The World Ends at Five & Other Stories Read online

  Then, as I came forward to test the gate itself, a bright light flashed out at me, like a camera going off. I blinked rapidly in its wake, and felt my chest burn with a cold heat. The stone was glowing again, and the gate responded by swinging open.

  I moved into the inner courtyard. Empty. Was the whole place abandoned?

  I pulled the map from the back pocket of the jeans and ventured into the dark yard. Even with the white walls of Steorra gleaming around me, the courtyard remained pitch black. I couldn’t walk quickly if I wanted to keep from tripping. Nor could I read the map in the dark.

  I looked up at the central dome of the compound that stood before me. I had the sense that whatever I was looking for would be in there. I made the assumption that there were no obstacles between where I stood in the courtyard and the white structure in front of me and started forward. Two steps later I was face down in water.

  “What the—?” I growled, more loudly than I should have done.

  From nearby shrubbery came the sound of movement, voices.

  “Did you hear something?” a man’s voice asked. “Water, I thought.” Another man.

  “The reflecting pool?”

  “Probably just some of the fish splashing.”

  Fish? Even as I thought it, I felt them moving around my body as I lay on my stomach in the shallow pool. One curious, scaly beast made soft attempts to nibble my hand. It tickled, and I had to stifle a giggle.

  A beam of weak light swept over my head, and I froze.

  “What is that?” one of the voices queried. The light traveled away. I heard them move closer, across the grass. My heart began to race. What would they do to me if they found me here? I stood up, thinking to get out of the water and hide, but the beam of light found me again. It traveled up my body to my face and wavered.

  “M-madam Aerwyth?” a small and frightened voice asked. There came the sound of something falling into the grass. No, someone. The second guard had fainted.

  “Eh?” I said aloud before composing myself once more. They thought I was her? Clearing my throat, I added as regally as I could, “Yes, it is I.”

  “But you—” He thought better of what he intended to say and knelt on the grass. “Forgive me; I did not mean to address you so familiarly.”

  “It’s okay,” I said without thinking. “Hey, stand up. I need to borrow your flashlight.”

  The guardian hesitated then did as I requested. He stood and handed me his light.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Waeyth.”

  “Well, Waeyth, I think you should get your friend inside.” I gestured toward the unconscious figure on the grass.

  I stepped out of the reflecting pool and swept the flashlight’s beam over the dark yard. It proved to be quite a garden, including a maze of low hedges, gravel and cobblestone paths, and statuary, in addition to the reflecting pool. I never would have managed it in the dark, and I was once again amazed at how all of it had seemed not to exist until touched by the light. Even as the beam swept away from this bush and that statue, those things melted into nothingness until the light passed over them once more.

  “It’s an illusion of some kind,” I murmured.

  “Maybe you need a guardian?” Waeyth asked from where he still stood, not having moved from the spot. “Please, Madam, let me serve you!”

  “You know, Waeyth, you might not be far wrong,” I told him. “Being dead a few days has made my memory fuzzy. Can you guide me to the, uh, atrium?” I resisted the urge to check my map again. Was the atrium what I was looking for?

  “Certainly, Madam! Oh, ah. . .” He gestured vaguely at the flashlight.

  “Sorry,” I said and handed it over. He led me swiftly through the maze of paths and shrubbery, his short and stocky body held erect with pride at his important duty.

  “Maybe we should have carried your friend,” I said after a moment, having forgotten the unconscious guardian.

  “Oh, Borwyn will be all right,” Waeyth assured me. “Won’t he be worried for you when he sees you’re gone?” I asked.

  “Probably not. He’ll probably think he dreamed the whole thing. He tends to, you know. . .” Waeyth paused; it was clearly not the kind of thing he might usually tell the Regent.

  Finally we arrived at the smooth white wall of Steorra’s largest dome. Its gleaming prompted Waeyth to turn off his flashlight.

  I looked to my right along the wall. I looked left. I looked up at the pure white, sloping stone.

  “There’s no door,” I said.

  There wasn’t a door. Or a window. Not even a drain pipe. Or any other viable way to get in.

  Waeyth gave me a strange look. “Well no, Madam. You need special clearance to—to access—well, to get in.” His eyes darted to my necklace to emphasize his meaning.

  “Oh, yeah,” I replied faintly. And waited.

  “Do you want me to go?” Waeyth asked after a moment.

  I swallowed hard. What was I doing here? Some clothes and a map and a moment in the mirror. And the fact that these people seemed to think I was Aerwyth. “Yes, Waeyth, I think you can leave me here. Thank you for your help.”

  He nodded and shuffled off. I mumbled through some strange words, not sure where they were coming from and getting them wrong twice, until the charmed third try, which resulted in a searing blue-white bolt of lightning striking forth from the stone at my throat and leaving a swirling blue-black hole in the wall of the dome, waiting to suck me inside.

  I, on the other hand, backed away.

  I thought about her, about the time we’d met. But what could I really say to defend a couple minutes of time that passed twenty years before? A couple minutes that had changed my life, bringing me to this, the brink of ruining it. . . and countless others’ besides?

  I sighed. I’d come this far, and momentum moved me forward.

  The sense of being on a roller coaster sang through my stomach, making it drop and my throat rise. For a terrible moment I thought I’d surely stepped out into nothingness, that I would fall into a void, that I had been tricked. But just as you sometimes feel that way when you accidentally miss a step on a staircase, only to land safely on solid ground, so did I find my feet supported by cold white marble.

  “Floor’s cold,” I muttered, but even a whisper carried through the chamber, bouncing off the tall columns and rounded walls. I noticed then that my shoes were gone. And yet somehow I wasn’t surprised. Something in me had known to expect it, had known that shoes weren’t permitted in the atrium.

  I took a long look around me. Steorra, the one place I’d longed all my life to see, and there I stood in its innermost sanctuary. All of it was white marble: the walls, the columns, the floor, the high curve of the ceiling. Lights burned up near the top of the dome, their brilliance seeming to soak into the room, causing it to glow. Only one place was dark. The zenith of the dome was open to the night sky. I wondered if it was glassed in or really just open to the air.

  But then, I knew the answer to that too, didn’t I? I knew that there was retractable glass in the skylight, and that it was pulled back during rainstorms.

  “The rain?” I asked, and wondered a moment afterward whether I’d said it aloud or just in my head.

  “To catch it in the well.”

  Was I talking to myself now?

  I looked. Certainly, in the center of the room was a sunken square with four steps leading down on each side. In the center of the square was a cylinder of marble, a sort of pedestal, about three feet high.

  I moved forward. The floor was cold on my bare feet and the air was cold on my wet clothes and skin.

  “The staff.”

  Had I said that? Or had someone else said it?

  I stopped and turned to my left. A rack against the wall displayed six staffs, each ornamented differently. Instinctively I chose the one made of blond wood and topped with a brass crescent moon wrapped around a mirror stone.

  I had done this before, I felt sure of it.

>   I hefted the staff and made my way to the pedestal in the center of the atrium. As I climbed up, I noticed that each column around the room featured an angel, about fourteen feet tall, each one holding an open scroll. Each scroll had a word, some word from another language, the same language as on the necklace, the earliest language known to man.

  “A gifted person is merely gifted. . . until The Order brings them here,” I told myself, as if reciting a lesson learned in my childhood. “The Angels allow us to see beyond, move in other dimensions and across many planes of existence.”

  “And they have allowed you to traverse the grave,” a cool voice added. I turned to my right and saw Maewyn leaning against a column. “Think a moment before you do this thing, Aerwyth. If you release them, The Order will fall. We will no longer be able to help the world you love so much.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. I didn’t like his glib tongue, his voice smooth as a serpent’s hiss and his expression as arrogant as Lucifer’s.

  “Beverly!” I shouted at him, the sound ricocheting around the marble room like a bird that finds nowhere to alight. “I am Beverly and always have been, no matter what you choose to call me!”

  The tears were flowing freely now, and I banged the end of the staff on the pedestal where I stood, a child in the grip of a tantrum.

  Maewyn chose another tactic. He approached the well, although he did not descend into it, instead standing on the very edge of it. “You don’t want to do this,” he told me, his silver-blue eyes locked on mine.

  I drew back involuntarily. Could that be true? And I suddenly saw that if I did not do this thing, release these angels from where they’d been imprisoned in marble, I would be Aerwyth forever.

  He must have read my expression as I realized this, for he began to shake his head, and if his face could have been any more white than it naturally was, I felt sure it would have been white at that moment. His eyes held no more mocking, no more conceit. He was afraid.

  I wanted to sneer, to spit on him, to gloat. But I forced back all these emotions because I knew I could not waste this precious time.

  Even as I thought these things, my mouth opened and began to chant. The words were strange, born of that same early language as was carved on the stone around my neck and the scrolls the angels held. The necklace began to glow, Maewyn’s too, his own stone an evil crimson. Slowly, as if he were struggling against some force, his hand reached up and pulled the chain free of his throat. He tossed it at my feet. “Take it, then! And all our lives!” he shouted, although I could barely hear him for the roaring in my ears. And yet my eyes remained fixed on him and his on me.

  Around us, the marble was disintegrating, bursting into light. I felt the warm rays focused on me, directed at me from every side. I knew now what had given Steorra its ethereal glow. The angels shone forth as their casings melted away from them.

  I was sure I would soon melt myself, so intense was the light around me as the angels came into full form. I wanted to close my eyes but couldn’t. Their brilliance filled me, I was on fire, standing in the center of a white sun. I could no longer see Maewyn at all.

  If the angels were grateful, they showed no sign of it. They did not speak, but I felt them go. I did not see it because I could not. I couldn’t see. I was blind.

  There was a long moment in which I waited, expecting my eyes to adjust. They didn’t, and slowly I became aware that they wouldn’t.

  I blinked rapidly, just to make sure my eyes were actually open. They were. But all I saw was the same bright white heat, even though my body was now cold.

  My body! I looked down but could not see it, so I touched experimentally. I still wore the jeans and tee-shirt, still surprisingly damp from my fall in the reflecting pool. I reached for my throat. The necklace remained, and I felt the blistering of my skin where it had burned me.

  A hand touching mine startled me. Maewyn said, “Beverly. Let me help you.” His voice was unbelievably kind, and at first I was suspicious. But his touch was gentle, so I allowed him to take away the staff and then help me off the pedestal.

  I stepped down onto grass.

  “Yes,” he said when I gasped, “Steorra has returned to the heavens.”

  Around us came the confused murmur of people I could not see. “Matthew?” I asked in alarm, gripping him more tightly.

  I felt him smile. “Yes. We are all what we once were, now. Who we once were.”

  And I had to laugh. Because I was Beverly, born to middle-class parents who’d died when a train had derailed when I was six. I’d died then, too, in my own way, and The Order had tried to inter me. But somewhere inside me Beverly had always struggled, until finally she’d laid Aerwyth to rest for good.

  Raising the Ruins

  I remember my mother’s kimono as a washed-out, frayed and tattered thing. Even when I was young and would stand at my mother’s closet, fingering the silky material, I could see the places where the fabric had worn thin and transparent. Once it must have been a colorful, cheerful robe of bright pink, shimmering silver-gray, lavender and white; by the time I saw it for what it was, it was over-worn to one faded non-color. Just like my mother.

  She had been beautiful once; anyone could see that. Small and dainty, with white porcelain for skin. And her hair was her crowning glory. How I had envied her those long, sleek, straight black tresses that never seemed to fade even as she did. Like a vampire, her hair sucked away the rest of her loveliness and stored it up in its shine.

  I sit staring at the television as they debate whether to bring up some of the artifacts. Underwater cameras show the fallen, seaweed-covered temples, their colors faded too after so much time away from the sun. The temples, the kimono, my mother—all relics of a lost world, something better left behind.

  She used to talk about the island. She had been in America when it had given its last, rattling breath and been consumed by the ocean. Away at college, dating the man she would marry, the man she would cling to after having lost her whole history to one seismic wave.

  Sitting on the sofa, watching the news report on the 25th anniversary of the quake, I remember these things. The kimono. The ivory and ebony sticks she would use to hold up all that hair. The little shrine at which she lit candles and incense and sometimes placed food.

  Dad had hated that shrine. She would only smile serenely at his protests. Although she obediently followed him to synagogue on Saturday mornings, although she upheld every Jewish tradition that my father subscribed to, she would not give up the shrine.

  “I guess it’s not hurting anything,” Dad would mutter. But he forbade her to “poison” me with her “voodoo.”

  When I was young, I would ask her about her childhood on the island. She would tell me stories of her family, all of them lost to her now. She showed me the paintings and calligraphy she used to do, and I wished then that I could do them. But I had the large, clumsy hands of my father, and his curly hair, and when I stood beside my mother and looked into the vanity mirror, I saw that I would never be as beautiful as she.

  I began to despise her. She was beautiful, but she was also weak. So dainty. So submissive. Always living in the past with her shrine and her faded kimono robe. She finally wasted away, and I felt she deserved what she got.

  My thoughts are disturbed by my boyfriend calling to tell me there is an exhibit at the museum. I tell him I’m not interested, that I have plans with my girlfriends and I’ll catch up with him later in the weekend. Then I hop on the subway and head downtown.

  The special exhibit costs more than regular admission and I almost balk. But then I show my old student ID, get the discount, and go in.

  The cases are filled with the same sort of paintings my mother used to do. The white-faced people in long, brightly colored robes holding fans, arranging flowers, drinking tea. They have bemused, dreamy expressions. They do not know they no longer exist, that their homeland and people have been lost and they are now castaways, floating from museum to museum , pieces of cu
riosity.

  Hadn’t my mother always worn that exact expression?

  “It tells the story of a peasant’s daughter that disguises herself as a courtesan and beseeches the emperor for his help against the tyrannical noble that rules her prefect.”

  I scowl up at the familiar voice. My boyfriend grins down at me.

  “You’re going backwards,” he tells me. “You have to start on the other side and work your way around to this one.”

  “Why are you here?” I ask him.

  “Because I knew you would be.”

  I snort. I’m mostly angry because I can’t deny it.

  “I can read it to you, if you like,” he offers.

  “Since when did you learn?” I demand, even as I follow him over to the first case.

  “My parents taught me.”

  His entire family had been traveling abroad when the island submitted to the roaring waves. They settled in America as refugees but held tight to their culture. Of course they would have taught him the language. They probably had a shrine at their house, too. I wondered what his mother’s kimono must look like. I had never met his family.

  We go around the cases and he reads me the story. Pretty soon I notice we have a small gathering of people around us, listening.

  It is a typical folktale of the kind my mother used to tell me as a child. She had only had a few native books with her at school, so the childhood stories had to be called forth from her memory, like an oral history of her people. It occurs to me to wonder that she never wrote them down. Perhaps she never saw a reason to, considering few people could read her native script, and she probably never would have thought to Anglicize the tales. She had tried to teach me her indigenous language, of course, but I’d had little patience for it. I had only learned enough Hebrew to get by in synagogue; languages weren’t my bag.

  At the end of the story, the people around us clap for my boyfriend. I feel irritated by his timid smile and drag him into the next room.