Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  “The Neverworld is real,” she said. “To understand and conquer it, we must first understand and conquer each other. I’ve thought it over. We must set aside the question of who should live. We’re not prepared for that. Not yet. Because there’s another mystery we have to solve. It’s dogged each of us in different ways since it happened.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Cannon, frowning.

  “Jim.”

  His name was like a gleaming sword pitching through the air, landing hard at our feet.

  “It was suicide,” whispered Whitley.

  Martha stared at her, stony. “You don’t actually believe that.”

  Wit seemed too uncomfortable to answer.

  “I’ve been studying the Neverworld,” Martha went on. “This place, among many things, makes us the most powerful detectives in the world. We can go back to the scene of the crime an infinite number of times. We can interview bystanders. Witnesses. The police. Every teacher, janitor, and student. We can polish our questions, manipulate, intimidate, blackmail. There are no penalties and no rules. We can find out what happened to Jim once and for all.”

  Martha’s dark eyes found mine as she said this, sending a shiver through me.

  “But the case was unsolvable,” said Cannon.

  “Yeah,” said Kipling in a low voice. “The cops didn’t get very far.”

  “They were pressured by the school board to wrap it up quickly. The sooner everyone believed suicide, the sooner Darrow could repaint the bloody walls. That’s what our parents wanted. They wanted to sweep the scandal under the rug, for everyone to chalk the whole thing up to another doomed dream boy. The Legend of Jim Mason would be just another ghost story echoing through the halls.”

  “So we’re Sherlocks for the foreseeable future,” said Whitley.

  Kipling raised an eyebrow. “I’ve always had a thing for herringbone and bloodhounds.”

  “I’m in,” said Cannon.

  “Me too,” whispered Whitley.

  “Beatrice?” asked Martha.

  They all looked at me. I stared back, my heart pounding.

  It was happening, after all this time: We were freeing the lion. Dredging the Titanic up from the bottom of the sea. We were unburying the man who’d been sealed inside the walls that night we went searching for the cask of the Amontillado.

  We were going to find out what happened to Jim.

  My Jim.

  The cat-and-mouse game had begun.

  The strange circumstances of Jim Livingston Mason’s death had always seemed unreal to me, even though I experienced them firsthand.

  As I thought back on it now, holed up in that library with my four former best friends, returning to each detail felt like trying to recall the rules of an imaginary game I’d played as a child.

  Senior year, spring semester before finals week, my boyfriend, Jim, went missing.

  Two days later, he was found dead, floating in the lake at Vulcan Quarry.

  He was my first love, though those words don’t begin to describe what he actually was. Moon. Voice in my head. Blood. Even though everyone and their grandmother will tell you young love never lasts, that its burn is much more fragile than it ever appears to the naked eye, I swore what Jim and I had was different.

  He was beautiful in the unlikely way of some eighteenth-century hero galloping across moors on horseback: six foot three, honey-brown stare, uncombed black hair, cockeyed smile. But there was something else too. He was alive. If life force is a river’s current, Jim’s was so strong it could take off your fingers. He charged through an ordinary Monday as if he had been tasked with imparting a crucial secret about existence before Tuesday. He was a goofball, grandmaster of the Catchy Tune, the Double Entendre, the Shock Romantic Gesture, like giving me a vintage diamond Cartier pin in the shape of a bumblebee after he’d known me just a week. He wrote me a theme song called “The Queen’s Neck.” The worst thing about Jim was that his intensity attracted everyone. He was the light on a porch at night. Men and women, young and old, swirled around him, as if mistaking the attention of Jim Mason for a miracle dip in Lourdes. I couldn’t fault them. He made them feel important and less alone.

  He called me Amish, and Cahoots, and Hedy Lamarr. He said I had some quality of the past that he could never put his finger on, that I was meant for some long-forgotten, more innocent time.

  “You’re a Dusky Flying Fox,” he told me.

  “A what?”

  “An extinct species of mammal known only by a single specimen. You were spotted once in 1874 on Percy Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. No other examples of you were ever found. Yet here you are again, tucked away in an antiquated, not especially impressive boarding school in the wilds of Rhode Island. And no one knows about you but me.”

  He was analytical, agonizing, easily wounded, unable to let much go. The summer before senior year, he and a childhood friend were drinking and driving a speedboat off Long Island when they collided with a sandbar, hitting a fisherman’s skiff. The fisherman and Jim’s friend were fine, thank goodness, but Jim suffered a skull fracture and ended up unconscious for two days. As a result of his injury, he wrote six songs, four poems, and a rap song called “Bang-Up” about the incident. He vowed to give up alcohol. Once a month after the accident, he wrote letters to the fisherman, as if confessing to a priest.

  That was just how Jim was. He saturated. He overflowed. He drowned.

  “You have to design your life like it’s a fresh America,” he used to say, pulling his guitar onto his lap, his calloused fingertips dancing along the strings. “An unseen brave new world sits before you. Every. Single. Day. What are you going to do about it?”

  Now Whitley, Cannon, Kipling, and Martha were watching me, uneasy. We’d never done this before. We’d never talked together about Jim’s death. This had had to do with timing as much as the devastation of it. When every fact had been released by police and the administration had made their statement, finals week was finished. In a state of shock, unable to leave my bed, barely able to speak, I allowed my stricken parents to whisk me away from the treacherous kingdom of Darrow, back to the calming shelter of Watch Hill. It was days before I could stop sobbing, months before I felt anything remotely resembling fine.

  “The body shuts down when it’s too sad,” said my dad.

  * * *

  —

  “Where do we begin?” I asked now.

  “Excellent question,” said Martha. She looked at me, her dark eyes glinting behind her glasses. “What do you think happened to Jim? I always wanted to ask you.”

  There it was, the question I asked myself every day. So much so, it had turned me into a secret freak of nature, like a man who wanders around for years with a bullet lodged in his brain, normal on the outside, a gruesome marvel on the inside.

  I was dying to spill my theories, what I knew but they didn’t know I knew. It had been my whole reason for coming to Wincroft. But in this dizzying life-and-death dynamic in which we found ourselves, sharing them wouldn’t necessarily be a wise idea. Not if I wanted to live. Martha asking this so pointedly sent a fresh wave of chills up my spine.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It was an accident,” interjected Kipling. “Had to have been, right? Say Jim was out at the quarry. Maybe he decided to get wasted. Sure, he’d sworn off booze after that boat crash, but maybe he was depressed. He was stressed about his musical. Didn’t think he could pull it off. Maybe he slipped. The swim team kept those Pabst Blue Ribbons stashed all over. So maybe he was wanderin’ the tall grass, which on a windy night could be like gettin’ caught in a car wash’s Deluxe Wax Special, and, I don’t know, he stepped too close to the edge and tripped?”

  “When did Jim Mason ever trip?” asked Cannon.

  Kipling shrugged, tipping back his head to s
quint at the ceiling.

  “Freak possible,” he said in a low voice. “That’s what Momma Greer calls it when worst-case scenarios on steroids actually happen. She says all the big mysteries of history, like Marilyn’s death, JFK, the Black Dahlia, the Lost Colony? They all came down to the freak possible.” He nodded as if trying to convince himself, giving a lazy wave of his hand. “It’s wild flukes. One-in-a-billion chances. Wrong places at the wrong time with a serious helping of bad luck. It’s some crazy, gnarled tangle of destiny that can never be undone by any outside detective ’cause it’d sound too damn absurd.” He looked at me, his face solemn. “The freak possible’s what happened to Jim. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Yeah,” said Whitley, shrugging. “I mean, none of us knew he was heading to the quarry that night.”

  Everyone nodded, glancing tentatively at the others.

  I suspected at least one of them was lying. I certainly was.

  After all, on the night of Jim’s death, none of them had been where they’d claimed.

  I knew this because I’d gone looking for each of them, one by one.

  I’d found nothing and no one.

  * * *

  —

  Vulcan Quarry—or Vulcanation, as Darrow’s students called it—was the abandoned quarry a mile from the center of campus.

  If Darrow had one enduring legend, it was that quarry. Given its tantalizing proximity to school—the seventeen-acre property bordered Darrow’s southeast woods—it was the off-limits no-man’s-land kids whispered about and obsessed over, a far-off world to visit for pranks, hazing, hookups, and all other adolescent rites of passage, you name it.

  Rumors about the quarry—how to find it, what happened to students who went there (most of whom were long gone from Darrow, so events could never be verified)—were part of the weekly goings-on at Darrow and served as a foundation to its lore. The quarry was as tightly woven into the fabric of the school as its official song, “Oh, Lord, Unbind My Heart”; its motto, “Truth, Compassion, Enterprise”; and even Marksman Library, the Gothic fortress of weather-beaten gray stones that stared out like a menacing stepfather from every brochure.

  After World War I, Vulcan Sandberg Corporation created the quarry for mining granite. By the 1950s, they were bankrupt, the quarry forsaken. In the ensuing years, the crater filled with water, creating a lake two hundred feet deep. The grounds overgrew, with grass that reached your neck. The Foreman’s Lookout—a wooden box like a pioneer-era saloon hoisted fifty feet into the sky, accessible only by scaling a narrow ladder—began to lean northward. Then there was the quarry itself, a hole in the earth the size of a small town. It sat there, gaping and ominous, impossible to look away from. It seemed to reveal some terrifying truth about the world the grown-ups wanted to keep hidden from us.

  Darrow’s football team used the quarry for Streak Night, the annual tradition of new recruits racing naked to the quarry and back. The crew team went swimming in the lake before state championships for good luck. Couples went there to lose their virginity, daredevils to brood. It was whispered that Vulcan Sandberg was actually a government cover-up, that the quarry had actually been the landing spot for an alien spaceship.

  For Darrow’s administration, Vulcan Quarry was a lawsuit waiting to happen, the enchanted wood they wanted to clear-cut to put an end to the dark fairy tales wafting off it like some toxic mist. There was always some board member protesting, collecting signatures to declare it a safety hazard, lobbying state representatives for it to be turned into a cultural center, a YMCA, a housing complex. In the meantime, it required new fencing and a twenty-four-hour police patrol. The town of Warwick—partly out of resentment over being told what to do by uppity out-of-towners, partly out of ineptitude—dragged their feet doing anything about it, though, and as long as I attended Darrow, the fencing around the quarry—rusted, riddled with holes, its faded signs halfheartedly declaring KEEP OUT—remained little more than a suggestion at best.

  After Jim was found dead, however, he became the poster boy for the board’s cause. Last I’d heard, the quarry was going to be turned into a reservoir and there was brand-new, state-of-the-art fencing around it.

  Not that that would keep Darrow’s students out.

  If the administration knew the lengths to which the student body went to sneak out at night, to the quarry and everywhere else—dorm rooms, basement gymnasiums, boiler rooms—they wouldn’t have believed it. There was a secret forum—AlbanzHax.biz—where students past and present anonymously revealed how to get in and out of every dorm without being caught.

  All dark clothing. Porch ledge. Sneak past the window where Mr. Robertson is zonked out with an issue of Poets & Writers over his chest. Get past him ur golden.

  The six of us snuck out to Vulcan Quarry all the time. We were already in the habit of stealing away to each other’s rooms after curfew, clambering across ledges and landings to hash over boys, teachers, sharing a cigarette in the dark before hightailing it home, stealing back into bed. Sophomore year, Cannon found the crude map and pointers for the quarry etched into the tiles of the forsaken gym in the old athletic center. At midnight we escaped our dorms, meeting at the entry to the Philosopher’s Walk. Barely able to suppress our laughter, we took off running down the tangle of dirt paths to get there.

  Those were the best nights of my life.

  I couldn’t say why, exactly, this was so—only that I knew that as an old woman, when I thought back to my youth, I’d remember these nights, sitting with these five people along the harrowing window ledge of the Foreman’s Lookout, gazing into that clear blue lake hundreds of feet below.

  Our friendship was born there. There we were bound together. Something about seeing each other against that spare, alien backdrop of rock, water, and sky—not to mention the prohibited, dangerous thing we were doing—it X-rayed us, revealed the unspoken questions we each were asking. You could feel life burning us, our scars as real as the wind whipping our faces. We knew that nothing would ever be the same, that youth was here and nearly gone already, that love was fragile and death was real.

  * * *

  —

  “What about the White Rabbit?” asked Martha now. “It never sat right with me. It was just too easy. The White Rabbit suddenly revealed to be Jim the exact moment he turns up dead?” She shook her head. “It went against everything I knew about him.”

  “You think it was a cover-up?” asked Whitley. “Some grand conspiracy concocted by the administration and Jim was the fall guy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re right,” I said to Martha. “There’s no way he was the White Rabbit.”

  “How do you know?” Cannon asked me.

  I just know.

  * * *

  —

  The White Rabbit.

  It was what everyone called the drug dealer at Darrow, someone who circulated the student body, invisible and invasive as a virus.

  For most of my time at the school he was a bogeyman. No one had actually ever seen him—no one who would admit to it, at least. He did his deals in creative scavenger-hunt dead drops all around Darrow, like behind the frame of Landscape #14 in the art gallery, or inside the ripped seat cushion of seat 104, row E, Orchestra Hall.

  By the time I was a senior, the name had garnered such cult status, whenever anything weird happened, it was said to be the work of the White Rabbit. Even teachers knew the name. They’d doubtlessly held emergency meetings about him, trying to determine whether he was real or it was just kids dreaming up some Keyser Söze.

  The biggest scandal concerned a freshman named Veronica Beers. She took some pills and went out of her mind during Winter Dance, fell down a flight of stairs, and got taken to the ER. She admitted the White Rabbit had sold her the pills. Tracing the phone number led to only a defunct prepaid phone.

  Was he a lone wolf or
a gang of hoodlums? A student or someone from the outside?

  When the police found Jim, he’d been dead for two days. The cause of death was asphyxiation due to drowning, but he also had signs of a concussion and leg and spinal fractures, which the coroner believed were sustained when he hit the water.

  Police searched Jim’s room at Packer Hall, and they found hidden inside his Gibson guitar stashes of pot, Adderall, Ritalin, and cocaine. They concluded that Jim had been the infamous supplier, his death most likely suicide, though foul play in conjunction with some local criminal couldn’t be ruled out.

  The revelation spread like wildfire.

  First Jim Mason’s disappearance and death, then the shocking reveal of his secret life. It was the perfect one-two punch to leave us all breathless at the end of a teen slasher flick.

  Of course the White Rabbit was Jim, everyone whispered. Totally.

  It’s always the one we worship the most we know the least.

  He was, after all, Darrow’s rock star, its heartthrob-musical-genius-Shakespeare, the boy who made spontaneous rapping, poetry, and wearing tweed caps cool (all small miracles unto themselves)—the kid everyone loved, longed for, yet simultaneously wished dead.

  He had it. An energy force field.

  He was the giant lit-up window with no curtains at night. You couldn’t help stopping to look closer on your silent walk past him.

  I never believed it.

  There was no way Jim was the White Rabbit. Someone had set him up, I was sure. He never touched drugs or alcohol after his speedboat accident. And he wouldn’t have sold it. He was a rescuer of broken-winged birds and lunchtime social outcasts. Nor did he need the money. His dad, Edgar Mason, was the inventor of the Van Gogh sneaker and the Poe hoodie, the man behind Starving Artist, a global leisurewear company he’d started in the back of his Jeep at nineteen. Jim’s family was worth five billion, according to Forbes.