Unhonored (20 page)

“The likes of me is
exactly
why I look this way!” Carmichael shouted. He turned to face Ellis. “You did this to me!”

“I did no such thing!” Ellis stood her ground, indignation evident in her expression.

“You did exactly that!” Carmichael seethed, his wings still rustling behind him. He turned to Alicia, still pressed against the door. “Tell me, Miss Van der Meer, just whom were you expecting to find?”

“We've come for Jenny,” Jonas said, trying to interject himself between Carmichael and the costumed girl.

Carmichael ignored him. “And just how did you expect to find Jenny?”

“Well.” Alicia was hesitant. “Ellis said the angels wouldn't help us so we needed to find…”

Alicia's eyes went wide.

Lucian Carmichael took a step back, taking care of his own barbed tail as he bowed deeply, pain still registering in his eyes.

“Just so, a demon.” Lucian completed the thought in his own words. “That's how her ‘ladyship' Ellis sees me and that's how I must appear in this pointless charade. At your service … and leave me alone, I want no part of you.”

Carmichael turned on his cloven foot and began walking away back toward where the book he had thrown had fallen. His wings dragged slightly behind him.

“You can help us,” Ellis called to him.

“Ah, if only I cared,” he called back over his shoulder.

“We can help you in turn,” Ellis tried again.

“Don't care.” Lucian did not bother to even glance back as he spoke. He reached down and picked up the book again. “Nobody home. Don't need anything you're selling.”

“But you're looking for something, too,” Jonas offered, stepping forward. “Here in the books. Something you haven't found yet.”

“Very clever, sir, and I'll bet you thought that up all on your own.” Carmichael continued picking up the fallen books, examining them and then setting them aside.

“You're looking for the way out, aren't you?” Jonas pressed.

“So what if I am.” The demon shrugged.

Ellis raised her chin, suddenly understanding. “But you're not just looking for
any
way out. You're a demon. You inherently know where the Gate is back to your own infernal regions. But that's not the Gate you're interested in finding.”

“You've changed your mind, haven't you?” Jonas said. “You don't want the demon's Gate, you want to—”

“And how do you think I'll be able to get through the Gate looking like this?” Carmichael replied angrily. “What angel is going to convince the Sentinels that I'm done with the old ways? When I show up with everything but a pitchfork?”

“Why would you even want to try?” Jonas asked. “You aren't of the Tween; already chose the darkness. Why not just return through your own gateway back to the hell that sent you?”

“Because I can't go back,” the doctor snapped.

“Why not?”

“Because I was lousy at my job!” Dr. Carmichael shouted. “They don't want me back. They say that I've become too attached to the idea of Earth and seduced by the promise of mortality. I was supposed to come here and convert the souls of the Tween into choosing mandated order and instead, it seems, they've converted me into doubting my own choice.”

“What?” Jonas scoffed. “A reformed devil?”

“You ever read Heraclitus, boy?” Carmichael's words were bitter. “He said change is the only constant. We all change or we rot. And, yes, just knowing about Heraclitus seems to call my commitment to my former masters into question. So I'm looking for a better offer from a, shall we say, more forgiving group. But how can I do that looking like
this
?”

“Jonas will help you,” Ellis said, wondering if she had just lied to the demon.

“I can,” Jonas replied. “I will.”

Carmichael stood still, his breathing laboring against his emotions. It took him long moments before he managed to speak. “You … you just had to come back, didn't you, Ellis? Why did you come back? I thought if I could learn about your life and what it was like to breathe and love and hate and have pain and joy that it would be enough. Why did you have to come back and show me what I was lacking? Why did you give me a taste for things I could never have?”

“Jenny trusted you,” Ellis said. “She would have come to you first for help when Merrick changed the Day.”

“Leave me alone.” The demon breathed the words out between his sharp teeth.

“Where's Jenny, Lucian?” Ellis asked quietly.

Carmichael looked away.

“We can help you but you've got to help us first.” Ellis's voice was soft as she spoke. “She's here, isn't she, Lucian?”

“Yes,” the demon replied in a whisper that she could barely hear.

“Show me where she is, Lucian,” Ellis said, steadying her voice to a calm she did not feel.

The demon reached down to the stack of fallen books at his feet. Ellis had not realized it before now but all of the books in this library were scrapbooks, as though all of the collected scrapbooks of each soul in the Tween had been gathered here to one place. Carmichael pushed several aside before lifting up a single tome, the cover of which was unadorned. He turned toward Ellis and handed her the book.

“Here,” he said.

Ellis took the scrapbook and examined it. Most scrapbooks she had found here were intricately adorned but this one was very simple. The cover was in blue dyed suede leather with a dull bronze binding on the spine.

Ellis moved to open the book but the demon's red, clawed hand came down gently on her own to prevent her.

“Remember, Ellis,” Carmichael said. “Sometimes the only way back is forward.”

Ellis gave the demon a quizzical look as he stepped back.

“Ellis,” Jonas said in sudden alarm. “Wait!”

She opened the book.

She felt a sudden pull forward. The book suddenly grew in size or perhaps she was getting smaller. All she knew was that she was being pulled between the pages and into the binding.

In the next moment, Ellis vanished from the library.

 

20

THE BLANK PAGE

For a moment, Ellis felt disoriented.

She stood in her green traveling dress in the middle of a featureless white plain. Her feet were firmly planted against the dull white surface but it seemed to extend away from her toward no discernable horizon. The sky above was white, too; she assumed everywhere was the same featureless blank.

Ellis recalled having once been in a heavy snowfall in Boston when she was in her high school years. She could see nothing beyond the blank whiteness around her. The sunlight was so completely diffused by the clouds and snow that not even its brightness could be discerned overhead. She remembered it as being both disconcerting and comforting at the same time, as though one could walk anonymously through the falling snow and be sequestered from the world. This place, wherever it was, had much that same feeling about it: the interior of a cocoon.

Ellis stooped down to touch the ground at her feet. As she ran her bare fingers across the surface she felt the slight roughness in the surface of its barely perceptible texture, yet it, too, was familiar to her.

“Paper,” she said aloud. The words sounded flat in her ears as though they were absorbed completely by the eternal space around her.

A sigh.

Ellis looked up sharply toward the sound.

There, in the distance, was something after all. It was a slightly darkened blotch at what Ellis could only assume was the horizon of this place. It was blurry and indistinct but at least it was something, a fixed mark that she could find her way toward.

Ellis walked toward the blemish. Whether she walked for minutes or hours she could not tell. The dark blotch grew with every passing step. It began to take on the aspects of a watercolor done in shades of green and blue. The edges of the colors had bloomed together as though flowing through fibers in the paper from a brush that was too wet. It was not just beneath her but it also seemed to flow around her at the sides and above as well, staining the stark whiteness in its soft, colorful haze.

With every step, more definition came into the painting that flowed about her. Above, the watercolor became a more distinctive blue with patches of white while the greens became more separated and varied in their sweeping shapes. Some congealed into blotches of individual leaves and long sweeping swaths of color reminiscent of tall grass. Soon browns, blacks and yellows appeared.

A brownish path formed beneath her feet. It meandered amid tall blades of grass formed of swaths of color more pronounced and with sharper edges than before. The blue of the sky congealed, retreating from where white clouds took form. Trees emerged from the blurred green shades, their trunks, branches and leaves growing more distinct with every step that she took. Soon the woods surrounded her on the path, the trees arching overhead, and the light from the sky shining down through the leaves dappled her form as she continued to follow the trail wandering before her. She recalled that she had come down this same trail before, sometime deep in her past.

The pathway emerged from the woods into a small meadow. It continued across the soft grasses to the far side of the clearing where a familiar wall stood. It was rendered, Ellis thought to herself, in the mixed media of watercolors and pencils.

In the wall at the end of the path was a gate.

Not
the
Gate, she reminded herself. This, too, was drawn in the same manner as the walls and surrounding foliage but it nevertheless was a perfect likeness of the Gate out of the Tween through which she had somehow passed seemingly an eternity before.

There, sitting next to the trail in the soft grasses and surrounded by flowers, sat the familiar form for whom Ellis had sought so diligently.

“Jenny,” Ellis breathed.

Her cousin looked up and smiled.

“You're … you're changed,” Ellis said.

Jenny's bobbed hair was now long and luxuriously styled up onto her head. She was the picture of a Gibson girl and, judging by the sharpness of her appearance, the only thing truly real in the scene that had materialized before Ellis. She wore an old-fashioned dress of white linen and lace, complete with large leg-of-mutton sleeves. Her curls were carefully coiffed up off the shoulders. The skirt was splayed carefully about her on a picnic blanket that shielded her from the grass.

“Not entirely changed, my dear Ellis,” Jenny answered. She held up her gloved hands, which appeared more deformed and contorted than Ellis recalled them. Still, her smile at Ellis's approach was radiant.

Ellis shook her head in puzzlement. “But your hair … the dress…”

“Ellis,” she answered, the sound of the name filled with sunshine. “I knew you would come back to me, if I waited long enough.”

“Like Jonas,” Ellis acknowledged, then she glanced at her cousin's hands. “But not entirely. Was it painful?”

“Was what painful?”

“The Gate … when it closed.”

Jenny's smile dimmed. “Yes. It was painful. I don't remember much about it, to be completely honest. I believe Alicia was here at the time. She got me back to Gamin somehow and to Uncle Lucian's office. Uncle said that it was not unusual for someone who has had such trauma to not remember it clearly. He took care of me for quite some time after … after the accident.”

Jenny looked down at her own hands, twisted in her lap.

“Do you remember that day, Ellis? Do you know what happened?”

“I remember.” Ellis nodded. “That is how I knew where to find you.”

“And so you have!” Jenny brightened at the thought. “You came back for me as I always knew that you would. Now we can be safe here together, just you and I!”

Ellis stepped carefully across the painted meadow. Flowers and blades of grass became more real wherever she stepped. “I came back for you, Jenny, but I didn't come to stay.”

“Why not?” Jenny's smile fell a bit at the corners.

“Because we have to leave, Jenny.”

Ellis offered her hand.

“No. No we don't.” Jenny withdrew slightly. “You've come back to me, as I knew you would. No one else could find me here. No one else could know where to look. We can be safe here. I knew if I waited, you would come and everything could go back to the way that it was before.”

“No, Jenny,” Ellis sighed. “We cannot go back.”

“Perhaps you don't remember,” Jenny continued, desperation rising in her voice. “But I know how it used to be with us. We can start over in this place—fresh and new.”

“Tabula rasa?” Ellis asked.

“Exactly! A blank slate!” Jenny replied, reaching out with her twisted hands toward Ellis. “We start over here, just the two of us at the Gate where we were separated. Only this time we won't let anyone else in. We can build a Day of our own, just the two of us right here, and make it into whatever we wanted. No one could find us! It would just be you and me, here in our own little world where no one could hurt us or make us afraid. We could be safe here, you and I.”

“Oh, my dear Jenny.” Ellis looked on her cousin with a sad smile.

“But isn't that a wonderful dream?” Jenny pleaded.

“Yes, Jenny, it is.” Ellis drew in a deep breath. “That is such a wonderful dream. To be able to stay asleep forever where there is no pain, no suffering and no evil. There is a part of me that wishes that we could just turn our backs on it all … the madness, hurt, cruelty, ignorance … and just retreat into ourselves.”

“Then let's do it,” Jenny begged. “Together we could … what's wrong?”

Ellis knelt down on the blanket with her cousin, folding Jenny's crippled hands into her own.

“We cannot stay,” Ellis said.

“Of course we can,” Jenny begged. “You just said…”