Invisibility

by Andrea Cremer

  The sound that drew me to her sharpens in focus. The buzz of the spell becomes a wail; keening, ceaseless. It’s so horrible I want to cover my ears, desperate to shut out its piercing whine. As I watch her, the curse shows itself. Unlike most, this curse is barely moving. It lies over her, dark and heavy, like a cloak meant to smother her, lacking the frenetic quality of so many of the spells I’d witnessed. This thick curse gloms onto her like tar.

  “She can’t sleep,” I murmur. “Or take care of herself. She has no hope.”

  Millie leans into me. “It’s a nasty one.”

  I’m still gazing at the woman, noticing her unwashed clothes. The dirt under her fingernails. I can sense that these are symptoms of the curse. She isn’t without money or a home, but she’s lost the ability to be well—physically and mentally.

  “Will it kill her?” I ask.

  “The curse itself isn’t fatal,” Millie says. “But it could well do the poor woman in. She’s so tired she could walk in front of a bus without ever noticing it was there. Curses of insomnia are very dangerous. And this one has the added twist of self-loathing.”

  I watch the curse lying corpse-like across the woman’s body. Unlike the spell affecting the lost girl, which I could see slipping away, this curse is in its peak, thriving. It isn’t going anywhere soon.

  “We have to help her.”

  Millie takes my face in her hands, turning me towards her and away from the wretched woman. “You aren’t ready.”

  “But—”

  “The girl,” she interrupts. “The lost child at the back of the car. You might be able to help her.”

  I resist the urge to turn back to the other woman. “How?”

  Millie glances up at Saul. He nods.

  “We’ve been talking, putting our heads together,” she says. “It’s still risky, but I think you should try.”

  “Try what?” I’m getting impatient. Seeing the curses is exhausting, not physically but emotionally. My mind and spirit are tapped into a darkness that colors the world in brutal shades, shades of vengeance, pettiness, of power fed by pride. It is a world full of ugly truths that once seen can’t be unseen, and I am sorry to have seen it.

  “As I’ve said before, my abilities extend only to identification,” Millie tells me. Her eyes are pinched with worry. “But according to lore and the few records I’ve been able to piece together, you might be able to do more.”

  “Can I break the curses?” I ask.

  Saul’s voice rumbles towards me. “It’s more visceral than that.”

  I shudder at the word visceral, especially coming from this man who I’m guessing has seen his share of guts, given his line of work.

  “Your talent may allow you to draw a curse out, like poison.” Millie doesn’t meet my eyes. “When you do that, the spell will no longer affect its victim.”

  “Good.” I straighten up. “How can I do that?”

  She shakes her head. “Listen, child. You don’t draw the magic only to let it go. You pull it into your own body. If you’re able to do this, you’ll need time to establish your resistance to the curse’s effects.”

  I look from Millie to Saul. “What will it do to me?”

  Millie is still shaking her head.

  “We can’t be sure,” Saul answers. He bends close. I try not to stare at his missing eye. The scars on his face. “Every spellseeker is different. But your body has the ability—in theory—to fight off curses. To destroy them.”

  “But there will be side effects at first,” Millie finishes. “And we don’t know how serious they might be. Or if it will even work.”

  I pull my eyes off the somber-faced pair and fix my gaze on the girl at the back of the car. She has one hand over her eyes now, having abandoned her attempts to keep her grief concealed.

  “I don’t care,” I lie. The truth is, I’m terrified. But I can’t see this other world, these other horrors, and not try to right its wrongs. “Just tell me how.”

  Saul grunts in what I think might be respect and Millie squeezes my hand.

  “Since I can’t do it myself, I can only guess,” she says. “But I believe your instincts will guide you. You were born to do this.”

  Her words startle me. I’d never subscribed to the idea of destiny or fate. The world had always seemed too fickle and unfair for such lofty concepts. But if fate was real, it led me to fall in love with an invisible boy. And I would do anything to save him.

  I don’t say anything, but squeeze her fingers in return and then slide away from her. Away from the world. The background rises up, offering the mysterious plane drained of color. The passengers blocking my view of the cursed girl become no more than shadows. I can see right through their insubstantial bodies.

  The girl, in contrast, is a stark outline. The curse is already weakened from the short time ago when I first saw it. I watch her for a minute or two, wondering what my next move should be. The tricky thing about instinct is that it’s instinct, not something you generally can call upon at will.

  Though impatient, I let myself sit, waiting, watching the curse move. Listening to its rustle. Without prompting, without a conscious decision, I feel a shift in my senses. A stretching, reaching. My spirit gains a focus. Magnet-like strength. And it begins to pull.

  I remain very still, breathing evenly. The draw of my spirit continues, creating a link between myself and the spell-ridden girl. The curse stops circling the girl. Wisps of smoke float towards me, leaving her behind. I don’t move, though I’m ready to scream. The instincts at work in my body tell me that the curse isn’t just going to hover near me. The connection I’ve wrought will draw the magic inside me, to wreak what havoc it will.

  And then it happens. I draw a breath and the smoke slides into my nose and mouth. With a shudder I groan, leaning over. My head throbs.

  “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” Millie is shaking me.

  I raise my head and am back in the world. The train is stopped and passengers are entering and exiting as usual. No one casts a glance my way.

  “Are you okay?” Saul asks.

  My head hurts, but not terribly—a couple of aspirin would knock out the ache—and otherwise everything seems normal. I sit up, searching for the girl. She’s gazing at the subway map in the train. She begins to giggle. Then she laughs out loud, which does draw stares from her fellow passengers. Her face is alight with relief. She dashes out of the car just as the doors begin to close.

  “It worked,” I whisper.

  Millie wraps her arms around me. “You are truly gifted.” She plants a dry kiss on my cheek.

  Headache or no headache, I feel wonderful. I can do this. I can save Stephen. And maybe I can help countless others.

  I stand up, moving towards the pole between Saul and the woman cursed with despair. She needs my help so much more than the lost girl did.

  “Elizabeth, sit down.” Millie’s voice follows me. “You need to rest. We should take this slowly. No matter your talent, you’re still very new to this.”

  “No.” I don’t look at her. Gripping the metal pole for balance, I slide into the background. It’s so easy now, I can switch planes in a second instead of in minutes.

  Somewhere, like a distant echo, I think I hear Millie calling me. I ignore the sound, focusing on the woman draped in a curse that could kill her. My spirit stretches out. I’m more aware of it now; it’s full of empathy, propelled by the desire to heal. When the connection is made, I shudder, almost losing my footing. I can feel the power of this curse, so much greater than the spell I just drew from the girl. Bracing myself, I beckon the magic. The way it moves is repulsive. While the other curse was floating, this spell slumps from the woman’s back and oozes towards me. I’m fighting fear as the dark puddle touches my foot. It slides over my shoe and inside my pant leg. I don’t expect the spell to have this much substance, but it is slimy against my skin, leaving a sticky trail as it moves up my body. Still, I keep drawing it until I’m sure I’ve taken all of it from the w
oman and onto myself.

  I want to step back into the world and see if I’ve helped her. But I’m feverish. Heat skitters over my body. My skin is on fire. I look down at my arms to see red bumps as large as nickels appearing. They are swelling, bursting open into pus-filled sores. I scream. This is a nightmare. It has to be. I wrench myself out of the background, calling out for Millie.

  I think I hear her crying, but my vision is blurry. The sepia of the background is gone, but my world, full of its sounds and colors, is spinning.

  My skin is still covered in sores.

  “Help me.” I choke on the rawness of my throat.

  The fever slams through my head, knocking me off my feet and into Saul’s arms.

  Chapter 19

  “Stephen.”

  I open my eyes as soon as I hear my father’s voice calling through my dream.

  “Stephen, are you here?”

  He’s right in the doorway of my room, and for a moment, I am a child again. With the light behind him, he hasn’t aged. He is my father’s silhouette, come to wake me up for dinner. My mother is waiting in the kitchen. This is our home.

  “I’m here,” I say. Not a child’s voice at all.

  My father turns on the lights. This was the way he’d wake me up as a kid too—the full plunge instead of the gentle emergence.

  “Dad!” I yell, turning away from the brightness. There’s no way for me to use my hand to shield my eyes.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles (without turning the light back off). “It’s four in the afternoon. You shouldn’t be asleep.”

  “I thought you were working.”

  “I am. But the rest of my afternoon is email, so I figured I could do it here.”

  “You really don’t need to do that.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I’m not sure I want you to do that.”

  “Look, I’ll just be in the other bedroom.” He starts to leave.

  “No,” I say, stopping him. “You can’t do that either.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t dodge the things that I say. You can’t just go into another room. Maybe Mom put up with it, but I won’t.”

  It’s the way he woke me up. It’s the way he called it the other bedroom. It’s my fear that he is going to try to assert some control over me after all these years. I am not going to let him get away with it. I can’t.

  “Say what you want to say, Stephen.”

  I don’t want to destroy the bridge between us. I just want it to be a drawbridge, with me choosing when it’s up or down.

  “You need to give me warning,” I say. “You can’t just show up.”

  “Stephen—”

  My name hangs in the air for a moment. If he takes this chance to remind me that he pays the bills, I will never forgive him. I am already very aware of that.

  But I don’t find out what he’s going to say, because once my name fades, I hear the reason he’s stopped.

  Someone is pounding on the door.

  I get up on my feet and push past him. It’s not a delivery knock.

  It’s urgent.

  I look through the peephole and see Elizabeth and Millie and the one-eyed guy from Millie’s store.

  “Who is it?” my father asks behind me.

  I open the door—my father didn’t lock it behind him—and see that Elizabeth’s leaning a little on Saul. She looks pale and shaken.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “We just need to come in.”

  “What happened?” I ask as Saul leads her to the couch.

  Millie looks almost as stricken as Elizabeth.

  “Baby steps,” she says. “I told her baby steps.”

  “Who are these people?” my father asks.

  “Dad, stay out of this.”

  I’ve snapped too quickly. He’s not going to take that.

  “Stephen, I will not have you talk to me that way.”

  “Dad, now is not the time.”

  Millie walks over to my father and offers her hand. “I am Mildred Lund. I am Elizabeth’s . . . teacher. And this is Saul, one of my associates.”

  It’s as if a thought bubble actually appears over my father’s head, saying, What kind of teachers are these people?!?

  “Curses, Dad. They’re the ones teaching us about curses.” I turn back to Elizabeth. “What did you do?”

  “I ate too much. Or had food poisoning. Only, it was curses instead of food. Where’s Laurie? We couldn’t go to my house, just in case Mom was there.”

  “Laurie’s with Sean. Do you want me to call him?”

  “No, it’s okay.” Then she looks at Millie and Saul. “Really, it’s okay. You don’t need to watch over me.”

  Millie shakes her head. “What you did was so foolish. So dangerous. I will not teach you if you are not going to listen to me.”

  “I want to be alone with her,” I say. “Please, can everyone just leave?”

  Saul seems eager to take up my invitation, as if he’s not used to being in apartments that have windows in them. Millie is more reluctant, tutting over Elizabeth some more. My father doesn’t seem to include himself in my request, and remains standing right where he is.

  “I would love to rest for a little while,” Elizabeth says. She looks at Millie. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I promise I won’t do anything until then. I’ve learned my lesson. I went too far.”

  Millie seems satisfied by this. “No cursewatching,” she says. Then she points in my direction. “Especially not with this one.”

  I think Elizabeth’s already learned that lesson.

  Saul is at the door, and Millie follows, looking back at Elizabeth every two seconds to make sure she’s doing the right thing. My father closes the door behind them and makes a show of locking it.

  “Dad,” I say, “would you mind leaving us alone to talk?”

  “Stephen, I’m your father.”

  “And Dad, Elizabeth’s my girlfriend. I want to talk to her. You do not need to be in the room when I do.” Elizabeth looks at me like I’m being too harsh; she has no idea what the history is. “Look,” I say, tempering my tone, “come back for dinner. We can talk at dinner.”

  Now my father looks awkward.

  “I’m afraid I—well, I have dinner plans tonight.”

  I don’t have any right to be annoyed, but I am. My drawbridge, not his.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Breakfast,” my father says. “I will be by for breakfast.”

  “It was good to see you, Mr. Swinton,” Elizabeth says. Even though she’s clearly weak, she has enough strength for niceties.

  “Good to see you too, Elizabeth,” he says, and I’m surprised he’s remembered her name. As he goes into “the other bedroom” to get his laptop, I move to the couch with Elizabeth. Not to the point of crowding her—I know she needs air, space. But I want to be just out of the range of contact, in case she suddenly needs it.

  My father says nothing but goodbye before he leaves. Once he’s gone, Elizabeth keeps looking at the door, or at everything beyond the door.

  “It’s just us now,” I tell her. “I want to know everything.”

  She tells me about the subway, about what happened to her.

  “You can’t push it too far,” I say. “Not until you’re ready.”

  “I know that,” she snaps. “Please, don’t join the chorus on this one. It’s already loud enough.”

  We sit there at an impasse. She’s lost in her thoughts, and I’m lost in not being able to know them.

  “We have to find him, don’t we?” I ask. “That’s where this is all leading, isn’t it? If he leaves a trail of curses, we have to follow. That’s how we’ll track him down.”

  “I’m guessing that’s Millie’s plan,” Elizabeth says. She doesn’t seem happy about it. “But I also think she has much more faith in me than I deserve.”

  “Don’t say that,” I protest. “You don’t know—”

  “Stop. I wasn’t saying
that for your affirmation. Don’t treat me like a girlfriend who just asked, ‘Does this make me look fat?’ You have no idea what my abilities are. None of us do. And to have everything balancing on them . . . that’s a lot.”

  “Look,” I say, touching her face, using that touch to ask her to look me in the eye, “nothing is in the balance here. If we don’t find him, that’s fine. I stay invisible. I’ve done fine so far. It’s enough to have you see me. Nothing truly bad will happen if we don’t find him. No one’s going to die.”

  When I say this last sentence—No one’s going to die—she flinches, turns away.

  “What?” I ask. “Has he cursed someone to die? Is there more I don’t know?”

  Elizabeth shakes her head. “No. It’s just . . . Millie makes it sound like what I’m doing is so important. All of these people are cursed—and I’m one of the few people left in the world who can help. I don’t know how to deal with that.”

  I want to tell her how. I want there to be an answer. But the only answer is this:

  Our lives are different. Inexplicably, intrinsically joined, but different.

  “I was only scared after,” she tells me. “During it, I was too overwhelmed. Fear is beside the point when you’re faced with the thing you fear. But after, I knew I’d come close to something really bad. Curses aren’t passive things. They’ll fight back.”

  I tell her, “Even though I didn’t know it was a curse, I thought I could break it.” I haven’t had these memories in years, and now here they are, waiting to be given. “I thought there was a way for me to fix it. Not just prayers—I tried a lot of praying. But I also tried other things. Harmful things. I heard something on TV about shock therapy. I didn’t even know what that meant. But the next time I was alone in my room, I shoved my finger into a socket. I held it in there as long as I could. My parents had no idea. Luckily, it was too much, and I had to pull away. And for a second, I thought the pain was so strong that the next time I blinked, I’d be able to see my hand. I’d be visible. But of course I wasn’t. Part of me wonders if death will do it. That when I die, my body will finally be seen. My grandfather’s last laugh.”