Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “What?”

  “A protein shake. It’s like a milkshake, only healthy,” Megan said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Amanda said. “Are you going on a diet?”

  Megan looked down at her stomach, which seemed to cave inwards. “I guess I don’t really need to.”

  “You could stand to put on about ten pounds. The supermodel look isn’t you.”

  “You’re probably right.” She grabbed two blueberry muffins to go with her Red Bull. As she neared the cashier, she patted her pockets. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it,” Amanda said. She took the muffins and then the can, an amused grin on her face. “Are you sure you should drink that? I mean, I didn’t think you were supposed to get too hyper.”

  Megan thought back to the asthma attack in her room. “I don’t want that to happen again.” She set the can of Red Bull back and chose an apple juice instead.

  She couldn’t help but notice Amanda took her to the very back of the cafeteria, to a corner table hidden from most everywhere else. Was it that weird for people to see her around campus? She waited until after she had taken a few bites of her first muffin before she asked, “Did you know where I was?”

  “Your daddy’s cabin, I think.”

  “My daddy?” Megan set her muffin down and put a hand to her mouth. “Is he still alive? Maybe I should call—”

  “As far as I know he’s still alive.” Amanda put a hand on Megan’s arm. “You can wait until after breakfast to call him.”

  “Oh, sure. Do you know if…if he and I—”

  “I’ve never seen him around here, if that answers your question.”

  “And my mother?”

  “She died when you were little.”

  “I don’t have any siblings, do I?”

  “Not that I know about. Look, Megan, try not to get too upset. You’ll only make yourself sick again.”

  Megan tried to relax and take nice, easy breaths. As she took a sip of apple juice, she closed her eyes and imagined it sliding down her throat, into her stomach. Her body relaxed and her breathing came easier.

  At least until she heard a man’s voice say, “I didn’t think you’d ever show your face around here again, Weezy.”

  She opened her eyes to see a beefy young man in a varsity jacket, his lip curled in a sneer. Amanda half-rose out of her chair to face the young man. “Leave her alone, Bret. Don’t you think you’ve done enough already?”

  “What, you’re her mother now?”

  “Just get out of here.”

  “Or you’ll do what? Call the cops?”

  “Yeah and maybe I’ll tell them where you got the money for that Escalade.”

  “You’d better watch your mouth, bitch.” Bret shoved Amanda back down into her chair. The chair wobbled for a moment before Amanda fell to the floor on her back. Before Amanda had hit the ground, Megan sprang up from her chair. She didn’t understand what she was doing until she was in the middle of a spin kick. Her foot struck Bret right in the diaphragm, but her slight frame didn’t have enough force behind it to do more than knock him back a couple of inches.

  “Leave us alone! Now!”

  “Oh yeah? Maybe I’ll just finish what I started.” He tried to wrap her in a bear hug. To her own surprise, she ducked under this and grabbed the front of his shirt. She tried to throw him, but her muscles weren’t strong enough; he shoved her down beside Amanda.

  Megan lay on the floor; the vise grip on her chest ratcheted up to squeeze the air from her lungs. She gasped for air, but couldn’t get anything into her lungs. Her inhaler. Where was her inhaler? She clawed at the pockets of her sweater, but she didn’t feel anything.

  “Oh shit,” Bret said. She heard his footsteps retreat while she felt Amanda’s hand on her back. The edges of her vision turned dark and fuzzy. She clawed at her throat, to get some air into her lungs, but it didn’t help.

  She dropped onto her stomach, her vision down to two faint tunnels of light. This was it; she would die now. Maybe then she would find out who she was. Or maybe her eternal punishment would be to wander around with no memory, never sure of who she was or where she had been.

  Something plastic pressed against her lips. As if from the bottom of a well, she heard Amanda say, “Come on, relax. It’s all right. You’re going to make it.”

  Then she passed out.

  ***

  Megan felt buried alive as in her dream. Only in this case it wasn’t rocks that covered her but sand. She coughed out a mouthful of the sand as she sat up and then rolled onto her knees to spit out a few more handfuls. As she did, she noticed the plastic shovel, bucket, and a stuffed bear.

  “Who are you?” a tiny voice asked from behind her.

  Megan saw a little girl with red pigtails and freckled cheeks behind her. The little girl’s blue eyes narrowed as she studied Megan. From the sand that covered the girl’s pink overalls, Megan deduced this must be her sandbox. “My name is Megan Putnam. I think.” She sat on the edge of the sandbox and brushed sand from her hair. It certainly felt real enough. “Do you know where I am?”

  “At Mommy’s house.”

  “Is this Heaven?” When the girl shook her head, Megan asked, “Hell?”

  “Mommy says you’re not supposed to say that word.”

  “Oh, right. I’m sorry.” Megan held out a hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Joanna. But everyone calls me Red because of my hair,” she answered as if by rote.

  “It’s good to meet you, Joanna. I don’t suppose you know how I got here?”

  “You fell.”

  “I fell? From where?”

  “From the other place.”

  Megan put a hand to her head and wondered if she really was alive. The last thing she remembered she lay on the floor of the cafeteria as she suffocated. But now she saw only a lush green lawn with a thick maple tree, from which dangled a swing. Beside the sandbox was a slide and a swing set. Beyond this was an ordinary white split-level ranch house, the type popular back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

  “I don’t understand,” she finally said. “I was in the cafeteria, at school. How did I get here?”

  “You fell from the other place,” Joanna repeated as if this should be obvious.

  “What is the other place?”

  “The place where Mommy said I can’t ever, ever go.”

  “Please, little girl—”

  “Joanna.”

  “Yes, Joanna. Please, you have to help me. I don’t know where I am.” Megan pushed hair away from her face. “I don’t really know who I am. Is there someone who can help me?”

  “Mommy can help. She’s really smart. She’s a fizzyzits.”

  “Fizzyzits?”

  “A scientist.”

  “Oh, a physicist. I see.” Megan got to her feet and took the hand Joanna offered to her. Before they left the sandbox, Joanna picked up the stuffed bear with her other hand and pressed it to her chest.

  “Randy gets scared without me.”

  “Randy?”

  “That’s my bear,” Joanna said. She held up the ordinary teddy bear.

  “Right.” Though Megan couldn’t remember much about herself, she could remember a book called Alice in Wonderland. Right now she felt as if she were Alice, on the trail of a white rabbit in the form of a little redheaded girl. She considered turning back, but Joanna pulled her along as she skipped around the side of the house to the front door.

  “Mommy, look what I found!” Joanna called out. She pulled Megan across the foyer, into the living room.

  The woman on the plaid couch in the living room looked almost identical to Joanna—only bigger. The woman took off her glasses and set them on top of a pile of papers with elaborate equations scribbled on them. The moment her eyes met those of Joanna’s mother, Megan felt her chest tighten.

  “Relax, young lady. No one’s going to hurt you here,” the woman said. Joanna’s mother bent down to look her little girl i
n the eye. “Joanna, what have I told you about playing in that sandbox?”

  “I wasn’t playing in it.” Her mother fixed her with a stern look that crumbled Joanna’s resolve. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, sweetheart.” Joanna’s mother kissed the girl’s forehead. “There are some cookies in the kitchen, why don’t you go fetch some for you and our guest?”

  “OK, Mommy.” Joanna let go of Megan’s hand and skipped off into the kitchen.

  The woman motioned for Megan to sit down on an armchair next to the couch. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions. Unfortunately I can’t answer them for you.”

  “Because it would take too long to explain?”

  “That’s part of it. It also might unravel the fabric of reality. That’s getting threadbare enough already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The woman fixed Megan with the same stern look as her daughter earlier. “Some people have been meddling with things that are beyond their understanding. They’re using holes like the one in my daughter’s sandbox to travel between worlds.” Megan wanted to ask how this was possible, but she figured the woman would say there wasn’t time to explain. “You have to return to your world soon, before any more damage is done.”

  “Damage? I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. It’s not your fault. Joanna hasn’t really learned how to use this power of hers responsibly yet. When she was playing in the sandbox and sensed you were in trouble, she yanked you through the hole.”

  Megan stared at Joanna’s mother blankly for a moment. “You mean that little girl is some kind of psychic?”

  “Something like that. She’s too young to understand it. I don’t even understand really.”

  “And she somehow pulled me into this, what, this parallel universe?”

  “Exactly.” The woman smiled again at some joke only she understood. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’d figure that out.”

  “Do you know who I am? Who I really am?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you aren’t going to tell me, are you?”

  “No. You’ll find out eventually.” The woman reached out to pat Megan’s knee. “When you feel his kiss, it’ll all come back to you.”

  “His kiss? Who?”

  “Your Prince Charming, of course.” The woman smiled at another of her little jokes. “Sorry, Joanna loves hearing those fairy tales at bedtime. So do I.”

  “Me too,” Megan said, though she wasn’t sure how she knew this. Maybe the mother she couldn’t remember had read to her as a child.

  Joanna skipped back into the room with a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies and two glasses of milk. “Look, Mommy, I poured the milk all by myself. And I didn’t spill any.” The little girl’s cheeks turned red. “Or almost any. I’m sorry.”

  Her mother took a glass from her with one hand and with the other pulled Joanna close to her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. Soon you’ll be big enough to do it without spilling.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” She kissed Joanna’s forehead again. “Now, I think it’s time you took your new friend back to the sandbox so she can go home.”

  “Can’t she stay a little longer? I wanted to show her my room and—”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but she has to go home. Back where she belongs.”

  “OK.” With a pout, Joanna wriggled away from her mother to set the extra glass of milk and plate of cookies on the table, on top of more papers. Then she held out her hand for Megan to take. “Let’s go.”

  Megan followed the girl to the doorway; she stopped to look back at Joanna’s mother. “Remember what I told you,” her mother said.

  As they went back around the side of the house Joanna grumbled about the unfairness of it. “Mommy always worries about me since Daddy went to Heaven. She won’t let me do anything.”

  “That’s because she loves you,” Megan said.

  “Does your mommy love you?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.” From what Amanda had said, though, her mother was dead. Maybe her mother had loved her in however long they had together.

  “I didn’t tell Mommy about the others because she’d get mad at me.”

  “Others?”

  “The one who looked like Mommy and the other one. She looked like you only her hair was prettier.”

  Megan took a handful of her platinum hair. “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know. She went to look for the one who disappeared. But then she disappeared too. And so did the one who promised to find them. If Mommy knew I was talking to them, she’d give me a spanking.”

  “I’m sure your mother only wants what’s best for you.”

  “I guess.” Joanna pointed to the sandbox. “You just stand in the middle.”

  “OK.” Before she headed for the sandbox, she bent down to look Joanna in the eye and put a hand on her shoulder. “You make sure to listen to your mommy. She seems like a really smart lady to me.”

  “I will.”

  “Good.” Megan looked towards the sandbox. “I guess I’d better be getting back. I’ll see you later.”

  “OK.”

  Megan stepped into the sandbox at the same point where she’d woke up earlier. Nothing happened at first, and then she looked over at Joanna, who had closed her eyes. Megan felt a breeze ruffle her hair; the breeze became more intense until she had to close her eyes to keep sand out of them. The sand beneath her feet shifted to plunge her down as if a trap door had opened. She was going back up the rabbit hole—

  When she opened her eyes, Amanda looked down at her, a washcloth in hand. Her roommate smiled nervously. “You’re awake. Thank God.”

  Megan saw she was back in her dorm room, in the bed where she had woke up earlier. “You brought me back here?”

  “I had some help. Are you all right?”

  Megan put a hand to her head and thought back to her strange dream about the little girl, her mother, and the sandbox. “I’m fine.”

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “No.”

  Amanda brushed at Megan’s hair. “Where’d all this sand come from?”

  Chapter 18

  As they walked through the sewers, Jim and Pepe ran into some rats of other tribes. To deflect any questions or requests to help, Jim said he and Pepe were needed to supervise the construction of a new nest out by the waterfront. This seemed to belay their curiosity, which left Jim and Pepe free to continue their journey alone.

  Jim didn’t know anything about the woman with the dark red hair except she had been at the house where Emma had taken him to heal. From what he could gather in his brief time there, Emma and the woman were friends, or so it had seemed. That woman had obviously betrayed Emma, but Jim couldn’t begin to understand why.

  The logical place to begin their search, then, was to go back to the house where Emma had taken him. If it was logical to him, he supposed it would be logical to the woman as well; she would probably take Emma somewhere more secluded, like one of the city’s many abandoned buildings.

  The task to search the house seemed best left to Jim and Pepe, who had been there several times before. From what Pepe said as they walked through the sewers, Emma had briefly lived in the house after someone kicked her out of her previous nest.

  When Pepe visited the house, he usually climbed up through the toilet, which would be far too small for Jim to fit through. Instead, they took the direct approach; Jim climbed up to the surface and took off his ratskin coat. Beneath it he still wore the clothes Emma had bought for him, though they were now dirty and torn from the fight in the gravel yards and his walk through the sewers. Still, he supposed he would pass as a somewhat normal human. The coat he gathered into a rough satchel in which Pepe rode.

  As he approached the house, Jim started to wish he had brought a weapon along. Then he thought of how the woman with the dark red hair had made her body turn hot as the sun and supposed it wouldn’t do much good. That begged th
e question of what he would do if he should find the woman and Emma, but he decided to worry about that when he found them.

  The front door of the house was locked and he couldn’t see any lights on inside. This didn’t surprise him; it wasn’t like the woman would want to advertise her presence or let anyone walk right in. Since he’d spent most of his adult life around rats, he knew a thing or two about how to get into a locked house.

  As he walked around the old house, Jim found what he wanted in an attic window. He whispered instructions to Pepe in ratspeak and then dropped the ratskin coat into the bushes. While he waited for Pepe, Jim began to climb up the side of the building; he used the rain gutters as a sort of ladder. For a human he wasn’t all that big or heavy, so the gutters held his weight as he climbed.

  By the time he reached the top, Pepe had infiltrated the house through the toilet and crept up into the attic. The window didn’t have a lock or a handle, so Pepe only had to hit it with his snout to tilt it open. A larger man wouldn’t have been able to make it through, but Jim was able to squeeze through the attic window without any trouble.

  For a moment he stood amongst dozens of dusty old trunks. Most of these trunks had stickers and tags written in foreign languages; he didn’t have Emma’s linguistic skills to decipher them. They probably weren’t important in any case. He motioned for Pepe to follow him back down the stairs, into the upper level of the house.

  Jim waited at the base of the stairs to listen for any sound that might betray where the woman held Emma. He didn’t hear anything other than the sounds of the house settling. His nose crinkled as he picked up the scent of flowers, no doubt from a perfume. The scent made his stomach churn, but he forced himself away from the stairs.

  The flower scent became stronger as he neared the first door. He twisted the knob slowly and eased the door open only to find an empty canopy bed. The smell of flowers in the room was enough to make Jim’s knees wobbly; he left a further investigation of the room to Pepe, who had spent enough time around Emma and the surface world to have built up a tolerance.