The Shadow Cabinet (20 page)

20

T
HERE
WAS
A
H
OME
N
' D
ECK
NEAR
MY
TO
WN
(
WE
DON
'
T
get a Home Depot; we're not that fancy). One night, a few years ago, it burned down. It was a huge fire—you could see it for miles. Everyone was pretty interested in this fire, so a few friends of mine and I drove over to look at it, because this is what you do for fun in Bénouville—you look at the burned-down remains of a building supply store and then you get some soft serve. When we arrived, there was a ring of cars around the place. The building had collapsed upon itself. There were charred riding lawn mowers out front and burned-out and half-melted racks where plants had been. The place was sunken and stinking. And in the middle, as if nothing had happened at all, a big pile of paving stones. They were the only thing still standing that looked totally unaffected. There was something about them that seemed to be saying, “What? Is that all you got?”

By this I mean: stones, they're tough. I guess this is an understood concept. Also, stones are stones, and maybe something in my mind was saying, “It's okay, you only told them about a stone. Who cares about a stone?”

Stephen would care. Of that, I was sure. And if this stone was what we'd been told it was, then moving it would be bad. Very bad. The kind of bad that Stephen would be extremely agitated by, if he hadn't been completely motionless and unable to do anything about it.

I sat on the bed, cradling his head on my lap, my hand over the injury on his brow. He had his glasses on this time, obviously the ones he'd been wearing at the time of the accident, because they were crooked and one of the lenses had a bit of a crack in the corner. The light shadow of hair that had grown around his chin on the morning he had slipped away was still there. I liked this slightly disheveled, morning-after look. It softened him.

Everything would be all right now. I would stay with him. Nothing would move me. Somehow, this would all work out.

I'm not sure how much time went by. Stephen and I were alone in the relative quiet. I could hear people coming and going below. There was music coming through the floor, but I didn't know the songs. Story of my life.

The afternoon ebbed away, bleeding out its light and falling into dark. Someone was in the room with me at all times—various weirdos I'd never seen before. Later in the day, I was watched over by Jack. It was easy to recognize Jack with his anachronistic clothes and his hair that looked like plastic. Given his size and the nature of our previous encounter, I knew he would take me down in a second if I tried to go anywhere or do anything. Not that I could. Jane understood completely—as long as Stephen was there, I was there. They might as well have set me in concrete.

I tried to work out how this scene had come to pass. Marigold was a doctor, and someone who worked with Thorpe. Thorpe had mentioned that someone had taken Stephen's body. Clearly, she'd been keeping him here for a reason—she'd realized that something was going on. She'd kept him in bed. There was some medical stuff in the room. She'd been trying to do something.

So Charlotte had come here. Charlotte, who was now playing for Team Jane. I would work out how that happened later. Charlotte told Jane where to come, what was going on. Then they'd set the trap and waited for us to spring it.

These people were crazy—of this, I was reasonably certain. Still, they had managed to give Charlotte the sight. They obviously knew some tricks we didn't, or at least that
I
didn't. And I was sitting here holding Stephen, who somehow had not exactly died, and now we were all waiting around for a magic stone. This would have seemed more stupid, was I not also a magic stone myself.

There was no road map for where I was. I realized something about that moment, now an hour or two past, when I had told Jane where the stone was. I did it because I was afraid for these three people who were now depending on me. But what was more disturbing was that in that moment, something in my brain—some tiny, tiny version of me made a tiny, tiny leap because she wanted to believe. Get the magic stone, wake the sleeping Stephen. Of course, these same people who wanted to help me out with this were also talking about defeating death and kept friends of mine under floorboards.

On some level I'd been expecting Boo or Callum or even Freddie to come sailing through the window. They had to realize we'd been gone too long. Except that “too long” was impossible to judge with Thorpe. Thorpe came and Thorpe went, and no one questioned the ways of Thorpe. It was unlikely they'd come here if no one got in touch with them. I was going to have to get a message out. That was going to be very hard. I couldn't leave. I had no phone. I was locked in a room.

There
was
one person who would notice if I didn't get in touch. Jerome.

If I could let him know something was wrong, then . . . well, I wasn't sure what happened then. It wasn't like I could tell him where I was, or that he should call the police. But Jerome was smart. Maybe he could work something out. As to how I would text him, well, that would require telling Jane the truth. Just tell her what happened. She knew enough about my life. She knew about Jerome.

“I need to speak to Jane,” I said.

Jack rolled his eyes and leaned against the door.

“I mean it,” I said.

“She's busy.”

“I need to talk to her,” I said. “Because if I don't, this whole thing is going to get screwed up, and then she'll beat you to death with her shoe. Get her.”

I sounded like I meant it. I was using the lawyer voice I copied from my parents, the one they used when they had to put the frighteners on people. I had never done it so well.

Jack cracked the door open and yelled down for Jane. I heard a creak on the stair. He spoke to her by the door in a low voice, and then she came in, pushing past him.

“What is it?” she said. There was a note of impatience in her voice, but she was still doing the “I'm a therapist, I never get annoyed” thing. We were both doing voices.

“Remember, in therapy, I told you about Jerome?”

“I do,” she said.

“And I told you how he's into conspiracies?”

She nodded.

“He found me yesterday. And Thorpe talked him into not saying anything. Well, Thorpe had me do it. The deal was, I have to text him a few times a day. If I don't, he'll go to the police. He knows where I'm staying. They would trace where I've gone. Did Thorpe have a phone in his pocket? Check it. Check the text messages. Call the number if you want. The only number in the phone is Jerome.”

“I want to believe you're telling me this for the right reasons, Rory, but given your situation, I'm not sure it's what I would do.”

After watching me for a moment, Jane called out for someone to bring Thorpe's phone up. She examined it.

“See?” I said.

“And how did he find you?”

“A Ripper conspiracy site,” I said. “There was someone watching the school. They saw me. Some Internet freak followed me and mentioned where I was. The Internet, huh?”

Jane read through the messages again.

“Look,” I said. “It's not going to help Stephen if the cops come here. He's dead. They'll take him. They'll . . . they'll do an autopsy. They'll cut him apart. I can't let that happen.”

My grief had the right ring to it because it was real.

“That's true,” she said.

“If you think I can wake him up, then I'm going to try it. And if they come here, that gets screwed up. Also, it's just
Jerome.
”

Jane gave me the once-over.

“Tell me what you want to say,” she said. “I will type.”

“Tell him: ‘I'm good. Have fun with Freddie. Love you.'”

“‘Love you'?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “This is the boy you broke up with. And at the moment, it's very clear that your feelings lie elsewhere. There was something in your demeanor that told me you were in love, but obviously not with Jerome. It all made sense once I saw this one. The way you reacted to seeing him only confirmed it. This is the boy you love.”

“That's true,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “But I also realized that Jerome was the one who got me through a lot. He found me, even though the government was hiding me. He's my friend. I don't have to be weird about it anymore. I do love him, like a friend love, and he gets that. Or don't type that. I don't care.”

“And who is Freddie?”

“Friend from school. Jerome's visiting him over the holiday. Some prefect thing. You can add, ‘even though he's an asshole.' That's better than ‘love you.'”

“That sounds a bit more like you, I think,” she said.

Jane typed. They clearly knew things about the squad, but they didn't know about Freddie. They didn't know she was a girl, and not from my school.

All I could do was set the dominoes falling and hope they made a pretty pattern on the floor. I held on to Stephen's hand, squeezed it.
I will get you out of here
is what I thought. Maybe he would know. Maybe he knew I was there.

What I felt like was a plastic bag, blowing in the wind.

• • •

More time passed. I was brought soup, which I first refused to eat. But Jane ate a spoonful herself to show me there was nothing wrong with it, and I was told it would be in my best interests to keep my strength up for the journey ahead. They seemed really concerned about this, so eventually I got some of it down. It settled heavily in my stomach, but I probably had needed it. I felt a bit clearer with something in my stomach. I tried to figure out how many people I was hearing downstairs, to tease apart their voices and count them. There were, I thought, maybe eight people in the house. Things were being moved around. Then there was a car out front, the door opened again, and new voices came into the mix. These voices were excited, out of breath. Jack looked out the door a lot, and then he was swapped out with Charlotte. She came in, all smiles.

“It's almost time,” she said. “Rory, I'm so excited for you. It's all going to happen now. It's going to be so amazing.”

I said nothing.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said. “It's new. It must seem so odd. But, Rory . . .”

She crossed the room. She still had that prefect walk—erect, head up, alert.

“My mother died,” she said. “Five years ago. I've tried since then to be good, to do all the right things. But I always knew, somewhere, in me, that she couldn't be gone. Those things I was doing, they were for some life I thought she would want me to have. But it's a life based on fear of something we don't need to fear. It's a life based on buying things and collecting things like someone's keeping score. She's not gone. My fear is gone. I find it tremendously empowering. I think that . . . despite all that's happened . . . I feel like I've come out of this stronger. I'm not afraid anymore. How can I be, knowing what I know now? No reason to be scared of death. Death, the thing that defines us all. It makes everything I did before feel so unimportant. All that worrying I used to do at school. All the panics I got into over Latin and history and getting into Oxford. I thought all of that mattered. I thought that was the most important thing in the world. Seems silly now. Jane was trying to tell me all along, during therapy, but I needed the sight to understand.”

Jane had drugged Charlotte throughout her therapy, but this was maybe not the moment to bring it up. When I thought about it, Jane had been working on Charlotte for a while. I hadn't known about Charlotte's mom. It turned out you might do just about anything if you thought you could see someone again. Here I was, sitting on the bed with Stephen, living proof.

“So this ceremony . . .” I said.

“The Eleusinian Mysteries. They were also known as the Rites of Demeter. They were central to life in ancient Greece. Many of the greatest thinkers participated in them—Socrates, Plato, Cicero. Those who were initiated lost their fear of death, but they could never speak of what they had experienced. It was a sacred secret, and one that vanished for thousands of years. Do you know the story of Persephone? In Greek myth, Persephone was the daughter of Demeter. She was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld. Demeter went to the underworld to try to rescue her daughter. Hades said she could return to the world above as long as she hadn't consumed anything from the underworld, but Persephone had eaten four pomegranate seeds, so she was forever tied to Hades. You, my dear, are our Demeter. You must go to Hades to reclaim what we have lost. But when our work is complete, no one will be bound.”

She had definitely memorized the script. She also might have known some of that. She studied classics.