Neverworld Wake(15)

Whitley was back in front of him with cooking twine, brutally tying up his wrists, brandishing a fourteen-inch carving knife inches from his jaw as she sliced the string. Crouching, teeth gritted, she moved to his ankles. The Keeper didn’t protest, only watching her, bemused, like a father when his four-year-old decides to bury him alive at the beach.

She dragged a stool over and sat in front of him, brushing her hair out of her eyes.

“Start talking.”

“About what?” asked the Keeper.

She smacked him hard across the cheek.

“Whitley,” reproached Cannon.

“Tell us who did this and how we get out of here.”

The Keeper closed his eyes. “I’ve already told you. The vote. As for who? There is an infinite number of possibilities. The universe, God, the Absolute, the Supreme Being, He Who Actually Is, Adonai, Ahura Mazda—”

She slapped him again.

“Wit,” whispered Kipling. “You think it’s wise to go all Tarantino on this poor man?”

“He’s not poor. He’s toying with us.”

She slapped him again. The Keeper remained unperturbed, blood trickling from his nose. I started to cry. And yet I made no attempt to stop her. None of us did. We stood there, frozen, all doubtlessly wondering—terrible as it was to admit—if hurting the Keeper might reveal something, something that would end this. He’d confess it was an elaborate game; the curtain would fall, scenery crashing. We’d laugh. How hilarious. You really had me going there. I also couldn’t help hoping that, as with so many nightmares I’d had as a child, if things became sufficiently strange, the dream would at last puncture and I’d wake up.

Whitley hit him again.

“The final three minutes of every wake you will each vote for the single person among you who will survive—”

“Why only one?” asked Martha sharply, stepping beside Whitley.

“I can’t explain the whys and hows of the Neverworld. They were determined by you.”

“But if time has stopped,” asked Cannon, “why can we return to our normal lives?”

“Only for eleven point two hours. Six hundred and seventy-two minutes. The length of your wake. For Cannon and Whitley it’s six hundred and seventy-five. At the end of that time, you will all wake up in the Neverworld again, as surely as Cinderella’s stagecoach turns back into a pumpkin. Even though your accident produced a snag in the space-time fabric, a crinkle in the cloth, the present world hasn’t disappeared. It remains alive all around you, a bullet left in the gun chamber.”

“What is the significance of our arrival time in the wake?” asked Martha.

“The beginning and end of a wake are based on an infinite number of factors, including violent impact, strength of connection, and random chance.”

Whitley, seemingly unable to hear another word, flung down the knife. She seized her phone off the kitchen island and had a curt, unintelligible conversation before hanging up, shoving her feet into her Converse sneakers.

“What are you doing now?” asked Cannon.

“Driving to T. F. Green.”

It was the airport for private jets outside Providence.

“I booked the jet to Hawaii. We’re leaving in an hour. Let’s go.”

“Won’t change a thing, I’m afraid,” said the Keeper.

She glared at him. “We will be in a plane thirty-six thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean at the end of the—what did you call it, the wake? What’s going to happen? We just vanish out of our seats like some Willy Wonka magic trick?”

“You’ll see,” said the Keeper.



* * *



—

Everyone went with Whitley except me.

I couldn’t. I was too devastated, too scared to move so far away from my parents, to be trapped in a box in the sky with them.

Them.

They were them to me too now. I wasn’t one of them, not anymore. If this situation had made anything clear, it was that: that the very people I’d once loved and trusted most in the world had become total strangers.

What had I done to deserve this? To end up in hell with them?

I couldn’t think about it. No, I couldn’t let my mind move ahead. It had to stay on a tight leash tied to this moment. It was all I could handle.

I watched them pile with varying degrees of conviction into Cannon’s Jeep. It was obvious that they suspected Whitley’s plan, an impetuous flight westward to a tropical island, was futile. Yet they went ahead. For a show of solidarity? Some last, vain hope that it might actually work, that the Linda’s Gulfstream V tearing through the pink cotton-candy clouds with its beige calfskin seats and trays of fanned-out mango slices would be the loophole, the wormhole, the Get Out of Jail Free card to puncture this nightmare?

I stumbled down the steps, barely aware of the rain drenching me as I climbed into the truck. As I backed out, I saw that the Keeper had managed to free himself from Whitley’s knots. Once again he was at the entrance, his face bloody and red, Gandalf at his side, as if the dog had always belonged to him.

This time the old man didn’t utter a word. He didn’t have to. His smile at me as I drove past him said it all.

See you later.





You can’t stay awake.