Whit came close and hugged me, glow and all.
“The worst thing is, Whit, maybe they
did
tell me about it. And maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention.”
Then I really started sobbing. My tears soaked into Whit’s jumpsuit, and he held me until we both sank into sleep, and my glow faded, faded away.
WHOA!
Celia came to visit me again that night, or sometime during those first harried hours in the new jail. I wasn’t so sure about the passage of time anymore. I wasn’t sure about anything.
“Hi, Whit, missed you,” Celia said, same as before, only now she said it with a wink. “I was thinking about you. The way it was. Happy days. Our first date. You wore that wrinkly bowling shirt you love.
Alley Cat.
Remember?”
Of course I remembered.
Oh man, oh man, oh Celia. What is happening? Am I totally insane? Is that why I’m in a nuthouse?
“Celes, listen, I need to ask you a question. Why did you stay away for so long? Please, if you don’t want me to go completely crazy, tell me what happened to you.”
Amazingly—especially if this was a dream—Celia reached out and touched me. I could feel her. It made me calm. Calmer. She felt like the old Celia, looked like the old Celia… and had the same sweet smile.
“I
will
tell you what happened to me, Whit. I want to so badly.”
“Thank you.” I let out a sigh from the bottom of my sneakers. “Thank you.”
“Not now, though. When I see you for real. In person. Not in a dream. We have to be careful, though—The One Who Is The One is watching us.”
I couldn’t let Celia go again. I held her close—very close—and I asked her once more for some kind of rational explanation.
Then Celia pulled away, but just far enough for her to stare into my eyes. I loved being able to look into her eyes again. We had the same baby blues. Her friends used to joke about the kids we’d have one day.
“Here’s all I can tell you for now, Whit. There’s a prophecy. It’s written on a wall in your future. Learn about it. Never forget it. You’re a part of it, of running the world. That’s why the New Order’s so afraid of you and Wisteria.”
I couldn’t even
absorb
that major information drop before she took a quick breath and continued. “Whit, I can’t be here any longer than this. I love you. Please miss me.”
“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “I can’t take this again.
Celia?
”
She was gone, but somehow I could still hear her voice: “We’ll be together again, Whit. I miss you already. Miss me. Please miss me.”
THAT MORNING, Whit and I were startled awake by a tapping sound, like a stick or maybe somebody’s cane. My heart immediately started racing full blast, but Whit still seemed groggy and disoriented.
“Celia,” he mumbled. I shoved myself away from him. I loved my brother, but this was no time for hopeless romanticism.
“No, it’s your sister, and as a reminder, we’re at home sweet hellhouse,” I said, and gave him a gentle slap. “Wake up! I need you here, dude!”
I held my breath as the knob slowly turned. By the time Whit showed any recognition of where he was, the door had opened several inches, but all I could see was the dimly lit hall through the crack.
A cold voice finally came from behind the door. “Thank you, Matron.” Its evil chill made my heart practically stop. “I’ll take it from here, if I may.”
“Watch yourself, now,” said the Matron. “These are dangerous fiends.”
“Thank you for your concern, but I think I’ll be just fine.” The door opened wider, and a towering skeletal figure—almost inhumanly tall—stepped into our room.
He was like Death itself, but in modern garb. A charcoal suit hung on him as if he were made of clothes hangers. His skin had a ghastly pallor, unhealthy as a plant left in a closet. For years.
Instinctively I moved back. Then, like a snake striking, a black leather riding crop whipped through the air with a hiss and smacked me hard. “Hey!”
The sting was icy cold, then burning, and I gasped and clutched my hand to my chest.
“No, you don’t, witch,” the Death figure commanded. “Your days of controlling people and objects with your evil powers are over.
I
am here now. I am your
Visitor.
”
WHEN THAT BULLYING, cowardly freak smacked Wisty’s hand with his snake whip, I almost lunged for him. I was ready to fight to the death, whatever it took. Nobody hits my sister.
Wisty bravely cradled her hand and watched him, her jaw set.
I glared at this Visitor creep, trying to distract him. “Let me guess. No one loved you as a child. Or as an adult. Well, tough noogies!”
Then,
smack!
I gasped as the riding crop whipped across my face, opening up my skin with a white-hot sting. Blood started running down my cheek.
“This is your first full day at the Hospital, wizard,” said the Visitor. “So I’m going to be especially gentle with you. But you won’t ever speak to the Matron or me that way again. We’re the only things standing between you and a fate far worse than death.”
“So there’s something
worse
than being kidnapped in the middle of the night, kept in prison, sentenced to death in a laughable trial, and then locked up in a condemned hospital with two sadists? It’s going to get
worse?!
”
“Are you done?” he asked calmly.
I shrugged and was just deciding what to say next when the crop zapped out of nowhere and hit me on the left ear, then the right ear, then the tip of my chin.
“Yessss. Much worse,” said the Visitor. “Your file indicated you weren’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. At any rate, you would do well to learn this much:
this
”—he sighed and gestured around our dank and disgusting cell—“is your new home.
“We have armed guards, security cameras, electronic perimeters, and multiple lethal safeguards that I’m not at liberty to discuss. Also, you’ll have no luck circumventing any of these systems with your trickery. This entire building has been altered to dampen your energies, and you will find you have no powers here. In short, once you walked in the door, you effectively became
normal.
”
Wisty and I exchanged a glance meaning “except for glowing.” I swear we could read each other’s mind sometimes, especially lately.
“As to this room’s amenities, please note that your one external window has a western exposure, through which you can see the blackness of a ten-story-deep ventilation shaft, the bottom of which is fitted with a turbine that could grind a blue whale into mush in less than ten seconds. Feel free to throw yourselves down it at any time.”
He continued like a hotel bellman describing an executive suite. “You also have your own semiprivate bathroom, complete with our special-issue toilet paper that feels so airy, you’ll swear it’s not even there.”
I looked into our doorless bathroom nook, which contained a seatless toilet surrounded by dust and chunks of fallen plaster, and I confirmed that, yes, in fact,
there was no toilet paper.
The Visitor looked down his long, hooked nose at us. “I will be back periodically to check on you,” he said in his deep zombielike voice. “If you misbehave in any way, well”—he paused and gave a smile that would have made a crocodile look cheerful—“I will mete out punishment.”
Sssst!
The riding crop slashed through the air, missing my eye by a whisker. “I’ll see you soon….
Promise.
”
Then he was gone, and the lock turned behind him.
“I don’t much care for him,” said Wisty. “You?”
WISTY THEN SUMMED UP our situation with typical offhanded precision.
“This totally sucks,” she said.
I considered that. Between our various bruises, bumps, cuts, welts, and torn clothes, it looked like we’d been in a cage match with a wolverine.
I also had less than a month to live.
“Much too optimistic,” I said. “You always see the bright side, don’t you?”
I wandered around the room, trying to distract myself from the burning pain of my injuries. But I was having trouble forming thoughts… other than self-torturing ones about juicy burgers and black-and-white milk shakes… and cheese fries. I’d never been so hungry in all my life.
Then I noticed Wisty sitting on the mattress, moving her lips silently.
“Talking to yourself already?” I asked.
“Why not? We’re in an insane asylum.” She smiled, then looked a little bit sheepish. “Actually, if you need to know, I’m trying to come up with a spell. You know, to get us out of here. If I’m a witch, I ought to be able to go ‘
shazam
’ and blast the door open.”
“They said we had no power here. You weren’t paying attention to The One With The Bullwhip.”
“Really? Then tell me that my little radioactive moment was just a weird dream,” she said.
“Okay, you win, glowgirl,” I said. “So, you think ‘shazam’ will do it? Go for it.”
She waved her hands at the door.
“Shazam!”
she yelled.
Snick!
It popped right open.
“HERE. BOTH OF YOU!” The Matron’s bigfoot-size body filled our doorway. “Come with me, vermin. I suppose it’s time you learned how to get food and water.”
In the woman’s massive hands were two beat-up plastic pails, which she flung out to us. Call it a hunch, but this already didn’t look good. I’d have done anything to get a drink of water, though. The sink in our bathroom didn’t work… and what was in the toilet wasn’t exactly, um, potable.
We each took a pail and followed the Matron as she noisily clomped down the dark hall, her keys jangling with each lurching step and her preternaturally huge feet sausaged into chunky white shoes.
I started to make out noises ahead, and they were vaguely… animalish. Snarls, growls, and high-pitched whines filled my ears.
“What is this?” Wisty croaked. “Now what?”
The Matron gestured toward the end of the hall. “There’s food way, way,
way
down there. And water. Use your pails.” She looked down at her enormous steel-banded watch. “You have four minutes. If you’re not back by then”—her black eyes shone and her mouth stretched in a horrible approximation of a smile—“then I’ll know you’ve passed to the other side. Violently.”
Turning, she clomped her way back to the nurses’ station fifty yards behind us. “Take care,” she called.
My palm was already sweaty where I held on to the thin metal handle of my pail. The hallway in front of us was lined on either side by… canine animals of some sort. Mad dogs? Wolves? Black-furred hyenas? Hungry, angry, hostile animals, chained to the walls up and down the hallway.
Somehow we had to get past them—and back—in four minutes… but only if we wanted food and water.
Only if we wanted to live.
ANYONE WHO’S EVER BEEN on the verge of a major disaster, possibly even death, will tell you that the most mundane things can go through your mind. Just before I was about to sacrifice my life to the animals, I thought about a really mean dog that used to live on our block. When I was little, my friends and I always rode our bikes on the other side of the street, because the dog looked wild and we were scared it would break free and bite our butts.
Her name was Princess. She was a shih tzu. And she now seemed like a fuzzy teddy bear that I could have dressed up in doll clothes for a tea party.
“Are those
dogs?
” Whit asked hoarsely as we started down the hallway. “Or wolves?”
I shook my head. “I’m going with hellhounds.”
“Do you think maybe you could burst into flames again?” Whit whispered.
“I can’t do it on purpose,” I croaked, frustrated. “I’m trying. Not happening.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll go,” Whit rasped back, then blew out a thin gust of air.
“No,” I wheezed. “I’m small and fast.”
Before Whit and I had a chance to finish the argument, we saw a small, indistinct figure appear at the end of the hall. Holding a pail.
“Who’s that?” I muttered.
Whoever it was suddenly darted forward, leaping and dodging and almost crashing against the wall, hurtling toward us at a furious pace. “It” was about thirty feet away when it suddenly tripped and fell.
Instantly several hounds fell on it, snarling and snapping. Just watching the awful scene took my breath away.
“I have to help,” Whit said, making a move toward the hapless soul.
But then the little figure bounced up, pail in hand, and hustled straight toward us again. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it was definitely a little kid, maybe five or six years younger than me. Blood streaked the poor tyke’s hair and ragged T-shirt. We stood to one side as he or she dashed past, then collapsed on the dirty floor, huddling against the wall, head and shoulders shaking.
The pail, which had fallen over when the child had tripped, was now completely empty. The hellhounds had eaten or drunk everything the kid had risked life and limb for.
Crying silently, the huddled figure grabbed the empty pail, skittered away on hands and knees to a couple of doors down the hall, and disappeared inside.
Whit and I looked on in shocked silence.
The Matron merely peered at her watch. “Seventy seconds,” she told us.
“Ticktock.”
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED to
think loudly?
It seems like a contradiction in terms. But you do what you gotta do when you have to pretend you can’t hear the sounds of vicious snarling and snapping jaws and teeth all around you.
I had to shout in my head over and over as I bolted down the hall with both our pails,
Make like you’re doing the hundred-yard dash—at the regional championship
.
Run, run, run!