Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  “Here!” Kate screamed. Max saw her holding the blanket sack that she and Jean had extracted from beneath Nell. “Here! Take it!”

  The slashers raised their heads. Their eyes locked on Kate.

  She ran to the opening of the cave and turned again. “This way!”

  The slashers leaped up, and Max, suddenly free, jumped to his feet. Behind Kate, he could see the stone ledge. She backed toward it.

  “Kate! Watch it!”

  Jean had flattened herself against the wall, and now she tugged Nell, who lay gasping in the dirt, out of the way. The slashers eyed Nell, then Kate.

  Kate lifted the blanket. “You want this!” she said. “Come on!”

  Then she flung the sack over the edge.

  The four figures leaped, and Max yelled, but they were past Kate in an instant and bounding down the ridges after the food.

  Gasping, Kate watched them go.

  Max ran toward her, shaking. They were all shaking. He stepped out to the ledge and looked down. Below the series of stone outcroppings, the slashers scrambled over the blanket, ripping at it and fighting over the peaches.

  “There’s not enough for them,” Nell said from behind him. “They’ll be back up for us.”

  Jean stood hugging herself by the cave opening. Nearby, Susan leaned heavily on the walking stick.

  “Why didn’t you make the wind blow like you did before?” Jean asked her.

  Susan only shook her head, trying to catch her breath.

  “I didn’t have time,” she panted. “Couldn’t.”

  The yelps and growls from below increased.

  “They’re almost done,” Nell said. “We’ve got to go!”

  Without another word, they started away, moving as fast as they could. The land continued to rise, and Max tried to steady his breathing. He looked down at his shirt. It was torn and stained red where the slasher had grabbed him.

  He fingered the fabric.

  “Max! Are you bleeding?” Susan asked him.

  He wished his hands would stop shaking. He balled them into fists so the girls wouldn’t see. “No, that was from them. I’m just scratched up.”

  They all were. They made their painful way up through the trees as the sound of the slashers diminished. Great gray rocks still pocked the ground here, jutting out like the teeth of some mythical beast. Between them, poplars with trunks like stone pillars rose toward the sky, their green foliage peppered with yellow leaves. The few that had fallen were black underfoot.

  “What if they follow us?” Jean asked. Her voice sounded pinched tight.

  Max looked over his shoulder, but nothing was coming. “I don’t know if they can,” he said. “They’re not animals, exactly.”

  Nell looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “They were wearing clothes,” he said. “Like you saw before.”

  She nodded. “That doesn’t mean they won’t kill you,” she said. “You saw their hands!”

  He had. But there was something about the look in the thing’s eyes. It had been like someone was there for a second and then gone. He didn’t know how to explain it.

  “I don’t think they killed anything,” Kate said.

  They all looked at her. “What?” Nell asked. “How would you know?”

  Kate bit her lip.

  “I saw the walls,” she said. “There was blood on them, and long scratch marks. It was like they’d been scratching at them until they bled. I think . . . I think they were trying to get out.”

  “Out!” Nell protested. “Why didn’t they use the door?”

  Kate only shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think maybe — maybe they were having a bad dream and couldn’t figure out how to.”

  Max felt suddenly sick. He thought again of being locked in that glass box and not knowing the way out.

  Nell shook her head. “Can’t imagine a thing like that dreaming,” she said.

  But Kate, much to Max’s surprise, seemed certain. “Not a dream,” she said. “A nightmare.”

  Change was coming. In dreams the exile felt it; on waking, it was a weight in the air.

  The word, with its long history, its burden of good and evil, seemed everywhere now. Each day the exile woke to it, as if expectation were a thing breathed, a scent inhaled.

  A new way. Once welcomed, now despised; once embraced, now shunned.

  Like the exile, a contradiction.

  And still, even in the valley, they spoke of change often, for it had been enshrined in the ancient books:

  With Eri came the dawn,

  And with Anam the day,

  For darkness shrouded all

  Before the light of understanding.

  As was their way, the thinkers looked deep into the words and unwound the meaning woven there, telling tales of wise men who lit an everlasting flame to shine through the long night of years.

  Oh, how the valley cherished the rebellion of its ancients and praised its own. We, the everlasting flame, are like the sun rising to color the sky in its glory, they said. We are the dawn.

  And yet how like the dawn was the twilight. How like the coming of the light was its passing away.

  The terrain grew steadily stranger as Max searched for a new place to camp that evening. The earth bristled with boulders, and the knobby roots of trees rose from the dirt to overtake them, gripping the rocks like tentacles. Max couldn’t help shuddering at the sight of them. He felt as if he were standing on the surface of a flat brown ocean and some creature from the depths had reached up to grab the stones.

  Stop that, he told himself. But he couldn’t help it. He felt battered and jittery, and every place the slasher had scratched or bitten him stood out as a separate hurt, stinging and aching and making him wince. Worst of all was the memory of the thing’s nearly human face, the shattered expression of loss and terror that had flickered there a moment, then gone away.

  He tried not to think of it as the five of them stumbled through the rocky wood, looking for a protected place to spend the night. At last, as blue shadows gathered in the trees and splashed across the rocks, they found a circle of clear ground, surrounded by stones. They collapsed inside it, shielded a little from the brooding trees, and struggled to concentrate enough to produce even peaches. Without any blanket to spread, they curled up in the dirt and tried to rest.

  The rocks interrupted the pattern of the forest, so that overhead, the umbrella of leaves opened to let in the sky. Night fell and the moon rose, three quarters full, to float over the clouds. Max tried not to feel like he was slowly suffocating.

  Next to him, Jean sniffled and rolled over.

  “Max, write me a letter,” she whispered. “About getting out of here.”

  He squinted up at the moon, wishing he could vault them to it, lie down in the Sea of Tranquility, even if it was just an empty crater, the name a mistake someone once made before space travel showed them the truth. But then he thought this probably wasn’t even his moon, with its comforting, old-fashioned names: Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Serenity, Sea of Rains, Sea of Clouds.

  “Dear Jean,” he whispered back. “We’re getting out of here. I promise. Soon. Your brother, Max.”

  At least tonight she seemed to believe him. Jean nodded and let her shoulders down a little. Kate wasn’t as easily appeased.

  “I wish we’d found another cave,” she said, looking around. “It’s scary out here.”

  She moved closer to Susan, who put an arm around her shoulder.

  “I’m not walking into another cave for the rest of my life,” Nell said. Max thought she looked a little forlorn, sitting there without her blanket. “At least out here you can see what’s coming.”

  Neither option appealed to Max. The stones pressed in on him, and the trees moving in the wind sounded like a warning.

  He looked up at the moon and tried to count time. The clouds drifted across it, blotting the light, and then uncovered it to reveal again the fierce shape of the land.
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  Was it two weeks now that they’d been here? Max spent a minute calculating. Almost. The thought dropped like a cold weight in his stomach. What if they never got home?

  “Can this place get any worse?” Nell whispered. She pushed her back against one of the stones and hugged her knees. “Even the forest looks haunted. And that’s not to mention this weird dirt.”

  “I told you it hated us,” Susan said to Max. “I think I was right.”

  “Places don’t hate people,” he told her wearily. “We’ll figure it out. Look how much we’ve figured out already! You’ll see. I promise.”

  But he knew he said it now only out of habit. He was teetering on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. The wind hissed in the trees.

  If he didn’t think they’d ever get home, what was there? What was there to solve, and where would they go? He closed his eyes and pushed the thought away. No. They would get out. They would get home. This place didn’t hate them, because places didn’t hate people, and the world, even strange worlds on the other sides of windows, made sense. If he was going to be sure of anything, he’d be sure of that. He had to be, or there was nothing left.

  He closed his eyes and forced himself to sleep.

  Things were supposed to look better in the morning, but they didn’t. The hot wind had picked up, clattering through the branches and swooping down to raise tufts of dust from the dirt, so that the ground belched out a low, muddy fog.

  When Max woke, the girls were already on the other side of the stones, talking. All except Susan, who sat just feet away, staring fixedly at the ground inside the circle.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  She didn’t look up.

  “Susan!”

  He had to practically shout at her to get her to look his way. Then she blinked at him, a little startled.

  “Were you calling me?”

  He nodded. “Twice. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m concentrating. I was thinking that you’re right. Places can’t hate people. So if the ground’s sour here, maybe we could do something about that. You know, like sweeten it up a little.”

  Max just stared at her. They couldn’t manage a window, but she thought she could fix a whole forest. He turned away without saying another word. It was tiring, sometimes, being the only sensible one.

  He found the others busy with a similarly ridiculous activity — teaching Nell to play the game Kate and Jean had made up, something called stones, or squish, he couldn’t tell which, since they kept arguing about it.

  “Susan done yet?” Nell asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “She told me she needs to have a talk with the dirt,” Nell said. “I think she might be losing it.”

  Kate frowned at her. “She’s not losing it,” she said. “Don’t say that.”

  Nell only shrugged, and Jean passed her a stone. “Ready?” she asked.

  Max sat pondering all the places he’d rather be when he felt a slight buzz in the air. Maybe Susan had done something after all. He turned, and there she was, already emerging from the circle of rocks to join the game.

  Again, the hair on Max’s arms stood up, and he sensed a nearly inaudible hum.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked Susan. “That zap in the air?”

  She stopped for a second, listening for it.

  “Maybe. What do you think it is?”

  “I thought it was you.”

  She shrugged and shook her head.

  The wind died, and they all sat, straining to hear something.

  “All I hear is bugs,” Jean said.

  “Shh,” he told her.

  Again, that faint buzz, then a sound like a flag flapping.

  Kate sucked in her breath and pointed.

  Behind Susan, where no one had been a moment before, stood a figure wearing a hood.

  Max had never liked fairy tales — stories that made things easy, that kept the night at bay. What was wrong with the truth? The truth was layered and fantastic, full of quarks and quasars, microbes and galaxies. The truth didn’t believe in bad guys who wore black hats and good guys who wore white ones. The truth was just the truth, and when you knew it — you could breathe.

  But he stood looking at the hooded figure who had appeared from nowhere and wondered if in fact it didn’t really matter what you believed in the end. If you were stuck in someone else’s story — in the nightmare they’d created — who cared what you knew?

  And then the figure did something unexpected. It reached up to pull back its hood.

  Kate threw her hands over her eyes. Jean squeaked. Susan paled and Nell gaped. Max just stood there watching and thinking, Whatever it is, I can stand it. Knowing is better than not knowing.

  The green mesh fell away.

  It was a man. Just a man. No fur, no fangs, no strange, stretched features. The fanatic’s hood had concealed nothing but a serious-eyed man on the early side of middle age, with light-brown skin and the beginnings of lines around his eyes.

  Instinctively, Max took a step toward him. “You’re normal!”

  Susan caught his arm.

  “Rally change!” she whispered. “Remember?”

  Max stopped short. If this was a trick, if the soldiers had followed them this far, it was all over.

  The man just stood there, waiting to see what Max would do. Could he be real? Max eyed him, trying to run through everything he remembered about the rally as fast as he could.

  The stranger watched him consider. His eyes flicked from Max to Susan.

  Just to his left, a dusty hemlock stood forlornly among the rocks, its jagged branches bobbing in the hot breeze. Every needle and cone hung crisp and sharp edged in the sunlight.

  At the rally, the buildings had wavered. In the tiled room, the air had buzzed and gone hazy near the Genius as he changed.

  “I think it’s okay,” he said to Susan. “Look.”

  She held on. “One of them tried to grab us in the city!”

  Then the man spoke for the first time, and the sound of his voice startled them as much as the sight of his face. It was as if a monster or zombie had suddenly become human.

  “Companions of mine,” he said. “They were clumsy, but they meant you no harm.”

  Nell wasn’t nearly as bowled over as Max by the sight and sound of the strange man.

  “They could have said something,” she said.

  For a fraction of a second, the man frowned, but his face was placid an instant later, and Max wondered if he’d imagined it. When he answered, he spoke to Max as much as to Nell.

  “That’s forbidden. We’re silent among the changed, and we never show our faces in the city.”

  “We’re not changed,” Nell said petulantly.

  This time he did look at her, and the intensity of his stare made Max want to take a step back. “Not,” he said, “anymore.”

  “Not ever!” Nell snapped back.

  But the man only gave her a pitying look.

  “So you’ve forgotten, then. It’s not unusual for the past to be hazy after a return.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but the man ignored her. He had a force that Max found both disconcerting and impressive.

  “At any rate, they were there to help you, as I’m here now.”

  Max couldn’t stop staring at him. He stood like a soldier and wore an expression Max wished he could manage and had sometimes practiced in the mirror.

  “Creeping up on people in the night?” Nell said. “That’s a strange way to —”

  “What kind of help?” Max cut in.

  The man shot him an approving look, and Max flushed.

  “Rescue,” he said. “Sanctuary.”

  Kate and Jean probably didn’t even know the second word, but Max did. A safe place.

  “You can keep us away from the Genius?”

  The man smiled.

  “Absolutely.”

  Nell had opened her mouth to keep going, but she shut i
t abruptly. And that made sense, Max thought, because there was nothing else worth talking about.

  “Then let us get our things,” he said. “We’re ready.”

  Someone’s pretty full of himself,” Nell griped as they walked back to the circle of stones. When, struggling to have the last word, she’d asked the man his name, he’d told them they could call him Master Watcher Lan. Nell’s eyebrows shot up. To Max it sounded appropriately forbidding.

  “What do you think somebody who goes around wearing a hood is going to want to be called?” he whispered to her. “Jim?”

  She only rolled her eyes. But it seemed to Max that the Master Watcher was the beginning of something promising. He looked back over his shoulder and wondered what the man was thinking. What would he be thinking if he met five kids carrying nothing but some peaches and a birthday doll? It wasn’t exactly an impressive sight.

  “Keep that Barbie tucked away,” he said to Jean as she ducked into the circle of stones to retrieve it. “Stick it back in your skirt, why don’t you?”

  Nell elbowed him.

  “Of course you like him,” she said. “He thinks you’re smart.”

  Max half smiled. “So what?”

  No use telling Nell that the Master Watcher unsettled him. He reminded Max of the kind of person he’d avoid back home, the kind who measured your worth by how hard you could hit a ball. But the man had acted like he thought Max was smart. That was different.

  Jean stepped into the circle of stones and drew a sharp breath.

  “Hey!” she whispered. “Susan, look!”

  They followed her. The doll no longer rested on the dirt. Beneath it, a faint curl of green nudged its way out of the brown. Kate crouched and pushed at it with her finger. On one end, Max could see the beginning of a bud.

  Susan had figured it out! He grinned at her.