Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  Calhoun flashed a grin that was really more of a sneer.

  “That case is closed.”

  * * *

  —

  That case is closed.

  The Warwick police station, located just off the highway, was a quaint banana-yellow bungalow with white shutters and a sign on the bulletin board that read LIFE IS BETTER WITH COFFEE. The place seemed ill-suited for solving crimes, better for selling homemade muffins.

  Little did we know how terrifying it would be—that our time with the Warwick police would be pandemonium.

  There was no other way to put it.

  We tried different tactics: warm, curt, nervous, sexy (Wit, wearing a low-cut red dress, perched on a desk). We tried surprising them. We tried a brazen arrival at Calhoun’s private residence after his wife went to bed and Calhoun stayed up late drinking Harpoon IPA, eating gummy worms, and watching Better Call Saul. No matter what we said, and where, how, or what time we said it, Calhoun refused to tell us anything about Jim’s case.

  “Can’t help you.”

  “You Nancy Drews get out of here.”

  “How dare you accost me at my home!”

  “You kids get out of here, or I’ll make sure every one of you spends the rest of your life flipping byproduct burgers at the local Mickey D’s, because a fryolator and an automatic mixer to make a few watery milk shakes are all you’ll be fit for after I get through with you. UNDERSTAND ME?”

  We decided to give up on Calhoun and bribe the office manager, Frederica.

  We waited for her to leave the station in workout clothes, watched her getting drenched in the downpour as her umbrella went inside out. As she fumbled for the keys to her Kia, Cannon ran to her, armed with a golf umbrella and a grin.

  We watched from the Mercedes as he made his pitch: ten thousand dollars cash to go back inside and steal the Jim Mason file. Frederica blushed, nodded, and power-walked back inside.

  Cannon turned, grinning, giving us the thumbs-up. Then Frederica emerged with the entire Warwick police force in tow, eight officers hightailing it for Cannon.

  “Get on your knees! Police!”

  With a yelp, Whitley backed the car out, tearing through the lot to pick up Cannon, who, sprinting for his life, hurled himself into the backseat. We barreled through the grass, over a curb, and through a red light into a twelve-lane intersection, tires squealing, and nearly collided with a cement truck.

  “Move!” Cannon screamed. “Move!”

  * * *

  —

  We spent the next few wakes at Roscoe gun range learning how to shoot as we formulated our new plan. We would raid the Warwick police. We paid the owner of Last Resort Twenty-Four-Hour Pawn Shop fifty dollars for the name of a guy who sold guns without a license out of the back of his RV, called Big Bobby. Out of Big Bobby, we bought three guns: two Ruger LC9 strikers, and a Heckler & Koch HK45.

  Our siege would take place at eleven-fifteen, when we believed all officers, apart from Polk and McAndress, had gone home for the night. We’d take them by surprise and lock them in the supply closet. Then we’d have the station to ourselves and we could find Jim’s file.

  The first time we attempted it, Officer McAndress—displaying moves apparently learned from a fruitful career moonlighting in mixed martial arts—struck Kip with an uppercut to the face, elbowed Wit in the ribs, then, spinning, back-kicked Cannon’s stomach, sending him gasping to the floor. Meanwhile, Officer Polk had me pinned to the ground, his left foot gouging my back as he zip-tied Martha to a desk chair.

  “The Warwick police aren’t actually police,” said Kipling with unabashed wonder the next wake. “They’re the spawn of Satan.”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  How many times at midnight, at one, two, three o’clock in the morning, did the five of us storm that station? Was it a hundred times? Was it ten thousand?

  How many different entry SWAT formations did we attempt, after finding on the Internet the Ground Reconnaissance Operations Handbook, a training manual for marines?

  Single file, double file, double file advancement with variation, through front doors, back doors, barred windows, fire escapes, drainpipes, adjacent-building rooftops. We downloaded something called The Criminal’s Guide to Revelry off the Deepnet, a hand-typed, poorly photocopied manual written by Anonymous Doe that detailed strategies for nullifying people who were aggressive, hysterical, or empowered by Superman fantasies, during any raid, heist, or robbery. How many terrifying masks did we try (clown, pig, Clockwork Orange droogs)? How many bullets did we shoot into the ceiling? How many threats and warnings did we scream?

  It should have been easy to get our hands on one case file.

  As the wakes went on, we transformed from disorganized teenagers acting out a makeshift version of Mission: Impossible into a real five-person platoon. We were able to advance without noise, reading each other’s thoughts and movements with nothing but a look.

  Wake after wake, we were thwarted.

  This was due not to Officers Polk and McAndress, but to their wild card, Officer Victoria Channing, assigned to Traffic Safety. She was always in the women’s bathroom, and she advanced on us out of nowhere, displaying an eagerness to kill that was psychotic.

  “Take that, you little shitheads!” she screamed.

  She was terrifying, even if we were immortal.

  Though Cannon and Whitley had learned to nullify Polk and McAndress, Channing eluded them every time. She was able to slip like vapor through the back stairwell, the front stairwell, a panel in the ceiling, firing her Glock without warning into Cannon’s chest.

  Or Kip’s stomach.

  Or Whitley’s forehead.

  The time she shot Martha in the temple—as if blithely turning the knob on a gumball machine—I froze, stunned, staring down at her and the rest of my friends lying on the police station carpet, blood gurgling out of their foreheads and necks like water trickling from a hose.

  “Hands up or you’ll be joining them in hell!” screeched Officer Channing, aiming at me.

  * * *

  —

  “Death feels like floating in a warm bath,” said Martha, the next wake.

  I was always the only one left alive. This was because I wasn’t a natural warrior. I tended to freeze when I needed to act. As a result, Cannon had decided my job was to locate Jim’s case file.

  Find Jim’s file. It was all I had to do.

  The closed homicide cases were kept in the basement. It was an unnerving, neglected fish tank of a room: humming green fluorescent light, smells of mildew, pipes yowling with steam. Row after row of metal shelves extended, dreamlike, in every direction, floor to ceiling, packed with cardboard boxes. Each box was scribbled with a victim’s name.

  Appleton, Janice

  Avery, Jennifer

  Azella, Robert P.

  At every break-in, no matter the hell being unleashed upstairs, I headed straight to the back stairwell and raced to the basement. I’d fling open the wooden doors marked STORAGE and sprint into the labyrinth of shelves, madly looking for the Ms, my footsteps squeaking on the orange linoleum. Every time, Channing caught me and I spent the rest of the wake sitting in a jail cell hearing her tell the other officers a phony story about having to kill everyone else in self-defense.

  And yet, each wake, while my friends were dealing with the mayhem upstairs, I was dealing with my own torment in that droning green basement, a trial that had nothing to do with Officer Channing.

  It began when I accidentally kicked a box off a bottom shelf.

  Hendrews, Holly

  The box tipped over, sending a plastic bag marked Evidence spinning across the floor. Inside, there was a blood-encrusted Christmas scarf decorated with snowmen and reindeer, but what struck me—I stopped dead, blinking in alarm—was that the bag was spangled with black mildew
.

  The box was also leaking.

  I kicked it closer, peering inside. An oil-like liquid had pooled in the corners, as if one of the evidence bags had leaked. Glancing up, I saw, stunned, that it wasn’t just this box. There were others. At least four or five boxes had that same black liquid seeping through the bottom.

  Then there were the shelves.

  They were hulking and metal. Yet sometimes as I raced past them, madly searching for MASON, JIM, the slightest brush of my shoulder would send the giant shelf toppling over as if it were nothing but cardboard. It would land with a deafening clang, sending the one beside it over, the one beside that too, until all the shelves in the basement were falling around me like massive dominos, hundreds of boxes thundering to the ground. All I could do was scramble out of the way, press my back against the nearest wall, pray I didn’t get hit until it was over.

  Afterward I’d try to sift through the rubble for Jim’s box before Officer Channing caught me red-handed, as she always did.

  I never mentioned to the others what was happening. I was too scared.

  “How’s it going in the basement?” Cannon asked me. “Are you close to finding Jim’s file? I heard a lot of banging downstairs this last time.”

  “There’s a lot to sift through,” I said. “I’m close.”

  The key, I’d found, was to sprint through the shelves as fast as I could, allowing them to fall after me as I kept running and running toward the row of Ms at the very back of the basement. I had just perfected the optimal path through the maze when, once, barreling too fast, I missed the correct row and was forced to backtrack. I was careful not to graze the shelf as I made the turn and slowed to a walk, panting. Usually there was the sound of havoc upstairs, banging and screaming. This time it was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  Machinsky, Tina D.

  Mahmoodi, Wafaa

  Malvo, Jed

  I spotted Jim’s box on the top shelf at the very end. In a rush of disbelief, I sprinted to it, reached on my tiptoes, tried to jostle it down without sending the entire shelf clattering over.

  Mason, Jim Livingston

  “Gotcha, you little shit,” a woman hissed. “Put your hands up and turn real slow.”

  Channing had stepped out from behind the shelves and was striding toward me, Glock aimed right at my head.

  “Don’t shoot. Please.”

  Her face was flushed. Her lips twitched. She pulled the trigger.

  She never had before.

  A giant match lit the wick of my brain. I hit the ground, rolling onto my back, accidentally throwing out my arms, which hit the shelf, sending it flying backward.

  “What the…?” Channing screamed in shock.

  As the shelves fell, I blinked up at the fluorescent lights, green filaments flickering in mysterious Morse code. There was so much pain it spilled everywhere, then drifted away.

  Dying was not as cataclysmic as I’d thought it’d be. Because even though I was in the Neverworld, my body and mind still reacted as if it were the real thing.

  There was no white light. There was no tunnel.

  Instead, as the shelves tumbled around me, there was a warm feeling of awe, as if, with the tearing away of my life from its attachment to earth, fragile as the connection of a leaf to a twig, everything permanent, factual, real—everything I swore was true—became the opposite of what I’d always thought.

  My last feeling wasn’t regret or pain. It was joy.

  That was the most terrifying thing of all.

  I get to see Jim now. That was all I was thinking before my life went out.

  If I’m dead, I’ll get to see Jim.

  * * *

  —

  “Really don’t feel like getting shot in the head today,” sang Kipling merrily as we filed into Wincroft at the start of the next wake. “How ’bout we take a page from Momma Greer’s Guide to the Good Life?”

  “What’s that?” asked Cannon.

  “Can’t beat your mortal enemy to a pulp?” He shrugged. “Throw him a party.”

  That was how we came to arrive at the Warwick police station armed not with our usual guns, but with identical Barry the Clown costumes rented from Gobbledygook Halloween World.

  “May I help you?” asked Frederica at the front desk.

  “We’re from Big Apple Balloon-a-Gram,” I said, smiling. “Where would you like us to set up for the surprise party?”

  “What surprise party?”

  “Detective Art Calhoun’s surprise seventieth.”

  Frederica was astonished. So were Officers Polk, McAndress, Cunningham, Leech, Ives, and Mapleton, as well as Art Calhoun himself, who emerged from his office with a distrustful scowl. But we had moved fast. The wireless speaker was already playing “Margaritaville.” Wit had already unveiled three dozen cupcakes, baskets of gummy worms, and party favors of gun Christmas tree ornaments. Cannon and Kip were standing on folding chairs, taping up the tinsel Happy Birthday sign. Martha tossed bottles of Harpoon IPA into a cooler.

  “Hold up. Just wait one…” Calhoun fell silent, eyeing the beer.

  “What’s happening here?” demanded Officer Polk.

  I made an elaborate show of examining the phony invoice, which was really the receipt for our costume rentals.

  “Elizabeth Calhoun hired us,” I said with a frown.

  “Lizzy did this?” whispered Calhoun, wide-eyed.

  Liz Calhoun was his estranged daughter who lived in San Diego. She hadn’t spoken to her father in three years, which meant there was little chance she’d take his call now, when he phoned to thank her for the unexpected party, even though his real seventieth birthday was over three weeks away.

  That meant I had time to find Jim’s file.

  “Nothing better than cupcakes,” said Officer Channing, grinning as she helped herself.

  “And now, friends, let’s start the entertainment!” shouted Kipling with a bow so low his red clown nose fell off and rolled under a desk. “If you could all gather round and join hands? Don’t be shy.”

  That was my cue.

  I darted into the back stairwell. I raced down the steps to the basement, heaved open the wood doors, and sprinted into the shadowed rows of boxes.

  I raced along the back wall, slipping past filing cabinets and a copy machine, and veered into the Gs, the Js, the Ls, zigzagging in and out, careful not to graze the shelves, my oversized clown shoes making loud quacking noises, my balloon pants making me trip.

  Eighth row. Far left. At the very top. MASON, JIM LIVINGSTON.

  It was there. My heart pounding, I had to jump up three times to shove it off the shelf without sending the entire thing toppling over. I set it carefully on the ground.

  “You found it?”

  I turned, startled, to see Martha hurrying toward me.

  She’d never appeared down here before. The knowing, even anxious look on her face seemed to suggest she had come because she didn’t trust me, because she didn’t want me left alone with the box. Or was it that she’d hoped I would never actually find it?

  I ripped off the tape and pulled open the lid.

  I stared inside for an entire minute, unable to speak.

  No. No. No. Impossible.

  “Are you kidding me?” whispered Martha in apparent shock, looking over my shoulder. “After all that? Getting shot dead a million times?”

  Shaking her head, a hand on her hip, she took down another box.

  “Maybe Jim’s file got put somewhere else,” she muttered.

  I couldn’t stop staring in, unable to breathe.

  The box was empty.

  There wasn’t a single paper left except a coupon: $5 off 1 bin of Honey Love Fried Chicken. Soul Mate Special!

  Upstairs, more singing and clapping had broken out. “For he’s
a jolly good fellow…”

  Martha was madly thrusting more boxes to the floor, yanking off the lids. Every one was crammed full of papers, plastic evidence bags, black ink.

  That ink was back, seeping through the corners again.

  “How can anyone find anything in here? It’s a mess. There’s some kind of leak.”

  Martha was examining the ink between her fingers, wrinkling her nose, though when she caught my eye, the knowing expression on her face chilled me.

  We spent another ten minutes going through boxes, Martha saying, “It has to be here somewhere.”

  The only empty box we came across was Jim’s.

  Martha knew something. That was clear. What it was, I had no idea.

  “Edgar Mason and Torchlight Security are behind it,” said Cannon when we were back at Wincroft, sprawled across the couches in the library. “Who else could make an entire case file just vanish?”

  “They had everything destroyed,” said Kipling in agreement. “Which was why Calhoun and the other cops were always so touchy when we asked about the case. They’ve been paid off.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Don’t you see?” said Cannon. “Something in there was incriminating to Jim.”

  “Right,” said Wit with a nod. “They didn’t want it made public. So they sent some Torchlight ex–Navy SEAL into the station and he stole it.”

  “Which means the Masons know the truth,” said Kipling.

  “And,” Cannon continued, “if they haven’t come forward to arrest anyone, if they’ve stayed silent, it means whatever they uncovered was damaging for the family.”

  As everyone fell silent, considering all this, my eyes caught Martha’s.

  She seemed skeptical, or her mind was somewhere else. I’d been unable to stop thinking about her sudden appearance in the basement and the look on her face when she’d spotted the ink. It made me wonder whether she suspected me somehow, whether she knew I’d received those texts from Jim asking me to meet him that night at the quarry.