Chapter 102 a.m. EST
“What are we going to do with that?” Van asked, when Colin came back to the table with a bleached, pitted conch shell bigger
than a football and prickling with spines.
“We’re going to listen to it,” Colin told him. “The tradition of conchomancy was old before Christ was born. It goes back
thousands of years in South America. This is an Aztec speaking trumpet, employed in the days before Cortés. The quiquizoani
called spirits to sacrifice by blowing into it—like a dinner bell for their gods, let them know they were serving up a beating
heart. Then they turned it around and listened to it for instructions. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take
turns blowing into it, to call King Sorrow to us, and then we’ll listen and see what sacrifice he demands.”
“The quiquizoani?” Van said. “Sounds like something you’d order from a pizza place.”
Or at least that was how Allie remembered it. No one else remembered the conch. Gwen and the McBrides remembered passing a
pearl-handled mirror. Colin and Arthur said it had been a World War II–era helmet filled with water, which they used as a
scrying bowl.
And no one but Allie remembered dragonedy o’clock.
They passed the conch and blew into it and called for King Sorrow. Doors slammed. Donna screamed. Gwen told her to keep her
hands on the table. At one point the door to the hallway flew open and it was just a starry night out there, like the sky
over the desert.
Allie had seen a sky like that before, when she was on the Outback Highway in Australia.
She would never forget it, just a hundred miles from Ayers Rock.
The sky was so big, and so full of stars, you didn’t dare look into it for long or your head would get dizzy and strange.
Her parents had taken them on a trade mission to the Pacific Rim nations.
It was all good memories, that trip. Theo had been in remission—they all believed he had beaten it.
Eighty-five percent of adolescents with his cancer did.
With his yellow hair and cleft chin and faraway blue eyes, her older brother looked like the stout-hearted, headstrong hero of a young adult novel.
He argued with their father at every turn—about politics, theology, ethics—but patiently, with a grin, and their father grinned back, both of them enjoying it.
When they argued Allie always took her father’s side, although he was indifferent to her help and Theo wouldn’t argue with her, would only look at her fondly, proudly.
He was two years older but had always called her “kid.” A few months after Ayers Rock, the cancer surged back, and Theo was dead by seventeen.
Her mother stopped going to church after that, while Allie became more serious about attending weekly services, if only to see the graffiti Theo had scratched in the pew with his pocketknife.
jesus saves but allie invests and is it a sin to fart while praying?
Allie had seen stars in the hallway as she lifted the conch to her lips like a boy-savage preparing to address the tribe.
She blew a breathy blat and wondered for the thousandth time if it was a sin to fart while praying.
“Paging King Sorrow,” she called, as she lowered the conch. “King Sorrow, proceed to your gate, your flight from the big nowhere
to Earth is preparing to depart.”
She lifted the big old Aztec shell to her ear and shut her eyes. For the longest time there was only that mindless susurration
that people said sounded like the sea, but which to her was closer to the sound a TV made when it was tuned to a dead channel,
receiving only static. She listened so hard her ears started to ring.
No—wait. It wasn’t a ringing in her ears. It was a single lingering note, a high G. Allie had been singing in choir since she was six and had a good ear, an educated ear, could harmonize in an instant with a note played on a piano. The high G she could hear now had no beginning. It had
always been there and she had gradually picked it out of the ceaseless shush. Then it dropped to an F sharp. And dropped again,
and then climbed, in a melancholy strain. She only needed three notes to recognize “Puff the Magic Dragon,” one of the first
songs she had ever learned to play on the piano. It came from a maddening distance, was so faint it was less like hearing
a song and more like imagining it, and it died away just before the very last note. It came to her then, what she had to do: King Sorrow wanted her to play
for him. She rose straightaway, thoughtlessly passing the cracked mirror to Donna (now that was odd, that she remembered passing Donna a mirror and not the pitted old seashell), and went to the player piano.
There were cartridges for the player piano. Big scrolls with holes punched in them, not all that different from the hole-punched
metal scrolls inside a child’s music box. Mr. Wren had a couple dozen tucked inside the piano bench, but Allie didn’t look
for “Puff the Magic Dragon,” already knew it wasn’t there among the ragtime and early blues numbers. Instead she began to
play the ever so slightly out-of-tune piano, fingers falling on the keys, notes rising into the air.
She played.
She played until her arms ached, until her fingers ached, until she tried to lift her hands and found she couldn’t, which was when she realized the piano was playing her. The keys yanked her fingers up-down-down-down-up-down. She knew the others were no longer sitting together at the card table.
She sensed them moving through the room, each under the power of some unnatural idea of their own.
Witched was the word that came to mind, although maybe that was wrong, maybe they had been dragoned.
She played faster. She smashed a fingernail, and the ring finger on her left hand began to bleed. First the keys were smeared
with blood. Then they were slick with it.
At some point, Allie lifted her head and saw Gwen taking framed butterflies down from the wall above the piano.
Gwen had been freeing them for a while before Allie noticed, but then it was easy not to see Gwen, she was the most unseeable girl Allie had ever met.
Gwen was only almost pretty, but she had kind eyes, eyes that promised that if something was broken, you would mend it together. They were the
green of old sea glass, the sort of sea glass that might wash up on the shores of Honalee, and how long had Allie been playing
this song? She caught a glimpse of her watch and saw it was five past dragonedy. Dragonedy was a number, a bit like the number
two, only it was a dragon with a lowered head.
When Allie looked up a second time, smoke was trickling from under the lid of the piano, and suddenly the keys released her
hands. The song went on, the bloody keys flashing and depressing and springing back up, her red fingerprints all over them.
Allie threw the lid open to see if something was burning in there, waving a hand back and forth to clear away the faintly
spicy-smelling haze. No fire, but she could see a cartridge plugged into the machine, the scroll feeding itself through the
sprockets. She saw a yellowing, peeling label which identified the song as “Blaec Wyrm the Magic Dragon.” The fallboard clapped
shut over the keys with a bang and startled Allie so badly she stepped back and her legs struck the bench and she had to sit
down.
Allie had never listened to a seashell since. She was afraid of what she might hear.