Afterworlds

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m starting to think it’s not near-death syndrome or survivor’s guilt. You’re showing classic signs of being in denial.”

  “I deny that completely,” I said, which actually got a smile from her.

  The bell rang then, and as I got up to leave, Jamie reached across the table and took my hand. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, Lizzie. Just as long as you know I’m still here. What happened last month doesn’t go away just because it’s not on TV anymore.”

  I squeezed her hand, trying to smile. She didn’t know that what had happened to me would never, ever go away.

  * * *

  That night my mother announced that we were making ravioli.

  It’s not as tricky as it sounds. You have to roll the dough out really thin, but we had a machine with little rollers for that, and we used a cookie cutter to make the pieces all the same size. For the filling my mother had decided on ricotta cheese.

  “If I’d gotten home earlier, I could have made some,” she said as we got started, giving the tub of store-bought ricotta a suspect look. Even before my father left us, she thought that buying things was sinfully lazy if you knew how to make them yourself.

  “We’ll survive,” I said.

  Soon the dough was made, and I was sending the first wad through, turning the machine’s little crank to spin the rollers. My mother took the end that came stretching out, as thin as a coin and marked with the flecks of black pepper we’d ground into the dough.

  We worked in silence for a while. This was the first time we’d cooked together since the old man had taken Mindy from me. I missed her ghostly presence in the corner, the way she watched us, intent but dutifully silent.

  My mother started with her usual conversational gambit: “How’s school?”

  “Better,” I said.

  She looked up from the bowl of ricotta, which she was crumbling with a fork. “Better?”

  “My friends have stopped tiptoeing around me.”

  “That’s great. What about everybody else? I mean, the kids who aren’t your friends.”

  “Jamie keeps them in line.”

  My mother smiled. “How is she?”

  It took a moment to realize that I didn’t have a good answer. “We mostly talk about me. I’ve been a pretty crappy friend lately.”

  Mom reached up with a dishtowel and dusted flour from my chin. “I’m sure Jamie doesn’t think you’re a bad friend. She probably doesn’t want to talk about herself. She wants to be there for you.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty good at making me spill my guts,” I said, silently promising myself that the next time I saw Jamie, I’d listen to her problems too.

  “So what have you been spilling your guts about with her?”

  I gave Mom a look. She wasn’t even trying to be subtle. “Whatever I’ve been thinking about that day.”

  She gave me a look back. “Such as?”

  Apparently Mom wasn’t letting me off the hook. But I could hardly tell her that we’d been discussing my secret boyfriend, and survivor’s guilt, and how near-death experiences leave you unable to face the future. And I couldn’t tell her that my other best friend, the ghost of Mindy, had been stolen from me.

  But I had to say something. “Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that’s happened in the last month to download into my brain. It’s nice, not knowing. Even if it’s just for five minutes.”

  She didn’t answer, probably because the expression on my face didn’t match my words. I was thinking about how Yama’s lips made sleep possible at all.

  We started building the ravioli. We cut out round pieces of rolled-out pasta dough, plopped a spoonful of filling into each, folded them over, and sealed them with our fingers. Mom ruffled the sealed edges with the tines of a fork, so that the ravioli looked like miniature calzones.

  It was slow going, and at some point in the process I always wondered if it was worth all the effort. It took about half a minute to make each piece, and only a few seconds to eat it. But there was something tiny and precious about them, like furniture in a dollhouse.

  “Have you talked to your father lately?”

  I looked up at Mom. She never brought up Dad if she could possibly avoid it. “Not since I texted him a thank-you for my phone.”

  “I don’t mean texting him. I mean really talking.”

  This was definitely weird. “Mom, I haven’t talked to Dad since I was in New York.”

  “He still hasn’t called you?” Anger curled her lips. Directed at him, not me, but I still felt like I’d done something wrong. “You two have to stay in better touch.”

  “Where’s this coming from?”

  “He’s your father. You’ll need him one day.”

  I had stopped working by now, and was openly staring at my mother. Her hands trembled as she worked the edges of the ravioli, showing what it had cost her even to mention Dad.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said a moment later. “We haven’t even started the water boiling!”

  She turned away to wash the flour from her hands, and I watched her add a long pour of salt to our biggest pot, then fill it up with water. The stovetop’s lighter popped a few times, followed by the huff of flame erupting.

  Mom stared down at the water, her expression hidden from me.

  “Can you finish up here?” she said brightly, then headed toward her end of the house. “I just need a minute!”

  “Sure. I won’t let the water burn,” I said, repeating an old and stupid joke from my childhood. For a moment, I wondered if she’d been crying. But over what?

  One of her friends had probably told her that I needed family right now, and to get over herself when it came to my dad. But did Mom really think I needed his help dealing with all this?

  I had her, and Jamie, and Yama. Maybe Mom didn’t know about the last of those, but still, I had enough. All I needed was to get Mindy back.

  I folded the last piece of ravioli onto itself. It was a not-quite-circular cut, a leftover scrap that barely held a half portion of ricotta. I managed to squish it closed, then clapped flour dust from my hands.

  “Done,” I said.

  “Very tasty-looking,” came a cold voice from behind me.

  I spun around. The old man in the patched coat stood there in my kitchen, his skin as pale as flour.

  Without a word, I reached for the knife block, pulling out a sleek boning knife.

  “Now, now, Lizzie.” He spread his fingers, hands out wide. His colorless eyes glittered in the kitchen lights. “There’s no need for that.”

  “Be quiet!” I hissed, looking over my shoulder toward my mom’s room.

  “I’m never visible, child. At my age, the overworld is bad for one’s heart.”

  I glanced at the floor—he had no shadow. But he still didn’t belong in my mother’s kitchen.

  “This is my house,” I whispered. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “But we have business to conduct.”

  “Not here.”

  He curled his fingers toward himself. “Then come across.”

  I checked the hallway again. Still no sign of my mom. My heart was racing, though, and the knife trembled in my hand. There was too much panic in my system to slip across to the flipside.

  Unless I used the words that had first sent me over . . .

  “Security is responding,” I whispered, and the knife steadied, my panic shifting into something sharper and cleaner—an alertness in my muscles, sparks on my skin.

  “Well, honey,” I murmured. “Maybe you should pretend to be dead.”

  The floury smell of uncooked pasta changed to rust in my nostrils, and the flame beneath the big pot of water turned a pale and lifeless gray.

  I was on the flipside, the knife shining dully in my hand.

  “Interesting technique,” the old man said, as if it wasn’t. But he’d been watching carefully.

  I no
longer had to keep quiet. “Where the hell is Mindy?”

  “She’s waiting for you.”

  “No cryptic bullshit!” I extended the knife. “Where?”

  “Shall I take you to her?”

  I took a slow breath, then nodded.

  He reached a hand up to his mouth. Like a child giving up an illicit wad of chewing gum, the old man spat out a little blob of black into his palm. I took a step back.

  He made a fist and held it out, and darkness squeezed between his pale fingers. It dribbled onto the floor, more and more of it pooling around his feet, spreading in all directions.

  “Interesting technique,” I said. “By which I mean, that’s disgusting.”

  “The river is the river.” He opened his palm, welcoming me to step into the slick of oil he’d made.

  I sighed, trying to pretend it wasn’t so different from tapping the floor, like Yama did. “If Mindy isn’t in one piece, I’m sticking this knife in your eye.”

  “Now there’s my little valkyrie,” he said with a smile. “But knives don’t work in the afterworld, even on the living. And I wouldn’t touch her for the world.”

  And he stepped into the puddle of black goo.

  I clutched the knife, held my nose with two fingers, and followed him down.

  * * *

  The River Vaitarna carried us a short distance, no more than a minute’s journey. The passage was steady, but thick with cold and grasping things. We emerged from the river into some kind of basement, its concrete floors glimmering with damp. The walls were tangled with pipes and junction boxes, and the only illumination came from flickering lights on panels full of switches and dials.

  “I don’t see my friend.”

  “She’s here.” The old man gestured vaguely at the space around us, as if Mindy had been boiled down and painted onto the walls.

  “What do you want from me?”

  He nodded happily at this, as if I’d asked the right question. As if it were up to me to figure out what was supposed to happen next.

  “Do me three favors, and I’ll give her back to you.”

  My grip on the knife tightened. “You kidnapped her. That’s not how favors work.”

  “Perform three labors, then. Or grant me three wishes. Whatever you want to call them, the first is very simple: kiss my hand.”

  He extended his hand to me, palm down, its pale flesh gleaming with psychopomp shine. His glittering eyes narrowed to colorless slits.

  It was all I could do to suppress a shudder. “Why do you want that?”

  “To make our connection stronger. A convenience, nothing more.”

  The way he said “convenience” brought the lurking shudder out of me. It wrinkled my body, twisting my muscles around themselves, forcing out a hiss of breath.

  “I don’t want to be connected to you. I don’t want you to come near me ever again.”

  “You misunderstand. I can reach you at any time, Lizzie Scofield. But I want our connection to go both ways. I want you to be able to call me.”

  A dry laugh pushed itself from my lungs. “Not going to be an issue.”

  “You may need me one day, little valkyrie. I’m good at so many things your dark-skinned friend is not. He may be older than me, but I can show you tricks he’s too prim and proper for. And if I’m wrong about you, and you never call . . .” He spread his hands. “You won’t ever see me again.”

  That promise was almost tempting. But three wishes and a kiss sounded too much like a fairy tale, one of those old-school, unedited Grimm stories with a horrible ending. They were always full of arbitrary rules: Don’t leave the path. Don’t eat the faerie food. Don’t kiss the scary psychopomp’s hand.

  Not to mention, the thought of touching my lips to his pale skin was revolting.

  “What else will kissing you do to me?” I asked.

  “Nothing at all.” He raised his right hand. “I swear.”

  I stood there, wishing I could ask Yama. But if I called him, the old man would disappear, along with any hope of finding Mindy.

  “Listen, girl. If you don’t want to play, we can always do this later. Say, ten years from now?”

  “Ten years?”

  “We can both live as long as we choose. So yes, a decade is the price for annoying me. Or you can kiss my hand right now.”

  “How do I know you won’t just keep Mindy? You collect children like her, don’t you?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Not like her. She doesn’t have what I want.”

  I remembered what he’d said the first time we met. “But what about all those memories of birthday cakes, of bedtime stories? Are you saying Mindy doesn’t have those?”

  “I’m sure she does, but I’ve already had a thousand birthdays, my dear. I’ve graduated to collecting endings. Sweet, beautiful ones that fade like sunset.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  His voice took on a singsong cadence. “You know when you finish a book, and it feels like all of those people in it have gone away to a party without you? That ache is in my pockets.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with children?”

  “That’s what I take from them, Lizzie,” he said. “The ones who died too young, the sweet way that they slip away. Those sick little children, smiling up at their parents, knowing they’re loved even as they fade into darkness.”

  I could only stand there, staring at the old man. He looked so happy, his bleached eyes radiant as they stared into the middle distance. His words had reached into the cold place inside me, the spot that had never warmed since Dallas, no matter how many times Yama’s electricity coursed across my skin.

  The old man wasn’t a child stealer, not quite. He was some other kind of monster. Maybe there were simply no words for what he was.

  His smile had drooped. “I’m afraid your little Mindy’s end was quite dreadful. So, no, I have no taste for her.”

  “What made you like this?” I said.

  “The war,” he replied simply, his hands smoothing his pockets. “There were so many orphans. Every time I was called to another burning city, I found their little ghosts wandering, having died in terror all alone. Hundreds of them.”

  I stared at him in silence. It still didn’t make sense.

  “Knowing there are children who died loved, that helps to fight the memories.” His face hardened. “But that’s enough of a history lesson, girl. Make your choice.”

  At that moment, part of me just wanted to start stabbing him and not stop until my arm was too tired to move. Then I would look for Mindy until I found her in that basement or somewhere nearby. She was a ghost. She couldn’t starve. I would keep searching if it took a thousand years.

  But the old man knew how to disappear in an instant. And was it even possible to kill someone—another liver—on the flipside?

  So I didn’t stab him. Instead, I said, “If you’re fucking with me, you will be sorry.”

  I must have put what I was thinking in my voice. His eyes widened, like translucent fish puffing themselves up to scare off a predator, and when the smile came again, it looked strained. But he extended his pale, shiny hand.

  It hung in the darkness between us, one last chance.

  “This sucks,” I muttered to myself, and took a step forward. Then another step, keeping my eyes from the growing expression of satisfaction on his face.

  I took his wrist, touching only his patched coat, the knife ready in my other hand, just in case he was lying about that too.

  As I bowed my head, panicked thoughts crowded my mind. Fairy tales again: Was this some kind of afterworld trick to play on the unwary? Was I dooming myself to eternal servitude by kissing his bare flesh?

  Of course, if that were true, then I was already Yama’s slave a thousand times over.

  I forced my head to descend the last few inches, until my lips brushed the back of the old man’s hand. His skin was as cold as marble, but carried the same buzz that I’d felt traveling ac
ross Yama’s, or my own. The old man’s electricity was darker, though, as bitter as a pencil tip.

  I dropped his hand and stumbled back, another shudder forcing its way through me. I gasped for air—I’d been holding my breath.

  “Done. Are you happy?”

  He breathed out a sigh. “Very.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “For my second wish, I want you to say my name.” He bowed. “I’m Mr. Hamlyn, Miss Scofield. Pleased to meet you properly at last.”

  “That’s it? Just say your name?”

  He nodded. “You’ll need to know it, to find me when the valkyrie inside you wakes up. Perhaps if you said it a few times, just to be sure.”

  This was much less repulsive than kissing him, so I did what he asked, repeating his name quickly, trying to sound offhand about it. But a fresh trickle of nerves was moving through me. Maybe he’d just been warming up.

  “Okay? What’s the last one?”

  “I want you to tell your rather impressive friend something. What’s his name again?”

  “Yamaraj.”

  The old man smiled. “Tell him I’m hungry.”

  With those words, he flickered out of sight.

  I stood there, staring at the spot he’d occupied, a sudden emptiness in the darkness of the basement.

  What had just happened? It had all seemed too sudden in the end, too easy, as if the old man had been scared off by something. I looked around—there were no sparks in the darkness, nothing but the scent of rust.

  This didn’t make sense.

  But then I heard a whimper, the sound of a child snuffling.

  “Mindy?” I cried. “It’s me!”

  For a moment there was no answer, but then a form emerged from the shadows. Her eyes were wide, her pigtails tangled and wild. She stared up at me through gray, teary eyes. “Lizzie?”

  I ran to her and dropped to one knee, wrapping my arms around her. She was cold and trembling, her muscles limp beneath my grasp.

  “It’s okay, Mindy.”

  Her arms hugged me in return, but timidly, as if she were afraid I would change into something else. “You promised no one would get me.”

  I pulled back, looking into her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Mindy stared back at me a moment, and then her eyes scanned the darkness. “The bad man was here.”