“Julio sure moves around a lot,” said Matt.
“That’s not it. This technique doesn’t work on him.”
“How can that be?”
He cupped the weight in his hand and stared down at the map, a frown plowing a line between his brows, “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”
The door creaked behind them, and Suki Backstrom, blonde and elegant in a tan sweater and olive green slacks, stepped out onto the porch. After three weeks here she had lost most of her California businesswoman/PR person chic, but she still hadn’t relaxed into Oregon coast casual. “You found me, and I didn’t want to be found,” she said, leaning against the house. She crossed her arms over her chest and smiled down at Matt.
“Are you sure?” asked Matt.
“Yes. I absolutely did not want to be found. Later I was glad you found me, but not at first.”
“Julio might have defenses,” Edmund said slowly. “Better defenses than you did.”
“Because of that demon thing?” Suki frowned. “I thought it went away after a couple of days.”
“What demon thing?” Matt asked.
“I don’t know that it ever went away,” said Edmund. “I think he wanted us to believe it went away. He pretended nothing happened. I asked him about it a couple of times, but he never gave me a straight answer.”
“What demon thing?” Matt asked again.
“It went away,” Suki said. “He was just the way he used to be.”
Edmund shook his head.
“Nathan?” Suki said.
Shadow and light shimmered beside her, coalesced into the shape of a teenage boy from a bygone era: while shirt, suspenders, dark knickers, black knee socks, button-sided ankle boots. Nathan’s skin was underground-pale; his hair was black, and his eyes gas-flame blue. Sometimes he looked more solid than others; today his edges were pearly and translucent.
“Julio got over that demon thing, didn’t he?” Suki asked him.
“Got over it?” asked Nathan.
“Put it behind him, went on with his life.”
He looked away from her at the blackberry vines in the yard. There were mounds of them so tall you almost couldn’t see the street past them, or the windbent shore pines that shielded the houses next door from view. “He went on with his life,” Nathan said,
“He didn’t get over the demon thing?” Suki asked.
“I can’t tell you that part. It’s not my story.”
“You said you still see him sometimes,” said Matt.
The ghost smiled. “Once in a while I see who Julio is now.”
“So you know what happened, but you’re just not talking? Unfair,” said Suki. She reached out as though to tickle him, growled when her hands went right through him. He laughed anyway.
“Looks like nobody’s going to tell me anything.” Matt felt frustrated.
—I’ll tell you,—the house whispered to her through the palms of her hands.—Later.—
Paradoxically, Matt wondered if she should even ask. People ought to be in charge of their own stories. She didn’t even know Julio, someone Edmund and Suki had been friends with for most of their childhoods. How would Julio feel about some stranger poking into his life story? Maybe it was none of her business.
She suggested this to the house.
The house waited a moment.—I’ll think about that. Let’s talk in dreams tonight.—
Matt bit her lip. The house told her lots of things in dreams. She wasn’t awake enough to say no, and she never wanted to anyway; everything the house told her was fascinating. Maybe this was its sneaky way of getting around her better self.
“We have to find Julio another way,” Edmund said. “Nathan, can you help us?”
“What if you’re correct? What if Julio doesn’t want to be found?”
“What if he’s like me and doesn’t know he wants to be found?” Suki asked.
“Can you still do that thing where you get inside him? Could you find him that way?” Edmund asked Nathan.
“Edmund—” said Nathan.
“Let’s look for your other friend instead,” suggested Matt. “Deirdre. We can worry about Julio later.”
Edmund glanced at her, then smiled. He flattened the map with his palm, spoke to the lead weight again, kissed it, sat back, took some deep breaths and let them out slowly, then held the weight above the map. “Deirdre. Deirdre,” he murmured.
The weight circled for a long time, and then pulled itself to a stop. Matt and Edmund leaned closer. A tiny town in central Oregon, a clear circle that meant it was unincorporated. “Artemisia,” Edmund read aloud. “What’s she doing there?”
“Let’s go find out.” Matt measured distances with her thumb, muttered figures to herself. “Looks like about two hundred seventy miles.” She glanced at the sun. Still high in the sky. Edmund’s car was great, but it didn’t go very fast, and they had two mountain ranges to cross, though the first one, the Coast Range, wasn’t very tall.
“We’ll go tomorrow.” Edmund glanced at Suki and Nathan. “You want to come?”
Nathan shrugged. “If you need me, call me up.” Most days the only way he could get away from the haunted house was by being summoned to a séance.
Suki said, “I’d rather wait and find out if she wants to see us. You do all the intrusive stuff. Besides, I have an interview. Who knows. I might get a job.”
A job! Getting a job was like nailing your foot to the floor, Matt thought. Especially a good job. Although Suki had walked away from the job she’d held in California for several years. Matt had walked away from lots of little stopgap jobs, the kind that weren’t meant to last, but she’d never had a job she wanted to keep.
Suki was different. Maybe she wanted to nail her feet to the floor here.
“Hey, good luck.” Edmund looked at Matt. “You’ll come?”
“Of course. I’m already packed.”
that night Matt lay alone in one of the beds in Julio’s old room. She could hear Edmund’s slow sleep breaths from the other bed. After years of sleeping alone, she had gotten used to sleeping beside him, liked waking up tangled with him, snuggled up against his warmth and wrapped in his sagebrush-and-woodsmoke scent, but she had told him that tonight she needed to sleep with her dreams.
The house hummed around her. She knew it was waiting for her to fall asleep so it could talk to her. She had never known another being who could walk into her dreams, turn them into its playground, its movie screen, the way the house could. Some nights it left her alone, but some nights it took a human form—not the same shape as Nathan, but a person, someone tall, comforting, welcoming, who walked beside her on a dream version of the Guthrie beach and talked about things Matt couldn’t remember when she woke up. House-as-person seemed more motherly than Matt’s mother had ever been.
Matt figured seeing the house as human was a natural extension of her relationship with inanimate objects. She knew things had souls and ideas, histories, memories, and desires, voices that only she seemed able to hear. Why not see a lively thing like the house as a person?
Matt closed her eyes, pulled the covers up to her chin, and settled into her sleeping position on her back.—Did you think about what I said?—she thought.
—Yes,—whispered the house.—This is Julio’s story, but it’s mine, too, because some of it happened to me. Matt, Julio knew me and Nathan the way you do, for different reasons. I don’t think he’ll mind if I tell you. At least, not this part of it. It happened fifteen years ago. Ready?—
Matt’s breathing slowed. She fell down into sleep, and opened her eyes somewhere else.
Chapter Three
Fifteen Years in the Past
friday afternoon, after the other high-school students had gone homo for the weekend, Julio Rivera lifted the violin to his shoulder and attacked for the fourteenth time a tricky piece of bowing in a fiddle tune called “Wilson’s Clog.” He had found the tune on a record of fiddle tunes he’d bought for a quarter at a yard sale. It
was a great tune, with lots of bounce, though it wasn’t classical. Mr. Noah, Julio’s music teacher, frowned on less-than-classical music pieces, but Julio loved them. Julio hadn’t heard many kinds of music he didn’t end up loving.
He couldn’t figure out how to bow “Wilson’s Clog” so the ups and downs worked out the same every time; he kept getting stuck bowing up on triplets where he wanted to bow down. He tried a variety of attacks, slurring some notes and not others, then switched. Finally, he locked it down. He played the piece through with the bowing he’d established, and the tune danced on the air, so inviting he wanted to dance himself. How could Mr. Noah not like this? Julio would play it for him. One of these days Mr. Noah would cave.
Well, Julio had better get back to his real practice. He stroked a long, pure note out of the violin with the bow. Eyes closed, he listened to the note. He willed grace into his joints as he drew the bow across the string and strove for a sound that stayed true for its whole journey.
Only when the sound ended and silence completed the note did he realize someone watched him.
He hadn’t heard the door of the high-school music room open or shut. It made a distinctive shriek, E flat, whenever anyone came in or out. He knew some people who could get in and out of places without using doors. Who was here now? One of his friends who had that ability? Or someone else who could do it, someone unknown?
He frowned, then lifted the bow and played a Latino valse his mother had taught him when he had started playing violin at seven, one of the few pieces of her childhood she had shared with him, and so deeply learned that he could play it without thought or concentration. What had the watcher seen before Julio knew he was being watched? Julio lived a guarded life, full of other people’s secrets; one of his best friends was a witch, another was a ghost, and the remaining two had things they never told anyone, things he knew but never gave up. He was sensitized to secrecy.
The muscles at the back of his neck tightened.
He opened his eyes and glanced across the music room, usually empty of everyone but Julio after hours. Mr. Noah had given Julio keys to come here whenever he liked. Julio often couldn’t practice in the small apartment he shared with his mother; too many near neighbors, too-thin walls. He could practice at the haunted house, but many of the instruments he used lived here.
An older man stood near the door. He wore his silver hair short. His pale eyes had a peculiar heat, his unlined features unnatural stillness. His arms crossed over his chest, the hands hidden in the crooks of opposite elbows.
No one Julio knew. A fiddle tune called “Lock the Door After the Silver’s Been Stolen” played in his mind. He had a bad feeling about this.
Julio lifted the bow off the strings. “May I help you?”
“I’m sure you can,” said the man. His bass voice held the rise and fall of music in a minor key, sparking Julio’s respect. “So kind of you to offer.”
“What can I do for you?” Who was this guy? Had Mr. Noah sent him?
No. Mr. Noah didn’t know people who could enter rooms without going through doors. Or he didn’t know he knew.
“You can come with me,” said the stranger. His voice held compulsion.
Julio’s feet walked toward the door. “Wait,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder at his backpack. Textbooks, notebooks, classwork, a couple of granola bars, his favorite pens and pencils, his musical-notation book full of half-finished compositions, his pennywhistles and spoons, and that English homework he was supposed to drop off at Ms. Orla’s office before he left today. And the violin case. He should at least put this violin away in the case, where it would be safe. It was a special violin Mr. Noah trusted Julio with: and Julio treasured that trust more than most other things in his life.
He couldn’t leave all that behind.
His feet didn’t listen. They kept walking.
julio sat in the backseat of the car, staring at the rear of the driver’s silver head. The tune that played through Julio’s mind held melancholy resignation. He held the violin bow up so that the horsehairs wouldn’t come into contact with anything, and he had laid the violin across his lap. After Julio’s third (unanswered) question, the man said, “Be quiet now, son.”
Words abandoned Julio. Questions still beat at his throat, but he couldn’t voice them.
The back windows of the car were blacked out; Julio couldn’t see any scenery to the sides, but he watched out the front window, memorizing road signs when he could, looking for landmarks. If his future held escape, this knowledge would come in handy later.
Mom would worry. Would anybody else? Probably not anytime soon. His friends knew he planned to practice in the music room this afternoon and wouldn’t join them at the haunted house. They wouldn’t expect to see him until tomorrow.
They left town behind and went by a road Julio didn’t know into the mountains. Miles passed. It would be a long walk home, if he could work free of the compulsion the man had laid on him.
Finally the car turned off the road onto a narrow paved track. Mountains loomed close above the car to the right; pines hemmed the left side. Despair wove through the song on Julio’s inner sound track. If he were on foot, and the man were driving—
Well, he could cut through the forest, and the car couldn’t follow. He wasn’t good at nature, though. He would get lost. He didn’t know how to spend a night in the wild. If it rained, how could he protect the violin?
On the other hand, if he could get the keys to the car …
The man parked the car in front of a house made of stone, crowded close by dark pines, and graveled up to its front. “Get out now,” said the man, his deep voice inviting and compelling at once.
Julio managed to protect the violin and bow from harm as his body responded to the command in the man’s voice, a minor victory.
“Come inside.”
He followed the stranger into the strange house, and found himself in a dimly lit but prosaic living room with a fire burning in the fireplace, and comfortable chairs near it. As the front door closed behind Julio, a younger man who looked about Julio’s age, black-haired and yellow-eyed, came into the room and took a scat by the fire. He was pale and solemn. “Master? Who is this?”
The stranger smiled. “One of the weak links in the golden chain we seek,” he said. “Observe, apprentice.” He turned to Julio and said, “Sit down, child.”
Julio sat, and the man sat across from him, his silver eyes alert and narrow.
“Now,” said the older man, “you may answer questions. You may not ask any. Tell me about your friends.”
Julio knew who this man was asking him about. Julio’s stomach went cold. So he was a weak link in the chain of friends? Anger thawed his stomach again. He didn’t know how to resist magical compulsion, but he could try.
“Speak.”
“Spike McTavish, I met him in second grade. I won his favorite marble, and after he beat me up and took it back, we got to be friends. Not really good friends, though. I don’t like people who punch other people. I haven’t seen Spike in a couple of years. Lily Onslow. I’ve known her since kindergarten. She has a huge stuffed animal collection. Her favorite is—”
“Slop.”
Julio sat with the violin across his lap, the bow upraised. He was more sensitive to sound than other people he knew, delighting in it more and suffering from it more, depending. He had had previous experiences with people who could control him with nothing but their voices, and he hated it. His friend Edmund could do it, but Edmund didn’t do it on purpose, and when alerted, would stop. How far did this man’s control of Julio extend?
He checked the second man—a boy, really. The first man called him “apprentice.” They worked together.
The boy gazed at him and said nothing. Julio couldn’t look to him for help.
“Not those friends,” said the kidnapper, but before he could voice his next order, Julio lifted the violin to his shoulder and drew the bow across the open A string. He stared into th
e man’s eyes. What would he a good tune in a situation like this? “Far and Away”? “Slip the leash”? “Sidestep Hornpipe”? He began “Sidestep Hornpipe,” lively and quick with an undertone of slipping out from under.
The older man sat back in his chair, eyelids half lowered, and listened. The younger man leaned forward, his eyes intent.
When Julio finished the tune, he waited a moment. The stranger seemed dazed. Could it have worked? Julio had no magic that he knew of. “Thanks for an interesting afternoon,” Julio said, and rose to his feet. “I’ll be going now.” He took two steps toward the front door.
“Sit,” said the man. “Stay.”
Woof, thought Julio as he complied.
“You know the friends I mean,” said the man. “The ones connected to the haunted house. Tell me about those friends.”
Nathan, a ghost; Edmund, a witch; Susan, who could talk to houses; and Deirdre, staunch and straightforward and almost as ordinary as Julio. He didn’t want to talk about any of them to someone who would grab someone from school and take him far away without warning or explanation.
“Tell me,” the man repeated, leaning forward. His voice was thrilling, enticing.
Julio opened his mouth, Fought to close it, clutched the neck of the violin until he was afraid he’d break it. No. I won’t. And you can’t force me. “No,” he said. “No.”
Excitement flowed through him. If I don’t have to do this, maybe I don’t have to do the rest, right? I can get up. He pushed himself to his feet. He headed for the door again.
“Stop!” cried the man.
Julio’s legs froze, but his arms and chest didn’t. He leaned so far forward he fell, crushing the violin beneath him. Mr. Noah’s violin, his favorite, not one of the cheap rentals Julio had learned on before he got to high school and met Mr. Noah, a man who was almost as interested in music as Julio was.
Julio had betrayed Mr. Noah’s trust.
He sat up, lifted the violin’s black neck with scrolled headpiece and pegs still intact, looked at the crushed body, the honey-colored outer wood, the pale unvarnished inner skin. Strings still bound the black tailpiece to the headpiece, but it was all crazy and wrong. He touched the scraps of wood, found the edge of one of the f-shaped sound holes. No way could he put this back together.
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