Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  She heard Max shouting. The soldier holding Nell cursed, and Susan saw him grab at a red spot on his arm; Nell had taken a bite out of him. Furious, he slammed her down into the chair. Kate whimpered unevenly, too terrified to draw breath, and Jean shrieked, one long extended scream that strangely did not echo in the smothering room.

  “Enough!” Ker shouted. “Be silent or you’ll have what to cry about!”

  Still, Jean whimpered.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “I’m cold.”

  Susan saw her shivering. It’s fear, she thought. She’s freezing from fear.

  But Susan was hot. The still air stopped up her throat and threatened to stifle her. She watched the soldiers step backward to the wall. One whispered something to Ker, and she nodded. He pushed the back door open farther and gave a low bow. A large black dog came through, followed by a man.

  The Genius.

  This close, he looked different. Coarser. His features jutted outward, the carefully manicured eyebrows only lines of makeup in a waxed face. Beneath them, his eyes, pale in a way Susan had never seen before, seemed wet and thirsty at the same time.

  And he was old. Much older than he’d seemed in the square. Ancient, withered.

  He smiled.

  “Beautiful,” he said, and his velvet voice reached out to her. “At last.”

  He moved to the center of the room, the black dog a shadow at his side, and stood looking at them, turning to each child slowly. Sweat gathered at the edges of Susan’s hair and slipped down toward her eyes. She blinked.

  The Genius stepped to Jean. He squinted at her, leaning down, too close to her face. Jean whimpered.

  “That face,” he said. “I know it.”

  Jean squirmed in the chair, and Susan pulled against the straps.

  “Please leave her alone! She’s little!” Max yelled.

  “Little,” the man repeated. He put his hand out to Jean’s face and touched one of the tears that rolled down her cheek. Again, that smile. “You remind me of my youth, child.”

  He stood looking at her a moment longer, then turned again to survey the rest of them.

  “So many questions,” the Genius said, half closing his eyes. His too-blunt teeth flashed behind moist lips. His hand strayed to the dog’s head, and he stroked it.

  “So much I want to know.”

  He lifted his hands and seemed to consider the thick nails. Then he looked up, and his eyes rested again on Jean.

  “Girl,” he said. “Answer me. Who gave you that face?”

  Jean’s lips shook as she tried to form an answer.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That face of yours. That unchanged face. Tell me where it came from.”

  Jean just shook her head. “I’m cold,” she whispered. “Please let me out.”

  The Genius’s face darkened. “It’s impolite not to answer a direct question, child. I would have thought such a pretty face would come with better manners.”

  “Please! She doesn’t know what you’re talking about! None of us do!” It was Max, breathing heavily.

  The dog growled, and the Genius patted its head. He gave the animal a gentle push, and it stepped back near Ker, watchful, as the man approached Max.

  “He was savage when I found him,” he said softly. “But you needn’t worry. He’s well trained now. So tell me. Tell me who did it. Who made those faces?”

  Max looked up at the Genius, then across at Susan.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Ah, but you do,” the Genius said. “You must. A useful boy like you will tell me what made that face.”

  Max blinked sweat from his eyes. Susan watched as he struggled to answer. “No one made it. We were born this way. We’ve always been this way.”

  The Genius tensed, and Susan saw his eyes narrow.

  “Do you mock me, boy?” he whispered. At his tone, the dog got to its feet again, but he motioned it back.

  The room was so hot. It had no air. Susan tried to take some in, but there wasn’t enough. Her chest felt tight; her shoulder burned.

  “It’s true!” she stammered, half gasping. “We’re not from here! We don’t know anything about this place! Please just let us go home!”

  The Genius turned her way. Susan felt as if she were looking at a stretch of road on a hot day. The air rippled before her, and, as it had in the rally square, the Genius’s face shifted. This time, she saw not the handsome man from the square but something feral, ravenous. A hunger, a wanting, throbbed from him.

  “Such selfish children,” he said, and now even his voice was frayed. “You can’t hide it, you know. Do you think that if someone has discovered the answer, they’ll be permitted to keep it from me? Do you think you can tell me lies and I will simply walk away?”

  Susan didn’t answer.

  “I’ve waited,” he said. “I’ve prepared. All these years. I will be satisfied.”

  He looked again at Jean, considering, then turned back to Susan, leaning so close she could smell the heat coming from him, musky and sour. Her heart stuttered in her chest.

  For another moment, the Genius loomed over her, his body coiled and tense. Then he pulled himself upright and smiled.

  “Never mind,” he said, and motioned to Ker. “I can see talk is useless here. But those faces hold secrets that my lady is expert at uncovering. She knows how much I treasure the right answers.”

  The Genius moved to a steel table across the room and rolled it toward them.

  The heat seemed to stop up Susan’s mouth and nose entirely.

  He lifted a small scalpel from the table, then a long needle, and put them down again.

  “Be thorough,” he said to Ker.

  He moved past the guards to the front door, the dog behind him. Once more, he turned, his eyes found Jean, and he smiled. Then he was gone.

  Ker took hold of the table and rolled it forward. The humid air pushed against Susan’s throat, and she watched the woman come. Beside the small scalpel, she could make out a long needle, a glass tube, and a knife with a thin blade. The woman approached Max. He pulled away from her, jerking and spitting, until a soldier stepped forward, gripped his head, and shoved it back against the metal. Ker leaned down with hooded eyes. She took the long needle and jabbed it into Max’s hand. A drop of blood, nearly black in the lamplight, welled up on his skin. Max yelled, pulled, and once again the soldier knocked his head back roughly. Ker peered down at the wound, then pushed a glass tube against Max’s hand. The blood slid into it, pooling in a dark puddle at the bottom.

  She smiled at him. “Such a fuss,” she said. “And for what? I just want to see what you’re made of.” She licked her thin lips and set the tube down. “You, it will be useful to preserve for now. After all, there is only one of you, isn’t there?”

  She lifted the scalpel from the table.

  “Of course, there are four of these others.”

  The heat and the woman and her tools, the long tables beyond the door, the knives in the case — all of it pressed on Susan, and the fear was like a physical thing in the room, pounding against her, crushing her chest, squeezing the sight from her eyes. The room tilted and grew dim for a moment. Words pulsed in her head. I need to get out. Out. Out.

  Ker turned toward Susan.

  “So pretty,” she said as she moved forward. “So smooth.”

  Susan watched her come. All she could think of was running, flinging herself from the chair and hurling herself through the red door, out into the hallway, out, somewhere, into the air. And yet the leather straps trapped her, crushing her as the woman approached. Out. Out. Out.

  Her heartbeat sliced jaggedly through her chest, and her breath came so fast it ached. Her throat burned. She closed her eyes and wished fiercely the straps would go. She saw them there in her mind’s eye, dissolving, flying away, saw herself running, running. Out. Out. Out.

  The woman’s cold hand was on her arm now. She cringed. She cou
ld feel the edge of the blade. Out. Out. Out!

  A pressure was building in her chest, pumping through her arms, her legs. She shivered, whether with cold or heat she couldn’t tell, but the picture was a living thing now in front of her: the straps flung off, freedom, movement; all glared inside her head with a light much brighter than the one in the room. Pain in her arm. The bite of the knife.

  A great force, heavy and swift at once, raced through her, rocketing down her legs, out her arms. Out! Out! Out!

  In a sudden rush, Susan felt the great thing pushing inside her jump forward; the room shook. Her eyes flew open. The straps exploded, shooting across the room and hitting the opposite wall. Ker shrieked. Susan jumped to her feet.

  The others! The fear leaped at her with such force that she staggered, and the same picture jumped into her mind. Out!

  The pressure shot through her again, and she fell. Across the room, the chairs themselves broke open, straps gone, children dumped in heaps on the floor. They scrambled to their feet as Ker screamed and the soldiers, confused, stepped forward.

  Out! Susan shouted it inside her head again, and a sudden gust of air slammed across the room, taking Ker and the soldiers with it. It whipped them back into the slick walls, toppling the metal table and the remains of the chairs. The tube of Max’s blood arced through the air and hit the tile with a sharp crack.

  “Out!” This time Susan screamed it aloud, and the others heard her and ran. Together they dashed into the hallway, down the corridor, toward the lobby. Soldiers approached, Susan heard distant shouting, but the one word roared in her mind like a wave. And as she repeated it, silently, with force, with terror, soldiers flew backward, doors ripped open, and the five of them were out, out in the sunlight and running down the long empty stretch of road that led away from the Domain.

  Max had considered the subject from a variety of angles, and he had come to the conclusion that theoretically or hypothetically, if one were to fall into another universe, the best people to take along would be Sherlock Holmes, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Daniel Boone. That was assuming you were allowed somebody fictional and/or dead. And that Einstein and Tesla could run fast. If not, he would have recruited an astronaut, a doctor, a samurai warrior, and a Green Beret. Unfortunately, nobody had asked him, and he’d landed here with Susan, Nell, Kate, and Jean.

  Now he’d begun to wonder if any of that mattered at all. What calculations could help you decipher a world in which tornadoes attacked furniture, or the wind started inside and followed you down the street? He’d never read anything on that in The Boy Scout Handbook.

  Running after Susan, he’d looked over his shoulder and seen the soldiers bracing against the gale, their dogs hunched beside them, noses to the ground and ears blown back. A moment later, up they all flew — cloaks and paws and arms and legs all waving as they somersaulted like toys. In the room, in the hall, and at the edge of the city, it had happened, until the five of them had crossed from the Domain into the dense woods that smudged the horizon, and lost the city in a mass of green.

  They had run without stopping until they couldn’t anymore, and then they had walked, their breath coming in hiccups as they pushed on into the hills, desperate to be as far away from that terrible room as they could get. At last, as the sky overhead began to shift, throwing up strands of vivid confetti clouds shredded through with high branches, Max had begun to breathe again. And so now, with his head aching and his hand stinging and his legs feeling like they had turned to wood or stone, or what was the heaviest metal — maybe uranium? — he set about trying to figure it out. Could he hurt this much in a dream? He didn’t think so, unless he’d happened to fall asleep on a bed of electrified rocks. Or unless he was having some surprise surgery no one had mentioned.

  But that seemed unlikely.

  Nothing plausible had come to him by the time the shapes of trees and stones began to fade into the twilit haze. The only thought that did stand out was that if they kept walking, they were going to walk off a cliff in the dark, so when he spotted a small cave shouldering its way up from the forest floor, he pointed to it, and they crawled in. Nell untied the blanket she’d managed to keep wrapped around her waist and let it fall into a heap. Then the five of them collapsed against the cool walls and watched night take the forest.

  Max rubbed his hand where the woman had pierced it. The back of his head throbbed, and he wondered if maybe all of this was just an elaborate hallucination. Maybe he was still in that chair, and she’d given him something to make him think . . . panic bubbled in his chest and he did a quick assessment of his surroundings. The rich green smell of the forest and the cool aroma of stone hung everywhere around him in the shallow cave. What was it he’d read about hallucinating smells? Oh, yeah, they were usually awful ones, like skunk and body odor. So he was probably safe.

  It was dark before any of them said a word. Outside, clouds obscured the moon, and the faint outline of inky trees shimmered against deeper spaces the color of coal. It was the only way he could tell he wasn’t blind. Inside the cave, it was pitch, but he could feel Jean, who had pushed up against him, feel the hard nub of her doll, the scratchy knottiness of its hair against his arm.

  “I’m hungry,” Jean said.

  The sound of her voice seemed to wake the others out of their daze. In the black, he heard Nell shift and groan, and Kate sniffle. Susan kept silent.

  “What happened?”

  That was Nell. “What got us out of there?”

  Her question bounced off the cave walls, a tiny echo.

  “It felt like something exploded,” Kate whispered after a minute. “Did something explode?”

  Max pondered this. It had felt like an explosion. But where had the sound been? And the fire?

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What could have exploded?”

  From somewhere across the cave, Susan answered.

  “Me.”

  His heart sank. The place had been too much for her. It stood to reason.

  “Uh, Susan? People don’t explode, remember?”

  She sniffed.

  “I’m not an idiot, Max.”

  Her voice sounded normal enough.

  “I only meant —”

  “I know what you meant.”

  Nell cleared her throat. “Susan, are you saying you sent that wind through the room?”

  Max sat straighter. He hadn’t hallucinated the wind!

  “I don’t know. Felt like it.”

  Felt like it? He squinted in Susan’s direction. “What exactly does it feel like to make a tornado?”

  Susan sighed. “I didn’t make a tornado,” she said. “I didn’t make anything. I just wanted to get out. And then I just was.”

  Max fingered the bump on the back of his head and thought they weren’t going to get very far with logic like that.

  “Things don’t happen just because you want them to,” he said. He thought ruefully that if they did, he’d be talking to Nikola Tesla right now.

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Of course, but —”

  “I don’t know, Max. It just happened. I wasn’t even sure it was real until about an hour ago.”

  Well, that made two of them.

  “Still,” he said. “We’ve got to figure it out. If you can do something like that —”

  She cut him off. “Don’t start going crazy. It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

  Max sighed. Susan had one thing in common with Tesla, anyway. They could both be difficult.

  Max woke in the night to shrieking. Kate was screaming into the black, crying and slapping the wall. It took them a while to find her, it was so dark, but at last he heard Susan catch hold of her and wake her. She said she’d been dreaming of the tiled room.

  As if things couldn’t get worse, at dawn they heard dogs. Outside the cave, cicadas buzzed and birds whistled, but from somewhere down the mountain, the urgent barking of a pack sliced through the morning.

&n
bsp; Max sat up with a stifled cry. He might as well have slept on a bed of knives, the way his muscles screamed when he moved. His head throbbed worse now from the inside than from the knot on the back of his skull.

  “Get up!” he yelled at the others. “Listen! Search dogs! They’re looking for us!”

  Kate bolted up so fast, she might have been stung by a bee, and Jean was on her feet before she’d opened her eyes.

  “What do we do?” Kate cried. “They’ll take us back there!”

  “We run,” Susan said. “And keep running.”

  They were too weak, though, to move quickly now. It had been more than a day since they’d eaten, or even had a drink. They limped from the cave into the forest, where a wet cotton fog, smelling of old leaves, blurred the ground.

  “Try to hurry,” Max said. “We have to keep moving up this mountain. Eventually they’ll give up.”

  Jean lost her footing and fell, disappearing into the cloudy ground cover. Max helped her up.

  “The ground is strange,” she said to him when he got her on her feet again. “Not like it was before. Look.”

  The fog was too thick to see anything below his knees, so he reached down and ran his hand over it. Bare dirt.

  Again, the echo of distant dogs pierced the morning.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  His heart was ramming so hard behind his ribs, he thought he might keel over, but Max forced himself on, tugging Jean along, until the sound of the dogs disappeared and the fog melted. It was then he noticed the full strangeness of the wood.

  The air smelled as if something green had curdled. Despite the thickness of trees all around, the forest floor stretched out empty as a vacant lot, dirt without a thing sprouting. A few withered weeds looked as if they’d started to grow at the base of a tree and thought better of it, shriveling nearly black before they sagged into the roots.