recognized it: the tune from Disneyland’s kiddie ride, “It’s a Small World.”
The four of them looked around. Their gazes fell, collectively, upon Ned’s new phone on the table. Warily, he picked it up, flipped it open, held it to his ear.
“Forgot to mention,” Melanie said from her own mobile in the house. He heard her trying not to laugh. “I programmed a ringtone for you, too. Tried to find something suitable.”
“This,” Ned said grimly into the phone, “means war. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Oh, Ned!” she giggled, “I thought you’d like it!” She hung up.
Ned put the phone down on the glass tabletop. He looked out for a second at the lavender bushes planted beyond the cypresses and the pool, and then at the three men around the table. They were each, including his father, struggling to keep a straight face. When he looked at them, they gave up, toppling into laughter.
he couldn’t sleep.
How unsurprising, Ned thought, punching his pillow for the twentieth time and flipping it over again. Jet lag would be part of it, on this second night overseas. They were six hours ahead of Montreal. It was supposed to take a day for each hour before you adjusted. Unless you were an airline pilot or something.
But it wasn’t really the time difference and he knew it. He checked the clock by the bed again: almost three in the morning. The dead of night. On April 30 that might have another meaning, Ned thought.
He’d have to remember to tell that one to Kate Wenger later today. She’d get the joke. If he could keep his eyes open by then, the way tonight was going.
He got up and went to the window, which was open to the night air. He had the middle bedroom of the three upstairs. His dad was in the master, Greg and Steve shared the last one.
He pulled back the curtain. His window was over the terrace, looking out at the pool and the lavender bushes and a clump of trees on the slope by the roadway. If he leaned out and looked to his right, he could see Aix’s lights glowing in the distance. The moon was orangered, hanging over the city, close to full. He saw the summer triangle above him. Even with moonlight, the stars were a lot brighter than they were in Westmount, in the middle of Montreal.
He wondered how they looked above Darfur right now. His mom would phone this evening—or tomorrow evening—whatever you said when it was 3:00 a.m.
The world will end before I ever find him in time.
He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but how did you control what you thought about, anyhow? Especially at this hour, half awake. The mind just…went places. Don’t think about pink elephants, or girls’ breasts, or when they wore skirts and uncrossed their legs. Sometimes in math class he’d wander off in his thoughts for a run, or think about music, or a movie he’d seen, or what some girl he’d never met had typed privately to him in a chatroom the night before. If it was a girl: there was always that to worry about online. His friend Doug was totally paranoid about it.
You thought about a lot of different things, minute by minute, through a day. Sometimes late at night you thought about a skull and a sculpted head in a corridor underground.
And that was going to be so helpful in getting to sleep, Ned knew. So would brooding about what had happened inside him this morning.
After another minute, irresolute, he made an attempt to access, locate—whatever word would suit—that place within himself again. The place where he’d somehow sensed the presence of the lean, nameless man on the roof above them. And where he had grasped another thing he had no proper way of knowing: that the person up there, today—right here, right now—had made the eight-hundred-year-old carving they’d been looking at.
Kate had been right, of course: the man’s response, hurtling down to confront them, white with rage, had told them what they needed to know.
But Ned couldn’t feel anything inside now, couldn’t find whatever he was looking for. He didn’t know if that was because it was over—a totally weird flicker of strangeness in the cloister—or if it was because there was nothing to find at this moment, looking out over dark grass and water and cypress trees in the night.
There wasn’t a whole lot of point standing here in sleep shorts thinking about it. He decided to go down for a glass of juice. On the way downstairs, barefoot in a sleeping house, he had an idea. A good one, actually. When you couldn’t do anything about the strange, hard things, you did what you could in other ways.
He had warned Melanie, after all.
She, the ever-efficient one, had rigged up a multi-charger station for all the mobile phones on the sideboard in the dining room. She had even been helpful enough to label everyone’s slot. In green ink.
It was almost too easy.
Working quickly through the options on each phone, Ned cheerfully changed Greg’s ring to the theme from “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and showed no mercy for Steve, innocent bystander though he might have been, rejigging his cell to play “The Teletubbies Song.” He left his father’s alone.
Then he took his time, scrolling thoughtfully through the choices on Melanie’s phone a couple of times before deciding.
Afterwards, pleased with himself and his contribution to justice in the world, he went and got his juice from the kitchen. He took it out on the terrace, standing shirtless in the night. It was cold now. His mother would have made him get a shirt or a robe if she’d been up. If she’d been here.
He tried, one more time, to see if he could find something within himself, feel attuned to anything. Nothing there. He looked out across the landscape and saw only night: pool and woods and grass to the south under stars. A low moon west. He heard an owl behind him. There were trees all around the villa, plenty of room for nests, and hunting.
As it happens, he is being watched.
In the small stand of trees beside the lavender bushes, the figure observing him has long ago learned how to keep from being sensed in any of the ways Ned Marriner might know or discover by searching inside himself.
Certain skills and knowledge are part of his heritage. Others have taken time and considerable effort. He has had time, and has never been fazed by difficulty.
He’d seen the boy appear at the open window upstairs, and then, a little later, watched him come outside, half naked, vulnerable and alone. The observing figure is amused by this, by almost all that has happened today, but he does think about killing him.
It is almost too easy.
Because of the day that is coming he holds himself in check. If you are in the midst of shaping something urgently awaited, you do not give way to impulses like this, however satisfying they might be. He is impulsive by nature, but hardly a fool. He has lived too long for that.
The boy, he has decided, is random, trivial, an accident, not anyone or anything that matters. And it is not a good idea to cause any disturbance now, among either the living or the spirits, some of them already beginning to stir. He knows about the spirits. He is waiting for them, diverting himself as best he can while he does so.
He lets the boy go back inside, alive and inconsequential.
The impulse to kill is still strong, however. He recognizes it, knows why it is building. When that desire comes, it is difficult to put away unslaked. He has found that to be so over time and is disinclined to deny himself.
He changes again—the skill he took so long in mastering—and goes hunting. Moonlight briefly finds his wings in flight, then they are lost again, entering the woods.
When Ned came down to the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed from his disrupted sleep, the others had already