by Andy Marino
Hannah didn’t want to understand. “You come and go all the time,” she pointed out.
She thought back to when Albert had raised the storm, how she’d somehow traveled with him back to the Widow’s Watch without ever leaving her cell. For that brief moment, they had existed in both worlds. And Albert had taken a storm from the North Atlantic and dragged it into the city of the dead. It must have been exhausting.
“He’s probably just resting,” Hannah said.
Belinda shook her head sadly. “If only that were the case.”
“You’re not getting it,” Nancy said to Hannah. “Pretend the closet we’re in right now is your head, okay?” She jumped up and slid the paint can onto the floor between them. It was labeled UPHOLSTERY. “Pretend this is me.”
Nancy placed a can labeled WALLPAPER alongside it. “This is Belinda.”
She slid a third can — CHANDELIER — just behind the first two. “And this is Albert. Now, after the storm, it’s like this inside your head.”
She removed the Albert can, leaving only the Belinda can and the Nancy can.
Hannah prodded the back of her head and the top of her skull. “So there’s a hole in there now?”
“Sort of. It’s more like …” Nancy looked at Belinda for help.
“An absence,” Belinda said. “An Albert-sized missing piece.”
Hannah wondered how she was supposed to feel. Should Albert be mourned, as if he were his own person?
“Albert disappeared and you two decided to hide.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Belinda said. “We had some things to work out on our own. And we felt that it wasn’t in anyone’s best interests for us to act too hasty, given the circumstances. You see?”
“No,” Hannah said.
“Translation,” Nancy said. “We were scared.”
Belinda looked at the dressers, the wall, the floor — anywhere except into Hannah’s eyes. The old woman was angry with herself, Hannah realized, or else ashamed. Just like a real person would be.
“I was scared, too,” Hannah said quietly.
“Ah, but think about how fortunate we are to have arrived here!” Belinda said, clearly happy to be changing the subject. “There has to be an authority figure in the Painters Guild, someone with real power who can help us with our search.”
Hannah wondered how long it had been since she’d seen her mother. Trying to figure it out was maddening. Time was elastic, the day just stretching on and on like the city itself, no beginning and no end. She called on events from her past at random (how her mother hated that word!) just to make sure her memories hadn’t been ripped away like Albert.
There was the hush of Cliff House on a Sunday morning broken only by humming in the garden. “Cork on the Ocean.” Afterward there would be pancakes, her mother drizzling the batter into blobby letters, H and L, together on a plate with a square pat of butter. Syrup — the good kind from the farmers’ market, not the sugary stuff you could buy at the Save Mate, where they seldom shopped. Slave Mate, her mother sometimes called it, when she was feeling derisive about the offerings of Carbine Pass, wine sloshing in her big-girl goblet. Or Shave Mate, which always made Hannah think of her father’s beard in the photographs.
Nancy’s blood-curdling shriek pulled Hannah from her reverie. The twin hurled herself across the floor to grab Hannah’s arm, huddling close.
“There!” she said, pointing to the back of the closet, where the fungus blanketed the wall.
“Oh, I don’t like this one bit,” Belinda said. “You can never trust mold like that.”
Hannah braced herself for some new horror. At first there was nothing. She wriggled her arm free from Nancy’s grip.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Keep looking,” Nancy said, “I swear I saw something. There! See?”
Hannah stopped trying to look directly at the fungus. As before, when she’d seen the facade as a painting on top of a real castle (or perhaps the other way around), the antique dressers and paint cans flipped inside-out without really moving at all, so that Hannah was now seeing the closet as a detailed portrait of itself.
Then it was Hannah’s turn to grab Nancy’s arm. Something emerged from behind the very last shelf: a smear of excess paint in the shape of a roly-poly lizard with a plump body and a long coiled tail. The lizard waddled toward them on its stubby legs. Paint slopped in its wake as it shed the colors of the room.
“Oh my,” Belinda said. “Perhaps we ought to throw something at it?”
The lizard opened an impossibly wide chasm of a mouth, dripping with a vibrant rainbow of drool.
Hannah picked up the nearest paint can and prepared to heave it at the creature.
The door flew open and Stefan burst in. Moths flapped into the room as if they’d been waiting outside the door for their chance.
“I heard a scream,” he said, stopping in his tracks, looking beyond Hannah to the lizard, whose saliva had pooled in a shimmering puddle.
“Nice work!” He grinned at Hannah. “I’ve been looking all over for him. He’s quite the little sneak.”
Stefan crouched next to the lizard and gave his spiny back a few gentle swipes with his paintbrush. “There you go, buddy.” The lizard bopped his head affectionately against Stefan’s arm. He left a spot of yellow on the sleeve of Stefan’s jacket.
“Sorry if he scared you,” Stefan said. “Hannah, this is Charlemagne. Charlemagne, Hannah.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why are you holding that paint can?”
Hannah set it down. “What is that thing?”
“Hey, he’s got a name.”
Hannah swatted at a moth. “Weren’t you supposed to be catching these?”
“Weren’t you supposed to be storming out?”
“I got lost in your stupid castle.”
Stefan leaned down and whispered something to Charlemagne. The creature splatted himself down beneath a dense cloud of moths and puddled into a blob of melted spines and multicolored scales. His mouth swirled open, a rainbow whirlpool that became a black hole. Tongues began to unfurl, one after another, snapping up to slurp a moth and drag it down into the gaping maw. In seconds, the lizard had reduced the moth cloud to thin air.
Charlemagne closed his mouth and unpuddled himself. Stefan gave him a few more swipes with the brush to nudge his spines into wholeness. “That’s a good boy.”
Hannah wanted desperately to be gone from this place. “Will you show me the way out of here?”
Stefan looked up from his pet.
“Now, wait just a second,” Belinda said, stepping forward. “Let’s not act with undue haste.” She turned to Stefan. “We request an audience with your king or guardian or parent. Or your most knowledgeable archivist. Perhaps a librarian.”
“Translation,” Nancy said. “Take us to your leader.”
Stefan blinked. His head swiveled from Belinda to Nancy. “Who are you?”
Hannah smacked his shoulder, forgetting her no-touching rule. “You can see them?”
Charlemagne perked up, his attention snagged by something out in the hallway. Faster than Hannah thought possible, he took off, tiny legs scrabbling and leaking paint.
Stefan ran out the door after the lizard.
“Wait just a moment!” Belinda said, following him. “Excuse me! Young man?”
“Belinda!” Hannah called out, but the old woman was gone. A single moth alighted on Nancy’s shoulder. Hannah brushed it off. At least her twin was still here.
“ ‘Moth-chaser,’ ” Nancy said. “ ‘A boy who can see us.’ ”
“No more Muffin vocab! This is serious, Nancy — what should we do?”
“You can do whatever you want. Personally, I think the old lady’s right.”
Hannah never thought she would miss the days when Nancy and Belinda were just irritating voices echoing inside her brain. They had bossed her around, but Hannah always had the upper hand — they were trapped inside her head, after all.
&nbs
p; “I can’t believe you two,” Hannah said. “Just because Stefan can see you doesn’t mean we should stick around and help him with his chores.”
“You know what?” Nancy ran her fingers through her hair, giving it a spiky flounce. “It feels kind of nice to be seen.”
Hannah and Nancy caught up with Belinda in a solarium down the hall, where Stefan was stalking a stray band of moths swarming beneath the glass roof.
“They think it’s a way out,” Stefan said, looking up. “They’re not that smart.”
The room was circular and the ceiling flat, giving Hannah the feeling of being inside a giant hockey puck. The sky seeped in through the glass, its dullness of spirit infecting the furniture. Couches sagged despondently.
“Hurry up and get rid of them!” cried a shrill voice from the far end of the room, where students stood behind wooden easels, paintbrushes at rest in their trays. The students’ eyes followed a man with horn-rimmed glasses and a long button-down smock, as he pointed to a Gothic arrangement of candles in the wall.
“There! You see? The little blighters have taken roost in the sconce, and now you’ll never get them out. I’ve already wasted an entire class period. This simply won’t do.”
“Sorry, Professor,” Stefan said. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Charlemagne puddled himself in the center of the floor.
The professor shot Stefan an icy glare, then turned to his students. “Right then, brushes down!”
When the professor realized that brushes were already down, he dismissed the class with a shooing wave of his hand. The students scurried out of the room, and their teacher followed, slamming the door in Belinda’s face before she could introduce herself. Nancy began to pester Stefan, who was trying to coax the moths down within range of Charlemagne’s tongues.
Hannah closed her eyes and commanded her brain to pull Nancy and Belinda back in. When she opened her eyes, the old woman and Hannah’s twin were both talking, and Stefan was doing his best to ignore them. Hannah would just have to wait while they made up their own minds.
She distracted herself with a series of paintings that hung around the room in heavy, gilded frames. In the first one, she recognized the huddled apartments and cobbled alleys of Nusle Kruselskaya. There, on a rooftop, among a thicket of dials and gauges, was the meter man, writing on his clipboard.
I know that guy, she thought.
Farther along the wall she found a neighborhood of gabled mansions like the ones she’d seen from the attic. This was a pleasant, hilly district; a country garden stuffed with rambling houses. Next, Hannah strolled past glittering skylines of glass-walled towers and villages of sloppy mud huts.
“Look, I’m already in a lot of trouble,” Stefan was saying as he crossed to the middle of the floor, brush dripping with orange paint, Nancy and Belinda in tow. “I can’t help you.”
“There, you see?” Hannah went over to meet them. “Now can we go?”
“Hannah,” Nancy complained, “he won’t listen to us.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” Stefan said, “or how you got in here.” He held his brush out straight and began jabbing at some invisible canvas. “This whole thing is way too weird for me.”
Hannah noticed that Nancy couldn’t stop running her hands through her hair, smoothing her eyebrows, pinching her cheek. It made Hannah’s skin tingle. She wanted to look in a mirror and examine her own face.
“Well then, allow me to show you what it looks like,” Stefan said.
Hannah blushed. “Did I say that out loud?”
“It’s time you stopped doing that, dear,” Belinda said.
“It’s your fault I do it in the first place!”
Hannah watched as a crude face began to take shape in the air, following the swirls of Stefan’s brush — circle eyes, triangle nose, smiley mouth.
“That’s not how I look,” Hannah said. Her hands went to her face. “Is that how I look?”
“Relax,” Stefan said. “I’m making it crappy on purpose. Artists have doubts and make bad choices and mess up their work all the time. That’s what the failure moths are attracted to. They don’t hurt anybody, but nobody wants them around. I mean” — he dabbed pupils into the eyes — “would you want to paint with these little guys buzzing around your head?”
“Wow,” Hannah said, studying the sloppy face. It looked like the finger painting of a two-year-old. “That’s really bad.”
“Thank you,” Stefan said, swiping in a few awkward strands of hair and stepping back. “My masterpiece is complete!”
Moths began to descend, swooping and circling the face. Beneath the cloud of tiny blurred wings, Charlemagne came to life. His puddle rippled. Sticky prehensile colors shot up into the air.
“Good boy,” Stefan said just as the moths that had sheltered behind the candles burst forth. Charlemagne unpuddled, leaping up onto a clawfoot sofa with the lithe quickness of a cat. His stubby feet left blotches of paint on the floral upholstery.
“Go get ’em!” Stefan yelled happily. Hannah had the feeling that Charlemagne was Stefan’s best friend. His messy footprints ended on the arm of the sofa, as if he’d splotched himself into the pattern. Nancy dragged a finger through one of the footprints and sniffed it curiously.
Stefan kicked the leg of the sofa. “Not a good time to hide, Charlemagne.”
“Is there a way to get out of this neighborhood without the Watchers seeing us?” Hannah asked.
Stefan was staring at the ceiling, giving the stray moths a fierce glare. Hannah waved her hand in front of his face. He brought his attention back down and stared at her for a moment. Finally, he seemed to remember what she was talking about. “You’re still playing this game?” He laughed. “You’re so paranoid. I told you, you don’t have to be afraid of the Watchers. Besides, they already know you’re here.”
Hannah felt a surge of dread. “How do you know?”
“Because of that.” He pointed to the doorway. For a moment she didn’t understand, and then she saw it. Peering down at them from a stone hollow above the door was a single glass eye.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Stefan said.
His room was much smaller than the supply closet. Paint-stained rags were piled high in one corner, neatly folded sweaters and pants in another. His furniture consisted of an absurdly small desk like a kindergartner’s, a dresser with three drawers, and a swan-necked floor lamp.
There were no glass eyes in here. Stefan explained that the eyes were only in the castle’s public spaces — studios, classrooms, and exhibit halls. Like most of the artists of Nusle Kruselskaya, the Painters Guild had voluntarily installed the Watchers’ spy equipment. When the Guild created artwork perfect enough to gain entry to Ascension, they wanted the Watchers to see.
Hannah found it hard to imagine — the thought of glass eyes following her every move made her skin feel prickly — but Stefan assured her that it worked this way all across the city. Nobody knew exactly how to get to Ascension. The rules weren’t entirely clear. Souls banded together into groups to work out their own beliefs. Eventually, if they were lucky, the Watchers would approve of their methods and escort them out of the city.
Hannah thought of the meter man. Watchers are your friends. They’re everybody’s friends.
Stefan pulled an oddly shaped leather bundle from his top drawer, slapped it down on top of the dresser, and unrolled it into a long strip. Paintbrushes of all shapes and sizes were tucked into little belt loops.
“How do you sleep in here without a bed?” Nancy asked. She was leaning against the dresser, arms folded. Belinda was giving the rag pile a look of distaste. They were all four squished together. A sudden movement could result in a tangle of limbs.
“I don’t sleep.”
He selected a thin brush, which reminded Hannah of her mother’s little-used mascara. She wore it when Patrick and Kyle came over.
Belinda tut-tutted. “Kids your age, staying up till all hours. Being well
rested is an important part of life.”
“Yeah, but, this isn’t really life.” Stefan unfolded a flimsy stool and placed it in front of Hannah. “You might want to sit down.”
Hannah sat. “You never sleep at all?”
“Have you been tired since you got here?” He began removing tubes of paint from the drawer. “Or hungry, or thirsty?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She hasn’t had to go to the bathroom, either,” Nancy volunteered.
Hannah glared at her.
“I really can’t believe I’m doing this.” Stefan looked from Nancy to Hannah. “Tell me again how you got here.”
“I walked through a door,” Hannah said. She had explained her situation on the way to his room, but it was obvious that Stefan still thought of her as a delusional girl who could not accept her own death.
“Because a bunch of banished souls killed your mother,” he said.
Hannah nodded. “I came to get her back. But the Watchers think I know something about the banished, so they put me in jail.”
“Which you escaped from with the help of your imaginary friend.”
“Albert.”
“Uh-huh.”
Hannah turned to Nancy and Belinda. “Show him.”
She didn’t know what it looked like when they retreated into her head. She hoped, for the purposes of this demonstration, that it was deeply disturbing.
Judging by the look of pure shock on Stefan’s face, it exceeded her wildest expectations. The problem was, it felt like someone had pressed a finger squarely against her forehead, cracked the bone, and squelched into the gray matter of her brain.
* * *
Winter at Cliff House began in November. The last remnants of grimy snow at the edge of the driveway didn’t melt until April. Her mother hoarded cans of food in the pantry and pickled acres of vegetables. She froze meat, though Hannah was always in favor of salting it, as if they were on an eighteenth-century ocean voyage.
She and her mother would be trapped in the house for weeks.
Thanksgiving was a last supper of sorts — good-bye to the Carbine Pass library, to the antique store, to the homeless hippie guy whose tie-dyed flag stuck up from the back of his bicycle. Good-bye to the Carbine Pass Savings Bank digital clock. Good-bye to the soccer fields, where the setting sun blasted the tin siding of the concession stand.
