I was there. I saw it. I felt it. I knew exactly who fired that gun. It was a damned given, so what was going wrong with the grand jury? I’d pointed out the right picture in the mug shot book. My feet pounded on the stairs. Bailey caught me by the shoulders.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”
When our eyes met, though, I knew it wasn’t. Bailey was the one who had optimism on her side. Instead of certain, she looked worried. No doubt, I looked crazed. Between the two of us, I expected we had a right to be both.
TWENTY
Grey
Here I am, rampant.
I stand in the lamp gallery, a jar in hand. The light inside it doesn’t glow so bright as the one that spins behind me. When I hold the jar high, it seems almost empty.
Four in a hundred years. It’s an impossible task, and it always has been. Sisyphus and his rock. My humble self and these souls. I’d laugh, but nothing’s funny anymore.
I keep throwing myself off the lighthouse. Again and again, I plunge into the sea. Ripped apart and reincorporated, I find the smallest pleasure in the fact that it’s starting to hurt. My veins bear no blood, my flesh contains no bone. But whatever magic keeps me together, it’s exhausted and aching.
The masquerade of breakfasts and dinners is over. If I were a real boy, I’d be parched. Nothing to drink for days—could be a week or more. Letting time slip away is a gift to myself. Better than music boxes or books or nonsense, all the nonsense I used to wish for.
As autumn cedes to winter, I cede to the mist.
Like a monk, I shaved my head. Like an ascetic, I stripped to the waist. No shoes, no gloves. No tie, no hair oil. Now I realize the true choice I had when I took Susannah’s place. The soul collection only distracted me. It was more fundamental than that. Or should I say, more elemental.
Be human or be mist. Lure the next Grey to the island or surrender. All this time, the island knew, the lighthouse knew, that I was meant to succumb. Magic mocks me. It laughs and echoes through the trees.
The only reason Willa came was to put on a show. To delight whatever ancient god or demon that resides within this rock.
Reason tells me she was a pawn, but the elements have no reason. They’re capricious and unknowable; they contain no conscience. I hate her, I curse her. I stand here at the edge of my world with her brother’s soul in the palm of my hand.
I’ve no idea what will happen if I break the glass.
What happened when I captured him? It’s a question that only now occurs to me. Did I impede his progress to heaven or hell? Do those ethereal realms even exist? This bottled light could be anything—a breath, a thought. The whole sum of a being, and I keep it in a cupboard, like last summer’s jam.
Leaning over the rail, I hold the jar aloft. The lighthouse groans, the beam making another pass. When the light drowns me, I drop my prize. My whole purpose for being. Four souls in a hundred years; now I have but three.
The sea roars, and the gears grind. Everywhere, wind swirls and whispers. These raw aspects of nature clamor; they devour the sound of glass breaking on the rocks. Avidly, I watch. But there’s no light lifting ever skyward. No flicker delving into the deep. It seems—when I set free a collected soul—that nothing happens at all.
I’m disappointed.
Because I can, I call the fog until it’s thick around the light. I, too, am capricious, so I banish it by sheer force of will. Then I fling myself over the side again. The sensation of gravity gives way to a sudden, concussive ache.
When I come back together, I find myself standing in front of the cupboard. My remaining three jars tremble. Pulsing with light, they seem to react to one another. And when I reach for one, the lights within them dim. Perhaps they realize what comes next.
Perhaps they realize that I’m the monster on the rock.
TWENTY-ONE
Willa
Because the fog was so erratic, some of the juniors started gathering the little kids in groups to guide them to the school. Parents walked their kids to the base of the hill, then we waited until we had a whole class to lead.
The heat from the path thinned the haze, giving us a clear shot from the village to the school. As long as everybody stayed on the pavement, we could get up safely and back down again at the end of the day.
Somehow, it just got organized. Seth had kindergarteners, and Bailey scored the sixth-graders. They had no trouble herding their classes to Vandenbrook.
It wasn’t so easy for me. I ended up with fourth-graders. Though I couldn’t prove it, I suspected their parents gave them Red Bull and straight sugar for breakfast. They were old enough that they argued about holding hands, and little enough that they could disappear in two seconds.
I lost the Lamere twins the second day and nearly had a nervous breakdown. Calling my throat raw, I scoured the path from top to bottom four times. Right when I thought I’d have to call the police, I found them. They sat on a stump just off the path, building a faery house out of shells and sticks.
After that, I made my kids say one letter of the alphabet each, in order, all the way up the hill. If a J or a Q dropped off, I knew I had a runner.
Denny streamed past with her white blond hair and an orderly line of first-graders. It wasn’t until she got the whole class ahead of me that she turned around. And it unnerved me, because she met my gaze on purpose. Her face was soft, her lips pursed.
She looked thoughtful. Or sorry. Something sympathetic, and it dragged a cold touch along the nape of my neck. That wasn’t the face of the girl who’d spat at my feet or gone riding with my boyfriend. I raised my hand to acknowledge her.
Fog curling around her pale head, Denny only stood there. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “I liked Levi, you know.”
Stiff, I tried to nod. “There was a lot to like.”
Whatever had stopped Denny pushed her to move again. She swept up her first-graders and flowed on toward school. Her voice echoed in my head. It hurt in a whole new way to hear my brother’s name. Like forcing a needle through a blister and going too deep. It left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
I turned back to my fourth-graders, then heard Nick calling in the distance. It was another blister to recognize my name on his voice, actually. We hadn’t talked since the bonfire; I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But his little sister was in fourth grade, and she hadn’t been at the base of the hill when we were ready to head up. They must have been running late together.
I put one hand on each of the twins’ heads to keep them from wandering and called back, “I’m not going anywhere!”
From the pale, Nick appeared. He was shaggy as ever, clinging to his sister’s hand. But instead of letting go, he plowed into my fourth-graders and pointed back to town. “Your mother’s been trying to call you. She says go home right now.”
My heart knotted, and I shook my head. “I can’t, I’ve got to walk them up.”
“She smells like cheese,” Jamie Lamere volunteered beneath my hand.
Nick clamped him by the back of the neck and nodded me away. “I’ve got ’em. Seriously, Willa, you better go.”