Abandon

by Meg Cabot

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see him, or feared seeing him.

  I needn’t have worried. The cemetery, like the street, was deserted. Everyone was trying to avoid the coming storm.

  Just like he was trying to avoid me. Or didn’t care.

  “Miss Oliviera,” the cemetery sexton said from behind me. “I don’t understand any of this. Who is he? What did you mean when you said you were there?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I laughed. I couldn’t believe any of this. “I threw a cup of tea in his face.”

  I heard the cemetery sexton’s chair creak, like he was getting up.

  “Wait,” he said. “Are you telling me that you —”

  “What do you want?” I swung around from the window. I don’t know why I was taking it out on him. It wasn’t his fault, poor man. I think it was going to the window and looking out and realizing he wasn’t there and that he’d never be there again, and that even after everything I’d been through, everything I’d just heard, when I should have been relieved to see he wasn’t there, what I felt was disappointment.

  I didn’t belong in New Pathways. I belonged back in kindergarten.

  “What do you want from me, giving me mysterious notes and trying to intimidate me like this?” I demanded. “Is it money to repair the stupid gate? Fine. I’ll get my dad to pay for it. Just don’t tell anyone about it. My mom is trying to make a new start here.”

  I walked over to the desk and snatched up the necklace. As soon as I did, I felt better. Comforted.

  This might have been the most disturbing thing of all.

  “And I lied to you,” I said. “This is mine. I’m taking it back. I don’t care about any stupid curse. So.” I looked him in the eye. “How much?”

  He looked surprised. More than just surprised.

  He looked horrified.

  “Money?” he echoed. “I never wanted money from you, Miss Oliviera. Money never had anything to do with this.”

  I looked at him in confusion.

  “But if you don’t want money,” I said, “what do you want from me?”

  “Well, to begin with, the truth.” He looked past me, towards the window I’d just been staring through. “How long have you known John?”

  “Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

  Dost thou not see the death that combats him

  Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?”

  DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto II

  Me?” I stared at him. “You mean you know John?”

  Then I realized what I’d done. I’d just admitted John’s existence to him.

  Except…hadn’t he just admitted John’s existence to me?

  “Well, of course I do,” Richard Smith said, looking at me as if I were a little slow-witted. “Not as well as you do, evidently. But then, when I passed, I didn’t go to the Underworld.”

  Suddenly, my knees felt weak. I fumbled for the chair, then sank down into it, clutching my necklace to my chest.

  “You mean you —”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, patting his chest impatiently. “Heart attack. Bypass surgery. But I just saw a light.” He sat back down in his chair and gazed at me with a completely different expression than he’d worn before. Now he looked…well, a little impressed. As if I weren’t the “idiotic teenager” he’d originally thought me.

  Which, I had to admit, I’d been acting like, sort of. But there’d been mitigating circumstances.

  “What about you, Miss Oliviera? How did you pass?” His gaze was gentle.

  “I tripped and hit my head,” I said. “And drowned. But I had hypothermia,” I added, because I hated the way I died. It sounded so stupid. Especially when you factored in the bird.

  He nodded. “Ah. Of course. That’ll be why they were able to revive you.” He fumbled with his glasses again, polishing the lenses with a cloth that had been lying on his desk, then putting them back on, and then eyeing me some more. “You said something about throwing…tea in his face?”

  I looked down at the floor. “Yes. That’s how…well, that’s how I escaped.”

  “I see,” he said in a completely nonjudgmental tone. “And this would have been about…a year and a half ago?”

  I glanced up again, surprised. “How did you —?”

  “Oh, just a guess,” he said, his gaze suddenly far off. “It would explain a lot, that’s all.”

  “About what?” I didn’t understand.

  “Never mind,” he said, looking back at me. “So.” He leaned forward in his chair, causing it to creak. “Tell me what happened with the necklace. If you don’t mind, that is. I’d ask him myself, but…well, he hasn’t been terribly communicative lately.” He grinned suddenly, his eyes twinkling from behind the lenses of his eyeglasses. “Now of course I know why. Though I’m sure you’ll agree, John does have his moments.”

  I shook my head, unable to believe what I was hearing. All this time, I’d been insisting to people that John was real, and no one had believed me.

  And now, sitting across from me was someone who not only believed me but had seen him — spoken to him — himself.

  And apparently didn’t think he was a monster. He called him John. Just like that. Just…John. John does have his moments.

  I wasn’t crazy. I had never been crazy.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You talk to him? You talk to him. You two have…talks.” I needed a soda, an espresso, my pills, a very, very fast ride down a hill on my bike, something. I could not process this information. The idea of John sitting in this office, in this chair, talking to this man, did not compute.

  “Well,” Richard Smith said, leaning back in his chair and looking thoughtful. “Not often, of course. But occasionally, yes, I run into him out there, and we chat. It hasn’t always been easy. He can be a bit…what does your generation call it? Oh, yes. Moody.”

  Moody? Popping in and out of nowhere, attempting to murder everyone who touched me? That was putting it mildly.

  “But I have the advantage of having experienced death before, which my predecessors in this position — who left numerous warnings about John’s…moodiness — did not,” the cemetery sexton explained. “So I am fearful of neither death nor the things that come with it, such as John.”

  My eyes widened. The fact that Richard Smith wasn’t afraid of John, or the place he came from, struck me as foolhardy to the extreme.

  “And some of the warnings, I will admit, have turned out to be warranted,” he went on. “As he is, of course, quite a tormented young man. Who wouldn’t be, in his position? But the stories about him — the things for which people tend to want to blame him around here — have grown completely out of proportion. The vandalism, for instance —”

  “Are you kidding me?” I stared at him in shock. “Are you talking about the gate? Because that was him. I was there. And that was totally him.”

  Richard Smith’s eyebrows rose.

  “Well, he certainly isn’t responsible for all the mysterious deaths for which my predecessors —”

  I shook my head. “Let me ask you something. Were the people who died kind of scummy dirtbags who deserved to die anyway? Because if they were, he did it.”

  The cemetery sexton was shaking his head. “But —”

  “What is wrong with you?” I burst out. “Can you not hear that thunder out there? That’s all totally him!”

  He broke off and stared at me. “He certainly cannot control the weather.”

  “All right,” I said. This guy lived in a fantasy world. “Fine. He can’t. How long has he been here? Was he around during that big hurricane you mentioned, the one where this necklace disappeared?”

  The cemetery sexton’s eyes widened. “He’s a death deity, Miss Oliviera, not a murderer or a weatherman. You of all people should know that.”

  I didn’t think this guy really knew John very well at all, but I didn’t say anything to correct him.

  “But from what I understand,” he went
on, “yes, the Great Hurricane of 1846 is when John originally appeared on this island…or at least when sightings of him first started being recorded.” I must have looked surprised, for he said, “Oh, yes. Other people have seen him, too, not just us cemetery sextons…although most sightings have occurred around here. Why do you think we’ve never had to bother investing in security cameras? Because everyone on Isla Huesos knows to stay away from here after dark, as no one wants to run the risk of encountering him.” His expression darkened. “Well, with the exception, of course, of teenagers who haven’t learned their lesson yet, especially during the days leading up to Coffin Night —”

  I shook my head. “What is that? Does that have something to do with John, too?”

  “Of course it does,” he said. By now the room had gotten so dark that I could barely see the sexton’s face in the shadows. Outside, the wind had calmed. It seemed deadly still, the kind of still it only gets just before it starts to pour. “Except it all happened so long ago, no one remembers the story or, at least, remembers it correctly. They just remember that it’s important to build a coffin, and then hide it.…Of course the hiding is symbolic. The hiding represents burying.”

  “But why?” I asked. “It makes no sense.”

  “It does, actually,” he said. “Because no life — if it was led by a decent person — should go unremembered. So if, for instance, a soldier was betrayed by people he thought were friends, his body tossed from a ship and abandoned to the waves, his family left to wonder forever what had happened to him, never knowing if he was alive, if he was well…That is a certain kind of hell all its own.”

  I blinked at him, my mind going back, for some reason, to those moments at the bottom of the pool in our backyard in Connecticut, when I had lain there looking up at the tassels on my scarf. Abandoned. That’s sort of how I’d felt. Even though, of course, no one had betrayed or murdered me, really. My death had been no one’s fault but my own.

  “Is that what happened to him?” I asked, a sudden throb in my voice. Even though of course I didn’t care about John, I didn’t like to think of that having happened to him. It must have been scary, being tossed around on all those ocean waves. It had been nice under the water of my pool. At least my mom had known where to find me.

  Do you think I like this any more than you do? John had asked me that day in his room, his voice raw. Don’t you think I’d like to see my mother?

  I think my heart broke a little bit more right there, in the cemetery sexton’s office.

  I hadn’t known. I hadn’t had any idea what John was talking about.

  I did now.

  The cemetery sexton leaned back in his chair suddenly, causing it to creak noisily. The moment — whatever it had been — was broken. He wasn’t going to tell me more about John’s death, if that’s even what he’d been talking about.

  “Like anything,” he said, all business again, “the tale’s gotten twisted. And perhaps, in this case, that’s a good thing. Because sometimes when people know the real story, they can’t take it. It’s too frightening. And so it turns into something like Coffin Night and has more to do with football and setting things on fire than it does with honoring the dead. But I’m still curious,” he said, “about what happened to you, Miss Oliviera, after you died. Is that when John gave you the necklace?”

  I felt myself blushing for some reason.

  “When I died…what happened…it was…” I shook my head. It was amazing. Now that I’d finally found someone who’d actually believe me, the words wouldn’t come. I could never tell this nice old man what it was really like in the Underworld, or what I’d been through there. “It wasn’t like in books,” I said finally. “I had to run. I had to.”

  Mr. Smith raised his eyebrows. “I see,” he said. “But first, he gave you that?” He pointed to the necklace in my hands. “And somehow it came back with you?”

  I was still too ashamed about what I had done back then to look him in the eye. I stared down at the stone. It seemed to wink back, white as Mr. Smith’s shirt.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d met him before, here, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when I was seven. He was…nice, that day. Then I died when I was fifteen, and I saw him again. That day, he wasn’t so nice. At least at first. I’ve only seen him a couple of times since then. Once was last night.” Suddenly, I realized I’d ruined my back-to-school manicure by peeling off most of the polish as I’d talked to him. It was lying in flakes all over the wood floor beneath my chair. Great. “John…he scares me,” I heard myself admit. “He can act a little bit…wild. I didn’t know why before, but now, thanks to you, I think I have a better idea. I want to help him, but he won’t let me —”

  Mr. Smith made a slight hooting noise. “Oh, no. I would imagine your help is the last thing he wants.”

  I lifted my hands in a helpless gesture. “Then I don’t know what to do. Doesn’t he scare you?”

  “Well…maybe a little, at the beginning. One hazard of working in a cemetery, I guess, is that you see scary things all the time. But —” Richard Smith shrugged. “You know why they call this place Island of Bones, don’t you? You can’t have a place that’s routinely littered with the dead and not have it be an entrance to the Underworld —”

  I looked up at him, my heart seeming to shrivel inside my chest. “Is that what Isla Huesos is?”

  “Well, of course, Miss Oliviera,” he said, grinning a little. “What did you think? And with that, of course, you have to have a keeper of the dead. And someone with a job like that is bound to be a bit scary.”

  “And is that who he is?” I asked, thinking of the name written above the door of the crypt beside which I’d met him twice now. I didn’t want to ask it. But now that I knew about the necklace, I had to. “Is he…Hades?”

  Outside, the first few drops of rain began to fall, pelting the tin roof. Slow at first. But hard. They sounded like bullets.

  “Of course not.” The old man looked surprised. “Hades was a god, and John Hayden’s not that. He was born a man, and lived like a man, and died like one, and only then came to be what you and I know him as now…ruler of the Underworld.”

  “So, he took Hades’ place when he…retired?” I asked, still not understanding.

  Mr. Smith shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “As close as I’ve been able to figure out — and please understand, you’re the only person I’ve ever met besides John who’s actually been there — John’s isn’t the Underworld. I personally don’t believe there can be a single Underworld. That would be quite an honor for our little island, but there’s been a bit of a population explosion since the days of Homer, don’t you think?”

  I stared at him. “I didn’t understand a single thing you just said.” Except that John wasn’t Hades. Which was a relief, I supposed. But I still didn’t get what he was, exactly. “Who’s Homer?”

  He sighed as if wondering how he’d been cursed with such an inept pupil, then turned back to his book about death deities, showing me a section of brightly colored illustrations, each depicting a different representation of what looked, to me, like hell. But I supposed to someone like him, they looked like super-fun playgrounds.

  “Look,” Richard Smith said, obviously trying to be patient with me. “It’s quite simple, really. Every culture, every religion in the world, has had their own mythology relating to an Underworld through which the souls of the newly dead pass before heading to the afterlife, from the Aztecs to the Greeks to the Muslims to the Christians. There may be dozens, even hundreds of Underworlds, for all we know. They act as…as sort of processing plants for the souls of the departed, sorting out the worthy from the unworthy, before they’re sent off to their final destinations. And this little cemetery here just happens to be centered over one of them. Your grandfather — who shared my interest in this subject — and I studied the matter extensively —”

  Shocked, I interrupted, “My grandfather knew John? I thought you said you only played bocce wit
h him.”

  He looked slightly ashamed of himself. “Oh, you mean what I said back at the high school today? Well, yes, that was a small fabrication. And no, your grandfather never met John, though he knew of him, of course. The person who held this position before I did —” He cleared his throat. “Let’s just say his views on the existence of an afterlife were somewhat narrow. You can’t imagine how unreceptive some people can be to the idea of a young man who is able to walk both the earthly as well as the astral plane, and has been doing so quite comfortably for the past century and a half —”

  Actually, I could very easily imagine how unreceptive “some people” might be to this idea. Like my dad, for instance. Which was why I’d never mentioned it to him.

  “My grandfather,” I said, trying to steer him back to the subject.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, yes, as I was saying, we didn’t see much of John in those days. It wasn’t until my own tenure here as sexton that I got a chance to know him, and by that time your grandfather had unfortunately passed. As for the bocce, your grandfather never wanted your grandmother to know that he was a member of our little, er, society. As I mentioned, some people consider the study of death deities and the Underworld slightly…well, just morbid. And your grandmother is one of those people. I’m not saying she’s not a lovely woman,” he added hastily. “And an asset to the community. My partner knits, and buys all his yarn at her shop. She’s just a very conservative lady, and I think she might have found the fact that your grandfather was involved in something so…esoteric a bit harder to understand than his being on a bocce team.”

  I shook my head. “That’s weird.”

  The cemetery sexton eyed me over the rims of his glasses. “Why is it weird?”

  I’d been about to say, Because she’s the one who introduced me to John.

  But she hadn’t, I remembered. In her kitchen, she’d actually insisted I’d made the whole thing up.

  It’s not safe for you here.

  Underworlds? Death deities? Furies? John hadn’t been kidding: It wasn’t safe for anyone in this cemetery. No way Grandma would have let me out of this office if she’d had a clue.