“Blood,” a rattling voice wheezed. “Fresh blood.”
They dragged me through what felt like a pane of glass. It smashed to pieces around me. Mr. Worthington’s thundering screams vanished, sucked away into nothingness.
Abruptly, the hands let go of me.
To make sure I was alive, I took a breath. Two breaths. I could feel it puffing, freezing in the air like a cloud of ice.
I clenched my fists, fingernails pinching my palms.
Igor shook against my stomach, his claws digging into my skin. I felt the warm sting of blood.
Alive, then.
But where?
I opened my eyes.
I WAS IN the Hall, but not the Hall I knew.
It was Limbo’s version.
The pipe organ here was black instead of silver, and five stories tall. Its pipes slithered in the air like seaweed underwater. Instead of dusty red fabric, the Hall floor seats were covered in skin, stretched tight and bolted into place with teeth. They loomed in the darkness, big as houses. Black water covered the floor, knee-deep. My hair was wet and frozen. So was Igor.
Igor tried to meow. Well, I hope you’re satisfied with yourself.
“I could have drawn this,” I whispered, looking around at the curtains made of old spiderwebs, at the craggy mountaintops that burst out of the Hall’s ceiling. Up past the tops of the mountains, black stars blinked in a dull, white sky.
That didn’t seem right.
Colors swirled everywhere, like when you close your eyes at night and see entire worlds behind your eyelids. Blues, purples, reds, pale yellows. I started to shiver. When I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, my skin felt crackly, old, like the bark of a tree, or . . .
A burn.
I looked down.
Igor noticed it at the same time, yowled, jumped into the water, and climbed onto one of the giant chairs. His claws pulled on the chair’s skin, yanking out long, gummy strands.
What have they done to you?
I turned my arms around, marveling at my newly black, glittering skin. I gleamed and glistened like volcanic rock.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
Igor’s tail flicked back and forth. Whoa? That’s all you can say?
“Whoa, I look awesome?”
I leaned down to touch the surface of the black water. My skin sizzled at the contact, and I jerked back. I took an experimental couple of steps forward. Tsssss, tsssss, the water sizzled around my legs.
Igor was crying on his chair. This is not happening.
“Sure it is,” I said, sizzling toward him. “Come on. We’ve got a doll to find.”
He shrank away from me. Aren’t you at all disturbed that your entire body seems to have changed its texture and color? That you’re sizzling when you walk? That you look like a shade?
Actually, I was incredibly disturbed. But what can you do when you’ve decided to do a thing—like go into Limbo to find a dead girl’s doll—and it ends up being more terrifying than you thought it would be?
You keep going.
So I did, with Igor wrapped around my shoulders. He couldn’t sit still, like if he kept his paws in one place, my skin would burn him.
“Igor, I won’t hurt you. Sit still.”
Igor sneezed in my ear. You don’t know that. For all I know, this could be the first stage of shade transformation. He sneezed in my ear again. And that’s what I think about this whole catastrophe. Mucus.
Shades slunk through the water beside me, crawling along the giant chairs, peering down at us from the mountaintops.
They followed me as I pushed through the water, but they didn’t touch me. They talked to me, though. Or about me, anyway.
“Once there was a shadow named Olivia,” they rasped.
I shivered. My skin cracked open along the seams of my veins. I was a walking earthquake.
“She had a father,” one of the shades wheezed, slinking between my ankles. “And a grandmother. And a motherrrr . . .”
“And a friend,” another shade said, laughing. “A much smarter, much more pleasing to look at friend than she was.”
One of the shades started scampering beside me, running across the top of the water. “And no one loved her. You can’t love something that isn’t there.”
I was in the Hall, but not the Hall I knew.
It was Limbo’s version.
Igor growled deep in his throat. I should like to claw its face off, if it had a face.
I ignored them and kept walking—toward what, I didn’t know. I started scanning the darkness for a doll. Where would you hide a doll in this land of black water, with the chandeliers hanging down from the ceiling like giant upside-down carousels, and doors on all sides, barred like a jail?
“She never paid attention in class,” a shade hissed, chomping its toothless mouth at me.
“She got into fights with people.”
“Olivia the shadow girl.”
“She tried to draw things, but they weren’t very good.”
The shades began to laugh—high, piercing, grinding sounds.
Igor swiped at a shade and almost lost his balance. Olivia is an excellent artist.
“Oooh, kitty’s got claws, kitty’s got paws,” sang a shade, swinging its head from side to side. “Kitty might die tonight, just because.”
“But what about the girl?” hummed one of the shades.
“Ah yes, the girl,” slithering through the water beside me.
“Olivia, the mean-hearted,” floating overhead with great, leathery wings.
“Olivia, the stupid.”
“Olivia, the talentless.”
“Olivia, who nobody loves.”
Don’t listen to them. Igor batted my face with his paws. They’re trying to distract you.
But with each sentence the shades moaned at me, it became harder to move. My steps grew heavier. The water turned to tar.
“Mean-hearted,” a shade whispered, a few inches from my ear.
Part of my ear flaked off and crumbled, dropping into the water like sizzling embers.
“Stupid,” another whispered.
“Talentless.”
“Unloved.”
Tears filled my eyes, black tears to match the rest of me. That made it hard to see. I tripped and fell into the water. Shades swarmed at my heels, their jaws clacking.
“I don’t know where I’m going, Igor,” I whispered into the water. I opened my mouth, let the cold rush in.
Igor tugged at my hair with his claws.
“Ow.”
Yes, that’s right, ow. Now get up.
I did, somehow, and started to climb.
A foothold here, in the side of this chair. Another, there. I pulled myself up, and then again, and again. Igor, perched on my shoulders, weighed me down like a sack of rocks, but I couldn’t leave him.
Behind me, a black wave of shades followed me up. The giant chairs turned to cliffs and then mountains, rising up out of the Hall into clean, cold air. The shades stampeded each other to get closer to me, digging their long fingers into each others’ backs.
“Mean-hearted,” their yawning voices echoed up at me.
“Stupid.”
“Talentless.”
“Unloved.”
It was harder to breathe up here. The sky grew whiter as I climbed, dotted with black stars. I saw, in the distance, faint outlines of pipe organ forests. There was a road in a valley. People floated along the road—gray people. Ghosts. They were running from the pitch-black shades chasing after them. The shades jumped. The shades engulfed them, slurping, chomping.
And when I looked again, there was a shade where the ghost had been.
I kept climbing, up and up the mountains made of black snow. Everything was reversed, here.
A shape reared up beside me.
“Henry?” I slid down a ridge and landed in a pool of black water that started climbing up my arms like it was alive. Igor sliced me free. “Henry, what are you doing here?”
“Olivia?” Hen
ry said, but it wasn’t Henry. It couldn’t have been. Oh, I hoped it couldn’t have been. He was shrinking, shriveling, into a treelike creature of black crusty limbs and black fungus spots where his freckles used to be.
“Olivia,” the Henry-creature moaned, reaching for me. “I’m so hungry. Help me?”
I turned away, shimmying back up the glassy black slope. Stomach pangs flooded through me. Tabby Worthington’s wet coughs echoed through the mountains like thunderclaps.
“Why won’t you help me?” the Henry-creature called out. “I’ll die. You can’t leave me here! Find me something to eat!”
“Igor?” I whispered. My sweating hands kept slipping on the snow.
Igor dug his claws into my crackling skin. Keep going. He’s not real.
I suddenly felt very small. I let myself drop. Curled into a ball, I let black snow rush into the cracks of my skin. “Are you sure?”
Olivia, this is not how I want to die.
I took a deep breath, and then another one. “No. Me neither.”
I pulled us up, inch by inch, flat on my belly. Igor rode on my back. I think I’ve counted one hundred and forty-seven shades so far.
“Thanks,” I panted. “That’s helpful.”
“You are such a disappointment.” Nonnie sighed, appearing suddenly to my right. I gasped at the sight of her—frostbitten, white and blue and black, her fingers and nose and skin dropping off. Her bones were as black as the snow. “I’m always so cold. So lonely. So frightened. And you just let me stay that way.”
“No,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I try to take very good care of you, Nonnie.”
“Not lately. You’ve been too busy. Too worried about yourself. What about me? I’m so old. So . . . old . . .”
I ran from the black Nonnie-skeleton chasing me, so high up now that my lungs started to burn. Finally, the Nonnie-skeleton crumbled and fell, back into the oncoming surge of shades. They gobbled up the bits of her like starving wolves. Below them, the Hall stood open to the skies.
Igor was purring. Keep going.
“I can’t,” I whispered, because my tears were freezing over, making hard lenses over my eyes. I took a step, another step, another, impossible step. “I can’t do it.”
But you are doing it.
“Olivia,” an awful creature croaked next to me, half Richard Ashley, half beast. “You’ve let us down.”
“Olivia,” a three-headed giant moaned, reaching down to breathe stinking air on me. One head was Counselor Davis, another Principal Cooper, another Mrs. Farrity. “You’re such a disappointment. Why can’t you be smarter?”
“Why can’t you work harder?”
“Why can’t you be nice?”
“I’m smart,” I whispered, “or I try, anyway.”
“She tries and she fails.” The giant laughed.
“Leave me alone.” I pressed my cheek into the snow, pulling myself up by handfuls of ice and grit. The cold was peeling off scraps of my clothes. “Please leave me alone.”
“Olivia,” boomed a voice.
The Maestro. Covered in tubes—up his nose, under his fingernails, into his scalp. The tubes spurted blood.
“You’ve killed me,” he moaned. “Why did you kill me? Why couldn’t you forgive me?”
My tears froze before they even reached the ground. I could barely move my face.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I can’t breathe.”
Igor was warm on my back. You’re doing it. You are, you are. And I’m here.
So I kept climbing. And, finally, I reached the top.
This was the tallest of the mountains.
I lay at the top, panting, and looked around. The other mountains were anthills far below. Even farther down, the Hall gaped open to the sky. The shades circled beneath me like a rushing black river.
It was only me and Igor up here, and the howling, biting wind, and the black stars, so close I could almost touch them. Black, purple, and shining.
“Olivia?” a new voice said.
Oh, no. I’d thought we were alone. Wrapping my head in my arms, I tried to burrow into the snow to hide.
“Leave me alone.” My frozen tears shattered like glass. “Please, no more.”
“Olivia,” the voice repeated, full of disbelief. And I recognized it then. That voice had made birds for me. That voice had told me to dream and made up stories late at night for me, with only a flashlight and a bedsheet.
“Look up, Olivia.”
I looked up.
Even though she was dark as night, even though she had no face—or at least, not the face I remembered—I knew it was her. I knew because when she pulled me into her arms, I wasn’t afraid, and Igor didn’t hiss, and even though she was made of shadows now, her hug still felt warm, just like it used to.
A flash of color flickered across her darkness—white, and blue, and gold. The same colors I’d seen in the Hall that day, on that strange-seeming shade.
“Mom,” I burst out. “Where did you go?”
She didn’t answer. She just rocked me, up there on that mountain in the wind, beneath the black stars. And I said her name a million times over, because I couldn’t get enough.
It would never be enough.
HOW LONG WE sat there, I have no idea. After a few minutes or a few hours, I forced myself to look at Mom’s face.
Black and crisped, shimmering like fairy dust. Without eyes, without nose, with a hole for a mouth.
“How long have you been here?” I whispered.
“Here?”
I closed my eyes, wrapping myself up in the sound of her voice, even though shadows scratched through it. “In Limbo.”
“Is that where this is?” She sighed, looked around. “You know, I’m not sure. I’m not sure of a lot of things, these days.”
“Mom, you do know . . . you know you’re dead, right?”
“Dead?” She tilted her head. “Is that what this is? It’s difficult to remember.”
I reached for Igor. He crawled into my lap.
“You left us.” I tried to sound casual about it. “The Christmas before last, you left me and . . . and the Maestro, and then about a year ago, you died.”
She stared at me in silence.
“There was a car crash, Mom. And a memorial at Pine Ridge Baptist. And the Maestro didn’t tell me. I just found out.”
“Car crash?”
“Why didn’t you say good-bye? Huh?” Suddenly I was mad. Boiling mad. Burning mad. I punched her arm. It was like punching stone, and I started to cry. “Why couldn’t you just have explained? You fell out of love with him. With us.”
“Never.” Mom leaned close to me. Her breath smelled of lightning and dark places. “Never you, Olivia.”
“Then why?”
“I was scared, and angry.”
I kicked the ground. Black snow flew everywhere. “Yeah, well, I’m scared and angry too. A lot. And I’m only a kid, you know?”
“I never said I had a good reason. But it’s a reason. And more time passed and more time passed, and then I was really scared. I couldn’t come back to you. You would hate me.”
I ground my fists into my eyes. “I never hated you.”
“But you hate your father.”
“He made you leave.”
“Nobody made me leave but me. I was unhappy. I left. I didn’t do it right. But I can’t change that now.” Mom looked out over the mountaintops. “So, Limbo, is it? It’s a strange sort of place. Isn’t it? Surely I was alive only yesterday. It can’t have been long.”
“You died, Mom,” I whispered, “and you never said goodbye. You were just . . . gone.”
“I know, baby.”
“We live at the Hall now. Me and the Maestro and Nonnie. He sold all our things.”
“Oh, honey.”
“I hate my clothes. They smell like smokers because I have to get them from the charity store.”
And I couldn’t stop talking. I told her everything, a whole year of everything. Cou
nselor Davis and Principal Cooper and the notes from school. Green candy. The petition. The Economy. Richard Ashley and how he let me cry into his jacket on the way to the hospital. My sketches, and art school.
Henry.
That color flickered over Mom’s face again. For a second, I thought I saw her real eyes. “Henry. He sounds like a nice boy. Is he cute?”
“Mom.”
“Well. I’m supposed to ask these things.”
I squinted up at her. “You are?”
“I think so. Well? Is he?”
Suddenly, my crackling black shoelaces seemed very interesting. “I don’t know, he’s got freckles and whatever.”
Igor snorted. Ahem.
“You’ve seen him, though, right?” I looked up carefully. “I mean, you and the shades have been all over the Hall. You’ve been attacking everything—the ceiling, the ghosts, even me.”
Mom leaned back. “We have?”
“Don’t you remember? For months, you’ve been coming to the Hall. You . . .” I swallowed, hard. “You hurt the Maestro. You crashed the ceiling down on him. He’s in the hospital.”
“Oh, Olivia . . .”
“You have to remember that. Why’d you do it?”
“Oh, I don’t, though.” She started to wring her hands. “I remember . . . light and warmth. I remember searching. I remember . . . feeling angry and lost, and so alone. I remember finding others. I remember searching for . . . fresh blood.”
Fresh blood. One of the shades that brought me here had said that to me. What if that shade had been Mom, confused?
Perhaps, Igor suggested, they are all confused.
“Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing?” I murmured.
Igor bent to smooth out his tail. Like moths to flames.
“Instinct.”
Frederick had said shades didn’t know who or what or where they were, once in the world of the Living. They become hardly more than mindless beasts, confused and vicious.
I scooted closer to Mom, took her hand in mine. My head ached, my heart ached. “Mom, are you telling me that you weren’t trying to eat the ghosts?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You weren’t trying to attack them, or us, or make the Hall come crashing down?”
Mom shook her head, shrinking into a black stump of shadow and snow. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Olivia. Please slow down.”
The Year of Shadows Page 25
