Vassa in the Night (24 page)

Her slender hand drapes along the top of one photograph in particular. She doesn't say anything but I have the distinct impression that there's nothing accidental about her pose. Once I've made it over to her, half-squirming and half-climbing, I pick the picture up. The frame is especially gorgeous on this one, gold and enamel set with opals, so it must be extra important.

At first glance, though, the image is nothing special. Two women, maybe in late middle age, wearing sloppy flowered dresses and squinting into the sun. I wouldn't recognize either of them if it weren't for the inscription:
Dearest Babs, memories of you are realer to me than present hours spent with anyone else! More love than tongue can tell, Bea.

Bea. Now I remember her. Zinaida used to brag that while other girls might have fairy godmothers, her own godmother was a
witch,
and that was obviously much cooler.

Once or twice we visited Bea's apartment, where she served us acrid tea and cookies so stale that they crumbled to grayish dust when I tried to pick them up. Since my mother talked so much about Bea's spooky powers I'd sit there fidgeting, too scared to make eye contact. But whenever I did steal a glance, Bea would be staring at me. It didn't take many visits like that before I started bursting into hysterical tears whenever my mom suggested another one.

If Bea and Babs were witchy best friends once, it seems pretty clear that they aren't all that crazy about each other now.

“Babs said something about her,” I tell the singer, a little breathlessly. Her eyes seem to float in front of me, wise and gray with caramel-colored streaks radiating through their irises. “Babs said that Bea
should know better
than to send me. But I haven't seen Bea in years.”

She doesn't say anything, because giving people solid answers just isn't the way things are done here. But she stares in a way that's as vivid as speech.

“But I guess that doesn't mean that she
didn't
send me here somehow,” I say after a moment. I think it works better if I speak to these people in statements rather than questions. And in fact the sweet-faced singer manages to tell me
Yes
without saying anything.

The next thought that occurs to me is so awful that I wish I could blot it out of my brain before it has time to register. Maybe the solution to all of Erg's mysteriousness is a lot simpler than I thought.

Maybe Erg is working for somebody else, and she has been all along.

That's why we're here.
Oh, right.

“Actually,” I tell the singer, “maybe I do know how Bea sent me.” My voice sounds choked and sweat slicks my forehead. I don't know what I'm hoping for. Maybe I'm still clueless enough to hope she'll contradict me, tell me something that proves Erg is totally innocent and hasn't betrayed me—hasn't been betraying me nonstop since I was ten years old.

“Of course you know how, Vassa,” the singer says simply. Then she turns and starts burrowing into a pile of chairs and ottomans so densely jumbled they look like a thicket; I wouldn't be surprised to find that the seat cushions were sprouting thorns. Her body seems to glide into the empty spaces, fitting itself to every shadowed gap. I'm trying to follow her, but by the time I've found a crevice big enough for one shoulder she's already gone. And I'm stuck behind in this room of expensive junk. It's just me, and the photo still in my hand, and some truly hideous thoughts.

“Where are Picnic and Pangolin?” I yell after her. God, I almost forgot to ask. “I have to find them!”

“Oh, Peek-neek and Pan-go-leen,” her voice croons back from the jagged shadows; she's assumed a grotesque fake French accent and she already sounds far away. “Oh, Peek-neek and Pan-go-leen, oh vhere can zey be?”

I know I have to move. I know I have to find my mutant lawyer friends and the motorcyclist and get the hell out of this place, where every last thing I see beats at my brain and sends my emotions reeling. I can't escape the realization that I'm way too close to cracking. But for a long time I just sit on the carpet, wondering about Erg, raking my memories for clues that she's some kind of double agent and always has been. Maybe all those times when she snuck away her thieving was just the cover story, and she was actually off conniving with Bea.

Then my thoughts veer again, and I'm rocking and clutching my knees and telling myself that it
can't
be true. If I'm right, then Erg has a spark of my mother's life inside her, and, as crazy as Zinaida was, I have to believe that she did love me—I mean, more or less. You know, in her selfish and oblivious and hopelessly ambivalent way. You don't paint portraits of your daughter as a suicide, do you, unless you have some seriously mixed feelings about her?

Erg practically came out and said that she feels
trapped
with me, and maybe in some twisty underground way that's Zinaida talking. I know I was an accident—that was never a secret, not even when I was tiny—and my existence was pretty inconvenient for both my parents. My dad sometimes talked about how much more
fulfilled
he would have been if Steph and I hadn't come along; he didn't say it to our faces but he wasn't super careful about being overheard, either. Maybe my mother wouldn't have totally minded getting rid of me, and now Erg feels the same way. She could never belong to anyone else, Erg said, not even if I died, but it's possible that she'd survive just fine on her own—and have a lot more fun doing it.

This line of thought is not helping me feel especially motivated. I'm supposed to care what happens to Picnic and Pangolin—why, again?

And then Night and the doll-monster-beast in black leather—I'm going to get all bent out of shape worrying about them? What did they ever do for me—besides, you know, save my life repeatedly? Which Erg has, too, now that you mention it.

Get up, Vassa.
Ugh. It's like Erg is talking in my head; we're bound together, formally
obligated,
and I can't ever get completely away from her.

“Get up and do what you have to do, Vassa,” I say out loud, and this time the voice is all mine. “Whatever that is. Erg was right that there's no big hero coming to do it for you.”

I stand up, shove the photo into my pocket, and stare at the nearest wall, daring it to play the next trick. A flicker passes over the plaster, visibly hesitates, and then resolves itself into a door. No matter what happens, I'm going to go through.

 

CHAPTER 15

As soon as the door falls ajar I'm engulfed by darkness, as if some light-destroying force was rushing through and obliterating the parlor where I've been standing. The shock is enough to freeze me in a defensive hunch, but after a moment I draw myself straight and inch forward into empty black, my eyes wide and my breath shallow and jerky. There's an awful sense of void, of echoing depths always half a step away. Behind and forward and sideways all seem to have their own awful suction, all pulling on me at once.

After a few moments the anxiety gets to be too much and I drop to my knees, sweeping my hands across the floor in front of me. Random tiny drafts come and go against my cheek, a hush and whisper like breaths migrating from one throat to the next. Panic impales me like an icicle and I stop dead, staring everywhere in the utter nothing. I have to go back, but there is no back.

This whole bravery thing was a terrible idea. I'm not cut out for it. The disorientation dragging on my limbs gets so bad that I finally lie flat on my belly and try to slide along in that way. My arms seem cold and rigid. I feel like I'm gliding much too fast, and simultaneously not moving at all.

And then someone groans. Low and tremulous, and very close, and on all sides of me at once.

I stop dead, my breath held so tightly that it feels like my lungs are trying to crush some small animal.

The groan comes again, and this time the voice catches at my memory. I've heard it before, deep and growling, but my mind's so deadened by fear that I can't place it. The voice murmurs a little, incomprehensibly, like someone talking in their sleep. Like someone in a dream, trying desperately to get through to anyone on the outside of his unconsciousness.

It sounds like the cries of someone who never wakes up.

The floor thuds fiercely. For one disordered moment I think it has a heartbeat, but it's only my own pulse recoiling off the cold surface and shivering back through me. That voice is his, or else it's something pretending to be him, and for a long while I can't make up my mind to speak and give myself away. But, as usual, I don't seem to have much choice. “Hey,” I whisper at last, “is that you?”

No answer. Of course, even if he's close by he won't be able to hear me

But he
is
here, I'm suddenly sure of it, and I'm damned if I'm going to leave him alone in this place.

Babs isn't winning this one. She doesn't get to keep him. He can't be far, and at any moment I'm sure I'll touch him, catch his hand in mine.

He groans again. I stop to listen, but the space we're in must have horribly tricky acoustics because he seems to be everywhere at one, blurred and scattered. “Hey,” I call. “Hey, it's me, Vassa! I've come to get you out. Why can't you
hear
me?”

The problem with talking out loud is that I have to listen to my own voice, understand how childish, pathetic, and weak I sound. Anyone would think that I was begging someone to come and rescue me, not the other way around. He's here, he has to be, but at the same time he's nowhere; my breath starts to rasp and my eyes go hot with pure frustration. “I can't get you out if I can't find you! Please,
please
just tell me where you are.”

And then finally I see something: a kind of golden wink in the distance, jagged and radiant. It's there for one instant and gone the next, but I'm almost sure it was real. Maybe he heard me after all, as a cry sifting into his dreams; maybe he's trying to wake up, or to signal me. I stagger upright, making an effort to slow my breathing, and push into a void whose only landmark is my own misplaced hope. No matter who I couldn't save before, no matter if I'm stuck being a random mess of a girl, I'm still going to save
something.

The sensory deprivation must be bringing on hallucinations, because just for a moment I'm not the flesh-and-blood Vassa. Instead I'm eight years old and made entirely of living paint, my head heaped with a tottering mass of purple curls that could shame Marie Antoinette. There's a gun in my mouth; I can taste the sour steel. I can feel my finger tightening on the trigger.

And then, just like that, the image is gone and I'm back in the dark, sixteen and basically human and no one in particular. That spark comes again, a golden star with rotating blades. Then my vision seems to double, and I see two of them, blinking parallel lights high up and still far away. Haven't I seen something like them somewhere before?

I must not be afraid of falling anymore, because I'm running toward them.

If the motorcyclist had a name, I would scream it. All around me the air rumbles with his voice, and this time I know he's calling to nobody but me.

I run for what feels like a long time. After what seems like about ten minutes or so, though, I start to feel like I really should be getting someplace besides the same dark, the same rhythm, the same jagged stars, which still look exactly the same distance away, even though I must have covered well over a mile by now—in an old lady's apartment in the back of BY's. Who can afford this much space in New York?

Something tugs on my pant leg right by the ankle. Erg, probably. “Is that you, doll?”

There's no reply. Just another tug toward the left and then a sluggish shuffling sound. Definitely not the clip of tiny wooden feet.

It could be almost anything, out to lure me almost anywhere. After a moment's wavering I decide to follow. I've gotten so used to the perfect emptiness here that I've stopped holding my hands out in front of me, and after all of a dozen steps I smack nose-first into something hard. A little fumbling investigation, and it reveals itself as a door.

A way out of here, which seems like a good thing on the face of it. Except, you know, that the motorcyclist might still be trapped somewhere behind me, and I told him I'm here to help him escape. My hand tightens on the knob; now that there's finally something to hold on to, I feel sick at the thought of letting it go and stumbling blindly away again. There could be a tiny coward in my chest, chattering at me to open the damn door and get myself out of here, no matter who I leave behind.

The knob is cold and damp. If I walk back into the dark, I know beyond all doubt that I'll never find the exit again. “Where are you?” I try calling—stupidly, selfishly, hoping that he won't answer so I'll have an excuse for saving myself. “Um, motorcyclist? Where are you? I really
tried
to find you!”