by Lily Markova
There’s another quick rustle—the girl called India must have snatched the magazine out of Remy’s hands.
“I was so excited about that movie!” She sounds as though she’s pouting. “And now, it’ll never be finished. You know what, Kai? Seeing as she’s in Immortown anyway, I want her to stay.”
“Yeah,” says Remy with a snort. “Good thing she has a choice.”
“Prickett, your sarcasm’s third on the list of reasons I want to die. I meant let her stay here, with us. With me.”
“No way,” says Kai. His bored tone is quite a contrast to the passionate notes ringing in India’s voice. “This house is overpopulated as it is.”
“This is my home too! And she’s staying.”
“Hang on,” says Remy. “I’m intrigued. What are the first and second reasons?”
Another rustle of pages.
“ ‘Why I want to kill myself,’ ” reads Remy, apparently struggling not to laugh. “Well, I must say, this is one hell of a long list!
“ ‘One. I will never get Freya Aurore’s autograph.
“ ‘Two. My brother is a damn psycho, and he kills people.
“ ‘Three. I’m married, and my idiot of a husband is brain cell-deficient.
“ ‘Four. I can’t trav—’ ”
Unable to bear any more of this, I open my eyes. India yelps and leaps away from me. Despite what I imagined from the sound of her voice, she seems only a year or two younger than Kai. Her resemblance to him is incredible. Her long, almost waist-length hair is the same pearly gray as his; her gray eyes under the heavy dark eyebrows have the same silvery glint to them—only it’s difficult to picture such an awestruck look on his face.
Meanwhile, Remy is wearing a maniacal grin. “Showtime!” he yells, and he jumps off the huge bed overflowing with pillows so white that for a moment, I wonder if I’m actually just dead and lying on a cloud. Remy pelts out of the room, humming something disturbingly triumphant.
I look around. On the nightstand to my left, there are a battered-looking paperback, On the Road, and a glazed photograph of a smiling young couple posing in front of a waterfall with two light-haired kids on their shoulders. The source of the disquieting crackling from my dream turns out to be the fireplace, which takes up one-third of the bedroom and looks like a large piece of rock with a cave-like grate in it. Leaning against the side of the fireplace is Kai, smoke rings escaping from his mouth and drifting to the ceiling, which he’s examining. With his chin lifted like this, the downward turn of the corners of his lips is even more noticeable, as if amplified by contempt or annoyance.
He’s staring up so intently that I give in to the instinctive impulse to raise my eyes too. The ceiling is occupied by a wall-to-wall, hand-painted map of the world. Scribbled below each green dart sticking out of it is a date, the latest of which seems to be 1962. The red darts—there are at least five times as many of these as the green ones—do not have any notes accompanying them.
“Hi,” says India with a trembling smile. She’s standing by the other side of the fireplace, not daring to come any closer. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
The bar, the marionette, the dizziness, the wet cobblestones—
“Some of it.” I sit up and shake my head slowly to check whether I have a slight concussion, but no pain or nausea ensues. “How—how did I get here, exactly?”
“Kai carried you—you kind of fainted on the street last night. That’s him—Kai.” India jerks her head toward him with an expression of utmost disapproval and blurts out, “I’m India, I’ve seen all of your movies, and I love them, you’re my role model, honestly, you’re so talented and strong and—”
Oh no. This is bad. Under any other circumstances, I would have been flattered, if feeling a little uncomfortable, but given that I’m in a strange house, in a strange town, surrounded by strangers, the only thing her words make me feel is unsafe.
“Thank you. . . India. I’m happy when people like my work.” I measure out my thanks with caution.
You can never tell at first sight whom you’re dealing with: someone who simply can relate to what you’ve created and who is just excited to have a chat with you, or a fixated admirer who might not be willing to settle for the role of random passerby in your life. Not to hurt the latter with an indifferent reply is as important as not to go too far with expressions of gratitude. It doesn’t matter whether they’ll hate you or decide they are special to you; either way, you might end up locked in a basement, or worse. Some people don’t care if you’re dead or alive as long as you’re on hand.
“Is there any chance you could tell me which way to Levengleds?” I ask her, but my hopes aren’t too high.
India looks back at Kai helplessly. He shrugs, never taking his unblinking eyes off the map. I notice that the door behind him is slightly open, porcelain gleaming through the crack.
“May I use your bathroom?” Without waiting for an answer, I jump to my feet and dart for the door.
“Wait! That’s not a—” India shouts after me, but I’m already inside and locking the door. “—great idea.”
There, I splash my face with cold water as I nervously try to think up an escape plan in case at least one of those three turns out to be a lunatic. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but usually, people are into things they can identify with. I act in weird movies, which often center around someone mentally unwell—I’m afraid to even imagine how cuckoo one has to be to love all of them. Besides, that “killing people” part of India’s list wasn’t all that encouraging either. My pale-faced reflection surveys me wearily, and my gaze slides sideways across the mirror, and—
Kai
So, Freya Aurore’s rushed off into the bathroom despite India’s attempt to warn her. One. . . . Two. . . . Three. There is a piercing scream closely followed by the sound of shattering glass. I was sure she would ruin my life but didn’t expect her to start with my sister’s bathroom.
“ ‘Oh no! ’ ” I say in a mockingly thin voice. “ ‘You’ve got a dead waiter in your bathtub.’ ” Always the same story.
The door shudders as though Freya’s hands are shaking so hard she can’t manage the latch. When she finally stumbles back into India’s bedroom, her face is almost as green as her eyes.
“There. . .in the bath,” she gasps, clinging to the wall for support, “your friend. . .I think he. . .drowned. . . .”
“Tsk. That’s Remy.” India rolls her eyes and explains, “He did it on purpose. I asked him not to do this to you, but of course he had to go and drown himself just to bum everyone out. Don’t give him attention—let him have a good, long soak.”
“What? No, you don’t get it, he’s not breathing, he—”
“Yeah, whatever.” India waves a hand, wrinkling her upturned nose.
It’s clear from the cornered expression on Freya’s face that she’s not used to starting her day with a nice morning cup of corpses. In Immortown, that won’t be the case much longer.
She tries to escape but chooses the wrong door again.
The wrongest door in this house.
Freya
“No!” shouts Kai. Too late.
“Alone among her own faces”—was that the title of that article Remy was reading? Well, it is rather relevant now. From every direction, I’m looking at myself frozen in the doorway, or rather my roles are looking at me.
The world has gone mad again, and just like always, I didn’t get there in time. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Yeah, I guess it was the other way around. Not all dangerous madmen are safely locked away. Some of them make movies. Like Mr. Nylander. Some act in those movies. As I do. And some watch those movies and then go on to cover every square inch of available wall space with my portraits. In itself, it’s not even that big a deal—who am I to judge? It is alarming, however, when I wake up at their place not remembering how I wound up there. And when one of the hosts deliberately sinks to the bottom of the bath first thing in the morning, and the rest of th
em don’t feel like getting all sentimental about that. . . well, it’s definitely not a good sign.
“KAI!” bellows India, bursting into the room. “You’re lying piece of—oh, how I wish I could finish you off!”
“Hmm, I have this sudden urge for coffee,” says Kai. “If anybody needs me for something other than my ultimate demise, I’ll be downstairs.”
As though there were nothing wrong with him, a thoroughly wet Remy squeezes past me into the room too. “How did it go? Did you get Freya’s autograph?” After some astonished gazing around, he turns back and yells in my ear, “Wow, you played that soldier boy in Kids, Abandoned. I’d never have guessed!”
I push the newly resurrected nutcase aside and dash back into the bedroom, where I detect yet another door, which just has to be my way out.
“Remy!” screams India. “We can’t let her leave!”
Remy grabs me halfway to the door, swings me onto his shoulder, and throws me back on the bed. India blocks the way to freedom. I writhe in the waiter’s large paws. “What. . .do you. . .need. . .from me?”
“Freya, please!” India’s almost crying, which is ridiculous. I should be crying. “Don’t struggle, you’ll be all right.” Somehow, I find that hard to believe.
“Hey, relax,” says Remy. “We just want you to understand something—stop fighting!—something important about yourself. We—Kaidammit—we’ve tried to explain that to others before, multiple times, but no one would simply take our word for it. It gets kind of tedious, you know, repeating the same thing over and over to no avail. So we’ve come up with—keep still, for hell’s sake—okay, I’ve come up with another, more persuasive way to get our point across.”
Remy pins my neck to the bed with one hand while his other hand retrieves a broad dagger from the nightstand drawer. The condition of the stained, blunted blade only further confirms that I’m not the first person he’s tried to explain something important to with the help of it. I thrash and kick, but Remy’s too sturdy for me to fight off. India takes a seat beside me and strokes my hair, peering at me with plausible compassion as the dagger’s cutting edge approaches my throat.
“KAI!”
It’s silly—especially after the way he treated me at the bar—but I feel as though had he stayed in the room, they wouldn’t dare harm me. It’s even sillier, but I feel as though he wouldn’t have let them. As though if I call his name, he’ll get here in time and stop them. But the blade is already touching my skin, and Kai is sipping his coffee downstairs, and he doesn’t hear me being killed.
No way in hell is this going to happen. I’m not dying like this. After everything I’ve been through, it would be plain stupid to die here and now. When Iver deserted us the way he did, I promised Mom I would never die. I reach over and fumble for the photograph, smash it against the corner of the nightstand, and thrust a shard into the side of Remy’s neck, at the same time knocking his hand with the dagger aside. He releases his grip on me for a second to press his palm to the wound. I crawl over to the edge of the bed, struggling to disentangle myself from the spongy comforter, and crash to the floor.
India lunges forward to intercept me, but luckily for me, Remy is too busy nursing his neck. I snatch my coat from the tree-shaped wooden hat-stand nearby, pointing the bloody shard of glass at India and growling, “Try anything, and I’ll make sure I take you to the next world with me.”
“Please don’t hate me.” Sobbing, India steps out of my way.
By some miracle, I manage not to trip and fall as I barrel down the steps, still clutching the slippery piece of glass in one hand and wiping Remy’s blood off my face with the other. But once downstairs, I run straight into Kai, spilling his coffee all over the front of his shirt. He catches me by the elbow to halt me, and I can see in his wintry eyes that knew what was coming. And if he had stayed in the room, he would have been blowing smoke rings at the ceiling while his friends would have slit my throat. Maybe he even would have done that himself—then again, he doesn’t seem like someone who would stain his hands with anything other than paint.
The canvas from the bar looms in my mind: a pair of white gloves and the doomed marionette that wanted to break free so desperately. I guess now Kai will drag me back upstairs to finish what was started. I prepare to strike a blow with my combat shard, but he lets go of my arm.
“Yeah, well, the exit is over there.” Kai points behind him with outstretched arm as he takes a sip of what’s left in his cup. “One can never drink his coffee in peace in this house.”
Never before in my life have I run as fast as I’m running now, sending ruby-red leaves spraying high into the air from under my boots. It’s chilly outside, and my breath comes out in clouds of bluish vapor. The slumbering park I’m crossing looks rather like an impressionist painting—soft strokes of pastel colors, misty, blurring into one another; everything seems poised on the verge of smooth movement, which never comes. Even the ashen morning haze lingering over the pond is eerily still. The numerous white statues lurking among the trees are frozen, too, in unnatural poses, as if they were about to reel and crash to the ground. The statues are blindfolded, but I can still see their empty stone eyes through the lace ribbons, and it makes my skin crawl. God, I need to get out of this town.
I’m so utterly, perfectly alone in this breathless, emotionless world. And it’s not even about Immortown. I’ve been alone since the morning Mom sat on my bed, uncharacteristically enveloped in the harsh smell of alcohol, took my hand, and said, “Iver is gone.” I’ve been alone ever since he stopped calling and playing his music for me. I can’t listen to this silence anymore. I can’t take being alone anymore. . . .
And I’m not. As soon as I think it, two smoky, dark purple shadows start to swirl in front of me, slowly assuming human shapes. The taller one becomes a copy of Mitch, only paler and sadder than I remember. He watches me with unspoken reproach, but it is the little shadow’s face that I peer into, shivering. So familiar, and at the same time so alien. . . .
“Why me?” asks the child, a slight crease forming between his eyebrows. “Why me, and not you?”
He looks exactly like my brother—the way he was eleven years ago. I feel as though an ice cube were sliding down my spine.
“Iver,” I say, shaking harder, “don’t go.”
But the phantoms melt away, and I lose him again. I spin around and around, longing to see him once more—he’s gone. Iver is gone.
In the distance, however, I can see someone else sitting on a leaf-strewn park bench. He seems to be engrossed in his book, not in the slightest perturbed about any illusory purple whirlwinds appearing and vanishing nearby. The closer I come, the clearer it is that at least this young man in his black bowler hat and bowtie is real, not a phantom, although he, too, seems familiar to me.
I’ve seen his face before, though only in a photograph—not far from my brother’s last home, on one of the snow-clad headstones, which was engraved with the name Tom Lezero. I remember, because he was the same age as my brother, and I stood there for a good five minutes before moving on to look for Iver’s grave—I stood there, wondering why.
“Tom?” I ask, my voice barely louder than a whisper. Now, of course, he’s going to shout at me, say that Tom was his twin brother, that he doesn’t want to talk about him. . . .
He finally raises his eyes, then his eyebrows. “Do I know you?” His tone is calm and polite. “Did you want to order a book?”
I flee again; I need to get out of the town so that this psychosis will finally end. I run, past the brooding hotel, past the—huh, I thought that just yesterday, there was a small cottage next to the Last Shelter. . . . Doesn’t matter; I must not stop.
On reaching the grim high gates, I slow down to catch my breath, and then, uncertainly, I walk through them. Hot blood is pounding against my temples. The town lets me out, but I can’t see anything ahead of me because of the impenetrable wall of smoke churning inches away. I look back and read the familiar, mocking wo
rds, “Welcome to Immer.”
No. Good-bye, Immortown. I won’t even tell anybody about you—who would believe me, anyway? My eyes still fixed on the arched plaque, I take a step back, and my shoulder blades come into contact with something elastic, something stretched tight, like a taut curtain. It takes me several seconds to pacify my panicky insides before I dare turn around.
There’s nothing in front of me. A couple of inches away from my face, an emptiness is staring back at me. I reach out into this emptiness, and it pushes my hand back, springy, resilient. I look back at the gates. A gust of wind swings the plate around so that, for a moment, I can see its reverse side. The upside-down letters remind me, as if intentionally, “You are never leaving Immortown.” A sticky mist enfolds my throat and tightens around it like a running knot, making me take shorter, shallower breaths.
Back home, whenever I felt as though the bars of my ribcage constricted so tightly I couldn’t breathe anymore, I ran away to the seaside. Whether the sea was warm and serene or frigid and fierce didn’t matter. The salty smell, the whisper of the waves, and a boundless, unobstructed view to the barely distinguishable line separating water from sky. . . . It was as if the world ceased to be fragmented, the pieces merged, and I too became an inalienable part of it all. Everything became so lucid and clear.
Now I’m lying on a pebble beach, listening to the ocean as it heaves and rolls. Nothing becomes clear. It feels as if the world had overturned and were now resting on my back. Miles of sand on my back. Gravity is invisible chains around my wrists and ankles, and they might come undone at any moment, and I will fall into this bleak sky. I mentally return the capsized world to its normal position and wonder if it’s safe for me to fall asleep here. I know when I wake up, this insanity will come after me once more.
I really am going mad, and it feels nice. I’ve got nothing to worry about anymore. My whole world cracked and fell apart in my own fist, which I’d inadvertently clenched too tight. Disjointed thoughts flare up in my mind, but there’s not enough time for any of them to take shape. I have no idea where I am. . . . I ran away from home, and I don’t know what’s going on there. . . . They must be already looking for me—but maybe they’ll decide I died in the fire. . . . I have to find a way to get in touch with Mom before she reads about it in the papers. . . . Please let Mitch be okay. . . . Let Kai’s mental friends leave me alone. . . . I did it, I defended myself—drove a piece of glass into somebody’s neck without even wincing. . . . Maybe I am indeed capable of murder? I, Freya Aurore—not just one of my characters. . . . I miss my brother. . . . When was the last time I ate?
