Forget This Ever Happened

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “Desperate.”

  “Who is? You? Aldraa? The sl—the monster from three nights

  ago?”

  The monster pauses. Julie sips on her Slurpee. She doesn’t feel fear, exactly, but her hands still shake. She hopes this time the monsters will tell her something practical, something she can use.

  “All,” the monster finally says.

  Julie frowns. “All?”

  “All.” It gestures with one arm and then the other, sweeping out in wide circles. The grass ripples around them, and Julie feels cold.

  “All the monsters?” she says. “You’re all desperate?”

  The monster nods. Its expression is blank and doll-like—it’s those huge shining eyes—but for a moment Julie thinks she sees a tremor of something else, something like fear. She’s seen it before on monsters’ faces, when she was first learning the ropes of the exterminators—she’d been out there with Forrest and he insisted it was her imagination. But she’d never been convinced.

  “You’re desperate to do something about this da zsa—da zsa ful zsu sho—this astronaut?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the timelines?”

  “Yes.”

  Julie takes a long drink of her melted Slurpee. The same thing over and over. Astronaut. Timelines.

  “What do you need me to do?” She squares her shoulders, hoping the answer is something she can actually manage.

  The monster lifts its face to the sky, and its transparent skin glows in the humid gray sunlight. The dark veins pulse all over its body. It’s thinking hard, Julie realizes. Concentrating.

  The monster looks at her. Julie goes still. She’s holding her breath.

  “You have to stop the astronaut,” the monster says, and its shoulders slump, as if speaking a full sentence is too much weight to bear.

  Julie guns the engine on her car, pushing sixty-five on the highway leading out to the power plant. After her conversation with the monster, she told Frank she got her period so he would let her go early. If Aldraa has answers, Julie wants to hear them.

  The highway is empty. The clouds press down low in the sky, a dark smudge growing out of the southeast, over the Gulf. That storm coming in.

  Julie drives on.

  The power plant appears, lights twinkling in the thin daylight. Julie presses down on the gas. The speedometer needle inches up to seventy, to seventy-five. She’s not even through the gates and already her head feels thick and heavy. But Aldraa’s going to answer her questions.

  She’ll make him if she has to. Somehow.

  Julie pulls into the drive. Wind whistles through her car windows. It’s a lot stronger here in the power plant, strong enough that her car shakes.

  She slams into the parking lot in front of the main building, not bothering to park between the lines. When she pushes her door open the wind catches it and almost slams it shut on her. She intercepts the door with her foot, kicks it back open, climbs out. Her hair billows into her face. The smell of rain is everywhere, and layered over that is the chemical scent of the power plant.

  Julie stomps into the main building, choking back her fear.

  The air inside is unmoving. When the door slams shut, Julie can’t even hear the wind howling outside. She pushes her hair away from her face and scans across the thick, tropical crush of plants.

  “Aldraa!” she says. “I need to speak with you!”

  Her courage falters now that she’s inside, now that she’s in this still-as-death air, surrounded by dense growing things. She realizes she forgot her earplugs. Still, she forces herself to march deeper into the building, deeper into the emerald gloom. The humidity sinks into her lungs, and already sweat beads on her skin.

  It’s hotter inside than it is out.

  “Aldraa!” she shouts. “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  Branches snap, leaves rustle. Julie whips her head around. Off in the left-hand corner the plants ripple. She watches that place, her hands curled into fists, her heart racing.

  Aldraa’s clawed foot appears, and then his leg, and then the rest of him. Julie’s vision immediately blurs. She shakes her head, looks off to the side.

  “You’ve been sending monsters to me,” she says, staring at a fan spray of some primeval fern. “One of them even kidnapped me and brought me here. All of them keep talking about astronauts and timelines and I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  Her voice is sharp in the thick stillness of the building. Aldraa rumbles forward over the plants, moving slowly, swaying from side to side. The building tremors and shakes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  His voice is so loud that she claps her hands over her ears.

  “Why?” She forces herself to look at him directly. Her head spins. The room tilts. It’s been too long since she’s talked to him.

  “Our town is in danger.”

  Our town. As if the monsters live here too.

  They do, whispers a scratchy little voice inside Julie’s head.

  “What sort of danger?” Julie says. “From an astronaut? Do you even know what an astronaut is?”

  “A starway traveler,” Aldraa says. “One who travels alone, usually. There’s no exact translation in your language—astronaut is the closest we could come.”

  “We?” She takes one step closer to him: a mistake. The room swings around. She drops her gaze and takes a deep breath. Her ears ring. “Who else is in on this? Why are you sending messengers to me? Why not my dad? Or any freaking adult. You do know what an adult is, right?”

  Aldraa’s long-nailed fingers tap against his thigh, one after another. It’s a parody of human impatience, and it doesn’t suit him. He’s not human.

  “Because you’re already involved,” he says. “We thought it would be easier.”

  “We!” Julie shrieks. “Who!”

  “The council.”

  Something curls up inside of Julie. A council. She’s never heard of this, not from her dad, not from anybody. They’ve only ever interacted with Aldraa.

  “Another word that doesn’t translate exactly,” Aldraa says. “But that’s all I will tell you about our ways. It’s not important. The only important thing now is to find the astronaut and stop her.”

  “The astronaut is a her. A woman.”

  “She looks like a woman, yes.”

  Julie closes her eyes. A migraine is forming at her left temple. She won’t be able to stay much longer.

  “You need to give me something else to go on.”

  “We can’t.” Aldraa stoops down and leans close to Julie, closer than he’s ever been before. Even in the dim light she can see a faint spiderweb of veins across his gray skin. Bile rises up in her throat, but she pushes it down. “She’s hiding herself from us, from everyone in the town.” It’s like standing next to speaker at a rock concert. “She is in a”—he stops for a moment—“la shul te tsaa. A place where you can’t see unless you look straight-on.”

  “A blind spot,” Julie says. At this point, she can barely hear herself speak. Then, her thoughts wild: “Is that where Claire is too? Is that what the monster meant, about her being hidden?”

  “Yes, I like that. A spot of blindness in the world.” Aldraa’s long arms ripple. “And you speak of the Sudek, yes? That is where she is. Hidden away from us by the astronaut. The Emmert, he’s there too. She uses mazes to hide herself and her victims. We’ve seen it before.”

  “But not from me,” Julie says, a statement that makes her chest hurt, because Claire is hidden away not by some monster’s magic but by the bad luck of sexual orientation.

  “No, she cannot hide her victims from any of your kind. Her technology isn’t suited. But we asked for your help, no one else’s, because it’ll be easier for you—you are far more embroiled in the timeline. You are part of it, part of the history, and we are only guests.”

  “What are you talking about!” Julie can barely keep his words in order. Her migraine pounds against her skull. “Ju
st tell me what’s going to happen to Indianola! Or to Claire, or to me, or—”

  Aldraa looks at her and Julie looks him straight in the eye, and like that, she’s caught. Her vision floods with pale light, and she totters backward, puts one hand down hard on thick, lush moss that sucks her fingers in.

  She can’t move.

  “I am telling you what’s happening,” he says, his voice booming deep inside her head. The pale light pulses in time with his words “But the vocabulary is different. Your language is hard for us. It doesn’t suit our way of thinking.”

  Distantly, Julie hears a whisper of alien voices, of syllables not formed by human tongues.

  “We came to this place not through the starway, but through the timeway. It’s faster, yes, to travel through time. But risky. Dangerous to the travelers. And it disrupts things. We tried to ensure that our arrival would not affect this new place, but of course it was an impossible dream. Things changed here.”

  A coldness creeps over Julie. The light dims, and she wriggles the fingers of her trapped hand. Moss, it’s just moss. “Things changed here? What sort of things?”

  “The trajectory of the town, of course. It was meant to be one way, but our arrival sent your lives in a different direction.”

  Julie gapes up at him, shaking. Her life would have been different? In what way? Is there some version of the world where she isn’t a giant freak at school, where she’s had a girlfriend? Lots of girlfriends? Where her father never made her work at the exterminator’s?

  And then Aldraa turns away, and the spell he held over her breaks. The light disappears; the migraine recedes. Julie snaps her hand out of the wet, pulling moss and rubs at it. She takes deep breaths and reorganizes her thoughts as best she can.

  “You came through a hundred years ago, didn’t you?” she gasps. “With that hurricane?”

  “Yes.” She can feel Aldraa moving off to her side, feel the reverberation of his footsteps through the ground, but she only watches him in the periphery of her vision, so that he’s nothing but a gray blur. “That hurricane meant the end of this town one hundred years ago. We intended to inhabit its shell. But there were miscalculations…we arrived too soon…and the timeline was changed, to our dismay. Indianola came back to life. We cannot move elsewhere, because traveling through the timeway again would destroy us. It wreaks havoc on living organisms. Now the astronaut wishes to change things again—to shape the past so that the present will be transformed. That must not be allowed to happen.”

  Julie slumps back. The thick air crawls over her skin. The gaps in reporting in the newspaper. Maybe Indianola had died, for a few days. And then the monsters revived it.

  She realizes she was thinking far too small when Aldraa said her life would have changed. Maybe it isn’t a question of change at all. Maybe she would never have existed.

  The thought leaves a dull ache inside of her. She thinks of the time she was swept out on a riptide and held underwater for a few seconds. Afterward, she sat gasping on the beach and considered the possibility that the sea could have been stronger, that she could have drowned. This was the same feeling now. The feeling of almost-dying-but-not.

  “I don’t know why the astronaut wants to change the timeline,” Aldraa says, his raspy voice dragging her back into the present. “But it’s imperative that you find her. She will erase all of us.”

  Julie shakes her head. “But you can’t give me any way of finding her! I don’t know what you want me to do!”

  She forces herself to look at Aldraa’s face, at a point on his cheek that she knows is safe. Her migraine swells, a sharp stab of pain, but she chokes it back and keeps looking at him. There is nothing human about his features, but for a glimmer of a second she thinks she sees a flash of terror. It shoots an arrow through her heart.

  “One hundred years have passed today,” Aldraa says. “When the astronaut does something, it will be tonight. That is the nature of her technology. Things must be re-created as they once were. The same place, the same people.”

  “Anyone from a hundred years ago is dead,” Julie mutters. She feels numb.

  “Their ancestors live on in this town.”

  A Sudek and an Alvarez. A cosmically interesting combination.

  “Tonight doesn’t give me very much time.” Something catches on Julie’s vision, and she looks away from Aldraa in time to see movement through the shadows, long and thin. She closes her eyes to combat a sudden wave of dizziness.

  “We started visiting the Sudek weeks ago.”

  “But you didn’t explain anything! I was scared! I thought—”

  “Yes. You went to the committee. But they don’t understand these things.”

  “I don’t understand either!”

  “I have explained to the best of my ability. Please, you must help us now.” Aldraa drags himself over to her, and the light pushes in, and her head throbs with pain. “We are desperate.”

  Desperate. Julie stares down at Aldraa’s clawed feet. She’s always thought of the monsters as monsters, as enemies. But maybe they aren’t the enemy here. They’ve never hurt her, only asked her to find an astronaut, an astronaut who will do something tonight—

  Julie jerks her head up. Aldraa’s looking down at her, watching her. In the gloomy shadows beyond him, Julie thinks she sees Audrey Duchesne.

  Her migraine swells, and Audrey disappears, but the idea has already been planted. Audrey Duchesne. Tonight.

  Tonight’s the Stargazer’s Masquerade.

  Julie has forgotten about it. She’d never been interested in the masquerade. But Claire might be going. She borrowed Abigail’s dress. Maybe she means to wear it as a costume.

  “You sense something.” Aldraa’s voice booms through the darkness. “You sense the hidden ones.”

  “Don’t talk!” Julie says, clamping her hands over her ears. Something splinters inside of her. Something that looks like Audrey Duchesne.

  But what could Audrey have to do with all this? She knows Audrey Duchesne, has known her all her life. They moved together through the three schools lined up on Scarrow Street: Indianola Elementary, Indianola Junior High, Indianola High School. She remembers seeing Audrey Duchesne sitting on the swing set in a bright blue pinafore dress; she remembers her singing “Leader of the Pack” in the talent show; she remembers her cheering on the sidelines of the handful of football games Julie’s ever bothered to attend.

  She remembers.

  “What is it?” Aldraa lurches forward. The air around him refracts and distorts, and Julie presses up against the moss-covered wall, trying to shut out his rumbling voice. She remembers Audrey Duchesne, but doesn’t she also remember Sara Hassani in that pinafore dress? Swinging back and forth, shouting “Leader of the Pack” at the top of her lungs?

  The two memories layer on top of each other, the images bleeding together. Audrey’s face becomes Sara’s face and back again. The pain in Julie’s head is almost unbearable. She presses her thumb into her temple and white light flares in the back of her skull, and then all she sees is Audrey Duchesne, swinging back and forth, sunlight streaming through her golden hair.

  She screams in pain and slides down the wall. Audrey keeps swinging inside her head. Julie forces her eyes open. Aldraa stares down at her. She looks at his mouth, at his rows of teeth.

  “I can feel it,” he hisses. “A disruption. She’s been changing things already.”

  And then he lashes out one arm and seals his hand against the side of Julie’s head. Julie struggles to pull away, but it does no good. The bones of his fingers sink into her flesh, into her mind.

  “Let go of me!” she screams.

  Aldraa whispers to himself, a low susurration of sound, someone saying shhh shhh shhh over and over.

  “Aldraa!” Julie screams. She jerks her head violently, hoping to tear away from him, but it only sends pain tearing up through her skull.

  “A disruption in the timeline!” Aldraa slides his hand away and Julie falls to the ground,
landing in a thick mat of gray-green leaves, damp with humidity. She crawls away from him. Moss spores and dirt ooze between her fingers.

  “Your memories have been disrupted,” he says. “It is unnatural.”

  She stops. The plants creep around her hands and knees, oozing like oil over her skin.

  “What did you do to me?” she whispers, staring straight ahead, at the little patch of white light that is the window in the door leading outside.

  “Nothing. It was the astronaut.”

  Audrey Duchesne swings on the playground, back and forth, back and forth.

  Julie stands up, her legs shaking. Aldraa stares at her. One of his hands hangs limp at his side, glowing.

  Julie’s anxiety for Claire has returned, a force stronger than the migraine, stronger than her fear. And Lawrence—Lawrence has been dating Audrey, letting her hold him and kiss him—

  “I have to go,” she says. “I’ll tell you if I find anything.”

  And she races out of the building, out into the gray windswept world.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  JULIE

  Julie drives straight to Claire’s house. She knows that the responsible thing would be to go to her father or to track down Mr. Vickery and alert the committee to what happened. But she doesn’t trust the committee to do anything about it other than file a report. Besides, it might be nothing. It might just be the ranting of monsters.

  Or it might be everything. Julie wants to make sure Claire is all

  right.

  She pulls into Claire’s driveway and climbs out of her car. The wind billows and gusts and roars through the trees. Still no rain, though there’s a distant rumble of thunder, a flicker of lightning.

  A hurricane a hundred years ago almost wiped out the town. Is this another hurricane, making its slow way across the Gulf? No, of course not, it would have been on the news, and Julie’s mom would have forced her to spend the afternoon hammering plywood boards onto the windows.