Skylark (17 page)

I could imagine what it must have been like to live here, work in this kitchen, have seemingly unlimited ingredients at my fingertips. If I half-closed my eyes I could see the kitchen restored to its original splendor, stone countertops polished, the tile floor gleaming, exotic food piled high on plates.

Against one wall behind the couches was a machine I recognized, and as I turned toward it the air flashed with power. Every Yuletide, the Institute brought out a device they called a phonograph, a device that used to exist in every household. A windup handle released a diamond-tipped needle to read engraved cylinders, translating the etchings into prerecorded music amplified by magic. The only one left in the city was the one the architects kept in the museum.

I reached out to touch it and experienced a similar jolt to the one I’d felt at the limestone deposit, though not as strong. As I ran my fingertips down the arm leading to the needle, the thrumming of magical energy grew stronger and stronger, until I was forced to pull my hand away. Diamond. It was clear that the pockets weren’t random after all. They formed around objects, substances that were somehow significant.

I could almost hear the chatter of the family that had lived here, reliving the events of their day around the dinner table. I heard the clatter of silverware against china, the clink of ice cubes in a glass. Someone—a child—laughed.

And then it was no longer my imagination. While I had been exploring, the sun had finished its trek to the horizon outside the shimmering barrier. Darkness had fallen outside the windows. And yet, in here, there was light. More than light. Overhead, panels cast a gentle, magical glow. The tile floors shone and the windows were once more intact. The phonograph, suddenly shiny and new again, crackled to life. The haunting strains of a woman’s voice floated on the air, singing a song I’d never heard.

And from the next room, voices. Conversation. Words. It was the first speech I’d heard since I’d thrown my brother from the balcony. The room came alive.

Chapter 15

I ducked behind an armchair, trying to make myself as small as possible. People. Real people. Alive beyond the Wall.

“Well, I hope you gave her hell for it,” said the sarcastic voice of a girl a bit older than me.

“Kacey!” gasped another voice, high and quick, belonging to a much younger girl. “You’re not supposed to say the H-word!”

“I won’t tell Dad if you don’t,” said the older girl, laughing.

They continued chattering. I heard the scrape of stools that I hadn’t seen at the counter. They didn’t
sound
like monsters. All I wanted to do was leap out of hiding and rush to them, explain everything, and beg for help.

Again my mind showed me the rows of razor-sharp teeth that I’d avoided so narrowly the night before. Inside the pockets, things were never what they seemed. I shut my eyes and squeezed myself more tightly into the corner.

A woman came in, older. She asked the girls about their days. I heard pots and pans, a knife on a cutting board, a hissing kettle. Plates, silverware. Laughter. I could even hear the once-broken clock ticking in the background.

A man joined them, distinct in his weary baritone. His steps thumped on the tile while the steps of the girls were almost noiseless. I listened to them eat, talk, laugh. A family.

I knew I had to leave, make a break for it. People living outside the Wall could not be trusted. At least I knew what I faced with the pixies. But I could not quite bring myself to flee. Monsters they might be, but they sounded like home.

The need for survival had so dominated my thoughts that I had never quite realized just how lonely I was.

“You girls finished your homework?” the mother was asking. After an unintelligible chorus from the two girls, the mother added, “Where is Jed? Not like him to be late for dinner.”

“Probably working on his bike,” said the older sister. “He doesn’t like casserole anyway.”

After a time, the chairs scraped back away from the table. Footsteps. Suddenly, I realized they were aiming for the couches in the living room. They were coming my way. If anyone sat in the chair, they’d see me clear as day. Now was my only chance to escape. Perhaps if I stayed low, they wouldn’t notice me.

I darted out, and as I straightened up to run out the door, someone came in from the other side.

I froze. The boy, a teenager about my age, was walking directly toward me. There was nowhere I could run.

He didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down. And then, without any indication that he saw me, he kept walking—straight through me. He flickered and fuzzed as he reached me and reappeared on the other side as he moved to join his family in the living room.

“Mom, could I have my allowance early? I need a new chain for my bike.”

Gasping, groping at myself to verify that I was, in fact, solid, I couldn’t quite hear the response. It must not have been satisfactory, though, because the boy turned and stomped out of the room and up the staircase. I leapt out of the way, but he gave absolutely no sign that he could see me.

Baffled, I shoved my fears aside and stepped back into the family room. They were all seated now in the living room, the parents reading while the girls played some sort of game with cards.

“Hello?” I croaked. My voice was hoarse, shocking, and strange. I swallowed, tried again. “Hello?”

Nothing. They all seemed riveted to what they were doing.

I walked between the girls and the cards on the floor, placing myself so that my body would be blocking their view. When that failed to garner a response, I walked up to the oldest daughter and waved my hand in front of her face, shouting in her ear. I tried to tap her on the shoulder, and my hand passed through.

There was a strange crackle, and the whole scene flickered. For the briefest instant I saw the room as I had when I entered, only pitch-dark now, only the edges of rotting furniture barely discernible. But only a flash, and then the family was back.

The phonograph buzzed and hiccupped with static, and then with a tiny snap, went quiet entirely. The father stood and crossed over to it, giving it a sharp rap on the side.

“Honey?” said the mother. “What’s going on? Is the record broken?”

“I don’t know; give me a sec.” The clock in the kitchen had stopped ticking.

The youngest girl, who would not have been more than eight, was gazing out the window. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

“Hang on,” said the father, preoccupied.

“No, that buzzing,” said the girl. Her voice suddenly jumped in pitch, to a scream. “Look, the window!”

Driven by the sudden urgency in the girl’s voice, the family turned to gaze out the window. I did the same, but I saw nothing, only vague, blurry shapes. Whatever they saw, though, electrified them. Everyone was shouting, and the mother threw herself on top of the children, barely a second before the windows all shattered inward and the room flashed brighter than the sun.

The scene flickered again and without warning the two girls were back in the kitchen.

“Well, I hope you gave her hell for it,” the older girl was saying.

“Kacey!” gasped the child, who seconds before had been pointing, horrified, at the window in the living room. “You’re not supposed to say the H-word!”

The scene flickered again.

“Kacey! You’re not supposed to say the H-word!”

Another flicker, and this time the figures were only halfpresent, superimposed over the dark, abandoned house.

I leaned back against the wall, sliding down until I hit the ground. One of the more popular stories about the world beyond the Wall was that it was inhabited only by ghosts, roaming the wilderness, hungry and lost. As a child I had imagined pale, dead-looking things that floated and moaned. In the stories they were always wretched and angry, vengeful for having died before their time.

These people, or memories—or whatever they were— didn’t even know I was there. They kept living their lives, that last day, that last night. It must have been during the wars, when some strike from a power-hungry Renewable knocked out this neighborhood.

I thought back to the first Yuletide festival I could remember, when the Institute had brought out the phonograph to demonstrate holiday music from before the wars. The sound popped and fuzzed, full of static. At one point later in the festival, the needle of the device had stuck and the record repeated the same few bars endlessly, the melody transformed into a grating parody of music.

I was reminded of that skipping record, watching the fragmented last day of this family play itself over and over. The house remembered them, or else the magic did, writing the memory and engraving it into the very bricks of the foundation. I could have left, gone upstairs to see if there was a place to sleep, or changed houses, but I stayed. Even fragmented, tinny with age, the voices felt familiar to me. It wasn’t my family but it was
a
family. I was lonely. And to them, I was no more than a ghost.

I curled up in my corner, listening to their laughter, covering my ears when the phonograph skipped and the little girl screamed. Though the vision of the family came with light, it brought no warmth, and I shivered through the night, sleeping only fitfully, torturing myself with the sound of this family living and dying again and again.

The scene became more fragmented as sunrise approached, the increasingly fitful skips and starts waking me from my doze. I had moved in the night, lying down on the mildewed carpeting, head pillowed on my hands. From this vantage point I saw that the boy had returned, something I’d never noticed from the previous versions of the memory.

He crouched underneath the counter, gazing toward his family and the chair I was curled behind. How had I not seen him before? Perhaps he sneaks in, later in the memory, to listen to the music but not make up with his mother?

I sat up. Wait. No. It wasn’t the boy. It was someone new. He was older and thinner. He was absolutely filthy, his clothes tattered. His hair was so grimy that the dirt concealed its color.

And he wasn’t looking at the family after all—he was looking straight at me.

The scene flickered again but the boy remained, solid and real. He looked to be in his late teens, though it was hard to tell underneath the dirt and the intensity of his face. His gaze was full upon me, fierce. The boy was slim, every limb taut and tense. Feral. Despite the dirt, the wildness, the frightening intensity, something about his face made my stomach tighten, my breath catch.

The sun was rising. As the scene flickered again I saw that it was growing lighter. And as I watched, the family gave one more flicker—
you girls finished your homework?
—and vanished entirely, leaving me and the wild boy alone in the empty house. In the light of the just-risen sun through the barrier beyond the broken windows, I could just make out the boy’s eyes, glittering in the gloom. I never saw him blink.

Perhaps if I ran now, I could make it outside the barrier before he caught me. Maybe the gloom would work to my benefit, hide me somehow. And yet, as the light grew stronger I was able to make out more of his features. He was dirty, absolutely filthy, his face stained with rusty-brown—
blood
, a fearful voice in my mind supplied—and his clothes tattered.
There are cannibals beyond the Wall
.

He saw me watching him. His eyes grew round, but he never took them off of me. There was not a flicker of intelligence behind those eyes as they met mine. The hairs stood up along my arms as a near-electrical jolt passed between us. My heart threatened to break free of my ribcage, so frenetic I thought it might burst.

My resolve cracked and I lurched to my feet, prepared to run. My legs blazed with pins and needles and I staggered, dizzy after such a long night spent curled up on the cold floor. My dazed vision barely caught his movement. Silently, he unfolded from his crouch and made a breathtaking leap for the window and was gone.

•  •  •

Though my restless night gave me little energy to face the day, I struck out as the sun began to trickle through the tree trunks. The morning was chilly, goosebumps rising on my arms.

And despite everything, the mist-filled morning was also beautiful. I hadn’t yet been outside so early, and the way the sun, mild and peach-colored on the horizon, lit the mist was beyond anything I’d seen behind the Wall.