The Twilight Prisoner (8 page)

Jack flew with Cora above Lexington Avenue. It was the darkest hour of the night, just before dawn. The streets were crowded both with the dead, drifting reluctantly back to the fountains, and the living, bleary-eyed, hurrying to work or back home after the night shift. The city had finally cooled down and the sky had become overcast, the tireless lights illuminating the clouds a pinkish gray. Jack began to shoot up vertically, as if they were on an elevator racing up into the air.

“Where are we going?” Cora asked.

“I want to show you something,” said Jack. First, before he told her the truth, he wanted just one more happy moment with her, the kind he had imagined having when he dragged her into the underworld in the first place.

Cora looked down in alarm. They were hundreds of feet up. Jack smiled, remembering how he had felt the same way when Euri had taken him here.

“We're almost there,” he assured her, as the city shrank into a miniature kingdom below them. With a final kick of his legs, they were face-to-face with a steel eagle, and then they sailed over its head and landed on its neck. “The top of the Chrysler building,” Jack explained. “It's my favorite place.”

Cora had her eyes shut. She slowly opened one of them. Gradually she opened the other. The city sparkled with lights, blinking, solid, flying through the air, unmoored from the ground. To the south, rising out of a cloud, loomed the Empire State Building, the red light atop its antenna seeming to graze the sky. The wind whipped through their hair.

“Euri took me here. I didn't know I could fly then. I was pretty scared. But when I saw the view . . .”

“It's beautiful,” Cora admitted. She turned to him with a serious look. “But why did you take me here? What do you want to tell me?”

Jack knew it was time. But instead, he looked out over the city. “Don't you feel like a god being up here?”

Cora frowned. “You're hiding something.”

“We can only stay three days in the underworld before—” he said, half-choking on the words. “I should have told you. But I thought we'd be out by now....”

“Before what?”

He opened his backpack and pulled out the
Unofficial Guide
, flipping to the page that explained the one rule about visiting the underworld that he hadn't told her about—and that couldn't be broken. “Here,” he said, handing her the guide.

Cora's eyes darted across the page as she silently read.

“I don't understand,” she said a moment later. But the panic in her voice told Jack she did.

“After three days, the strain of being here becomes too much on living bodies. I should have told you.”

“I'm going to die?” she said quietly.

“We still have two days,” Jack said hurriedly. “We can still find Viele.”

But Cora didn't seem to hear him. She grabbed his arm so hard that he felt the imprint of her fingers. “I can't die, Jack. My mother.” Tears cascaded down her cheeks.

“I know,” Jack said softly. “My dad . . .”

“No, you don't know!” she shouted. “She's alone here. I'm all she has.” Her voice caught in her throat. She looked out over the city, but Jack could tell that the view had become to her what it had always been to Euri—a prison.

She caught his eye accusingly. “Why did you take me here?”

“I . . . I . . .” he stuttered, unable to tell her the real reason.

“You never even gave me a choice. You never told me where we were really going. ‘Magic,' you said,” Cora spat out. “This isn'tmagic, Jack!This is death!”

“We're not dead,” Jack protested. “We still have—”

“I can't believe you did this to me!” she said, cutting him off.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered, barely able to speak. “I'll bring you back to your mom. I promise.”

Euri was the only ghost around by the time Jack touched down with Cora at the small cobblestone park nestled between two buildings on Fifty-third Street. The sky was turning from pinkish gray to shades of purple. Coffee carts began to arrive by the curbs, hitched to the back of beat-up station wagons, and garbage trucks rolled down the streets. Euri was floating in a ball, hugging her knees to her chest. Behind her flowed the strangest fountain that Jack had ever seen—a twenty-foot-high wall that water rushed down like a waterfall.

“There you are!” she shouted. “It's almost dawn.”

“I know, I'm sorry,” said Jack.

“Let's go,” she snapped, flying at the watery wall and vanishing into the basin of the fountain.

Jack looked at Cora. She gazed down at the cobblestones with a grim expression. “Are you ready?” he asked as gently as he could.

“Can't we just stay up here?”

“Ghosts aren't allowed in the living world during the day.”

“But I'm not a ghost,” Cora said.

Once again, he had said the wrong thing. “We were counted when we came up through the fountain,” he tried to explain, “so the guards would come after us if we didn't return.”

Cora nodded but didn't speak. Jack flew at the wall and then felt his stomach drop as they fell with the water into the basin. He held tight to Cora's fingers as they whirled down the drain and through a series of tubes. A moment later, with a pop, they were spit out onto a dirty tunnel floor.

“Just in time,” said a ghost in a nurse's uniform as she counted them in on her clicker. “Sun rises in thirty seconds.”

Euri gave them an “I told you so” look, but Jack knew she wasn't really mad. “Let's go,” she ordered, grabbing Jack's other hand and dragging him down the tunnel. Cora sniffed, blinking back tears, and for the first time since they'd reunited, Euri took a good look at her. “You two need some sleep,” she said. “Somewhere Cerberus won't find you.”

They followed her through a series of warm tunnels that sloped downward into the earth. The deeper they went, the fewer ghosts they saw. Finally, Euri stopped in front of a steel door and pressed a button on the wall next to it. A mechanical hum filled the air, and the door creaked open to reveal a metal freight elevator. “See,” said Euri, looking at Cora, “we can even take the elevator down.”

But Cora just shrugged.

“Down?” asked Jack. “Howmuch farther can we go?”

“You'll see,” said Euri. “No one will bother us there.”

The elevator groaned as it descended. For several minutes, no one spoke. Cora looked down at her feet. Then the door creaked open, and they stepped out of it and into a steamy room nearly the size of a football field. In the center of it were what looked like enormous metal wheels with fan belts inside them. Jack couldn't believe a room of this size existed so deep underground. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Under the main concourse of Grand Central,” said Euri. “This is the Dynamo Room. Very few people, living or dead, know about it. You have to really haunt the station to find it. It's not on any of the blueprints.”

“Why not?” asked Jack.

“For security reasons.” Euri pointed to the giant wheels. “Those big things are converters. They used to power the trains. It's a good place for you to sleep, though.”

They walked past the hulking, silent converters and floated through a glass door into a small office tucked into the back of the room. Inside was a wooden chair, a desk, and a calendar flipped to a page marked December 1989. Jack took off his sweater and gave it to Cora, who wordlessly accepted it and curled up in a corner.

“That's the worst case of mourning sickness I've ever seen,” whispered Euri.

Jack also felt the bleak, hopeless feeling that all ghosts felt when they returned to the underworld after a night of haunting and remembering life. But he knew what Cora was feeling was worse than just mourning sickness. He sat down in the opposite corner of the dusty office and watched as her eyelids fluttered and her breathing became regular.

“Aren't you going to sleep, too?” asked Euri, floating above the paper-strewn desk.

“I told her the truth,” Jack said. “About how we only have three nights.”

“Well, that explains things,” said Euri. “But why now?”

“Because I'm not sure we'll ever find Viele. I had to let her know.” He rested his forehead against his knees.

Euri floated down beside him. “It's not your fault, Jack.”

He lifted his head and looked at her. “You're right about me being a freak. I belong here. The guards even think I look dead. But I shouldn't have brought her.”

Euri shifted uncomfortably. “I didn't really mean that.”

“I'm going to get Cora back, and then maybe I'll just do what you did. Maybe I'll jump in front of a train, too.”

He had barely finished when Euri grabbed him by the shoulders. Her pale eyes were fierce. “I won't ever speak to you again if you . . .” Her mouth remained open, but no words came out.

Jack suddenly felt ashamed. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Euri slowly let go of his shoulders.

“I still don't understand why you jumped,” Jack said quietly.

Euri said nothing, just picked at her skirt. Finally, she spoke. “I wasn't alone.”

Jack turned toward her. “What do you mean?”

“When it happened. There was someone else with me. We were holding hands.”

Jack wanted to ask her more, but she moved away from him and floated over to Cora. “Promise me, Jack. She goes back, you go back.”

He nodded. “As long as there's still a way.”

“Viele is the way. Now, get some sleep.”

Jack could tell from the way that Euri somersaulted upside down and stared blankly at the wall that the conversation was over. He closed his eyes, imagining Euri standing on a train platform in Grand Central Terminal, her hand in someone else's. He had always imagined her jumping alone. Then he thought about the man she had haunted in the tenement. Was the hand she had been holding his?

“Wake up, Jack.”

Someone was shaking his shoulder. Jack opened his eyes, a sinking feeling in his chest as he glimpsed the Dynamo Room office. He had dreamed that he and Cora were back in the living world.

Euri shook him again. “It's night. Time to get up.”

“I'm awake,” he said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

Cora sat cross-legged on the office chair staring stonily ahead. Next to her was his copy of the
Unofficial Guide
. He smiled at her, but she turned away.

“Maybe we need to take a break . . . and regroup,” said Euri.

“What kind of break?” Jack asked. “We don't have much—” He looked at Cora and cut himself off.

“I need to go downtown,” Euri said. “I can meet you later....”

“To haunt? Now?”

Euri scowled. “I don't haunt.”

“What could be more important than finding Viele and getting Cora back?” Jack snapped.

“Stop!” said Cora, surprising them both. “We don't know what to do next anyway. Let's just go with Euri.”

Twenty minutes later, they shot out of a small fountain beneath a stone canopy topped with a statue of Juventas, the Roman goddess of youth. Jack could see a ring of benches and hear the squeaks of a tire swing from a playground. Past it were the four-and five-story walk-up apartments of the East Village, and he realized they were in Tompkins Square Park. It was early evening—the trees were silhouetted against a darkening-gray sky—and there were a number of living people sitting on the benches in the park or strolling through it. Jack noticed that they were wearing sweaters or jackets, and he even glimpsed an old lady in a pair of gloves and a scarf. The Indian summer was over, and he almost wondered if his abduction of Cora had caused autumn to begin.

But Cora didn't seem to notice the change in weather. She seemed tired, almost resigned. He feared that she was starting to die—in spirit, at least. As they sailed down Avenue A, over the roofs of cabs, past vintage clothing shops, dive bars, and neon diner signs, she closed her eyes.

Moments later, they landed on the familiar fire escape.

“Wait here,” said Euri. Then she disappeared through the window.

Cora sat down on the fire escape and went back to reading the
Unofficial Guide
. With an impatient sigh, Jack stuck his head through the window of the tiny apartment. The musician was lying on his bed, his guitar slung across his body. “Everyone heads for this place,” he sang darkly, staring up at the ceiling. “The final home.”

Euri floated in the middle of the room, watching him. At first, her expression was gentle. But then the song ended and an angry look returned to her face. She stuck her hand in the pocket of her blazer and pulled out a cockroach, throwing it onto the man's bed. He kicked at it with his foot and dropped his guitar. “Leave me alone!” he cried out. “Please.”

Jack flew through the window and into the cluttered room. “It was him.”

Euri started and turned around.

“At Grand Central,” Jack continued. “When you jumped.”

Euri began to pick at her skirt. “Well, you're a real Sherlock Holmes, aren't you?”

“Why didn't he stop you?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

There was a hard edge to Euri's voice that warned Jack not to ask again. The musician settled back down with his guitar.

“What's his name?” Jack asked after a moment.

“Nate,” Euri whispered.

“Did he always play guitar?”

Euri nodded.

“How did you meet?”

“One day after school. In the park. He knew one of my friends. He played this song for me....” Euri smiled at the memory.

A rapping sound on the window made them both turn around. It was Cora. Euri's smile vanished. Jack stood up and opened the window to let Cora in.

“I want to get a message to my mom,” she said.

Euri shot her an annoyed stare. “Which part of being in the underworld do you not understand? The living-people-not-hearing-you part or the living-people-not-hearing-you part?”

Cora held up the
Unofficial Guide
. “It says here that we can talk to the living with a Ouija board. Maybe we can get someone living to pass along a message to my mom?”

“Wait a second,” said Jack. “That's it!”

“What's it?” said Euri.

“Dr. Lyons,” Jack explained. “He can help us find Viele!”

“Who's Dr. Lyons?” asked Cora.

“He's a doctor of the paranormal,” Jack explained. “Last time I was here we talked to him through his Ouija board. We can have him contact your mom and also look for more information about Viele.”

“That's the best idea you've had so far,” Euri said.

Cora eagerly held out her hand. “Let's go.”

Jack was relieved that they had a plan, but he noticed that Cora still wouldn't look him in the eye. As they flew over the crowded streets of the Lower East Side, Euri taking the lead, he reminded himself that they still had two nights. If Dr. Lyons helped them find Viele, there was a chance he could get Cora home. Perhaps his dream had been a good omen.

And that was when he saw him. Austin—Jack was certain of it—was standing on the sidewalk outside St. Mark's Comics, talking to a familiar-looking plump ghost. Before Jack could do anything, the ghost offered Austin his hand, and they flew off together toward downtown.