Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  “Out of all of us, Bee,” she said suddenly, “you spent the most time with the Masons. Did they ever tell you what they thought happened to their son?”

  I shook my head, shrugging. “We completely fell out of touch.”

  Countless times during the past year, I’d wondered how the Masons had handled Jim’s death. I never found out. I never even made it to Jim’s funeral. My parents, fretting about my mental well-being, begged me not to go. And while a few Darrow students—including Whitley, Cannon, and Kip—had gotten special permission to take the train to New York for the service, I decided to stay away. My absence, I knew, would come as a relief. His family had liked their modern art collection infinitely more than they’d ever liked me. Jim’s mom, Gloria—a champagne flute of a woman, all ice-blond hair and long limbs, with a low voice—always surveyed me as if I were a window with an airshaft view. Jim’s father had to be introduced to me three times before he recalled who I was. And even then he called me Barbara.

  “I say we pay a surprise visit to the Masons,” said Whitley.

  “We’ll probably have to waterboard ’em to get ’em to talk, child,” said Kipling. “But count me in.”

  “There’s a problem,” I said.

  “What?” asked Martha.

  “The wake.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s only eleven point two hours. That’s not enough time.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kip, frowning. “We fly to East Hampton. We’ll be outside the Masons’ Water Mill estate in less than two hours.”

  “They’re not in Water Mill. The Masons spend every summer on Amorgos, an island in the Aegean Sea. It takes eleven hours by plane. Plus a three-hour boat ride. Then you have to hike up a mountain to reach the house.”

  They seemed skeptical, so I dialed the Masons’ Fifth Avenue apartment. The housekeeper who answered confirmed the family was away.

  “Are they at Villa Anna Sofia on Amorgos Island?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Would you like to leave a message for Mr. and Mrs. Mason?”

  Jim called his family’s compound in Greece the Milk Shake for the way it oozed down the cliff overlooking the ocean. Much to my parents’ irritation, I’d spent five days there with Jim the summer before junior year. Although the time had passed in a sunburnt blur of bleached-white beaches and outdoor feasts, sunset boat rides and Greek folk music, Jim working relentlessly on his musical, that island and the Masons’ vertigo-inducing compound remained one of the most surreally beautiful places I’d ever seen.

  “We could try Skyping them,” suggested Kipling. “ ‘Hi, we’re Jim’s old friends phoning from purgatory. We command you to tell us everything about your son’s death.’ ”

  “I guess that’s that,” said Whitley gloomily.

  “Not exactly,” said Martha.

  I turned to her with a shiver of dread.

  “It’s time you guys learned the truth.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Whitley.

  Martha cleared her throat.

  “The Neverworld is more complex than you think. I mean, none of you have noticed anything strange?”

  “Oh, no, this is all perfectly routine,” said Kipling, smiling.

  “Strange things like what?” I asked.

  “Unusual disruptions. Magnetism. Instability.”

  Instantly I thought of the mold, the peeling wallpaper, the tumbling trees, the collapsing shelves, the exploding snow globes, that black ink soaking through all the case files.

  Martha appeared to know what it was, what it meant. She was fumbling in her heavy black bag, pulling out a small black notebook.

  I recognized it. It was the one I’d spotted her carrying in the early days of the Neverworld, when she stopped to hastily scribble in the pages before moving on.

  “ ‘Sighting, six thirty-nine p.m.,’ ” she read. “ ‘One mysterious purple-feathered owl perched atop a maple tree, unknown species.’ ” She turned the page. “ ‘Overheard. Variety of eighties songs by the Cure in every passing car and every surrounding house.’ ”

  Martha closed the notebook, surveying us.

  “Remember what the Keeper said. ‘Imagine if each of your minds was placed inside a blender, and that blender turned on high. The resulting smoothie is this moment.’ ”

  “Okay,” said Whitley, nervous.

  “He was talking about the physics of the Neverworld. I’m very excited to tell you that it’s based in part on J. C. Gossamer Madwick’s groundbreaking masterpiece. And it’s my fault.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Cannon.

  “I wrote a two-hundred-page thesis on the novel. I tracked down every rare book about it. Every obscure blog. I interviewed professors, experts, and scientists. I even went to visit Madwick’s daughter on Bello Costa Island in the Florida Keys, rowing out to this tiny, falling-down beach house in a remote cove swarming with alligators. She let me inspect Madwick’s notebooks, which have never been seen by anyone outside the family, not even the people at Harvard who’ve been bullying her to donate them to their archives. I read all eleven notebooks, translating them from Lurroscript, the language Madwick made up.”

  She stopped her mad outpouring of words to take a deep breath.

  I realized she was talking about The Bend, the fantasy novel she’d been obsessed with, the one no one had ever heard of except her and a bunch of geeky fanboys on the Internet.

  “My preoccupation with the book made it our reality. I lived it. Breathed it. Now it’s in the Neverworld.”

  “But what does that mean, child?” Kipling asked, faint shrillness in his voice. “We’re all about to float out into outer space? Become androids?”

  Martha tilted her head and grinned, the lenses in her glasses flashing in the light.

  My heart plunged. Whatever she was about to tell us, I knew I couldn’t trust it.

  I also knew that in this world stuck on repeat, everything we knew was about to change.

  “Well, for one thing,” Martha said excitedly, “it means rather than waking up at Wincroft, we can wake up anywhere in the past, present, or future.”

  “And how do we do that?” asked Cannon.

  “We climb out the unlatched window.”

  We could only stare, baffled.

  She sighed. “Right. Okay. I got way ahead of myself.”

  She took another impatient breath.

  “Lesson One. J. C. Gossamer Madwick was a science fiction writer. He wrote just one book, called The Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. The Bend for short. It’s this amazing adventure story and alternative world, different from anything you’ve ever read. It was never published. Just photocopied over and over again, bound using a hole-puncher and garbage bag zip ties, passed hand to hand by anonymous travelers, student backpackers, and disaffected youths in hostels. The thing you have to do once you finish The Bend? You sign the dedication page and leave it for the next lucky person on a park bench, bunk bed, airplane seat, or train compartment. For the longest time the only copies to be found were in ancient bookshops and on eBay, some with hundreds of thousands of signatures. The ones with famous names of the readers, like Marilyn Monroe and Leonard Bernstein and Frank Sinatra? They went for as much as four, five grand. Now it’s an official cult classic, steadily in print, and even random people like E.S.S. Burt have copies.”

  To my surprise, Martha raced over to the shelves and pulled out a hulking silver hardback book. Returning to the couches, she handed it to me. The cover featured a collage of birdcages, steam trains, men and women wearing top hats, masquerade masks straight out of Victorian England.

  The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend by J. C. Gossamer Madwick.

  The legendary cult saga of future pasts. Present mysteries. An undying love at the end of the world.


  I flipped to the back flap and stared down at the author photo.

  It was grainy and black-and-white. In a rumpled suit, Madwick was a man few would look twice at: hound-dog face, extravagant ears, an apologetic slouch suggesting he was more comfortable ducking out of a room than entering one.

  Jeremiah Chester Gossamer Madwick (December 2, 1891–March 18, 1944) was an American novelist from Key West, Florida. His only work, the posthumously published The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend, won the Gilmer-Hecht Prize for Fantasy in 1968. For 37 years he worked as a bus driver for the Key West transit office, driving passengers to and from Stock Island by day, and writing his 1,397-page masterpiece by hand on hotel notepads by night. At age 53, he was found dead in the doorway of Hasty Retreat Saloon, a harmonica, a tin of tobacco, and the final paragraph of his novel in his pocket.

  “Madwick died penniless and unknown,” Martha said. “Now he’s considered one of the greatest fantasy writers who ever lived. Harvard has an entire class about him: Hobos, Strangers, and Vagabonds: The Literature of Madwick. He even has a cult following in the real-life physics community due to his theory of time.”

  She paused to hastily draw something in her notebook. It was a sketch of a train.

  “Which brings me to Lesson Two,” she said. “Time travel. Madwick viewed time not as linear, or an arrow, or even a fabric, like Einstein. He saw it as a locomotive. To time travel in Elsewhere Bend, you climb out the window of your speeding train compartment and scale onto the roof, like a bandit in an old western. Then you carefully move toward the front of the train, the future, or the back of the train, the past. It’s vital not to move too quickly in either direction because that will cause instability. Like, the train can jump the tracks, or crash, or separate compartments, or veer suddenly onto a wrong track heading clear in the opposite direction.”

  Shuddering in apparent horror at the thought of such a scenario, Martha took a deep breath and tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “In the event of such disasters, you, the time traveler, are doomed. Because you’ll never be able to get your train back running on the original track, much less on time, much less climb back to the compartment in which you began. Although technically you can live the rest of your life in the past or future, the carriage where you were born, the original present, is where you belong. Always. That’s where life will be the smoothest journey for you. Where things work out and love lasts. A life lived at any other time will be restless, rough, ill fated. You can visit the past and the future, but you can’t stay there. Not if you want any chance at happiness.”

  “What does this have to do with the Neverworld?” asked Cannon, uneasy.

  “We want to interrogate Jim’s parents? I believe we can. We just have to choose a day in the close past or the future where we can reach them in the eleven point two hours of the wake. Then we find the open window in our train and climb out. And this open window…” She nibbled her fingernail. “It’s somewhere here. I don’t know where yet, but it’s a collision of life and death. It tends to be suicidal. In The Bend, the protagonist uncovers it by accident in Chapter One when he tries to commit suicide. And obviously none of us has ever committed suicide.”

  I shook my head. So did Whitley, Cannon, and Kipling.

  “So that rules that out,” Martha said gloomily. “We’ll have to locate the open window by some other means. Which brings me to Lesson Three.”

  She cleared her throat. “The Neverworld was created not only by me, but by each of you. My biggest contribution is Madwick’s Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. But what about you? The closer you study the Neverworld, the more of yourself you’ll find. Your darkest secrets. Your worst nightmares. Your fears and dreams. The embarrassing thing you never want anyone to learn. It’s all here, buried, if you look close enough.”

  An uneasy chill inched down my spine.

  There was something threatening in the way she announced this. The others looked uncomfortable too. Whitley sat on the couch, motionless. Kipling looked pale. Cannon stared her down, completely absorbed.

  Martha surveyed her notebook with a faint smile. “Kipling.” She cleared her throat. “I meant to ask you.” She held up a page where she’d drawn a red wasp. “The scarlet-bodied wasp moth. Native to Louisiana. I’ve spotted three at Wincroft. Two crawled out of the attic upstairs. Another from a radiator. They shouldn’t exist this far north. Do you recognize it?”

  “How did you…?” blurted Kipling. He chuckled nervously. “Momma Greer used to catch them in mason jars. Kept them all around the house. Pit fiends, she called them. Said the sting was lethal and she’d put them on me while I slept if I didn’t sit still during church.”

  Martha nodded blankly, unsurprised. She turned the page.

  “Cannon. Surely you’ve noticed all the Japanese larch?”

  He sat up, nervous. “The…what?”

  “The Japanese larch and silver birch trees growing around Wincroft. If you look closer, they’re dead. A bunch of tall, spindly black tree trunks sticking out of the ground. Those trees aren’t native to Rhode Island. They’re indigenous to the Chubu and Kanto regions of Japan. If you go up to one and dig down about six inches, chalky blue water pools everywhere.” She beamed. “You know what I’m getting at?”

  Cannon only stared.

  “Blue Pond?” she suggested. “Cannon’s Birdcage? The bug you discovered in Apple’s OS X operating system sophomore year? The accidental combination of keystrokes that crashes your hard drive, delivering the photo of Blue Pond wallpaper to your screen? The photograph is an almost surreal picture of a bright blue lake, dead snow-tipped trees growing right out of it.”

  He was confounded. “Okay. What about it?”

  “That photo is embedded in the Neverworld’s landscape. Everywhere.”

  Cannon said nothing, only slipped to his feet, crossed the library to the window, stared out.

  “Then there’s Whitley,” Martha went on officially. “There’s a volatility in the Neverworld’s weather because of you.”

  “Me?” said Wit.

  “Gale-force winds. Constant rain, thunder, lightning. It’s your temper.”

  Whitley glared at her.

  “The night we went back to Darrow,” Martha went on. “How we got chased by the police. I watched wind overturn every car in the parking lot. It was because of your confession about being the White Rabbit.”

  Whitley huffed in apparent disagreement, but her eyes flitted worriedly to the windows.

  “These details go for all of us,” Martha went on. “The closer we get to the truth, the root of who we are, the more unstable this world will become. Which brings me to Beatrice.”

  She turned to me, her expression stony. My heart began to pound.

  “I have no clue.”

  Everyone frowned at her—and then at me.

  “Your contribution is here. Somewhere. But I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  I swallowed. What was Martha attempting to do? Intimidate me? Scare me? If so, it was working.

  She sighed. “One thing I do know is that if we try changing the wake, we have to stick together.”

  “Why is that?” asked Cannon.

  “We don’t know how we’re going to react. The past hooks you like a drug. The future jolts you like an electric chair. Reliving beautiful memories can be just as devastating as reliving the terrible ones. They’re addictive. Given that time travel in The Bend is so dangerous, and that inside the Neverworld there are elements we can’t anticipate—the things you are each contributing—we have no idea what will happen if we even attempt this.” She shook her head, her voice trembling with so much emotion, she reminded me of an evangelical minister on a public access channel, lecturing a rapt congregation about the end of the world. “It could be a complete disaster. We could accidentally end up in different train compartments on different trains
speeding in different directions. That means it’ll be impossible to ever make it back here. To Wincroft. Together. To vote. Then we really will be trapped here forever.”

  The rest of us eyed each other in alarm. No one spoke.

  I gazed down at the hulking book on my lap. I couldn’t breathe.

  What was she up to? Was Martha actually trying to help us? Or was this new revelation only the meticulous and conniving arrangement of her chess pieces on the board, some ingenious trap we would all fall into, which would somehow result in everyone voting for her?

  What I did know—or at least strongly suspected—was that she knew what my contribution to the Neverworld was. I could tell by the way she looked at me, by her flat, implausible explanation: I haven’t been able to figure it out.

  Martha always figured everything out. For whatever reason, she’d decided not to disclose this piece of information.

  Not yet.

  For the next couple of wakes, we stayed in the library at Wincroft, studying The Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. We wanted to understand everything Martha had told us.

  We downloaded the audiobook and spent hours listening to all 1,322 pages, curled up under mohair blankets, drinking tea as the narrator—some young British actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company with an opera baritone and a schizophrenic ability to sound like completely different men and women, young, old, poor, aristocratic—told the futuristic tale of love and loss. It was a bewitching story, one of the best I’d ever heard, a heart-pounding mystery unfolding against a future world, fascinating and terrifying plot twists you couldn’t see coming.

  The book took place far in the future. The main character, Jonathan Elster, was a bumbling, absentminded professor at a university for outcasts in Old Earth. He taught a popular alternative philosophy course, Intro to Unknowns, which covered, among other things, the nuts and bolts of time travel. For years, Elster had been in love from afar with a mysterious woman named Anastasia Bent, who taught in the history department. When she accidentally stumbled upon a cover-up about the history of the universe and vanished—a fisherman witnessing her wandering a cliff walk suggested she committed suicide, though her body was never recovered—Jonathan set off on a perilous quest across space and time to find her.