Messenger of Fear

by Michael Grant

  All of this came to me as a sort of accelerated slide show, pictures tumbling over pictures, snippets of video mingling with audio tracks, a vast hallucinogenic data dump.

  A particular video caught my eye, and I plucked it out to examine. Liam was in a classroom and, judging by the other students around him, it must have been recent, from no more than a few months ago. In this, Liam was looking at Emma. I saw it as a glance, a look away to the white board and the teacher, a glance back, a look away, a glance, until Emma happened to spy him looking at her and she met his gaze with an arched brow and a dubious expression.

  At the same time I saw Emma’s path to that same moment. I saw her earliest memories, her mother and father, her brothers, her cat, her room.

  I felt ashamed. I had become a stalker, an invader of minds, an intruder in memories I had no right to. And yet it was fascinating and exhilarating at almost a physical level, a rush, a thrill ride. A nauseating intrusion, but with my own memory reduced to a few pencil sketches, this trove of memories and sensations—for I could feel the emotion in each memory—was luxurious. I swam in the warm waters of memories that were not my own.

  Finally, reluctantly, I broke contact.

  There were tears on my cheeks.

  “They love each other,” I said. It was no great revelation, but I had felt the intensity of that emotion and knew in a way that left me feeling small and unimportant. Love, yes, the love I no doubt felt for my parents and a half-remembered brother, but this was a different thing. This was not a long-burning candle; it was roaring fire. This was desire and need and a willing surrender that empowered.

  “Yes,” Messenger agreed. “And what of the wrong they have done?”

  I frowned, not sure quite what he meant, though I had as well felt Liam and Emma’s panic and self-loathing at the violent act they had committed.

  “They’re good people,” I said.

  “Yes,” Messenger agreed. “What of the wrong they have done?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I want to know your thoughts, Mara. What of the wrong they have done?”

  “Can’t you just open my head up and see for yourself?” I snapped. “If I can do it, you can. You have, obviously. You’re the one keeping me from seeing my own memories.” I was becoming agitated, sickened by the terrible violation I had committed in stealing the memories of these two decent kids, kids my own age, not monsters, just kids who had made a very bad mistake.

  And yet . . . and yet did I not want to see still more? Did I not still wish that I was myself experiencing their intensity of feeling? There was a hunger in me that might be fed by gorging on borrowed emotion.

  Messenger said, “I can do many things, Mara. But you will learn nothing from my reading of your mind. To learn you must form your thoughts and emotions into expression. What. Of. The. Wrong?”

  I threw up my hands, helpless. I looked pleadingly at Liam and Emma—my God, I knew them each better than I knew myself—as if they could somehow save me from my own guilt. But, of course, neither of them understood that I had just dined on their most intimate experiences.

  “I guess,” I said, “they should . . . pay something. Be made to . . . They should . . .”

  I could go no further. Messenger relented then and turned away from me to face the two frightened kids. “This wrong demands punishment,” he said. “I offer you a game. If you win, you will go free, unbothered by me or by my apprentice.”

  “A game?” Liam echoed in obvious confusion.

  “A game,” Messenger said. “If you win, you go free. If you lose, then you will face the thing you fear most.”

  “What . . . what game?” Emma asked, with a nervous glance at Liam. “What’s the game?”

  “We will consider,” Messenger said.

  “Wait,” Liam protested. “We’re just supposed to sit here and wait, not knowing? I mean, what the hell, man?”

  Emma was ready to jump in and also demand some kind of resolution, but whatever she had to say, I didn’t hear it then, for we were no longer with Emma and Liam. We were once again with Samantha Early.

  9

  IT WAS A SCHOOL LUNCHROOM. NOISY, CHAOTIC, smelling of grease and overcooked brussels sprouts. On the walls were posters exhorting the team to beat the Redwood Giants. There was a nutrition poster on the wall next to the food line. The tables were round six-tops with molded plastic chairs that made a scraping sound with each movement and laid a sort of uneven rhythm track beneath the babble of voices.

  Samantha Early was at a table with three other girls. None of them were talking. Mason Crain, a pleasant-looking if not handsome kid who had not quite grown into his hands and feet, sat down across from her carrying a tray loaded with something brown, something green, and something red.

  Samantha glanced up, then returned her gaze immediately to the laptop on which she was typing in between bites of turkey lasagna.

  Two tables away sat Kayla and her friends. They were not all beauties, but even those who were of only average looks were well and expensively turned out, with better-than-Claire’s jewelry, outfits from A&F and Nordstrom, designer shoes and bags, and latest-generation cell phones.

  “See who just sat down with Spazmantha?” Kayla asked.

  All heads turned, noted the boy at Samantha Early’s table, and looked back to Kayla for guidance as to why, precisely, this was important.

  “That’s Mason Crain,” Kayla said. “He’s acting all cool, but Samantha gave him a b.j. in his car up at the Headlands. In one of those pullouts where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  This in itself was not enough to elicit more than a few obligatory Eeeewwws.

  “Oh, my God,” Kayla said in mock disbelief at their cluelessness. “Don’t you know who Mason Crain’s mother is?”

  Publishing, I thought. His mother is in publishing. That fact must have come the same way so much came to me now, but for a moment I frowned, concentrating, trying to scroll back through my earlier encounter with Samantha’s world, and I did not recall the moment at which I had heard that name.

  Blank stares from Kayla’s sycophants. Kayla waited for the suspense to build. “Mason Crain’s mother is Amber Crain. She’s a big deal, an editor or whatever they call them, at a big publisher.”

  The dots were still not connecting. So Kayla laid the last piece out in front of them, speaking slowly, as if to little children. “That’s how she got her book published. Duh. Spazmantha sucked her way to success.”

  And now every eye turned back again to Samantha, and to Mason, but returning to Samantha. And from her seat Samantha must have felt the eyes on her. She looked up and saw six eager, malicious, titillated sets of eyes.

  They made eye contact, six on one, and there was a burst of giggling, unmistakably directed at Samantha. Samantha blushed, baffled by why exactly—why this time—she was being laughed at.

  We moved again, in that seamless way that Messenger had of simply appearing where he wished to appear, and now we were with Samantha as she left school at the end of the day. She pulled out her cell phone and saw that her Twitter feed had lit up.

  Twenty-nine tweets talking about her.

  Some of them had a photo taken of her and Mason at lunch.

  Samantha rocked back and for a moment looked as if she might faint. She leaned against her locker and scrolled again and again over the list of tweets, reading each of them, seeing new ones pop up. A thirtieth. A fortieth. In minutes the entire school would know a lie, a lie she could deny but never destroy.

  Samantha gasped for breath. Her eyes darted to the exit, and she made a little jerking motion in that direction but couldn’t seem to move. She was frozen in panic. Tears were filling her eyes.

  I reached for her without thinking because her knees had started to buckle, but of course I could not touch her, I could not help her. Yet she needed help. Maybe there were people who could laugh off a rapidly spreading lie, but Samantha was not that person.

/>   Kayla was coming down the hall with two of her followers, her primed-for-cruelty followers, her toadies, her co-conspirators. Not Kayla’s fault alone, I thought, not just her, them, too! Them, too! They were laughing but not looking at Samantha, not making eye contact, avoiding eye contact, just laughing, loudly, with the hard-edged falseness that spoke of sadism and not humor.

  Samantha looked almost pleadingly at Kayla. Not angrily, pleadingly, desperately. She looked like a cow going to slaughter who smells death ahead and knows with sickening dread that there is no escape.

  “I don’t want to watch this,” I said. Minutes before I had been an unwelcome spy in Emma’s and Liam’s minds. Now I was a helpless witness to bullying. And I knew already where the bullying would lead.

  It is a terrible thing to watch evil unfolding. It’s a terrible thing to see doom coming to an innocent girl. I felt like throwing up. I felt sick of everything that had happened to me in the time since I had woken up beneath that unwholesome yellow mist. I crossed my arms, digging my fingernails into my forearms, a protective pose, a fearful pose. A pose that in a small way transmitted reflected pain.

  “How long?” I asked Messenger through gritted teeth. “How long have I been here?”

  He did not answer.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. As if my heart was too large an organ to fit my narrow chest. “You don’t understand, I’m not like you. I’m not . . . I can’t . . . I can’t just watch this happen and not try to stop it.”

  “It’s easier if you believe that all of this has already happened, Mara,” Messenger said. There was something almost human in his voice. But I did not fail to notice his careful word choice.

  Easier if I believe.

  Had it already happened? It must have; I’d seen the final act of Samantha’s tragic story. But what meaning did past and present and future have when you could dip in and out of a person’s life, a minute here, an hour there?

  It was impossible to accept as reality. But no, no, that wasn’t quite true. In fact, I had accepted it. In a very short time I had adjusted in some ways at least to the notion that I could simply move through time and space. This new reality should not have been as easy to accept as a change in the weather.

  I had a sudden realization.

  “You closed off my memory to make it easier for me to adapt.”

  Messenger’s face remained impassive. But something came through anyway, some sense that he was pleased. Pleased with me for understanding.

  To my shame I swelled with pride. Then instantly I pushed that emotion away. Was I some lonely puppy, bouncing and groveling because Messenger had given me a pat on the head?

  I called up the images I had seen when Messenger had touched me, images of terror and pain and utter despair. I could call him Messenger, but his full title was Messenger of Fear.

  Fear. And I was to be his apprentice until such time as I was ready to become the dread messenger myself.

  I imagined escaping from him. I could run out the door of this school and find a phone to call my parents. No, my mother. Just my mother. I had forgotten again that my father was dead.

  I imagined the call. Mom, I’m . . . somewhere. I need help. I’m trapped with a supernatural being who apparently thinks he’s some sort of judge, jury, and executioner. Get me out of here. Wherever here is.

  I saw a memory of her then. Perhaps a memory of a picture. That simple gift, the ability to remember my mother’s face, however imperfectly, filled me with emotion and made swallowing difficult.

  I did not want to cry in front of Messenger, but I needed to cry for so many reasons. I needed to cry for Liam and Emma and the dog they had killed, and even for whoever might own and love that dog. I needed to cry for Samantha Early—I needed to scream at heaven for what was coming to Samantha Early.

  And, in unworthy self-pity, I needed to cry for myself, because surely whatever I had done to deserve this, whatever had wrung soul-searing sobs from me, it must surely have been a mistake, an accident, like Liam and Emma. For surely whatever I had done, it was nothing that sank to Kayla’s level. I didn’t believe I was capable of true wickedness.

  But I would learn that we don’t always know ourselves.

  I would learn that and more.

  10

  IT WAS WITH THE GREATEST RELIEF THAT I SAW we had moved on, leaving poor, doomed Samantha Early to read the 140-character mocks and insults and false expressions of disgust.

  We stood outside a house perched just below a narrow, one-lane, poorly blacktopped, and winding road. My house? For a moment it was almost as if Messenger had read my thoughts, my search for my own roots, and was taking me to a familiar place. There was a familiarity about the place, but no, of course this wasn’t my house, it couldn’t be.

  “This is Kayla’s home?” I asked, and received no answer. I was becoming accustomed to Messenger’s taciturnity, to his grudging release of any information, as though truth was a poison that must be taken with the smallest of spoons, over time, allowing immunity to build up.

  Kayla’s family had money; that much was clear. The home was large, six bedrooms, with a pool to the side and a view of a stand of woods that might be inviting on the sunniest of spring days but now felt sullen, dense, and silent.

  The slope behind the house was quite steep, even more sharply declined than the steps from the road down to the front door. That rear slope led down to Sleepy Hollow Creek. White alders, willows, and buckeyes grew tall, and the deck at the rear of the house was in the midst of those trees, so that sunshine only rarely struck the cedar planks and . . .

  I blinked in confusion. I had not been to the back of the house—I was still standing on the road, looking at the house between parked cars. Was I now acquiring information without even the need to pose a question? Was I a fish swimming in a sea of information to which I had now, by virtue of my incredible situation, become entitled?

  We stepped into Kayla’s room, as though walking from the one-lane road directly into her room was a matter of course. There was an architecture, a geography to this sphere I now inhabited. I thought that eventually I must come to understand it if I was ever to free myself from an existence as a helpless appendage.

  I could only wonder what my own home was like. The brief flashes of memory I’d enjoyed had given me very little to work with. I still had no idea what my room was like, but I felt sure it was not as nice as Kayla’s.

  She had a queen-size bed with an antique-white headboard detailed with a blue stripe that picked up the color on one of her walls. The other walls were lighter, avoiding the heaviness that can come from too much blue.

  The furniture . . .

  Wait a minute. I knew the furniture. That was a Restoration Hardware bed. The dresser and desk were both antiques. How did I know that? Why did I know that? I was too young to be some kind of interior decorator. Was this an interest of mine? That would be an embarrassing bit of knowledge if it turned out I was a student of home furnishing.

  I had felt from the start that I cared about words. Cared maybe too much, but that at least felt organic to me, part of me. This unusual knowledge of furniture must come from some personal experience. Maybe my own room had been redecorated?

  I tried to force a picture to appear, but it would not, and my attention was drawn to Kayla, who was doing homework on her laptop, tapping, dragging her finger across the touch screen, tapping, glancing at a book, tapping some more.

  Above her desk was a cork bulletin board, squeezed in between posters of pop stars and actors and a wistful travel poster from Venice. I moved in to see the bulletin board. A course list. A shopping list—very organized was our Kayla: eyeliner, socks, moisturizer, scrunchies.

  My eye was drawn then to a ribbon, a blue satin rectangle with the letters “NaNoWriMo.” I knew what it meant, which was both reassuring and unsettling. National Novel Writing Month. Kayla had participated, even won some sort of recognition.

  The door opened
. I fought back the instinct to hide. We were invisible, of course, except when Messenger decided otherwise. Through the door came a woman. She was pretty in a chrome-and-glass kind of way, cold, face unnaturally smooth, hair a glossy black, very different from Kayla. I was sure that black hair should be at least touched with gray, might have been so touched at some point in the past.

  She was dressed in a too-short skirt and too-tight blouse over too-ambitious breast-enhancement surgery. She had the aspect of a woman trying very hard to be other than what nature had meant her to be.

  “We’re going out,” the woman said.

  Kayla didn’t turn around. “You’re supposed to knock.”

  “I don’t need to knock in my own home.”

  “Your home. Of course,” Kayla sneered. “Yours and his now. Maybe he should be able to walk in on me without knocking, too. I’ll bet he’d like to.”

  “Kayla, unless you have something to say, unless you have some kind of sensible thing to say, do not go there.”

  Kayla waved a dismissive hand and went back to her work, but she wasn’t really reading; she was waiting, tensed and angry.

  “Do you have something to say, Kayla?” her mother pressed.

  “No, Jessica,” Kayla said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Not at all. After all, I’m sure a man who is fifteen years younger than you, and only ten years older than me, has no interest at all in walking in on me.”

  Jessica crossed the room with long-legged strides, grabbed Kayla’s shoulder, and spun her around. Kayla half fell from her chair and yelled, “Get out and leave me alone!”

  “Listen to me, Kayla, if Arnie has done anything . . . questionable . . . you tell me. Otherwise, you stop spreading poison.”

  “Questionable? Has he done anything questionable? You mean, aside from moving into my house and sleeping with my mother in my father’s bed?” Kayla’s voice had risen with each word, louder, more insistent, and by the time she had reached the final syllable, there were tears in her eyes and her voice was a scream.