Later that night, Mom lifted Glenn into her arms and glided up the stairs and down the hall, Hopkins following dutifully behind. Glenn dropped her head onto her mom’s shoulder and listened as she sang her familiar lullaby, a lilting song made up of nonsense words that rolled off her tongue.
She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over
Glenn’s, for one quiet moment, like a moon.
“
The strange words drifted down from her mother’s lips,
whispered as light as falling snow.
“What does it mean, Mommy?”
Fingertips grazed Glenn’s cheek. “It means I love you. It means I’ll always love you.” She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. “No matter what.”
She stepped into the bright hallway and closed the door.
When Glenn woke the next morning, her mother was gone.
Glenn remembered the time as being like tumbling out of control down a long hill as images of the world assaulted her in disconnected jolts. The red of the Authority agents. Her father’s grief-stricken face.
The awful quiet of their house. Hopkins standing guard at the foot of her bed.
The search effort was called off after six months. And it was another six before Glenn and her father began to emerge from their grief, quiet and shaken, like newborns. It was years until Glenn realized that she had always sensed a distance in her mother, a vast expanse at her center that reached down to dark and unknowable depths. There were times when she laughed, chimelike and beautiful, followed by great stretches of gray silence. Glenn remembered all the times she found her staring blankly out into the forest with the haunted look of someone walking alone on a dark road, aching to glance behind her but terrified of what she might see.
Glenn knew that whatever had hold of her in those moments was what finally drove her away.
Was it possible, Glenn wondered, that the same madness had
returned to devour her father as well? And if that was true, was it crouched somewhere deep in Glenn’s genes too, biding its time?
After all, there were signs, weren’t there?
Ever since her mother had disappeared, Glenn had felt something stalking her, a shadow circling her in the darkness. From time to time it would draw close, testing her boundaries. Sitting in class, she’d feel a chill and hear a chorus of whispering voices. Or she’d step up onto a train platform and swear she saw some dark figure, huge and amorphous, moving just at the edge of her vision. How many times had she closed her eyes only to see the image of a woman in white turning to face her, her eyes like that of some awful bird of prey?
Glenn had never told Dr. Kapoor about any of this — he would have medicated her immediately, a black mark her DSS application never would have withstood — and for years she had been able to push those hauntings out of her mind, convincing herself that they were nothing but the bits and pieces of some old dream.
But what was harder to shake was the feeling that there was a message buried somewhere in those whispering voices and snatches of movement. And that if she were to surrender to them, if she invited them in, she would be able to unravel its meaning.
Glenn reached for her tablet, almost dropping it before she managed to turn the starlight projectors on. The night sky appeared above her, a winking lid of stars. She could isolate 813 with the computer, but sometimes, she thought, it was better to do it yourself.
She located Orion, then traced a path to the three blue-white stars that huddled together in a tight line to make up his belt. Alnitak.
Alnilam. Mintaka. From them she went up to Betelgeuse and down to Rigel. Found Taurus and Gemini. And then there it was. 813.
5
Glenn breathed in, then out.
The pounding inside her dulled. The whispering voices faded away. Her mother was gone. That had been true for ten years and had no more bearing on what was happening now than anything else that happened when she was six did.
Her father was sick. That was all that mattered. Before she left for the Academy, she would make sure that whatever it was that claimed her mother would not claim him too.
Glenn lifted her tablet and placed a call. Kevin looked stunned when he answered, but Glenn jumped in before he could say a word.
“I need to see your father,” she said.
Dr. Kapoor’s office was dim and quiet. The furniture looked antique, all of it polished to a dark sheen. Bookshelves filled with actual paper volumes surrounded them. Glenn sat, as she always did, deep in an overstuffed chair while Dr. Kapoor sat on the other side of a vast mahogany desk. He was nearly the opposite of Kevin, short and round with a wide face and soft brown eyes.
“He said he had made some sort of breakthrough?” Dr. Kapoor said in his well-modulated whisper after Glenn told him her story.
“Yes,” Glenn answered, twisting in her chair. “On his project.”
“That he’s been working on ever since your mother left.”
Glenn met his gentle but probing eyes, then looked down at the arm of the chair and picked at the brass rivets that held it together.
Dr. Kapoor shuffled the papers in front of him. “And he says this project will allow him to pass into this other world while bringing a piece of our reality with him. And in this way he’ll be able to rescue your mother from the other side of the border, where she’s trapped, presumably against her will.”
Something caught in Glenn’s throat, but she pushed it aside and nodded.
“Did you see any evidence that this was true?”
Glenn knew he was testing her. Seeing if she had been sucked in by her father’s delusion.
“No,” Glenn said. “Of course not.”
Dr. Kapoor leaned back from his desk and studied her, holding a silvery pen like a bridge between his two hands. “And how are
In her mind, she saw a bird slowly turn its head until its black eyes rested on her. The shadow that moved through the trees was so close she could reach out and touch it.
“Glenn?”
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she said. “My dad needs help.
I want to know what you can do for him.”
Dr. Kapoor stared at her from across the desk, then dropped his pen on the table and sighed. “I’ll make a few calls,” he said. “But, Glenn — ”
Glenn didn’t wait for him to finish. She pulled herself out of her chair and made for the door. Unfortunately, Kevin was just outside. He popped up off the couch the second she opened the door.
“Glenn. Wait.”
“I’m going home, Kevin.”
Kevin shuffled along, trying to keep up. “Just a second.
Seriously.”
“I’ve got to go!”
Glenn threw the front door open. Her breath was coming fast and she could feel tears mounting. She didn’t want anyone, least of all Kevin, seeing her like that. She crossed their wide yard toward the train, and the next thing she knew, she was back in her bedroom.
It was dusk. Hopkins sat at the foot of her bed, staring at the closed door. Her little general. She hadn’t seen Dad when she’d gotten home, having slipped back into the house as carefully and quietly as she had done when leaving that morning on the way to school. Glenn guessed he was either in the workshop or his computer lab,
