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It was all the awful, shattering, mind-numbing scenes that touching him had sent flooding into my mind. Screaming faces with bulging eyes and mouths so distorted they looked scarcely human. Twisted limbs, some so attenuated that they seemed barely attached and maybe were not. Blood, in drops like sweat and in streams and in spouting fountains. Sharp objects, ropes, guns, drowning water and roasting flames, whips and chains and medieval instruments of arcane construction but manifestly foul purpose.
All of it inscribed on his body.
I stared and he allowed me to stare without comment, without explanation, without seeking to soften the blow. I knew this was what he had come to show me. He had known what would be done to me, and he had known that when I found that despicable art emblazoned on my own flesh, that I would be so destroyed by the vision of my future that I might not be capable of going on.
I was to be slowly, inexorably turned into a tapestry of retributive justice, if justice this was.
He slipped his shirt on, buttoning as carefully as he had unbuttoned minutes before.
“Why?” I asked, no longer capable of the energy required to shout.
He finished dressing, and then he said, “The world, Mara, the world you knew, that I knew, the world we saw as the only world, rests on the edge of a knife extended out over a sea of flame. Tilt to one direction, and fall into the flame. Tilt the other direction, and the same fate awaits. Lose our balance even a little, and slip onto the blade itself and be eviscerated.”
“What are you talking about? Balance? What . . .”
“There are forces that badly want us to lose our balance. And there are countervailing forces that would see us maintain our precarious stance and survive. We, you and I, are tools of that second force. The task we are given is one small part of maintaining that balance.”
He took a sip of coffee, finishing the cup.
“Those are just words,” I said.
“Balance is everything,” he said, almost in a whisper, though as always with Messenger, I heard his every word as if it were spoken by lips pressed against my ear. “The balance between good and evil, between true and false, between pain and pleasure, between love and loss, hatred and indifference. However you name them, these balances are all that keep the world spinning.”
He moved around the counter and came to me. For a moment I thought he might touch me, and such was the spell woven by his words and, yes, by the inexpressible feelings he evoked in me, that I wished him to. Instead he used one finger to gently lift the sleeve and reveal the terrible thing beneath. He looked at it, solemn, sad and solemn, and said, “We are given great powers, though we did not choose to have them. And with power comes hubris—overweening confidence, arrogance. These marks, these terrible artworks, are our humility. They provide our balance.”
“I don’t want to . . .” I was unable to go on for the tightening of my throat. Tears blurred my vision. All I could see was my own body, my very self, marred forever, made into a living nightmare. No one would ever be able to stand to look at me. I would have to spend the rest of my life covered, concealed, ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to look in a mirror. I would never have a boyfriend, never get married.
I sobbed. I sat down on the tile floor, my back against hard kitchen cupboards, and sobbed into my hands. I don’t know how long I sat like that, feeling hopeless, so absolutely hopeless. I had not cried like that since my father died. I was lost. I was destroyed.
After a while the wracking sobs stopped, though the tears kept coming in waves, lessening, renewing, seemingly endless. I just didn’t care if Messenger heard me or saw me. I didn’t care because I was nothing. I was a stupid girl without a memory, weeping on the floor of a kitchen in which I did not belong.
Only when I was drained of not only tears but hope and self-respect, did the slightest glimmer of anything that was not black appear at the ragged edge of my thoughts.
He had survived it.
Messenger had been the Messenger of Fear for . . . I had no idea how long. But his chest, his stomach, his shoulders and back and tapered torso, had all been covered with tattoos of vile tortures, each the equal of mine, and perhaps the rest of him as well, and yet he lived. Yet he had not lost all humanity, I thought. Yet he still longed for his Ariadne.
Somehow the boy in black had survived, and, I was sure, still had hope.
Having hated him, raged at him, believed every foul thing about him, I nevertheless knew that he had hope. And I knew this because he had shown me. That was why he had taken me with him to Carcassonne. To show me that despite all the inconceivable fear he had witnessed and necessarily felt, still, he hoped.
My knees were stiff, my muscles sore, as I stood. Messenger was gone, but I knew I would find him.
I ate my cold toast, barely tasting it. I cannot say it restored all my strength, but it helped. Then I walked to the kitchen door, put my hand on the brass knob, took a shaky breath, twisted it, and stepped through to find myself once more outside Samantha Early’s home, where Messenger waited for me.
“You have something to tell me,” I said. “You’ve been preparing me.”
For just a second, so brief that I could never have sworn it was real, though I wished fervently to believe that it was, he seemed to feel sorry for me. It was gone in an instant, replaced by his more usual expression. But the sense that he had pitied me, that he knew what was coming and pitied me, scared me.
“Yes,” Messenger said.
“Then . . . I’m ready.”
22
THE END CAME DESPITE WELL-MEANING EFFORTS to stop it. One of the parents heard about what was happening to Samantha at school and called S
amantha’s mother.
