The Violet Hour (13 page)

THE HISTORY OF HARLOW

Mei Mei held her tiny hand out to me. My palm slid against hers, and she guided me through the break in the bookcase. She paused as we crossed the threshold. I knew she was waiting for me to close the bookcase behind us. I didn’t want to—we would be entombed in blackness. But I did it anyway.

It shut with a
skreeek
that echoed down the blank expanse stretching in front of us. These must be servant passageways, but judging from the dank smell of them, they didn’t get much use. Mei Mei ushered us forward and I shuffled behind her. The tunnel got narrower and narrower, and my shoulders began to bump against the sides.

“Are you taking me to see my father?” I asked in hushed tones.

Mei Mei didn’t respond. I wondered if she only spoke when sleepwalking.

We continued on for what seemed like an eternity, Mei Mei making confident turns at every twist and juncture. There was no way I would find my way back from this trip into the dark unknown.

Finally Mei Mei stopped short. She placed my hand on something cool and round. A doorknob. All was silent. I turned the knob and entered a smooth white world suffused with blue light. It reminded me of the inner sanctum of the Tokyo temple where I’d taken the Rite.

I looked behind me in time to see Mei Mei pulling the door softly shut, her satin blindfold shining in the darkness and then disappearing. I was alone.

I was in what looked like some kind of wacked-out mental institution. The hallway curved around in a semi-circle, a series of identical white doors with small observation windows dotting its length. Muffled beeps and the rhythmic sound of air compressions floated from somewhere beyond the doors. This must be Sacristan Wang’s personal lab. I stood perfectly still, pricking my ears for any sound of footfalls. Nothing.

I approached the door in front of me, going up on my tiptoes to peek through the narrow window. Inside, a man was curled up on a cot under a thin blanket, wearing a pale blue hospital gown. There was a clear plastic barrier partitioning him from the rest of the room, which held odd equipment and a sink lined with suspicious instruments. There was nothing behind the barrier other than the man, the blanket, and the cot, all under the ever-present glow of soft blue light.

The man writhed and gave a feeble cough, and I got a look at the crown of his head. The once-thick hair was now thinning, as was the blocklike bone structure I’d once assumed was indestructible.

It was the General. I barely recognized him lying there, stripped and isolated. He’d lost considerable weight in only a few days. There was a thin thread of blood crusted between one nostril and the frayed skin at the edge of his lips. His signature eye-patch was gone; the angry, puckered skin over his missing eye looked as if it were burning.

Without hesitation or thought to what infection might lie beyond, I pushed my way into the room. The General flinched, curling into the blanket tighter and rasping something that sounded like a protest. There was some kind of speaker system that piped the sounds from behind his plastic partition into the rest of the room.

The metal door slammed behind me and we both jumped. The General’s good eye opened and fixed on me. The black of his pupil consumed nearly his entire eye.

“Isiris?” His voice was scratchy.

My stomach turned. “It’s me, dad. It’s Harlow.”

He blinked once in confusion, then seemed to startle back to himself. He used what appeared to be the last of his energy to push up to sitting. He looked like an orphaned child—bare feet, bewildered gaze. It felt as if a weight were literally crushing my heart. I put my hand up to the partition; as far as I could tell, there was no way through it.

“Harlow?” he asked, his voice catching. “Is it really you?”

“Yes. The Wangs’ daughter brought me here,” I said.

“The Wangs?” he asked, clearly disoriented.

I wanted to sob and wail, seeing my larger-than-life father broken like this. But I didn’t have that luxury. I had no idea if the General would be able to tell me anything of use, but I had to try. Information was the only weapon I had, and my only hope for ultimately getting my father and the rest of us out of here.

“Sacristan Wang. We’re in his house. He’s behind the abductions,” I said.

This seemed to register with the General, to bring him a shade closer to his normal self. “I have to stop him,” he said.

“That’s why I’m here. I need you to tell me some things. It’s very important, Dad.”

He nodded, but I wasn’t confident he understood. Still, there was very little time and no option but to try.

“Who is Isiris?” I asked.

He physically recoiled at the name, but also became more lucid. He put his hand over his eyes for a moment, as if what he was about to say was too painful to bear.

“I had a family before you, Harlow. A wife and a baby daughter,” he said.

This revelation hit me like a grenade. I’d had no idea that the General had another family before me.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“A van hit their car head-on. I was supposed to be with them, and I wasn’t, and they died. Eparch Fitz was a passenger in the van that hit them—he was the sole survivor, and racked with guilt because of it. Survivor’s guilt, they call it. It sounds strange, but we became friends. Brothers in arms, of a sort. Initially, we set out to destroy ourselves; we took crazy risks, inviting death to come and take us.”

Even though it was totally twisted, I resented my father’s real family. I was just a replacement, and a dubious one. The loss he’d suffered made him human—destructible—and it was their fault.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could manage to say.

He nodded. “Eparch Fitz and I traveled the world for nearly a year, doing things I don’t even want to speak of. Then, deep in the Cambodian jungle, we happened upon the crumbling ruin of a temple. It was buried in strangler figs and looked old—it didn’t quite look Khmer, but at the time I didn’t think much of it. I left Eparch Fitz, wandered around the temple a bit. I felt drawn to it somehow. Out of nowhere, a doorway appeared.”

I knew what would be coming next. The part where all the puzzle pieces fell together. The General’s eyes glazed over and he looked off into the corner.

“What happened then?” I prompted him. It seemed to snap him back, at least part of him.

“There was a girl there. Standing in the doorway, holding an infant. She invited me in.” His eye zeroed in on me. His voice hitched and a wrinkle appeared on his brow. “She looked exactly like you.”

“Isiris,” I whispered. I thought of the girl in the mirror.

He nodded. “Walking into the temple was like stepping through to another plane of existence. It was round, endless, levels going up as far up as the eye could see, corridors and doorways everywhere I looked.”

If I wasn’t someone who heard voices in her head, I’d have assumed the General had lost it, right there in the Cambodian jungle.

“What did she want from you?” I asked.

“She said she’d been waiting for me—that all the tragedy in my life had not been without purpose, and it had all been leading up to this.”

“Like she knew you were coming,” I said. A little part of me wondered whether, if she knew so much, maybe she had somehow orchestrated it all.

“She handed me you. Said I should raise you as my own.”

There was more dangling at the end of that sentence. “In exchange for what?” I asked.

“For greatness beyond my imagination,” he said. “Power, wealth, money, respect … and love.”

I felt as though a stone had lodged itself in my throat. I was just a bargain he’d made for something better.

The General caught the look on my face and shook his head. “Harlow, it was the last one that sealed it for me. Love. All I saw was your beautiful, perfect face. I didn’t care about the rest of it. All I saw was you.”

I swallowed the stone. This was the closest my father had ever come to saying he loved me. He seemed like a dying man giving his last will and testament.

“But there was a catch, wasn’t there?” I asked.

“She said I need only sacrifice one of my eyes as a sign of my faith. Then I would return to the world and listen for her voice in my head. Do as she asked, obeying every word with purity of heart.”

The memory of Isiris’s voice rang in my mind.
Sacrifice. Purity.
That was her, all right.

“Did she tell you what was supposed to happen then?” I asked.

“I would establish her kingdom in the physical world, and then she would join us and give all her believers immortal life,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t really buy it. Despite what I was seeing right in front of me, I was completely transfixed by you. I would have done anything to have you in my arms.”

I looked at my father now, at his missing eye.

“That was how you lost your eye? In exchange for me?” I whispered.

He nodded. “It was worth it.”

“Did you hear her voice like she said you would?” I asked, my throat going dry.

The General rubbed his eyes. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he was fading.

“I did. She told me what to do—how to make VisionCrest. She dictated the scripture of the Inner Eye, which I hid from all but the innermost circle of the Ministry because it was so outlandish. She fed me the mysteries and Rites. Her voice was strong when you were close to me, and unreachable when you were far.” He ducked his head as if ashamed. “I got scared, convinced myself the whole thing was a dream. I kept you away from me, and over time her voice faded. I did what I wanted with VisionCrest. Created a mythology that was more believable. And for a while, it worked. Everything was great—”

“Until I started having visions,” I said.

His shoulders slumped. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

“What am I?” I asked.

He looked up at me, his eye meeting mine. He tilted his chin up. “You’re my daughter.”

“Yes, I am. But that’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t know, Harlow. But you look exactly like her.”

“Is that why you’ve been so distant?” I asked. “Because I look like her?”

“Harlow, you don’t just look like her. You
are
her. Exactly.”

My stomach plummeted to my feet. He was wrong. I wasn’t her, not even remotely.

“Do you believe Isiris is everything you’ve preached? Is Isiris the Inner Eye?” I needed to know more, before it was too late.

“I don’t know what she is, Harlow. She has immense power and is without mercy. I didn’t want to bring that to the world. She lives in a temple with a thousand doors, but she doesn’t seem to have a way out. So I chose to make VisionCrest something else, something better. And in doing that, I may have condemned us all. I’m so sorry.”

A thread of blood issued from his nose. His body began to shake.

“Harlow. They’ve done something to me. I don’t feel like myself anymore,” he said, seeming to slip back into his bewildered state.

I pressed my hands up against the glass, looking for a way to push through.

“Dad,” I croaked, helpless.

He lay back down on the cot, his eye going blank into the far distance, his breathing shallow. I didn’t know if it was the same affliction that had taken Mercy down, but I could tell he wasn’t going to last much longer.

“I’ll get you out of here,” I promised.

I knew it wasn’t true—he was near the end. Still, he deserved to have the comfort of hope. He closed his eye. The urge to break the glass so I could lay my head on his shoulder and never leave was overwhelming. But I had to keep going.

Reluctantly, I turned away.

“Harlow?” His voice was barely audible.

I tipped my forehead against the cold metal of the door to the room, unable to turn back and look at him. “Yes?”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too, Dad.” I barely managed the words.

My heart felt like it was being turned inside out. My father had finally revealed the truth about who I was, and simultaneously confirmed my deepest-held fears. My brain still wanted to deny it, but I knew in my heart it was true. On top of everything else, he’d told me he loved me for the first and last time. My heart felt like it was being mixed an industrial-strength blender.

I pushed through the door, knowing I would never see him again. It clicked shut behind me. My feet felt like they were poured in concrete. I doubled over, sobbing. My pain echoed down the hallway in both directions. I had finally made a real connection with my father, and I was still completely alone. I had no idea what to do next. But I had to do something.

I wiped the tears from my face and forced myself upright. Unsure of what else to do, I decided to look in the other nearby windows. Maybe I would learn something useful. I approached the first one, feeling as if my guts had been torn to ribbons.

I looked in, my eyes bleary. There was a very young boy I didn’t recognize, playing with a small red ball behind a partition identical to the General’s. I moved on to the next room: a young girl, lying on a bed with a canopy of plastic draped over it, a veil of wires emanating from her bald head. I looked into the next one, expecting yet another stranger. Instead, I saw something that made me straighten up and snap out of my wallow.

Mercy.

Holy crap—she wasn’t dead. I stepped inside. The room was hung in plastic—walls, floors, ceiling. There was no partition. It was just a white-marble cube that had served who-knows-what purpose prior to becoming Sacristan Wang’s playground of pain. Mercy was enshrined at the center, encased in a transparent plastic bullet, tubes running in and out of her. She was alive, but by the looks of it just barely. Foreboding skittered up my arms.

Last time I saw her, Mercy was flailing like a guppy on the floor beneath my feet. Even if I had no great love for the girl, she didn’t deserve to end like this.

I approached her bed slowly, the soft whirring of the machines disguising the click of my shoes on the marble floor. Even from afar, I could see that this was not the Mercy I knew. It was her sunken shell—skin draped across bone. I stopped at the foot of the capsule and steadied my hand against it. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face.