Thirteen Days to Midnight

by Patrick Carman

About six feet up, against the brick wall of the building, there was a broken window. Underneath sat a folding metal chair, the kind we used at assemblies. I collapsed the chair and looked at the bottom, found the paint-stenciled words HOLY CROSS.

  “I don’t think it’s Father Tim in there,” I said.

  “Okay, now I believe you.” said Milo. “Come on.”

  We ran back in the direction from which we’d come. Milo took his ring of car keys out of his pocket and found the one he needed, turning the dead bolt on the front door.

  “Hang on,” he said, bolting for his car and reaching into the backseat. When he emerged again, he had the hammer and a long metal chisel. He leaned back in, grabbed the roll of duct tape and showed it to me, but I waved it off. I got the chisel, which felt more like a knife in my hand than I was comfortable with.

  Milo opened the door slowly, noiselessly, and we both stepped inside. When the door was closed again, there was only one source of light in the room. It was a thin shaft way off in the corner, and we silently made our way to its source, the old wooden floor creaking softly under our feet.

  “You got a plan, right?” asked Milo.

  “Not really.”

  “We need to get her calmed down, explain things to her.”

  I knew in my heart that wasn’t going to work. And I’d lied, I did have a plan. I just didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You think you could go through with it?” asked Milo.

  “Go through with what?”

  “You know what I mean. Could you kill her? Could you do it if it saved her life?”

  It sounded so twisted: Kill the one I love to save her. It made no sense. And it was so much worse with Oh, because who knew how many deaths we’d piled up inside her? Even if what we were planning to do worked, even if I could do it and she came back, it wouldn’t matter. I’d have to get them all out. And the scariest part? One too many kills and she really would be dead.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket and I stopped, staring down at the message.

  I know you’re here.

  “She’s down there,” I said. “She’s been using the Isengrim.”

  “What? No way,” said Milo.

  I thought of the horrible sounds she’d made when she called, and I could almost see the electricity charging through her.

  “When we get down there,” whispered Milo, “go straight for the shelves to your left. That’s where the best weapons are.”

  I looked at him in the dark, still not believing the fact that it might go that far.

  “Dude, she’s indestructible,” he reminded me. “We have to protect ourselves or she’ll kill us both.” He held up the hammer. “I’d rather have a mace if I can get my hands on one.”

  Milo disappeared into the darkness of Coffin Books, leaving me alone and staring at the shaft of light leading into the basement. When he returned, he was carrying a baseball bat.

  “You want the hammer?” he asked, holding it out to me. “I like my chances better with this thing.”

  I took the hammer in my free hand, and we crept closer to the shelf that had been pushed aside, listening for movement from below. The electric sound of the Isengrim echoed up the stairwell.

  I crept down the stairs with Milo right behind me until I was close enough to see. I couldn’t take that last step. I couldn’t see Oh that way, convulsing, dying but not dying. A second later I heard Oh hit the floor like a sack of flour.

  “Be careful,” said Milo, his voice cracking with fear as he crossed to the shelves of weapons. “Remember, she’s not dead. She’s coming back.”

  I stepped the rest of the way into the basement and felt warm air lingering with cold earth. Oh was lying on her side, her back to me, and she almost looked like a normal girl again. It was like she was sleeping, all curled up in the fetal position in her jeans and black T-shirt.

  But then she moved, not slowly like I’d expected, as if she were coming awake. She was up on her feet all at once, pulling the pink notebook out of her pocket and slapping it down on the metal surface of the Isengrim. She went to work scrawling something out with a half-melted ballpoint pen.

  “Here,” Milo whispered. He was trying to hand me the bat, because he’d picked up a mace off the shelf. The surface of the ball was covered in rusted nails, and Milo dangled the foot-long chain from his hand.

  “That bat won’t do you any good,” said Oh. Her voice startled both of us. She was sitting on the Isengrim, staring at us. “Hit me with it all you want.”

  “Give me the notebook,” I said. It was the only thing that mattered, because the answers I needed were hidden in there.

  “Come and take it from me.”

  “I need to see the notebook.”

  She walked a couple of steps toward us.

  “Take back the power and I’ll give it to you.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “I think you can.”

  Without any warning, she leaped wildly in my direction, her body against mine with such speed and force I didn’t have time to lift the hammer and beat her back. I stumbled, fell backward, and felt Oh’s weight pinning me down against the floor.

  “Take it back or I’ll kill you.”

  “What should I do?” yelled Milo.

  Oh had one hand on my neck and the other on her heart, which was where I’d planted my fist trying to hold her back. The handle of the chisel was in my balled up fist, but the long thin rod was somewhere inside Oh. I couldn’t believe what I’d done, couldn’t imagine I was capable…

  “That felt good. Will you do it again?”

  Oh yanked my hand away, pulling seven or eight inches of long, thin metal slowly free from her flesh. The expression on her face was almost euphoric, like a black adrenaline rush was blasting through her veins.

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!” she laughed.

  The chisel was turned on me now, both of us holding it together.

  “Oh, please, listen to me,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry. I can fix this. I can still protect you.”

  There was a small look of recognition then, like some deep part of the real girl I loved was in there, hearing my voice, believing I could take it away.

  And then Milo swung the mace hard and fast without any warning. It came under her body, caught her in the chest, and lifted her off her feet, sending her careening through the air.

  “Milo, NO!” I couldn’t stand the thought of rusted nails cutting through her skin, but they had, ripping the handle out of Milo’s hand as Oh crashed on the dirt floor of the basement.

  Oh sat up, looked at her chest, touched it. She took the pink notebook and the pen out of her hip pocket, flipping drunkenly to the right page. She scrawled another cross, and then another. We’d killed her twice in the span of about a minute and it made me feel like throwing up.

  Oh put the notebook and the pen in her pocket again, and when she looked up at me, she was crying. She got up on her feet and lifted herself up on the Isengrim, wrapping the bare wires around her wrist. She hadn’t figured out how to put the Isengrim back together so it would work the way it was designed to, but she’d come up with her own twisted version that appeared to work just fine.

  “You did this to me,” she sobbed. “You made me this way.”

  “It’s a trick,” whispered Milo. “Don’t get near her.”

  Oh grabbed the lever with the fingers of her broken arm and drew it toward her, sending a wave of electricity up the line and into her arm. She convulsed grotesquely, screaming into the open air of the basement. It was harrowing, the way her hair lifted off her head and her eyes darted in every direction. She was the closest thing I’d ever seen to a monster, lost in some unfathomable torture she couldn’t stop inflicting on herself.

  And in my dream I saw a black lion of death coming to take me away.

  I swear I saw it then, rising over Oh, gripping her head in its black claws.

  “Please, Oh,” I whispered. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but I wished she cou
ld. The hum of electric power scorching through her veins must have sounded like a freight train. I stepped closer to her, the tears starting to come.

  “Stay back, Jacob!” yelled Milo.

  But I kept going, one slow step at a time.

  “I need the pink notebook, Oh. Will you give it to me?”

  She slammed the lever down on the Isengrim and went limp for an instant, then lifted her head and stared at me through shimmering eyes.

  “I didn’t want to start a fire,” she said.

  I had wondered, but hearing her say it broke my heart.

  “No one got hurt,” I said. “And it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

  She started crying again, softer this time.

  “I didn’t want to kill Ethan,” she said.

  Oh had thought she’d taken the life of an innocent person.

  “You didn’t,” I told her. “He’s fine, honest.”

  “Jacob, use your head,” Milo said from behind me. “She’s trying to trick you. Don’t get any closer!”

  Oh reached into her back pocket and pulled out the pink notebook. She flipped it open to the page full of crude crosses. I was nearly sick when I saw how many there were.

  “Oh God, you didn’t.”

  Her pen lay on the surface of the Isengrim with its plastic shell melted and deformed. She picked it up and put another cross on the page.

  “You were supposed to protect me,” she said, dropping the pen on the metal slab of the Isengrim. “I trusted you.”

  She touched the pink cast, battered and broken, where I’d written the words. She’d added diamonds of different sizes, all of them filled in black.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I do now,” I explained, taking one more step toward her. Her fingers darted to the handle.

  “Just take it back, Jacob.”

  I took the last step, close enough to reach out and put my hand on her face.

  “Jacob, don’t!” yelled Milo.

  I touched Oh’s face, felt the coldness of her skin. There was no Isengrim, no electricity, no Milo or Mr. Fielding. Just her pleading eyes staring back at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling the handle slowly toward her. I felt the first jolt come through her face and into the palm of my hand.

  “I love you, Ophelia James.”

  When I pulled my hand away, she was gone. The power was mine again, whispered in the quiet of my own head. I’d finally taken it back. I took her hand in my own, pushed the handle down again, and felt her body fall limp in my arms.

  Ophelia James was dead.

  She was lighter than I expected when I picked her up. Or maybe it was having the power back inside me, giving me strength I hadn’t known for a while. I laid her on the Isengrim and listened, hoping for sounds of life.

  “What if we were wrong, what then?” I asked Milo. He was standing at the far end of the Isengrim holding the bat, looking at Oh’s shoes.

  “The rubber’s melted on her Cons.”

  He couldn’t answer me or didn’t want to. Either I’d just killed Oh or she’d come back to life at some point. It could be ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours—we had no idea if she’d ever return.

  “What if she doesn’t come back?”

  I was looking at Oh’s face, getting lost in the dread of what I’d done.

  “We should strap her down, before it’s too late,” Milo said.

  “She’s not coming back.”

  He cracked the bat against the surface of the Isengrim and I snapped to attention.

  “Stop it, Jacob. She’s in there, you know she is. And if we’re right, then there’s a lot more killing to be done. Unless you want to chase her around the basement all night we need to strap her down.”

  Milo set the bat on top of the Isengrim and went to work on the straps at Oh’s feet. I took one of Oh’s cold wrists in my hand, the one without the pink cast, and fumbled around with the leather strap designed to hold her down. I was facing Milo, really having to concentrate to get the strap on tight. I glanced up at Milo, down at Oh’s feet, and he looked at me. The expression on his face was like he’d seen a ghost, and he scrambled for the bat.

  He told me later she was starting to sit up behind me, staring at the back of my head.

  I turned just in time to see Oh’s pink cast windmilling toward my face. She put everything she had into it, catching me square in the nose with the words I’d written thirteen days before.

  I felt the blow, felt it when my head hit the hard dirt floor and my neck twisted inhumanly.

  When I looked up, blood was dripping out of Ophelia’s nose as she worked the leather strap on her wrist with her one free hand.

  “Jacob! You have to do it again!” cried Milo. He held the bat, but I could see he really didn’t want to use it. Oh wasn’t indestructible anymore. If he hit her with a baseball bat, bones were really going to break. We couldn’t go that route no matter what happened.

  “Get me off this thing!” screamed Oh. “Murderer!”

  She kept screaming that word, free of the wrist shackle and down to her feet, trying desperately to get free. The wires had flown off her hands and dangled near the floor, and I took them in my hand.

  “Oh, listen to me,” I said, trying to stay calm as she swung her arms to keep me away. “I’m trying to save you.”

  “Give it back. Please, Jacob, give it back to me.”

  She was pleading as I got up on the table and lay down next to her. She kept hitting me with that cast, crying out for me to give her the power back. I wrapped my body around hers, held her tighter than I’ve ever held anyone before, and asked Milo to pull the lever.

  We were fused together, me and Oh, the same electricity coursing through our veins. It was beautiful and terrible, because I didn’t feel any pain at all, just the sweet feeling of holding the girl I loved as she passed from life to death. Milo cut the charge, and Oh lay dead in my arms.

  I wept openly then, unable to hold back what it felt like to see Oh die not once, but twice. And more than that. Laying on the Isengrim, my face buried in her hair, I couldn’t stand that I’d been the one to kill her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Milo, touching me on the back. “I’ll do the rest if you want.”

  He peeled me off of Oh and held me by my shoulders.

  “We’re going to get through this. She’s coming back.”

  I needed to hear those words, to think this madness had the possibility of success. This time, we wasted no time getting Oh completely strapped down.

  “Where’s the notebook?” asked Milo.

  “Back pocket,” I answered, taking it in my hand. I handed it to Milo and he flipped to the page where Oh had kept track of every life we’d saved. Every one had a cross, carefully drawn and perfect. On the opposite page there were more crosses, but they weren’t lovingly rendered. They were scrawled, crooked, and wild. There were more of these, and we knew what they were.

  They were all the times Oh had tried to kill herself.

  “She can never know what she’s done. We can’t let that happen.”

  “This is the sickest thing ever,” said Milo. He was holding the pink notebook, where we’d crossed out all but two of the twenty-seven crosses.

  “She’s coming to,” I said.

  Oh was lying flat on top of the Isengrim, her ankles and arms in the shackles. “Where am I? What’s happening?” she said, pulling on the shackles and wincing in pain.

  “What are you doing to me?” she said, panic rising in her voice as she realized where she was. It was like her memory was shattered. I couldn’t stand to see her this way, frightened beyond words.

  “Try to stay still. We had to take your cast off,” I said. Her arm wouldn’t stay locked in place very well with the cast on, so we’d removed it. It had slid off with surprising ease, and we soon realized it had been taken off before.

  Under the cast, in the middle of her forearm, Oh had gotten a tattoo. It must have burned and itched without relief
for days. There wasn’t much to it, just a simple black diamond with a bright pink center.

  I pulled the handle down and had the horrifying experience of watching my girlfriend convulse before my eyes again. Ten seconds later I pulled the handle back, and she was gone.

  Milo swirled black marks through another cross in the notebook. There was only one left. “Are you worried about getting it wrong?” asked Milo.

  I didn’t answer him. Of course I was worried. I wasn’t certain she’d written them all down. What if one cross had been missed? Some of the crosses had notations next to them, so I knew they were accounted for.

  + Girl on the water + Home run shot to the head + Off the roof + Fire

  “Oh,” I whispered, drawing my hand over her hair. “Did you write one down that you shouldn’t have? Did you know it would come to this? Did you plan for it? Please say no.”

  We sat in silence, waiting, not knowing if she would come back. When seven minutes passed, I got up and started pacing back and forth. Eight minutes, longer than before, and I was beside myself with worry. When it reached ten minutes, I began to feel my heart breaking. The times between had been getting progressively longer with every jolt, but there was no way to know for sure. Had we killed Ophelia James, or had we saved her?

  “No more crosses,” Milo mumbled.

  “Let’s get her out of here.”

  I unshackled Oh from the Isengrim and carried her up the stairs with help from Milo. I went to Mrs. Coffin’s easy chair and sat down. Oh lay dead on my lap, and I touched the pink and black tattoo on her arm, wishing she could feel it.

  “Get me the cast, will you?” I asked Milo.

  I looked up at him, and he told me how long she’d been dead, his voice trembling and afraid.

  “Fourteen minutes.”

  “Please, get the cast.”

  Milo backed up slowly until he reached the door to the basement, then he turned and was gone.

  I wanted to be alone, to tell her how sorry I was and say good-bye. I thought of Mr. Fielding and what he’d said about the long walk all by himself. I didn’t think I had the strength to go it alone, not for a hundred years, not even for a hundred seconds.

  “I can’t do this all by myself,” I whispered.