Beautiful Chaos (23 page)

My head felt heavy, and I opened my eyes slowly. Bright light poured in from the unblinded window. I had fallen asleep in the chair next to Aunt Prue, the way I used to fall asleep on my mom’s chair, waiting for her to finish up in the archive. I looked
down, and Aunt Prue was lying on her bed, milky eyes open as if nothing had happened. I dropped her hand.

I must have looked spooked, because Lena looked worried. “Ethan, what is it?”

“I—I saw Aunt Prue. I talked to her.”

“While you were asleep?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But it didn’t feel like a dream. And she wasn’t surprised to see me. I had already been there.”

“What are you talking about?” Lena was watching me carefully now.

“Last night. She said I came to see her. Only I don’t remember.” It was becoming more common, and more frustrating. I was forgetting things all the time now.

Before Lena could say anything, the nurse rapped on the door, opening it just a crack.

“I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over. You’ll have to let your aunt have some rest now, Ethan.”

She sounded friendly, but the message was clear. We were out the door and into the empty hall before my heart had time to stop pounding.

On the way out, Lena realized she had left her bag in Aunt Prue’s room. While I waited for her to get it, I walked through the hallway slowly, stopping at a doorway. I couldn’t help it. The boy in the room was about my age, and for a minute I found myself wondering what it would be like to be in his place. He was still sitting up at the table, and his hand was still writing. I looked up and down the hall, then slipped into his room.

“Hey, man. Just passing through.”

I sat down on the edge of the chair in front of him. His eyes didn’t even flicker in my direction, and his hand didn’t stop moving. Over and over, he had written a hole into his paper, even into the sheet underneath.

I tugged on the paper, and it moved, an inch or so.

The hand stopped. I looked at his eyes.

Still nothing.

I tugged the paper again. “Come on. You write. I’ll read. I want to hear it, whatever you have to say. Your masterpiece.”

The hand began to move. I pulled the paper, a millimeter at a time, trying to match the speed of the writing.

this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends on the eighteenth moon the eighteenth moon the eighteenth moon this is the way the world

The hand stopped, a thin line of drool spilling across the pen and the paper.

“I got it. I hear you, man. The Eighteenth Moon. I’ll figure it out.”

The hand began to write again, and this time I let the words write over themselves until the message was lost once again.

“Thanks,” I said quietly. I looked past him, to where his name was written in dry-erase marker on the little whiteboard that was not and would never be on the door of anyone’s dorm room.

“Thanks, John.”

9.28

I
t’s some kind of sign.” I was driving Lena home, and we were tearing down Route 9. She kept glancing at the speedometer.

“Ethan, slow down.” Lena was as spooked as I was, but she was doing a good job of hiding it.

I couldn’t get away from County Care fast enough, the peach walls and sickening smell, the broken bodies and empty eyes. “His name was John, and he was writing ‘the world ends on the Eighteenth Moon’ over and over. And his chart said he was in a motorcycle accident.”

“I know.” Lena touched my shoulder, and I could see her hair curling in the breeze. “But if you don’t slow down, I’m going to do it for you.”

The car slowed, but my mind was still racing. I took my hands off the wheel, and it didn’t even swerve. “You want to drive? I can pull over.”

“I don’t want to drive, but if we end up in County Care, we won’t be able to figure this out.” Lena pointed at the road. “Watch where you’re going.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Well, let’s think about what we know.”

I dragged my mind back to the night Abraham showed up in my room. The first time I really believed John Breed was still alive. The night that started it all. “Abraham comes looking for John Breed. Vexes destroy the town and put Aunt Prue in the hospital. And I meet some guy named John there, who warns me about the Eighteenth Moon. Maybe it’s some kind of warning.”

“It’s like the Shadowing Song.” She was right. “And then there’s your father’s book.”

“I guess.” I still couldn’t bring myself to think about how my dad fit into any of this.

“So the Eighteenth Moon and John Breed are connected somehow.” Lena was thinking out loud.

“We need to know when the Eighteenth Moon is. How do we figure that out?”

“Well, that depends. Whose Eighteenth Moon are we talking about?” Lena looked out the window, and I said the one thing she didn’t want to hear.

“Yours?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s mine.”

“How do you know?”

“My birthday is a long way off. And Abraham seems pretty desperate to find John.” She was right. Abraham wasn’t looking for her this time. He wanted John. Lena was still talking. “And that guy’s name wasn’t Lena.”

I wasn’t listening anymore.

His name wasn’t Lena. It was John. And he was scribbling messages about the Eighteenth Moon.

I almost swerved off the road. The hearse righted itself, and I gave up, taking my hands back off the wheel. I was too freaked out to drive. “Do you think it could be about John Breed’s Eighteenth Moon?”

Lena twisted her charm necklace around her finger, thinking. “I don’t know, but it fits.”

I took a deep breath. “What if everything Abraham said was true, and John Breed is still alive? What if something even worse is going to happen on his Eighteenth Moon?”

“Oh my God,” Lena whispered.

The car jerked to a stop in the middle of Route 9. A truck horn blared, and I saw a blur of faded red metal spin around us. For a minute, neither one of us said a word.

The whole world was spinning out of control, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

After I dropped Lena off at Ravenwood, I wasn’t ready to go home. I had some thinking to do, and I couldn’t do it there. Amma would take one look at me and know something was wrong. I didn’t want to walk into the kitchen and pretend everything was okay—that I hadn’t seen Amma making some kind of deal with the voodoo equivalent of a Dark Caster. That I hadn’t spoken to Aunt Prue while she was lying, unresponsive, in her peach-colored prison. Or watched a random guy named John send me a message saying the end of the world was coming.

I wanted to face the truth—all the heat and the bugs and the driedup lake, the broken houses and busted roofs and cosmic Orders I couldn’t fix. The consequences Lena’s Claiming had brought on the Mortal world and Abraham’s wrath had brought on my town. As I drove down Main, it looked a hundred times worse in the daylight than it had a few nights ago in the dark.

The shop windows were all boarded up. You couldn’t see Maybelline Sutter chatting up her customers while she cut their hair too short or dyed it a shade of bluish white at the Snip ’n’ Curl. You couldn’t see Sissy Honeycutt stuffing vases full of carnations and baby’s breath at the counter of Gardens of Eden, or Millie and her daughter serving up biscuits and red-eye gravy a few doors down.

They were in there, but Gatlin wasn’t a town of glass windows anymore. It was a town of locked doors and stockpiled pantries, a town full of folks waiting for the next twister or the end of the world, depending on who you asked.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Link’s mom standing in front of the Evangelical Baptist Church when I turned down Cypress Grove. Close to half the folks in Gatlin were there, Methodists and Baptists alike—on the sidewalk, the lawn, anywhere they could elbow themselves a spot. Reverend Blackwell was standing in front of the chapel doors, underneath the words
ONLY ROOM FOR THE RIGHTEOUS IN HEAVEN.
The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up, his shirt wrinkled and untucked. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

He was holding a bullhorn—not that he needed it. He called out into the crowd of people, who were waving their own cardboard signs and crosses as if he was Elvis back from the dead.
“The Bi-ah-ble”—he always gave the word three syllables—“tells us there will be signs. Seven seals to mark the End a Days.”

“Amen! Praise the Lord!” the crowd shouted back. One voice stood out above the rest, of course. Mrs. Lincoln was standing at the base of the steps, her DAR lackeys huddled around her, arm in arm. She was carrying her own homemade sign, with the words
THE END IS NEAR
written in bloodred marker.

I pulled over next to the curb, the heat smacking me in the face the second the car stopped moving. The crooked oak shading the church was swarming with lubbers, the sun shining off the armor of their black backs.

“Conflict! Drought! Pestilence!” Reverend Blackwell paused, looking up at the pathetic, dying oak. “ ‘Fearful sights and great signs from heaven.’ That’s the Gospel a Luke.” He bowed his head respectfully for a second, then lifted it with a renewed sense of determination in his eyes. “Now, I have seen some fearful sights!”

The crowd nodded in agreement.

“A few nights ago, a tornado came down from the heavens like the finger a God! And it touched us, crushed the very framework a this fair town! A fine family lost their home. Our town library, home to the words a God and man, burned to the ground. You think that was an accident?” The reverend defending the library? That was a first. I wished my mom was here to see it.