The Dark Vault

by Victoria Schwab

  I don’t have a clean record with my parents when it comes to lying, from sneaking out to the occasional inexplicable bruise—some Histories don’t want to be Returned—so I have to tread carefully, and since Dad paved the way for truth, I roll with it. Besides, sometimes a parent appreciates a little honesty, confidentiality. It makes them feel like the favorite.

  “This whole thing,” I say, slumping against the doorway, “it’s a lot of change. I just needed some space.”

  “Plenty of that here.”

  “I know,” I say. “Big building.”

  “Did you see all seven floors?”

  “Only got to five.” The lie is effortless, delivered with an ease that would make Da proud.

  I can hear Mom several rooms away, the sounds of unpacking overlapped with radio music. Mom hates quiet, fills every space with as much noise and movement as possible.

  “See anything good?” asks Dad.

  “Dust.” I shrug. “Maybe a ghost or two.”

  He offers a conspiratorial smile and steps aside to let me pass.

  My chest tightens at the sight of the boxes exploding across every spare inch of the room. About half of them just say STUFF. If Mom was feeling ambitious, she scribbled a small list of items beneath the word, but seeing as her handwriting is virtually illegible, we won’t know what’s in each box until we actually open it. Like Christmas. Except we already own everything.

  Dad’s about to hand me a pair of scissors when the phone rings. I didn’t know we had a phone yet. Dad and I scramble to find it among the packing materials, when Mom shouts, “Kitchen counter by the fridge,” and sure enough, there it is.

  “Hello?” I answer, breathless.

  “You disappoint me,” says a girl.

  “Huh?” Everything is too strange too fast, and I can’t place the voice.

  “You’ve been in your new residence for hours, and you’ve already forgotten me.”

  Lyndsey. I loosen.

  “How do you even know this number?” I ask. “I don’t know this number.”

  “I’m magical,” she says. “And if you’d just get a cell…”

  “I have a cell.”

  “When’s the last time you charged it?”

  I try to think.

  “Mackenzie Bishop, if you have to think about it, it’s been too long.”

  I want to deliver a comeback, but I can’t. I’ve never needed to charge the phone. Lyndsey is—was—my next door neighbor for ten years. Was—is—my best friend.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say, wading through the boxes and down a short hall. Lyndsey tells me to hold and starts talking to someone else, covering the phone with her hand so all I hear are vowels.

  At the end of the hall there’s a door with a Post-it note stuck to it. There’s a letter on it that vaguely resembles an M, so I’m going to assume this is my room. I nudge the door open with my foot and head inside to find more boxes, an unassembled bed, and a mattress.

  Lyndsey laughs at something someone says, and even sixty miles away, through a phone and her muffled hand, the sound is threaded with light. Lyndsey Newman is made of light. You see it in her blond curls, her sun-kissed skin, and the band of freckles across her cheeks. You feel it when you’re near her. She possesses this unconditional loyalty and the kind of cheer you start to suspect no longer exists in the world until you talk to her. And she never asks the wrong questions, the ones I can’t answer. Never makes me lie.

  “You there?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I say, nudging a box out of the way so I can reach the bed. The frame leans against the wall, the mattress and box spring stacked on the floor.

  “Has your mom gotten bored yet?” Lyndsey asks.

  “Sadly, not yet,” I say, collapsing onto the bare mattress.

  Ben was madly in love with Lyndsey, or as in love as a little boy can get. And she adored him. She’s the kind of only child who dreams of siblings, so we just agreed to share. When Ben died, Lyndsey only got brighter, fiercer. An almost defiant kind of optimism. But when my parents told me we were moving, all I could think was, What about Lynds? How can she lose us both? The day I told her about the move, I saw her strength finally waver. Something slipped inside her, and she faltered. But moments later, she was back. A nine-out-of-ten smile—but still, wider than what anyone in my house had been able to muster.

  “You should convince her to open up an ice cream parlor in some awesome beachside town….” I slide my ring to the edge of my finger, then roll it back over my knuckle as Lynds adds, “Oh, or in, like, Russia. Get out, see the world at least.”

  Lyndsey has a point. My parents may be running, but I think they’re scared of running so far they can’t look back and see what they’ve left. We’re only an hour from our old home. Only an hour from our old lives.

  “Agreed,” I say. “So when are you going to come crash in the splendor that is the Coronado?”

  “Is it incredible? Tell me it’s incredible.”

  “It’s…old.”

  “Is it haunted?”

  Depends on the definition of haunted, really. Ghost is just a term used by people who don’t know about Histories.

  “You’re taking an awfully long time to answer that, Mac.”

  “Can’t confirm ghosts yet,” I say, “but give me time.”

  I can hear her mother in the background. “Come on, Lyndsey. Mackenzie might have the luxury of slacking, but you don’t.”

  Ouch. Slacking. What would it feel like to slack? Not that I can argue my case. The Archive might take issue with my exposing them just to prove that I’m a productive teen.

  “Ack, sorry,” says Lyndsey. “I need to go to practice.”

  “Which one?” I tease.

  “Soccer.”

  “Of course.”

  “Talk soon, okay?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  The phone goes dead.

  I sit up and scan the boxes piled around the bed. They each have an M somewhere on the side. I’ve seen M’s, and A’s (my mother’s name is Allison) and P’s (my father’s name is Peter) around the living room, but no B’s. A sick feeling twists my stomach.

  “Mom!” I call out, pushing up from the bed and heading back down the hall.

  Dad is hiding out in a corner of the living room, a box cutter in one hand and a book in the other. He seems more interested in the book.

  “What’s wrong, Mac?” he asks without looking up. But Dad didn’t do this. I know he didn’t. He might be running, too, but he’s not leading the pack.

  “Mom!” I call again. I find her in her bedroom, blasting some talk show on the radio as she unpacks.

  “What is it, love?” she asks, tossing hangers onto the bed.

  When I speak, the words come out quiet, as if I don’t want to ask. As if I don’t want to know.

  “Where are Ben’s boxes?”

  There is a very, very long pause. “Mackenzie,” she says slowly. “This is about fresh starts—”

  “Where are they?”

  “A few are in storage. The rest…”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Colleen said that sometimes change requires drastic—”

  “You’re going to blame your therapist for throwing out Ben’s stuff? Seriously?” My voice must have gone up, because Dad appears behind me in the doorway. Mom’s expression collapses, and he goes to her, and suddenly I’m the bad guy for wanting to hold on to something. Something I can read.

  “Tell me you kept some of it,” I say through gritted teeth.

  Mom nods, her face still buried in Dad’s collar. “A small box. Just a few things. They’re in your room.”

  I’m already in the hall. I slam my door behind me and push boxes out of the way until I find it. Shoved in a corner. A small B on one side. It’s little bigger than a shoe box.

  I slice the clear packing tape with Da’s key, and turn the box over on the bed, spreading all that’s left of Ben across the mattress. My eyes burn. It’s not
that Mom didn’t keep anything, it’s that she kept the wrong things. We leave memories on objects we love and cherish, things we use and wear down.

  If Mom had kept his favorite shirt—the one with the X over the heart—or any of his blue pencils—even a stub—or the mile patch he won in track, the one he kept in his pocket because he was too proud to leave it at home, but not proud enough to put it on his backpack…but the things scattered on my bed aren’t really his. Photos she framed for him, graded tests, a hat he wore once, a small spelling trophy, a teddy bear he hated, and a cup he made in an art class when he was only five or six.

  I tug off my ring and reach for the first item.

  Maybe there’s something.

  There has to be something.

  Something.

  Anything.

  “It’s not a party trick, Kenzie,” you snap.

  I drop the bauble and it rolls across the table. You are teaching me how to read—things, not books—and I must have made a joke, given the act a dramatic flair.

  “There’s only one reason Keepers have the ability to read things,” you say sternly. “It makes us better hunters. It helps us track down Histories.”

  “It’s blank anyway,” I mutter.

  “Of course it is,” you say, retrieving the trinket and turning it over between your fingers. “It’s a paperweight. And you should have known the moment you touched it.”

  I could. It had the telltale hollow quiet. It didn’t hum against my fingers. You hand me back my ring, and I slip it on.

  “Not everything holds memories,” you say. “Not every memory’s worth holding. Flat surfaces—walls, floors, tables, that kind of thing—they’re like canvases, great at taking in images. The smaller the object, the harder it is for it to hold an impression. But,” you add, holding up the paperweight so I can see the world distorted in the glass, “if there is a memory, you should be able to tell with a brush of your hand. That’s all the time you’ll have. If a History makes it into the Outer—”

  “How would they do that?” I ask.

  “Kill a Keeper? Steal a key? Both.” You cough, a racking, wet sound. “It’s not easy.” You cough again, and I want to do something to help; but the one time I offered you water, you growled that water wouldn’t fix a damn thing unless I meant to drown you with it. So now we pretend the cough isn’t there, punctuating your lectures.

  “But,” you say, recovering, “if a History does get out, you have to track them down, and fast. Reading surfaces has to be second nature. This gift is not a game, Kenzie. It’s not a magic trick. We read the past for one reason, and one alone. To hunt.”

  I know what my gift is for, but it doesn’t stop me from sifting through every framed photo, every random slip of paper, every piece of sentimental junk Mom chose, hoping for even a whisper, a hint of a memory of Ben. And it doesn’t matter anyway because they’re all useless. By the time I get to the stupid art camp cup, I’m desperate. I pick it up, and my heart flutters when I feel the subtle hum against my fingertips, like a promise; but when I close my eyes—even when I reach past the hum—there’s nothing but pattern and light, blurred beyond readability.

  I want to pitch the cup as hard as I can against the wall, add another scratch. I’m actually about to throw it when a piece of black plastic catches my eye, and I realize I’ve missed something. I let the cup fall back on the bed and retrieve a pair of battered glasses pinned beneath the trophy and the bear.

  My heart skips. The glasses are black, thick-rimmed, just frames, no lenses, and they’re the only thing here that’s really his. Ben used to put them on when he wanted to be taken seriously. He’d make us call him Professor Bishop, even though that was Dad’s name, and Dad never wore glasses. I try to picture Ben wearing them. Try to remember the exact color of his eyes behind the frames, the way he smiled just before he put them on.

  And I can’t.

  My chest aches as I wrap my fingers around the silly black frames. And then, just as I’m about to set the glasses aside, I feel it, faint and far away and yet right there in my palm. A soft hum, like a bell trailing off. The tone is feather-light, but it’s there, and I close my eyes, take a slow, steadying breath, and reach for the thread of memory. It’s too thin and it keeps slipping through my fingers, but finally I catch it. The dark shifts behind my eyes and lightens into gray, and the gray twists from a flat shade into shapes, and from shapes into an image.

  There’s not even enough memory to make a full scene, only a kind of jagged picture, the details all smeared away. But it doesn’t matter, because Ben is there—well, a Ben-like shape—standing in front of a Dad-like shape with the glasses perched on his nose and his chin thrust out as he looks up and tries not to smile because he thinks that only frowns are taken seriously, and there’s just enough time for the smudged line of his mouth to waver and crack into a grin before the memory falters and dissolves back into gray, and gray darkens to black.

  My heart hammers in my ears as I clutch the glasses. I don’t have to rewind, guide the memory back to the start, because there’s only one sad set of images looping inside these plastic frames; and sure enough, a moment later the darkness wobbles into gray, and it starts again. I let the stilted memory of Ben loop five times—each time hoping it will sharpen, hoping it will grow into a scene instead of a few smudged moments—before I finally force myself to let go, force myself to blink, and it’s gone and I’m back in a box-filled bedroom, cradling my dead brother’s glasses.

  My hands are shaking, and I can’t tell if it’s from anger or sadness or fear. Fear that I’m losing him, bit by bit. Not just his face—that started to fade right away—but the marks he made on the world.

  I set the glasses by my bed and return the rest of Ben’s things to their box. I’m about to put my ring back on when a thought stops me. Marks. Our last house was new when we moved in. Every scuff was ours, every nick was ours, and all of them had stories.

  Now, as I look around at a room filled not only with boxes but plenty of its own marks, I want to know the stories behind them. Or rather, a part of me wants to know those stories. The other part of me thinks that’s the worst idea in the world, but I don’t listen to that part. Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy, Da’s warning echoes in my head, and I know, I know; but there are no Histories here to feel sympathy for. Which is exactly why the Archive wouldn’t approve. They don’t approve of any form of recreational reading.

  But it’s my talent, and it’s not like a little light goes off every time I use it. Besides, I’ve already broken the rule once tonight by reading Ben’s things, so I might as well group my infractions. I clear a space on the floor, which gives off a low thrum when my fingertips press against the boards. Here in the Outer, the floors hold the best impressions.

  I reach, and my hands begin to tingle. The numbness slides up my wrists as the line between the wall and my skin seems to dissolve. Behind my closed eyes, the room takes shape again, the same and yet different. For one thing, I see myself standing in it, just like I was a few moments ago, looking down at Ben’s box. The color’s been bleached out, leaving a faded landscape of memory, and the whole picture is faint, like a print in sand, recent but already fading.

  I get my footing in the moment before I begin to roll the memory backward.

  It plays like a film in reverse.

  Time spins away and the room fills up with shadows, there and gone and there and gone, so fast they overlap. Movers. Boxes disappear until the space is bare. In a matter of moments, the scene goes dark. Empty. But not ended. Vacant. I can feel the older memories beyond the dark. I rewind faster, searching for more people, more stories. There’s nothing, nothing, and then the memories flicker up again.

  Broad surfaces hold on to every impression, but there are two kinds—those burned in by emotion and those worn in by repetition—and they register differently. The first is bold, bright, defined. This room is full of the second kind—dull
, long periods of habit worn into the surfaces, years pressed into a moment more like a photo than a film. Most of what I see are faded snapshots: a dark wooden desk and a wall of books, a man walking like a pendulum back and forth between the two; a woman stretched out on a couch; an older couple. The room flares into clarity during a fight, but by the time the woman has slammed the door, the scene fades back into shadow, and then dark again.

  A heavy, lasting dark.

  And yet, I can feel something past it.

  Something bright, vivid, promising.

  The numbness spreads up my arms and through my chest as I press my hands flush against the floorboards, reaching through the span of black until a dull ache forms behind my eyes and the darkness finally gives way to light and shape and memory. I’ve pushed too hard, rewound too far. The scenes skip back too fast, a blur, spiraling out of my control so that I have to drag time until it slows, lean into it until it shudders to a stop around me.

  When it does, I’m kneeling in a room that is my room and isn’t. I’m about to continue backward, when something stops me. On the floor, a few feet in front of my hands, is a drop of something blackish, and a spray of broken glass. I look up.

  At first glance it’s a pretty room, old-fashioned, delicate, white furniture with painted flowers…but the covers on the bed are askew, the contents of the dresser shelf—books and baubles—are mostly toppled.

  I search for a date, the way Da taught me—bread crumbs, bookmarks, in case I ever need to come back to this moment—and find a small calendar propped on the table, the word MARCH legible, but no year. I scan for other temporal markers: a blue dress, bright for the faded memory, draped over a small corner chair. A black book on the side table.

  A sinking feeling spreads through me as I roll time forward, and a young man stumbles in. The same slick and blackish stuff is splashed across his shirt, painted up his arms to the elbows. It drips from his fingers, and even in the faded world of the memory, I know it’s blood.

  I can tell by the way he looks down at his skin, as if he wants to crawl out of it.