The After-Room Read online

  “It was,” Janie said. “I mean, that was the important part.”

  “It looked like a pretty important kiss,” her father said.

  Janie felt her face heat up. “It might’ve been, until you ruined it!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was an instinct. I felt protective. He lives under our roof. He sleeps upstairs.”

  “Believe me, nothing is going on,” Janie said. “So you can relax.”

  But as she said it, she thought about what Benjamin had told her on the school steps. Something was going on under their roof; it just wasn’t kissing. It was contacting the Underworld, or—what did Benjamin call it? The After-room. Benjamin didn’t make things up, or let his imagination run away with him. He was practical; that was a core aspect of his personality. It was the first thing she’d seen in him, in London. He wasn’t going to climb under the lunch table during an atomic bomb drill if it didn’t make sense. And she didn’t think he was crazy.

  She put down the sandwich. “I’m going to bed.”

  “So was the dance fun, at least?” her mother asked.

  “Sure,” Janie said. “I don’t know. It’s hard to do normal kid stuff sometimes, I guess. Thanks for worrying about me.” She brushed crumbs off her hands, over the plate.

  Her parents looked helpless and forlorn, and she went upstairs so she wouldn’t have to see them that way. The steps creaked and her silk skirt rustled as she climbed.

  At Benjamin’s door, she stopped and knocked quietly. “Benjamin?”

  There wasn’t any answer.

  “I just want to say,” she said through the door, “that I believe what you told me.”

  More silence. She was about to turn away when the door opened. Benjamin looked deranged, his eyes wild.

  “I made a list of questions,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “Tomorrow, when your parents go out—I need your help.”

  Chapter 5

  The List

  When Benjamin woke the next morning, he lay in bed listening to Janie’s parents talking in hushed voices outside his door. “Shouldn’t they be awake by now?” Mr. Scott asked.

  “Oh, let them sleep,” Mrs. Scott said. “The band played ‘Skylark’ last night. That’ll put anyone down for a week.”

  They usually took a walk in the morning, and Benjamin waited. Finally he heard them go downstairs: creak, creak, creak. The house was old and the stairs complained. The front door opened and closed behind them. Then he jumped out of bed, got dressed, and padded in socks to Janie’s door. She answered in pajamas, with black smudges beneath her eyes and her hair in flattened, messy curls.

  “Now’s our chance,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes. “Just give me a minute.”

  When she came to his room, she was more recognizable, clean-faced and ponytailed, with a bathrobe tied over her pajamas. She looked prettier without the makeup. He remembered how they had almost kissed the night before, then pushed the thought aside. They had important things to do. His father was out there, he could feel it. He tapped a few grains of powder into a glass of water and swirled it to dissolve them. Janie watched.

  “I can’t believe you made that and didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said. And he was sorry. But he hadn’t had the energy for teamwork lately, or for worrying about whether Janie would believe him. It would’ve shaken him too much if she hadn’t, and he couldn’t afford to be shaken. It took everything he had just to face her parents at breakfast, and get through school each day.

  “What are you going to ask your father?” she asked.

  He handed her his list of questions. He had already memorized it. It said:

  What is this place where you are?

  Is there a certain length of time you can stay?

  What happens then?

  What should I do now?

  How much of the Pharmacopoeia doesn’t work?

  Janie finished reading and looked up, her eyebrows knitted together. “Can I go with you?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I need you to watch me, in case something goes wrong. And write down anything I say. I’ll be dizzy and sick afterward, and might not remember.”

  “I don’t know, Benjamin. This seems really dangerous.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “I’ve been there already.”

  “How long are you going to stay?”

  “Until I get some answers,” he said.

  He picked up the glass of water and drank it down. Then he sat on his bed and closed his eyes, his feelings turbulent and strange. The After-room was the greatest scientific discovery in history—another dimension, a verifiable afterworld. And he had been there! And his father was there now, waiting for him. He tried to be calm.

  He had to think about his father, to reach him. So he pictured the abstracted air his father used to get when he worked, the way he pushed his spectacles up on his nose and disappeared into his mind when he had an idea.

  Then, unbidden, came the image of his father’s agonized face, struggling for air, on the verge of death. Benjamin didn’t want that memory—his heart began to race. His father had told him not to get caught up in grief, or anger, or bitterness. Because he was the vessel through which the work flowed, and the vessel couldn’t be collapsed by guilt. But he couldn’t help it.

  He felt a twinge of uncertainty. Maybe Janie was right, and this was dangerous. He concentrated on the idea of his father healthy and well, in his shop back in London, and then the dark behind his closed eyelids opened up into the different, unearthly darkness of the After-room. He recognized it at once. It was both a place and not a place. A room and not a room.

  “Dad?” he said—or thought. It was like speaking in a dream. “I’m here.”

  There was a silence that felt like disapproval. And why wouldn’t his father disapprove? Benjamin had been responsible for his death.

  He grimaced with the pain of remembering, and took a breath. “I have some questions,” he said.

  Still silence. The room had no corners—so was it circular? Not exactly. An ellipse, maybe. The walls were like a screen, and outside, he saw shimmering particles. Benjamin had always thought that he didn’t remember anything specific about his mother, but now a memory came into his head. He was very small, and she was reaching down to pick him up. She was lifting him over her head, laughing—so young and happy—and then she brought him down out of the air and gathered him close.

  His mother! He was prepared for his father to be here, but not for her. She had been gone so long. He felt that she was not in the After-room but outside it, in the place where the shimmering lights were, and he started to move toward them.

  “Mother!” he called. “Are you there?” He pushed against the walls of the After-room. They were like gauze—no, they were like a thick, viscous fog. There was pressure mounting in his head, and he was getting very cold.

  Then his father’s voice came booming. “Benjamin—don’t!” It sounded like the result of great effort: a gathering of strength to speak. His father was here!

  But Benjamin was suddenly afraid of the things he would have to say, if he spoke to his father. With his mother there would be no guilt, nothing for which he was responsible. He had been only three when she died. He moved toward her again.

  “Benjamin!” his father called.

  “She’s out there!” Benjamin cried.

  “You can’t go to her.”

  “But I want to!” He sounded like a child. His careful list was forgotten. How much of the Pharmacopoeia doesn’t work? What a stupid question! Why had he cared about that? He could go to his mother now, the mother he had never known. It was getting hard to breathe. “I want to see her!”

  Someone else was calling his name, too, and he shook his head to make these distractions go away. Everything felt dense and slow. And so cold. To
warm himself, he thought of his mother lifting him over her head again. Her smile, and her laughter. It was out there, if he could only get to it.

  Something shadowy reached for him. Snakes. He pushed them away, but they weren’t snakes, they were arms, hands, clutching and grabbing him. He tried to struggle free. Something was pulling him away from everything he wanted. Why would anyone do that? How dare they? The After-room began to disappear, the fog to disperse. He struggled.

  “Benjamin, wake up!” Janie said.

  He opened his eyes wide and he was back in a real room, a bedroom, his bedroom. Janie was there. It was her arms that had grabbed him. Her eyes were wide and terrified. He was lying on his bed and Janie was shaking him, shouting.

  “Breathe!” she said.

  He took a dragging breath that seemed to come through a tiny hole in his throat, with space for only a tiny sip of air. He gasped, the wheezing breath like sandpaper in his chest. It made a terrible noise. His lungs ached. It was so much easier not to breathe.

  “Again!” Janie cried.

  The room spun like a carnival ride. Benjamin closed his eyes and sank back into comfortable dimness. Mother.

  Then a bright pain burst unexpectedly on his face, and he looked up at Janie. She had slapped him. He scowled at her. Slapped him!

  “Stay awake!” she said furiously. “Breathe!”

  His voice came out as a wheezing croak: “I can’t.”

  “You have to!”

  “Water.”

  “I’ll get you water,” she said. “But you have to keep your eyes open! And keep breathing! Okay?”

  He managed to nod. She ran from the room. He watched the spinning ceiling but he couldn’t stand it, he thought he would throw up, and he closed his eyes again, sinking into darkness.

  “Benjamin!”

  She was back, and shook him again. He opened his eyes, and she held a glass of water to his mouth. He drank, and his throat seemed to relax a little. He could take in more air now, and it didn’t hurt so much.

  “You stopped breathing,” Janie said. “Your face turned purple, and you were so cold. You can’t go back there again. Promise!”

  “My mother,” he whispered.

  “You were dying, Benjamin.”

  “It was so beautiful. She was there.”

  “You can’t go with her,” Janie said. “I need you here. Okay?”

  Downstairs, the front door opened and closed, Janie’s parents back from their morning walk.

  “Rise and shine!” her father called up the stairs, impossibly cheerful.

  “It’s so gorgeous out there, you two!” her mother said.

  “I’m making eggs!” her father called.

  Benjamin stared at Janie. “Don’t tell them,” he whispered.

  She wiped tears off her face. “I think you should see a doctor,” she said. “You weren’t breathing.”

  “Please don’t say anything.”

  “Do you think you can eat?” she asked.

  Benjamin nodded.

  “And talk to my parents?”

  “As long as your dad doesn’t call me Figment.”

  Janie smiled weakly. “I can’t promise that.” She picked up the glass jar of powder from his night table and slipped it into her bathrobe pocket. “I’ll just keep this.”

  Benjamin watched the jar disappear. He said nothing, but he was surprised how painful it was to see it go, and how sharp his longing was to have it back.

  Chapter 6

  Traffic

  The man who had found Jin Lo shared his food and water with her, and gave her his cot to sleep in, but she still wasn’t strong enough to walk more than a few steps without support. She was annoyed at her own weakness, and irritated that Ned Maddox wouldn’t let her send a message to her friends, or even listen to his radio, when that was the one thing she might easily do. He said it would drain the battery. So instead she slept, and thought.

  He came in from his post in the banyan tree at noon, pulling a sun hat off his head. He had shaved his face and cut his hair since she arrived, and he looked less like a madman, but she missed the tangled beard of her rescuer. Now he seemed like a military officer, superior and insensible. She did not have good associations with soldiers. But she had an idea for him.

  “With a bicycle,” she said, “you could charge this radio.”

  His face broke into a wide smile, a smile that made her think Americans were different. It didn’t matter how much war this man had seen, or how long he’d been alone on a deserted island; his smile came from a place of innocence and excellent dentists. “You mean bring a bike in here, and wire it to the generator, and charge the battery?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You’ll pedal?”

  “Yes!” she said. Was he taking her seriously? “I will get stronger.”

  “Great, I’ll requisition a bike,” he said. “It should take about three years to get here.”

  She frowned.

  Ned Maddox lifted his binocular strap over his head and hung it on a hook. He had quizzed her about her country’s politics, wanting to determine that she had no love for Mao Tse-tung, and then he told her something about the work he did. He had been a coastwatcher in the war, hiding behind the Japanese lines, sending reports back to his commanders. Now the civil war in China went on and on, with the United States supporting Chiang Kai-shek against Mao’s Communists. And Ned Maddox had been assigned here again to keep watch.

  He was lonely, or he would not have told her so much. She thought she must seem like a magical being in a children’s story, washing up on his beach. Maybe he believed she would grant him wishes. He made two sandwiches.

  “So, you ready to tell me why you’re here?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “People are on edge, you know,” he said. “We almost had a nuclear situation. I’m supposed to report what I see.”

  She frowned. “What nuclear situation?”

  He eyed her. “It was in the newspapers.”

  “I have seen no newspapers,” she said.

  So he told her that the two Chinese factions were fighting over the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, close to the Chinese mainland. Chiang’s Nationalists had been reinforcing the islands with guns from Taiwan, and Mao’s army had bombarded them with shells from the mainland. President Eisenhower had considered a nuclear attack on China, but then had decided against it. The shelling went on, back and forth.

  Jin Lo cursed herself, because it was exactly the sort of situation she was supposed to be watching for. Instead she had been lost at sea, barely keeping herself alive, with nothing to show for it: Danby and the supercharged uranium were gone. “I have nothing to do with that,” she said, and it was sadly true.

  Ned Maddox handed her one of the sandwiches. “So who’s the Englishman you’re looking for?” he asked.

  “He stole something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Something I need back,” she said. “He has an old landing craft, from the war, so he could be anywhere, hiding on any island.”

  “A boat like that needs fuel,” Ned Maddox said.

  “He is resourceful,” she said.

  “And did you ever run across an American officer?” Ned Maddox asked. “On his own, while you were out there?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He brightened. “Where?”

  She pointed at him.

  He smiled that wide smile again, with crinkles of amusement around eyes that were the color of the ocean. “A different American,” he said. “He might be in a boat, like your Englishman.”

  “He is what you’re looking for?”

  “One of the things,” Ned Maddox said.

  She struggled to sit up. “I want to help,” she said. “I ca
n listen to your radio while you watch.”

  “You just want to find your Englishman,” he said.

  “I might find your American, too.”

  “I can’t let you listen,” he said. “It’s against my orders.”

  “You have never done something not in your orders?” she asked. “Because you knew it was the best thing? The right thing?”

  A muscle worked in Ned Maddox’s jaw. “You can’t use the radio,” he said.

  He took his sandwich and went back out to his tree. Jin Lo looked greedily at the boxy shape beneath the yellow cloth. She only had to wait now. He was changing his mind.

  That evening, when he came in from his post, he said, “No transmissions. Or the Chinese navy will descend on us like hellfire. You understand?”

  She nodded.

  He uncovered the heavy radio and showed her how it worked, then handed over his padded earphones and started making up his bed on the floor of the hut. She put the earphones on and began to scan the dial. A thick cloud of radio traffic swirled around her, some in Chinese, some in English, some in code, back and forth among airplanes and towers, ships and ports and ground units. It was like dipping a cup into a vast river that kept flowing past her. How would she find what she needed?

  Rotating the dial through a patch of static, she thought she heard the apothecary’s voice, and her heart leaped. She turned the dial back, searching for it again. It had been kindly and firm, speaking English, a voice from the ether. What had he said? There was only static now, in the place on the dial where the voice had been.

  “Anything interesting?” Ned Maddox asked, lying on the floor and looking at the ceiling.

  Jin Lo shook her head, her hands trembling. “Not yet.”

  Chapter 7

  The Magician

  Benjamin was light-headed and distracted at breakfast. Janie’s parents were annoyingly jolly, but at least they didn’t call him Figment. And the scrambled eggs were good: salty and hot, not too wet or too dry—he had to give Mr. Scott that. But he felt far away, not quite in touch with the real world. He kept thinking about the After-room. Was his father really remaining close by choice? Or was he trapped in that place? Would Benjamin ever be able to go there safely, or would it always suffocate him?