Cloaked (11 page)

Chapter 23

Whilst he was sleeping she took the cloak from his shoulders, hung it on her own, and wished herself home again.

—“The Salad”

I’ve never been to South Carolina before. Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble visualizing it. But I kind of thought there’d be light.

There’s none. No light, and hardly any air. It feels like the time when I was eight and got locked in the storage closet. Except, that time, there were at least the shoe parts, pieces of leather, something familiar. I feel around me. Nothing to my left. To my right, I feel someone. Norina. She’s moved away from me.

“Norina, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry. It’s really dark here. Anyway, you didn’t let me finish. I was going to tell you that you need to be really specific about where you want to go. Like, you can’t just say you want to go to South Carolina or even just the town. That’s how you end up underwater or in the middle of the street or wherever we are now. You have to wish exactly where you want to go.”

“I understand.” Norina’s voice sounds different. Older, maybe. But things always sound different in the dark. I wonder where we are. A cave, maybe? My eyes aren’t getting used to this darkness. It’s darker than dark here.

“Anyway.” Try to stay calm. “If you come over here, we can use the cloak again, and go exactly where you want to go. Your parents’ house or something.”

“That von’t be necessary.”

Von’t?
An icy chill prickles across my arms. I gather the cloak closer. That’s when I realize I don’t have it anymore. Norina must have grabbed it. “Norina, I think you have my . . .”

But I stop. I know there’s no Norina, never was. I remember Victoriana’s words: Smarter men than you have been tricked. And her description of the witch who dressed up as a village girl to cast a spell on Prince Philippe. I hear a match strike, and I know I’m in the presence of that very same witch. The darkness is because I’m underground.

A circle of light grows around her, revealing the hooked nose and humped back of a crone. Sieglinde. She’s real.

“We’re not in South Carolina, are we?”

“Of course not,” the crone says. “Ve are in Zalkenbourg. But it is no matter. As soon as Siegfried comes, you vill be novere at all.”

“Siegfried?”

“My son, Siegfried. You have seen him, I believe. He rides a motorcycle.”

Yeah. I’ve seen him.

“Of course, I could kill you myself, but Siegfried vishes to do the honors. He vas in grave trouble ven he failed to kill you in Miami, so I promised that I vould vait for him.”

Oh. Well, as long as that’s what he wants.

“Thank you for the tip about being specific, by the vay.” She pulls the cloak around her. “I vish to be aboveground, in the house, in the kitchen.”

She takes the candle with her when she goes, so I’m in darkness again.

Chapter 24

I’m in Zalkenbourg, underground, waiting for some scary dude named Siegfried, with no cloak. I’m a dead man, and I’m not even a man yet. I’m just a kid. I think of every regret I have in the world, not saying good-bye to my mother, lying to Meg, going on this dangerous quest at all.

I hear noises, scratching. Is it Sieglinde or Siegfried? No. It’s just rats. And not the helpful, talking kind either. The kind with rabies.

I’m. So. Dead.

The place smells like dirt and rot. I feel the air being sucked from my lungs, and with the air I have left, I start praying, praying for my mother to be okay, for her to survive without me.

If I die here, no one will ever know what happened to me. I’ll be like the used-to-bes, people who vanished without a trace.

I step on something small. Probably a bug. But maybe, just maybe it’s the matchbook Sieglinde had.

I fall to my knees, looking for it. Light would be good. I don’t find a match, though. I feel in my pocket on the impossible chance I have anything that will help me, but all I find is a ring. Meg’s ring. Regret surges through my veins. I’ll never give Meg’s ring back.

That time I got locked in the storage closet, I panicked. I heard the door click locked behind me, and immediately, I felt my lungs collapsing, like now. I couldn’t even scream, so I passed out in sheer terror. My mother found me an hour later. Meg had told her that sometimes, when we played hide-and-seek, I hid in that closet. She’d saved my life.

I’ll never see Meg again.

I slide the ring onto my finger, remembering her giving it to me, for luck. I could use some luck now. I continue feeling around the room. Maybe there’s a trapdoor I’m not seeing. Or maybe I’m not really underground, and there are windows. Maybe.

“Hey, where am I?”

I freeze at the voice. She’s back. The witch.

“I don’t know where you are.” I try to keep my voice even. Maybe Siegfried’s not with her. “But if you give me back my cloak, I’ll—”

“Johnny?”

“Of course it’s Johnny. You know it’s—”

“Johnny, where are we? How’d we get here?”

The voice in the darkness doesn’t sound like Sieglinde’s anymore. Instead, it sounds exactly like the voice I want to hear more than any other. It sounds like Meg.

Which means it’s all a lie. Maybe I’ve passed out again, and my airless brain is playing tricks on me. Or maybe the witch is trying a new voice.

Or maybe I’m dead.

“Johnny?” Meg’s voice says.

“Stop it. You can’t make me believe it’s Meg.”

“But it is Meg.” The voice in the darkness comes closer. I shove at her, push her away. “Ow! Who else would it be?”

I flail my arms in the air, but she knows not to come close again.

“Johnny?” she says in the distance. “Who do you think it is?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe some ugly old crone who’s getting her son, Siegfried, to come kill me?”

“What?” She laughs, and it sounds just like Meg’s laugh. But Sieglinde has fooled me before. “How’d you get into this mess, Johnny? I knew when I gave you the ring, you’d probably need it. I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“What? What ring? How’d you know about the ring?”

“I’m the one who gave it to you, dummy. Oh, I said it was for luck. But really, I knew you’d get in a jam sometime, looking for that frog prince. And then, you’d need my help.”

The room, which felt cold before, is hot now, closing in on me in all directions.

“Ha! That proves you’re not Meg. Meg didn’t know about the frog prince. I told her I was looking for my father.”

“Who won the Alabama lottery?”

“Yes, who . . .” I stop. “How’d you know about that?”

“Because I’m Meg. That’s what you told me. And I knew you were lying because there’s no lottery in Alabama. My aunt lives there, and they vote on it every few years, but it never passes. Some people drive to Florida to buy a ticket, but you said he didn’t do that. You said he won the Alabama lottery.”

They’ve been watching me, I realize. Watching me with Meg, watching me talk to my mother. Maybe even with Victoriana. That explains the frog at the bed-and-breakfast. The witch was there too. She created the frog, or the illusion of him.

“Why did you lie?” she says, still using Meg’s voice.

And it’s Meg’s voice that makes me respond, makes me have to respond. “I had to lie. I couldn’t tell Meg I was looking for the frog so I could—”

“Flirt with the princess? Why couldn’t you tell Meg that, Johnny?”

“Because it . . . I don’t need to explain this to you.”

“Because it would have hurt her feelings, right? Because she’s so ugly you know no one will ever look at her the way you look at Victoriana?”

“No! That’s not it. You’re pretty. I mean, Meg is. I mean . . .” I don’t know what I mean. I’m confused from the tightness, the lack of oxygen to my brain, the walls closing in. “Can you please just leave me? Isn’t it enough that you’ve lured me here, that you’re waiting for some guy named Siegfried to come smash my head in, without having to pretend you’re Meg, my best friend in the world?”

“I
am
Meg.”

“Fine. Prove it. Tell me something only Meg would know.”

“Okay.” The voice is small in the darkness.

“And it can’t be something from the past few weeks, since Victoriana checked in.”

“All right.” A pause. She’s thinking, and for a moment, I let myself hope. What if it is Meg? What if she’s here? If she could help me get out? Meg always knows what to do.

“I thought of something,” Meg’s voice says.

“What?”

“Imelda Marcos was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t have three thousand pairs of shoes. I had one thousand sixty.’”

Imelda Marcos. She was the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of the Philippines, long before I was born. The reason I know about her was she owned more than a thousand pairs of shoes.

Meg found that quote when we first started collecting them. She got it off a website. No one else I know would have a clue who Imelda Marcos is.

“Meg!”

“Yeah, dummy. It’s me.”

“But how’d you get here?” Even as I say it, relief washes over me.

“The ring I gave you, the opal ring. It’s magical.”

“Magical?” At one time, this would have surprised me. Not now.

“My grandmother on the Murphy side was a witch. She’s the one who gave me the ring. She used to make me carry it when I was little. She told me, ‘If you get lost, Meggie girl, just put it on your finger.’ Its power is that it makes the person who gave it to you come wherever you are.”

“But you don’t have any powers? I was hoping maybe you could get me out of here, or at least make some light so I can escape. Some guy named Siegfried’s coming to kill me.”

“So you said.” I hear movement, like she’s rummaging in her purse. “I can’t get you out with magic, but I do have this.” Her face is illuminated by a tiny flashlight, the kind you attach to your keys. “Lucky I was holding my purse when you put on the ring.”

“Not so lucky. You’re stuck with me because I put on the ring when I was trapped.”

She shrugs. “It has some glitches, I guess. But we shouldn’t waste time talking about that. We need to find a way out. Where are we anyway?”

“Zalkenbourg. It’s in Europe, I guess. A witch tricked me into using my magic cloak to bring her here.”

“Sorry I asked.” She shines the flashlight. It’s barely enough of a glow to illuminate a foot of wall, but it does its job. The floor is dirt, the walls of concrete. Shiny black bugs scurry away. No door. Meg slides the light to the ceiling.

Jackpot.

A trapdoor. I rush over to it, but even when I stand on my toes, it’s too high, almost a foot above my head.

“Maybe if you get on my back, you could reach it,” I say.

“But how would you get out?”

“You could go get help.” Even as I say it, I know I’m lying. We’re in a country I can’t even spell, much less speak the language. But I know they’re not looking for Meg. She wasn’t the one who decided to risk her life for this stupid quest. She also wasn’t the one who let the witch use her cloak. So she shouldn’t get killed by Siegfried for my mistakes.

I crouch low so she can climb on my back. When she’s up, I shine the flashlight onto the trapdoor and walk, piggybacking her. She pushes it and, to my surprise, it gives.

“Can you make it?” I ask as something scurries across my foot.

She reaches up. “I think so. But wait a sec.”

“What?”

“Give me my ring back.”

If that doesn’t beat all. She’s leaving me here, to die in Europe, and she wants to make sure I don’t take her ring with me. But I say, “Sure. I guess it’s an heirloom, right?”

“It does come in handy sometimes.”

I tug it off my finger and hand it up to her. “Hurry. You’re getting heavy.”

She takes it, then straightens herself on my shoulders to reach the door. I try to hold the light steady, though my hand is shaking and my back aches. Finally, Meg pushes up the trapdoor. She looks out, and I feel air. Real outside air, filling my lungs. I breathe in deep.

“Middle of nowhere,” Meg says, looking out.

“Can you get up?” I turn off the flashlight, but there’s still some light from the full moon, peering out through tall pines.

“I think so.” She swings first one, then the other elbow onto the ground above, then pulls herself up. “Dirt. And pine needles. We’re outside.”

“At least you are.”

She steps on my shoulder.

“Ouch!” I say as her foot lands on my cheek.

“Sorry.” The foot comes back down onto my shoulder. Meg pushes herself out. “Made it. Now you.”

“Huh?”

She reaches down for me. “I’ll pull you out.”

I draw in a hard breath. I should have known Meg wouldn’t ditch me here. But when I reach up so she can pull me out, she starts to backslide into the hole. I let go. “Get farther back, maybe.”

The next time, I slip from her grip and onto the floor. A cockroach or beetle or some kind of Zalkenbourgian bug skitters across my hand. It’s huge, and it makes me think of Siegfried, coming here, maybe soon. Sieglinde had the cloak after all. She only had to find him and bring him back. If he gets here and sees Meg, she’ll be dead meat too.

I make a decision. “You should go.”

“And leave you here? I don’t think so.”

“I’m the one who got into this mess. You shouldn’t pay for it.”

“But maybe I could—”

I don’t stand up. “Look, I’ve got a plan. When they get here, they’ll have the cloak, a magic cloak that transports you wherever you want to go. Now that I’ve got your flashlight, I’ll be able to see them. I’ll sneak up in the dark, turn on the light, and grab the cloak. So I’ll wish to be someplace impossible to guess, like the football stadium, and then I’ll be there. I’ll hide out a while. They’ll never find me.”

“Oookayy.” I can tell she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t get it about the cloak. “Look, I’ll find someone who speaks English, and I’ll bring them back for you.”

“Okay.” I think how unlikely this is, if the witch is working for the king. But I say, “You need to leave now. Please, Meg, don’t let me be responsible for you getting hurt.”

“I’ll find someone.”

“You’ve got a credit card in your purse, right? For emergencies? You can buy a ticket home. And then, you can tell my mother what happened to me, so she won’t wonder like with my dad.”

She draws in a breath. “Oh, Johnny.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I’ll get back somehow.”

I think I hear a sniff. “I don’t know.”

“I do.” I make a decision. I look away from Meg’s moonlit face. Before I chicken out, I say, “Go away, Meg. They could be back any second, without warning. Just shut the door behind you so they won’t know you were here. I’m not talking anymore.”

I walk away, and a minute later, I hear the trapdoor thump closed.

I’m alone again, in the dark, and now it’s worse because Meg was here and now she isn’t. There’s nothing to do but think about dying. You don’t usually think about that. I mean, everyone knows they’re going to die eventually. But not any time soon. The most enormous bug so far walks across my hand. I don’t do anything. What does it matter?