The After-Room

by Mailie Meloy

  “Cinecittà,” she said.

  Chapter 47

  Captives

  Jin Lo had stopped trying to work her hands free. The skin on her wrists stung. The sun was relentless, and she closed her eyes against it, and against the sight of Ned Maddox bound beside her. The captain’s wife had suggested moving the captives into the shade, but Xiao had refused.

  “They are thieves!” he said. “Pirates. They deserve no sympathy.”

  “We are not pirates,” Jin Lo said weakly.

  One of the two little girls crept forward, when their father wasn’t looking. “You don’t look like a pirate,” she said.

  Jin Lo opened her eyes. “I’m not.”

  “What are you?”

  “A friend,” Jin Lo said. She edged her hands out from behind her back to show the little girl. “Do you know how to untie knots?”

  The little girl nodded, but her mother called, “Ming!” and the girl scampered off.

  Jin Lo sank back against the rail. There was another child somewhere. Jin Lo scanned the deck. There: watching from behind a bucket of juggling pins. Wide, dark, frightened eyes. The shy sister. She wouldn’t be any easier to convince.

  Ned Maddox struggled back to consciousness and sized up the situation. “Can’t you do something?” he whispered. “One of your tricks?”

  But her tricks were just that. A cloud of orange smoke, an immobilized cricket. None of those was good theater, outside in daylight. They were all designed to be seen close up, indoors. Her bag of supplies from the herbalist still lay spilled on the deck, but she couldn’t reach it. She searched in her mind for the apothecary, for guidance, but she felt nothing.

  Her shoulders ached, and she shifted on the hard wooden deck.

  Chapter 48

  Catastrophe

  Benjamin left Vili’s apartment with the Pharmacopoeia in the satchel slung across his chest. Janie and Vili and Doyle ran out onto the pavement after him. Primo was edging away. He had brought them the warning, but Benjamin guessed he would vanish and save himself if Rocco’s men actually turned up.

  The important thing was to protect the book. Salvatore Rocco claimed to be a man of honor, and in some ways he was, but he was also a criminal. It was very clear to Benjamin how his own mistakes had led him here, but his mind was fogged about what to do next. Janie said they should go to the movie studio. Would they be safe there?

  “There’s a taxi stand this way,” Janie said. She stepped into the street, and looked back to see that Benjamin was following.

  The fog in his mind cleared, and in colors bright and clear as after a rainstorm, he saw a red car come careening around the corner. The driver had a petrified look on his face, and the filmy shape of a ghost in his passenger seat. Before Benjamin could call out a warning, the car picked Janie up like a rag doll. She hit the windshield with a sickening thump, then flew over the top of the car. The driver raced on as if he hadn’t noticed. Janie rolled to a stop in the cobblestone street, her arms up around her head.

  Everything moved in slow motion after that. Benjamin’s feet seemed to be trapped in deep mud, and his voice caught in a cry of protest. Then somehow he was beside Janie, throwing off his bag, trying to remember what to do.

  He knew he shouldn’t roll her over without stabilizing her spine. He cradled the back of her head with one hand and found her chin with the other, pressing his trembling forearm to her sternum, and eased her over carefully. Her forehead was marred by a bloody red sunburst.

  “Janie!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?”

  He’d told Janie that it wouldn’t matter if the ghosts stayed—that it wasn’t the worst thing ever to happen in Rome.

  The worst thing ever to happen in Rome. Had just happened.

  He heard the clanging bell of an ambulance. Who had called it? What were Roman doctors like? Shouldn’t he and Vili use the Pharmacopoeia to heal her? But there was no time. Janie’s white shirt was stained with blood and her eyes were closed.

  “Stay with me!” he cried.

  Then the ambulance was there. Men gave commands in Italian. They were annoyed with Benjamin for moving her. But her face had been in the gutter. He couldn’t leave her like that. Had he hurt her?

  They lifted her gently to a stretcher, and put her in the back of the ambulance, while Benjamin hovered. He tried to climb in after her, but one of the men put a hand out to stop him, and closed the door.

  Then the ambulance was pulling away. Benjamin ran a few steps after it, shouting. He became aware of Vili standing in the street, trying to hail a cab. Two went by, agonizingly, before one screeched to a stop. They climbed in.

  The streets went by in a blur.

  At the hospital, when Benjamin scrambled out, Vili stayed in the taxi. “I’ll collect her parents,” the count said.

  Her parents! What was he going to tell them? Benjamin sprinted into the hospital, through the halls.

  Janie’s room, when he found it, was so full of white coats that Benjamin couldn’t see the bed. When he tried to go inside, a nurse pushed him out: polite but firm. He stamped his feet quietly on the linoleum floor in the hallway to try to keep his body from shaking.

  He waited, and waited, and then Vili came down the hall with the Scotts. They looked stony-faced, but when they saw Benjamin, their composure melted. They’d been keeping horror at bay with disbelief, and now they believed.

  “Where is she?” her mother cried.

  “How could you let this happen?” her father shouted.

  “I’m sorry,” Benjamin said. “The car came out of nowhere.” He was shaking again: a full-body tremor.

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Vili said.

  “Janie’s always so careful,” her mother said.

  “I know!” Benjamin said.

  Then he remembered Janie saying that they could go through the After-room to help Jin Lo. And his insistence that they couldn’t, because they weren’t ghosts. So had she stepped in front of the car on purpose? But no, he had seen her turn her head, just before the ghost-ridden car came flying around the corner. She’d been hit only because she was checking on him, looking back to see if he would follow.

  “Have the doctors told you anything?” her father asked.

  Benjamin shook his head.

  Mrs. Scott collapsed on a bench against the wall. “Oh, God.”

  “Where do I give blood?” Mr. Scott asked, rolling up his sleeve. “Nurse! How do you say nurse?”

  “You’re not her blood type,” Mrs. Scott said.

  “I’m not? What’s my blood type? She’s my daughter!” Mr. Scott pointed a finger in Benjamin’s face. “If she dies, I will murder you.”

  “Davis!”

  “I will!”

  “It’s not his fault!”

  A passing nurse with a clipboard gave them a warning look.

  “I feel as bad as you do,” Benjamin said quietly.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Janie’s father said.

  Her mother began to sob.

  Vili looked at his watch. “They’ll tell us something soon.”

  As if on cue, a doctor came out of Janie’s room. “Siete la famiglia?” he asked.

  “Sì,” Benjamin said, stepping forward, taking advantage of the Scotts’ hesitation, and calling on every bit of Italian he had picked up. “Siamo la famiglia.” Because he was Janie’s family. He had no other. “Is she okay? What’s happening?”

  “The blood pressure,” the doctor said. “It drops too much.”

  “So give her more blood! Take mine!” He held out his arm.

  The doctor shook his head. “It is too dangerous, with this trauma. There is too much pressure on the brain.”

  “Can’t you do something about that?”

  The doctor looked pained.

  “Can we see her? I have to see he
r.”

  The doctor frowned. “For one minute. And no agitation.”

  Benjamin crept into the room, afraid of what he might see. A nurse stood between him and Janie, and then the nurse moved away. Janie’s eyes were closed, with purple bruises growing beneath them, and her head was bandaged in white. He thought of how she had looked with the sun in her hair at the kitchen table that morning—only that morning!

  He sat and picked up her hand. He could feel the Scotts’ presence behind him, and their anguish at seeing her bruised and broken. He only had a few seconds to say what he needed to say. Was Janie in the After-room now? Was she headed for Jin Lo?

  “Janie,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Listen. Whatever you’re doing, I need you to come back.”

  There was no sign from her motionless face that she had heard.

  Chapter 49

  A Decision

  There was pain, so much of it, so sudden. A blow to her body, and then to her head. A feeling not of flying as a bird, but of being flung: her human body airborne and twisting out of control. A view of sky. The world distorted. Then cold, wet stone and darkness.

  Next was a hospital room, with a lot of people. Blinding pain again. Then numbness flooding her body, and soft voices. Benjamin’s voice. He seemed to be very far away. She was too tired to open her eyes.

  Next she saw the ghosts. They were all around her, like people waiting for a train. Janie could feel their readiness to leave. They knew she had let them in to the living world, and they were ready to go back with her. They had gotten the thing they had wanted so badly, and most of them had said what they needed to say.

  A little boy took her hand. He might have been seven. She felt him tug at her arm, but there was no pain. It was a relief to be out of her broken body.

  “It’s time to go,” he said.

  What language was it? She didn’t know. The thought simply came into her head: Time to go.

  So she began to walk, holding the child’s hand, in a crowd of figures stretching out into the darkness. It wasn’t anything like the rush of wind she had felt when the ghosts came into the world. This journey was slow and deliberate, a procession. The little boy told her it was going to be all right.

  They walked down a green grass path, with trees all around, and Janie had the sense that the boy was making the path with his mind. It was the place he wanted to be. Beyond the leafy branches, beyond the springy grass, she could feel the great distance of space.

  “Ciao,” the little boy said, and he vanished.

  And Janie was alone in the After-room.

  Back in the living world, Benjamin was holding her actual, physical hand, and he was talking. He was telling her to come back. But she was here, and there was something she needed to do.

  “Mr. Burrows?” she called.

  At first, nothing. Was he with his wife again?

  “Mr. Burrows!”

  Then he was there, in front of her. She was overwhelmed with joy at seeing him. She wasn’t just looking through his mind now; she was with him. Because she had come here not with the powder but the old-fashioned way: by an unexpected blow. The apothecary was hazy like the others, but she knew his kind face and his serious manner.

  “Mr. Burrows, I’m here!” she said.

  “I know,” he said sadly. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “But it means I can help Jin Lo!”

  “It might be too late,” he said.

  Janie imagined what it would mean to be too late—Beijing destroyed, tens of thousands dead, China humiliated, Russia outraged, a nuclear war. It all flashed through her mind as a serial horror.

  “I have to go to her,” she said. “Like the commander’s son went. Now that I’m really here, I can do it.”

  “The tether to your body would be stretched too far,” the apothecary said. “You wouldn’t be able to go back.”

  Janie felt, as a distant dream, Benjamin and her parents sitting by her bedside in Rome. Her mother weeping. Her father raging about incompetent doctors. There was so much pain there. She turned her mind away from it. “This place is a portal,” she said. “You’ll keep it open for me, so I can try. And I know you know where she is. I need to go.”

  “Your parents will suffer every day of their lives if they lose you,” the apothecary said. “So will Benjamin. It will deform their existence.”

  Janie felt impatient. “Were you with your wife again, just now?” she asked.

  “In a way,” he said. “Almost.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “But I can feel the edge of it, with my mind.”

  “And you’ll go to her, when you’re through here,” she said.

  “I will,” he said, and there was elation in his voice.

  “I need to go to China, Mr. Burrows,” she said. “If I can’t get back to Benjamin and my parents, I’ll find them later, like you found your wife. It’s better that I die now than that thousands of other people’s children do. You know that.”

  The apothecary was silent. Then he said, “You won’t be able to touch anything, you know. And no one but Jin Lo will see or hear you.”

  “That’s enough,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  The apothecary bowed his head. “It’s your choice.”

  So Janie pulled her mind away from the hospital room, leaving her lifeless body there. She thought about Jin Lo, their brilliant, impatient, orphaned, self-reliant friend. And she stepped out of the dark After-room onto the deck of a boat, late in the afternoon, in the waterborne world of China’s Grand Canal.

  Chapter 50

  The Vessel

  The first thing Janie saw was Jin Lo tied up against the barge’s rail. She wanted to rush to her side, but she hesitated, afraid someone might see her. Then she remembered that no one could see or hear her. It was like being invisible again.

  Someone had dumped out a bag of bottles and packets on the deck. And a man was tied beside Jin Lo. Janie remembered Vili saying that Jin Lo had an ally in the U.S. Navy.

  She willed herself across the deck. Movement was a strange sensation. There was no friction beneath her feet, because she had no mass. So she floated, more or less. She had the sense that she could sink down through the wooden planks of the deck into the barge’s hold, if she wanted to. She could stay underwater, because she didn’t have to breathe. It was almost thrilling. She was invincible, invisible, bulletproof—

  Dead.

  She pushed the thought away, and crouched at Jin Lo’s side. Her friend’s eyes were closed against the late afternoon sun, and Janie wondered how long she had been here without water. Long enough for the people on the barge to get bored and leave her alone, clearly, because no one was guarding her, or the man tied up beside her.

  “Jin Lo, it’s Janie,” she whispered.

  Her friend looked up and scanned the air. “Janie,” she croaked.

  “Can you see me?” Janie asked.

  “Only a little. Like heat in the air. Like the commander’s son.”

  “I came to help you.”

  “Oh, no!” Jin Lo said. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I’ll try to go back,” Janie said. “But I’m here now. I want to help you.”

  “I can’t get loose.” Jin Lo slid her wrists over to show Janie, then winced. The skin on her wrists was rubbed red. Janie reached to untie those awful ropes, and get them off, but her hands passed right through the knots, like Keats reaching for the book.

  Jin Lo shuddered. “You’re so cold.”

  “I can’t touch anything,” Janie said. “My hands just go through.” What good was being invincible if you couldn’t untie a piece of rope? If you couldn’t pick up so much as a piece of paper?

  A piece of paper!

  She had only moved very light things before, with any contr
ol. But Doyle could juggle oranges in the air. If Doyle could do it, then she could. She began to focus her mind. She tried to determine which way the loose ends went through the knots, and which direction to tug. It was the friction of the fibers that she needed to overcome, more than the weight of the rope. She tugged with her mind and felt nothing. The knot didn’t budge.

  “Leave me and go find the bomb,” Jin Lo whispered.

  “Just hold still,” Janie said.

  “You must stop the commander.”

  “Shh,” Janie said, concentrating on the rope.

  “You can go across water, yes?” Jin Lo said.

  “I haven’t tried.” There was a slight give in the knot. Had she imagined it? She pulled harder with her mind, and the rope end slid a fraction of an inch; she could see it move.

  She missed having fingers. She wished she could just grab the stupid knot and untie it. If beggars were horses, her father would say.

  She renewed her concentration, and the knot gave. She pulled the loose ends through.

  “It’s done!” she said, and she looked up to see a little girl standing beside her, looking curiously down at Jin Lo. Janie froze, but of course the little girl couldn’t see her. She was about five or six, and she asked Jin Lo something in Chinese. Jin Lo answered, slipping her hands secretly from the loops behind her back.

  Janie moved to the side of the captured man, who was slumped over, asleep or unconscious. She started the process over again, and it was easier now. She imagined the knot that bound his wrists coming loose, and slowly it began to obey. He stirred as the knot loosened, and he struggled to sit up. He had a bruise on his forehead, and he blinked in confusion.

  “Ming!” a man’s voice barked, and the little girl looked in that direction, but didn’t run away.

  Jin Lo spoke in English. “Ned Maddox,” she said, “catch the girl. Make a distraction.”