Messenger of Fear (19 page)

He had survived it.

Messenger had been the Messenger of Fear for . . . I had no idea how long. But his chest, his stomach, his shoulders and back and tapered torso, had all been covered with tattoos of vile tortures, each the equal of mine, and perhaps the rest of him as well, and yet he lived. Yet he had not lost all humanity, I thought. Yet he still longed for his Ariadne.

Somehow the boy in black had survived, and, I was sure, still had hope.

Having hated him, raged at him, believed every foul thing about him, I nevertheless knew that he had hope. And I knew this because he had shown me. That was why he had taken me with him to Carcassonne. To show me that despite all the inconceivable fear he had witnessed and necessarily felt, still, he
hoped
.

My knees were stiff, my muscles sore, as I stood. Messenger was gone, but I knew I would find him.

I ate my cold toast, barely tasting it. I cannot say it restored all my strength, but it helped. Then I walked to the kitchen door, put my hand on the brass knob, took a shaky breath, twisted it, and stepped through to find myself once more outside Samantha Early’s home, where Messenger waited for me.

“You have something to tell me,” I said. “You’ve been preparing me.”

For just a second, so brief that I could never have sworn it was real, though I wished fervently to believe that it was, he seemed to feel sorry for me. It was gone in an instant, replaced by his more usual expression. But the sense that he had pitied me, that he knew what was coming and pitied me, scared me.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“Then . . . I’m ready.”

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THE END CAME DESPITE WELL-MEANING EFFORTS to stop it. One of the parents heard about what was happening to Samantha at school and called Samantha’s mother.

We were there at the aftermath, Messenger and me. Samantha’s mother, a woman with thinning red hair and a weary, put-upon expression, found Samantha in the garage. The garage was like so many, a mess of folded lawn furniture, plastic bins of papers and old books, slumping cardboard boxes, a once organized, now haphazard peg board of tools. There was no car; the garage had obviously been turned over to use for storage.

A washer and dryer piled high with laundry.

Against one wall was a metal locker, red, closed with a combination lock.

“What are you doing in here, honey?”

Samantha looked up guiltily from the cardboard box she had been rummaging through. A small pile of objects sat on a table that had obviously once been used for arts and crafts, as it was spattered with paint and globs of dried glue and even scraps of tissue paper stuck in place. The objects included a tiny silver cup inscribed with words I could not see from where I stood. And there was what looked like a grammar school project, a storybook covered in construction paper and decorated with crayon drawings of a girl and a dog.

“Oh, I’m just, you know, looking for some stuff for my room,” Samantha said, pushing the storybook aside self-consciously.

“I heard you’re having some issues at school,” the mother said.

“Issues?”

“Sam, are you being bullied?”

Samantha shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

“One of the mothers called me. Mrs. Jepson. She seemed to think you were being picked on.”

“No, Mom, I would tell you.”

“Would you? Because I can help.”

“I’m fine, I’m just, you know, redecorating my room.” She gestured at the stuff on the table. “I was looking for Miss Pooky.”

“Who?”

“Nothing.”

“Was that your bear? From when you were little?”

Samantha was embarrassed. “Yeah, I think so, wasn’t it? Did you want something else?” Her eyes pleaded for her mother to go away. Her mother’s eyes were worried but vague, and I saw the slight shrug and the surrender that signified the mother’s acceptance of her dismissal.

After the mother was gone, Samantha searched for a while longer, before giving up on finding her bear. She went to the metal cabinet. She spun the combination, mouthing the numbers to herself as she did. The lock snapped open and, with a steadying breath, Samantha opened the metal door.

Inside, resting on their stocks, were a rifle and a shotgun. On a shelf at the top of the cabinet was a soft, deerskin zipper bag and several greasy cardboard boxes of shells.

Samantha glanced anxiously toward the door through which her mother had emerged. She took the deerskin bag to the table, unzipped it, and folded it open, revealing the blued-steel gun within. She fetched a box of ammunition. It was a bit like a large matchbox, with an inner tray that slid open to reveal neatly stacked cartridges, brass and lead and smelling of oil and sulfur.

“Can’t we stop her?” I asked, though I knew the answer. This had already happened. Hearing no response and expecting none to come, I posed a second question, a question tinged with bitterness. “Why do people have guns? Don’t they know?”

“Her father thought he was protecting the family. And he thought it was safe.”

“Then why did he tell her the combination?”

Messenger shook his head. “He didn’t. She guessed it. Her birthday, month, day, year. This is not the first time that Samantha has taken the gun out to look at it, to think about it, to consider . . .”

Samantha counted out three shells. Three cylinders, like miniature fireplugs in shape, each no bigger than a little finger. Samantha stared at the shells and frowned. The number troubled her. The number was not right, not her number.

Her number was seven. She counted out seven shells, lined them up with excruciating care, servant even now to her obsessive-compulsive illness. Seven in a row.

She counted them by tapping each slug with the tip of her finger.

Then she counted them again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.

Seven times she counted until her demon could be satisfied. Seven times seven.

She popped the clip out with practiced ease and loaded the bullets in one by one. Each one made a multipart click. When she was done, she slid the clip back into the handle of the pistol and piled the gun and her mementos into a crumpled brown paper bag. She walked away, shoulders slumped, tread heavy.

“I can’t watch this again. We don’t need to watch this again,” I said.

“No,” Messenger agreed.

Less than ten minutes later Samantha would fire a single round into her brain and die within seconds.

“Her mother . . . ,” I said, overcome with a wave of pity, guessing that she would play those last few minutes with her daughter over and over and over again in memory and in dreams. She would blame herself. She was blameless, but that would not stop her blaming herself and then her husband.

A question occurred to me, one that Messenger might even answer. “If she had tried to kill herself and survived . . . would she have been visited by the Messenger of Fear?”

“Should she have been?” he asked me.

I thought about it for a while, standing in that gloomy garage. I don’t know why, but it felt necessary to me, to think through what Samantha was about to do, what she had in fact already done.

“Yes,” I said at last. “She has no right.”

“She is a girl with a crippling mental problem who has been bullied,” Messenger said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “And Kayla deserves to be punished. A long and terrible punishment, because her bullying pushed Samantha to the point where she couldn’t endure it anymore. But . . .”

“But?”

“But there has never been, and there never will be, a reason to take your own life.”

“Because?” He was genuinely curious, I think. He was watching me as I answered, something he rarely did.

“Because mostly people live, I don’t know, eighty years, whatever the number is. She’s sixteen. She’s lived a fifth of her life, eighty percent still to come. That’s too early to declare defeat and surrender. People despair and yet go on, and many of them, maybe even most, have wonderful lives. College. Career. Love. Children, maybe, grandchildren, and giving up when you’re sixteen?” I shook my head. “It’s a sin. It’s an awful, wicked, ugly sin.”

There was a long silence between us. Then, through the floors and walls we heard a muffled
Bang!

The silence stretched.

“A sin,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “But I guess she’s paid all she can pay for her sin.”

“And Kayla?”

I brushed away the tears, even as I heard her mother’s voice, worried, cry, “Sam? Sam?”

“I want to be away before she screams,” I said, barely able to force the words through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to hear her mother scream.”

The garage dissolved into the school. It was morning, before the bell. The car line snaked down the street and through the parking lot. Kids jumped out of cars and vans and SUVs, reached in to grab backpacks, then rushed away to join friends or just head to the first class.

Inside, the arriving crowd was compressed into the main hallway of my school.

I stopped moving then.
My
school?

I looked to the left and saw a poster. The colors had changed since Messenger and I had visited before. Now they were green and white. There was a well-drawn caricature of a pirate with a cutlass clenched in his teeth. Sir Francis Drake High School, home of the Drake Pirates. Go green.

“This isn’t the . . . This is . . .”

Messenger said nothing, but I had the sense that he was standing just a bit closer to me than was his habit.

I felt for tendrils of memory. It was like trying to grab wisps of smoke. They were there, I could almost touch them, but when I tried, they slipped away, leaving only bits and pieces, impressions. They left a residue of emotion but without explanation.

And yet I knew this place. This school.

My God, had I known Samantha Early? Was I one of the many who must have known that she was in pain, must have known that she was being bullied?

The ground seemed to be moving beneath me, like a slow-motion earthquake. I felt nauseous, and as if that was only the merest symptom of a terrible illness that was coming my way, inexorable, impossible to sidestep.

“Where’s Kayla?” I demanded. “That’s what you’ve come to show me, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? So where is she?”

The bell rang and the crowd, already thinned, evaporated with a loud banging of lockers, sneakers squeaking on fresh-waxed floor and the usual calls and jokes and promises to hook up later.

“Where is she? I want to see her. They’re going to announce it, aren’t they? They always do when there’s something awful that’s happened, they do, over the PA, Ms. Seabury, she’ll . . .”

I was breathing hard, though I wasn’t moving fast enough to warrant it. I moved with an ease I would have found impossible to believe days earlier, right through doors, into and out of classes, hurrying, searching faces for Kayla. AP Comp, that’s where she would be, first period.

I was panting now, my heart pounding madly in my chest, hurrying, a blur as I passed through solid objects, a ghost in my old school, because yes, it was my old school, my school, and there was J.P., as usual, clowning in the back of the Chem Lab, and I knew him. I knew Alison DeBarge, twirling her hair sullenly over close to the window in French. They were both part of my circle of friends.

My group. My friends. We weren’t the coolest of the cool, maybe, but the group around me, the ones who sometimes called me M-Todd.

M-Todd. Mara Todd.

M-Todd.

How had that gotten started, that stupid nickname? Someone . . . Shannon, yeah, it was her, Shannon, my best friend, who had come up with that and for some stupid reason it stuck, even though it was stupid, as stupid as K-Mack.

I stopped suddenly. Stopped and stuck out my hand to hold myself up against a wall that avoided my touch.

Dread. It was coming for me. I felt it looming behind me, before me, all around me. Dread.

“No,” I whispered.

Messenger waited, knowing, waited. Waited, and I hated him for that patience, hated him for already knowing what I could only feel as a terrible beast coming to devour me.

“Where’s Kayla?” I demanded.

And he said nothing.

“Where is Kayla?” I cried out. “Where is she? Where is Kayla? Where is Kayla?” My whole body trembled. I shook like I was seized by fever chills.

“Where is Kayla?” I screamed.

And only then did Messenger say what I knew he must say. “There is no Kayla.”

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