Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (22 page)

She caught her breath at the sight of herself as a little girl in a
school picture, grinning away, with no notion of what was to come. She was
missing her two front teeth.

“I was six,” she said.

She turned over the picture. The handwriting was careful; she read,
Delaney
Martin
(
Dana
.) And the address of their house, the one she had still
been living in, with Jordan and the others. Then, (
YOUR NIECE!
)

“Is that your mother’s handwriting?” Alex asked her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. We never wrote anything down.”

Feelings she couldn’t describe swept upward, making her feel out of
kilter. She stared at the handwriting, then at the picture. Her heart tugged.

“This was… before,” she said.

“
Ja
,” he said. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at
the Delaney that had been. Stuffed animals and Disneyland, those had been her
hopes and dreams. She felt the heat of his skin and wondered what his life had
been like with the Cohens. Jets and flying lessons?”

“From what I can tell, your aunt was only here for a couple of weeks
before everything went crazy,” he said.

There were some burned fragments of lined paper. She put down the
picture and carefully sorted through them. She looked a piece of paper.

THINGS TO DO

LEARN GERMAN

On another, she read;

I think
something’s going on downstairs. Something wrong
.

She turned another page of the book, to see photographs of other people
dressed like Meg Zecherle. They looked like riot police.

“Those were her teammates,” Alex said. “They were some kind of security
guards. They patrolled along a place called the Pale.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A border. They had to keep something out. I think it got in.”

She looked at the massive volumes. “All this, and that’s all you’ve
got?”
“Most of this is written in Latin. I think. I think some was very
old German.” He opened a book at random. “Here or there I found something I
could read. Spells.” He looked abashed. “Imagine if you came here. Would you
know what to do?”

They shared a grim smile.

“There’s nothing more about… us?” she asked, not sure which “us” she
meant.

“Maybe you can find something,” he said. “There
is
something,”
he went on, reaching for another book. Bound in maroon leather, it was enormous.

He opened it to the first page. There was a black-and-white woodblock
print of a man in a three-cornered hat on a horse, and a small child clasped
against his chest. The horse was cantering the night. Clouds billowed in the
background, and in the largest of them, a shadowy face smiled wickedly down at
them.

Alex pointed to lines of text beneath the picture. It was organized in
stanzas like a poem, and he began to read aloud, in German. She listened to his
voice.

“It’s
Der Erlkönig
,” he said. “‘The Erl King.’ Do you know it?
‘Who rides so late, through night and wind’?” When she shook her head, he said,
“I keep coming back to this picture. I keep reading the poem. I don’t know
why.”

“What is it about?”

“The child is sick. The father is riding with him through the forest,
and the Erl King wants him. The boy can see him. The father can’t. He begs his
father to save him from the Erl King. But he doesn’t.”

“Cheery,” she said.

The despair tugged at her again, almost like someone pulling on her
hand. Anger skittered ratlike up her spine and she stepped away from the table.

“Delaney?” he asked.

Freaked, she looked around the room. “Is this place haunted?”

“I don’t know. His expression told her he had come to a decision. “The
town’s deserted. We can look for a place—”

A sharp stab of light replaced his face. She saw a circular stone
stairway. Saw herself walking down it behind Alex.

She brushed past him and went into the hall. Her thought was to go back
out the front door, but instead, she turned in the opposite direction, into the
pitch blackness.

Light flared behind her. She heard the thudding of his boots, and then
he was beside her. He had a flashlight. He said something to her in German,
gave his head an impatient shake.

“English, English,” he said to himself. “What is happening?” he asked
her.“There’s something down there,” she said, halting before a hole in the
floor at the end of the hall. “I saw it. It’s a cage.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There are a lot of cages down
there. But you wanted to leave, and I think we should. We can come back.”

She nodded. He was right.

But then it happened again: the flash of light. The cage.

And the horrible, horrible despair. Cold, miserable, alone. Dying.

Pleading.

“I think I have to go down there,” she said hesitantly.

“Okay, here,” he said, turning and aiming the flashlight at a curved
stone wall, then downward at a circular flight of stone stairs. “I’ll go
first.”

He started down, taking the flashlight beam with him. She followed for
a couple of steps, but then she froze. There was no banister and she pushed
herself against the wall, afraid she’d fall off the edge of the staircase and
never stop falling. She was no Alice, and this was no Wonderland. Grief wafted
up from the depths below and twisted around her, like people drowning on the
Titanic
.
She recoiled and crossed her arms.

She headed back up.

Then suddenly, rage poured right in, crashing over her head.

Just go down
and kick him. Kick him hard, and he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck
. It was as if someone
else inside her was whispering commands. Raging because he was the enemy, and
the end of the world was his fault.

“Alex,” she said, swallowing hard.

Oblivious, he kept going.

She took another step up.

Kill him.
They lied. They told us we were doing a great thing. But we were not.

 
She teetered and on the
step and went back down. The rage ebbed. Another step down. It faded.

Another.

It was gone.

“Alex, wait,” she said. “There’s something bad. Really bad.”

He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She got to him and to her
surprise, he put his arm around her protectively.

“There’s something that’s angry. It told me to…” she began. And then
realized that she didn’t really know this guy, and she had watched him charm
his way into her home.

“To what?” he asked.

What the
hell am I doing
? she thought. She felt as if she were waking up after a long, strange
dream.

“It told me to leave,” she lied. “And I think—”

And then she felt the sorrow, and the terror. It was longing, and
keening, and fear. She thought she heard a moan, and caught her breath. Was
someone down here? Someone alive?

“I think we should hurry,” she said.

“You’re okay, though?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” she snapped, because she was afraid of him. “Why
don’t you just zap me so I’ll do your bidding, master?”

He knit his brows and took his arm away, exhaled and ran his hand
across his forehead. She saw how tired he was. He’d just flown halfway across
the world, for God’s sake. But she hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t asked for
any of this.

He reached out a hand toward her, then lowered it. The flashlight beam
glinted off the piercing in his eyebrow. No, not the beam. There was light
around him, as if he were glowing from the inside. His eyes were almost
luminescent.

“I feel like you’re supposed to be here. And
ja
, I pushed to
make that happen. If things were different I would
never
have invaded
you…” He shrugged. “But they’re not.”

“
Invaded
?” she repeated.

He walked on. She walked behind him, staring at the back of his head,
at his shoulders. She could almost see tendrils connecting her to him. She
didn’t feel like she was supposed to be in the castle, but she did feel like
she was supposed to be with him. Was that his doing? Was he leading her down
there to do something to her?

No
, she thought, but how
did she know that?

At the bottom of the next landing, a white strip gleamed. Luminous
paint. There was a sign in German. EINTRITT VERBOTEN. She knew Verboten meant
“forbidden.”

The sorrow came back. A silver trickle of strange sounds, like wind
chimes, breathed against her ear.

“*
_*
^*
*.”

Twinkling like starlight.

“*
_*
^*
*.”

And she knew they meant “Mama.”

“Hello?” she called out.

“Delaney?” Alex said.

“Ssh,” she ordered. She listened hard.

“*
_*
^*
*.”

Mama
.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

Silence. And…… weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling.
And another voice, higher-pitched:

“**
_****
^**
”.

Help
.

She ran forward, past Alex, who tried to reach out a hand to her. Then
she stood at the beginning of a double row of cubes, or boxes, that stretched
far into the darkness. The sounds were all around her now, coming from the
boxes. Whispers, cries for help. Help that never came.

She ran to the closest one and stood facing it. There were bars across
the front, and what appeared to be shattered glass in a semicircle on the
floor. The moan again:

**
_****
^**
”.

She felt emotions: Loneliness, misery. Shock. They hadn’t expected this
to happen to them. Something else was supposed to have happened. Someone else
was supposed to be waiting for them. Whatever had been in here had been
abandoned, dumped into cells.

“It’s evil. So evil,” she said.

Then her knees buckled. She felt her eyes roll back in her head. Light
blossomed in front of her, reaching to the ceiling in ribbons of color, like
the Aurora Borealis Alex had conjured on the ocean. Shadows appeared, then
snapped into sharp silhouettes. Misshapen figures rode huge black horses whose
hooves sparked as they galloped six inches about the ground. Tiny, gibbering
things
crouched on the saddles. Dogs, breathing fire, wove in and out between the
horses’ legs as they cantered along a hill. At the head of the parade, a tall
figure wearing a helmet decorated with two enormous antlers turns to look at
her.

The deepest fear she had ever felt shot through her soul.

Then everything vanished.

Wordlessly, Alex picked her up and carried her out of the room. Up all
the flights of stairs, to the main floor of the castle; and there she felt the
rage again.
Kick him. Stab him. Kill him
. He raced across the marble
floor and through the rubble; the ash of the doorway. Out to the leveled
forest, in the gray, smelly snow.

He set her down on a rock and bent down in front of her. He took both
her hands in his. They were cold.

“Are you all right now?” he asked her.

She blinked at him. “What was in there?” she asked him. “And what were
the things with the horses?”


“Horses?” He looked bewildered. “What did you see?”

She told him. Then, still not sure it was the right thing to do, she
told him about the rage.

“It told you to kill me?” he repeated, the blood draining from his
face. “That I was a liar?”

She nodded.

He made a face and muttered in German. Then he said, “I guess it’s
haunted, then.” His shoulders rounded and he patted her hand as he got up and
plopped down beside her. He gestured to the castle. “I don’t think the answer
is there.” He clicked his teeth and scratched his chin. “I thought you would
find it.”

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “You glowed. When I looked at
you, I saw light.”

“I’m Mr. Electric,” he said. He opened his arms. Blue crackles shot
from his fingertips. “We can go back to your home. I can make your refrigerator
work.”

She heard the disappointment in his voice. “But Alex, something was
going on with your family. They did something bad. And maybe we’re here to fix
it.”

“You can’t go back in there,” he said.

“I think I have to,” she replied, feeling sick to her stomach at the
thought.

“But not tonight.” He sighed. “I have a car. We can go to the village.”

It was a Mercedes; why was she surprised? They didn’t even go back for
their stuff. They drove into the deserted village. Some shops were still filled
with goods; they got toothbrushes and food, and changes of clothes. Sheets in
packages. They broke into an inn and commandeered two rooms. She wasn’t sure
which would make her feel better, to sleep in the same room or apart. She
wasn’t sure of anything. She remembered how great it had felt to find that
carton of batteries. It felt like that had happened to someone else. Not here,
any way.