Authors: Michael Grant
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #Bullying
Messenger of Fear (5 page)
But rather than my insubstantial hand passing through a solid object, it was the door handle that moved. It was there, and then, seconds before my fingers would have touched it, it was gone. And the instant I withdrew my hand, it was back.
“You cannot alter what you see around you,” Messenger instructed. “You may see all but touch nothing. What you see is all past, and the past may not be changed.”
“How do I see what she’s writing if I can’t open the stupid door?” I said. I was annoyed by the door, irrationally annoyed. It was strange to be irritated by something so small in these wanderings with a strange boy through an impossible universe. But maybe it was easier or safer to be bothered by things that seemed familiar.
The deal I made.
Did I even want to know how I had come to make a deal with Messenger? And why had he said that we may not touch? Why
may
and not
can
? That word choice hinted at rules, and rules come from a person or institution.
“I need time,” I said. “I need to . . . to rest.” If I could just sit down somewhere, digest, put things together. Think.
“It’s a lot to understand,” Messenger allowed. “But the understanding will only come by living it.”
“Or you could explain it,” I snapped.
“Do you want to know what Samantha Early is writing?”
I have a fatal weakness: I am the cat curiosity killed. “Yes, of course I want to know. The girl is going to kill herself. Maybe her writing will tell us why.”
“Then see,” Messenger said.
It was a challenge. Or a test. He wanted to know whether I could find a way into the coffee shop.
The thing I “may” not do was to change anything around me. I could not touch, could not change. I had a thought then and wondered if it made sense. I could ask Messenger, but I sensed that this would disappoint him, and absurdly, I did not want to disappoint him.
We had become teacher and student, and I have always been a good, if not perfect, student. It’s one of the things I dislike about myself, that willingness to please. Sometimes I dislike it so much that I pick fights with people just to show that I will not be their slave. But this was not the time, and Messenger was not the person. He held my memories. He had power over me. If I were ever to get back to my own reality, escape this . . . this whatever it was. . . then it would be through Messenger.
It occurred to me then that I had a project due. My science project, which was . . . I couldn’t recall what it was, but that single fugitive memory, that anxiety, had crept through whatever blocked my memory and reminded me that I did truly have a need to get back.
My God, was that really my only reason for needing to get back to my life?
I took a deep breath and walked straight toward the Starbucks’ brick-and-plate-glass storefront. I steeled myself for impact and closed my eyes in a flinch.
There was no impact. I was on the other side of the window, inside the coffee shop, standing behind Samantha Early as she typed and paused and typed some more.
This is what I saw on her monitor:
what the French call, l’esprit de l’escalier. It means the spirit of the staircase, but what it’s really about is the way you always think of the perfect comeback after it’s too late, after you’re on the bus heading home from school, or in your mom’s car, or on the staircase, and then, ah hah! The perfect comeback.
Now Jessica knew what she should have said to Elise. She should have said, “I am sad for you that you care so much about how I look and what I wear. It must be hard for you being so superficial.” That’s what she should have said. But instead she
Messenger was beside me. I did not turn to look at him but said, “She’s a pretty good writer. I wonder what the story is about.”
“Wonder,” he said. It wasn’t an echo, it was an instruction.
So, I wondered, and gasped as the whole of it, the 72 pages that preceded that single screen, and the 241 pages that would come after it, were all suddenly known to me. As if I had read it all. No, not that, because even when you read a book, you forget a lot of it. This book,
The Nightmare Clique
, was known to me in every detail.
“It’s about a group of high school girls who use supernatural powers to bully kids they don’t like,” I said.
“That’s the story. Is it the real purpose of the book?”
I shook my head. “No. No, it’s really about Samantha. She is Jessica. And the nightmare clique is Kayla and her friends.”
Messenger nodded. “Shall we look at the happiest day in Samantha’s life?”
I was not so naive that I didn’t realize there was a danger in this. Seeing Samantha happy would only emphasize the awful tragedy of her death. But Messenger didn’t wait for an answer. Without any sense of movement we were suddenly in a different place. We were at Yolo’s, and Samantha was loading a large Styrofoam dish of frozen yogurt with Reese’s Pieces and Butterfinger crumbles. She paid at the register and glanced around, nervous that someone from school would see her piling on calories.
As soon as she sat down, she ate a big spoonful and while she crunched the cold candies, she checked her email on her phone. I saw the email, and in some way I could not yet hope to explain, I saw it more fully in Samantha’s mind.
It was from a literary agent.
I am very pleased to tell you that I would love to represent The Nightmare Clique. I think there is an excellent chance of selling it to a major publisher, and if you will sign the attached document, I will get to work immediately.
“She thinks she’s going to publish it!” I said. I was excited. There have been times when I thought of becoming a writer, but I would never have had the courage to actually submit a manuscript at my age. Samantha and I were the same age, and she had been brave enough to risk rejection.
I had pitied her. Now I admired her.
“Twenty-seven days from this moment, HarperCollins will agree to publish Samantha’s book,” Messenger said. “Samantha will read that letter seven times, will have no choice but to read it seven times. She will be frustrated by her compulsion, but she will also be elated. She will tell herself that now, at last, everything will change for the better.”
“But that’s not the way it works out,” I said.
“No,” Messenger said, and we were back in Samantha’s room, and her body was on the floor of her bedroom, stiffening, growing cold as it awaited her mother’s horrifying discovery that her only child was gone.
I shook my head. “I can’t do this, okay? I can’t. You have to let me go. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to feel this, Messenger, whoever you are,
what
ever you are, I don’t . . .” I was crying. It should have been humiliating, crying in front of him.
“No one prefers this path,” he said. His voice was flat and devoid of emotion. But I saw something like nausea reflected in his expression. “No one would choose to feel another’s pain. But this is my . . . This is
your
fate, Mara.”
“No,” I said sharply. “This is all some kind of creepy trick!”
He didn’t deign to reply to that. He waited, silent, as the truth, or at least a part of it, began to sink in.
“I’m being punished,” I said.
Again, he said nothing. I wondered if I could find a way to feel what he was feeling, to know his mind as I had so easily penetrated the mind of Samantha Early, but when I turned my thoughts that way, I felt his mind retreat and fend me off.
It was like the door handle. I could see him, but I was not allowed to touch him. Not physically, not mentally. I was an open book to him, and he was closed to me.
I am not to be touched.
“Not all my . . .
our
. . . duties are quite so grim,” he said at last. “This terrible matter will hold for a while. And I think you could do with a change of scenery.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
THE CHANGE OF SCENERY WAS SUDDEN AND extreme. One moment we were standing over Samantha Early’s body, and the next we were in the backseat of a car. The transfer was carried out by no usual earthly means and was testament to the fact that I never felt even the slightest acceleration, though we had gone in a flash from stationary to sixty-four miles an hour.
A boy and a girl were in the front seat. The girl was driving. The boy was clowning, doing a duck-face rendition of a Rihanna song. The girl laughed.
“What is this?” I asked in a whisper. It was a natural human instinct to whisper, though I had slowly begun to realize that nothing I did would be seen, and nothing I said would be heard by the people we watched.
“This is Emma and Liam,” Messenger said.
Liam was a ginger, so Irish-looking he could have been the poster boy for an Irish tourism ad campaign. Emma was very nearly his opposite. She was Latina, with extraordinarily voluminous brown hair, dark eyes, and smooth skin that I admired.
“Is that the place?” Liam asked as they drove past a narrow, rutted driveway marked by a mailbox that had not seen a delivery in a very long time. He was rubbing Emma’s neck and she was enjoying it.
You can sense when a couple is a couple, when they are so close that silence is as good as talking, and when talking is a series of sentences left dangling because you know the other person knows what you mean. A couple is close when most of what passes between them is tacit, unvoiced, not for display, not for signaling to outsiders. I had the vague feeling that perhaps my parents had been like that once. I had the definite feeling that I had never known that kind of relationship.
“Yep. Missed it.” The road was two-lane, trees on both sides, trees arching overhead, blocking the rapidly failing light of a cold sun. Emma pulled the car into a U-turn and winced when she heard the bumper scrape over branches. “I cannot have a mark on the car. You know my dad.”
“Sadly, yes, I do know your dad.”
“He’s actually—”
“A good guy. Yeah, Emma, I know. Someday I’ll be a father with a daughter and—”
“You’ll be just like him.”
“Well, much hotter, of course.”
“Don’t say the word ‘hot’ anywhere near the words ‘your dad,’” Emma said.
“The word ‘hot’ is all about me,” Liam said. “And you.”
“There’s the road.”
They drove back to the missed pull-off, then at walking speed followed the overgrown path until it reached a clearing. In the clearing was a barn with a collapsed roof and a tiny house that must once have been loved. The sagging porch had long ago been painted in bright colors, and someone had carved gingerbread appliqué to give the place a quaint, almost fairy-tale look.
“You sure no one’s here?” Liam asked, looking dubious.
“It belongs to my grandmother,” Emma said, and drove the car around the back so that even if someone did happen down the road, it would not be seen.
“The grandmother—”
“Yes, the one in the nursing home. Granny Batista. She hasn’t been here in, like, a year, and I’ve been watering her plants.”
“I’m going to water your plants.”
“Really, Liam? That’s your sexual innuendo? Water my plants?”
They both laughed, Liam as much as Emma, taking pleasure in the silliness of the exchange.
They climbed out and Liam came around to the driver’s side and leaned Emma back against the car. They kissed and this went on for quite a while and was clearly becoming a prelude to more.
Messenger watched impassively, but I was feeling most uncomfortable. “Do we have to be Peeping Toms?”
“We can move forward.”
Suddenly, as though the two young lovers were a video, they began to move faster, faster, a video on fast-forward. They kissed, broke apart, moved like manic robots to the door, out the door.
Messenger stood waiting. He glanced around at the trees. “Dogwood and hemlock,” he said as though answering a question. “Oak as well, of course.”
“Hemlock. Isn’t that poisonous?” Seriously, this he would discuss with me? Botany?
“It can be. It’s a favorite of witches.”
I played that back in my head, wondering if there had been irony surrounding the word “witches.” I heard no hint of humor. And suddenly we were in a hallway in the house, outside a closed and locked door.
We didn’t wait long before Emma and Liam came out, somewhat less fully dressed than they had been, but decent, arms around each other.
“There are chips and cookies downstairs,” Emma said. “You need to keep your strength up.”
That earned a laugh and they rushed downstairs to feed. By the time they reached the kitchen, Messenger and I were waiting for them.
“Remind me to check the car for scratches or anything. The mileage will look like I went to the Walgreens, but if it’s scraped up or has crushed green leaves or whatever . . .”
“Your dad,” Liam said.
“He’s just . . . you know, old. I mean, your mom and dad are what, thirty-two?”
“Thirty-three and four,” Liam said, ripping open a bag of chips.
“And my dad is sixty,” Emma said. “Sixty and raised in a little mountain village in Nowhere, Guatemala. He thinks different.”