Another Pan

by Daniel Nayeri

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Nayeri and Dina Nayeri

  Cover photograph copyright © 2010 by Scott Nobles

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2010

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Nayeri, Daniel.

  Another Pan / Daniel and Dina Nayeri. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While attending an elite prep school where their father is a professor, Wendy and John Darling discover a book which opens the door to other worlds, to Egyptian myths long thought impossible, and to the home of an age-old darkness.

  ISBN 978-0-7636-3712-5 (hardcover)

  [1. Characters in literature — Fiction. 2. Mythology, Egyptian — Fiction. 3. Fantasy.]

  I. Nayeri, Dina. II. Title.

  PZ7.N225An 2010

  [Fic] — dc22 2010006606

  ISBN 978-0-7636-5210-4 (electronic)

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. All set for tomorrow?”

  “D&D’s writing session? Sure, I have things covered on my end.”

  “Let’s go over it again, just in case.”

  “OK, for a level-one spat, I distract her with background music.”

  “For level two, I have a purse full of Snickers bars ready.”

  “For level three, I turn off the Internet access, and they lose Skype connection for fifteen minutes . . .”

  “At which point, I step in with the Snickers.”

  “And for a level-four fight . . . Um, what do we do for level four?”

  “Let’s go with pastries; pray we never see a four. See you at Christmas.”

  “OK. Good night.”

  This book is dedicated to our friends and family.

  For giving us the happy thoughts.

  New York (spring)

  All nights come to an end — that is to say, all nights see the break of day. For those of us who are afraid of the dark, or at least not very fond of vampires or impending alarm clocks, thankfully, all nights do end. As the sun comes crashing up over the horizon, flooding the world with flashes and revelation, the night and all its creatures retreat, crawling back into their caves. For most of us, that’s great news. Sure, there are plenty of wonderful uses for night — sound sleep, for one; stargazing and fireworks, for two more — but it is a documented fact that evil is a nocturnal animal. There are no daymares, for example. No one has ever brought a car to a screeching stop to let a werewolf cross the road at noontime. It’s not how things work. The only monsters that prowl in the daytime are orthodontists.

  When it comes to death and destruction and all that, night is right. Under its downhearted blanket, all sorts of things can go wrong. For instance, you could take a tumble down a flight of stairs. Or you might fail to see a hundred reptilian tongues salivating on your pillow, just waiting for that nest you call hair. Or you could scream out when the snakes get you, and someone you love could take the tumble down the stairs. And now you’ve done it. You and the dark night and all its nighttime creatures. It’s easy to suppose that that’s why daytime was invented. One might even take solace in the fact that all nights come to an eventual end. All nights, that is, except for one.

  You probably don’t remember.

  The dawn froze in New York City so that the day was long overdue, but no one seemed to notice it. The gridlock on Fifth Avenue was wound tighter than a mummy with a mortgage, but the drivers sat politely in their cars, not making a single noise. A flock of pigeons was kind enough to preserve the silence by pausing in mid-flutter, twelve feet off the ground, in a static explosion of fungal breadcrumbs and greasy feathers. Even the motionless wave of rainwater almost splashing a passing woman, the bicyclist whistling at the oblivious tourist, the foulmouthed businessman holding a cappuccino to his mouth and a cell phone to his ear — all were frozen in mid-step, stride, or syllable.

  The only thing moving in the still city was the lady with silky clothes and ivory skin and blond hair. The governess Vileroy. Her body was broken, her hair singed, her elegant clothes in tatters. As she stumbled through the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment, she clutched her throat and gagged in short spasmodic bursts. Her carefully constructed body was falling apart around her, lifetimes of splendid trappings ripping away like curtains. She seemed to be bending in odd directions, like a tangled marionette. Her hacking was the only noise to be heard.

  The lady called Vileroy climbed out of the shattered window, then her still-female form angled down the fire escape and crawled to the street below. Somewhere far off, a street lamp extinguished itself. She lurched along the streets of the Upper East Side, bits of skin and hair flying away, her face contorted in agonizing fits of pain. She crossed a road — half woman, half nebulous haze — moving past a car and then a bicyclist, who was pursing his lips to whistle at an oblivious tourist. She whistled her own tune. It was the wheezing sound of trapped air escaping a dead body. Another fit of coughing consumed her, and a black mist escaped her mouth. She was crawling now, on what little remained of her four limbs.

  The lady continued to inch forward, pulled onward by a beckoning force. Soon, she no longer inched or lurched, but seeped through the city streets like smog, unseen and undetected. A demon with no purpose, a darkness with no light. A governess with no children. She paused to listen, and the voice called to her again, taunting her. It was the voice of a new darkness. A voice that she knew she needed in order to survive. It was not temporary, like her crumbling body. It was something more precisely measured on the eternal scale. The voice of a black divinity bigger than this individual demon. The voice pierced the billowing black fog that was slowly leaking out of the dark lady, leaving behind silky clothes and ivory skin and blond hair. Soon, the lady was engulfed in a sea of reeking black fog — the stench of all the world’s malice, hatred, and merciless intentions.

  Her one devilish eye, a crucifix branded in its blue core, did not abandon her as she lost her last vestiges of humanity. It was her most true part — the only part of her that could never die and fall away. When the hindrance of the broken body was gone, the black fog billowed on . . . until it reached the Marlowe School.

  In the tranquil night, Marlowe looked like an ancient monument, grand and imposing. No one saw the thick, polluted cloud overtake the school and disappear into the basement. No one was there to see the broken eye rush hungrily for whatever lay under Marlowe.

  Damaged and starving for deliverance, the darkness was drawn deeper inside. Past the marble hallways and satellite classrooms and lockers stuffed with hoodies, Harvard applications, and half-eaten snack cakes, it crept toward its purpose. The basement was dusty, full of old, forgotten exhibits and books with the edges curled shut. In the corner was a computer graveyard overrun with cracked keyboards and monitors the size of headstones. But recently, a section had been taped off for a new shipment. Statues, boxes, and aging artifacts were piled together around a sarcophagus. A yellow sign rested against the wall:

  Marlowe Egyptian Exhibit

  Courtesy of the British Museum

  Location: Barrie Auditorium

  Curator: Professor George Darling

  Among the chaos of the unassembled exhibit, the demon eye of the
former governess devoured the scene until it found a small statue in a far corner. Neferat. A plaque rested at the feet of the oddly female statuette, its body curved, its head worn by time but clearly elongated, like a wolf or a jackal. The darkness did not linger long. This was the source of the calling. This was the timeless task. This was the place where she would rest, alone and undisturbed, until she had regained her strength.

  The statue shook.

  Then the eye was gone, the last wisps of fog snaking their way into the long but featureless head. For a brief moment, stone became flesh and the statue’s head turned. An alabaster ball that had been its left eye fell out and rolled across the floor. A new eye flashed blue in its place and broke into four parts.

  Out in the streets, the morning came alive again.

  A woman felt a chill and blamed it on a splash of rainwater.

  A bicyclist reeled at a stench and turned his nose at a tourist.

  A businessman spit out a mouthful of sour cappuccino.

  The governess Vileroy was gone. But not truly gone. The night began to end, but the darkness was only just starting, preparing once again to haunt the Marlowe School.

  For the three months of summer vacation, when the school was empty and no teachers or parents were watching for signs of excess dirt, unexplained toxins, or any kind of danger to their children’s health or comfort, the darkness lurked, rebuilding a lost strength, polluting Marlowe from below, slowly blackening the air, so that in the fall, when the administration came back from their European travels to open the doors onto a new academic year, they couldn’t really tell what was different. Something was different, though. . . .

  No one had seen the bland, plain-looking woman with poor posture crawling out of a closet in the basement — clearly sick, she coughed into a white lace handkerchief and wiped the sweat from her pale face. She hadn’t wanted to be summoned into the world so soon. Three months is nothing on the eternal scale, and the once-beautiful governess had not yet gained back all that she had lost. She was desperate to creep back into the dark, past the ancient statue, and into the unseen places where injured demons recover and lick their wounds. But an old child had come looking for her, and so she was back in the world of the living in this frail human body — not fully healed. She was no longer beautiful. No longer tall or regal. Her face was scrunched together, her nose too fat, her eyes (even the unchanging branded eye) too small. Her blue sweater was moth-eaten and smelled like disease. And so no one noticed the new school nurse as she staggered into her office.

  New York (summer)

  The summer between middle school and high school is an irreversibly, undeniably crucial time for an image makeover — in fact, if you’re looking to reinvent yourself, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Particularly if you happen to be a thirteen-year-old, skinny ex-nerdling who is starting high school a year early. It won’t help if you’re a teacher’s kid, that’s for sure. And it won’t help if you have an older sister already going to your super-exclusive, socially impossible high school (in this case Marlowe) — unless, of course, you’ve spent a whole summer with a killer game plan.

  John Darling happened to be a grand master of game plans. And in his entire thirteen years of life, he had never wanted a plan to work as much as this. Sure, John was shorter than the other kids at school. He was thinner, weaker, and less . . . well, just less, as far as he could tell. Less of everything. But in high school, he would eradicate all vestiges of his previous self. No more John the Loser. No more John the Gaming Nerd. No more John the Joke.

  “This is the Year of John,” he said to himself, and sometimes to his sister, Wendy, who told him to just relax, because everybody liked him the way he was. But John didn’t want to hear that. What did Wendy know about not being cool? And about starting at a new school a year too young? She was hot (strawberry blond hair, cute little freckles, and a tennis-team build) and popular (but definitely still in the three digits if you’re counting Facebook friends, which John did). And now Connor Wirth, aka Captain Marlowe, was hitting on her. Wendy couldn’t possibly know anything about John’s problems — about being alone at lunch, worrying if anyone will come to your birthday, wondering if you’ll have to spend your free period in the science lab instead of out on the front lawn with the popular kids. But John wasn’t one to give up. He was a man of action. “This is the year I’m gonna be a badass . . . get some respect.”

  Last spring, John had gotten in to Finnegan High, the city’s toughest school in terms of pure academics and a place where he would have fit in perfectly. It was just as selective as Marlowe, but it was no rich-kid haven. Its admissions were based only on test results. If you got in, they’d pay your way, whatever your family’s needs. But John had turned it down in favor of Marlowe (which was also free of charge for him and Wendy, since their father taught ancient civilizations there). He knew that he could make it there. Even though his father had resisted, urged him to take the Finnegan offer, John knew that if he tried hard enough, he could be one of them — not just part of the intellectual elite, but the social elite too. He could graduate from Marlowe a part of something so much better, so much bigger, than just the clique of super smart New Yorkers headed to MIT. He could come out of it with an acceptance to a top college and the friendship of the people who would really run the world. Those Finnegan guys, sure, they’d be successful, but they would probably all be crunching numbers for the overprivileged party boys from Marlowe. That’s the way the world worked, and John knew that.

  He had spent the last three months lifting weights, cultivating the slightest Hamptons tan in his backyard, scoping online discount stores for all the designer duds he could afford on his meager allowance, and trying to hang out with Connor Wirth, who had invited Wendy (and therefore John) to his family’s Fourth of July party. Usually, John hated having Wendy involved in his life, but this Connor thing, whatever it was, could be his ticket. After the party, John started methodically changing his Facebook image.

  The thing about Facebook is that you can’t just change yourself all at once. People will know and then they’ll fire back, calling you out on your wall, tagging you in all sorts of embarrassing old pictures (and John had been to enough Cosplay conventions to be worried). So, since leaving middle school in June, and especially after the party, John had uploaded cool new pictures of himself with all the right people, joined less embarrassing groups and fan pages, and started tailoring his status updates. He kept ignoring or deleting any mocking comments from his old gaming buddies until they finally shut up about it.

  John Darling is psyched to have his bud Massimo visiting from Torino. . . . We couldn’t go out, though, ’cause I’m trying not to get back into that lifestyle . . . spent too much of last year toasted. . . .

  John Darling had a great time last night . . . but don’t ask for details, ’cause she knows who she is and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

  John Darling → Connor Wirth: Hey, bro! Are you lifting weights tomorrow? I’m gonna lift anyway, so you can come if you want. Whatever . . .

  Connor Wirth → John Darling: Hi, little buddy. Sure, you can lift with us again. Say hi to your sister.

  Poor John, Wendy thought as another one of her brother’s transparent Facebook updates dropped onto her mini-feed. What? He’s telling people he used to have a drug problem? Wendy had tried to be understanding the previous week when he started talking about his supposed sex life and his summer fling with a Bulgarian girl who was too Bohemian to have a Facebook profile, but this was too much. He could actually get himself into trouble for this. She couldn’t say anything to John, of course, because he was so sensitive about his summer reinvention campaign that he would have a fit if Wendy even suggested that people weren’t buying his act. But to Wendy, it was obvious what was really going on. John was lonely. Maybe he needed an older brother. He wanted to be someone else — to prove to everyone that he was big and important and deserved respect. And if this was the way he chose to get it, the
n . . . fine . . . She couldn’t be his older brother, but maybe she could look the other way.

  Tomorrow, on her date with Connor, she would ask him to invite John to something low-key. Maybe they could play soccer together. That would help. Wendy had been quietly dating Connor Wirth since early July, but she hadn’t said anything to her family — even though Connor had introduced her as his girlfriend to his three best friends, even though he had called every day for a month. Why take the risk? she thought. Who knows what will happen once school starts? Wendy was a pragmatic girl. She knew that boys her age were fickle and couldn’t be trusted. And who knew if Connor would suddenly forget all his fawning speeches when he was faced with his shallow, social-climbing friends and their judgmental attitudes? Maybe he would pretend she didn’t even exist.

  Just then, her cell rang with Connor’s ringtone. OK, so she had given him his own ringtone. It wasn’t even that good a song . . . hardly a commitment. OK, fine, it was her favorite song, but only from this summer.

  “Hey, Connor,” she said, and immediately began forgetting about John. “What’s up?”

  “Wanna come over?” Connor said, then added, “My mom’s back from Biarritz.”

  “You want me to meet your mom?” said Wendy, elated and wondering why she ever doubted Connor.

  “Oh . . .” Connor said, and starting to mumble, “um . . . she’s not here now.”

  “Right.” Wendy could feel herself turning red. “I mean —”

  “I just meant that she brought the cheese I told you about . . . made it through customs and everything,” said Connor. “We can watch movies and eat it all before she gets home.”

  Normally, Wendy would be mortified by such a humiliating mistake. But Connor seemed to rebound quickly enough, going on and on about the cheese (a bit too long, actually, so he was obviously nervous), probably trying to make her feel better with his own awkwardness. “OK,” she said, and reached for her purse. “I’ll be there in thirty.”