I’M SORRY,” VOLT STAMMERED. “I didn’t know.” He gave the covered object a frightened sideways glance. “What is that?”
“She’s not a what. She’s the Demon Queen. And now she’s looked at you. Your soul is hers.”
“Honor’s just joking,” Jesse quickly said. “Aren’t you, Honor?”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s all a joke. My dad thought it was so funny, he laughed his head off.”
“I’d better get home,” Volt said, and ran for the stairs.
Jesse turned. “Volt, wait up. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Honor caught his arm to hold him back. “Don’t be stupid. You know what happens.”
“Nothing will happen,” Jesse said. He ran up the stairs.
Honor shouted after him, “You’d better start believing it, Jesse.”
Volt was already heading down the sidewalk when Jesse caught up to him. The boy’s shoulders were hunched with worry. “What did she mean, my soul is hers? Am I going to die?”
“Of course not. It’s just a Balinese mask. Her mom’s writing a book about all that stuff you saw. It’s going to be as boring as a dictionary.”
“It didn’t look very boring. It looked scary.”
“Of course it did. That’s what it looked like. But that’s all. Doesn’t mean it’s real.”
Volt thought about that. “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t sound very convinced.
When they got to Volt’s house, his mother had changed to sweats and was cleaning the oven, rubber gloves on her hand. “That was quick,” she said. “I’m sure August was feeling guilty about not practicing the piano, weren’t you, honey?”
That levered him out of his funk. “I was not,” he said indignantly.
“Thanks for keeping him out of trouble, Jesse.”
“Sure,” Jesse said, trying to look innocent.
He hadn’t reached the end of the block when he heard Mrs. Volter calling out for him to stop. She bore down on him, pulling Volt along with a hand clamped to her son’s wrist. She hadn’t taken off her cleaning gloves. She pointed a rubbery finger at the rice grains still stuck on Volt’s forehead and neck. “What’s this?” She didn’t give Jesse a chance to frame a diplomatic reply. “August says Honor put this on him to protect him from black magic. What on earth was going on there?” She folded her arms across her chest, as hissy and sparkly as a broken high-voltage cable.
Jesse picked his words. “Honor showed us some spiritual books her mom is studying. The rice grains are a Balinese tradition.”
“A heathen practice.”
“Not to the Balinese—”
“You shouldn’t have let August get involved in anything like that.”
“It happened too fast for me to do anything.”
“Honor’s a disturbed girl. Losing her father like that, it’s understandable. I’m praying for her, we’re all praying for her, but you, you should have known better.”
“I’m sorry.” Jesse didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m so disappointed in you.” She unfolded her arms and marched off, hauling Volt after her.
When Jesse got home, Miss Myrna was banging up against the porch’s screen. How had she gotten out of her cage? She settled down on the sill and cocked her head at Jesse. “Set me free, why don’t you?”
Jesse frowned at her. “What did you say?”
“Set me free, why don’t you?”
He laughed. “So you did remember.”
She said it again. It sounded to Jesse as if she actually understood what it meant. Except, of course, birds were birds, with bird brains. She spread her wings and beat against the screen.
“Oh come on, Miss Myrna, you wouldn’t last a day out there.”
“Perhaps that does not matter to her,” a voice behind him said. “A day of freedom is sometimes better than a life in prison.”
Jesse spun around. There, in the cage, stood the old man, sucking on his eternal cigarette. The strong sweet scent of cloves filled the porch.
Miss Myrna was frozen in midflight, wings spread but not flapping. Outside, a leaf falling from the tree hung in midair.
“I now have to resort to stopping time in order to come here,” the old man said. “It’s extremely difficult and very dangerous magic.”
Jesse rubbed his forehead, using his palm to block his eyes. When he lowered his hand, the man was still there. “You can’t stop time. Nobody can. It’s impossible.”
“Stop prattling. We have no time for silly talk. Rangda is here, the queen of witches, the mistress of demons.”
Jesse thought of that mask, cold and powerful, biding its time in Honor’s basement. For the first time, he allowed the thought that perhaps there were things in this world that were beyond the reach of reason and the law of large numbers.
“In human form,” the man said, pacing in the cage. His steps did not crinkle the newspaper, which remained as firm as cement. “I was a fool not to realize this earlier. The mask is the vessel of her full power, and the girl is preparing the way for their union. It is in motion. The night of bulan tilem. The dark of the moon.”
Jesse was thrown back into confusion. “You’re saying Rangda is here as a person?”
“Are you deaf?”
“Who?”
“Who can tell? A migrant worker, a town matron. I doubt the girl herself knows. Rangda often hides among the ranks of the fearful and the ignorant, and of them there is an uncountable number.” He pointed the cigarette at Jesse. “When the center is opened, however, the Demon Queen will assume her full power and make her true appearance, descending on a great wind. And chaos will reign forever.”
The way he said that, Jesse saw in his mind a shattered and clawed landscape stretching out to the horizon, furtive red-eyed creatures in the shadows of twisted trees, and mutant fields of corn.
The man noisily exhaled more smoke. “Where’s your keris?”
“My what?”
“This! Your weapon!” He reached away from him and seemed to pull from the warp of frozen space-time a wavy-bladed knife.
“I don’t have one.”
He shook his head in disbelief before glancing heavenward. “He doesn’t have one. What good, pray tell, is he?”
Jesse had had enough. “Look,” he snapped, “if you’re going to keep popping into my life, would you mind telling me what’s going on? You obviously know something about me I don’t, and instead of getting angry at me all the time, why don’t you just tell me?”
That hit the mark, leaving the priest looking as startled as a chicken. “Do you not know? The boat—the girl—has no one at least explained these things to you?”
“No.” Some of Jesse’s anger seeped away into curiosity. “How did I get on that boat?”
The old man appeared both astounded and deeply troubled. “I apologize. I assumed that others…” His image wavered, like a signal going bad. His eyes flared in alarm. “I must go. Return to my flesh. An enemy is dangerously close. I will come to you and explain, but in the meantime, believe what I say. You must, you absolutely must, stop the girl. Before the dark of the moon.” He flicked the cigarette out onto the floor. “Proof for your doubts.”
He vanished.
The leaf resumed its fall. Miss Myrna’s wings flapped loudly.
Jesse stared at the cigarette, smoldering on the floor, and was vaguely aware of footsteps in the hall as he knelt to pick it up. Mrs. Mindell opened the back door. “We’re home early,” she said, announcing the obvious, and then cut herself off. “Jesse, are you smoking?”
Mr. Mindell had wandered in behind her, a beer from the fridge in his hand. He sniffed the sweet smoke with a frown. “Is that marijuana?”
“No, no,” Jesse said hastily. “It was a man. A tramp. I think he was after Miss Myrna. I scared him off, just a couple of seconds ago. Honest.”
A lie, but what could he say? A Balinese time-traveling priest showing up on the Mindells’ back porch? Yeah, right.
Mr. Mindell put Miss Myrna back into her cage and called the police. A short while later, Officer Jenk drove up in his patrol car. He poked around the backyard for a few minutes and checked the window. He took the cigarette butt, sniffed it, and bagged it. Back in the kitchen, he declined a beer because he was on duty but accepted a glass of lemonade.
“Somebody’s going around mutilating birds,” he said. “The Shields lost their parakeets and old Mrs. Hawley, she lost her two parrots the other day. We found one torn to shreds.”
“That’s terrible,” Mrs. Mindell said.
Officer Jenk guzzled the lemonade and then pulled out his notebook and asked Jesse to describe the man.
“Squat, muscular, with small ears,” Jesse said, describing one of the Homeland Security agents who’d interrogated him, but adding tattoos and long stringy hair. As he did so, he stared at the bagged cigarette. Unfiltered. A blue band around the soggy bottom. Lumpy, hand-rolled.
Proof for your doubts, the old man had said.
Jesse was as twitchy as a squirrel, even more worried than before about Volt.
Before dinner, he phoned the Volter house, hoping to get Volt. Mrs. Volter answered. He didn’t say anything. Just before he hung up, he heard Volt sneezing in the background and his clogged voice saying, “Mom, are you sure it’s hay fever?”