“That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”
Harper couldn’t put her weight on her right foot, but Carol got an arm around her and helped her stand. As they hobbled past the radio on the counter, Carol reached out—hesitated a moment—and moved the dial slowly through bands of static. That anatomical model of a human head gaped at them in amazement. It was a grotesque thing, skin peeled away from one half of the face to show the sinew and nerves beneath, one eyeball suspended in a fibrous red nest of exposed muscle.
“What?” Harper asked. “Are you listening for something in particular?”
“Snuffleupagus,” Carol said, and laughed, and switched the radio off.
Harper waited for her to explain. She didn’t.
4
The cafeteria was perched on top of the hill, overlooking the soccer pitch and the pebbly beach below. Moss and strands of yellowing dead grass grew on the shingled roof and the windows were boarded up, giving it a look of long disuse.
The impression of abandonment was dispelled the moment Carol pushed open the door and led them into the seating area, a dim, cavernous space with exposed beams of red pine. Plates clattered in the kitchen and the air was fragrant with the odor of marinara sauce and stewed pork.
Lunch appeared to be over and done, but they didn’t have the place entirely to themselves. Renée Gilmonton sat at a table for two, across from an old fella in a Greek fisherman’s cap, both of them hunched above steaming coffees. A boy sat alone at the next table over, the kid who looked like a Viking. Michael, Harper remembered. He was forking up noodles in red sauce and turning the pages of an ancient Ranger Rick, reading by the light of a candle in a jelly jar. The evening before, Michael had come across as maybe seventeen. Now, bent over an article on “Miami’s Marvelous Manatees,” his eyes wide with fascination, he looked like a ten-year-old in a fake beard.
Renée lifted her chin and caught Harper’s eye. It was a pleasure and a relief to have a friend here, to not be completely alone among strangers. Harper flashed back to other lunches in other cafeterias, and the anxiety that came with not seeing a familiar face and not knowing where to sit. She suspected Renée had waited around in hopes of meeting up with Harper and helping her to settle in . . . a small act of consideration for which Harper was indecently grateful.
The serving counter was manned by Norma Heald, a mountainous pile of flesh with the broad, sloping shoulders of a silverback gorilla. The postmeal cleanup was under way—Harper saw a couple of teenage boys in the kitchen, plunging dishes into soapy water by the light of an oil lamp—but Norma had reserved some pasta in a steel warming pan and a couple of ladles of sauce. There was coffee and a can of condensed milk for cream.
“We had sugar for a while and it was full of ants. Ants in the coffee, ants in the muffins, ants in the peach cobbler,” Carol said. “For a few weeks, ants were my primary source of protein. No sugar now, though! Just syrup. Sorry! Welcome to the Last Days!”
“The sugar is gone and the milk will follow,” Norma said. “I put out two cans of milk for the coffee, but there’s only one left.”
“The other got used up?” Carol asked. “So quickly?”
“Nope. Stole.”
“I’m sure no one stole a can of milk.”
“Stole,” Norma repeated, her tone of voice closer to satisfaction than outrage. She sat behind the counter, occupied with a pair of silver knitting needles that raced back and forth, clicking and clacking, all the time she spoke. She was working on a giant shapeless tube of black yarn that might’ve been a prophylactic for King Kong.
Harper and Carol made their way to Michael’s table, Carol making a come-on-over gesture to Renée and the old fella. “Sit with us, you two. We can all share Harper! There’s enough to go around.”
They arranged themselves around the table, bumping knees. Harper lifted her hand for her fork, but Carol grasped her fingers before she could reach it.
“Before we eat, we go around the circle and say one thing we’re glad for,” Carol said, leaning into Harper and speaking in a confidential tone of voice. “Sometimes it’s the best part of the meal. Which will make more sense after you’ve tried the food.”
“We snacked already, but I don’t mind bowing the head with you,” said the old man, who hadn’t yet been introduced.
Renée squeezed Harper’s other hand and then they were all sitting in a ring, leaning in toward the light of the single candle, like a group assembled for a séance.
“I’ll start us off,” Carol said. “I’m glad for the woman sitting next to me, who saved my nephew when he had appendicitis. I’m glad she’s here and I have a chance to show her how grateful I am. I’m glad for her baby, because babies are exciting! Like fat little sausages with faces!”
The old fella spoke with lowered head and half-shut eyes. “I’m glad for the nurse myself, because a hundred and twenty-four people need a lot of lookin’ after, and I’ve been over my head for months. I’m all this camp’s had for medical care since the end of August, and all I know is what I larnt in the navy. I don’t want to say how long it’s been since I studied as a hospital corpsman, but at the time they had only just phased out the use of leeches.”
“Me, I guess I’m mostly just glad to be in a place where people love me,” Michael told them. “People like Aunt Carol and Father Storey. I’d do anything for them, to keep this place safe. I lost one family. I’d rather die myself than lose another.”
“I’m glad to have had a hot lunch,” Renée said, “even if it was fried Spam in Ragú. I’m also glad this camp has an ace fisherman in Don Lewiston, and I’ll be gladder still the next time it’s my turn for fish.” Nodding at the old fella. Then she looked sidelong at Harper and said, “And I’m so glad to see my friend from Portsmouth Hospital, who marched around eighteen hours a day, whistling Disney tunes and trying to keep up the spirits of a thousand sick and terrified patients. Every time she came in the room, it felt like a break in a month of clouds. She made me want to keep going when there wasn’t any other reason.”
Harper wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her own voice, was ambushed by unexpected emotion. In her days at Portsmouth Hospital, she had felt about as useful as Renée’s potted mint, and it caught her unprepared to hear someone tell her different. Finally, she managed, “I’m just glad not to be alone anymore.”
Carol squeezed her fingers. “I am so glad to be part of this circle. We are all voices in the same chorus and we sing our thanks.”
And for a moment it was there again: Carol’s eyes pulsed with brightness, her irises becoming rings of fey green light. Michael’s eyes flashed as well, and Harper saw a prickle of red and gold flicker across the whorls of Dragonscale on his bare arms.
Harper let go of Carol’s hand as if at a physical shock. But then the weird sheen was gone and Carol was eyeing her mischievously.
“Freaked you out, didn’t I? Sorry. You’ll get used to it, though. Eventually it’ll happen to you, too.”
“It’s a little frightening,” Harper said. “But also . . . well, like magic.”
“It’s not magic. It’s a miracle,” Carol said, like someone identifying the make of her new car: It’s a Miata.
“What’s happening when you shine like that?” Harper asked. Something came back to her then and she looked, almost accusingly, at Renée. “It’s the same thing that happened to you in the hospital. You ran out covered in light. Everyone thought you were going to explode.”
“So did I,” Renée said. “I stumbled onto it by accident. They call it joining the Bright.”
Michael said, “Or the Network. But I guess that’s only people my age. A lot of my friends joke that it’s just another social network. Only they’re kind of not joking.”
“You probably understand that the Dragonscale responds badly to stress,” Carol said.