“That was a long time ago, Stephen. You were younger then. You were a kid. You’re older now. Look at what you’re wearing. You’re in a uniform.”
Stephen blinked and studied his hands. He looked down at his chest and examined the sweater with the police insignia. He looked around at the diner again, but this time he stopped on different objects. The counter. The display case. The menu. Then he looked back at the bathrooms, where he thought his sister was.
“She’s taking drugs,” he said calmly. “That’s what they’re doing. That’s what her friend brought. That’s what she was waiting for.”
This piece of information must have kicked off a chain reaction, because I saw him coming back more and more.
“You can’t be here,” he said, and this time, there was more certainty in his voice. “Rory, you can’t be here.”
“Well, guess what,” I said. “I’m here. And we’re going to leave. Together.”
“I need to wait for Regina.”
“She’s not here,” I said. Whether she was or not, I didn’t know for sure, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t. This place was like a spiderweb—if something moved in another part of it, I was sure I’d feel the shake, the tiny vibrations. This was like being in my own mind—I knew I was the only person in there, even though I had no actual proof of that fact.
“Come on,” I said, gesturing toward the door. Stephen did not move. This news about Regina had silenced him again, and he frowned at the back wall. I had to get him talking once more and convince him that he should come with me.
“I need you to think,” I said. “You’re good at thinking. Come on. You know who I am. I’m Rory. What’s the last thing you remember?”
He struggled with this one. His breathing—here, he was breathing—quickened. He took his glasses off and shut his eyes and covered his face with his hands.
“Stephen, look at me.”
I reached over and took his hands from his face.
No boom. Just my hands on his.
I held them from across the table, and he looked down. He wasn’t crying, but he was struggling—a confusion so deep it had become fear. I’d never seen him like this.
“You were so pissed at me because I got kicked out of Wexford. You told me to go back to school. Do you remember?”
This got a slight nod.
“Good. That’s good. You remember I was kicked out. You put a phone in my coat. You followed me. And some people took me. They kidnapped me. You came after me. Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely.” His voice was uncertain.
“Jane took me. Her name was Jane. She took me, and you followed. And there was an accident. You pulled the car you were driving in front of Jane’s car.”
“I did?”
“You did,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “Callum and Boo came. You guys got me out of Jane’s car. You took us back to your father’s flat.”
A glint of recognition at that.
“Regina destroyed the flat.”
“Regina isn’t here. I’m here.”
“She tore the curtains.”
He took his hand from mine and reached up and felt along his hairline, where he’d been injured. I’m not sure he even knew why he was doing it. There was no cut there now. I saw him trying to piece it together. I think he knew, but it was a vague knowledge, like something he’d heard once, a long time ago.
“Stephen, listen to me. We were in the flat together.”
“She said I couldn’t go to Eton.”
“It was us in the flat. You. Me. Callum and Boo.”
“I told her I had to go. I had to.”
Words weren’t going to do it. I got up and joined him on his side of the booth. I had no idea if this was possible, but I was doing it anyway. It was the only thing to do. I took his face in my hands and for a moment he looked utterly lost, utterly hopeless.
I kissed him.
This was not like any other experience I ever had. This was not a moment in time. I’m not sure the diner was there anymore, but he was. He was warm. He was unsure at first, but he was kissing me back. His body eased, his shoulders slumped. His heart was going strong.
Wherever I was, right now, I had no desire to leave. If this was it, I would stay.
He stopped the kiss, but not abruptly. Our lips remained together for a half a minute, closed, barely touching. It was like this bit of contact was holding all of reality together. He leaned back and looked at me, and this time, he saw me. The lights were on.
“We were in the flat. There was an accident. We went to the flat. And then we . . .”
“We kissed,” I said. “Like that.”
“We did,” he said. “Callum came in.”
“And said he lost a bet.”
“And said he lost a bet. And I went into the living room to sleep . . .”
And that, I guess, was where the memory ended for him.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” he said. He was less fearful now, but he definitely didn’t sound sure of anything. This must have been some kind of rising hunch.
“Well, I’m here,” I said, taking his hand. “And we’re leaving.”
“Why are we leaving?”
“Because you’re not supposed to be here either,” I said.
“Where am I supposed to be, Rory?”
That last word, when he said my name—it was said like a question. A pure question asking for reassurance, asking for some kind of proof or explanation. At that moment I understood the impulse that led him to drive a car into another car. It was so simple. I wasn’t going to let anything hurt him. This was on me. I would get him out of wherever we were. How we did that was less clear. But it started with getting up.
“Come on,” I said, guiding him out. He followed, but stopped at the door and looked toward the bathroom again.
“She’s not in there,” I said.
The furrowing stopped, and he blinked quickly and adjusted his glasses.
“No,” he said. “I think you may be right.”
We stepped out on the street.
22
THE AIR WAS DIFFERENT NOW—IT HAD REGAINED THAT particular London quality. A little bit like seawater, a faintly metallic tang, a bit of pollution and old smoke. The moon had become intensely bright, washing the streets with a bald white light. This moon was going overboard, glowing like the sun. The change of air seemed to affect Stephen. He stood up straighter and lifted his chin to look around.
“I’m a little confused,” he said as we stood on the empty street together. “I can’t remember much.”
“I’ll remember for you for now,” I said. “Let’s go back the way I came.”
Except that street was no longer there. When we turned the corner, Piccadilly Circus was gone and we were in a neighborhood of houses—quiet, stately ones in tidy rows. It was vaguely familiar to me in the sense that it looked like so many neighborhoods in London I’d passed through.
“Okay,” I said, “I take that back. I might need you to remember more. Does this place look familiar to you?”
Stephen stood in the middle of the street and slowly took in the entire scene.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “West London, most like. But there are no landmarks, and . . .” He walked to the corner and examined the view up and down. “No street signs. Where the hell are the street signs?”
The old Stephen was coming back more and more with every second as he realized how little sense all of this made. He stood at the end of the street and looked at the moon, looked at the emptiness of it all.
“What exactly happened?” he said. “I remember going after you. And I remember getting you out of the car, and we went back to the flat. I know we . . . I know what we did, you and I. I think I went to bed then, maybe, but I can’t remember anything after that
.”
He had to be told. I suppose here, and now, wherever we were, in whatever London this was. This was not something I wanted to do, but clearly it needed to be done. The goal now was to get out, and it looked like the more Stephen could put the picture together, the more awake he got. So he would need the truth, even if the truth scorched my throat as I tried to make the words.
“You died,” I said. “Sort of.”
I guess this hadn’t quite occurred to him yet.
“I . . . died? Of what? I only cut my head. I had a little headache . . .”
“You were bleeding inside, on your brain.”
“When did I die?”
“We couldn’t wake you up in the morning. We called an ambulance. You were in the hospital. They said they couldn’t save you . . .”
Stephen had died. He died. And now I was telling him all about it, the one person I’d needed to talk to all this time. I had to tell him he died.
“There was a machine . . .”
I tried to get some of it out, but I gagged on the words. I physically couldn’t do it. I coughed, and then I started crying. Stephen got blurry in my vision, but I was aware that he was moving closer, and I rushed to him. The next thing I was aware of was being held by Stephen in the middle of the street and sobbing into the front of his sweater and holding on to him like he was the only thing in the world. Which, I guess, he was. His embrace was the most solid thing I’d ever felt. His hand was on the back of my head and I heard his heartbeat in my ear.
The rest of it went away for a while. It didn’t matter.
I eventually stopped crying, but we stayed as we were, in the road.
“I remember now,” he said.
I stepped back to look at him. He probably should have been the one freaking out, but he wasn’t. I checked his expression to make sure he was okay, and he seemed to be. The information was now in place, and with Stephen, information was something that could be worked with.
“I remember you were there,” he said. “I don’t know where. I remember you talking to me and telling me not to go, and you were holding my hand. You said not to go, and so . . . I didn’t. I suppose. Because I’m here. Am I here? Is this real?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“This could be residual brain activity.”
“Okay,” I said. I coughed out the last of the throaty tears and cleared my face. “I’ll tell you something you couldn’t make up.”
I scoured the yard sale of my mind, looking for something to hand him. Something stupid. Something pointless. Something that I hadn’t told him before because there would be no reason.
“I used to work in an ice cream place called Grunt’s . . .”
“Grunt’s?”
“That’s the guy’s name. It’s this place out by the bayou, off the highway. It looks like a big smiling ice cream cone, but it hasn’t been painted in about twenty years, so it looks like a smiling ice cream cone whose face is falling off. And one time the soft-serve machine failed and started dumping out soft serve for, like, an hour. And there was nothing I could do. So I started catching it in a bucket, and I took it out back to dump it. And this woman in our town, Miss Allouette, who is pretty much the worst person in town? She saw me and, I don’t know if she thought I was stealing or something, but she pulled over her car? She’d just come from the hairdresser because she had her do—I mean, tight curls, big hair—and she said she was going to call the cops and tell them I was stealing. I was trying to hold the door open, but when she was yelling at me, I got locked out, and I got so pissed off at everything because I hated this job anyway that I dumped the entire bucket of soft-serve crap on her trunk. Which I thought was funny but she said that it ate at the paint or something and she made my parents give her three hundred dollars and I got fired and then I started working at the burrito place. There. Does that sound like something your brain would make up?”
After a moment, he said, “No.”
“I can tell you more stuff. I can tell you gross stuff.”
“No, I . . . I think I believe you. I think that wherever we are, we’re there together. I mean, it’s all possible, I suppose. Considering what we see all the time. Multiple dimensions or . . . I don’t know. But if I’m here, and you say I’m dead, and you’re here . . .”
I saw something move. It was a yellow car, and it was driving slowly toward us. We both watched it turn onto a road a street up. I recognized the car right away, because you didn’t see many like it—colored like butter, classic, long and curvy. There were two figures in the front seat. I could only see their very similar outlines, but that was enough.
“I think that’s them,” I said.
“Who are they?”
“Sid and Sadie.”
I looked around again, and suddenly things started to make sense. I had been here before. This was Jane’s neighborhood.
“Sid and Sadie?” he said. “The names sound familiar.”
“They’re friends of Jane’s,” I said. “I don’t think we want them to see us.”
“I think it’s a bit late for that,” he said.
The car was heading for us, driving slowly down the middle of the road. We walked faster. The moon that had been so full was now only half, and it had suddenly gotten cold. By the time we hit the corner, it was snowing. I turned to look for the car, and it was gone.
“They’re gone,” I said.
“No they aren’t. Look where we are.”
A single street sign appeared at the end of the tiny road where Jane lived. Hyssop Close. We took the few steps down to the house. The car was parked in front, there was music playing, and their house was the only one with any lights on. We stood on the pavement, looking down the walk, up the steps, at the door hanging open in the cold like an unfinished thought.
“Are we planning on going inside?” Stephen asked. “I don’t think we can stay out here.”
The snow was falling crazily. There was already an inch or two on the ground, despite the fact that it had only been going for a few moments. I shivered violently as the wind kicked up. Stephen’s sweater was going white from the accumulation. The outdoors was turning on us, and we had exactly one place to go. It felt inevitable.
“Before we do,” Stephen said, “I need to understand. You said I died. So if I died and I’m here, did you . . .”
“It’s complicated,” I said, brushing snow from my lashes.
“Try me. You said you came to get me. What exactly does that mean? What did you do?”
“I did what I had to. And now we just have to find the way back. Which I guess starts here.”
“What do you mean, you did what you had to do?” He sounded angry. “Rory, what exactly did you do?”
“You drove in front of a car. So we’re even, okay?”
“I need to know,” he said. He was very loud, possibly to be heard over the shriek of the wind, or maybe just because he was mad. The worsening weather filled me with urgency.
“I did a ceremony,” I said.
“What sort of ceremony?”
“A weird one! Does it even matter?”
“Yes!”
“Look,” I said, “Jane said there was a way you could come back. She would show me. The deal was, I’d come for you but I had to find them for her. And now we’re in front of their house and we can’t stay out here. So I guess I have to deal with them. We just have to be careful. They kind of murdered ten people.”
Stephen stared at me.
“You’re joking.”
“The point is, there’s a way back.” I pointed at the dark doorway. “I think they’re kind of crazy, but they may know where it is. They did the ceremony too, and it didn’t work, and they ended up frozen and asleep, like you. Except they’ve been that way since 1973. I’m not saying we have to take them back with us, but they are literally the o
nly other people here. I think we have to go inside at least.”
He shook some of the snow from his arms and looked again at the house, then reached around on his belt and produced a small flashlight, which, to our surprise, actually worked.
“Murdered ten people?” he said.
“Probably.”
He pointed the beam at the doorway as he stepped forward.
“Let’s not bring them with us, then,” he said. “Agreed?”
We stepped forward together, the snow crunching under our feet. I had a sudden sweeping recollection of home. Every year in my town, the fire station puts on a haunted house to raise money. They do it in the firehouse reception room, which is this big linoleum rectangle that you can rent for weddings and fried oyster nights or whatever you want. It’s a blank space with an industrial kitchen, ready to be filled. The haunted house is the biggest event of the year. All the volunteer firefighters and their families spend about two weeks getting it ready. They turn the room into a maze using room dividers and cardboard. Considering that and all the fake cobwebs, you’d think it would be a fire hazard. We always sort of assume it’s not, because it’s in the firehouse. Or if it is (which, given our town, it probably is), at least the fire can get put out really quickly.
Going to this haunted house is a rite of passage in Bénouville. You have to do it. There’s a lot of discussion as to when kids should be allowed to go. The minimum age is eight, and that’s the age I insisted I should go. My parents are the kind that like to encourage self-reliance. They are also some of the least superstitious people I know, and they have always been eager to show me that things that my neighbors think are going bump in the night are rabid possums and alligators and other neighbors. They were fine with me going when I was eight, and I was so proud of this fact, I wore it like a badge for a full week. “I’m going,” I said to everyone, while coolly eating my organic dried fruit jerky. This was a Very Big Deal on the playground, and for that week I felt like a pioneer, someone brave, someone with her eye on the horizon. I had a ticket for Friday night. Uncle Bick was going to take me through, because he was friends with a lot of people in the fire department. It never occurred to me once that entire week that this might actually be scary. And it’s not that I was brave—it’s more that I didn’t think ahead. I was in the moment, living it up on the monkey bars. It wasn’t until we pulled up to the actual firehouse and I saw this girl who was two grades ahead of me sitting on a concrete parking bumper crying uncontrollably that I realized that maybe there was something to this haunted house thing. That was the moment I remembered the details of the stories—how people would reach out for you in the dark. How they’d follow you. How you’d put your hands into jars, and they would be full of spiders and millipedes and brains . . . and how one year a kid went in and actually went insane.
The Shadow Cabinet Page 21