The Conformity (18 page)

Tap tromps off and I follow him, trying not to slip on any loose books lying on the floor. The light from the trash-can fire gives us enough illumination to see, but it's very dark now. We both walk with our hands out.

One of the doors to the offices has been kicked in or otherwise forced open, hanging crazily on one hinge. In the offices, we rummage about long enough to find the lost and found box—full of brightly colored knit caps and wool mittens and musty-smelling scarves. We're able to beef up our poor winter wear with some of the kids' castoffs. In a desk we find a couple of scented candles and some saltine crackers. An empty thermos that smells of chicken noodle soup. I light a candle—its perfume tickles my nose—and take the thermos to the restroom to rinse it out in the sink. Thank goodness the water here still works.

Tap keeps rummaging. Finds a knitted shawl—the kind a grandmother might wear—that he tosses over his shoulders on top of his blanket/cape and wraps around his torso. As he does, he looks at me and says, “Not a word, dude.”

“My lips are sealed, Gamgam.”

He snorts and moves to open another drawer in a desk. He pulls out a canned weight-loss shake, tosses it to me, and withdraws another for himself.

We drink the shakes, standing in the near-dark. In a shitburg town twenty miles away from where my best friend lies dying. We're almost finished with them when the sound of the library door opening echoes like a gunshot. Torchlight whites out our candles.

A heavy male voice: “Come out of there and into the light of the All-Seeing.”

seventeen

–they call me thief, they call me trailer trash, but that kid called me titty baby and all the C-wing goons laughed and watched me with lidded eyes, appraising, scanning for any weakness. So I follow him down out of B wing on a Saturday morning for breakfast when everyone else is in Commons. He's older than me, seventeen, but thin with long arms and a malicious grin that tells me he'll be hell on earth when he gets out of here, this stint in Casimir is just another notch on his belt, a little more clout in his street cred. But I could give a shit. I've been here longer and know the ropes. I follow him, hanging back, and we pass Sloe-Eyed Norman and pass through the howling boys of Commons on the way to the mess hall and in the crook of hallway with the disabled camera, Ox waits. It's expensive, what he wanted from me to be there, but I can afford it. But just barely. What I can't afford is not doing anything after this cock-munch dissed me in front of C wing. We settle things here, however we can. When the bitch sees Ox, he stops and backs up and then sees me and the malicious grin dies on his face and all that's left there is a wounded look, the look of someone that's been abandoned, or hurt, terribly hurt by someone he trusts. It's an of-course-this-is-happening-because-the-world-is-a-sewer look and for a moment I feel a sinking inside because I'm the one making his world a little shittier. But it's only for a moment and then Ox wades in, big fist falling, and the boy doesn't have any time for reflection on the harshness or shittiness of the world–

CASEY

It's too easy to forget what's going on out there. But sometimes when I close my eyes, even at the strangest of times, I see the towering walls of people, melded together, staggering through the world and pouring steam and waves of stench. Sometimes, even when all of the lodge is silent and the snow hisses outside, I catch my breath in a panic, race to the window, waiting for the silhouette of the merged form of thousands of souls to appear, lumbering, bellowing. Moaning.

Jack and Tap haven't returned, and it's dark now, though the day never lightened to more than a gray gloom. Negata hasn't said anything for hours, and his inscrutable face makes me wonder, sometimes, if he's not sleeping with his eyes open. The man possesses a stillness that I've never seen in anyone, neither priests, nor monks, nor statues.

Ember's disappeared in the lodge—she said to get some more blankets, because the temperature has dropped drastically since nightfall. I've asked Negata to get more firewood.

For the moment I'm alone except for Shreve, lying beside me. His hair is tousled and his skin pale, but the swelling on his head has gone down and his chest rises and falls with more strength than when we pulled him from the snow. He seems stronger. Yet he's still not awake.

I reach into the fire with the ghosthand and turn the logs and pile the coals so that when Negata returns the fire will be perfect for whatever logs are left to us.

I touch Shreve's cheek, stand, and, taking a candle, turn to go find Ember.

It's a big building, two stories and there might be an attic, but we haven't been able to find access to it in the dim light. Everything's hushed except for the occasional
crack
of a falling branch weighted with snow outside. I hold the votive candle high overhead so that to an observer it would seem to be floating. At first I feel a strain keeping it there, three or four feet above my head, but after a while it becomes normal.

There are three stairwells, the one in the atrium and one at either end of the lodge, which is shaped in a rough U so that the valley—whenever it's not so overcast—can be seen through the big front windows. It was built in another time, when materials were rugged and the scale of everything was larger, so that the rooms are tall and airy (and hard to heat) and the hallways are quite wide. The floating candle makes everything seem darker at the edges.

I take the atrium stairs, a grand affair of heavy wooden planks. The only sounds are the soft padding of my shoes on the steps. The air is hushed, expectant.

Upstairs, I send the candle floating down the left hall. “Ember?”

Someone is there, I think. Just out of reach of the candlelight.

I walk forward. “Ember. Don't—”

The shadow moves to the right, through a door and to the back of the building. I follow, sending the candle floating after it. In the doorway, I stop. It's a bedroom, with a stripped bed, a small dresser, and a bedside table. The heavy drapes are pulled aside and the window, rimed in frost, is lit from beyond with a bluish light. As I look at it, a face appears in the pane, dark. Girlish, long dark hair. Eye sockets dark. Mouth open in a bell. Blinking, I rub my eyes. Not been getting enough sleep, watching over Shreve. And it's almost too cold to sleep anyway. When I look again, the face is gone. Then, slowly, the cold radiator begins to tick, as if it was heating up. But the room remains so cold. The ticks resolve themselves into a rhythm, slow. Somewhere down the hall there's a bump. A slide like someone dragging something. A tick.

Bump. Slide. Tick tick.

Bump. Slide. Tick. Tick.

Then it stops.

I get the hell out of there.

I find Ember back with Negata. She's begun piling blankets on the floor.

“I was looking for you.”

“Here I am,” she says, making a pallet from a particularly moth-eaten wool blanket. “Saw something weird and went to check it out.”

“Was it a face at the window?”

“No, someone standing in the hall. And a noise. I might have just imagined it.”

“So now we're being haunted.” I can't help but think of Bernard and Danielle sleeping out underneath the snow, bloody smears.

Ember's expression clouds, and she must be thinking the same thing. But she shakes her head and moves on. “We're so low on wood, I think this is the only room we can heat for now. Might have enough for a day or two.”

I move to sit down by Shreve. Negata watches me, silent.

“That's a good idea. No more keeping two rooms heated. We'll have to all sleep here.” I glance at Ember, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“I've shut every door I could. We need to shut those two that lead to the front hall. Pull the drapes. Less draft. Less air to heat.”

Negata nods.

“Makes sense,” I say. I wait a few moments. “When are you going to do it?”

“Do what?” she says, like an idiot.

But I shake my head and say nothing. Why get into it with her? She knows what I'm talking about.

She fishes in her jacket pocket and withdraws a cigarette. She holds it out to me, and I shake my head. “Got a light?” she asks. “Don't want to waste matches.”

I grab a small cherry coal from the fire with the ghosthand
and hold it out to her. She touches the end of the cigarette to it and draws long enough for it to glow. I replace the coal and Ember stares at it, fascinated, as it floats back to the fire. The smell of the burning tobacco mixes with the hardwood smoke of the fire. It's not altogether unpleasant.

She smokes in silence for a long while, and when she's done, she flicks the butt into the fireplace and sighs.

“Okay. I guess I'm going in.”

“Tell Shreve …”

She looks at me sharply. “Tell him what?”

“Tell him it's time to wake up.”

She nods, the muscles in her cheek standing out. She crosses her legs on the pallet she's made and stares into the fire.

“Might be he can't. Swelling brain or something,” she says. She glances at me and then at Shreve's face, giving nothing up. “But we'll see. And away we go.”

eighteen

–she's gone when Vig and I get back to the trailer. I cook him Hamburger Helper, putter about, ignoring my homework. It's not until the next morning that I even notice she's still not there, it's not rare for her to stay out after her lunch and evening shifts at the Waffle Hut. I don't realize she's not sleeping it off until Vig says, “Where's Momma, Shree?” and I pad back to her little bedroom at the end of the trailer. Walking back there, part of me hopes she's done us all a favor and suffocated in her own vomit, but the room is empty. The next day he asks, “Where's Momma, Shree, where's Momma?” over and over and over again and I finally break down and call the police who come by and remove us from the trailer and place us into child services and we spend the night with prayer people, always asking for blessings from the bearded god on a fluffy white cloud before we can eat Spaghetti-Os or Spam sandwiches. It's two more days before she comes back to get us. In the car she smokes and says nothing and it's only after Vig's in bed does she come and stand in front of me, an intense and unreadable look on her face. She slaps me, hard, bringing tears to my eyes. When my vision clears and she comes back into focus, there's a pensive look on her face like she's deliberating something and then she's decided. She slaps me again, a big open-handed slap that knocks me sideways and into the trailer wall. She says nothing. She doesn't even look at me. She goes to the kitchenette and takes the vodka bottle there and walks stiffly back to her room and shuts the door–

EMBER

Used to emotions, picking up strong feelings and the most obvious of thoughts—lust, rage, love, jealously. Only once have I ever had direct mind-to-mind contact with anyone else, and that was with the Li'l Devil here.

Think about how he felt, his presence. The scent of him, way he held himself, that ridiculous shit-eating grin. The smell lingers, that slight essence of him that you don't really notice until it's disassociated from the body. It seems stronger then.

That's what I focus on. The scent of his mind.

Bernard said he thought he'd taste of chocolate. But he didn't. He tasted of yeast and bread. Danielle had the scent of cinnamon and ozone.

Shreve? He smelled of everything and nothing at all. Of alcohol and water and unnamed spices. But there was a pressure there, to his mind. He's more than a scent.

I think of his face, the intense, wolfish gaze. His eyes are blue, but in my mind's eye I see them as gray and that's okay. Messy hair. Narrow, bony chest. The sound of his voice, whip-crack intense. His ferocity in speech. In action.

He's there. I feel him.

Not so much popping a bubble but merging with him. For a moment I'm surrounded by a tempest of scents and smells and sounds, all ineffably Shreve, and then I'm in.