Messenger of Fear

by Michael Grant

  Samantha was embarrassed. “Yeah, I think so, wasn’t it? Did you want something else?” Her eyes pleaded for her mother to go away. Her mother’s eyes were worried but vague, and I saw the slight shrug and the surrender that signified the mother’s acceptance of her dismissal.

  After the mother was gone, Samantha searched for a while longer, before giving up on finding her bear. She went to the metal cabinet. She spun the combination, mouthing the numbers to herself as she did. The lock snapped open and, with a steadying breath, Samantha opened the metal door.

  Inside, resting on their stocks, were a rifle and a shotgun. On a shelf at the top of the cabinet was a soft, deerskin zipper bag and several greasy cardboard boxes of shells.

  Samantha glanced anxiously toward the door through which her mother had emerged. She took the deerskin bag to the table, unzipped it, and folded it open, revealing the blued-steel gun within. She fetched a box of ammunition. It was a bit like a large matchbox, with an inner tray that slid open to reveal neatly stacked cartridges, brass and lead and smelling of oil and sulfur.

  “Can’t we stop her?” I asked, though I knew the answer. This had already happened. Hearing no response and expecting none to come, I posed a second question, a question tinged with bitterness. “Why do people have guns? Don’t they know?”

  “Her father thought he was protecting the family. And he thought it was safe.”

  “Then why did he tell her the combination?”

  Messenger shook his head. “He didn’t. She guessed it. Her birthday, month, day, year. This is not the first time that Samantha has taken the gun out to look at it, to think about it, to consider . . .”

  Samantha counted out three shells. Three cylinders, like miniature fireplugs in shape, each no bigger than a little finger. Samantha stared at the shells and frowned. The number troubled her. The number was not right, not her number.

  Her number was seven. She counted out seven shells, lined them up with excruciating care, servant even now to her obsessive-compulsive illness. Seven in a row.

  She counted them by tapping each slug with the tip of her finger.

  Then she counted them again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.

  Seven times she counted until her demon could be satisfied. Seven times seven.

  She popped the clip out with practiced ease and loaded the bullets in one by one. Each one made a multi-part click. When she was done, she slid the clip back into the handle of the pistol and piled the gun and her mementos into a crumpled brown paper bag. She walked away, shoulders slumped, tread heavy.

  “I can’t watch this again. We don’t need to watch this again,” I said.

  “No,” Messenger agreed.

  Less than ten minutes later Samantha would fire a single round into her brain and die within seconds.

  “Her mother . . . ,” I said, overcome with a wave of pity, guessing that she would play those last few minutes with her daughter over and over and over again in memory and in dreams. She would blame herself. She was blameless, but that would not stop her blaming herself and then her husband.

  A question occurred to me, one that Messenger might even answer. “If she had tried to kill herself and survived . . . would she have been visited by the Messenger of Fear?”

  “Should she have been?” he asked me.

  I thought about it for a while, standing in that gloomy garage. I don’t know why, but it felt necessary to me, to think through what Samantha was about to do, what she had in fact already done.

  “Yes,” I said at last. “She has no right.”

  “She is a girl with a crippling mental problem who has been bullied,” Messenger said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And Kayla deserves to be punished. A long and terrible punishment, because her bullying pushed Samantha to the point where she couldn’t endure it anymore. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “But there has never been, and there never will be, a reason to take your own life.”

  “Because?” He was genuinely curious, I think. He was watching me as I answered, something he rarely did.

  “Because mostly people live, I don’t know, eighty years, whatever the number is. She’s sixteen. She’s lived a fifth of her life, eighty percent still to come. That’s too early to declare defeat and surrender. People despair and yet go on, and many of them, maybe even most, have wonderful lives. College. Career. Love. Children, maybe, grandchildren, and giving up when you’re sixteen?” I shook my head. “It’s a sin. It’s an awful, wicked, ugly sin.”

  There was a long silence between us. Then, through the floors and walls we heard a muffled Bang!

  The silence stretched.

  “A sin,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “But I guess she’s paid all she can pay for her sin.”

  “And Kayla?”

  I brushed away the tears, even as I heard her mother’s voice, worried, cry, “Sam? Sam?”

  “I want to be away before she screams,” I said, barely able to force the words through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to hear her mother scream.”

  The garage dissolved into the school. It was morning, before the bell. The car line snaked down the street and through the parking lot. Kids jumped out of cars and vans and SUVs, reached in to grab backpacks, then rushed away to join friends or just head to the first class.

  Inside, the arriving crowd was compressed into the main hallway of my school.

  I stopped moving then. My school?

  I looked to the left and saw a poster. The colors had changed since Messenger and I had visited before. Now they were green and white. There was a well-drawn caricature of a pirate with a cutlass clenched in his teeth. Sir Francis Drake High School, home of the Drake Pirates. Go green.

  “This isn’t the . . . This is . . .”

  Messenger said nothing, but I had the sense that he was standing just a bit closer to me than was his habit.

  I felt for tendrils of memory. It was like trying to grab wisps of smoke. They were there, I could almost touch them, but when I tried, they slipped away, leaving only bits and pieces, impressions. They left a residue of emotion but without explanation.

  And yet I knew this place. This school.

  My God, had I known Samantha Early? Was I one of the many who must have known that she was in pain, must have known that she was being bullied?

  The ground seemed to be moving beneath me, like a slow-motion earthquake. I felt nauseous, and as if that was only the merest symptom of a terrible illness that was coming my way, inexorable, impossible to sidestep.

  “Where’s Kayla?” I demanded. “That’s what you’ve come to show me, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? So where is she?”

  The bell rang and the crowd, already thinned, evaporated with a loud banging of lockers, sneakers squeaking on fresh-waxed floor and the usual calls and jokes and promises to hook up later.

  “Where is she? I want to see her. They’re going to announce it, aren’t they? They always do when there’s something awful that’s happened, they do, over the PA, Ms. Seabury, she’ll . . .”

  I was breathing hard, though I wasn’t moving fast enough to warrant it. I moved with an ease I would have found impossible to believe days earlier, right through doors, into and out of classes, hurrying, searching faces for Kayla. AP Comp, that’s where she would be, first period.

  I was panting now, my heart pounding madly in my chest, hurrying, a blur as I passed through solid objects, a ghost in my old school, because yes, it was my old school, my school, and there was J.P., as usual, clowning in the back of the Chem Lab, and I knew him. I knew Alison DeBarge, twirling her hair sullenly over close to the window in French. They were both part of my circle of friends.

  My group. My friends. We weren’t the coolest of the cool, maybe, but the group around me, the ones who sometimes called me M-Todd.

  M-Todd. Mara Todd.

  M-Todd.

  How had that gotten started, that stupid nickname? Someone . . . Shannon, yeah, it
was her, Shannon, my best friend, who had come up with that and for some stupid reason it stuck, even though it was stupid, as stupid as K-Mack.

  I stopped suddenly. Stopped and stuck out my hand to hold myself up against a wall that avoided my touch.

  Dread. It was coming for me. I felt it looming behind me, before me, all around me. Dread.

  “No,” I whispered.

  Messenger waited, knowing, waited. Waited, and I hated him for that patience, hated him for already knowing what I could only feel as a terrible beast coming to devour me.

  “Where’s Kayla?” I demanded.

  And he said nothing.

  “Where is Kayla?” I cried out. “Where is she? Where is Kayla? Where is Kayla?” My whole body trembled. I shook like I was seized by fever chills.

  “Where is Kayla?” I screamed.

  And only then did Messenger say what I knew he must say. “There is no Kayla.”

  23

  SOMETHING INSIDE ME BROKE. CAN A SOUL break? I was hollowed out. I was nothing.

  “No,” I pleaded.

  And he said nothing.

  “No,” I begged again.

  “Mara . . .”

  “No,” I said, but flat now, knowing at last that the moment had come for truth. Still, though, I bargained for some better answer, any other answer besides what I now felt as truth. “I saw her. We both saw her. We both heard her, Messenger. She has blond hair.” I grabbed a handful of my own black hair and held it out as evidence. “She’s white, I’m Asian. She’s . . . not me. Not me.”

  “You were not ready for the truth,” Messenger said. “I hid it from you, with illusion and misdirection. With the face of a girl who looked nothing at all like you. You had things to learn first. You had things to understand. First.”

  “Did I miss it? Am I too late?” Oriax. She was there, this time dressed head to ankle in a single, shiny black leotard. I looked down and saw that she no longer wore boots to cover her too-small feet. I saw there the truth, the glossy black hooves.

  She was bending down to bring her face level with mine. “Oh, good. Oh, such lovely tears,” she said. She licked her green lips. “I would lick them off if Messenger would let me. Delicacies to be savored. The tears of remorse.” She shuddered like a person fantasizing about some imagined pleasure. “I’ll bet they are ever so bitter.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said, my voice weak, my whole body sick and unsteady.

  “Alone?” Oriax mocked. “Oh, little mini-Messenger, you have so much still to learn. You and I are going to be BFFs. Sooner or later, you’ll break, little girl. And I will laugh as you are carted away to the Shoals. Shall I tell you about the Shoals? Would you like me to show you around that happy, happy place? You’ll end there eventually.”

  She laughed. It was a sound full of glee and madness, rage and lust. But it faded mercifully as the scene changed again. The school was gone, as was Oriax. I felt a chill breeze on my face. There was salt in the air. I knew even before I looked that I was on that beach, the one from my dream. The one from my memory.

  We were alone, Messenger and me. The sand crescent was abandoned, and the sun was dropping toward the horizon, touching the thin clouds with fire.

  Messenger did not rush me. He asked nothing and said nothing, content to wait. He knew what I would have to say, the words that would be wrung from me as though by some terrible torture. And finally, I said them.

  “I killed Samantha Early.”

  He did not speak, but he had heard, and he then released the last of his hold on my memory.

  My name is Mara Todd. My birthday is July 26. I was born in the maternity ward of Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. My father had been stationed there at the time.

  We had moved around, like many military families. I had lived in Hawaii, Virginia, the panhandle of Florida, and when my father was deployed overseas for the last time, we moved to San Anselmo, California, because it was near where my paternal grandparents lived. My mom and dad thought it would be good for me to be close to family for a change.

  Middle school had been hard for me, but when we moved to San Anselmo, I found a place for myself at Drake. It was a humane school. San Anselmo was a good place to live. Steep, wooded hills in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais—Mount Tam, to everyone who knew it. We were just north of San Francisco and south of wine country.

  I had liked it immediately, and loved our house above the creek, hidden away in the trees. We’d been happy there, me, my little brother, my mom, and when he could get away on leave, my dad.

  Then he had died. And that was when I began to feel that I had stories to tell. That was when I started to feel the urge to write. My teachers praised me. It was what I had that made me special, a talent.

  And then, Samantha Early had leaped past me. Suddenly Spazmantha was the real thing, a soon-to-be published author, and I was . . . a kid with promise.

  “I was jealous,” I said.

  “Yes,” Messenger said.

  “I knew. Did you see that when you looked into my soul? That I knew Samantha was troubled? I had seen her washing her hands, I’d observed her doing counting rituals. I knew she had a problem. I knew what it was called. I knew how serious it was.”

  For once I was grateful for his silence.

  “I knew and I used it. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I was mad at my mom for . . . I guess, for going on with her life. I was mad at the world for taking my dad. I couldn’t stand that . . . that I should lose him, and then lose the one thing I had come to care about. I did just what you said. I knew. I knew what I was doing.”

  I listened to the waves. I breathed deeply of salt air.

  “There’s one thing missing from my memories,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I need to see it.”

  The beach faded as the mist flowed from the water, from the sky, from the sand beneath my feet.

  I was alone. I had been alone. Back when the mist had first come for me.

  “What the . . . Is this fog? What is—” I had stopped talking then when I glimpsed a figure coming toward me from that sickly yellow mist. I had squinted to see clearly, to discern first the shape and then the detail of that gaunt, pale face framed by black hair.

  I had noted the coat, the shirt, the boots, the buttons of death’s heads. The rings on his hands, one a symbol of life, the other a representation of agony.

  I had looked into the blue eyes, searching for an explanation. And he had said to me, “I am the Messenger of Fear. I offer you a game.”

  He had explained my very limited options to me. I could choose to play the game, and if I won, I would go free. And if I lost, I would be punished for my deeds. I would be scourged for the death of Samantha Early. I would endure my worst fear.

  I had chosen to play the game. It had been grueling, all but impossible. I had been made to cross a desert wasteland and tasked to collect seven objects that would be visible, but just barely.

  Seven objects, scattered on sun-blasted rocks and barely peeking out from rattlesnake holes.

  A pen.

  A pad of paper.

  A combination lock.

  A folded flag.

  A gun.

  A skull.

  A tattered brown teddy bear.

  There had been no time limit set, except that hunger and thirst applied their own unique pressures. It had taken me many hours, or at least I had experienced them as hours. Hours of wandering beneath a blistering sky, denying as I walked that I understood the significance of the objects.

  But when I was done, when I held all seven objects in weary fingers, I knew.

  Memory faded away and I once again beheld the beautiful Pacific, the waves gentling now as the sun turned all the world pink and orange and gold.

  “I won the game,” I said.

  “Yes,” Messenger said. “You were free to go. You did not.”

  I shook my head, recalling that last as well, but Messenger told it to me as if it was a story I had nev
er heard.

  “I told you that you had won. That you were free to go on. And you said, ‘No.’ That you did not deserve to walk free. That you deserved to be punished.”

  “Daniel was there,” I said.

  Messenger displayed one of his rare, fractional, fleeting smiles that never quite became a smile. “Daniel generally is.”

  “He said he had a way. He said it was not a punishment he could impose, but rather one I could choose to accept. But once I accepted . . .”

  “You would be bound. You would be bound until your penance had been completed.”

  I nodded. I wondered if Messenger had come to this same duty by a similar path. I believed he had. I doubted he would ever tell me the how and the why of it, but in that I proved to be mistaken. It would be a long time coming, but in the end I would know all.

  “I am to be the Messenger of Fear,” I said, and my voice no longer quavered as I spoke, though this terrible truth would have left me whimpering before.

  “When you have learned,” Messenger said. “When you are ready.”

  I suppose I should have been accustomed to sudden changes of venue, but it still came as a surprise when I blinked, opened my eyes, and saw that I was in a place like no place I had ever known or imagined.

  It was both an open and a closed space, at once vast and intimate. I felt myself to be at the bottom of a well, a cylinder driven deep into the earth. Hundreds of feet, maybe even thousands. Looking straight up, I could make out a flattened circle of stars, and even the melancholy lights of a passenger jet miles above.

  The sides of this well were lined with dull golden rectangles, each perhaps ten feet tall and half as wide. All that I could see—and most were too far above me to be seen clearly—seemed to have been inscribed in careful, ornate calligraphy.

  There was no other visible source of light that I could see, no lamps or sconces or torches. But there was a glow greater than could possibly have come from the cold stars, and of far warmer hues. It seemed almost that the gold itself was glowing softly.

  The nearest of these tablets ended just above my head, and peering through the gloom at this, I read names. Some were easily recognized: Tom, Harley, Diana. Others were more exotic: Akim, Shadan, Caratacus. Some were in Western script; others appeared to be Chinese or Japanese, Arabic or Hebrew. There must have been thousands of names. Maybe tens of thousands.