Chapter 32 #2
a crowd of his foes. A lacrosse bonehead catches it in his knee, shrieks, and hops around on one foot, holding his leg. A
second lacrosse bozo gets thumped in the breastbone and is propelled, stumbling backward. His heels strike up against Gwen,
who is still on all fours, and the bozo falls over.
Van’s face appears in camera, filling most of the shot, his face jubilant. He wears chain mail and has a buckler on one arm—they
had all dressed as characters from Dungeons & Dragons that night. “Take a knee, motherfuckers! King Arthur is back in town, and is he pissed!”
Van whoops and pitches himself into the action, circling Gwen in rapid swoops, his shield held out to one side. A lacrosse
thug takes a run at Arthur from the side and catches a face full of Van’s shield instead, is thrown onto his back.
And Arthur spins and spins, whipping that stick around and around, and he looks into the lens of the camera and his lips move,
he’s saying something, it’s impossible to tell what, and that is where the video catches and freezes for an instant, before
leaping back to the beginning to start all over again.
Gwen is on the ground, covered in an ankle-length cape . . .
The mirror made its way down the line. When it got to Gwen, she set it on the floor in front of her knees, the reflective
side up. She held the hands of the women on either side of her and leaned forward to stare into the glass. A dying woman stared
back. Her hair was limp and frail and there were dark satchels under her eyes and her upper lip was damp with sweat.
“Arthur,” she said. “I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. Come back. What do you say, old buddy? Old chum? Old puh—p—”
Something snagged in her throat and she coughed and felt another tearing sensation inside.
She slipped a hand out of Allie’s to touch her lips.
It came away red. A drop of blood plinked onto the glass.
She tried to wipe it away and only got it into the crack, making a kind of crimson shatter-line down the center of the mirror’s face.
“Christ,” Tana said. “She needs a doctor.”
“I’m all right. Just—warm,” Gwen said.
It was true. The room had a curiously airless quality. She might’ve been wrapped in the martyr’s robe instead of Allie, she
was so overheated. Gwen closed her eyes for an instant to recover herself.
When the flushed, swimmy sensation had passed, she glanced up and said, “Can we crack a window? Sorry, I know we just started.”
Donna and Robin traded a look and Gwen got the idea she had said something unsettling.
“Sure, love,” Robin said, and stood. Donna let go and got up with her.
Someone had moved the mirror during the few moments she had her eyes closed. It was in front of Tana now.
“How long was she out, you think?” Gwen heard Robin say, from a long way off.
“Half hour?” Donna said.
“These don’t open,” Robin said, gesturing to the thin panes of glass in one of the embrasures.
Donna picked up the newspaper that was scattered on a nearby study table, placed it over the window, and punched. Glass tinkled.
When she tossed the newspaper down there was a cool, tender breath of green-smelling air coming in.
“Sure they do,” Donna said.
They knelt again. Allie touched a wet cloth to Gwen’s forehead. It was not that the cloth was chilly so much as Gwen’s face
was, she realized now, hideously warm. Where had the cloth come from? How had it got damp? It came to Gwen that she had been
chanting for Arthur in a kind of trance, that she had not been entirely—or at all—conscious.
The ghost of Arthur Oakes rolled into view and began to fight again.
“What time is it?” Allie asked.
Tana replied. “Couple minutes after ten.” But that was impossible. They had come upstairs at seven thirty, Gwen had only watched this little two-minute video play through twice. A fresh sweat prickled her face and sides.
The mirror went around and came back to Gwen. This time Gwen let go of Allie’s hand to pick the mirror up and look into it.
She was worried if she put it on the floor in front of her and bent forward to see her reflection, she would overbalance and
go face-first.
“You there, old chum? You there, old buddy?”
Her hand was slippery with sweat and she couldn’t hold the mirror steady. It jiggled to show her the wooden table behind her
and to her left. The Y-shaped crack down the front of the mirror split that table in two, with the newspaper visible on the
left-hand side. As Gwen watched, the breeze caught one corner of the newspaper, lifted it, and flapped it across the table.
Only when it crossed the crack in the glass it became a storm of velvety black butterflies, a whirling cloud of them that
rose in a whispering rush into darkness. Or maybe there was a crack running across her consciousness as well as the mirror
and for an instant she was dreaming while awake.
She set the mirror on the floor with a shaking hand and turned her head. No butterflies, of course, but the newspaper had
slid itself off the table and across the floor, wound up only a few feet away. Gwen left the line of kneeling girls. Donna
twisted her head to see what she was doing, and Gwen waved a limp-wristed hand at her.
“Keep going,” Gwen said. “I just need to—”
She didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t know what she needed. The newspaper had fallen open to the crossword. Someone had already
penned in a few answers. Hurts sharply. SMARTS. Sex cells? GAMETES. Where J. Nighswander died. CALI.
Gwen stared at the puzzle, looking from the filled-in answers to the clues and back. A drop of sweat fell from her forehead,
plinked onto the page.
“Gwen? Are you all right?” Allie asked.
Gwen nodded. “Keep calling for Arthur. I have to finish the crossword.”
Allie was staring at her. Donna reached across the gap for Allie’s hand.
“You heard her,” Donna said. “Keep going.”
“Arthur,” Robin said. “I shouldn’t have let you go under the bridge without me. Please come back.”
“Yo, Artie,” Tana said. “We had us some okay times, didn’t we? Once more, for old time’s sake? What do you say? You never
forget your first?”
“Van,” Donna said.
“Van,” Allie whispered with her. “What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”
“You stood up for me once, Van,” Donna said. “No, more than once. A thousand times. Can you do it again? One last time? Help
me, Van. Come back to me.”
Gwen ignored them and stared at the crossword. She was going to need a pen, but for a moment she just looked at it. Six across:
Property and coffee. She knew that one, of course . . . had spent some of her life caring for the one and fueled by the other.
“Grounds,” she whispered, tracing her finger across the puzzle. She shut her eyes against a wave of dizziness.
When she opened her eyes again it had been filled in, in her own handwriting. Another drop of sweat plinked onto the newspaper.
She wiped her brow, shook her head. One of the crosses was filling itself in, a down, building off GROUNDS. The clue was:
Elwood Hondo. The answer, in Arthur’s calligraphic handwriting, read GHOST.
“King Arthur is back in town!” Van shouted from across the room, his memory calling out over a gulf of twenty years.
Gwen searched the clues. Internet troublemaker. TROLL. Deal with a psychic. ZENER. As she thought the answers, they filled themselves in . . . and at the same time Arthur was writing in answers of
his own, from somewhere far away, somewhere on the other side of her pain and exhaustion.
Phone for spirits. CONCH. Cutest member of Mystery Inc.
VELMA. The answers wrote themselves, her words and his, a cat’s cradle of what he knew and what she knew, the half of her that fitted perfectly against half of him.
Across the room, Donna smashed another window to let in more air.
“Stop breaking windows, Donna,” Gwen muttered. “Someone will notice.”
“I didn’t break it,” Donna said. “It’s Easter morning, babe. It’s Easter morning, and he’s here.”