Neverworld Wake(45)
“The Japanese larch and silver birch trees growing around Wincroft. If you look closer, they’re dead. A bunch of tall, spindly black tree trunks sticking out of the ground. Those trees aren’t native to Rhode Island. They’re indigenous to the Chubu and Kanto regions of Japan. If you go up to one and dig down about six inches, chalky blue water pools everywhere.” She beamed. “You know what I’m getting at?”
Cannon only stared.
“Blue Pond?” she suggested. “Cannon’s Birdcage? The bug you discovered in Apple’s OS X operating system sophomore year? The accidental combination of keystrokes that crashes your hard drive, delivering the photo of Blue Pond wallpaper to your screen? The photograph is an almost surreal picture of a bright blue lake, dead snow-tipped trees growing right out of it.”
He was confounded. “Okay. What about it?”
“That photo is embedded in the Neverworld’s landscape. Everywhere.”
Cannon said nothing, only slipped to his feet, crossed the library to the window, stared out.
“Then there’s Whitley,” Martha went on officially. “There’s a volatility in the Neverworld’s weather because of you.”
“Me?” said Wit.
“Gale-force winds. Constant rain, thunder, lightning. It’s your temper.”
Whitley glared at her.
“The night we went back to Darrow,” Martha went on. “How we got chased by the police. I watched wind overturn every car in the parking lot. It was because of your confession about being the White Rabbit.”
Whitley huffed in apparent disagreement, but her eyes flitted worriedly to the windows.
“These details go for all of us,” Martha went on. “The closer we get to the truth, the root of who we are, the more unstable this world will become. Which brings me to Beatrice.”
She turned to me, her expression stony. My heart began to pound.
“I have no clue.”
Everyone frowned at her—and then at me.
“Your contribution is here. Somewhere. But I haven’t figured it out yet.”
I swallowed. What was Martha attempting to do? Intimidate me? Scare me? If so, it was working.
She sighed. “One thing I do know is that if we try changing the wake, we have to stick together.”
“Why is that?” asked Cannon.
“We don’t know how we’re going to react. The past hooks you like a drug. The future jolts you like an electric chair. Reliving beautiful memories can be just as devastating as reliving the terrible ones. They’re addictive. Given that time travel in The Bend is so dangerous, and that inside the Neverworld there are elements we can’t anticipate—the things you are each contributing—we have no idea what will happen if we even attempt this.” She shook her head, her voice trembling with so much emotion, she reminded me of an evangelical minister on a public access channel, lecturing a rapt congregation about the end of the world. “It could be a complete disaster. We could accidentally end up in different train compartments on different trains speeding in different directions. That means it’ll be impossible to ever make it back here. To Wincroft. Together. To vote. Then we really will be trapped here forever.”
The rest of us eyed each other in alarm. No one spoke.
I gazed down at the hulking book on my lap. I couldn’t breathe.
What was she up to? Was Martha actually trying to help us? Or was this new revelation only the meticulous and conniving arrangement of her chess pieces on the board, some ingenious trap we would all fall into, which would somehow result in everyone voting for her?
What I did know—or at least strongly suspected—was that she knew what my contribution to the Neverworld was. I could tell by the way she looked at me, by her flat, implausible explanation: I haven’t been able to figure it out.
Martha always figured everything out. For whatever reason, she’d decided not to disclose this piece of information.
Not yet.
For the next couple of wakes, we stayed in the library at Wincroft, studying The Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. We wanted to understand everything Martha had told us.
We downloaded the audiobook and spent hours listening to all 1,322 pages, curled up under mohair blankets, drinking tea as the narrator—some young British actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company with an opera baritone and a schizophrenic ability to sound like completely different men and women, young, old, poor, aristocratic—told the futuristic tale of love and loss. It was a bewitching story, one of the best I’d ever heard, a heart-pounding mystery unfolding against a future world, fascinating and terrifying plot twists you couldn’t see coming.
The book took place far in the future. The main character, Jonathan Elster, was a bumbling, absentminded professor at a university for outcasts in Old Earth. He taught a popular alternative philosophy course, Intro to Unknowns, which covered, among other things, the nuts and bolts of time travel. For years, Elster had been in love from afar with a mysterious woman named Anastasia Bent, who taught in the history department. When she accidentally stumbled upon a cover-up about the history of the universe and vanished—a fisherman witnessing her wandering a cliff walk suggested she committed suicide, though her body was never recovered—Jonathan set off on a perilous quest across space and time to find her.
All of us grew silent and sullen as we listened. The violence at the Warwick police station had brought us all together, opened up the roped-off rooms in the sprawling, lavish mansion that had once been our friendship, flung the sheets off the furniture, turned on the lights. Now it seemed Martha’s disclosure had us taking refuge in our separate rooms again, disappearing up winding staircases, holing up behind closed doors, the only hint of company an occasional creak of the floorboards overhead.