(Skeleton Key) Into Elurien (12 page)

I
didn’t dare move
until the end of the meeting.

“Remember,” Verelle announced. Her clear, sweet voice carried easily over the square. “I will treat you as well as you treat me.” She waved her hand at the bushes, and they burst into pink blossoms that had no place on that particular species. I held in a sneeze as pollen exploded into the air. “I can restore your city, make it better than it’s ever been. I bring such gifts for you!” She clasped her hands beneath her chin as though delighted by the idea.

“Wouldn’t need improvement if she hadn’t wrecked it,” someone muttered in the front row. Jim Hancock, the pharmacist. I barely heard it, but Verelle had picked it up clearly. She shot him a disappointed look.

“Don’t pout because I had to show my power before you would listen. I’ll work wonders for you, and later for your whole world. I want your support so that I may bless you as I blessed the humans of my old home. They loved me, as you will. But my love does not come free. Go now, and make your decision.”

She gathered the long skirts of a dress I suspected had been made of the mayor’s office curtains and went inside. Several of her soldiers followed, while two remained outside the door, still as statues, swords drawn.

The people left, breaking into three groups: one group heading for the school, another moving toward the big white church on the hill, and the last ambling toward the nicer old houses near the square. Only the last group talked and laughed as they went.

I made my way back to the ravine, not wanting to cause a stir in public when people recognized me. Any surprise or excitement might be noted by the soldiers.

I’d have to be careful. Zinian had said that Verelle directed her soldiers’ every movement. They’d lived without her when she’d disappeared, but had behaved like masterless puppets. With her here, they were capable of much more. I just didn’t know exactly what.

I entered the convenience store by the broken back door. The place had been cleared out, but I found several fruit and nut bars that had fallen under a bottom shelf. I didn’t look to see how long ago they might have been lost there. They tasted fine and they filled my stomach, and I didn’t care about anything else.

I rested in the store room, and after sunset I made my way to the school. My ankle was bitching again, and I swallowed a few more pills on the way.

The school’s outside doors were all locked, but I saw flickering light coming from the other side of the open gymnasium doors inside. I knocked as loud as I dared.

Three shadowed faces peered out of the gym, then came toward the door. They carried weapons, such as they were—a bright red fire extinguisher, an uncoupled fire hose held ready to be used as a whip, and the long wooden chalkboard pointer that old Mr. Goodyear had wielded during his fifty year reign at the school. They carried flashlights, which they promptly blinded me with.

“Who’s there?” a familiar voice I couldn’t place demanded.

“Hazel Walsh,” I said, lowering the hand I’d thrown up to shield my face. The glass doors muffled our voices slightly, but weatherproofing for the school had never been high on the town’s budget priorities.

“Hazel?” The one who had spoken stepped forward. Jimmy Wood, ruiner of reputations, knocker-up of cheerleaders, in the flesh. “How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

Jimmy stepped back. “No one has been able to get onto or off the island for a week,” he said.

So time had passed more slowly here than in Elurien.

“I drove in before that,” I said. “I was at the inn when it collapsed.” Not entirely true, but enough for now.

Jimmy’s flashlight caught one of the other faces. Mrs. Perry, the vice principal. She squinted at me and shook her head. “Can’t say. You know how that woman has tricked us.”

The sound of wingbeats passed in the distance. I wasn’t willing to be caught if he came closer. “Mrs. Perry, I went to this school when you started—” I did some mental math based on my grade “—ten years ago. I was here when Wiley Snow set the lab on fire. He was three years ahead of me. The smell lingered for weeks. I ate the soggy cabbage rolls every Tuesday that the church ladies cooked for us so the ‘poor dears could have a real meal.’ I graduated with honours. I came to help with my uncle’s dairy bar.”

The wings again, coming closer and then fading.

“Please,” I added. “I’d stand out here and sing the school song for you, but I don’t want to make more noise, and quite frankly I’ve forgotten the words because no one ever remembered to make us sing it.”

Jimmy reached for the lock and let me in. I leapt into the school, and he caught me in one arm as he locked the door with the other.

The shadow of a winged soldier passed over the steps.

“Thank you,” I sighed, and looked around. “Are there many people here? What the hell is happening?”

The third person, an older man I only knew by sight and not by name, brandished his floppy hose as threateningly as was possible. “I still have questions. If you arrived a week ago and survived the inn’s collapse, where have you been?”

“Long story,” I said. “I bet yours is more relevant.”

He grunted and let me follow Jimmy toward the gym.

“It’s good to see you, Hazel,” Jimmy said. “How long has it been?”

“Years,” I replied. “How’s Jenny and the baby?”

“Oh. Can’t say. They went to live with her aunt in Nova Scotia two years ago. Didn’t work out after all.”

Around fifty people occupied the gym, sitting on sleeping bags and cots. A handful of small children ran around, but most were adults, or nearly there. A good number of them were approaching half-past adult, with silver hair and wrinkled faces. I put as many names to faces as I could, orienting myself. This was my town, all right, if not the one I’d expected to find when I decided to come back. For a moment, I saw what mainlanders saw when they visited my hometown.
It’s not so bad here, really. Even if—

A scream echoed through the gym, and my mother clicked across the floor. I knew it was her before I saw her face. Only Loretta Walsh would wear high heels to the apocalypse.

She gripped my shoulders and pulled me into an unexpected hug. “You did come,” she said. “You look horrible.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Thanks, Mom. You and Dad are okay?”

She sighed. “He’s sleeping in the cafeteria. Fool broke his leg running from one of those angel things. Doc Saunders has him patched up and drugged up. You’ll come see him when he wakes.”

Not a question. Nothing ever was. I nodded and excused myself, and she went to sit with the church ladies.

It was good to know they were safe, or reasonably so. I just hoped they’d stay that way, and that I’d find a way to escape the suffocating feeling that was once again tightening like iron bands across my chest.

Welcome home, Hazel.

I sat with my back against the obnoxious primary-coloured wall beside the equipment locker and stretched my injured leg out in front of me. Jimmy ran around, gathering the people I supposed he considered important, and Mrs. Perry stood guard beside me.

“Tell me what’s happening,” I said. “I want to help.”

She sighed. “Nobody knows what’s happening. As I recall it, though, some of us awoke just over a week ago to the sound of the inn collapsing. Middle of the night. Volunteer crew went out to see what was happening and save Violetta James. Assuming she’d consent to being saved, of course.”

I smiled to myself. I had sort of missed the familiarity of these people who knew each other so well. Big cities can’t match that.

“She’d been crushed in her bed, which turned out to be a mercy for her. The boys dug through the rubble searching for whoever might have owned the car out front. Verelle emerged instead. Beautiful woman in a white dress, not a scratch on her. Wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her, and—”

She hesitated.

“What?”

“Stories get muddled at that point. Simon Blackwood died. Some said he tripped. Some said she pushed him into the hole she’d rose from. A couple said he fell, but it was because she did something to him when he tried to touch her, like an electric shock that sent him flying. And that’s how it’s been since. She cut the island off. No traffic in or out, no electricity or phone, and the boats hit some kind of invisible wall half a kilometre out. The town’s beat up, which was all her doing, and there are those angel things she keeps. There’s a small faction thinks she really is from God as she claims, and she keeps them close and treats them well. Gave them the nice houses, and the stunned arses took them. The rest of us are confused. She’s got some strange power like we’ve never seen. She’s affecting our minds.”

She looked at the man who’d stood with her in the foyer. “Samuel, has anyone seen Jim Hancock since he spoke up at the rally?”

It seemed strange to call such a dismal gathering a rally. Verelle’s word, I was sure.

“No one,” he said. “And you know, I keep forgetting to think of him.”

“That’s how it goes,” Mrs. Perry told me. “Some of us remember better. Others could have seen him tortured in the street—and I wouldn’t put it past that woman—and forget five minutes later that the man ever lived.”

I shivered. I hadn’t heard of anything like this when Zinian spoke about Verelle.

Jimmy had gathered a group of two dozen people and led them over. Mostly men, mostly middle-aged, all sober and solemn.

“You were in the inn when it collapsed?” asked Fred Blackwood, Simon’s father and the other mechanic I might have consulted about Gladys.

“In a manner of speaking. I wasn’t
there
there.” I took a deep breath. They’d seen Verelle’s magic. They’d have to believe me. “I went through a door into another world, one that was living in terror of Verelle. She somehow switched places with me. I came back in the hope that Verelle would be returned to that world.”

No one spoke for a minute, until old David McMurtry clucked his tongue and shook his head. “The girl’s got concussed,” he said kindly. “Probably lost in the rubble of the inn, delirious and dehydrated, until she came and found us. God love her. Someone fetch a lemonade.”

I accepted the lemonade, then shook my head. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but do you have a better explanation for her?”

Feet shuffled nervously in the small crowd. “Some thinks it’s technological,” Mr. McMurtry said. “Robots and such. Maybe drugs in the water supply. We’re a little short on theories, and I’m sure we’ll add yours to the list.” He patted my head. “Tell me, were there fairies and monsters in this other world?”

“Yes,” I grumbled, and ducked out from under his hand. “They’re the ones the humans ruled over. There was a revolution.”

Mrs. Perry sank to the floor beside me. “Hazel, my love. Was there a big talking lion wandering—”

“No. There was not.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. “The fact is that however that Verelle got here, we’re stuck with her until we do something.”

It was easily the most sensible thing I’d ever heard Prettyboy McJockface say in all the time I’d known him. I nodded and finished my lemonade.

Jimmy motioned for the others to step closer. “Are we all ready?”

“For what?” I asked.

“Not you, gimpy,” he said, not unkindly. We might have been friends if his teasing had been that gentle in school. “We’re going after Verelle tonight. David still has his key for the town hall’s back door.”

I struggled to stand so I could talk sense to his face instead of his kneecaps. “Jimmy, you need a better plan than that. She’ll be expecting it if she knows you all want her gone. She’s lived through rebellions before, and she’s well guarded.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve got a couple of shotguns, which if you’re right about her origins, she hasn’t dealt with before.”

He almost sounded like he believed me.

“And if not,” he continued. “We’re splitting up to find the actual source of her so-called magic. It’s got to be in that building. She almost never leaves.”

I crossed my arms. “And what is it you think she’s doing? How do you explain the soldiers?”

He frowned. “We don’t explain them. We get rid of them.”

My stomach sank. “You can’t go in without knowing exactly what you’re going to do and what you’re facing. It’s too big a risk.”

Jimmy gave me a cocky smile. “No worries. We’ll be back safe and sound with the island freed by morning.”

They left, Mrs. Perry with them. I looked around the gym. Familiar faces, but no good friends of mine. I wondered whether the people I knew better were at the church, or if they’d been taken in by Verelle’s speeches. It was hard to believe anyone would be.

She fooled Zinian,
I reminded myself. And he was as smart as anyone I knew. But maybe that awareness had come later, after he saw the truth.

No one came closer to say hello. I supposed I must have been quite a sight with my tangled hair and weird clothes. A trip to the girls’ bathroom confirmed all of that, and worse. My face was filthy and covered in scratches, as were my hands. I washed in a sink and did what I could with my hair, which I tied back with an abandoned pink elastic I found under the counter.

“Well, I’m not just going to sit here,” I told my reflection. I would have, once. But I’d changed in the past few weeks. I’d survived a near-beheading, ventured into the desert with an ogre I called a friend, stood up to monsters, and won the heart of one of the best of them.

I’m different.
I felt bigger than I had before. More capable. Braver. I didn’t have a plan or a lucky charm, but I knew I might be able to help, and that was all I needed. I tightened the strap of my shoulder bag, asked Janet McMurtry lock up after me, and headed out into the night.

The streets were quiet, as I’d expected. I stuck to the deepest shadows, hobbling as quickly as I could. I was rushing through an ink-black alley when I tripped over something soft and fell to my hands and knees.

“MEEEEEERF?”

“Tomie! Go home!”

The fat old cat rubbed against my face, and I wiped away the hairs that stuck to my sweaty skin. He followed when I started walking again, yelling the whole way.