The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  “Of course you do,” Benjamin said.

  Doyle let Janie go. She caught the wall and steadied herself. The room kept spinning. “Not enough to get caught,” he said. “Just enough to win.”

  “Well, you won’t even be able to do that,” Benjamin said.

  Doyle lifted his chin. “I don’t need poker anyway.”

  “Can you live on birthday parties?” Benjamin asked.

  “If I did enough of them.”

  “Are there enough?” Janie asked.

  Doyle frowned. “No.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Benjamin asked.

  “There are lots of ways to make money,” Doyle said. His eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I want to do something for you!”

  “I know,” Benjamin said. “You’re going to teach me how to contact my father.”

  “And I’d like to learn telekinesis,” Janie put in.

  “No, no—more than that!” Doyle said. “I could get you a lot of money. Some associates of mine in Detroit would be very interested in your ability to contact dead people.”

  Janie felt her smile vanish.

  Benjamin’s expression hardened. “What associates?” he asked.

  “Oh, people I play poker with. People with money! Moola, moola!”

  “Have you told them about us?” Janie asked.

  “Of course not!” the magician said. “Just keep it in mind, if you’re ever in need. These people are connected, if you know what I mean.”

  Benjamin’s body had gone rigid. “You can’t tell them about us.”

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Janie said.

  “It was only a suggestion!” Doyle said. But something was different about him now—Janie had the ominous feeling that something was very wrong.

  “If you breathe a word of this to anyone, we’ll never make you the filter again!” Benjamin said.

  Doyle shrugged. “A chemist I know will analyze it and make it for me. He’s very good with drugs.”

  “No!” Benjamin said, and he lunged for the filter.

  The magician, who was almost a foot taller, held the bottle over his head by the neck, just as he’d held the girl’s phone number out of reach at the party. It was a practiced move. “Let’s not overreact, now,” he said.

  “That’s my formula and it’s a secret!” Benjamin said.

  A nasty edge crept into the magician’s voice. “Not anymore.”

  Janie’s chest tightened with anguish. Why had they trusted Doyle? Her father had told her the story of the scorpion who stings the frog who helps him cross the river. When the dying frog asks why, the scorpion says, “It is my nature.” Was this Doyle’s nature? Or had they made him this way with the filter? He’d been so happy and generous a moment before.

  Still holding the wine bottle out of reach, the magician pushed them toward the door. “Out,” he said. “Good-bye. Go. Don’t bother to keep in touch.”

  He gave them each a last shove. Janie stumbled out onto the rickety landing after Benjamin.

  “Wait!” Benjamin said. “I did my part! You have to teach me what to do in the After-room!”

  “I don’t have to teach you anything, you little wretch,” the magician said, and he slammed the door.

  Chapter 13

  The Cricket and the Flame

  Ned Maddox sat in his banyan tree, eyes on the horizon, thinking about what Jin Lo had told him. She claimed that she and her friends could contain a nuclear explosion. It sounded ludicrous, but Ned had heard rumors about what had happened to the Soviet hydrogen bomb on Nova Zembla. At first it seemed that the Russians had messed up, done their calculations wrong. Everyone enjoyed thinking that, because it made them feel safer. But then a Russian sailor defected, and turned himself in to the U.S. Navy, and he said that something much stranger had happened to the bomb. It had started to explode, but then shrank back in on itself, and afterward there’d been no radiation on the frozen ground. Not a pip from the Geiger counter.

  That demanded an explanation, and this girl who’d washed up on Ned’s island had one. She and her friends had been on Nova Zembla, and had contained the explosion with a sort of net, a very strong polymer that contracted in the presence of radiation. Then they’d mopped up the remaining radiation with something called the Quintessence. Ned still didn’t really understand that part. Jin Lo said that the Quintessence was just a nickname for this particular oil. The word meant the fifth element and the essence of all life, but the oil was an extract that came from a flowering tree.

  She had also shown him, in small ways, that she had strange powers. She had paralyzed a cricket on his table, then set it free. She had taken a little salt in her hand and lit a blue flame from it, watching it dance, then closed her hand to put it out. Ned had been duly impressed. But something else had happened. It had to do with the serious, absorbed look on her face, while she brought out her tricks. It made him feel like that cricket: entirely at her command. So maybe she could stop an atomic explosion with some kind of magical net. Who was he to say that she couldn’t?

  If it were true, then the U.S. Navy would be very, very interested in talking to her. They would want her methods for themselves. They certainly wouldn’t want them falling into the hands of the Chinese Communists, or the Soviets. If the American nuclear arsenal was useless, then America’s power in the world was over. Done. Kaput. And Ned believed in his country. He thought that the land of the free was not a bad place for power to reside.

  But he couldn’t deliver Jin Lo to be interrogated by people who wouldn’t understand her. He shouldn’t have left the piece of paper in his pocket, of course, but he’d discovered that he didn’t mind that she’d looked. It meant she’d been curious about him. She had asked him what a nuclear artillery shell was.

  “It’s a nuclear bomb that can be fired from a big gun,” he said. “Like any artillery shell.”

  Jin Lo’s face grew pale. “This exists?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “That’s terrible.”

  “They can do a lot of damage,” he admitted.

  “And what does ‘8-in. dia’ mean?”

  “It means the missing nuclear shell has an eight-inch diameter,” he said, making a circle with his hands, his fingers not touching. “There are different sizes of shell, depending on the size of the gun—just like regular artillery.”

  “This one is small?”

  He nodded. “It’s new, just a prototype.”

  “Tell me about the commander,” she said.

  “His name is Thomas Hayes. He’s a respected naval officer, decorated in the war. His son joined up after him, and was killed in the Communist shelling of Quemoy. The son was just a kid. And now he’s dead. I think Hayes wishes we’d gone after China, but we didn’t, so he wants to do it himself.”

  “He wants revenge,” Jin Lo had said.

  “It’s a crazy way to get it.”

  “People are not rational when their families are killed,” she’d said.

  Now Ned scanned the horizon through his binoculars, from the banyan tree. The sea was glassy and blue, mirrored silver where the sun blazed off it. He saw nothing out there, no fugitive Americans, no boats. Target believed China, the message had said, but China was an awfully big target.

  “Where are you, Commander?” he muttered. “Where are you planning to go?”

  Chapter 14

  Followed

  Days went by, and Janie and Benjamin went through the motions of school and dinner and homework. Benjamin spent even more time alone in his room, reading the Pharmacopoeia. When they made the filter, Janie had thought he might be emerging from his misery, but the magician’s betrayal had knocked him back down the hole.

  She wished that Count Vili had left an address, a way for them to contact him. He had been their protector, and he should have been in touch. The ap
othecary was dead, and Jin Lo was on the other side of the world. So wasn’t it Vili’s duty to stay in contact?

  She was picturing the apothecary’s kind, bespectacled face, and missing him with a keen ache in her chest, when another image came into her head. It was like a fleeting dream that might melt away and vanish, and she tried to hold it in her mind while she figured out what it was. It was a book, a leather-bound book, but not the Pharmacopoeia. It was smaller, and worn, but not by seven hundred years of use. It had a snap clasp to hold it closed. She went upstairs, and walked like a sleepwalker into her parents’ bedroom.

  On the bureau was her mother’s leather address book. It closed with a snap, just like the image in her head. The cover was worn from having been carried around by her mother since college.

  She let the daydream go, and picked the book up. It was heavier than it looked. Was this snooping? She would be furious if her parents read her diary, but this wasn’t a diary. She unsnapped the cover and looked at the paper tabs running down the right side of it: ABC, DEF. She picked up the tab that said TUV, knowing her mother wouldn’t trust herself to remember Vili’s many aristocratic surnames. And there he was, Count Vilmos Hadik de Galántha, in her mother’s neat cursive. With an address in Luxembourg.

  Janie’s heart pounded. He had left an address with her parents. But why hadn’t he told her he’d done that? Why not just leave the address with her?

  Then she remembered the state she and Benjamin had been in when they returned from Malaya. She had been kidnapped and locked in a mine. Benjamin had been drugged and imprisoned and lost at sea. They had watched Benjamin’s father die, and they had come home grief-stricken and guilty, barely able to look at each other. Maybe Vili had found her parents easier to communicate with, or maybe he’d tried to earn her parents’ trust by being a responsible adult among adults—not a near stranger (and possible creep) in contact with their daughter.

  But his reasons didn’t matter now. She could write to him! She went to her bedroom to look for letter paper, and found Benjamin crouched in front of her bureau, digging through her bottom drawer.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, although she knew. He was looking for the powder.

  He spun to face her, clutching a handful of blue sweater. “I just need to take it one more time.”

  “It isn’t safe,” she said. “And you should ask me, not search my room!”

  “But you’d say no.”

  “Of course I would!”

  “I’ve been practicing controlling my breathing,” he said. “Just like the magician said.”

  “You almost died,” she said. “He didn’t teach you enough.” She held up her mother’s little book. “I found Vili’s address. I’m going to write to him and tell him what’s going on. We need him.”

  Benjamin looked at the book. “Your parents had his address? All this time?”

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t Vili give it to us?”

  “We were a mess,” she said. “I don’t blame him.” She didn’t tell him about the strange dream image that had come into her mind, of the address book. She wanted to think more about that first. “Let’s write a letter.”

  “A telegram will be faster,” Benjamin said.

  So they sat down at her desk with a blank piece of notebook paper. What could they say in a communication that could not be private, when they had established no code to use with Vili? And how would they explain about the After-room? Or about Doyle? Janie’s pen hovered.

  “You write ‘stop’ at the end of a sentence,” Benjamin offered. “And you pay by the word.”

  So she wrote:

  B in touch with father STOP. Some danger involved STOP.

  “Better not to say ‘danger,’” Benjamin said. Janie crossed it out and started again.

  B in touch with father STOP. Request your advice STOP.

  But that wasn’t the whole story. Doyle had threatened to tell people about them, people who sounded suspicious and criminal.

  B communicating with father STOP. Request your advice STOP. Some trouble here STOP. Unsure of exact nature STOP.

  That was pretty vague, but mostly true. Janie thought Vili would recognize it as a call for help. They walked to the Western Union office to send the telegram, pooling their cash to pay for it.

  “That’s it?” the clerk asked, reading the message. He was small, with round glasses.

  “That’s it,” Janie said.

  “No signature?”

  “No thanks,” Benjamin said. Vili would know who had sent the telegram—he didn’t know anyone else in Ann Arbor.

  The clerk pursed his lips, then shrugged. “It’s your money,” he said.

  The next morning at school, the Doyle twins found them at Janie’s locker. Nat looked uncomfortable, and Valentina was fiddling with her bag strap.

  “Can we ask you a question?” Nat asked.

  Janie nodded, nervous about what the question might be.

  “When you saw our uncle, did he seem—all right?” Nat said.

  “Why?” Benjamin asked.

  Valentina said, “He showed up last night with a broken nose and a black eye. He asked our mother to sew up his eyebrow.”

  “He wouldn’t go to the hospital,” Nat said.

  “He’s been losing at cards,” Valentina said.

  Janie winced. Of course Doyle was losing at cards, if he was using the filter. He had won before because he knew what cards everyone else had. But why was he still playing? Benjamin had warned him not to.

  “He’s also gotten so mean,” Valentina said. “He says terrible things. He told our dad he was getting fat. It’s like he doesn’t care about anyone else.”

  “We just wondered if you noticed anything strange when you went to see him,” Nat said.

  There was a silence as Janie considered how to answer. She felt Benjamin doing the same thing beside her. She decided to address the immediate problem. “Can you get him to stop playing poker?”

  The twins shook their heads in unison.

  “He wants to win back his losses,” Valentina said.

  “But he can’t,” Janie said desperately. “He won’t, not now.”

  Benjamin coughed, and the twins looked puzzled. “How do you know?” Nat asked.

  Janie fumbled for an explanation. “Because—he’s panicking,” she said. “He’ll just get in deeper.”

  “I still don’t understand how he could lose,” Nat said. “You’ve seen what he can do, how he knows stuff.”

  Janie looked down at her shoes. A bell rang.

  Valentina said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be dragging you into this.”

  Janie went to class feeling guilty and confused. All day, the words in her notebook went in and out of focus. To distract herself, she tried to move the pencil on her desk without touching it, but it didn’t budge.

  After school, she met Benjamin on a bench near the tennis courts.

  “We created a monster,” she said.

  “It’s not our fault that he’s playing cards when he has no advantage,” Benjamin said. “I warned him.”

  “We should have thought about the side effects,” she said.

  “What side effects?”

  “The lack of empathy,” she said. “Not caring about anyone else’s feelings.”

  “That’s not a side effect,” Benjamin said. “That’s the main effect. It’s what he asked for, to be free from other people’s thoughts.”

  “He asked not to know them, telepathically,” she said. “But the filter is too strong. It makes him not even imagine other people’s thoughts. He doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or feels.”

  “What’s the difference?” Benjamin said.

  “There is one,” she said. “We saw it happen, remember? He was so happy, dancing around, and then he changed in fro
nt of us and threw us out.”

  “Because we didn’t want to sell the powder to his friends,” Benjamin said.

  “I think it was more than that,” Janie said. “And they don’t seem to be his friends anymore. Friends don’t break your nose.”

  They sat in unhappy silence. They’d taken a sad, telepathic magician, and created a sociopath with gambling debts.

  “Maybe he’ll run out of the filter soon,” Janie said.

  Benjamin sounded glum. “He’ll just have his chemist friend make more.”

  “We could try to find him, and explain why he has to stop playing poker.”

  “He won’t listen.”

  Janie looked off across the street and saw a man in a blue sedan, parked beneath the trees, looking back at her. He wore dark glasses and didn’t drop his gaze. “Don’t turn around now,” she said, “but there’s a man watching us.”

  “Where?”

  She lifted her chin in the man’s direction.

  Benjamin stretched his legs out in front of him and settled his arms on the back of the bench, just happening to glance off toward the car. Then he looked up at the sky as if to check the weather, or look at a bird. “How long’s he been there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure he’s watching us?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Maybe he’s just having a rest in the shade.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Should we start walking home, and see what he does?”

  They stood, gathering their things, and tried to walk away normally, but Janie thought they wouldn’t fool anyone. The blue sedan pulled away from the curb. Janie had been followed by federal marshals in Los Angeles, and in New Hampshire she’d been dragged into a car and kidnapped while she was walking down the street. She did not want to repeat either experience.

  “He’s following us,” she said. Her heart began to race.

  “I know,” Benjamin said.

  “Should we go somewhere else, instead of home?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know!”