Messenger of Fear (2 page)

All of it was beyond my ability to control.

“Her name was Samantha Early. It is a terribly apt name. Dead too early is young Samantha Early.”

Was I supposed to laugh? Was that some effort at a joke? But nothing about him suggested humor.

“Tell me who you are,” I said. My voice sounded pitifully thin. If there was any threat in that voice, then it was a laughable one.

“That’s not the question you want answered first,” he said.

He had a strange voice. It was as if his mouth was pressed close against my ear so that I could hear every shade of every word, the inhalation and exhalation, the play of tongue against teeth, teeth against lips, lips softly percussing the
b
and
p
sounds.

I recoiled a bit from that voice, not from fear but from a sense that its intimacy was somehow inappropriate.

“Are you reading my mind?” I asked.

There was the slightest narrowing of his eyes, and if not a smile, there was a softening of the stern lines of his mouth.

He did not answer. Instead he said, “Samantha Early. Age sixteen. Dead by her own hand.”

With that he laid his pale fingers softly, reverently on her cheek and then rolled her head to the side so that I could see.

“Oh, God!” I cried. It was a hole, just large enough that a little finger could have been stuck into it. The hole was in her temple, and it was the color of ancient rust. Around the hole an elongated oval of scorched skin and crisped hair.

It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen in my life. I looked then at her face. She was not pretty; her chin was too big, too meaty. Her nose was perhaps too forceful, and there were dark circles under her eyes. I felt, seeing this face, that she had endured pain. It was a sad face, though how can a face in death ever be happy?

I was so intent on her face that I failed at first to notice that the light all around me had changed.

I looked up and saw that the church was gone. The coffin, that terrible object, that reproach against life itself, grew transparent.

And then, the pale flesh of the dead girl began to regain some aspects of life. It grew pink. And I was certain I detected the movement of her eyes beneath their lids.

I cried out, “She’s alive!”

And just then, as though my exclamation was a signal, she sat up. She sat up and now, dreamlike, the coffin was no longer there. Feeling wildly unstable, I put my hand out as though to steady myself, but there was nothing within my reach but the shoulder of the boy in black.

My fingers closed around his bicep, which flexed at my touch. It was reassuring in its solidity. He was real, not some figment.

He shook his head and did not meet my eyes. “I am not to be touched.”

It wasn’t anger but a soft-spoken warning. It was said with what might have been regret but with absolute conviction.

I pulled my hand away and mumbled an apology, but I was less concerned about him than I was consumed with the horror of looking directly into the dead girl’s eyes. She had risen to her feet. She stood. The hole still a testament to brutality, bloody, only now, now, oh . . . oh . . . It was
bleeding
. Wet and viscous, the blood drained from the hole in her head as the blood seemed to drain from my own limbs. Little globules of something more solid slid down the trail of blood, bits of her brain forced outward as the bullet had forced its way inward.

Her eyes were brown and empty, her face blank, her blond hair fidgeted in a slight breeze, and the blood ran down her cheek and down her neck and pooled at the hollow of her throat.

I wanted to say that we needed to call 911. I wanted to say that we must help. But the boy in black stood perfectly still, looking at me and not at the girl, the girl dead or living or whatever unholy cross between the two that defined Samantha Early.

Dead too early.

“The question you want answered,” the boy in black said as though no time had passed, “is whether
you
are dead.”

I licked my lips nervously. My throat burned as though I’d been days without a drink of water. “Yes,” I said to him.

“You live,” he said. “She does not.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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“WE HAVE TO HELP HER.”

“She is past help,” the boy in black said.

“She’s standing, she’s . . . Can you hear me?” I addressed this to Samantha, knowing how foolish it was, knowing that my words would fall into the inconceivably vast chasm that separates the living and the dead.

No flicker or recognition in those brown eyes, no sudden cock of the head. I was inaudible and invisible to her.

Then she began to move, to walk. But backward. Away from us but backward, not awkward but with normal grace. As though she had always walked backward. Backward across what was now a suburban street. A car came around the corner, not fast, the driver seeming to check for addresses as he drove. If he saw Samantha, he gave no sign of it. I was sure, too, that he did not see me or the boy in black.

The car moved forward normally. Across the street a dog raced along its enclosure, moving forward as well, seeing the car but not us. Only Samantha was in rewind, only she moved backward to the sidewalk, to the flagstone-paved path, to a front door that opened for her. Now it was opened
by
her but all in reverse. It was a disturbing effect, part of what I was now sure had to be a strangely elaborate dream. Dreams could play with cause and effect. Dreams could show you bullet wounds and staring girls and people walking backward. Dreams could move you from blackhearted un-church to sunlit suburbia without effort.

“A dream,” I whispered. I looked again at the boy. He had heard me, I was sure of that, but his expression was grim, focused on Samantha.

The door of the house closed and should have blocked her from our view, but we were now inside that house, though we had passed through no door. We were in a hallway at the foot of steps leading upward.

There were framed photos on the wall beside the steps: a family, parents, a little boy and Samantha. And other pictures that must have been grandparents and aunts and cousins. I saw them all as, without thinking about it, I began to ascend those steps. Even as Samantha walked backward up them.

She disappeared around the corner at the top, but the boy in black and I arrived at her room before she did. By what means we came there, I could not say, except that that’s how dreams are.

I felt sick in my stomach, the nausea of dread, because now I was sure that I knew what terrible event I would soon witness.

And oh, God in heaven, if there is one, oh, God, it was happening, happening before my eyes. Samantha sat on the edge of her bed. The gun was in her lap. Tears flowed, sobs wracked her, her shoulders heaved as if something inside her was trying to escape, as if life itself wanted to force her to her feet, force her to leave this place, this room, that gun.

“No,” I said.

She was no longer moving backward.

“No,” I said again.

She raised the gun to her mouth. Put the barrel in her mouth. Grimaced at the taste of steel and oil. But she couldn’t turn her wrist far enough to reach the trigger and yet keep the barrel resolutely pointed toward the roof of her mouth.

She pulled it out.

She sobbed again and spoke a small whimper, a sound so terrible, so hopeless, and then, she placed the barrel against the side of her head, which now no longer showed the wound, the wound that was coming if she didn’t—

BANG!

The noise was so much louder than in movies. I felt as if I’d been struck physically. I felt that sound in my bones and my teeth, in my heart.

Samantha’s head jerked.

Her hand fell away, limp and blood-spattered.

Blood sprayed from the hole for a moment, then slowed to an insidious, vile pulsation.

She remained seated for a terribly long time as the gun fell and the blood poured and then, at last, she fell onto her side, smeared red over the pastel floral print of her comforter, and rolled to the floor, a heap on the carpet.

The gunshot rang in my ears. On and on.

“I don’t like this dream,” I said, gritting my teeth, shaking my head, fighting the panic that rose in me.

The boy in black said nothing. He just looked and when I turned to him for explanation, I saw a grim mien, anger, disgust. Simmering rage. His pale lips trembled. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

He crossed abruptly, his first sudden movement, to the desk in the corner of the room. There was a laptop computer open to Facebook. There were school books, a notebook, a Disney World cup holding pencils, a dozen colorful erasers in various shapes, a tube of acne medicine, a Valentine’s card curled with age, a photograph of Samantha and two other girls at a beach, laughing.

There was a piece of paper, held down at the four corners by tiny glass figures of fancifully colored ponies. The paper had been torn from the notebook.

The boy in black looked down at the paper and said nothing. He looked at it for far longer than it could have taken to read the few words written there in blue ink. I knew, for I, too, read the words.

I found that I could not look up from the words. I felt that if I looked away, I must look at the dead girl, and I didn’t want to see her. She had still lived when she had written these words.

Then I realized that he was looking at me.

“Why is this happening?” I asked him.

He touched the note reverently with one finger.

“Why am I here?” I asked with sudden vehemence.

“The same reason we are all here,” the boy said. “To learn.”

But I had lost patience with cryptic answers. “Hey. Enough. If this is a dream, then I don’t have to put up with you!”

“Mara,” he said, though I had never told him my name. “This is not a dream.”

“Then what is it, huh?” My voice was ragged. I was sick through and through, sick with what I had just witnessed, sick with what I feared about myself. “What is it and what are you?”

“I am . . . ,” he began, then hesitated, considered, and again showed that slight lessening in the grim lines of his face. “I am the messenger.”

“Messenger? What’s your message, showing me this poor dead girl? I never wanted to see that. I don’t want it in my head. Is that your message? Showing me this?”

“My message?” He seemed almost surprised by the question. “My message? My message is that a price must be paid. A price paid with terror.”

I reached to grab him angrily, but he moved easily out of range. I had wanted to grab him by the throat, though I had instead reached for his arm. It was not that I blamed him for what I was now enduring, it was rather that I simply needed to hurt someone, something, because of what I had seen, and what I had felt since waking to find myself in the mist. It was like an acid inside of me, churning and burning me from the inside.

I wanted to kick something, to shout, to throw things, to scream and then to cry.

To save that poor girl.

To wipe the memory from my mind.

“You’re the messenger?” I asked in a shrill, nasty, mocking voice. “And your message is to be afraid?”

He was unmoved by my emotion. . . . No, that’s not quite right. It was more accurate to say that he was not taken aback. He was not unmoved, he was . . . pleased. Reassured?

“Yes, Mara,” he said with a sense of finality, as though now we could begin to understand each other, though I yet understood nothing. “I am the messenger. The Messenger of Fear.”

It would be a long time before I came to know him by any other name.

Calmer now, having released some of my boiling anger and worry, I turned my unwilling eyes back to Samantha Early. Her life’s blood was running out, soaking into the carpet.

“Why did she do it?” I asked.

“We will see,” Messenger said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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SAMANTHA EARLY LOOKS AT THE CLOTHES hanging in her closet. She clenches her fists. The veins on her forearms stand out. Her body seems to vibrate with tension.