Seven Wonders Book 3 (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

L
OST

M
Y EARPLUGS COULDN'T
dim one decibel of Cass's scream. I could smell the griffin, hear its ugly cry, feel its heat. It sprang upward, lifting its talons like just-sharpened daggers above our heads. A spray of toxic spittle flew off to both sides as it opened its jaws.

Aly was yelling something. Cass's arms windmilled as he tried to backstroke away. I knew in that moment we were toast.

Fight it, and the bad memories will consume you, like all diseases. I have seen it happen
. . .

Skilaki's words echoed in my head. This river was going to kill us if we let it. I took a deep breath, gulping down a blast of hot, rotten-meat air. I stared the griffin in the eye despite the fact that every twitching muscle in my body was telling me to jump away.

Instead, I opened my mouth and shouted the first thing that came to mind:

“I AM NOT AFRAID TO THINK ABOUT YOU!”

The second thing that came to mind was that I was an idiot. The talons were inches from my eyes.

I ducked. I felt the talons dig into my shoulder. Pain shot through me to my toes. I was rising upward, out of the river.

“It . . . didn't . . . work,” I said through clenched teeth.

Cass grabbed my arm. “Let go of him, griffin!”

“The bird is your memory, Cass!” Aly shouted. “Not Jack's. Face it. Say something!”

Cass was shaking. “Uh. Uh. I will not forget and—”

“Mean it, boy!” Professor Bhegad croaked.

“I am not afraid to think about you!” Cass shouted.

The griffin faltered. Its talons loosened and I felt myself plunging downward. Cass was still shaking. Overhead the griffin seemed to bounce away as if it had hit a Plexiglas wall. It glared at Cass, growling and spitting, but it was fading from sight, losing color.

Professor Bhegad was shaking, staring at the bird creature. “Please no, please no, please no . . .” he murmured.

The griffin seemed to take strength from this. It did a roll in midair and came down on Professor Bhegad. The old man let out a scream as the beast dug its talons into his tweed jacket, lifting him clear out of the water. His lips were shaking, his eyes wide and bloodshot.

“It's his worst fear, too!” Aly said. “He was the first person the griffin attacked. It nearly killed him. He's not strong enough to do what Cass did.”

“Tell it, Professor!” I said. “Find it in yourself!”

The old man was flailing miserably. The beast shrieked in triumph, carrying Bhegad toward the other shore like a hawk carrying a rat.

Aly and I began to run as fast as we could, our legs churning through the dense but transparent river. Cass was right behind us. In a moment the beast was nearly to the land. But its wings were faltering, its body losing altitude. Professor Bhegad's body lurched downward, and then fell back into the river.

We could see him struggling to stand, throwing his shoulders back, looking straight at the beast. From this distance we couldn't hear him, but the griffin was reacting, lurching backward.

It came across toward us again, barely keeping itself above the surface of the river. Its talons, legs, and body faded to black-and-white, a pencil cartoon of a beast. I held my arms wide and our bodies merged, the griffin and me. I could feel the beast passing through me like a wave of summer heat. It shimmered down my body, through the molecules of my legs, and into the sand below.

The obnoxious scraping of the river's static was delightful in comparison to the griffin's noise.

“I've got you, Professor . . .” Aly said as she lifted Bhegad off a boulder just below the river's surface.

We were just a few yards from the opposite bank now. Cass was just to our right, staggering along. “His glasses,” he said. “They're missing . . .”

“Never mind that,” Professor Bhegad replied. “They won't be much use to me where I'm going.”

I helped Aly lift the professor out of the river and onto the land. The effort exhausted me, yet the minute I waded out onto the bank, it was as if nothing had happened. My body felt fine, even where the griffin had grabbed me. And my clothes were totally dry.

Professor Bhegad looked dazed. “Wh-what just happened?”

“Last I remember,” Cass said, “Jack was shouting something about a crevasse.”

I laughed. “A necktie?”

“It's a big crack in the earth,” Aly said. “Wait. You don't remember that?”

“You know . . . your mom?” Cass said.

Mom . . .

Yes, it was all coming back. The ringing phone. The awful news. Dad's eyes . . .

Aly squinted at me, then turned toward Cass and Professor Bhegad. “Do you two guys have any recollection of . . . a griffin?”

“Like the mythological beast?” Cass said.

“At the Karai Institute, we believe it may not have been so mythological,” Professor Bhegad said.

Aly stared at them in disbelief. “You called it up, Cass,” she said, “out of the river. And both of you defeated it.”

Cass's eyes widened. “Do I get a medal?”

“Okay, okay,” Aly said, looking back over the river. “Let's figure this out. We know this river makes you forget bad memories, but you have to stand up to them first. For you, Cass, it was a griffin. It came. We saw it. We had an adventure with it in Greece. But that's been totally wiped out from your memory. And you, Jack . . . you don't remember the image of the phone call. You don't know that your mom . . .”

She looked at me and clammed up.

I knew in that moment she didn't want to tell me news I had forgotten. She didn't want me to know that my mom had died.

But I knew. I remembered.

I had not “lost” the bad memory at all.

“What about Aly?” Cass asked.

“I don't know. I remember everything, still.” She grinned. “Guess it's because I'm not afraid of anything. Now where's Skilaki? She was going to meet us here.”

I looked up to the shore and called the old woman's name. “Guess we'll have to climb up there,” I said.

But Aly was leaning over the bank, gazing into the river. A pair of glasses bobbed on the glittery surface. “Hey, Professor, you'll be able to see again!” she said. “One second . . .”

She lowered herself back into the river and grabbed the glasses. As she tossed them up, Cass and I both reached out, but they plopped down onto the soil.

“Be glad Marco wasn't here to see that,” Cass murmured. “Be very glad.”

“Thank you, my dear . . .” As Bhegad scooped his glasses off the ground, his voice trailed off. He was staring at Aly, who remained in the river, standing motionless. Her mouth dropped open in an expression of unspeakable fear. “Jack . . . ?” she said.

I moved toward her, but a churning blur of red and white surged up from the river, inches from her.

Spinning like a basketball, a hideous clown face thrust through the surface.

I jumped back in shock.
A clown?

As it bounced toward her, laughing, she let out a scream that made my hair stand on end.

 

“The figure of the clown has long been used to represent both horror and childlike joy,” Professor Bhegad said as we walked along a wooded path, looking for Skilaki.

“Clowns scare me, too,” Cass said. “Those painted smiles. Creepy. I don't blame you, Aly. I hated the circus.”

Aly looked at him as if he had just spoken Mongolian. “What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” Cass said.

We had been walking at least fifteen minutes. Or what would have been fifteen minutes if time still worked. Aly had faced down the memory of the clown and promptly forgotten it. Cass had confronted the griffin. And so had Professor Bhegad.

But I could not shake the memory of that phone call. And the realization that I hadn't forgotten it.

What had I done? Did I totally screw up? Did I need to go back into the river?

It was the last thing I wanted to do. I was hardly consumed by the bad memory, which Skilaki had predicted. Maybe three out of four memory confronters were enough. We were here, after all. Alive and in one piece.

I looked around for the ex-sibyl. She had asked us to wait, but I couldn't bear the idea of staying near that horrible river. There was only one path away from it anyway. We couldn't help but meet Skilaki if we stuck to it.

Cass was leading us, but his pace had slowed. The trees had grown thicker, and the path was narrowing and overgrown. “Is it possible . . .” Professor Bhegad said, leaning against a tree, “that this is the wrong way?”

We stopped. Aly looked back the way we'd come. “Cass? Where are we headed?”

Cass glanced around. “Actually . . . I'm not sure. I lost the map in the river.”

“Don't play games,” Aly snapped. “You don't need it. You know the route.”

“I did,” Cass said. “But . . . it's not there, Aly. In my brain. I can't call it up.”

“What do you mean, not there?” Aly said. “If you're being insecure again, like you were in Babylon, now's the time to stop.”

Cass's eyes were hollow and scared. “I don't feel insecure. This is so strange . . .”

I looked at him closely. “Cass, can you say ‘River Nostalgikos' backward?”

“Nostalgikos . . . River?” Cass said.

“Oh, dear,” Professor Bhegad muttered.

“Cass, you had the ability to say anything backward, letter for letter,” Aly said. “You called it Backwardish.”

Cass swallowed hard. “Dishwardback?”

“The river . . .” Professor Bhegad said. “It took the ability from him.”

“Skilaki warned us,” Aly said softly. “She said the river required a sacrifice . . .”

“I thought she was talking about maybe giving up a finger or a toe,” Cass replied. “I didn't think I would lose the thing . . .” He trailed off, but I knew what he was going to say. The thing that made him Cass.

“Let's go back,” Aly said. “We should have waited for her anyway. She said she'd take a while. Maybe she took some other route.”

I took Bhegad's arm. “I'll help you if you're tired.”

“I'm not,” he said.

We began walking back the way we'd come, but after about fifty yards we came to a three-way fork. “I didn't notice this coming in,” Aly said.

“The tines of the fork are slanted in the direction we came,” Professor Bhegad said. “Easy to miss when you're going the other way.”

“Let's split up,” I said. “Aly takes the left, Cass the center, me the right, Professor Bhegad remains here. Count a thousand paces and then come back. And let's hope one of us sees the river.”

As my two friends went off, I jogged onto the right-hand path. Almost immediately I could no longer hear their footsteps. The dull grayness of the woods made it hard to avoid roots and brambles, which lashed into my legs as I passed. They made pinpricks of blood that never turned into trickles. Even the blood was gray in the odd light.

The path meandered in many directions, and soon it became noticeably warmer. Overhead I heard a soft chittering sound and looked up to see a cloud of bats explode from a tree, swooping downward.

As I fell to the ground, covering my head, I heard a different sound, farther into the woods—a scuffling, a murmur that sounded nearly human. I stood. Through the twisted trees was a shifting of blackness, a movement of shadows. The air was brightening now into a dull silver, as if a gray sun were rising. “Hello?” I called out.

“Uhhh . . .”

The sound made me leap to my feet. My forehead was now bathed in sweat. Smaller shadows skittered through the woods, ragged-looking squirrels, moles, mice, all going the opposite direction from me, as if they were running from the day's first light.

I trudged onward carefully, until I reached the edge of a vast, dry field. It too swarmed with fleeing animals—and along the edges, in the surrounding trees, larger forms. Human.

But my eyes were focused on the forest beyond the clearing. There, a raging fire was licking up the trees like matchsticks. Its flames were ash gray, and it gave off a gray light that was frighteningly intense.

And it was headed my way.

I turned and ran. I didn't stop until I reached Professor Bhegad. He stood, dumbfounded, his eyes focused on the woods behind me. “By the Great Qalani . . .”

“The place is going up in flames,” I said. “We have to get out of here. Where are Cass and Aly?”

“She warned us,” Professor Bhegad said. “Skilaki. I should have known . . .”

The River Photia protects the palace. For those who have passed through Nostalgikos, who come to Artemisia with a true heart, it will allow safe passage. But if it senses intruders, it will destroy them.
Skilaki's words clanged in my head.

“But she told us about a river,” I said. “Not this.”