Wax (37 page)

Jill crammed in an onion ring. “Have you figured out what to do with your tankful of melted enemies?”

“No. I convinced the foreman to keep it heated and in a liquid state, but all that wax​—​it would have to be dispersed way, way out. If flames of the Chandlers' souls are still lit somewhere, in a safe place, all it would take is for someone to make a Hollow for them again . . .”

“Oh, like that's gonna happen.”

“I know. But we can't take that chance.”

They chewed in silence for a moment.

“You okay?” Jill asked.

Poppy sighed. “I miss him.”

∗ ∗ ∗

She got home around ten. Her mother and father were curled up on the couch, watching a
Dr. Steve
rerun.

“Hey, Pops,” her father said as she walked into the living room. “How's the family hero?”

“Full of ice cream.”

“Friendly's again?”

“I am nothing if not loyal.”

Her mother laughed. “I guess when you find your true love, you love it forever.”

Poppy nodded and gave her a sad smile. They sad-smiled back.

And all three knew they weren't really talking about ice cream.

∗ ∗ ∗

Poppy stared at her Broadway posters in the dark, at the whirly autographs that now looked to her like a hundred little arrows, all pointed at the thing in the backyard shed, as if to say,
If you miss him, go look at him! There's a startlingly good replica in there!

But she couldn't, not yet. The thought was too distressing.

She tossed and turned some more. She didn't want to fall asleep. No, that wasn't right​—​she
did
want to fall asleep. It was the waking up that she dreaded, the fading away of all that transpired in her dreams.

She glanced at the closet. It was silent and mostly dark​—​except for a muted, flickering light.

This was getting ridiculous. A whole week had passed since . . . since. She hadn't opened her closet once in all that time, had gone so far as to borrow a bunch of Jill's clothes so she wouldn't have to.

But she couldn't avoid it forever.

Her breath caught as she opened the closet door. Everything was just as he'd left it: sleeping bag crumpled up into a ball, radio shoved to the side. The long-burning wax of the stone candle was still lit, but Poppy didn't bother to look inside​—​its message had ended more than a week ago. She fleetingly thought about blowing it out but banished the thought once again, as she had every night, unable to extinguish the one thing he'd left/sneezed behind.

At the memory, a giggle formed in her throat, followed by a lump. She hastily started to close the door​—​but stopped as she threw one last glance at the candle.

She carefully lifted it from the floor, brought the heavy stone up to her eyes, and gasped.

After seven inches of blank space and more than a week of burning, Madame Grosholtz had spoken one last time​—​way down at the bottom of the candle, in the shaky writing of one who knows the end is near:

AND YET, THOUGH MY REGRETS ARE MANY, MY GREATEST IS THIS: THAT I WAS NEVER ABLE TO CREATE A LIFE FROM SCRATCH. WITH ALL THE WAR AND SUFFERING AND EVIL I'VE SEEN OVER MY YEARS, I WANTED TO CREATE A PERSON WHO WOULD TRULY APPRECIATE LIFE, NEVER TREAT IT CALLOUSLY OR TAKE IT FOR GRANTED LIKE THE CHANDLERS HAVE. ONE WHO'D NEVER BEEN ALIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE​—​FOR ONLY THOSE WHO TRULY UNDERSTAND THE GIFT OF LIFE SHOULD BE THE ONES ALLOWED TO LIVE IT.

 

SO I PROPOSE ONE LAST EXPERIMENT. I WILL PLACE AN EMBER IN ONE OF MY EXPERIMENTAL HOLLOWS. NOT A FULL COPY OF MY FLAME-SOUL​—​IT IS FAR TOO RISKY TO ALLOW MY LIFE TO CONTINUE, TO LET THE CHANDLERS FIND IT AND EXPLOIT IT ONCE MORE​—​BUT MERELY AN EMBER, A SHADOW OF MYSELF, AS PARENTS PASS ON THE GHOSTS OF THEIR SELVES TO THEIR CHILDREN. IT IS MY HOPE THAT THIS EMBER WILL CATCH FIRE AND CREATE A NEW SOUL ALTOGETHER.

 

I HOPE THE FLAME WILL GROW.

 

I HOPE THE FLAME WILL ENDURE.

Hardly breathing, Poppy stared at the flame.

Then turned her head toward the window.

Looked at the shed.

And bolted out of her room.

THE TOWN OF PARAFFIN SMELLED OF NOTHING.

Gone were the cloying, clashing scents of fruit mixed with seawater, flowers mixed with cookies, licorice mixed with grass, old New England charm mixed with magazine-worthy modern living.

On the eve of its sestercentennial celebration, the town of Paraffin smelled
pure.

Many things hadn't changed. Just as it had been at its bicentennial fifty years before, the gazebo was adorned with a large banner. Smitty's was packed with hungry donut eaters, though all that remained of Smitty was a Polaroid photo taped to the cash register. The lake still lured strolling citizens to its shore, where evil geese pecked at their ankles, their ferocity not tempered by time.

The Grosholtz Candle Factory was still in operation. It had been taken under new management forty years before and had catapulted into previously unheard-of levels of success. The CEO knew everything there was to know about candles and had replaced the retail shop with a world-class wax museum, attracting tourists from far and wide with his exquisite sculptures. Visitors often remarked that he almost seemed to be a wax sculpture himself​—​but of course, that couldn't be, as he aged the same way everyone else did. “He'd have to resculpt himself anew every few days,” his partner would say when confronted with such rumors, “adding wrinkles and gray hairs one at a time! How ridiculous!”

Now the president of the factory herself, she was notorious for being a confident, tenacious leader, with a systematic way of doing things that couldn't be beat. She'd even written a bestseller outlining her process, titled
The List.

But her business acumen wasn't her biggest source of fame. Not long after she and her partner had acquired ownership of the factory, she called a press conference that was to take place, oddly,
inside
Mount Cerumen.

The media were shocked to find themselves in a beautiful, soaring cavern, Gothic in its natural design and lit solely by candlelight. The audience took their seats​—​refurbished and reupholstered, taken from the local high school auditorium right before it had been demolished​—​sat back, and reveled in the inaugural performance, a fully staged production of
The Phantom of the Opera.
The acoustics were astounding, as was the lead actor, a Broadway star who had returned to his hometown for a special one-time performance. In the forty years since that night, the Candlelight Theater had been home to several productions staged every year, featuring just about every musical in existence​—​except for
The Sound of Music.
Never
The Sound of Music.

But for Paraffin, the candles were still the main attraction. All agreed that the products now shipping to countless happy homes all over the world were the finest the factory had ever produced. No more pungent smells. No more cheesy names. Just pure, durable candles blazing longer and brighter than any that had come before, as if the wax itself were imbued with immortality.

And they all burned waxily ever after.

Max's life of crime started poorly
, with the theft of a glittery pink bobblehead in the shape of a cat.

His boss had burst out of the back room moments earlier. “Forest-green Honda Civic license BNR one seven five!” she yelled in a heavy Greek accent as she waddled out the door of the small convenience store, chest heaving and dyed-red bouffant hairdo bouncing. Stavroula Papadopoulos was neither young nor physically fit, but she hadn't let a gas-and-dasher go without a fight for well on thirty years, and she wasn't about to start.

Max's gaze followed her bobbing hair to the abandoned gas pump but got hijacked by the cat, sitting in all its glory next to the cash register. He could hardly believe his luck.

It's breathtaking,
he thought.

In actuality, the thing was hideous—poorly made, terrible paint job, practically falling apart. Stavroula must have ordered it from one of those crappy gift store catalogs she was so fond of. Max normally would never have dreamed of taking it, no matter how much irresistible enchantment it exuded, but something strange had come over him. One minute it was sitting there on the counter, all smug and catlike and made in China, and the next it was in his hands, the glitter already beginning to coat his palms.

He wiped his hands on his stiff blue employee vest—then, realizing that this was only incriminating him further, he turned the vest inside out and put it back on. The cat he rammed into his backpack, its head nodding up and down as if to say
Yessiree, I'm contraband!

Sweat started to seep through Max's T-shirt. His hands were shaking, his stomach queasy. He told himself to knock it off, to sack up already. This was not the sort of behavior befitting a felon.

He was a hardened criminal now, and it was time to start acting like one.

Seventeen-year-old Max Kilgore suffered from the unfortunate curse of having a name that was far cooler than the person it was attached to.
Max Kilgore
evoked images of Bruce Willis mowing down every law enforcement officer in Los Angeles with a single machine gun, then lassoing a helicopter, stealing the Hollywood sign, and blowing up an army of cyborgs, all in the name of Vengeance.

But the real Max Kilgore was not one to break the rules. He did his homework every night. He never talked in class. He obeyed every bicycle traffic rule in the bicycle traffic rule book—which he had requested from the library and read cover to cover, lest
God forbid
he ever be pulled over by a police officer, a thought that made him want to vomit up a kidney or two. Trouble was something that kids with piercings and sculpted calf muscles got into, and as he had neither, he toed the line like a perpetually paranoid parolee.

As far as Max could tell, this phobia didn't stem from any traumatic events in his childhood, which had been relatively happy. His father had exited the picture long ago, being a “rotten hippie” his mother had slept with “on a dare” and had soon after kicked out of the house owing to his “lack of deodorizing and parenting skills.” His mother had picked up the slack just fine, raising him as if single parenthood were as natural to her as breathing clean, patchouli-free air.

Of course, Max had made it easy for her, well-behaved as he was. And until his sophomore year they'd been doing okay on their own, just the two of them. Now life was a bit harder. Now, instead of paying real American dollars for a plastic animal with eyes facing in two different directions and ears that looked as if they'd been designed by someone who had never seen a cat firsthand, he had to break the law and steal it.

And not even in the name of Vengeance.

The sound of jingling bells snapped Max to attention as Stavroula returned to the store, a flood of Greek words—probably of the swearing sort—gushing out of her mouth. “Second one this week,” she spat. “I leave old country for this? Headaches and scoundrels?”

“Headaches and scoundrels” was Stavroula's favorite phrase—Max heard her utter it three or four times over the course of each of his shifts at the Gas Bag—and with it came a pang of guilt at the thought of stealing from her. Grouchy though she may be, Stavroula had given him a job when he'd needed it most, and he knew it wasn't easy for her to have taken over her husband's business when he'd died a few years earlier.

But it was only a small pang. One he could live with.

“Bah!” She threw her hands up in the air, still vexed. “Tomorrow I buy shotgun.”

The fear of getting caught was interfering with Max's ability to speak properly. “You said that last week,” he said, his voice cracking.