Stay calm, I tell myself. It’s a process. You can’t expect overnight results. If she was just going to find me annoying, why would so many factors work so perfectly to bring us together? Short answer: they wouldn’t bother. And that’s why I’m back at Bluebell’s in a collapsing brocade chair, inhaling cocoa and shortbread, while closing time creeps up on me.
Something weird that I hadn’t totally registered before: I can’t seem to read my own writing. As in, at all. My hand seems to be full of enthusiasm for the creative process, but my eyes flinch at the wriggling ink. I have to assume I’m writing about her?
But she doesn’t show, she doesn’t show. And after a while the counter dude comes to kick me out. His piercings bayonet the innocent air, and we hate each other.
The instant I’m back in the street I get the feeling that things aren’t entirely right. I need to be on the lookout, but for what?
For what? My mind starts to sing with alertness in a whole new way; I didn’t know I was capable of it. That mailbox on the corner, for example: it’s as if I’m watching it from every angle at once, holding it suspended in my mind like some kind of 3D rendering. I can rotate it, inspect it inside and out. I can breathe in the traffic vibrations sliding through its metal sides.
The mailbox checks out. So do the fifteen squares of sidewalk between me and it. I walk that far, then stop again. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back, and even though I’m not particularly close to my mom I stick to the squares. The bookstore’s display window glows on my right, limning the mailbox and a sapling in soft gold. The excessively pierced jerk from the café walks out behind me—I don’t need to look to know it’s him, because even his scrubby little beard prods my consciousness on a hair-by-hair level—locks the door, and glares at my back for a few beats before he turns away.
Bye-bye.
Shit. Something else is moving; it’s my fault for letting the café guy distract me. A twitchy paper-cut of a motion somewhere near my left shoe.
A thin black line is fidgeting an inch above the ground. I stare, and it looks like an optical illusion, like the kind of artifact that might jump around on your retinas after you gazed at a bright crack for too long.
A crack. I understand it’s a significant detail before I grasp why. Not a line.
Oh. It’s one of the cracks that surrounds my square of pavement. It’s lifting free of the sidewalk and ascending the air with spasmodic little jerks. Higher and higher. It’s like a slim drain made of pure darkness, and my mind is sliding into its dancing suction.
Shit, shit, shit. That is not a metaphor. The line is drinking me down.
I reel back, but they’re all around me now. Black sidewalk cracks prance on all sides, slurping on the edges of my mind. They gouge my view of the tree trunks across the street, gash the parked cars, carve into the bright jackets of the books gleaming behind glass. There’s a straining in my skull as my consciousness tightens like cloth yanked in every direction at once.
They’re going to rip me apart and feed on the scraps. Spew my remnants through to—somewhere, crumple me, chew me into compost. Why do I get the feeling it’s happened before, this mashing down, over and over? Why am I sick to death of being recycled? It’s not a great moment to dwell on the question. I scramble up onto the mailbox, clinging on all fours to its blue metal lid, but the cracks keep on with their inexorable twitching up, and up, and up.
Even though the cracks are about to devour me, I’m impressed. This is an advanced stunt. I feel, I don’t know, a sort of professional admiration for it, though I know that makes no sense. Somebody did this to me, that much I get. It follows that somebody hates my guts.
There’s a shredding pain along my left thigh. I’ll never get to kiss her now, or even touch her hand.
A silver-blue car shrieks to a stop beside me. The crack jitters in front of it, crossing out the shimmering paint behind. The darkness is accumulating now like a heap of sticks, but I can make out the car’s passenger door swinging open.
“Angus!” A spill of long silver hair, warm brown eyes. Whose, again? “Angus, get in!”
Lore. But the crack separates me from her car, a hungry midair moat. It wobbles, it craves.
“I can’t get to you!”
“Leap over it! And pull your feet up!”
I can see what she’s thinking, but it seems challenging. That dark dancing crack is already a good bit higher than the mailbox’s top. I’ll have to spring way up and out at the same time from my slippery blue summit, and I can barely get traction.
It’s that or have my psyche drawn and quartered, sucked straight from my skull. And I have to do it now, or I’ll have no chance of getting over that thing.
I scramble my feet into a steadier position, crouch, and propel myself up into the night. There’s a sharp streak of pain deep in my head as if a strip of glue had torn away, taking brain tissue with it—the bitch of a crack bit me!—but then I’m crashing down. My shins hit the edge of Lore’s car and my upper body topples through the open door and onto the seat.
She’s dragging me in by the shoulders even as I’m swinging my legs in behind me. I wind up in a tilted fetal position while she leans over me to slam the door, her foot already pounding down on the gas.
It takes me a moment to catch a first breath and straighten myself out, and several breaths more before I can speak. My head is screaming and my heart jabbers like a cage full of monkeys. When I twist around to look behind us, my odd heightened sense of perception is gone, and I don’t see anything but ordinary street and electric-frosted night.
“Lore,” I manage, “Lore, you’re so great! Thank you. Those things would have killed me.” Then I turn back to her. Her profile, weary but still strong and defined, her golden-brown skin ribboned in bluish light, her brown eyes fixed on the road. We’re peeling away at wild speed, heading down streets I haven’t seen before. It’s already getting leafier than I would expect in the middle of a city; are we entering some huge park?
“They would,” she agrees. “You would have been destroyed barely a week after your appearance here, and it would have been due to your own carelessness. Angus, I absolutely expected you to do better than that!”
“You’re criticizing me for almost getting murdered? That seems pretty unfair. I have no idea why some stranger would try to off me!”
Shit. I’m almost whimpering. There’s a flash in my head, not quite a face. Turning away under a spill of honey hair and smiling pure loathing. Who?
Lore’s scolding has such a warm, motherly tone, though; it’s almost like she’s chewing me out because she cares about me. The car is zooming now down an alley of vastly arching mossy trees, a primeval tangle of night-stained green.
I watch Lore nod in the mirror, moonlit reflections waving on her deep eyes—not an agreement nod, a so-that’s-what-you-think nod.
“It’s only effective on a very temporary basis,” Lore says, and her voice sounds like she’s kidding but I don’t quite get the joke. “And once you’ve killed someone enough times, you can start to be fond of them.”
I give a little laugh just so she won’t think I’m too dim to follow her humor, even if I am.
The car swerves around a bend, and an enormous chasm opens up on our right. There aren’t any streetlights out here, but the moon is full and throbbing and bigger than I’ve ever seen it, glazing everything in pearl. It echoes a cluster of irregularly spiraled towers and domes glowing at the depths of that crevasse; they’re made of something pale and semitranslucent, like quartz or cloudy ice. After a moment, I realize how huge that clump of shining buildings must be, a city within this city.
A sound ravels up from the depths: a scream threading into my mind, shrill and bright. A girl’s voice; I know I’ll never reach her in time. That flash again, her honey hair rippling up in the blast.
I’m so sorry, I think. It’s too late to save you.
The road gives another quick twist, and the chasm vanishes behind dense foliage. Taking the scream with it, thank God. Did Lore hear anything?
“Does everybody know about this park?” I try. I’m realizing that I sometimes have trouble understanding what would seem normal to normal people and what wouldn’t. It’s like I have some kind of dyslexia, but for reality instead of reading.
Lore smiles, more to herself than to me. “It isn’t widely recognized, no.”
“Okay.” Then what is it?
“Did that city look familiar to you, Angus? Would you say you’ve been there before?”
Lore’s tone is cautious, measured, like it’s a sensitive question. And it kind of is, because I feel a suppressed boiling in my guts. A punishing snap of headache where the crack bit me. What business is it of hers, I’d like to know.
“I’ve never even heard of it,” I snarl. Way too nastily, actually, but Lore just nods.
“It seems unlikely that the entity which attacked you is a stranger, though. And if you have no idea who or why, it might be time to question your memory.”
“You seem like you know a lot about me.” I think about that. “Am I supposed to know why? Like, did we meet each other before, somewhere?”
Maybe in that city. Is that why she asked about it?
Maybe in a lot of cities. But how is that possible? It’s not like I ever traveled much.
Where do these nagging thoughts come from? The seared stripe in my brain blinks neon pain at me.
“We could have,” Lore says. Somehow we’re back in the warehouse district, and she takes advantage of a traffic light to glance toward me with a wry smile. “Stranger things have happened, my poor young friend.”
She likes me and she feels sorry for me, and I have no idea why. Her pity gets into my guts, knots them into an anxious mess. I decide to keep my mouth shut; talking just increases the risk she’ll say things I can’t stand to hear. We roll on again and pretty soon we’re pulling up on West Street right by my rusty green door. The gold mylar parallelograms around 2021 glint like wet teeth.
“Angus, before you go.” She’s reaching into a pocket. “I have something for you.”
She dangles a long silver chain in front of me. Hanging from it is a flat, dark beach stone, sort of like the ones she wears, but bigger. It’s maybe an inch and a half long, an approximate oval with a hole drilled in the top for the chain. I take it in my hand, and it has the most alluring satiny smoothness. Stroking it instantly makes me feel better, soothes the pain in my head and settles the blood that’s been banging around my system ever since the cracks jumped me.
Something interesting about the pendant: it’s mostly dark gray, but on one side half of it brightens along an imperceptible gradation. When I look closely my own dark eye winks back. It’s stone that reflects like a mirror. I didn’t know anything like it even existed.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Why did I have to go and get pissy with Lore, when she’s so awesome?
“Wow,” I say. “Thank you. That’s so cool.”
“It’s more than that,” Lore says, and I think I kind of knew. “If you wear it faithfully, it will help you.”
“You mean like protect me?” That sounds useful. Somebody wants me mulched, wood-chippered, chowed into cat food, so magical talismans are totally in order.
“If not you, then someone you love,” Lore says. She’s twisting in the driver’s seat to face me, enveloping me in her searching gaze. “There’s someone already, isn’t there?”
I can’t get over how insightful Lore is.
“Yeah,” I admit. “She works at that café. Bluebell’s. But we’ve barely even talked. It’s just—I’ve seen her and I know I love her, but it would be hard to explain why?”
“You’ll understand the whole why of it in time,” Lore assures me. “Wear the stone all the time, then. For her sake.”
“Okay,” I promise. “Shit, so would the mystery person who’s trying to kill me actually be vicious enough to target her too? That’s so horrible!”
“I wouldn’t suggest you take any chances, especially not with her safety. Evil has a way of manifesting where you least expect it. Here.”
Lore lifts the pendant from my hands and slides the chain over my head. The stone drops against my heart. Its weight is reassuring, subtly warm, like a hand tenderly pressed against me.
“I’ll wear it every day, then. I’d never want her to go through anything like I just did, with those cracks!” That reminds me. “Um, thanks for saving my life tonight?”
“You don’t need to thank me. I’m doing the best I can with a difficult situation.” Once again I’m having trouble following her thinking, but she doesn’t elaborate. “Good night, Angus. Angus Farrow, still innocent. Still unbroken. Let’s keep you that way.”