The Door

by Andy Marino

  “I’m so unbelievably sorry about what happened to your mom. Things got out of hand that night, and if I could take it all back and do it another way, I would. Seriously. I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe anything I say, but I think if you give yourself a little time, then you’ll understand. At least I hope you will. Because you were both so nice to me, it really bums me out that it got so messed up. That was some amazing lasagna, remember? Even though my arm is still a little sore from doing all those dishes.” He laughed. “Oh, man.”

  Furious, Hannah could barely listen to him speak. His words seemed to move in and out of the red mist in her head. And yet he was so beguiling, the way he moved as if sliding between particles of air, the universe clearing a path. She wondered, briefly, what kind of person he’d been when he’d been alive on earth the first time. Then she chased the thought away. The fact that she was wondering about him at all meant that she was once again caught up in his peculiar gravity, and she was ashamed of herself.

  “You threw her down and left her to die,” Hannah said. “I found her in the mud.”

  Kyle took a step toward her. He smelled of pine and woodsmoke. She told herself that he stunk, that his lies stunk, but it wasn’t true: His scent was comforting. She breathed out as hard as she could, pushing it away. His expression became grim. He nodded gravely and looked down at the floor. Then he raised his eyes back to Hannah.

  “This isn’t easy for you to hear right now, I know, but she got in the way of something way more important than any single earthly life. The reason we were banished in the first place is because we learned the truth about the city of the dead, and the reason we came back is to share it with everyone.”

  “You are a fraud,” Eri said coldly. Kyle ignored her.

  “Yeah, so, listen, I don’t know you, or anything,” Stefan said, “but you’re not exactly proving yourself to be a decent soul by keeping us tied up. Also that thing with your eyes …” He shook his head.

  Kyle regarded Stefan for the first time. “Painters Guild, right? Maybe you can do a group portrait of us. Return of the Banished, or something. It’ll be a classic.” Behind him, titters swept through the ranks.

  “No problem, I’d be happy to.”

  Hannah caught Eri’s glance and rolled her eyes. Stefan was trying to appeal to Kyle as if they were old pals, about to put this whole pesky incident behind them.

  “Let us go now,” Eri said.

  “You know, this concerns you” — Kyle nodded to Eri — “and you” — he smiled at Stefan — “as much as it does Hannah. So check it out.” He clapped once. “There is no Ascension. It’s a total lie. There’s no magical place with gardens and fountains and pretty birds and fluffy clouds that souls get whisked away to after they do something really cool that impresses the Watchers. Everyone’s been suckered into believing in some grand reward that never existed in the first place.” He shook his head sadly. “The truth is — the truth that me and my friends got banished for wanting other souls to know — is that nobody goes anywhere. The city is the beginning of our afterlives and it’s also the end. Everybody’s just here. That’s it. Here.” He gestured to the window, where Hannah could see the tip of a single minaret, sharp and focused against the sky. “The city, forever and ever.”

  “Wrong,” Stefan said. “People Ascend all the time. I’ve seen the Watchers come and —”

  “And what?” Kyle put his arms out, palms up. “What have you really seen?” He closed a hand into a fist, pretended to think for a moment, then pointed a finger at Stefan. “But! You bring up a good point. Where do souls go when the Watchers come and take them away?” He yelled over his shoulder. “Yo, Benjamin! That’s your cue, buddy!”

  At her father’s name, Hannah felt a cold knot form in her stomach.

  “Psst.” Nancy strained against the shadows around her shoulders to lean her head a little closer to Hannah. She began to whisper while Hannah craned her neck to see her father, who hadn’t yet appeared.

  “I want you to know I’m glad to be part of you, sis.”

  “Why are you telling me this right now?” Hannah whispered back.

  “I just wanted to tell you before I said good-bye.”

  “Ladies!” Kyle turned his attention toward their whispered conversation. “Something you’d like to share with the group?”

  “Nancy, don’t …” Hannah pleaded.

  “It’s my turn, dummy. I’m going to find out what happened to Belinda and Albert.” She stuck out her tongue. “See you around.”

  Nancy’s departure jolted Hannah’s body, stretching her bindings, whipping her head back in its shadowy cradle.

  * * *

  The Game Room at Cliff House was full of clocks. Two stately grandfathers with gold-plated faces and pendulums that swung behind little windows. Seven cuckoos mounted on the wall. Eleven unplugged radios gathering dust on an end table, and two that took batteries, flashing 12:00. One masquerading as a dartboard, another in the shape of a parakeet. A square mirror with hands of onyx that ticked as loud as a typewriter. Her father’s contribution was a clock in the shape of a grapefruit wearing sunglasses. Sometimes, for no apparent reason — or perhaps because it was broken — two small bulbs lit up behind the sunglasses and a tinny speaker at the navel said, “THAT’S JUICE-A-RIFFIC, BABY!”

  The game that Hannah and Nancy made up revolved around the grapefruit, and was the reason this room was called the Game Room instead of something more fitting, like the Clock Room. Hannah stood with her knees bent in a baseball player’s ready stance, waiting for the grapefruit to speak. She had played the game so many times that she could hear the little crackle of the speaker before it even said the word That’s, and could be well on her way to the largest grandfather clock before the grapefruit finished its sentence.

  Nancy screamed inside her head: Twelve forty-one!

  As soon as the speaker crackled, Hannah pulled open the glass door that protected the face of the grandfather clock and spun the minute hand around and around until it matched the time Nancy had chosen for this round of the game. Then she shut the door and moved on to the cuckoo clocks, nimbly dodging the birds that popped out as she twirled the hands to twelve forty-one.

  The game had only one rule: finish setting all the clocks before the grapefruit spoke for a second time. The tricky part was that nobody knew when that was going to be. Sometimes she had three minutes, sometimes thirty. Once an entire hour had gone by, but that was rare. The clock radios gave her the most trouble because they had to be plugged in to the power strip and then set. And recently, Nancy had added a new wrinkle: She liked to scream out other times while Hannah was trying to concentrate.

  Four fifty-eight!

  On this occasion, Hannah didn’t tell her twin to shut up. She just ran from clock to clock, savoring the sound of Nancy’s voice, wondering if she would ever hear it again.

  Nine thirty!

  Hannah breathed deeply, inhaling the memories of the Game Room: the smell of cheap plastic mingling with aged wood, the cuckoo clock that spit out a squirrel instead of a bird, the stain on the rug where she had spilled cranberry juice.

  Eleven thirteen!

  She was spinning the winged hands of the parakeet clock when Nancy laughed hysterically and the hands began moving by themselves. Behind her, the grandfather clocks chimed angrily. Cuckoos exploded from their perches.

  Three thirty-nine!

  Digital clock radios blinked with smiley faces.

  Six fourteen! Eight twenty-three!

  Dizzy from the frenzied chimes and the madcap revolutions of the minute hands, Hannah collapsed in the middle of the Game Room. Nancy couldn’t stop laughing.

  How do you like that, Kyle?

  Shadows grasped at thin air in the place Nancy had been. They hissed and sputtered and slunk away, reshaping themselves into patterns on the floor. Kyle investigated the empty space.

  “Interesting,” he said, kneeling down and tracing his finger along a floorboar
d. “How’d she do that?”

  Hannah could barely hear him over the racket of the Game Room clocks, which resounded in her head. She tried to make the presence of her twin linger, clinging desperately to the little habits that made Nancy real, like the way she picked at the ragged hole in her jeans. There was a brief ecstatic moment when Nancy seemed to pop back into life, full of obnoxious energy.

  Then the clocks went silent.

  Nancy tore herself away from Hannah so quickly that her sudden absence was a tremendous shock. Hannah’s body ached. She pictured the paint cans in the supply closet at the castle, vanishing one by one. A phrase formed in her mind — Nancy’s final contribution to Muffin Language.

  “ ‘Empty closet,’ ” Hannah said, “means ‘a sister who’s gone away.’ ”

  Kyle raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

  “Excuse me,” Stefan chimed in.

  “I wouldn’t expect a murderer to understand,” Hannah said to Kyle.

  Kyle stood up. His left eye was obscured by smoke that seeped from his tear duct. “I said I was sorry, Hannah. What more do you want me to do? This entire world is a lie. And we’re going to expose it. We are on the side of truth, here — you have to see that.” He turned to the girl with the oscillating fan. “Can you please find Benjamin Silver and tell him that his daughter wants to see him?”

  She nodded briskly and ran off.

  “I don’t want to see him,” Hannah said. “There was only the two of us, me and my mother. Nobody else.”

  “EXCUSE ME!” Stefan yelled, exasperated. He thrust his chin toward the roof deck, which had also drawn the attention of several banished souls.

  Outside the suite, Foundation meters were spinning out of control. Hands moved backward, springs popped, displays blinked 12:00. Hannah could feel a rumbling beneath her feet as the meters went completely haywire. She smiled.

  Nancy.

  A frantic meter man began rushing from dial to dial, tearing pages from his clipboard and crumpling them up before simply tossing the entire clipboard away. The Presidential Suite was thrown into turmoil.

  “Somebody deal with him!” Kyle yelled at nobody and everybody. It was the first time Hannah had ever heard him raise his voice. He seemed to forget all about his captives and took off running toward the deck. Outside, the meter man cupped his hands around his mouth and sent a blood-curdling noise halfway between a bellow and a shriek into the empty sky.

  Eri’s lips moved, but Hannah couldn’t hear anything over the man’s terrible cry. She felt her bonds slacken as Kyle got farther away. Eri managed to wriggle her watch free. Her sprites emerged, glowing faintly in the lightday sun, then brighter as they fanned out to fight the shadows. Hannah felt her bindings simmer. Dark branches writhed and hissed. Then Eri’s sword glinted and the bonds retreated, slashed and torn, to lick their wounds flat against the hardwood floor. Hannah rubbed circulation back into her arms and legs.

  The brain-rattling sound had drawn most of the banished to the roof deck, where there seemed to be some confusion about what to do. When the windows that faced the floating canal shattered inward, spraying the room with a torrent of foul-smelling water, Hannah assumed the wailing of the meter man had vibrated the glass into pieces. But then a banished weapon roared and the withering shot — a spinning top — sailed between two Institute submersibles that tumbled into the Presidential Suite, riding the crest of the canal.

  Hannah pulled Stefan down beneath a granite workbench. Water pooled about their knees and ankles. Eri’s sprites zipped past in a complex aerial weave, slamming into the first submersible as its hatch raised to reveal Throckmorton and Urvashi. Banished souls came charging back in from the roof deck to head off this unexpected invasion.

  Tucked away beneath the workbench, Hannah watched in horror as Stefan’s chest began to change its shape. Something was crawling under his sweater. When Charlemagne popped his head up through the collar, Hannah burst out laughing.

  If only Nancy were here to see the chaos she’d sparked, Hannah thought. From her hiding spot she could look out upon the canal side, where more Institute subs had begun to arrive, disgorging troops. Throckmorton led one squad, Urvashi another, and the room became a blinding swirl of Institute sprites. The banished did their best to form a skirmish line to protect their tarp-covered treasure. Hannah picked out the girl with the plastic fan weapon. The man next to her wielded two kitchen hand mixers reshaped into pistols. A woman in camouflage fatigues hoisted a shoulder-mounted tube while another loaded it with what appeared to be laundry.

  There was a standoff.

  Stefan leaned close to Hannah’s ear, Charlemagne puddled around his collar like a gaudy necklace. “Maybe we can steal one of those subs?”

  She considered this. Where would they go? Back into the depths of the lake, through a different network of tunnels?

  Before she could answer, the meter man’s shriek came to a sudden end.

  “Maybe we can steal,” suggested Charlemagne in Stefan’s voice. Hannah peeked around the side of the workbench. Beyond the meters, dots had appeared in the sky like tiny holes in a sheet. Her ears picked up a low buzzing sound that she had heard before. With a start, Hannah realized that the meter man’s cry had been a summoning.

  Then Kyle burst into the suite, screaming a single word.

  “WATCHERS!”

  Kyle’s warning was the green light for several things to happen at once.

  A banished soul accidentally discharged his weapon (a plastic PVC pipe strung with Christmas lights and trailing a power cord that plugged into a backpack). Throckmorton ducked as a baseball grazed the top of his helmet and embedded itself in the glossy hull of a submersible.

  A wave of humid air blasted through the suite, announcing the arrival of the hornet ships. Hannah’s skin broke out into a damp sweat. The entire room fell into a prickly stillness as everyone paused, sick and unsettled.

  With a sound like ice cracking on a frozen lake, the submersible that had been struck by the baseball began to rust. The steel alloy frame crumpled, the open hatch sagged and dislodged itself. In seconds, the vessel was a forgotten piece of scrap metal. Hannah thought that decaying was worse than blowing up. At least an explosion wasn’t sad.

  The Institute struck back. At the very edge of the battle lines, Eri disappeared into the lightning swerves and twirls of a thousand sprites, sword slashing furiously.

  “We have to get her out of there,” Stefan said as he crawled out from beneath the bench. Hannah pulled him back in, just as a stray shirt from the laundry cannon landed on a swivel chair in front of their hiding spot. Immediately, the shirt spread itself out, fabric suctioning like an octopus. Hannah watched, disgusted, as the shirt’s armpits stained themselves yellow. The chair’s molded plastic shape became rigid and uptight. Before her eyes, the design of the chair moved back in time through rustic kitchen furniture, then rough-hewn stools, before collapsing in a pile of rotten old wood.

  “Thanks,” Stefan said shakily. “I could have been babyfied.”

  Cautiously, she peeked out. Kyle had ducked behind a sofa with an old white-haired nurse and a man in a cowboy hat. They were sprinkling a jar of Foundation inside the barrel of a gun shaped like a weathervane. It was a good spot: Kyle was shielded from the battle with the Institute, and angled so he could ambush the Watchers, whose hornets were just beginning to land on the roof deck — six, seven, eight of them — setting down on twiggy legs beside the meters.

  Turning back to Stefan, Hannah suddenly felt as if the city had just opened its arms to her. In her mind she was already flying free, leaving the Dockside Arms far behind.

  “You’ve got a weird look on your face,” Stefan said nervously.

  “We could steal one of those,” she said, to hear how convincing it sounded. Not very. She tried again. “We could definitely steal one of those.”

  “One of those what?”

  “Hornets,” she said. “Eri could probably fly it. Right? And then we’d re
ally see what the Watchers see. We’d be inside one of their ships! We could fly it straight to my mother’s house.”

  Stefan opened his mouth but no words came out. A little boy scampered past their hiding place, hands clutching a neon squirt gun. She could hear Urvashi’s voice calling out commands.

  “Let’s go,” Hannah said. “Before somebody wins.”

  Stefan was incredulous. “You think we can just waltz onto one of their ships?”

  Charlemagne un-necklaced himself and crawled up the side of Stefan’s head, curling his tail around Stefan’s ear. He stared at Hannah with his eager liquid eyes.

  “Not without a disguise,” she said. “You know what a Watcher looks like, don’t you? The tattoo?” She nuzzled the paint-lizard. His body stole its pattern from the granite of the workbench.

  “Of course I do,” Stefan said.

  “I’m not talking to you.” Hannah poked Charlemagne with a tentative finger.

  “Oh no,” Stefan said. “No way.” The paint-lizard glooped down over his face, swimming like a blurry eel.

  “Tattoo,” said Charlemagne. “Watcher.”

  “See? He gets it!” Hannah said.

  Stefan sighed. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  * * *

  The Watchers arrived cloaked in moist, chewy air, like a midsummer swamp. Even Hannah’s eyeballs felt coated in slimy heat.

  She left the army jacket hanging on a hook beneath the bench, worried that someone might recognize her in it. Stefan wore her checked flannel over his striped sweater. The mismatch seemed to throw Charlemagne into gleeful overdrive and their faces swam with his plaid energy. They stumbled through ankle-deep water, sloshing past wrecked submersibles and overturned desks. As long as they walked side by side, shoulders pressed together, Charlemagne was stretchy enough to splatter across both of their faces at once.

  Just two more Watchers out for a stroll through the battle.

  In the center of the room the tarp hiding the mysterious object fluttered. Shadows slithered around it, crisscrossing in the middle, securing it like a ribbon-tied gift. As Hannah and Stefan passed it, a projectile came screaming out of the fray near the canal, heading straight for them.