The After-Room

by Mailie Meloy

  “I’m telling you now.”

  Janie stared at Benjamin, and thought how little she’d known him, in the last months. She hadn’t thought he was capable of such planning and energy.

  “Well, let’s have it!” Pip said.

  “There are three closed doors!” Benjamin said.

  “Someone will open them,” Pip said. “And then we’ll be ready.”

  So Benjamin untucked his shirt and tore the stitching on the hem. He’d sewn three small vials into his shirt, like Jin Lo used to do. Janie hadn’t even known Benjamin could sew. He forced the vials out of the fabric and got ready to toss one underhand across the passageway.

  “Wait!” Janie said. “If I miss, it’ll break.”

  So Benjamin crouched and rolled the vial across the stone floor toward her cell, but the stones were uneven. The vial caught on an edge, spun, and stopped halfway between the cells. They all stared at it. Janie remembered the telegram and the straw, and tried to pull the vial toward her with her mind, but it didn’t budge.

  “Okay, throw the next one,” Janie said.

  Benjamin held it out between the bars and hesitated.

  “Dai, dai, dai!” one of the ghosts said, encouragingly.

  Benjamin tossed the vial, and Janie held her hands out and willed the vial toward her. It dropped into the palm of her hand, the glass cold and smooth.

  “You’re sure you made it right?” she asked. She was thinking of the white foam all over her parents’ kitchen in Ann Arbor.

  “I’m not sure of anything,” Benjamin said.

  The door opened at the end of the hall, and the burly officer came in. He wore heavy shoes, and Janie watched his big feet approach the vial on the floor between the cells. If it broke, then only two of them would be able to get out.

  “Pull it toward you!” Benjamin said.

  She tried again to move the vial with her mind, but it didn’t budge. She was too nervous. “I can’t!”

  The officer’s foot missed the glass tube by an inch. He turned toward Benjamin’s cell, reached between the bars, and grabbed Benjamin by the throat.

  “We have to get out of here,” Pip whispered.

  Janie uncorked her vial. She had once jumped off a building while still human, trusting that she would transform before she reached the ground. This should be easier. She drank the elixir down. It had the familiar bitter, mossy taste.

  Then her throat felt too constricted to speak. Her head felt light, and her arms and legs began to shrink. Her skin prickled all over. She tipped forward at the waist, and her nose grew pointed and hard. Soft feathers grew down her chest, and her arms became delicate wings. Her bones lightened and her skull thinned.

  She darted out easily between the bars. The vial on the floor was so huge now! She didn’t think she could get her beak around it. She felt the looming officer notice her on the ground. He let Benjamin go and swiped at her with both meaty hands. She jumped free, into the air.

  Benjamin uncorked his own vial and drank the contents down. The policeman tried to grab Janie again, almost crushing the vial with his foot. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Benjamin begin to shrink and tilt and sprout feathers. She sang out with happiness. The policeman stared at the diminishing boy.

  The ghosts were shouting again in Italian, which made everything more confusing. As soon as Benjamin became a skylark, he flew out through the bars directly at the policeman’s eyes, and Janie swooped down to the vial while the cop swung his hand at the bird. With her beak, she pushed the vial laboriously across the floor toward the cell where Pip was still trapped. Pip reached out his arm and snatched it up.

  The policeman saw the vial in Pip’s hand, and stuck his arm between the bars, lunging for it.

  Janie flew to the policeman’s head and took a hank of his hair in her talons, pulling hard. He shouted, snatching at her, but she flitted free.

  Pip drank the elixir down, and the policeman grabbed his shoulder. But Pip was shrinking, tilting, changing, slipping out of the policeman’s grasp.

  The ghosts were chanting, “Uccelli! Uccelli!” Birds! Birds! But the policeman couldn’t hear them.

  Pip became a swallow and shot out between the bars. He and Benjamin dived for the policeman’s eyes, and the policeman screamed and ran away, throwing open the door at the end of the cells to escape.

  The three birds flew after him, darting out through the door before it slammed shut. He threw open the next door, and they made it through that one, too.

  Now they were in the police station waiting room, where they’d first arrived. The officer caught up a wire letter tray and held it over his head like a cage.

  Benjamin tried to fly at him, to herd him toward the door to the street, but the policeman was more confident behind his wire basket. He grabbed a broomstick and started to swing it at the birds. They dodged away, but they were trapped in the waiting room, hovering near the low ceiling. Janie felt the whoosh of the broom come dangerously close.

  Then the door to the street opened, and Vili strode in, wearing his rumpled white linen suit and his green scarf. He looked at the man with the wire basket on his head and the broomstick in his hand like a sword, and then up at the three birds. Pip the swallow shot out through the door Vili had come through. The skylark followed, but then the door swung shut. Janie tugged on Vili’s scarf and sang out a warning.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “The door.”

  He opened it again, and Janie shot free into the fresh air. A heavy bench stood beside the door, and Vili dragged it over to trap the policeman inside. Then he looked around, brushed off his hands, and walked quickly away, swinging his walking stick, attended by three small birds circling his head.

  Chapter 42

  The Pharmacopoeia

  Janie thought she had remembered what it was like to fly, but now she realized it was impossible to hang on to the true feeling. The majesty of it, and the freedom and vulnerability, were so overwhelming that she only retained a shadow of the experience when she was back in human form.

  But now here it was again—she felt every passing air current in her wings, and knew how to ride it up or down. She swooped and whirled. Benjamin flew through the air beside her. Pip made a great plunging dive, then shot back up for another.

  “Excuse me,” Vili called from the ground. “Would you all come down here for a moment?”

  The three birds descended reluctantly. Vili could have become an albatross and joined them—except that they had drunk all of the elixir. And it was useful to have someone to open doors. They hovered over his head.

  “I need to consult the Pharmacopoeia,” Vili said. “There might be some way to help Jin Lo that we haven’t considered. The book is at your flat?”

  The skylark nodded.

  “I assume you prefer to fly,” Vili said. “I will meet you there.” He hailed a cab.

  A warm column of air lifted Janie’s wings as Vili climbed in, to travel along the ground like an insect. The Pharmacopoeia! She had forgotten it existed. What did a bird need with a book?

  The churches and monuments looked like models in a toy city, from above. There was the Pantheon, with its smooth domed roof. The people were tiny, walking the streets. One or two even looked transparent, from so high. Then Janie remembered—they were transparent. They were ghosts. But where her human brain would have worried, weighing her guilt and wondering what to do, her robin’s brain only lighted on the thought for a moment, then took off again.

  Worms! She would like some worms.

  Ordinary birds gave them a wide berth. There were no American robins in Italy, and the other birds knew there was something unnatural about the three of them.

  They neared Cinecittà with its matching buildings, which looked more like a bunch of cardboard boxes than ever from the air. She wondered if her parents were still at work. She was supposed to meet th
em for dinner, and they would be upset if she didn’t show up. But she was sixteen years old, and perfectly responsible, and a robin! There was no reason for them to worry.

  Except that she had let some ghosts into Rome.

  And there was a nuclear bomb missing in China.

  Worms! Fat, glossy ones. She wondered if Benjamin and Pip were hungry, too. She hadn’t even had breakfast.

  Outside the apartment, she stopped in a tree, wobbling a little as she perched. Braking was still the hardest part of flying—not enough practice. Her parents weren’t home, and all the windows were closed.

  Vili went inside the building, and Janie followed. He knocked on the landlady’s door and began speaking beautiful, courteous Italian, asking to be let into his dear friends’ apartment. Janie perched on a light fixture near the ceiling and admired how reassuring and convincing the count sounded. The landlady was smitten, and took Vili upstairs. She unlocked the door to the flat. Easy as that. The three birds flew inside as soon as the landlady turned her back.

  Benjamin led Vili to his room, and tapped his beak on the bottom drawer. Vili pulled it open and dug through the clothes. Janie had a moment of panic that the book was gone—stolen!—but then she saw the weathered leather cover.

  Vili had just tucked the Pharmacopoeia under his arm when Janie heard a high-pitched alarm from Pip, a rapid-fire cheeping.

  She flew to the windowsill and saw her parents walking down the street below, on their way home. They were deep in conversation and she could see, in the way they stood a little taller than usual, with their shoulders back, how happy they were, working on the movie. Happy! So coming to Rome had been a good thing. Something to celebrate.

  Vili, still carrying the heavy book, looked out and saw them, too.

  “Oh dear,” he said.

  Chapter 43

  Discovery

  There was nowhere for Vili to run, with the heavy Pharmacopoeia in his arms. Janie’s parents were on their way into the building. Vili was good at smoothing things over, but how would he explain why he was there in the apartment with the book and three small birds?

  Stress and fear always sped up the reverse transformation, and Janie felt the prickling in her scalp that meant that her feathers were retracting. The main door opened downstairs, creaking on its old hinges. Janie’s legs stretched and grew, and her talons became toes again. Her feathered wing tips stretched into fingers, and her bones grew dense and strong. The tiny feathers on her head disappeared, and she felt the familiar weight of her hair spilling down her shoulders.

  There were voices downstairs. The landlady was trying to explain, in slow, careful Italian, that she’d let an eminent, distinguished gentleman friend into their flat to wait for them. But Janie’s parents didn’t understand what she was saying.

  Pip and Benjamin were still changing back into their human forms. The skylark’s crest became Benjamin’s wavy hair. Pip’s long wings became arms. Her parents’ footsteps climbed the staircase. Janie thought they were taking the stairs more quickly than they usually did, in their brisk new happiness. Why couldn’t they dawdle? The landlady called something after them, from her apartment below.

  The black feathers on Pip’s face had just disappeared when her mother pushed open the door and saw the four of them standing there, staring at her. “Oh!” she said, surprised. “That’s what the landlady was saying. You’re all here!”

  Janie saw a tail feather vanish under Benjamin’s jacket. She touched her nose—it was soft. She was pretty sure her beak had become a mouth again, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. Luckily, her parents, in their cheerful mood, could keep the conversation going on their own.

  “Your Excellency!” her father said. “Hello!”

  “I came to borrow Benjamin’s book,” Vili said.

  “He lets you borrow the book?” her father said, with mock awe, but then he noticed Pip. “Hey, we were looking for you!” he said. “Clifford Kent is sick!”

  “Sick?” Pip said. His voice was still high-pitched, with the hint of a swallow’s call.

  “Or maybe you poisoned him,” her father said. “With Benjamin’s big book of potions.”

  “Dad!” Janie said.

  “We didn’t!” Benjamin said, horrified.

  “He’s joking,” her mother said. “Clifford came down with pneumonia.”

  Her father dug in his briefcase. “How quick a study are you, Pip?”

  “The quickest!” Pip said, his face radiant, his voice normal.

  Her father handed over a pile of loose script pages. “Maybe look at the first scene, to read for Tony tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir!” Pip held the pages with reverence, as if they were the manuscript of War and Peace.

  Then Janie’s mother rounded on Benjamin. “You have some explaining to do, young man. Why didn’t you come home last night?”

  “I’m sorry,” Benjamin said, hanging his head. “I—fell asleep in the ruins. I didn’t mean to.”

  “In the ruins!”

  “I’d just gone for a walk. I was really tired, I guess from the time difference. I’m not sure how it happened.”

  Janie’s mother seemed unconvinced.

  “Is it a good location?” her father asked.

  “Not really,” Benjamin said.

  “Can we go to dinner?” Janie asked, to head off this conversation. “I’m starving.”

  Pip said, “I’m not hungry. Can I stay and read the script?”

  “We’ll bring you something back,” her mother said.

  “And I have a great deal of work to do,” Vili said, patting the Pharmacopoeia’s leather cover. “So I’ll excuse myself, if I may.”

  • • •

  On the walk down the street to Angelo’s trattoria, her parents talked about their day, about Clifford Kent’s sudden illness, about the director’s panic and his relief when they told him they had another actor in mind. Janie tried, in whispers, to explain to Benjamin about Jin Lo and the commander’s son, but her father was soon waving them through the restaurant’s door.

  They chose a table in the corner, and Angelo himself came to take their order. “Buona sera!” he said.

  “Come stai?” Janie’s father asked, winking at Janie and looking very pleased with himself for having formed an actual question.

  In response, Angelo launched into a long complaint in Italian about his dead sister. She had been talking to him all day. She was full of criticism. She didn’t like what he’d done with the restaurant. She didn’t like the garlic knots. He’d told her fine, if she had so many ideas, then she should come back to life and take over.

  When Angelo had gone, Janie’s father said, “Did you catch any of that?”

  “Something about his sister,” Janie said. “Complaining about the restaurant.”

  “I thought I heard the word morta,” her mother said. “Doesn’t that mean dead?”

  “Mmm—I dunno.” Janie popped a big piece of garlic knot into her mouth.

  “Maybe she thinks the restaurant is dying,” her mother said. “But I don’t think it is. It seems very popular.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Janie said, through the oily bread. She caught sight of a bosomy middle-aged ghost—the sister—scowling at the food being served to another table.

  “Do you feel something weird in here tonight?” her father asked. “Like something’s kind of off?”

  “Unh-uh,” Janie said, still chewing.

  “Nope,” Benjamin said.

  Janie got the bread down. “So—how’s the script going?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know,” her mother said, unfolding her napkin. “It’s a little like doing surgery, with the new scenes. Sometimes I’m afraid we’re losing blood flow, killing the patient.”

  “Do you think they’ll really cast Pip?” Janie asked.

  “If Tony l
ikes him,” her father said. “And I don’t see why he wouldn’t.”

  “Pip would be thrilled,” she said. “He’s in love with Evie.”

  “Terrific!” her father said. “That’ll be good press. Young stars in love.”

  “Who’s Evie?” Benjamin asked.

  “She’s our princess,” Janie’s father said. “Wait’ll you see her. Mamma mia.”

  Janie glanced at Benjamin, who didn’t seem interested. Maybe it was better that he didn’t care about anything except the After-room. If he were fully in the living world, he might fall for Evie, as everyone else had.

  Angelo brought a large pizza, and everyone reached for the hot slices, with tomato sauce and basil and rounds of melting mozzarella. There was a silence as they fell to eating. When Angelo came back to see that everyone was happy, Janie could see his transparent sister standing beside him with her arms crossed over her chest, judging his table-waiting skills.

  “Angelo, this is the best pizza I’ve ever eaten!” her father said, wiping his hands on his napkin. “Magnifico, delizioso, fantastico!”

  “Please tell your sister we love this place,” her mother said. “We love everything you’ve done with it.”

  Angelo bowed, deeply moved, and the shade of his sister frowned.

  Chapter 44

  The Tiger’s Back

  When Jin Lo woke up, she heard water hitting something hollow. The hull of a boat? She was thirsty, her tongue dry and swollen. She tried to remember where she was. The sun was beating down, and her wrists were tied behind her back. She remembered an attacker flying at her, out of nowhere. Was Ned Maddox still here? Her head hurt when she turned to look for him. Then she saw him on the deck beside her, unconscious, his wrists tied, his shoulders slumped against the barge’s rail. He had trusted her, and abandoned his post, and this was what she had brought him to.

  A small, bow-legged, sun-weathered man stood over her. In Cantonese, he asked, “Why are you on my barge?”

  So this was Xiao, of the circus. She saw her bag of supplies spilled out on the deck. Someone had pawed through it.