Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

We gaped at her. Her neon-blue hair was gone. She was her old self from Darrow, dark hair in a careless ponytail, oversized Oxford shirt.

  “What hole did you just crawl out of?” asked Kipling.

  “We thought you ditched us,” said Wit.

  “Yeah. Sorry about that.” She adjusted her glasses. “For some reason—I think it was because I was thinking of the map of the entire quarry before the wake—I ended up waking not by the south fence with you guys, but by the east fence behind the Pancake House. I had to hike the mile along the quarry road to get here.” She took a deep breath. “Seen anything yet?”

  “Only that light,” said Whitley, indicating the Foreman’s Lookout.

  Martha squinted up at it. She seemed unsurprised.

  “Did you see anyone along the road?” I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  It was then that I noticed she was drenched in sweat. Her shirt clung to her. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. Walking along the quarry road wouldn’t have exerted her to that extent. She was lying.

  Noticing my stare, she smiled thinly and slipped past me to the pipe, wiping her forehead.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  “Now we wait and see,” I said, moving beside her.

  * * *

  —

  The car arrived at one-thirty.

  We heard it coming before we saw it. A loose hubcap. Radio blaring. The four of us fell silent, standing shoulder to shoulder along the pipe. Gold headlights swept across the grass. Then a red Nissan slowly rounded the quarry road, bouncing and clanging along the uneven ground before stopping right beside the Foreman’s Lookout. I couldn’t see who was driving, though I could make out a For Sale sign in the back window.

  “Vida Joshua?” whispered Whitley, incredulous.

  The engine idled, white moths whirling in the headlights. The radio switched off. There was a moment of silence. Then the driver’s door opened, and someone climbed out.

  When I saw who it was, chills electrocuted my spine.

  Cannon.

  He dressed in jeans, his old gray hacker’s hoodie. He fought through the grass and disappeared into the old mapping office, a sagging shed with a tin roof, though after a minute he reemerged, agitated. He clambered back to the car, texted someone, waited for a response, crossing and uncrossing his arms. As I watched him, I wondered how Cannon of all people had come to be driving Mr. Joshua’s car, a car that usually remained parked behind the music school when Vida wasn’t using it. Then I remembered how he and Whitley had always stolen things around campus. He had stolen the car to drive out here to meet someone.

  “Hello?” Cannon called. “Anybody here?”

  No one answered.

  He moved to the front of the car and sat on the hood, staring meditatively into the headlights. Another ten minutes, and he was furious. He looked around, scowling, then seemed to give up and climbed behind the wheel, slamming the door, radio blasting heavy metal. He tried to pull away, but the wheels were caught in the grass, the tires spinning. He put the car in reverse, and it bumped backward a few feet. He hit the gas harder and the car roared back, hitting something. Cannon inched the car forward, then reversed again. The car jerked, smashing whatever it was, bouncing over it and stalling.

  Cannon climbed out. He crouched down to check under the tires.

  He stood up immediately. Then he bent down again. Then he stood up.

  He bent down a third time.

  “No. No. No. No. No.”

  Cannon threw his head back and began to howl.

  “No. No. No.”

  Bewildered, I glanced over at Martha, Kipling, and Whitley watching the scene in silence beside me. They seemed as puzzled as I was.

  Muttering something, Cannon bent down once more, seemingly trying to wrench whatever he had run over out from under the tires. For minutes, all we could see were shaking grasses.

  When he stood up again, he was making a strange noise, as if he was crying. That was when I caught sight of what was in his hand.

  A tweed cap. It was Jim’s.

  No. This can’t be happening.

  Cannon was back behind the wheel. After a few tries, he managed to back out, doing a three-point turn. He was about to drive away, it seemed, only he had second thoughts, because the car jolted to a halt and he climbed out again.

  He stood frozen for a moment, as if in a trance.

  Then he stepped over to what he had pulled out from under the wheels; what I could see now in a rush of disbelief, of horror, as I scrambled on top of the pipe for a better look, was no log. It was Jim, my Jim, lying on his side. His jeans were streaked with blood. Cannon was cradling Jim’s head in his lap. Cannon bent over him, whispering something, and then he was on his feet again, on the phone.

  “Call me. I need you to come. I need you to help me. Now. Please call me back. Please. Please.”

  He said it over and over, his voice a high-pitched whine. It was terrible to witness. Cannon’s resolute action, his ease with problem-solving, his unflappable tenaciousness—all of which had come to define him in my mind the way waves define the ocean, clouds the sky—it was gone now. He was a different person.

  “I need you. I need you now. Please come. Please.”

  Whoever he was calling, no one answered. Cannon climbed into the driver’s seat again, sitting in pitch darkness, engine running, radio on.

  Fifteen minutes later, when he finally emerged, he had a plan. He was his old self, the fixer. He grabbed Jim’s ankles and began to pull him brutally through the grass, cursing as Jim lost a loafer, crying out in disbelief, in despair, before wiping his face in the crook of his arm and continuing on.

  He reached the quarry’s edge. It was yards away from where we were watching.

  He threw Jim into the quarry without saying a prayer, without hesitation.

  There was the hushed whir of the body falling, knocking against rocks, and then nothing, the muted splash of Jim hitting the water lost in the shriek of crickets.

  Cannon stared after him, immobile, his blank face hollowed by shadows.

  I wondered if he was considering going in with Jim, ending it all, right then and there.

  Instead, he turned with an empty stare, climbed into the car, and drove off.

  * * *

  —

  It was a moment before any of us could move.

  I was standing on top of the pipe in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind short-circuiting. Too late, I realized the cement was cracking under my feet. Abruptly, with an angry belch, the entire thing collapsed, Martha and the others jumping back into the grass as I was sent plummeting into the pile of rubble.

  Wit helped me, gasping, to my feet.

  “What the hell was that? Are you okay?”

  I nodded, climbing out, dusting myself off.

  We stood silently in a circle for a moment, eyeing each other in shock.

  “But who did Cannon call?” whispered Wit with a hint of indignation. “Because it wasn’t me. I never knew any of this.”

  “He called Kipling,” said Martha.

  We turned to Kip. He eyed us stiffly, guiltily, his arms held at odd angles at his side.

  “She’s right,” he whispered. “The devil called, and I answered.”

  He said it flatly, with a hint of relief, and I remembered with a shiver of shock the meaningful glance I’d seen Kip exchange with Cannon back in the Wincroft library, when they were confessing how Kipling had made it through Darrow. They hadn’t been thinking about the arrangement Cannon had made, or the cheating. They’d been thinking about this very night, and the secret they kept.

  “I helped him throw Jim’s body into the quarry,” said Kipling.

  We stared at him.

  “How can that be?” asked Whitley. “We didn’t see yo
u.”

  “Chapter Thirty-Nine, The Bend,” whispered Martha. “You never run into yourself in the past or the future.”

  Kipling nodded. “I had to come here. I had to watch. I had to know, once and for all, if it had been my idea to throw Jim into the lake, or Cannon’s. Would it happen if I wasn’t a part of it? I had to know who was the bad one, and who was worse.”

  “Did Cannon tell you why he had come here?” Martha asked, and bit her lip.

  “He did.”

  “What did he say?”

  Kipling smiled demurely. “Why don’t you ask her?” He nodded at Whitley.

  She glared at him, livid. For a moment, I thought she was about to start screaming, unleashing one of her rages. Instead, she sighed.

  “Cannon was my best customer,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

  “Adderall. The White Rabbit gave him his boundless supply. He popped them like Tic-Tacs. He still does.”

  “All that time during school, he never knew you were the White Rabbit?” asked Martha.

  Wit shook her head. “Not until Vida. I was too scared to tell him.”

  I thought back to Cannon’s reaction when he’d learned Wit was the White Rabbit. He had been livid. Now I understood why. It was because she had known his secret all along, and had never told him hers.

  “So let me get this straight,” said Martha. “On the night Jim died, Cannon called the White Rabbit for another stash of Adderall, and you sent him out here.”

  Whitley nodded, sullen.

  “Why here?”

  Wit shook her head. “Jim had found me out a few weeks before. He was watching me constantly, telling me I had to stop. I was afraid to do a drop on campus. So I decided out here was perfect. It was remote. I texted Cannon as the White Rabbit, telling him he could find his supply inside a desk in the mapping office. Only I couldn’t make it out here in time. I got caught talking to Mrs. Lapinetti about my Italian final. I raced back to the quarry and did the drop, but I had no further contact that night from Cannon.”

  “When did you make it back here?” asked Martha.

  “It was three in the morning. I didn’t see anything or anyone, I swear to God.”

  “You must have just missed them.” Martha checked her watch. “When Jim turned up dead at the quarry, you must have suspected Cannon. After all, you knew he’d come out here.”

  Wit nodded. “But I knew he’d never willingly hurt Jim.”

  Martha turned, staring up at the Foreman’s Lookout.

  “So the only question now is…”

  She fell silent, nibbling a fingernail.

  “What?” prompted Kipling.

  “How did Jim appear so suddenly under that car?”

  She turned on her heel, resolved.

  “Come,” she ordered.

  Beckoning us to follow her, she vanished into the grass.

  When we caught up to Martha, she was crouching underneath the Foreman’s Lookout. Staring overhead, I saw in astonishment that the ladder to climb up was missing. I realized then that what remained of it was strewn all over the ground.

  “Incredible.”

  Martha gasped in shock over some revelation, then stood up, shaking her head.

  “It’s really the most impossible sequence of events.”

  “What?” asked Kipling.

  “Momma Greer was right.”

  “About?”

  “The freak possible.”

  Martha rolled one of the pieces of wood under her sneaker, then gazed up at the landing suspended high over our heads.

  “Poor Jim.”

  She looked at me, and instantly I felt chills inching up my arms. What was she aiming at? What was she trying to do? It was dark, but her eyes sparkled behind her glasses, alert, alive.

  “It happened right here,” she said. “Jim was undone over Beatrice confronting him about his lie, the night he went off with Vida. He was also distraught over Estella Ornato. His perfect life had fallen down around him, so he escaped here, as he often did, to be alone, to write music. He started to climb up to the Foreman’s Lookout, but the ladder gave out. He managed to grab a few supporting beams, trying to save himself, but they didn’t hold.”

  Martha bent down to inspect a piece of the wood, showing us that the underside was completely rotten.

  “He fell. It was a considerable distance, five, six stories, a drop that would have killed most people. Yet Jim survived.”

  “How?” I whispered.

  “He was drunk. It’s why drunk drivers survive car accidents. Drunks don’t tense up on impact. They relax. That saves their lives. He was unconscious for an hour. Maybe two. Then he woke up.” She squinted out at the quarry road. “He must have heard the car, or seen the headlights. Or maybe he was just trying to get to his bike.”

  Martha hurried to the other side of the road and dragged Jim’s bike out of the grass, throwing it at our feet with the flair of a magician whisking a rabbit from a hat.

  “He crawled from here to here.” She pointed toward the road. “That’s eight, ten feet? He was trying to get help. At that point, Cannon had climbed behind the wheel again. If Jim called out, it was lost in the crickets, the engine, the radio. We couldn’t hear a thing, or see much in the dark. Neither did Cannon. Cannon, assuming the White Rabbit stood him up, has to get back to school, drive the car back before Moses returns to the gatehouse after his AA meeting. Frustrated, he puts the car in reverse, hitting Jim. He realizes what’s happened, and he goes crazy. He calls Kipling, who is in his debt. Kipling arrives, and together they decide that the only way out of this unimaginable turn of events is to throw Jim into the quarry and pray the police think suicide.”

  Kipling nodded. “We hoped the cops wouldn’t notice the difference between injuries sustained from a car hitting you and injuries from a three-hundred-foot fall.”

  “The police probably would have looked closer,” said Martha, “if not for the Masons. They were worried the business about Estella Ornato was about to be exposed. They didn’t know what Jim had told people. Given the level of his anger, they probably weren’t so sure Jim didn’t commit suicide, having learned the truth about what they’d done. What he had done. So they stayed silent. And probably applied some pressure on that little police station. Whatever other pieces of evidence the cops unearthed—Jim’s visit to Honey Love Fried Chicken, Vida’s tip-off about Shrieks being the real White Rabbit, cell phone records? They stopped pursuing it.”

  “The Masons confiscated the contents of Jim’s case file, don’t forget,” said Kipling.

  “Exactly.”

  “But there’s blood here,” whispered Whitley. She was using the light on her cell to illuminate the area where the Nissan had been parked. “It wouldn’t take much effort for police to see that something brutal had happened right here.”

  “We cleaned it up,” said Kipling. “I noticed the blood, and we spent an hour tearing up the grass with bloodstains. I shoved it into my backpack and spent more time at school flushing it down the toilet.”

  “There you have it,” said Martha. “The freak possible.”

  There was nothing to say, nothing to do except to consider the strange history Martha had just related like a professor illuminating to her students some new law of gravity. For a while, I was aware of nothing but my own shallow breathing, and the orchestra of crickets, and the night, gasping and alive all around us.

  Never had I imagined a truth like this.

  “It’s too extraordinary,” whispered Whitley, crossing her arms, shivering. “When you think about it, we all killed Jim. I sent Cannon here. And Cannon hit Jim with the car. And Kipling helped him cover it up. All of us are guilty, right? All of us except Martha and Beatrice. You’re the good ones.”

  “That’s not true,�
�� I blurted, tears burning my eyes, a lump in my throat.

  “It’s time to get out of here.”

  Martha whispered this, frowning thoughtfully as she stared overhead. Bewildered, none of us moved. Then she was pushing us and I realized, stunned, looking up, that without even being aware of it, I’d been standing too close to one of the tower’s steel legs, because the entire thing was tottering. The wood was groaning and splintering.

  Suddenly, with a thunderous moan of metal and glass, the entire Lookout was tipping over, rusted nails and screws and wooden beams raining down on us as we took off across the quarry road. I threw myself into the wall of grass, fighting back blades as they slapped and whipped my face. I ducked and covered my head as the entire structure collapsed around me with a roar, Kipling and Whitley shouting somewhere behind me. I felt myself tossed forward.

  When I opened my eyes, I was on my stomach, the immense pressure of the ending wake pressing against my legs. I managed to heave myself onto my back, blinking up at the sky.

  I heard voices, and then Martha and the others were bending over me.

  “She’s at the end of her wake,” said Martha. “We don’t have much time. We have to find Cannon.”

  “I think I know where he is,” said Whitley, her face grave.

  When she told us the location, no one spoke. Of all possible places in space and time, this one seemed the most frightening, and the most impossible.

  “No,” said Martha. “No way. It’s too risky for Bee.” She was helping me to my feet, pulling me toward the edge of the quarry. “We should go back to Wincroft.”

  “We need Cannon for the vote,” I said. “I’ll go. I’ll get him and bring him back.”

  Martha looked anxious. But there wasn’t time to argue. I could feel the wake traveling up my neck. I knew what to do. I stared down at the quarry and the lake, so far below.

  This was the same journey Jim had made. My Jim.

  “I’ll see you there,” I whispered.

  They were watching me, afraid, but there was no time and nothing to say to reassure them. I squeezed their hands, one by one.

  Then I jumped.