“Plus, you know,” Paul continued, “you’re a freak too, and you’re still cool. You know? You write all over your hands and you’re like, totally obsessive, and still, every guy who knows you wants to be you.” Paul’s head thumped against the wall beside his bed. “It gives freaks like me hope.”
Nuala’s fingers on my skin seemed like my whole world. I wanted her to pull me underneath the bed and disappear into the darkness with me, but I managed, “You’re not a freak.”
“Oh, dude, you have no idea. You want to hear how messed up I am? No way would I tell anyone this normally. This is good shit.”
Nuala’s breath was on my face and I’m sure my crap sausage-and-green-peppers breath was on hers, but if she minded it she didn’t show it. Her mouth was curled into a very innocent and beautiful sort of half-smile I’m sure she would’ve killed immediately if she’d been aware of it.
“Get this. Every night, I hear singing.”
My fingers froze. Nuala’s fingers froze. We were both still, mirror images of each other.
“Every night I hear singing, and it’s like I’m dreaming. It’s like in a dream where, you know, you know it’s in a different language, but you can understand it? Anyway, this song is just a list. It’s a list of names.” Paul stopped, and I could hear him drink and drink and drink and drink. “And I just know when I hear the names, that it’s a list of dead. People who are going to die. I just know it is, because what he says afterwards, always, is remember us, so sing the dead, lest we remember you.”
I started to shiver. I hadn’t realized before then that I hadn’t been.
My voice sounded normal. “Who’s on it?”
“Me,” Paul said.
“You?”
“Yeah. And a bunch of names I don’t recognize. And Sullivan. And you. And—I didn’t know her name before you told me, but she’s on it. Dee. Deirdre Monaghan, right? Dude, I think we’re all going to die. Soon.” More drinking. “Do you think I’m crazy now?”
Nuala’s hand was a fist inside my fingers. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You should’ve told me sooner. I believe you.”
“I know you do,” Paul said.
I shivered, hard.
“I know you do, because you go running every time he’s about to sing. But if I’d told you, and you told me you heard it too, that’d make it real, you know?”
Nuala unfisted her fingers and used them to turn my hand slowly until words that I’d written on the back were visible to me: the list.
Shit, I thought.
“Yes,” she whispered softly.
“I thought this crap would stop when I came here.” Paul’s voice was plaintive.
“I did too,” I said.
I left Paul dozing on his bed in an imagined alcohol stupor and retreated to the fourth floor bathroom. I knew it was stupid to call her, because no way was I going to gain any comfort from it, but I felt weirded out by Paul’s revelation. Pushed off-balance. It was one thing for me to be involved in some supernatural plot. It was another thing to hear Dee’s name on a list of dead and think she was somehow up to her neck in something too.
“Dee?”
I picked a chip of lime green paint off the brick wall. The night was so black outside the little window beside my head that the glass acted like a mirror, reflecting an image of me with the cell phone pressed up to my ear.
“James?” Dee’s voice was surprised. “It really is you.”
For a moment I didn’t say anything. For a moment, it hurt too badly to know that it was her on the other end of the phone, the memory of her words after the kiss choking me.
I had to say something. I said, “Yeah. Things wild and crazy over there?”
I heard a night bird call, loud and clear and very close. I couldn’t tell if it was right outside my window or coming from Dee’s end of the conversation. Her voice was low. “We’re just getting ready to go to sleep. That’s our version of wild and crazy.”
“Wow. You animals you.” I bit my lip. Just ask her. “Dee, do you remember when we first ran into each other here? Do you remember what you first asked me?”
“You must think I have the brain of an elephant to remember that far back. Oh. Oh. That.”
Yeah, that. When you asked me if I’d seen the faeries. “Have you seen any more?”
A long pause. Then: “What? No. No, definitely not. Why, have you?”
My skin still smelled like Nuala’s summer rain and woodsmoke scent. I sighed. “No. Is—everything okay with you?”
She laughed a little, cute, uncertain laugh. “Yeah, of course it is. I mean. Um. Other than me being messed up. Right?”
“I dunno. I asked you.”
“Then yeah. Everything’s okay.”
My voice was flat. “No faeries.”
“Shhh.”
“Why shhh?”
“Just because they’re not around anymore doesn’t mean I go around shouting the word from the rooftops,” Dee said. “Everything’s fine.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. At least honesty. What was I going to do, call her out on it? I sighed and rested my head against the dingy wall. “I just wanted to make sure.”
“Thanks,” Dee said. “That means a lot to me.”
I looked at my reflection in the old, narrow mirrors on the wall across from me. The James-in-the-mirror frowned back at me, the ugly scar as dark as his knitted eyebrows.
“I better go,” Dee said.
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
I hung up. She hadn’t asked me if I was okay.
Nuala
A frightening menagerie, my emotions are
Too many and varied to number
Like creatures they crawl and they fly above
Tearing my body asunder.
—from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter
I was watching James sleep when I was summoned. For the moment when I was traveling, all I could think of was the last thing I’d been looking at: James in his own personal battleground that was sleep, arms wrapped tight around a pillow, arms scrawled with our handiwork. He was dreaming of Ballad, all by himself, without any prodding on my part. He was dreaming of the main character, who was really a metaphor for himself, an egotistical magician in a world full of ordinary people. And he dreamt of a building to stage the play in, a low, flat yellow-brick building covered with ivy. And Eric was there, playing guitar, and whatshisface—Roundhead—Paul—was playing one of the characters in the play, his gestures exaggerated and face shocked. Everything was so vividly painted, down to the musty smell of the building, that it was as if I, for once, was dreaming.