by Cora Choi
Chapter 26: Anne-Marie
Irving and I were thrown into a moldy basement. Originally designed as a dungeon, it now stored gardening tools. Though the dungeon was below ground level, a foot of it was aboveground, enough room for a window—a crude cutout in the wall, the size of a large stone block—situated in the upper-right corner of the cell. We were able to peer through this window into the courtyard.
One of the walls of our prison was a rusted iron lattice that prevented Irving and me from entering the narrow corridor just beyond it. The center section served as a door that opened into the corridor. At its far end, a bare lightbulb cast a faint beam into our cell. Within minutes of settling in, Irving yawned.
“I’m beat. Aren’t you tired, Hugh?” he asked.
“I’m the Demon of Stauros, remember?” I smirked. “I don’t get tired.”
“Right,” said Irving, scratching his head, his eyes barely open. He kept trying to open his eyes wider, but with each attempt, his eyelids sank lower.
“Demons don’t get tired,” he mumbled. He turned away from me and the window and lay down on the floor. Within seconds, he was snoring.
I continued to look through the window. The thickness of the wall prevented me from seeing anything to the left or right, even when I shifted my position by the window. My field of vision was limited to what was straight ahead of me. The cobblestones of the courtyard were at eye level, and all I could see were skidding and stomping feet.
I heard rocks being thrown and shots ringing out. The courtyard was filled with rioting students. Irving and I had been gone from the courtyard for only a couple of hours, yet it was clear that the aggression had escalated during that short period of time. I couldn’t see any faces. I was anxious about Max and J.P., for I was sure that instead of running away, they were most likely at the front, fighting with the guards.
I pressed my face as close to the window as I could, hoping to hear the voices of my roommates—any kind of reassurance. Instead, I heard the whooshing of a helicopter propeller. The chugging of the engine blocked out all other noises for a minute and then started to recede. Within a couple of minutes, the sounds from the helicopter were only echoes in the distance. I assumed Parafron was in the helicopter, as well as the trustees—who included Anne-Marie.
How could she have never even given a sign to let me know that she was alive and well? If she had truly cared for me, wouldn’t she have thought about coming back to the island and letting me know somehow? Even if I had locked myself in the cellar, if she had come back to tell me or even left a message of some kind, I would have known.
I turned my face from the window and pressed my back against the wall. I stared at the rusted prison grate opposite where I stood, feeling my anger transform into sorrow as my heart sank into my stomach. Pain. I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes.
She had never loved me. I was a fool who had been so desperate that I’d interpreted her interest in the story of the Slayer and the Order of the Crane as love, a love for me and for my cause. All of it had been a game for her. She had been one of them all along, and I was the only fool who couldn’t see her for what she really was: treacherous, deceitful, betraying . . .
Now, four hundred years later, I knew why my father had wanted me to become a monk. He’d wanted to spare me the double-crossing, deceptive ways of a woman. I was angry at myself for not having realized that earlier. I wanted to tear my heart out.
Irving’s words echoed in my head. When you turned away, she was crying. At first those words made me want to doubt her treachery—perhaps she did care about me and, upon seeing me, had been overcome with longing.
However, I quickly dismissed the idea. There was too much to risk by letting my heart run away with my hopes. She was putting on an act, just like her disappearance from the island, her interest in championing my book and finding the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. All of that was a show. She had tricked me once, but I would not be fooled again.
“Hugh?”
I froze. Anne-Marie’s voice echoed through that cavernous underground hole. Why was she here? Why was she searching me out? I didn’t make a sound. Irving’s snores responded instead.
“Hugh?” I heard feet shuffling on the ground in the corridor. I heard the sounds of steps approaching, coming closer to me. The faint glow emanating from the far end of the corridor was obstructed. I waited. The thick, damp air in that dungeon grew heavier with each breath. Then I saw her figure appear opposite me, on the other side of those prison bars. She leaned in near the iron grate that separated us.
“Oh, Hugh!” she said. Light leaking from the lone bulb hanging at the end of the hall illuminated the details of her trench coat and hat. She lifted her hand to wipe her eyes, as though combating tears—tears that I couldn’t see. Instead, a gold band on her ring finger immediately caught my eye. It was the ring of the Order of the Shrike. From where I stood, it looked identical to the one Parafron wore.
She reached into a pocket of her trench coat and pulled out a jumble of keys. Fiddling with them, she found one that fit the lock and swung open the middle section of the iron grate. She walked through it and stood there blocking the opening.
I stood facing her, immobile. I didn’t know what to say. My heart was pounding, breaking a little more with each beat. I had no energy to put forth words. I wanted her to leave me alone forever, and at the same time, I wanted to wrap my arms around her and not let her go.
“Hugh?” She cleared her throat.
I didn’t move.
“Hugh.” She let out a loud sigh. “Please. Don’t be upset. I’ll explain everything—it’s why I’ve come here.”
I took a couple of steps toward her and then looked down at Irving, who was sleeping like a drunk. He lay flat on his back on the concrete floor, with his arms spread open. I knelt down beside him.
“Irving,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Wake up.”
He grunted, rubbed his nose, and then turned onto his stomach.
“Irving!” I said, shaking him.
“Ouwho,” he mumbled, as he slowly opened his eyes.
“You need to get out of here,” I said. “Find J.P. and Max. It’s pandemonium outside. When the tide goes down, you three have to leave the island.”
Upon hearing my words, Irving became more alert. He got to his feet immediately. Seeing Anne-Marie at the door, he was taken aback.
“It’s all right, Irving,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “She’s here to let us go.”
Irving looked at Anne-Marie for confirmation. She nodded, and that seemed to assure him.
“And . . . and what about you?” he asked.
“I need to explain something to her . . . to the head of trustees,” I said, nudging my head in the direction of Anne-Marie. “Go, find the others.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Anne-Marie smile, and it made me anxious that she should feel so at ease when I felt so tense. Irving studied her for a couple of seconds and then turned to me and nodded. He briskly got to his feet. As he ran out of the door of the dungeon, he shouted back to me, “We’ll be back for you, Hugh.”
“Don’t bother . . . ,” I began, but he disappeared from view. His steps echoed in the corridor.
“You’ve made friends,” Anne-Marie said, waiting several seconds after we could no longer hear Irving’s footsteps. I knew she wanted to take the conversation in a lighthearted direction, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“You betrayed me, Anne-Marie!” I tried to keep my voice even, but it rose from my belly like a growl.
“Hugh,” she said, shaking her head as though I were a child throwing a tantrum, “I never betrayed you—”
“Your interest in the Order of the Crane, and your support for me to find the Slayer and the Shadow of Fear—that was a ruse! I see now that it was all so that you could use that information to serve the Order of the Shrike! You don’t care about the people; you just care about yourself and pres
erving the order!” I was panting with all the energy it took to shout those words. I caught my breath. “You never cared about me. I was just someone you could use—”
“No. Listen to me,” she said, walking toward me. She took off her hat, and I could see her full face. Though tempted by her beauty, I turned away. I loathed myself for still desiring her.
She continued, “I, too, know what’s going on out there—all those people dying mysteriously by their own hand. It’s awful. The Shadow of Fear has gotten absolutely out of control. And I don’t like it, not one bit. I want to give some people—most people—a fighting chance, because some of them really do deserve it. I’m like you: I want people to know that there was once a time when people could control their fears. I know that if they know . . .” She exhaled loudly and shook her head. “But what’s the point? People today are so uncultured and clueless, why make the effort to tell them? They wouldn’t bother to read the old stories.” She shrugged. “The Shadow of Fear is probably going to take every single one of them down. It’s tragic—heartbreaking, actually—to think that everything we’ve built might collapse.”
We! I stopped to glare at her. With this one word, she’d proved herself to be wholly and completely a part of the Order of the Shrike.
Anne-Marie carried on as though nothing had changed, but for me, here was irrefutable proof that what I’d believed about her was true. She was as power-hungry, coldhearted, and ruthless as any of the members in that order. “Some in the order agree with me and are worried that if this goes too far, we’ll decimate the population, have nothing left. But most of them can’t see past the moment; they’re too blind with keeping their power, ready to do whatever it takes so they don’t lose it. . . . Hugh, are you listening to me?”
“And so you’re the renegade member of the Order of the Shrike who’s going to turn things around?” I asked, my eyebrows arched, looking at her with suspicion.
“Please hear me out!” She stared at me sharply. “None of us in the order knew the Shadow of Fear would take down anyone at any given moment. We thought it would be only the weak, the unintelligent, the—”
“The ones the order doesn’t care about anyway.”
“Right.”
Shameless. I struggled to keep my mouth shut, for I was ready to unleash a slew of curses upon her and the order. The conversation had revealed more and more about the person Anne-Marie had become. Or had she always been like this, while I had idealized her into someone else? I turned to her.
“And when you realized the Shadow of Fear could attack anyone, regardless of his or her education, or wealth, what did you do?”
“Well, that’s when it became clear that the Shadow of Fear could do more damage than good for us. We had meant only for the Shadow of Fear to keep the masses in line.”
“And once the masses are gone, what’s the order going to do?” I asked, staring straight into her eyes. “Whom will the order steal from? Whose labor will they exploit?” I frowned. “You chose the wrong side, Anne-Marie.”
“Hugh, at first I was on your side! Your book, and what you wrote about the Slayer and the Shadow of Fear . . . I knew we had to find that one person, the one who would have all the power—power over the Shadow of Fear. I knew I had to find the Slayer before—” She stopped suddenly, as if she had not meant to say those last words. I stared at her quizzically, and her face reddened.
“I wanted to find the Slayer, too, because . . . because I knew that would change the society that we have now.” She spoke cautiously, accenting every syllable, her eyes on my face. I thought she was calculating the effect they had on me. Aware that she wanted to manipulate me into thinking a certain way, I became suspicious. I decided to stay impervious and not give her the satisfaction of a nod. Instead, I narrowed my eyes and scowled, as if trying to see right through her. My actions were enough to cause her to become more nervous, and she began to babble.
“It’s like . . . like when a war is about to happen, or a riot or an uprising. You can feel it in the air; it’s not palpable, you can’t feel or grasp it with your hand, but it’s swirling around you like a heat wave. And you know that when the people are pushed to the edge, when they’re pushed so far into a corner that they have no option but to turn around and fight back . . . well, you don’t know what they’ll do. When people have nothing to lose, can you imagine how they’ll fight?”
“Like nothing means a damn,” I replied monotonously.
Anne-Marie looked at me for a moment without saying anything. I inhaled sharply, holding my breath as I held that stare that reminded me of that sweet young woman, years ago, typing away at her computer in the dead of night. She opened her mouth to speak, and that image vanished. “Those ignorant masses will fight like wild dogs and tear this world apart—this beautiful world. What would we have then?”
I looked at the ground, shaking my head. “Anne-Marie, this is a world held hostage by fear. As long as things stay the same, it cannot be a beautiful world—”
“What do you know, Hugh? For God’s sake, you’ve been dead for four hundred years!” I saw her jerk her head away from me and stare at a corner in the cell. “And you’re still a boy; you’re exactly the same as when I left you years ago.”
I looked at my feet and hands. I stared at my fingers as I spread them slowly. She was right. At least in her eyes, I was still a boy. I might’ve been around much longer than she, and had seen many changes throughout the centuries, but there was a certain wisdom that came with aging naturally. I only nodded my head slowly a few times to let her know that I understood her position. I felt my shoulders relax, for I could now see the world, at least somewhat, through her eyes.
She must have come to a similar conclusion about me, for she nodded as well, before speaking gently. “When you’re twenty years old, you want the world to be fair and for people to be kind to each other. But you live life, and before you know it, you become twenty-five, thirty, and soon you’re thirty-eight, thirty-nine, pushing forty, like me, and you realize that life is not about fairness or happiness. Life is chaos. And in this chaos, you come to appreciate how we’ve built a system that creates order.”
“Manipulating unwitting people isn’t order, Anne-Marie.”
“You don’t know, Hugh, having been on this island all this time. But I, well, I’ve lived out there in the world, and I’ve traveled to places where the Order of the Shrike doesn’t have as strong an influence as it should. And the people there—my God, they live like animals. Don’t you see? People need temperance, and the order gives it to them.”
“Because of the order, the world is fighting a losing battle against the Shadow of Fear, Anne-Marie.”
She shook her head vigorously, not so much to disagree but as if to shake off my comment. “If we didn’t have the order, we wouldn’t have a civilization. You think that a common person alone has the capability of working honestly to live a decent life?”
“Why, yes, in fact, I do.”
“You’re mistaken. The majority of this population are a herd of cows mooing when we tell them to, and if it weren’t for the order, they’d be running around with meat cleavers and hammers, killing senselessly.”
“Funny you should say that,” I said. “Because that’s exactly how I remember the Order of the Shrike the day I died.”
Anne-Marie shot me a baleful look. “It’s ridiculous now to say whether the order should have taken power or to discuss how they took power—because all that matters is that they are in power. What we need now is change, a kind of renaissance in the order. The Slayer is just the kind of new blood that we need. He’ll be our catalyst for change, our hope for a new future—a young man to lead us into a new era. . . .”
At that moment, it occurred to me to tell her that Drev was dead, but I didn’t know what good it would do. I tuned her out as she went on and on about the future and her plans, which included the Shrike at the helm.
"It would be like you wrote in your book,” she said.
“Those last lines,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “‘We sang like the birds sing, not fearing who listened to us or what they thought.’ Which reminds me!” She snapped her fingers, turned on her heels, and walked out the dungeon door. I heard her voice from the end of the corridor. “I have a gift for you, Hugh.” She gave a quick laugh. “It’s the other reason why I came down to see you.”
“A gift?” I said, shifting my weight from left to right and drawing my head back with suspicion. “What kind of gift?”
“Well, I guess it’s not really a gift,” she said, returning to the cell with a leather satchel, “since it was yours originally.”
“What?”
“When I ran away from the island, the only thing I took with me was your book. . . .” She pulled out a large, threadbare, leather-bound book and handed it to me. I took it from her slowly, as though I were seeing it for the first time. The cover had eroded from the bright red it had once been to a burgundy, nearly brown hue. The edges were tattered, and the pages had decayed to a dusty yellow.
“They say a book holds a piece of the author’s soul,” she said. “It’s true. Like you, this book is invisible during the day. I could open it and read it only when the sun wasn’t out.”
“So you had it all this time,” I said, retreating toward the corner by the window. I clutched the book with both hands, holding it a foot away from me, disgusted that it had been a tool for Parafron. I had been bent on destroying it. I still was. But now another worry lingered in my head: What evil had it sown while it had been in Anne-Marie’s hands all those years? I thought about what Parafron had told me, how he had used his copy to lure students to the cave and the World of the Damned.
“Why’d you keep it?” I finally asked, dreading her answer.
“As a souvenir of us.” She smiled. “Actually, I knew there would be a time when it would come in handy, and it did!”
“For what?”
“No reason to panic, Hugh,” she said, looking alarmed at my reaction. “I needed it as a reference, to cue the Slayer when his time had come to take up his duty.”
I immediately recalled Drev and the letter he had received at the beginning of the school year. The letter had been a direct copy of the last lines in my book. How had Anne-Marie known that Drev was the Slayer before I knew? How did she know Drev?
I gulped.
A thin grin crept across her face as she nodded. “I take it you know who I’m talking about?”
“Y-yes,” I stuttered.
“Then you and Andrev must have become acquainted!” she said, clasping her hands together. In that dark cell, her eyes emitted a phosphorescent-like glow. I studied her face, trying to decipher if she had always wanted us to meet each other, if she had planned it. But her mind was a labyrinth I could not even begin to fathom. “And what do you think of him?”
Her eyes were wide and glistening, as though she had been waiting to ask this question for years.
“He’s . . . he’s the one I was searching for. . . . He was the Slayer,” I said, turning my head away.
Her smile faded as she asked, “Was? Was? What do you mean, ‘was’?”
“Anne-Marie, he leaped off the tower tonight, trying to save a girl.” I looked at her face and was surprised to see so much shock and anguish in her eyes. I had expected her to be disappointed, but not to look as though she herself might die.
“Parafron mentioned the phantom girl,” she said, her voice quavering. “But he didn’t mention that there was a boy who also . . . also fell into the sea.”
“He didn’t fall. He dove.” I inhaled sharply as I recalled the moments before I saw Drev leap after Pamina. The numbness of losing him was wearing off, and I was grappling with why he had pursued her until the very end. “He saw what the world was like under the Order of the Shrike. He was miserable about it. But Pamina gave him something—peace of mind, friendship, love—really worth calling beautiful.” I stopped and looked at Anne-Marie, who had tears running down her face. “He was a smart kid. He didn’t jump to kill himself. He went after Pamina to save her—even though, on some level, he knew that if he wanted to be with Pamina forever, he would have to give up his life. In the end, that’s what he did. He decided to die with her.”
The keys slipped from Anne-Marie’s hand, clattering to the floor. Her face was so white it glowed in that darkness.
“Anne-Marie, were you close to him?”
She stared at the floor, her eyes focusing on nothing in particular.
“How did you know him?” I was curious yet anxious about their relationship.
“Andrev and I . . . We were . . . we were very close,” she finally said, her lips barely moving.
There was a long silence before she lifted both her hands and covered her face. Her body shook as she sobbed silently. Despite wanting to detest her, I found myself, in that moment, wishing I could press my lips against her soft cheek to comfort her. Not trusting myself, I looked at the window.
“You knew him long before he came to the school?” I asked.
She regained her composure, wiped her eyes and nose, but no words came forth. She only nodded.
“And you knew he was the Slayer?”
She was still for a moment, before saying, “I knew he was special, a bit like you. But I wasn’t one hundred percent certain he was the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. If he were, I wanted him to discover it for himself. That’s why I sent him the letter—to pique his interest.”
“He got in trouble for it.”
“I wasn’t planning for it to happen that way!” she snapped. My eyes met hers. Within seconds, her harsh glare vanished and she continued. “I stood up for them—all the boys. Three others were being punished at the same time as Andrev. I didn’t want to make it obvious that I wanted to protect only Andrev. Parafron and I don’t see eye to eye. I didn’t want him to pick up on my favoritism toward him.”
I mulled over what she was saying. She sounded sincere, but it was impossible to ascertain at this point if what she was saying was true. My delayed response prompted her to fill the silence.
“I pushed him toward finding out about the story of the Slayer and the Shadow of Fear, by telling him the myth of the Shrike and the Crane.”
“You’re the one who told the story to him when he was little,” I blurted out, suddenly piecing it together. “So you were his nanny!”
Anne-Marie nodded, wiping away a few tears that escaped her eyes. I understood now how she had known him so well and why she had sought to prevent him from being kicked out. Nevertheless, I was still confused. Given Anne-Marie’s fortune and stature, why had she become a nanny? Before I could ask her, though, she spoke.
“I haven’t seen him since he was five years old.”
“You would have been proud of him,” I said softly. I felt as though I were giving a eulogy. “He was the kind of guy everyone could come to like, as long as they made the effort to know him. Sure, he had a short fuse, but he was fair, brave, devoted . . .” My voice began to crack and I stopped speaking.
“Hugh,” said Anne-Marie, her lips pressed together and trembling. I was surprised to see that her entire body was shaking. “Hugh, did you ever sense something different with Andrev? Anything? Anything?”
“Different?” I looked at Anne-Marie, trying to decipher what she was getting at. She looked overly distressed. Was she trying to gain sympathy by showing how much pain she was in? I kept a cold heart. “I told you that he was the Slayer,” I said, my tone matter-of-fact. “The one I had been looking for all these decades. So, yes, of course, I suppose you could say he was different.”
She grimaced and looked to the floor, shaking her head. She let out a sob and then covered her eyes with one hand. Despite mustering the discipline to remain stone cold, I couldn’t help but walk over to her. I was about to reach out and put my arms around her shoulders, when a microphone screeched
outside and a rigid, mechanical voice flowed from the courtyard.
“Students of Stauros! Attention! Attention! As you see, we have flown in many guards to the island, and there are now more guards here than students. Your rebellion is useless. Put down your rocks and sticks and give us a few minutes of your time. Your chancellor is here to say a few words to you. It is important that you listen carefully. He will explain how and when to evacuate the island, for it is scheduled to be firebombed within the next twenty hours.”
Chapter 27: The Final Truth
