The Keepers (30 page)

“We take the malkund. We take it and destroy it.”

“How? And what if we can't? Mr. Meister said it was hard to destroy, right?”

“
Extremely difficult
, he said. I know. So I thought maybe, if we can't destroy it, we could—if you're willing—send it through the box.”

“Are you—” Horace began, and then lowered his voice. “Are you insane?”

“I know, but I've been thinking. This thing has my dad under some kind of spell. Or not a spell, okay, but it has a power over him. If we send it through the box, though, it'll just be—”

“Gone,” Horace finished.

“Yes. Better than destroyed.”

“But it'll come back.”

“Yes, and I'll have to deal with it. But for twenty-four hours, it'll be nowhere. It'll be traveling. Maybe that will break the connection, or something. My dad, he—” Her voice cracked ever so slightly, and she looked so fragile and lost as she searched for the right words that after a moment Horace leaned toward her, putting out his hand. But then the wings of the dragonfly flickered, and Horace snatched his hand back.

“Don't,” Chloe said.

“I'm not.”

“You were. And please don't look at me like that, all . . . protecty, or whatever.” All the vulnerability was gone from her voice now, pushing a stab of embarrassment and a strange, sick kind of sadness through Horace.

“I'm not being protecty, I'm being . . . friendy.”

Chloe's throat worked up and down cruelly. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Then be my friend,” she said.

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER, AT
11:14,
THE TWO OF THEM
mounted the back steps of Chloe's house. They entered a tilting screened-in porch that seemed like it was about to fall off the house. Chloe flipped a switch and lit a dim, bare bulb overhead. A broken porch swing lay beside the back door like the skeleton of some dead animal, bleached and collapsing. There was a bike tire, too—flat—plus a couple of cinder blocks and a small white wastebasket with a board over the top. “Don't say anything about my house,” Chloe said. “I don't want you to laugh or whatever.”

“Why would I laugh?”

“Just . . . don't, okay?”

“Okay.”

If things were in disarray outside, the inside was a wreck. They passed through a cluttered, narrow hall into the front room, and here there were papers everywhere, and clothes,
and all kinds of everything. There was so much debris that paths had been made through it from door to door. The only furnishings were a single ratty-looking recliner and a couple of wooden kitchen chairs—one of which held an ancient TV—and a kind of coffee table propped up by milk crates. This table, like the rest, was buried beneath a drift of paper and clothes and garbage. Horace spotted a half dozen empty liquor bottles in the mix.

And there was a smell, a nagging stink that Horace couldn't put a name to. Through another door, he could see a cramped, grimy kitchen. The tops of more empty bottles peeked out of the sink.

Chloe led him swiftly across the front room through another doorway. Horace passed a chest-high piece of furniture covered in papers and realized it was a piano. The keys were exposed, and in one place there was a pile of big black crumbs—crumbs, or worse. Horace's face scrunched up in disgust, involuntarily. He quickly tried to smooth it away. To the right, stairs led up to the second floor, where a dingy yellow light shone from a water-stained fixture on the ceiling. To the left, the darkness of another room yawned. A faint, grating snore trickled out through the door.

Chloe put a finger over her lips. She crept nimbly up the steps, keeping her feet close to the right-hand wall. Horace came behind her, following her as precisely as he could. The boards creaked under him, making him feel huge, but the snoring continued.

Chloe led the way into her bedroom. Not nearly so messy here. In fact, the place was far neater than Horace's own room. The only real mess was an astounding heap of books in one corner—stack after stack, some waist-high, piled like a rocky desert landscape. Library books all. Horace got the feeling she didn't plan to return them anytime soon.

Her bed was a mattress lying on the floor. She had a milk crate for a bedside table. The only piece of real furniture was a pale blue dresser. Atop it Horace spied two photographs. One was a recent picture of Chloe and Madeline in front of the Navy Pier Ferris wheel. The other was older, showing both girls laughing in the lap of a large, bearded, smiling man—their father?

The walls were bare, except for one. Around the closet door in the rear wall, someone had painted what looked like an ornate gateway. It was rough and a bit lopsided, but beautiful—iron brown for the most part, but full of winding lattices and curlicues and little colored decorations, flowers and animals and symbols. It was a foot wide on all sides, reaching almost to the ceiling above. Horace came closer and marveled.

“Did you do this?” he asked.

“Oh, no. That's Madeline.”

Horace felt his eyebrows float up. “Madeline did this?”

“I know, she's talented. You should see her room.”

“It's cool that your dad lets her draw on the walls.”

“Oh, yeah, Horace,” she sniped. “He's a real art connoisseur. And a devoted homemaker.” Horace looked away,
embarrassed. As his gaze drifted around the little room, he spotted a shoebox inside the milk crate Chloe used for a nightstand. It was full of food—candy bars, granola bars, a box of graham crackers. Rolls and rolls of wintergreen mints. All stolen, no doubt, but that stealing—here in this stark room with sheets for a curtain, and with the snore coming from the dark, smelly room downstairs—that stealing didn't seem quite so bad.

“So I was thinking,” Horace said. “Will it be safe, sending the malkund? It's a Tanu, right? I never sent a Tanu through the box before.”

Chloe bit her lip. “We could test it.”

“With what?”

“The raven's eye Mr. Meister gave me.”

“What? No, Chloe, don't be stupid. You need to keep that. It's helping to protect you.”

Chloe sighed and reached into her pocket. “Maybe I'm too stupid to know how this thing is supposed to work, but I get the feeling it's not going to protect me much longer.” She pulled out the raven's eye and held it forward for Horace to see.

Horace gasped. The little leestone had faded drastically. The purple cloud inside was the size of a pea, after just seven hours or so. “Chloe, oh my god. That's bad.” He searched her face, but it was wooden. “It took almost a whole day for the raven's eye I had to fade this much, and Mr. Meister kind of freaked.”

Chloe's eyes flared. “Okay, so it's about to be worthless,
right? So let's send it. If you're willing to try . . . Keeper.” She held out the leestone.

“Okay. Okay.” Horace took the stone, surprised as ever by the strange warmth. He thought he could almost see the purple cloud shrinking.

He took out the box. Better not to drag this out. He stood over the bed, the box in one hand and the raven's eye in the other. “I'm nervous,” he said.

“It's not going to blow up or anything. Mr. Meister would have warned you. It's an instrument of legend, and all that, right?”

“Right.” Horace opened the box and put the raven's eye quickly inside. He felt nothing unusual. Before he could doubt himself any more, he slid the lid closed. The tingle thrummed through his fingers—stronger than usual, maybe, but to his relief it was otherwise utterly normal. When he opened the lid, he spotted the raven's eye lying there on tomorrow's bed, sharp and clear, the tiny nugget of color at the center still visible. Apparently it hadn't faded while traveling.

“It worked,” he said, snapping the box closed again.

“Yes,” Chloe hissed. “So let's do it. Can you do it?”

“I can do it. And then we have to go.”

Chloe nodded. She outlined the plan. She would go into her father's room and take the malkund from him. “He sleeps with it in his hand,” she explained. Horace would wait on the back porch, and she would bring it out to him. They would try to destroy the malkund, but if they couldn't,
they would send it through the box.

They inched down the stairs. Snores still drifted from the gloomy room at the bottom. Chloe stepped just inside the doorway and stood there—letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, Horace realized. She glanced back at him and nodded.

Returning to the back porch was a blessing; fresh air came through the screens, cool and clean. Horace held the box at the ready but kept the lid closed. He resisted the urge to see what would be going on here at this time tomorrow night, worried that they were already using the box too much. He waited nervously, realized he was scanning the backyard for the sight of anything strange.

Murmured words drifted down the narrow hallway from the front room. Chloe. Long seconds passed—
twenty-two, twenty-three
—and at last she appeared, scurrying. She had her hands tightly cupped together around something, as if it might escape. “Coming, coming!” she hissed at Horace. She burst out of the hall and onto the porch. With a shout, she let the malkund fall. “God, it bit me!”

The malkund fell with a clatter, bouncing across the floor and coming to a stop. It was no bigger than a fingertip, shining and black. Horace squatted to examine it. It was shaped like a bug, with a round black head and chunky, folded hind legs—a roughly carved cricket. And it stank. It smelled like Dr. Jericho.

“No, no, crush it!” Chloe lunged forward to step on it.

The malkund leapt into the air, chirping. Horace fell back
onto his butt, slamming his head against a post. The malkund sprang into the wreckage of the porch swing, trying to burrow between the slats as Chloe stomped at it. “It wants to get back to him!” she cried.

The malkund leapt again, coming down between Horace's outstretched feet. Horace backpedaled away. His foot caught a cinder block. The block toppled slowly, then hammered down onto the malkund with a dull crack.

Horace and Chloe gaped at each other.

“I didn't know they were alive,” Horace said.

Chloe clutched at her shirt with both hands, wiping them. She frowned down into one palm. “Not alive. Just another kind of Tanu. But it bit me. I could hardly get it out of his hand, and then it bit me or something. It was chirping, too, trying to wake him.”

Horace leaned forward cautiously and tipped up the cinder block. Beneath it, the malkund lay still. One of its tiny back legs had snapped off, and it was badly scratched, but it seemed otherwise undamaged. “Do you think it's—” Horace began, and then the malkund twitched violently. Chloe yelped and Horace fell back again, taking the cinder block with him. It scraped his calf as it fell, scoring cornrows of blood across his flesh. The malkund leapt away, wounded but still fast. It skittered around the porch like popcorn popping.

A crash snapped Horace's head around. A man with a great bushy beard and broad muscular shoulders was staggering down the hallway, shirtless and huge. He'd knocked over
a lamp and a stack of newspapers and was stumbling toward them, mumbling angrily, his words slurring together into a growl. His red-rimmed eyes locked on to Horace. Chloe's father, but this was not the same kind man as in the photograph upstairs. “Kids,” he rumbled. “Gimme, dammit—gimme!” He took another lurching step and fell against the wall. He held one hand downturned, fingers like claws, snapping at the air. He was halfway down the hall now.

“Keep it away from him!” Chloe cried. She took a long step and kicked at the malkund, hitting it square on. It sailed across the porch, cartwheeling crazily, and bounced out of the still-open door. “Get it, Horace, get it!”

Horace sprinted after the malkund, leaping down the back steps. It twitched and hopped across the concrete walk at the foot of the stairs, blundering back toward the house. He stomped at it. It sprang around, trying to escape. At last he got it, felt it snap beneath his heel. When he lifted his foot, he saw the other leg had broken in half. Still the thing squirmed and skittered, dancing around in twitchy circles. It bounced into the dark grass.

“Send it! Send it now!” Chloe called. Her father loomed in the doorway behind her.

Horace dropped to one knee, opening the box, dipping it into the malkund's path. The malkund tumbled blindly into the box, chirping shrilly. Up on the porch, Chloe's dad roared and stumbled out of the hallway. “Chloe?” he bellowed. Chloe stood in front of him, arms raised—so tiny in front of
the towering, raging form of her father.

Horace closed the box. The malkund's cries cut off mid-chirp. A long, strong tingle streamed into his hands. At the same moment, Chloe's father collapsed, going down like a tree. Chloe sidestepped him as he fell and then dropped immediately to his side, peering into his face.