Locked (The Heaven's Gate Trilogy) (10 page)

Mrs. Franklin nodded to
the boys, who were squirming in their seats, silently dismissing them.  They
threw down their napkins and dashed away.

“Roger,” she said firmly
as she rose from her own seat, beginning to clear the table. “I don’t think the
girls want to engage in theological debate right now.  I believe they need to
get ready for their night out.  Girls?”

Tabitha beamed at her
mother.

“Can we help you clear,
ma’am?” I asked.

“House rules,” she
responded with a smile.  “The cooks get the night off.  Dr. Franklin and I will
clean up.”

Dr. Franklin grumbled in
his seat as we scraped our chairs away from the table.  “Bested by two
teenagers,” he muttered.

“Like father, like
daughter,” Mrs. Franklin laughed as we ran upstairs to Tabitha’s room.

Her door was covered with
dark posters, dramatic “Keep Out” signs and caution tape.  As I swung the door
open and crossed the threshold into her room, I let out an involuntary gasp at
what I saw.

“What?” Tabitha crossed
her arms defensively, jutting one bony hip out.

“It’s just so….pink,” I
said, unable to keep a straight face.  The room was a six-year-old’s fantasy –
rainbows, unicorns, and every sweet pastel you could imagine.  Clearly her
‘self-expression’ had been stopped short of a redecorating budget.  “The
princess wallpaper is definitely you.”

She scowled.  “Make all
the fun you want.  I just haven’t had time to redo it.”

“I see that,” I said,
spinning around to take it all in.  The posters of Goth and Emo bands looked
wildly out of place next to the “Hang in There!” kitten calendar.

She ignored me, throwing
open her closet doors.  It was a bipolar closet – starched and preppy good girl
clothes on one half, lots of black and neon on the other.  She roughly shoved
the JCrew half to one side, muttering “Sunday stuff.”  Then she began whipping
through the dark side of her closet, looking for who knows what.

“Aha!” she declared,
pulling out a t-shirt that looked like it had been ripped to shreds and holding
it up against my chest.  “This will be perfect on you.”

“Uh, what’s wrong with
what I have on?” I asked, looking down at my layered tee and polo shirt.  I
nervously fingered the fringe on my scarf.

“Bo-ring,” she judged,
rolling her eyes.  “Don’t you want to try something different for a change?”

“But nobody is going to
see it, anyway,” I protested, pushing the shirt away, “since we’re going to
have our jackets on.”

She tossed her hair back,
impatient with me.  “At least let me do your makeup and hair, then,” she said,
throwing down the shirt and dragging me into her bathroom. 

Before I could protest
she’d plopped me down on a stool and started rummaging through drawers, pulling
out tubes and bottles and all sorts of things I didn’t even know how to use. 
For all of her studied anti-social behaviors, she sure cared about fashion.

This is not going to turn
out well, I thought, sighing inwardly.

She stepped behind me to
take an appraising look in the mirror.  “You have good bone structure.  We just
need a little drama, a little edge.  Here, let’s get this hair out of the way,”
she said, sweeping my long hair back with both hands.

“No!” my hands flew back
to stop her, but it was too late.  My hair was tucked high on my head in a tie,
and she’d flicked away the scarf I’d wrapped around my neck.  I tried to cover
myself, but she swatted my hands away.

My whole body stiffened. 
Her jaw fell open as she stared at the back of my neck.  I watched her in the
mirror as she stared for a long time, cocking her head to one side, eyes
narrowing, as she tried to work out this new development.

“Hope, you little devil,”
she said, eyeing me with new respect as she jumped up onto the counter. 
“Pretending to be miss goody-two-shoes when all along you have a big old tattoo
on the back of your neck.” She peered closer and rubbed her thumb against my
Mark, hard.  “And it’s a real one, too – not even I have the guts to do that. 
What else do you have going on that I don’t know about?” She started pawing at
me and my clothes with curiosity.  “More tattoos? Piercings?”

“There’s nothing else,” I
said, rushing the words out as I pushed away her hands and tried to create some
distance between us.  “And it’s not what you think,” I said, my face burning. 
“Please, believe me.”

“What is it then?  I’m
all ears,” she demanded, crossing her arms and laughing at my discomfort.

My mind raced, trying to
find an easy way out.  “It’s hard to explain.”  I stuck my chin out, my body
daring her to continue.

“I bet it is,” she said,
arching a brow.  “And not just any tattoo, either.  Aramaic and Greek!  That
must have been some high-brow tattoo parlor you went to.”

My mind stumbled over
what she’d just said.  “It’s Greek?” I said, bewildered that after all this
time, someone seemed to know what it was.

She gave me a searching
look.  “
Part
of it is Greek.  Symbolic Ancient Greek, to be precise. 
See this pattern along the edges? It’s called a Greek key.  They used it in
ancient Greek architecture. The rest of it is letters.  It’s written vertically
and is a bit blurry, but I’m pretty sure it’s Aramaic.  I think it spells
‘key,’” she said, coming back behind me to trace the symbols down my vertebrae.
“Or maybe ‘guardian of the key?’
Natchurat kleedah
,” she pronounced
carefully, her tongue thick as she attempted the ancient language.    She was engrossed
in studying the markings, like a scholar poring over her books.  “Though why
anyone would go to such lengths to label themselves a ‘key’ is beyond me.”

She studied the design
intently again, and then looked up at me in the mirror.  “Please tell me you
didn’t just choose this because it looked pretty. And you had to have chosen it
– no parlor is going to offer this on its normal menu.”

She cocked her eyebrow
and waited for my answer.

“I didn’t choose it.”

Her other eyebrow shot
up.  “So someone else chose it for you?  That doesn’t sound like you.”

My hands crept back up to
touch the spot she’d just traced, my mind racing.  “I didn’t know it meant
anything.  Are you sure?”

“Well, my Dad taught me
when I was little.  He had to learn ancient languages in seminary.  We could
show him…”

“No!” I didn’t even allow
her to finish speaking before I’d ruled it out.  It was bad enough that she’d
seen it.

She knotted her eyebrows
together, trying to puzzle me out.  “Is this why you’re always wearing those
turtlenecks and scarves?  Why are you so touchy about it?  It
is
sort of
pretty, in a totally geeky kind of way.”

Don’t tell her
anything.

I sat in silence, staring
at the faded white linoleum of her bathroom.  How could I explain to her that
the Mark had just shown up on me? How could I tell her, without having to go
through the whole story of my abduction?  Would she even believe me if I told
her how my parents had tried again and again to get it removed, subjecting me
to countless hours of pain only to have the thing show up again, fresh and
dark, only hours later?  Finally, she let out a long sigh.

“Fine.  I’ll keep your
secret, though I have to say you’re totally over-reacting.” She tossed my scarf
back in my lap; I wound it around my neck as if I was binding up an open wound.

The price for her silence
was giving her a complete free hand with my makeup.  We turned up at Stone
Mountain looking like two ghouls straight from the gates of Hades.  She’d
streaked my dark hair in hot pink and somehow managed to make it hang halfway
across my face, drawing attention to my eyes, which glittered like pools of
coal made by eyeliner and black shadow.  A thin layer of pale foundation made
me look sickly and glow in the dark.

“I look ridiculous,” I
said, pointing to my North Face jacket.  “Goths don’t wear fleece.”

She shrugged as she
stomped ahead.  “It’s Emo, not Goth,” she shot back over her shoulder.  “And
you could have changed your clothes,” she added, dragging me in her wake.

We skirted the stream of
people coming through the high wooden gates of the Park and headed for the
woods.  Many people gave us frightened looks and steered their children away,
making Tabitha chuckle.   The twinkling lights inside the park disappeared as
we strode into the trees.

“Where are we going?” I
called after her.

“We’re cutting around to
the hiking path.  We’re supposed to meet at the summit.”

“The summit?”  I stopped
in my tracks.  “What are we going to do up there? And won’t it be cold?”

She turned and stood in
the darkness of the trees, shining a flashlight in my eyes so that I winced. 
“Are you coming or not?”  The sharpness of her tone told me how frustrating
she’d found me this evening.  Without waiting for my answer, she turned and
kept walking away from me in her tall, black boots.

“OK,” I said meekly,
walking swiftly to catch up.  I had to stay on good terms with her, at least
until our project was finished.

The path was clearly
marked, winding around the base of the mountain through the trees.  Nobody else
was in sight, but just in case, Tabitha drew a finger over her lips, telling me
to be quiet.  We veered away from the noise of the park until all I could hear
was the wind whistling through the pines.  The further we walked, the darker it
became as the parking lot lights faded out of sight.

We came to a clearing,
the intersection of two trails.  To our left, the mountain stood in a heap. 
Bald granite twinkled as the beam from Tabitha’s flashlight danced across the
surface.  The path seemed to go straight up.

“C’mon, let’s go,” she urged,
starting up the trail.

The hike seemed
interminable in the dark.  The naked rock was marked with a faded yellow line,
but the range of the flashlight was limited, leaving us with the eerie feeling
of walking into space, with no signs or landmarks along the way to let us know
how far we’d gone.  We scrabbled over rocks and pebbles rolling down the trail,
our shoes slipping on the slick surface.  Periodically, we’d enter into a small
stand of windswept trees or underbrush, or pass an emergency telephone posted
on a pole along the trail.  Other than that, there was nothing – no buildings,
no animals, and no people.  Every now and then I thought I heard an owl or some
other sort of bird screeching, but I could never convince myself it was more
than just the wind.  If I took my eyes off the trail all I could see was
black.  But I could only do so for an instant, at risk of slipping and falling.

The further we got, the
chattier Tabitha became, returning to her normal know-it-all self.  “You know
its not really just granite,” she said, randomly shifting the conversation to
the geology of the mountain.  “It’s partly Quartz monzonite, that’s why it’s so
pretty.”

I huffed back at her,
catching my breath after a particularly steep portion of trail.  “Is there
anything you don’t know about?”

“Nope,” she said, turning
back to grin at me.  “At least not that I’ll admit.”

“How much longer?” I
complained.  It seemed like we’d been climbing for an hour.

“Shhhh. I hear voices.”

We rounded a bend and
looked up a few hundred yards to where a permanent shelter stood along the
trail.  A group of kids were already huddled around a small bonfire near the
shelter.  Others straddled benches, deep in conversation.  The chatter built as
we climbed closer.

“Hey, Tabitha!  You made
it!”  An older boy, his hair swept into a temporary mohawk by a shellacking of
gel, spotted us and started scrambling down the hill.  “Give you hand?”

Tabitha’s face broke open
in a smile.  “I told you I’d come,” she said, reaching out her hand.  His hand
swallowed her tiny one as he hoisted her up over the last big boulder.

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Hope,” she said,
leaving me to scrabble up the rock by myself.  “She’s new in town, and I
thought it might be fun for her to come, too.  It’s ok, right?”  She twisted a
piece of her hair and nibbled it nervously.  She was seriously into this boy.

“Hope, I’m Tony.”  Under
all his makeup, he had a nice smile.  “You girls thirsty?”

“After that climb, are
you kidding me?” Tabitha playfully punched him in the arm.  “I’m dying.  What
do you have?”

“You’ll see,” he said
mysteriously, leading us over to the bonfire.  The flickering light from the
fire cast weird shadows across the faces of the assembled crowd, making their
pale skin and liberal doses of black eye shadow appear truly sinister.  They
were all dressed like Tabitha, in dog collars and chains, with weird sets of
locks hooked onto their belts, and boots that looked like they came off of
storm troopers.  All of them seemed much older than us. 

“Where do you know these
kids from?” I whispered to Tabitha, but she silenced me with a stare, mouthing
behind Tony’s back “Don’t embarrass me!”