She was figuring out how to win.
I tailed Martha over and over again. Every time, she drove to Brown’s Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences building. Every time, she visited Beloroda. They remained holed up in his office for three, four hours. Clearly she’d figured out a way to hook him, captivate him with some high-level question about group dynamics or a detail mined from his own papers that served as the magic key to Open Sesame the close connection, the meeting of like minds. When they finally emerged, Beloroda—an elfin man with a turned-up nose and an overmanicured inky beard like a Rorschach test—was beaming at Martha (now hauling a pile of textbooks he’d given her, as well as a legal pad covered with notes), bewitched by the sudden appearance of such an engaging new student.
Sharing an umbrella, they always strolled outside, deep in conversation, and chatted for another twenty minutes on the sidewalk. Once I crept behind them, hiding in an alcove where a few students were smoking under the awning.
“You’re absolutely correct,” said Beloroda. “But here I would cite the philosophy of M. Scott Peck. In all groups there are four stages. Pseudocommunity. Chaos. Emptiness. And true community.”
“Could you tell me more about the Milgram experiment?”
“Ah. The blind obedience to authority figures.” Beloroda chuckled. “There’s nothing I’d like more, but I’m afraid I’m due to join my wife at a party. How about we resume this conversation tomorrow after my Group Cohesion lecture?”
He was unlocking his car, climbing in.
“It was a delight to meet you, Miss Peters. Until tomorrow?”
He drove off. Martha stared after him, her affable smile abruptly falling from her face as she pulled up her hood and took off. She sat for the next few hours in a window booth at Greek Taverna, poring over the books, taking notes. When the diner closed, she moved to her Honda and read in there, seat reclined, overhead light on.
The longer I watched from the darkness of the park across the street, the more I felt a choking anxiousness and fear, as if the Neverworld were closing in on me.
Martha was brilliant. Martha understood. She was light-years ahead of the rest of us. She had summarily accepted the crushing reality of the Neverworld, and rather than fighting it, she had dedicated her time to figuring out how to master it.
I wanted to live, didn’t I? I wanted to be chosen. Yet, staring at the pale light inside Martha’s car, fighting back tears, I sensed I was too late, that I’d already lost.
My gaze suddenly fell on a dark figure pushing a wheelbarrow toward me down the path through the park. It was heaped with black compost.
I should have been used to the Keeper’s presence by now. I should have ignored how no matter where I went, however near or far, when I least expected it, he would come to me like a terrifying thought, the Neverworld’s omnipresent alarm, its memento, its tolling bell.
The vote. The vote. The vote.
The temperature had dropped. The rain was turning to snow again.
I sprinted to the McKendrick van, climbed in, and took off, swerving into the road so wildly I almost hit a streetlamp. The Keeper paused to watch me go, a shovel balanced on his shoulder.
I caught a glimpse of his face through the swirling snowflakes, the chilling smile.
I couldn’t imagine what Martha was planning. Whatever it was, I suspected it’d be so well considered and masterful, none of us would ever see her coming.
How right I was.
How did I pass the next few wakes?
Was it months? Or was it years?
I was the only one left. Wincroft was my castle to rule, my tiny home planet. The solitude was infinite. Gandalf was there, but he backed away and barked whenever I tried to pet him, as if aware I wasn’t quite real. I wandered the creaking hallways and musty rooms, had conversations with stuffed deer and grizzly bears. I read every book in E.S.S. Burt’s library, sprawled across daybeds, love seats, and carpets; dining room tables, window seats, and grand pianos. I watched every show on every cable channel at every time. I ate chocolate. I played Scrabble by myself, and chess by myself, and sang pop songs. I drew everything I could think of—eyes, faces, landscapes, shadows. I made a dream soundtrack, song lyrics to a fake four-hour movie about the end of the world called Ned Gromby’s Last Day Alive Ever, scribbling the mad rhymes about life and death, war and peace, all over the wallpaper and floors and ceilings of Wincroft. Wincroft was my bridge underpass spangled with my graffiti. I squeezed my eyes closed to beat back the silence, and sifted through memories of my old life as if inside them I’d find a key to a door that would lead me somewhere.
I visited the elderly. They were my favorite. Because they were locked inside their own Neverworlds too, impenetrable rooms of repetition and loneliness. I made a habit of ringing their doorbells with an excuse about selling early Christmas calendars for my church. I ate their fruitcake and petted their old dogs with bad breath before they scampered away with twitching backs. I sipped the weird tea and watched TV, inhaled the curdled house odors the owner was oblivious to. Most of all, I listened to the stories. I untangled the gnarled pileups of anecdotes and convoluted tales of dead husbands, failing health, childhoods of taffeta and milk that cost ten cents.
I figured if I remained in the Neverworld, alone, until the end of time, I would be like an ancient traveler wandering the side of the road with a calloused heart and hands, weighted with the world’s tales and secrets.
At least then, if nothing else, I would be wise.
It was inevitable that I’d be sitting there, listening to the story about the broken engagement, the dead child, the cat, when suddenly I’d see the decay. It always came out of nowhere and made me jump. Every windowpane in every single window around me would be silently cracking. Or a family photo would suddenly drop down the wall with a thump, revealing a garish rectangle of wallpaper that hadn’t seen daylight in forty years.
“What in the name of Jesus is going on…?”
In Mrs. Kahn’s case, it began with a faint popping noise.
“Damn raccoon’s got in again,” she muttered, tightening her robe. When she started shrieking in the den, I ran to her, astonished, to find her prized collection of snow globes—gifts from Paul, a lost suitor—detonating like grenades, water and snow and glass, plastic Santas, Eiffel Towers, St. Peter’s Basilicas, exploding around the room.
Mrs. Kahn shielded her face. “It’s the Day of Judgment!”
Of course, I’d noticed the deterioration before, back at my house with my mom. Again that night at the Crow. I didn’t know why, or what it meant, but whenever I was away from Wincroft, the world began to decay and disintegrate around me.
It always made me scared. I ran away, muttering some excuse and that I’d be back tomorrow, leaving Mrs. Kahn, Mr. Appleton, Mrs. Janowitz, Miss Bellossi, bent over, disconcerted, as they inspected the rot, the mold, the cracks traveling like lengthening skeletal fingers along the windows. I’d sprint back to Wincroft to search the gardens and grounds for the Keeper. I wanted to confront him, demand to know what was happening.
Yet, bafflingly, whenever I willed him to appear, he stayed away.
The corrosion appeared to be getting stronger. What did it mean? Was the Neverworld going to swallow itself like a black hole? Were we running out of time to vote? Was it all because of what happened to Jim?
The answer jolted me like an electric shock.
Jim. It had to be because of Jim.
Then came the day Wit didn’t leave.
I discovered her upstairs, buried under an avalanche of duvet, her face swollen with tears as she watched Heathers on her laptop. I stared at her, dumbfounded. I felt like some shipwreck survivor finding another person who’d washed up alive on my island.