Crossroads (24 page)

Sheila frowned holding her hands up to let Kira know she wasn’t speaking to her. A three way conversation in which one person was invisible could be tricky. "This isn’t a joke, Mother."

"What isn’t a joke, dear?" said Marguerite. "You haven’t gotten around to telling me what the dickens you’re all doing here."

"We came here... I don’t know... I just drove here without thinking," said Sheila in a frustrated voice.

"The Grigs came," said Kira. "They tried to kill us."

Marguerite frowned. "What are these Grigs, Sheila, and why are they after you?"

Sheila sighed loudly. "You’d better go over your story one more time, Kira. I don’t want to keep having to repeat myself if you don’t mind."

Kira nodded, launching into her and Jen’s tale. By the time she was finished Marguerite’s initial look of confusion had changed to disbelief, wonder, and then dread.

"I knew I felt something odd about these two as soon as I met them," said Marguerite.

Sheila nodded. She had to admit that odd was a good way of describing Kira and Jen.

Marguerite glanced up as Sheila rose and headed for the living room. "What are you doing, dear?"

"What I should have done as soon as I got here," said Sheila. "I’m calling the police."

Marguerite waited. Finally Sheila stopped, the wall phone in her hand. Of course it had been disconnected even before the power. For the first time in her life she wished she carried a cell phone like everyone else in the world.

Marguerite nodded. "And what are you going to tell them when you do get around to calling?"

Sheila hesitated.

"That little black monsters set your block on fire?" asked Marguerite.

"I need to warn them," said Sheila, shakily.

Marguerite turned back to Kira. "Are the people in town in any more danger from these Grigs?"

Sheila repeated the question for Kira.

Kira shrugged. "I don’t know. Maybe not. Now that we’re gone they probably won’t stick around."

"There," said Marguerite, staring at Sheila again. "But it occurs to me that the police are probably looking for you."

"For me?"

"I imagine they’d like to know that you’re okay and maybe who set the street on fire. Don’t you?"

"We didn’t do it."

"Of course not, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for the three of you to get trapped in any police station answering questions right now. Do you?"

Sheila shivered at the thought.

"No," she whispered.

Jen was leaning over the desk, her fingers sliding up and down something that Sheila at first took to be a small calculator. Then she caught a glimpse of the sheen of reflective glass and realized that it was a hand-held mirror. She watched as Jen stared deeply into its depths.

"Look," said Jen.

Everyone turned to her, and Sheila  moved in alongside her mother to stare into the glass.

"Don’t," said Kira, weakly.

But it was already too late. Sheila felt herself being drawn to the mirror. As she gazed at her own reflection she was shocked to see it changing. Instead of a face it was as though she were peering through a small window into another, alien landscape. A place of dreams. Of nightmares. The land where the Grigs and the
Empty-eyed-man
lived. Strange, midget-like creatures with huge goggle eyes, wearing raggedly sewn leather suits and heavy-soled, black boots waddled along cobblestone streets between alien looking buildings that seemed to have flowed up out of the ground like bubbling lava. Ominous shadows loomed across the undulating thoroughfares between the buildings, hiding from the bright orange double suns, high overhead. There was a terrible purpose about the scurrying of the creatures, as though they were running to some imminent event to which they dare not be late.

When Jen slowly slid her hand along the mirror again, it turned back into shimmering glass, and the images vanished.

"What was that?" gasped Sheila. "What were those things?"

Marguerite and Sheila stared at Kira, waiting for an answer, but Kira could only shake her head.

"The malformed," said Jen.

"What are they?" asked Kira.

Jen scrunched up her lips, winding her arms around her knees and lifting her legs up onto the couch. "The malformed came after the
Empty-eyed-man..."

"They belong to him like the Grigs?" asked Kira.

Jen nodded.

"What does he want?" asked Sheila .

"The Originals who escaped his grasp, but most of all, the creators."

Kira frowned. "There are other creators?"

"What are creators?" asked Sheila .

Kira shook her head. "I am."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I can make things."

"Like what?"

Kira knew that Sheila was on a
cusp,
but just explaining to her, just listening to Jen, wasn’t going to push her over it.

"Like this," she said, holding her palms open so that Sheila  and Marguerite could both watch as a small, golden skeleton key formed there out of nothing. Kira stared at it as raptly as the others because it wasn’t what she had meant to create. Why had it come into being instead of the hundred dollar bill she had imaged up in her mind?

"That’s just sleight of hand," gasped Sheila .           

But when Kira refused to argue Sheila sighed. The key felt heavy and cold in Kira's hands, but she sensed that she had created it for a reason. She just didn’t have any idea what that reason might be. She felt something bumping against her chest, and when she glanced down she noticed that her necklace had slipped out of her shirt. She hastily tucked it back in.

"Mother said she would like to see that pendant," said Sheila, raising her eyebrows.

"Why?" asked Kira, suspiciously.

Sheila shrugged.

Reluctantly Kira dug the Oculet back out and held it in front of her face. Sheila nodded to say that Marguerite was looking at it. Finally Kira tucked it back inside her shirt.

"She wants to know where you got it," said Sheila.

"My mother gave it to me," said Kira, "the night the Grigs came."

"Mother says she has a pendant just like that," whispered Sheila, rising to her feet.

She disappeared down the hall, returning with a necklace that was a perfect match for Kira’s own. Sheila also held a thick and dusty old photo album. Kira stared at Jen, but she had taken on another one of her blank looks.

"Where did your mother get that necklace?" asked Kira.

Sheila plopped the album onto the edge of the table beside the mirror, and flipped slowly through the time-yellowed pages. Finally one finger stopped on a faded Polaroid picture, and Kira leaned to see. She immediately recognized the setting if not the characters.

The woman in the shot had short, dark black hair, and wore a knee-length denim skirt and boots. The man beside her, resting one hand on the long metal crank that controlled the Ferris wheel had his other arm around her shoulders. His wide grin and smiling eyes were infectious, and Kira could almost feel herself being drawn into the picture. It reminded her so much of home that she could hear the sounds of the towners, the creak and music of the rides, the call of the barkers. She could almost see the wheel moving. Her throat constricted, and she had to look away.                                           

"That’s your father?" she whispered.

Sheila nodded. "Burney Bright. I don’t really remember him, but before he left he gave mother this pendant. He said he wouldn’t be needing it anymore."

"What did your mother do in the show?" asked Kira.

"That was where she learned to read Tarot and do astrological charts," said Sheila, clearly repeating her mother’s words. "Burney’s friend, Miranda, taught her. Mom had been on the road for a year or two, working odd jobs, trying to find herself after leaving a commune in Nevada. She picked up with the show in Carson City, and she and Burney stayed with it for almost a year before they bought this place."

"And the necklaces?" said Sheila, turning away from Kira. "What do they have to do with anything? Are they from some kind of carney
club?
"

"Well?" asked Kira, after a moment.

Sheila frowned. "Burney told her they were all made by a man named Shandan Graves."

Kira gasped.

"What?" asked Sheila.

"My name is Kira Graves," said Kira.

"Maybe he’s your uncle or your grandfather or something," said Sheila.

"My mother told me that we didn’t have any family. The show was our family."

"I still don’t see what the necklace has to do with anything," said Sheila. Then she seemed to be listening to her mother again, and frowning as usual.

"I saw
something
in the mirror," she said. "I don’t know what caused it."

Kira fingered the key she had slipped into her pocket, stared at the mirror, and wondered how anyone could not believe. Sheila might not have wanted to believe yesterday. Today things had changed.

"I think Jen and I should just leave," she said, quietly.

"Where would you go?" asked Sheila.

"I think we’re supposed to go
somewhere
," said Kira. "Not just running away from the Grigs or the
Empty-eyed-man.
Most of the time I’ve had the feeling like we’ve been heading in the right direction."

"But is it a
good
somewhere?"

Kira bit her lip. "I don’t know."

"Then you probably shouldn’t be going all by your lonesome."

"You don’t understand," insisted Kira.

"I do understand. You think that you are responsible somehow for your parents’s deaths, for all the deaths that happened."

Kira nodded, but Sheila shook her head.

"No, you aren’t. If anyone is responsible those things are. Do you think that if you weren’t even here, if you didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be here?"

"I don’t know. They’re after Jen and me."

"They’re after something, but mother isn’t so sure it’s you two."

"What else would it be?" asked Kira, but she slipped her hand out of her pocket and clutched the necklace.

"Burney told mother that Shandan Graves lived on an island, and that he never left it. Ever."

"Does she know where it is?" asked Kira.

"No, but she says it’s way up north somewhere. Burney said that the only time he was there it was snowing a blizzard, and he was seasick as hell after the trip to the mainland. He said he never wanted to see the ocean ever again."

"That’s where Jen and I need to go," said Kira, realizing it was true, but also realizing that she didn’t really want to see the ocean, either.

She could almost picture the island in her head. Rocky, storm beaten, and treacherous. That was where the quest was leading her and Jen. But the idea of getting there, of crossing a deep, dark sea to some mysterious and quite possibly deadly location caused another large lump to form in her throat.

"That’s No Legs," said Sheila, pointing at the photo of a skinny man with hollow cheeks and a sharp black beard. He was sitting-legless as his nickname implied-on a stool in front of a carney tent, smiling at the camera.

"Mother wants to know if your parents might have ever spoken of him," said Sheila. "Apparently he  was quite a character. He never would say how he lost his limbs, and Burney warned her not to ask. But he knew more jokes than anybody she ever met."

Kira shook her head. She was certain she’d have remembered hearing about a man with no legs.

"He’s dead," said Jen, simply.

Sheila frowned. "Mom wants to know when it happened."

Jen shook her head. "A couple of weeks ago. They're all dead now."

"All the carneys?" said Kira.

"All the
Originals
."

"So Burney and No Legs really did come from Otherworld?" said Sheila, again repeating her mother’s words.

Jen nodded.

"What’s Otherworld?" asked Kira.

"Mom says that’s what Burney called the place on the other side of the mirror. This really is crazy."

"As crazy as Grigs burning down your block?" asked Kira. "As crazy as them attacking you?"

"I don’t know what those things were," insisted Sheila. "Maybe they’re some kind of experiment gone wrong, but I still have a hard time believing in people stepping out of a magic mirror."

But of course it all made perfect sense to Kira. If the Grigs and the
Empty-eyed-man
all came from the place on the other side of the mirror, that had to be where the original carneys came from, too. That was why her father could read minds. Why she could create things out of nothing, like the key. She didn’t belong here. This wasn’t her world. Her world was that horrid place she had glimpsed in her nightmares, the hell she had witnessed in Marguerite’s mirror.

"That’s where I belong. Isn’t it?" she whispered, nodding toward the mirror.

But Jen shook her head.

"I’m a creator," insisted Kira. "We come from the other side of the mirror, don’t we?"

"Not you," said Jen. "You were born here. You’re half of that world, and half of this one. Just like Sheila."

"Crazy," muttered Sheila . But Kira noticed that she slipped her mother’s necklace around her own throat, tucking it into her shirt.

"What’s crazy is not believing your own eyes," said her mother. "And I have to ask. If you think all of this is an hallucination or some kind of experiment gone wrong, why did you come to me? Why not go to the authorities right off?"

Sheila sighed, shaking her head. "I don’t know. Instinct I guess."

Her mother wrapped her arms around her and hugged even though Sheila’s arms still draped at her sides. She thought for the first time that she could actually
feel
her mom’s touch, but giving in to that belief seemed like a final surrender she wasn’t quite ready to grant.

"I’m glad you did," said Marguerite. "The cops weren’t going to be any help, and you might just have gotten hurt... or worse."

"So what do you suggest, then?" asked Sheila, slowly extricating herself.    

"It sounds to me like the next thing to do is find Shandan Graves’ island."

"And do what?"