. I had a feeling of falling, like a lurching elevator dropping between floors. The woman opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, there was a rush of air around us and a roaring noise.
And then, there was the light—impossibly bright and filling the senses. It consumed us both. A moment after that, it blinked out. I fell backward, stumbling through the open doorway of the stall and just managing to catch myself before I fell over.
“Rory!” That was my mother’s voice, urgent. Claudia was saying something as well. My eyes were still adjusting. I could just make out shapes at first—the stall door, the window, the pattern of the tiles. The smell was already there, sweet, floral, almost like a scented candle. The unmistakable smell of a ghost departed. And as my eyes came back into focus, I saw that the woman was gone. I looked at the empty space, then at my hand.
“Rory?” my mother said. “What happened? What was that noise?”
That was not a question I was prepared to answer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I HAD THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK ONE VERY HOT SUMMER’S DAY IN London. I shoved everything else aside and worked on it like a mad working thing. I talked about it a lot. I dragged people to dark alleys in the East of London to stare at walls and sidewalks. I made some of the same people watch hours of footage taken from the driver’s compartment of a Tube train (“Hey! This one is forty-five minutes of driving the Northern line tunnels! Grab a snack!”) I have depended on the following people in various ways, and they are all owed thanks.
First, to my agent and friend Kate Schafer Testerman—there is no me without Kate. I will always fondly remember how you answered e-mails about this book while you were in labor, and I asked you why you were answering e-mails while you were in labor, and you said you were bored and between episodes of Buffy.
To Jennifer Besser, my editor, who believed in this book from the word go—I don’t think the term “fairy godmother” is out of place here. To Shauna Fay, who is always there with a helping hand. And to everyone at Penguin for all of your support.
To my friends Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Robin Wasserman, Holly Black, Cassie Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, John Green, Libba Bray, Ally Carter . . . who read drafts, walked me through plot problems, and talked me off ledges. (Not that I was ever going to jump, but like a cat, I find myself in high, precarious places sometimes.) You are wise and long-suffering, and I am lucky to know you all. Believe me, I know it.
Andy Friel, Chelsea Hunt, and Rebecca Leach all served as advanced readers. Mary Johnson (RN, CSNP, MOM) served as the medical consultant and got very used to me calling up and starting conversations with things like, “So, say I was sawing off a human head . . .”
Jason and Paula allowed me to marry them in the middle of all of this, and went with my idea of rolling a twenty-sided die in the ceremony to determine the success of the marriage.
And thank you to all my online friends who listen to my ramblings every day as I merrily roll along.
Without all of you, I’d be nowhere. Or, I’d be somewhere, but it would be the wrong place.
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