Messenger 93

by Barbara Radecki

  Train-effect of people passing in front of the person, obscuring his identity.

  Infinity Girl pushes through the anonymous crowd. She gets closer. She’s almost there. And then she realizes it’s not the person she seeks. She collapses to the ground. One of her superhero mirrors breaks. She picks up two long shards. A moment of hesitation. A decision. She aims the shards at her own body. She smashes all the mirrors that cover her. Naked and broken, she falls in a heap. The crowd continues to mill about her, rushing in both directions.

  I drew one last panel and wrote inside it: The End.

  What a waste.

  I’d always promised myself — no love story. There was nothing true about them. They always, in some way, killed the hero in the end.

  I shoved the newspaper into my backpack, bunched my clothes on top of it, then pulled myself up and made myself keep going.

  I TRIED TO KEEP to one direction, but had the constant, suspicious feeling that I was walking in loopy circles. I couldn’t tell if it was late afternoon or early evening by the time I found the first trail. It was marked with a blue rectangle that was painted on the bark of a smooth old tree. Farther down, there was another blue-painted rectangle. When I got to that tree, there was another blue-painted rectangle on a farther-off tree.

  The trail was a trail, which means there were well-worn parts where I could go fast — as fast as I could, despite everything — and there were trickier parts where I had to go slowly, scaling narrow passages over rocks and roots.

  There was always the pressing urgency of waning light, of being caught in the middle of nowhere with no shelter and a long night ahead. With every next degree of darkness, my senses heightened. I tried to tell myself there was nothing to fear, but fear kept catching up to me.

  It started tracking me at true nightfall. It was a simultaneous awareness that I’d lost the light to see the trail, and that a very specific crackling of groundcover in the distance was steady and getting closer.

  Witiko. Now it was Vivvie’s voice echoing in my memory-chamber. An ice-hearted cannibal-zombie that chased you through the woods.

  There was a tremendously loud crack behind me. Something really big.

  The serial killer.

  I froze and didn’t breathe as I turned my head around to see if I could see anything. But it was like I was up against a monolithic wall of black. Caught as darkness closed in on me like a giant crushing compactor.

  The stalking thing froze too. Or at least I didn’t hear it in the next few seconds.

  I couldn’t run. If it was a creature, it would be faster than me, would have better night vision, would be able to smell me from miles away. If it was the serial killer, he probably knew these woods better than I did. I was standing there like bait on a hook.

  Then my body took over. It began to hustle me through the forest.

  I succumbed to its primitive decree. I ran.

  Somehow I slipped past trees and over obstacles on the ground. Somehow I made it to the next step and the next step without falling or breaking my leg. My breathing was too loud in my ears now, and I couldn’t hear anymore if the thing/person was still following me. I couldn’t stop to take stock.

  Soon the light changed again and I could see the forest clearly, and there were long shadows everywhere like in daytime. I saw it was the moon rising above the trees. It was bruise-yellow and its waxing edge was smudged and sloppy. I ran faster now, desperate to escape the penitentiary shadow-bars of tree trunks and silhouettes.

  I ran until, by some miracle or mathematical inevitability, I burst out of the labyrinth and landed on a dirt road.

  Left or right. I didn’t know which was the better choice. But I thought I saw the hard rim of a domed shape above the trees to the left. A building, or a rock-face, I couldn’t tell which.

  I glanced over my shoulder and checked back the way I’d come. The silence was electric, like an accumulation of a dozen bated breaths. Then something snapped again.

  I turned left down the road and ran.

  My movement wasn’t athletic or smooth. It was always at the edge of disaster, my muscles, wobbly and failing, were spurred only by adrenaline and instinct.

  I rounded a curve in the road and the domed shape that rose over the trees was only a few hundred yards away from me, sitting in an otherwise empty clearing, highlighted by the bright and sloppy moon. A rusted old water tower.

  3

  THE WATER TOWER WAS immensely high, maybe seven stories. Its fat tank was propped on four stilt-legs, and two of the legs were also ladders that led up to a railed walkway that circled the tank. There was no fence to stop me from climbing up. So I kept running and leapt onto the closest ladder and grabbed the rusted metal rails and pulled myself up.

  I’d scaled maybe twenty rungs when I finally dared to stop and check behind me again. There was nothing in the clearing. It was a long, rectangular field, mowed or maintained by someone. Nothing was stalking me from it. Even the short blades of grass weren’t moving. I checked the woods from where I’d come. They were a ways off, but the moon was so bright, its light shone in like a high-powered lantern.

  Something just inside the tree line shuffled and stopped. I could feel its eyes on me.

  I launched myself up the ladder.

  It was terrifyingly steep and narrow and rickety. I didn’t look down anymore. If I did, my legs would give out. I’d never tested my fear of heights, had never been on a rollercoaster or zipline or circus-trapeze, or any of those manufactured tests of courage, but I had a sudden certainty that heights were not my thing. The bottoms of my feet and backs of my legs were numbing out.

  There were too many rungs. My breath was fading fast, my muscles had reached the end of their strength. But I kept climbing, hand over hand, step over step. Like I was climbing to the moon.

  When I finally pulled myself up onto the ringed walkway, I couldn’t even stand. I collapsed onto the rusted-cage flooring and panted. I checked the clearing around the tower, and then the forest beyond it. As far as I could see, no creature or stalker had skulked out. Not yet, anyway.

  I stared and stared at the edge of the forest, waiting for whatever it was to come out and find a way to get me. But, despite all my efforts to stop it, my body shut down and my eyes closed.

  WHEN I WOKE UP next, the first thing I saw was a thousand stars glimmering in a velvet-black sky. The moon was still alive, but it had spun farther away. For that one moment I was in awe and not imagining some horrific death filled with my screams and hemorrhaging blood.

  Then I noticed the swollen belly of the water tank at my side, and I remembered where I was. I didn’t want to, but checked the other way and saw that I was on the narrowest precipice of a walkway, only one thin rusted crossbar between me and a seven-story plummet to the ground.

  I sat up, but my body was stiff and sore like nothing I’d ever felt before. Violent shivers spasmed my muscles. Then I realized how cold it was. Running had kept me warm for hours, and now there was nothing to hold the cold at bay.

  Dusty’s words came back to me: Warmth comes from within. Go into your own self. Become the warmth.

  I tried it. Tried channeling heat. Tried magnetically pulling it to me and forcing it into my cells. But it didn’t work. If anything, I was colder than ever.

  Very carefully, I took my backpack off and rummaged inside for the extra two sweatshirts and pairs of socks. It was a desperate high-wire act as I stripped off my coat, gingerly trying not to drop anything, and layered on the extra clothes.

  When I pulled on the first sweatshirt, I noticed Gray’s knife strapped to my left arm. Did it make me feel safer knowing it was there? Or was it more terrifying knowing I could use it?

  I put my coat back on over the layers, pulled the hood over my head, and strapped my backpack on again. I zipped every zipper, snapped every snap, then covered my hands with the s
ocks so I was as bundled as could be.

  The cold had sunk deep. If possible, I shivered even more.

  I scanned the area. I couldn’t tell if my stalker was still watching from the forest. There was no stakeout at the bottom of the tower’s four stilt-legs. It was so far to the ground, my stomach twisted and my head spun. I couldn’t imagine ever making it down again.

  She will fall.

  That’s when I understood. The whole time, the messages had been warning me.

  You will go where you would not go. You will see what you would not see.

  They’d been trying to open my eyes to what I already knew.

  It’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough.

  It wasn’t rabid wolves or fairy-tale monsters or fugitive serial killers that were going to get me. It was loneliness.

  As she falls, so do we all.

  Krista ran away because of it. We were all running away from it.

  The truth is the way.

  This was how I was going to disappear. Forever lost on the caged walkway of some abandoned water tower. Nothing to remember me by but my rotting flesh and bones. No one ever finding them.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18

  ONE DAY UNTIL THE FALL

  1

  IT WAS DAYBREAK WHEN I woke up again, with the sun just appearing at the brink of the world. I was wedged between the tank and the inner edge of the walkway. So cold, my body didn’t even bother to shiver. I was still alive, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  I listened closely. There was a dull roar of wind in the distance, the flourish of a million leaves. But I didn’t hear the countdown. She will fall in one day. Where was it?

  Had something happened to Krista? Had she fallen already? Was it all over?

  Images of her deadly plummet rocketed through my brain — her tumbling backwards into a black abyss, an open-mouth scream ratcheting her face, her falling, falling, falling out of my reach. All my fault.

  A swirl of movement caught my eye and I looked up. There they were, perched on the guardrail only a few feet away. Six silent crows.

  “Say it,” I said.

  Their six glossy heads twitched left and right. But they didn’t caw. Didn’t say a word.

  “Say it: She will fall in one day.”

  They didn’t seem to care that I was there. They weren’t scared of me.

  I banged my fist against the rusty grated walkway. “She will fall in one day. Say it!” The metal was still echoing from my punch: channnnnnnngggg. I noticed the thick layer of socks encasing my hands and wished Gray was there so we could laugh.

  “So is that it then?”

  The nearest crow twitched its head to look at me. The others kept their attention out towards the woods.

  “You’re not talking to me? You bring me all this way, and I don’t find Krista, and then you leave me up here all by myself?”

  Two of the crows took a few steps away along the rail.

  I was getting louder, angrier. “I’ve lost everything, you know.” I thumped a socked hand against my chest. “I don’t even have me anymore.” The one crow was still watching me. I jabbed a socked hand at it. “I didn’t find Krista. We never found Jocelyn. Gray hates me. I’m made up of lies. What was it for?” I was yelling now. “Tell me! What was it for?”

  The closest crow lifted its wings and gained a bit of air and flew-hopped a few feet down the rail to join its buddies.

  I jabbed the air again. “Joan of Arc heard a voice that was supposed to help her win a war.” My heart was constricting. “But in a war there are two sides, aren’t there? Innocent people die in wars.” In a moment my heart was going to burst. “And all those other prophets and messiahs — the good ones, the selfless and noble ones — they didn’t make the world a better place, did they?” My railing voice echoed off empty treetops. The crows ignored it. “You sent me out here for nothing.” I pounded the rail and it channngged and still the crows didn’t care. “Save her, save us all? Who has ever ever SAVED THE WORLD?!”

  “Nineteen hours.”

  “What?!” I yelled at nobody.

  Nineteen hours.

  There it was. Whispering in my ear.

  I torqued myself around to look behind me. Of course nothing was there.

  HURRY.

  This time not a voice, but written on the water tank in tall all-cap letters.

  HURRY.

  The crow had given me another countdown: Nineteen hours.

  It was morning, so mathematically speaking, nineteen hours would arrive not long after midnight. Which would make it end the next day. Tomorrow. The day of Krista’s fall.

  HURRY.

  I put my hands against the rail — the socks kept me from getting a proper grip, but I was able to pull myself to standing. In the crisp morning light, I could see for miles. There was the dirt road I’d run, and the menacing forest spreading all the way to the horizon. I craned to see in the other direction. The view was blocked by the fat belly of the tank.

  The walkway was narrow, built to protect its workers with only one thin rail. I leaned against the tank and clutched my sock-covered hands to its rusted surface. The crows eyed me, but didn’t move as I inched my way along until I could see the other side. The water tower was perched on a hill. At the bottom of the hill, maybe half a mile away through the woods at the end of a runway-like clearing, was a small town.

  A town.

  The closest crow flared its wings and angled itself so it could keep a side-eye on me.

  All this time, I had been a short sprint from safety.

  In the not-too-far distance, a ways off from the town but closer to me, there was a circular clearing. A bull’s-eye within green. Inside the circle stood a small cabin. Shaded front porch, tendrils of smoke drifting out of the chimney, doors and windows closed against the cool invading air. It looked idyllic and innocent. Like a little kid drawing of a home.

  The stretch between me and the cabin was short enough that I could see the stacked logs, the dark green paint on the trim, and a couple of sculptures on the perimeter that were made out of balancing rocks.

  Dusty.

  I had walked in a loopy circle.

  I searched the clearing for Gray’s tent — its comforting, exhilarating blue. But the tent had been set up in a part of the clearing that wasn’t visible from up there.

  I had to get to him. Had to face what I had done.

  One of the crows gave an abrupt caw. HURRY.

  I started and pulled the layers of socks off my hands. I fished around in my hair behind my left ear. It was tangled so tightly that I had to rip the strands that were holding it in place. A spring from a pen. The present the crow had given me near Jocelyn’s house. When the small coil was free, I teased off my broken wisps of hair and rubbed it clean against my jeans until it was as shiny as it would ever be.

  “Thank you,” I said as I extended the old spring towards the nearest crow on the rail.

  The crow considered my offer — profile-stare, beak high — but didn’t come over to get it. I left my gift anyway, balancing it on top of the rail and making sure it was steady.

  By the time I started climbing down the ladder, the crows still hadn’t moved to pick it up. By the time I got all the way down to the ground, all six crows were gone.

  IT WASN’T “HURRY” ON the side of the water tank. The rest of the letters scrolled into view as I climbed off the tower. It was BETTHURRY — the name of the town.

  Breaking news — Betthurry, site of unidentified human remains.

  Except not unidentified anymore. A law student. Once missing, but now found.

  I was as hobbled as an old woman, my muscles atrophied from cold and fatigue. I urged my body on, cutting into the woods, aiming for Dusty’s house.

  Even though I had no idea what I was going t
o say to Gray, I couldn’t wait to get to him. I was wrong. I made a mistake. I want to help. I want to do the right thing. Tell me what it is and I will be there for you. Couldn’t wait to see his face again, even if it was torqued with justifiable anger.

  “Gray!” My voice ricocheted off bark and stone. He had looked for me the night before. Maybe if he heard me calling now, he would come. “Gray!”

  It should’ve been ten minutes, fifteen at most, to get to Dusty’s. But I walked much longer than that. Too long. I kept calling his name, even as I collapsed on a rock and heaved with frustrated breath.

  I didn’t hear his approach, but felt his light arm wrap around my shoulder.

  It was like a pin in a balloon. “Where’s Gray?” I said even before I looked up.

  “He is gone.”

  Of course Gray would’ve left. Of course he had to get on with his life.

  “He called his friends,” Dusty said in a gentle voice. “They came for him.”

  I imagined Lily and Walter jumping out of their car and hugging him. Forgiving him. I imagined Gray’s happiness at being with the right people. Relief filled me to know he was safe.

  Dusty looped his arm under mine and lifted me up. I didn’t feel like an old woman anymore, but like a baby.

  “Did they find Jocelyn?” I said.

  Dusty shook his head. “They are still looking for the young lady. Now they’re looking for you too.”

  “They’re looking for me?” Tears sprang to my eyes.Looking for me was a waste of their time.

  Dusty tugged at my arm and I took my own weight and followed him. He led the way through the woods in silence, this time without stopping to admire the wilderness. It wasn’t long before we arrived at the cabin. He settled me on the couch and left the living room. Down the hall, there was a hard rush of water.

  I knew I had to contact my parents, or someone who could get me to them. I rooted inside my backpack and found my charger, then pulled out Krista’s phone and plugged it into the same outlet Gray had used the night before.

  I kept my eyes riveted to the black screen and the empty battery icon. The phone was sluggish — not just dead, but probably damp and half-frozen like me.