Beneath the Rising - Premee Mohamed Page 0,139
a glorious holiday to get away from house monsters, somewhat in the way that you would stay at a nice hotel if your house was being sprayed for bedbugs. They had spent the few days excitedly eating berries and marveling at the unsetting boreal sun; but Mom and Carla had been so terrified that even now, the fear and shock could be seen on their faces in unguarded moments.
“Oh Henry Bars!” someone squealed, and Johnny ducked out the door before the riot started. I squeezed past them and followed her outside, ending up on the front sidewalk under the big poplar tree. She glanced at the scratches on the bark, the exposed wood yellow now, like a cut apple, still sharply visible.
“Happy Halloween,” I said. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“I’m Frodo, from—”
“The Lord of the Never Getting Laid?”
“Har har. Who are you supposed to be?”
“I’m handing out candy! I don’t need to be in costume.”
“You do so!”
“Fine, Frodork, I’m dressed as a semi-pro candy-hander-outer.” I flicked the ring hanging from the chain at her neck, both of which turned out to be plastic. “Man, this isn’t gonna last long in a volcano.”
“Good.” We both paused appraisingly at the sounds of shrieking and thumping in the house, but before I could bring up that hyperactivity study from way back that she’d told me was a fraud, she said, as casually as possible, staring at the grass, “Just so you know, I came by to—”
“Get the kids hepped up on sugar? Thanks a ton.”
“—say goodbye.”
“Oh, yeah? Where you off to now, Carmen Sandiego? Lecture tour? Lab visits?”
“No.”
My dinner—mostly chocolate—crept slowly up from my stomach and lodged smouldering under my breastbone like a coal. Yes, the barometer, the burglar alarm, never wrong. I had to swallow several times before I could speak again.
Johnny let the silence stretch out, knowing what I knew. Knowing exactly what it meant. Had the wind grown colder? Was that the whisper of a language no one knew, hissing through the brown leaves in the gutters?
I had never found out what she had done to Drozanoth, nor how, nor what it had cost. Only that the universe would not have let her pay for it with anything but time. In my absence, I still wondered what horror I had missed. And in turn, she had never found out that at those last moments, I had heard another voice speaking the words she had once said, in my head; that I still woke up dreaming of them, full of terror that my courage might fail. I did not want to tell her that I had heard it. If she hadn’t said it, then who?
Rutger had parked way down the block, the silver Lexus already becoming soft-edged and ghostly in the coming darkness, smudged by the drifting smoke of leaf fires; he was leaning against the door, curled up on himself in misery. So she had told him, too. And perhaps told him goodbye.
“I recalibrated the reactor,” she said quietly. “It only accesses a ‘pocket’ dimension now: more or less next door in the topographical material. And I’ve tested it extensively. It’s ready to move to the next phase.”
“Does it... still make the noise?”
“No. Not any more. All the same...” She sighed, and closed a hand around the plastic ring hanging around her neck. “No one else can get it to work. There was a test last month where I—”
“I know. I saw it on the news.” She’d been asked to prove that her reactor wasn’t a fraud, like the cold fusion excitement years ago, and had agreed to build one completely from scratch in a random laboratory in New York, filmed the entire time and using only the materials provided by the lab. It had worked, but no one could explain why. And if she had told them it was because she alone stood at the interface between the science and magic that let the reactor work...
“So I’m a fraud,” she said. “Or a wizard or something.”
Godlet, I thought. That’s what it called you. Don’t think I’ll forget. Don’t think I’ll forget what you did. You wanted to be a god and that’s how they got you. And now I see you haven’t stopped. Won’t stop.
“But this is more important than what people think I am,” she added, looking up at me from under the brown curls of the wig. Her face was fearful, eager. For what, I wondered. My approval? I couldn’t give her that. I used to think I was incomplete without her, and now I understand that that was her design all along. I looked at her differently now. I had to. I felt more complete now, even as I tried to rebuild my relationship with my family; she seemed not quite herself too, more ruthless rather than less, more arrogant rather than less. Even if this was a function of her running out of time, I wasn’t sure I could forgive her for it. Any of it. “It’s more important than ever that we try to focus on the future now. I mean, since the Dimensional Anomaly,” she said quietly, using the term that everyone used now, since it seemed that the entire Northern hemisphere had seen the things reaching down from the sky. “We’re free. Safe. We just have to work together to turn the tide against everything we’ve done.”
I nodded. I hoped she meant ‘we’ in the global sense. That she knew that I was done with her, with all this. I was satisfied with a life without her, for the first time I could remember. Covenant or no. I would never be dragged into her manipulation again. Even that kiss, I thought. We’d argued about it quietly and coolly, both holding back tears. I didn’t mean it like that, she’d said. You put your tongue in my mouth, I argued; it has to mean that. It didn’t, she said. I was just... overwhelmed for a second.
We both looked back at the house at the same moment, golden light visible through the repaired front window, black silhouettes of princesses and ninja turtles behind it, a waving wand. As if staged: light in the darkness. Hope, in the fading day.
Maybe she’d finally realized what she’d taken from us.
But I doubted it.
“Good luck,” I said.
She looked up at me, green eyes faded with fatigue and fear, but still the eyes I knew—beautiful, hopeful, watchful. That gaze would never change no matter what we looked at. No monster could take it away, no danger dull it. The ring on her chest was caught for a moment in a stray beam of light, and glowed as if it were on fire. “I’d better go. Say goodbye to everyone for me.”
“I will.”
Someone was calling me from the house; down the street, clear against the setting sun, I saw groups of kids already walking between other houses. I stuffed my cold hands in my pockets and took a deep breath of the cool, smoky air. Where would she go? When might she smell it again? Had she dressed as Frodo on purpose, hoping that I would be her Sam?
How hard would it be to stop her now, as she walked back towards the car, just put a hand on that small, cloaked shoulder, and say, “Stop, I’ll take you back.” How hard would it be to say, “I still love you, I forgive you.” Even though neither of those things were true.
But I let her walk, and went back inside, and watched from the window as she got in, not looking back, and the car pulled away. Someone sidled up to me, rested their head on my arm; I embraced whoever it was absently, then looked down to see Carla, her face covered in glitter.
“We’re ready,” she said. “How do I look?”
“Princessy. Very princessy. The most princessy of all. I have literally no idea who you’re supposed to be.”
“What did Au... Johnny want?”
“She just wanted to drop off the candy. That’s all.”
And to say goodbye, I almost said. Goodbye to me, to you, to Chris and Brent, to Mom. To say goodbye to us as a part of her life, and to the idea even of saying goodbye. To say without words that this might be the last time I saw her.
“Is everything going to go back to normal now?”
I looked at the phone, my arm still around Carla’s shoulders.
“Of course it is.”
Back to normal. Johnny continuing to soar into history like a rocket, the brightest star, till she could be assured that her name and her legacy would never be forgotten; and no one knowing how, the deal struck and never renounced, the evil that fueled her rise. And she would never be free from it. Only I was free. From her, and from her evil. Forever.