Towering (25 page)

“I told you why.” I try to act like everything is normal, like it’s not creepy at all. “He was a friend of my mom’s. She said to look him up. No big deal. If you don’t know anything about him, I’ll go.” I made like I was going to walk out.

I saw a flash of silver, a knife. Then, it was against my neck.

“Stop right there,” Carl’s voice said.

I did what I was told. I stopped. He signaled me to sit down on a dirty sofa. I sat.

“Now, listen you little punk.” Even in the dim light, I could see spit flying out his lips as he spoke. “We know you’re lying. Not just suspect. Know.”

“You couldn’t because there’s nothing—”

“Zach never went to school with your mother or anyone else around here. He came into town for a month or two. He did two things while he was here. One was work at the bar, and I think you know what the other thing was.”

Involuntarily, I nodded. He’d gotten Danielle pregnant. But why? Why would he come to town, specifically to meet one girl? Or maybe he left when he found out about her being pregnant. Except, judging from her diary, she’d never told him.

Carl nodded. “So you do know about Danielle.”

“Danielle’s dead. That’s all I know. I’m staying with a woman, her mother. You know that, of course.”

I was trying to play dumb, real dumb, but also, nice. Specifically, I was trying to be a kid you wouldn’t want to stab.

“She talks about Danielle all the time, so I got curious. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” Henry said behind me. “The old lady, she wouldn’t have known about Zach unless Danielle told her. And Danielle wouldn’t have told her.”

Did these guys know Danielle? It sounded like it. “Okay, I found her diary. She talked about Zach. But the diary ended after she found out he skipped town.”

Now, I wondered,
had
he skipped town? Or had someone killed him? Had these guys killed him?

“I don’t know what happened to Danielle any more than you do. Any more than anyone does. Her poor mother . . .” I realized Mrs. Greenwood definitely hadn’t had anything to do with Danielle’s disappearance. “Her mother’s always crying about her, and I found the diary, so I thought this Zach guy might know something. That’s all. Obviously, if he’s d—gone, he doesn’t know.”

“We don’t care about Zach,” Carl said. “We want the daughter.”

“Daughter?” I tried to look confused.

“The daughter. The one you’ve been visiting. She’s hidden somewhere, and you know where she is.” Henry was there again, with his knife. They wanted Rachel. Would they really kill me to get to her?

I wasn’t telling them. I didn’t know what they wanted with Rachel, but I knew it wasn’t good. If they were looking for her because one of them was her long-lost grandpa, they wouldn’t have lured me here, and they wouldn’t be threatening murder.

I made my choice. I would do what I hadn’t done with Tyler and Nikki. I would be brave. They wanted Rachel for some bad reason, and I wasn’t going to let them have her.

I looked at Carl, felt the knife digging into my neck, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I go out to ski with a girl named Astrid. That’s all.”

And then, I closed my eyes and waited.

But instead of the sound of a cut to the jugular, I felt a rough hand on my arm. Carl’s voice said, “Well, let’s see if you remember after a few hours downstairs.”

He grabbed me, opened a door I’d thought was a closet. Instead, there were stairs, leading to gray darkness. Henry took my other arm, and they frog-marched me down.

Mama was the lady Wyatt had been living with, the lady Wyatt called Mrs. Greenwood. And, since Mama was Danielle’s mother, that made her my own grandmother, my real, true grandmother. My face was warm, yet I was shivering. I drew my mother’s coat out from its hiding place and wrapped it once more around me. I inhaled deeply, the scent of my mother’s house, my grandmother’s. How I longed to go there. I felt, finally, that I had a history. If only I could see them.

But Mama would be angry if she knew. She did not want me to see, to talk to anyone. A boy climbing through my window would still be strictly forbidden. But perhaps, the fact that Mama knew him, knew that he was kind and good, would make up for the fact that he had entered my bedroom.

Probably not.

And that he kissed me.

Definitely not.

And yet, I wanted desperately to talk to her, to someone. Even more than I usually wanted to talk to someone.

Where was Wyatt?

It was very early, still. I knew I was being unreasonable. But those who are not trapped in towers could not possibly understand the special concern of those of us who are. We get lonely.

Still, I walked over to my window, opened it, and leaned out.

The cold air on my face made me feel alive. Below, the coat warmed me. I scanned the snowy ground below to see if he was coming. No one there except a bird, perhaps a hawk, circling overhead, looking for its morning meal. I wondered if hawks ever got lonely. They did not flock together, as other types of birds did, crows or blue jays. No, a hawk’s life was a solitary life. Like mine.

I threw my head back and yelled his name: “Wyatt!”

The sound was swallowed by the morning. No one heard, not even the hawk.

Still, I stood, staring, watching the still, silent, painted world until I started to shiver and had to close the window.

Now, the clock said ten. He had said he would come early. Where was he?

I struggled against them, but they were strong, freakishly strong for such old guys. Did they have some kind of magical strength? I couldn’t resist them. I had expected the stairs to lead to a cellar, or even something smaller, a hole in the ground, or an abandoned well like the one the killer in
The Silence of the Lambs
used to imprison his victims, small and dark.

The landing of the stairs was dark, but Carl immediately turned me and led me to a door, which opened on to another stair.

“Where are you taking me?”

For all the world, it looked like hell. When the door opened, a dull, red light pervaded the room, and it was warm, warmer than I’d been in weeks. The door slammed behind me, and I continued down the dark, creaky stairs. I struggled, but struggle was no good. It only made me more afraid of falling. Henry had a knife, and they both were strong, stronger than I’d imagined.

The stairway seemed blocks long, creaky, hollow, and as I trudged farther, the heat got hotter. The light grew redder. I expected to see the biblical face of Lucifer. Instead, I only saw more red light below, more black darkness to each side. I heard a sort of roaring noise. Was it a monster? Were they going to feed me to it? Before all this happened, I would never have believed in a monster. But at this point, I had climbed a tower. I had seen a girl with healing tears. I had seen a ghost, and I was not convinced it was my imagination. If magic was real, why not monsters? Why not the gates of hell? The closer I got, the louder the roar, and I pictured a hellhound, gnashing his teeth.

I would never see Rachel again. What would become of her, alone in the tower? Would she grow old and die alone? Or would some other guy come to her rescue? And would she know what happened to me, sense it, somehow, as I had sensed her existence, had known she was there in the woods. Even now, I heard her voice crying, “Wyatt!”

It was amazing that, faced with my own death, my first, my only thought was of Rachel. Maybe not amazing. I had seen, faced death before, and it couldn’t scare me. Leaving Rachel scared me.

So many steps. Would this never end? But as long as I was walking, I was alive.

Finally, though, we reached the bottom. I stumbled a bit, expecting another step, and backed into Carl. He tightened his grip on me, then pushed me around the corner.

It took a moment for my eyes to focus in the new light. It was not the mouth of hell which, I guess, was a good thing. It was a room, a cave about the size of a hockey rink. The roar came from a waterfall on one side, blue water rushing down the cave walls. But it was what it was watering that was so weird.

The light came from huge lights hanging from the ceiling, a greenhouse of some sort, artificially lit. Below the lights hung thousands of plants, suspended with no dirt, but growing. Each plant was a vine with a dozen or more bright blue flowers.

I remembered reading about hydroponics in science class once. That must be what this was. The plants got nourishment not from sun and soil, but from the artificial light and possibly, from a substance that was being sprayed on them by dozens of workers in blue jumpsuits. They all looked forward, like they didn’t even see us.

The substance wasn’t water. It came from a dark blue river, carved into the granite that glowed red, flowing through the hydroponics garden. At one end, it formed a waterfall to water the plants. That was the water I heard. Several rowboats were tied to a makeshift riverbank, and more workers rowed through the “field,” picking the blue flowers and carefully placing them into bins on one of the boats. When the boat was filled, two boys got in and began to row.

“What . . . what is all this?”

“Nothing. Just a cave. None of your business.”

But, of course, I knew. This was the green, the salad Danielle had eaten that had made her hallucinate. It was a drug, and these people, these zombies, were on it. They were growing it here, and that was what the old man’s daughter, the others who’d disappeared, had been addicted to.

But why did they want me? Or Rachel? What could we do?

“We need the girl,” Carl said.

You mentioned that
. “For what?” I asked even though I knew it didn’t matter. I wasn’t giving her up no matter what. “So you can bring her here and turn her into one of them?” I gestured at the zombie workers who were carrying buckets of water from the blue waterfall to the plants. They all looked like they were staring at a television that wasn’t there.

“The workers are happy,” Carl said. “See, they’re smiling.” He gestured toward a girl with a painted-looking smile on her face. Blond and blue eyed, she could have been Rachel’s sister. “Besides, we only want to talk to the girl. Zach was more than an employee. He was our nephew. Now, he’s gone so, of course, we want to meet his daughter.”

“You expect me to believe that you kidnapped me and are holding me at knifepoint, all for some sentimental family reunion?”

“She’s been taken away from us, hidden all these years. Who knows if she’s safe.”

“She’s safe from you.” A guy my age walked by, looking straight ahead. “I’m not telling you anything.”

“So you do know where she is?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then we’ll go with plan B,” Carl said, “lock you up and get the information from the old lady.”

“The old lady? Mrs. Greenwood? But she doesn’t know anything about this, about . . .” I stopped myself before I said Rachel’s name. “She’s just a sweet old lady who lost her daughter. If she knew about the girl, her granddaughter, she’d be with her. She’d have taken her someplace.”

“That’s what we always thought, assumed for a long time. But when you showed up, came to live with her, we realized she must know.” That was Henry. Carl gave him a hard look.

But I said, “Why?”

“Because of the prophecy. She had to know that the girl was the one who—”

“Would you shut up!” Carl bellowed.

“Why? You have him here. I’m the one who told you about him. Why should I shut up?” He sounded like a little kid more than an old man.

“I don’t know,” Carl said. “Could it be because you’re stupid and always saying stupid things?”

“That’s not nice.”

“That’s not nice,” Carl imitated. He reached into his pocket and handed Henry something. “Do you think you could, for once in your life, open the door?”

“I’m not sure I’m capable,” Henry said.

“Do it!” Carl bellowed.

“Okay, okay.” Henry squeezed past Carl and me to a small door in the wall. “You’re gonna put him in here?”

“Think so?” Carl thrust me forward and into the room. It was gray, empty like my mother’s basement at home. “Let’s see if he changes his mind.”