by N. D. Wilson
Still not breathing, Cyrus set the waffle on the front desk and grabbed his collar. Inside out, the shirt would be as good as new. He tugged the dirty cotton up around his puffed cheeks and over his head. As he did, the room rocked with thunder, and the walls shook like the sides of a kick drum. The mirror rattled, and Cyrus staggered backward, tangled in his shirt. Jerking his arms free, he dropped the shirt and looked around, his ears buzzing like two beehives. The lights flickered twice and died. Had the motel been struck? Blinking in the dim light, Cyrus picked up the waffle and wobbled toward the glass doors. Well, he was a hero now, wasn’t he? The power was out, but the waffle was made. The Archer’s service would not be compromised. He put his bare shoulder against the front door and pushed out into the courtyard. The air was cooler, the clouds had already choked out the sun, and Mrs. Eldridge was screaming.
Cyrus jumped into a jog. “Hold on!” he yelled. “I beat it! Waffle up!” Bare feet slapping on the sidewalk, he rounded the corner into the parking lot as the first bird’s-egg raindrops spattered on the asphalt.
Mrs. Eldridge was once again perched on her second-story walkway, this time without her hat and robe. This time, she was holding a shotgun.
Cyrus froze. A long nightgown fluttered around Mrs. Eldridge’s scrawny legs, and her thin gray curls feathered in the wind. The butt of the big gun was pressed against her shoulder. The two barrels were aimed across the parking lot at an old, round-nosed, macaroni-yellow pickup truck stopped beneath the Pale Lady.
While Cyrus watched, Mrs. Eldridge took careful aim at the truck, and she fired.
two. BILLY BONES
THE SHOTGUN KICKED and spat forked fire. Mrs. Eldridge staggered back against the wall and slid down onto the walkway.
Steam crept out of the yellow truck’s dingy grille. The driver’s door opened slowly.
“No!” Mrs. Eldridge yelled. “Don’t make me do it, William Skelton! You know I will.” Still sitting, she levered open the shotgun and forced in two more shells.
Heavy drops slapped onto Cyrus’s bare shoulders as he looked from Mrs. Eldridge to the truck and back again. The sweet smell of rain on warm asphalt was mingling with the harsh taint of gunpowder. He took a step toward the stairs.
“Mrs. Eldridge!”
The old woman grabbed the rail and pulled herself up.
“Mrs. Eldridge?” Cyrus said again. One slow step at a time, he climbed up to the old woman’s side, glancing back at the truck. “Hey,” he said. “Maybe put down the gun. You’re going to kill someone.”
“Not that lucky,” she said. “But I’ll try.”
A lean, white-haired man in an ancient leather jacket and gloves stepped out of the truck and into the rain. He was old, skeletal, and his weathered face looked too small for his skull. Cupping his gloves around his mouth, he lit a cigarette and stepped backward toward the Pale Lady’s pole. Exhaling smoke into the rain, he leaned against the pole and dropped his hands to his hips.
“Eleanor Eldridge,” he said. “What exactly are you trying to pull?”
Mrs. Eldridge snorted. “Get out of here, Billy. Move along. You’re not wanted.”
The old man grinned. “Can’t keep me out, Eleanor, you old hen. But you know that already. Fire away.”
Cyrus focused on the man’s face. This was the guy. Room 111.
Electricity buzzed as long-dead neon chattered through forgotten veins. Above the old man, the Lady no longer slept on her pole. She was golden and dripping golden rain — her limbs, her bow, her arrow, all humming and flickering in front of the dark and drifting clouds. The Lady was alive.
The man patted the pole and stepped forward. “Let me on in, Eleanor. You know I’m not a body to fear.”
The rain surged. Raindrops slapped down in crowds, and the wind broke into a run. Cyrus tore his eyes off the Lady, blinking away streams, shivering. He was directly beside Mrs. Eldridge now. He could grab her gun if he needed to.
Mrs. Eldridge shook her head. Gray strands of hair were rain-glued to her cheeks.
“I made a promise, William Skelton. I promised Katie. You remember. You did, too, but only one of us would care about a thing like that.”
Cyrus glanced at Mrs. Eldridge. “Katie?” he asked. “Katie, like my mom, Katie?”
Eleanor Eldridge didn’t look at him. She sniffed loudly, and then pushed her dripping hair back from her face.
The rain had doused the old man’s cigarette. Flicking it away, he stepped forward. “That’s right, boy — your mother. At least if you’re one of the Smith mutts, and with that skin and that hair, I’m saying you are.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t be bragging about promise keeping, Eleanor, not with this Raggedy Andy beside you, shirtless and filthy in the rain. Maybe I’m here to keep a promise myself.”
Cyrus squinted through the rain at the old man, at the truck, at the crackling Golden Lady. What was going on? None of this seemed real. But it was. The rain on his skin. The soggy waffle and drooping napkins. The smell of gunpowder.
Mrs. Eldridge coughed. “One more step, Skelton, and you’ll get two barrels’ worth of shot in the gut.”
The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick, clear square of glass, holding it up between his gloved forefinger and thumb. Cyrus could see something dark and round in its center.
“You’re bluffing!” Mrs. Eldridge yelled, but her voice wavered. “It’s not real. We put them all in the collection!”
The old man’s eyebrows climbed. “Go ahead and shoot me, Eleanor. But only if you want this place to burn.” His white hair drooped on his spotted scalp. “Last call,” he said. “Going, going, and already gone!”
William Skelton raised his arm to throw. Eleanor Eldridge cocked two hammers and braced herself.
“Hold on!” Cyrus yelled. “Hold on! I don’t know what the fight is, but it doesn’t matter.” Still holding the waffle with one hand, he reached over and pushed the gun barrels to the side. “He can stay. It’s fine.” He turned to the old man. “You want a room, right? We can give you a room. Not a problem. Nobody needs to get shot, and nothing has to burn down.”
The old man grinned. “Listen to the boy, Eleanor. Nobody needs to get shot.”
“You’ve got no say here, Cyrus Smith.” Mrs. Eldridge clamped her wrinkled jaw, but her eyes were worried. “I made a promise to your mother and that’s that. Now get inside.”
“I don’t think he’s leaving,” Cyrus said. “And I own one-third of this motel, and I’m going to let him in.”
The old man laughed and slid his glass cube back into his pocket.
Mrs. Eldridge didn’t move. Potholes were overflowing now. The motel’s gutters rattled. Cyrus looked down at the waffle in his hands. Half-sponge, half-dough, it was swamping on the plastic plate. Hooking one finger into its side to keep it from falling, Cyrus tipped the plate and dumped the water. Then he held it out to Mrs. Eldridge.
“Your waffle,” he said. “It was done before the power went out.”
The old woman lowered her gun and took the plate. She didn’t look at it. Her veined eyes were searching Cyrus’s. “Me or him?” she asked. “I told Katie I’d keep you safe. If he stays, I can’t do that. Not from what’s coming. I leave. No more protection. Not from anything.”
“Protection?” Cyrus looked at the thin old woman, at her bone-white fingers on the black barrels of the shotgun. “No,” he said. “No more protection. But you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.”
Mrs. Eldridge seemed to deflate. She looked at the plate in her hand, and her lips were tight. Scowling, she turned back into her room and slammed the door behind her.
Cyrus hurried down the stairs and moved slowly toward the man called William Skelton. He stopped a car’s length away.
“How did you do that?” Cyrus pointed up at the Golden Lady. The wet asphalt warped and spattered her reflected light.
“The sign?” The old man shrugged. “The lightning, maybe. I didn’t do anything.”
“It c
ame on after you touched it.”
William Skelton smiled. “Did it? Well, it wasn’t me, exactly.”
Cyrus licked rainwater off his lips and wiped it out of his eyes. “What was the glass thing?”
The old man blinked slowly. Up close, his skin was the color of caramel, freckled with patches of paper white and bone gray. He smiled, once again reaching into his jacket. “Boy, you ever seen a lightning bug?”
“Every summer,” Cyrus said. “Why?”
“Not fireflies, son.” The old man held out the glass square. “I’m talking lightning bugs.” The glass was rippled and warped — homemade somehow. Frozen in its center, with six legs folded against its belly and black armor that glistened with blue, there was a heavy beetle. The glass was drip-free and dry. The rain didn’t seem to touch it.
Cyrus stepped closer, squinting. “A beetle?” In glass. Like for a microscope. He wasn’t sure what to say. What could be frightening about a beetle, even one the size of his big toe? But Mrs. Eldridge had definitely been scared, even with a shotgun.
Cyrus looked into Skelton’s eyes and nodded at the Golden Lady. “This did that?”
The old man shook his head. “Nope. This didn’t do anything. But you asked to see it.”
Cyrus inched closer, watching the old man.
Water ran down around Skelton’s eyes, dripping off sparse and antique lashes. He didn’t blink. Instead, slowly, he looked down at Cyrus’s bare shoulders, at his hands, at his feet.
The sky groaned, rolling thunder in its throat.
Cyrus reached for the old man’s extended arm, his cracked glove, the glass square and its prisoner beetle.
“Careful, she’s hot,” Skelton said, and Cyrus closed his fingers around the glass.
Electricity shot up his arm, buzzing in his joints, tingling in his teeth. He staggered backward and swung his arm down, shaking himself loose from the current. Glass shattered on the asphalt at his feet, and the heavy beetle tumbled free.
Skelton hadn’t moved. Hadn’t flinched. Gasping, Cyrus watched the beetle right itself and lever up its wing casings. The wings beneath them were much too small to do anything, especially in the rain.
William Skelton whistled between his teeth. Blinking, Cyrus tore his eyes off the beetle and looked at the old man.
“If I were you,” the man said, “and I wanted to stay alive, I’d get those bare feet off the wet ground and inside. Fast. She’s ready to lay her eggs, and she’s been waiting in that glass a long, long time.”
Cyrus’s feet began to tingle. With a pop and a crackle, the lightning bug launched and landed and launched again. Blue electric arcs trailed from its abdomen and flicked between its wings as it circled, bumblebee-heavy.
Cyrus spun away, asphalt tearing at the balls of his feet as he scrambled toward the motel. Four strides. Five, and he was in the courtyard. Ten, and he’d reached the front door. He jerked it open.
Thunder knocked him forward.
Antigone Smith yawned. She hated riding in the car. She hated it more than waffles. More than the Archer Motel and its wood paneling. More than the foul-smelling reception area. Of course, she only ever rode in the ancient red station wagon — the Red Baron — and she was sure that riding in the station wagon was less comfortable than riding in a wheelbarrow. It wasn’t as bad when Cyrus came along. He always sat in the permanently reclining front passenger seat like it was some kind of throne. While Dan fretted over traffic or fuel or strange sounds behind the dash, Cyrus would cross his arms like a mummy and give cool commands, refusing to call Dan anything but Driver.
If it weren’t for the mold on the seat belts, or the bloodred velveteen upholstery, Antigone wouldn’t have minded the backseat. At least it wasn’t angled like a dentist’s chair. But Dan never let her sit in the back when it was just the two of them, and so she was stuck staring at the fabric bubbles on the ceiling, kinking her neck trying to watch the road, or perching on the front edge of the seat and crossing her arms on the dash with her face inches from the glass — which made her feel like a bobble-head. If she were just a couple of inches taller, as tall as her lanky little brother, she might have been able to lean back comfortably in the broken seat. But she wasn’t tall by any standard, not for thirteen and a half, and feeling like a bobble-head was better than feeling like the seat was swallowing her whole.
Antigone sighed, adjusted the two worn camera cases that hung around her neck, ran her fingers through her cropped black hair, and then stretched her arms back until she touched the ceiling.
Rain chattered on the roof above her, and the station wagon’s badly timed wipers flailed uselessly at the water on the windshield. She couldn’t blame them. It was tough to wipe water off both sides of the glass. She dropped her hands into her lap and watched her older brother. His hands were tense on the wheel, and his jaw was grinding. Two years ago, he’d been a laid-back, sun-baked eighteen-year-old surfer thinking about college. Now he was thin and pale, eyes hollowed by stress, twenty going on forty.
“Dan?” Her brother didn’t answer her. “Dan, relax. We’ll be fine. We’re close.”
Lightning flickered silently in the distance. Dan twitched.
“Breathe, brother. Breathe,” Antigone said.
Dan shot her a glance. “What will breathing do?”
A train of small drips fell from the roof, spotting Antigone’s jeans. She watched the spots merge and grow. “Well,” she said, pitching her voice up like she was talking to a sulky five-year-old, “breathing puts oxygen in your blood, enabling your brain to function. It keeps you alive. Which is a good thing, Daniel Smith.”
“You know,” Dan said, “sometimes you’re worse than Cyrus.”
Antigone smiled. “At no time in my life have I ever been worse than Cyrus. Maybe—maybe—when I fed him your goldfish family, but I was only four.”
A heavy drip caught Dan’s ear and he flinched, quickly grinding it dry on his shoulder. “Cy skipped out of school today, didn’t he?”
Antigone scrunched her face and looked away.
“I should know,” Dan continued. “If I were halfway good at my job, I already would. But we both know that I’m not, and I don’t.” He looked over at his sister. “Just tell me. Did Cyrus ditch? Why would anyone skip the last day of school?”
“You’re not bad at your job,” Antigone said quietly. She knew she was deflecting, but it was true. “It’s not even your job. You should be off at college, not stuck with us in a rotten motel.”
Dan’s jaw retightened. Antigone straightened, brushed back her hair, and popped open one of the cases around her neck. Carefully, like she was handling some fragile newborn creature, she pulled out her ancient silent-movie camera. The camera was small, mostly brown, and textured like leather. Three generations of Smiths had worn silver smooth finger tracks around its skin. Rotating the heavy little box in her hands, Antigone pinched a lever on the side and wound it tight. Then she leaned forward and pointed the small lens at her brother.
“Smile, Danny,” she said. “I’m putting you at the end of the reel with Mom.” She flipped another lever, and invisible gears chattered, spooling eight-millimeter film.
“You need a new camera,” Dan said.
“You need a new car.” Antigone slowly panned across the windshield. The wipers were so out of sync, they were bound to tangle soon. But it didn’t matter. She knew the road, and they were in the final bend. One more corner and they’d see the Archer in the distance.
“Home again,” Antigone said.
Blurry through the storm, she could just make out something bright and golden. Squinting, she leaned even closer to the windshield. It was the Lady on her pole, the Archer Motel squatting behind her.
Dan nearly drifted into the other lane. “What’s going on? She’s lit. Is that a truck? Someone’s parked in the entrance. How is she lit?”
The front of the truck was yellow, but anything wet would have looked yellow beneath the glowing Lady. The truck’s bed was domina
ted by an awkward wooden camper.
As the station wagon slowed, Antigone could just make out two shapes in the parking lot. One of them began hopping.
“Tell me that’s not Cyrus,” Dan said, stopping the car. “What’s he doing out in this?”
Antigone pointed her camera toward her younger brother, shirtless in the rain. He was running. And something was sparking in the air behind him.
Antigone leaned forward. “Maybe he’s—”
Snarled lightning ripped the world in half. Thunder shook the car. Deaf, blinking, Antigone slammed back into her door, banged her head against the window, and dropped her camera. Dan yelped, punching the gas and the brake at the same time. The station wagon rocked and smoked in the quivering air.
Rain drummed on the roof. Antigone’s hands were shaking, and her eyes were seared with jagged white light. She could hear Dan breathing hard beside her. The world came slowly back into focus. The two wipers had grabbed on to each other. Now they twitched in place. Through the distorting streams on the windshield, Antigone watched a blurry man in the parking lot pull a small bag out of the truck and walk slowly toward the motel.
Dan sat up. “Is Cyrus okay?”
Antigone squinted. “Don’t know,” she said. She cranked down her window. Cool rain spattered on her face, but she hardly noticed.
The old man looked back at the golden sign. He nodded. Then he waved at the station wagon and disappeared into the courtyard.
Antigone kicked open her door and stepped into the road.
Cyrus lay panting on his stomach just inside the motel’s glass doors. Grit from the doormat was clinging to his skin, but he didn’t care. The world was swirling.
Cyrus tried to lift his head, then dropped it back to the ground. He couldn’t move, not just yet. Even lying on the floor, his body felt wobbly in the adrenaline aftermath of the lightning strike.
Slow, even breaths. In … out. His ears were ringing. Not ringing. More than that. They were crowded with a thousand screaming ants. He hadn’t known how high-pitched an ant’s screaming could be.