The After-Room by Mailie Meloy
It was funny, in a way. All Jin Lo had wanted was to find the uranium, and now that Danby was here, and taking her to it, she didn’t want to go. She had to find the American commander and the missing shell.
“Stop struggling,” he said. “This is a rare chance. You can tell your grandchildren that you met the famous pirate queen!” He was steering her away from Ned Maddox, along the tied-up boats. She could not be taken to the pirates, not now.
When they were close to the edge of the water, between a sampan and a small cruiser, she put her foot in front of Danby’s to make him stumble forward. When he was off-balance, she heaved his whole weight onto her shoulder, using his grip on her arm, and then ducked and flipped him toward the harbor. His feet went sailing skyward and he splashed headfirst into the brown water, between the two boats.
Jin Lo turned and ran. Danby rose to the surface and she heard him splutter, shouting unintelligibly. When she reached Ned Maddox’s boat, she leaped aboard and untied the lines. Ned Maddox came up from below and started the engine, without asking questions. He acted quickly. She did value him for that. They backed away from the dock, narrowly missing a scow with a little boy in it.
As Ned Maddox steered out of the harbor, Jin Lo saw Danby, wet through, struggling onto the pier, hauling his thin body out of the water.
They picked up speed. “Who was that?” Ned Maddox asked.
“The Englishman I was looking for.”
Ned Maddox looked back. “But then—why are we leaving?”
“We don’t have time. We will find him later.”
“But he’s here!”
“This is not the moment.”
She looked back and saw Danby, sodden with seawater, watching them go. She could not take on a band of pirates now. But how would she ever find the uranium again? She wished the apothecary were here to help her think it out.
But then a thought broke through her confusion: Danby will follow you.
And she felt much calmer. Of course. Danby would not give up. He would come to her.
Chapter 31
An Aubade
Janie sat in one enormous club chair in the hotel room and watched Benjamin sleep in the other. He looked much younger, with his eyes closed and his hair sticking out from under the throw blanket. She wondered about the years after his mother died, when he had lived with only his father. Had Mr. Burrows read him books and tucked him into bed? Had he cooked dinner for the two of them, patched up Benjamin’s skinned knees, and helped with homework? Or had he been too grieving and preoccupied?
She couldn’t imagine losing either of her parents. But losing both—Janie thought Benjamin was handling it all pretty well, considering.
Benjamin stirred, in the big chair. He stretched, hands balled into fists, and his mouth gaped in a yawn. He blinked at Janie and pushed himself to sitting. She felt a flush of relief that he was safe, that something terrible hadn’t happened. He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles.
“Hullo,” he said.
She smiled. “Hi.”
“Have you been watching me sleep?” He tried to flatten his hair, but it didn’t help.
“Not for long.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Vili hired a street kid to find the car.”
“It’s a nice car.”
“Very. And recognizable.”
“Is Doyle still here?” he asked.
She nodded toward the door. “In the hall, talking to Vili.”
“And Rocco?”
She frowned, confused. “Rocco? You mean Joey the Haberdasher?”
Benjamin shook his head. “His cousin. Never mind. Listen, I was there, Janie, with my father! We had a whole conversation! And there were other people there, too.”
“Dead people?” she asked.
He nodded. “They were outside the After-room, looking in. They knew I was alive.”
“What did they want?”
“They miss it here. I think I saw the poet, Keats, and he tried to, well—” Benjamin hesitated. “Come through me. Into this world.”
“Did he?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. My father says we have to help Jin Lo.”
“Help her find the uranium?”
Benjamin shook his head. “It’s something else. He says I have to turn outward.” His face crumpled. “I miss him so much, Janie. No one I love can ever die again. I mean it. You can’t die. Okay?”
Janie was startled, and wasn’t sure how to answer. She was teasing out the logic of what he’d said, thinking of algebra. Did the transitive property apply in those sentences? No one he loved could ever die. And she couldn’t die. So therefore—had he really meant it? “Okay,” she said.
“Promise?”
“I promise,” she said.
He was silent, staring at the floor, his hair wild in all directions. Then he looked up at her. “You didn’t answer.”
“I just promised.”
“No, I mean the other thing.” His face was twitching with emotion.
“I didn’t know if you meant it,” she said. “The whole equation, I mean. Did you?”
He nodded.
“Well, I love you, too, Benjamin Burrows,” she said, feeling a smile take over her face. It seemed absurd that she had never said it before, and absurd that he didn’t know it in his bones.
He smiled and the room seemed to brighten, as if the curtains had been thrown open to the morning light.
“Move over,” she said. She climbed into the club chair beside him, and he put his arm around her shoulder. She tugged the blanket over their knees and rested her head against him. They were in some weird hotel room, with the awful Doyle outside in the hall, and still she never wanted to leave. She just wanted to stay here, with her hip tucked against Benjamin’s hip, her leg pressed against his. But something nagged at her.
“So wait,” she said. “Who’s Rocco’s cousin?”
“I gave him the powder.”
She sat up, her heart lurching. “You did what?”
Then Doyle came into the room, with Vili behind him. The magician raised his eyebrows. “Some chaperones we are.”
“You gave some stranger the powder?” Janie said.
“It’s all right,” Benjamin said. “Rocco just wants to talk to his mother. He keeps smelling her perfume. He thinks it’s a message.”
Doyle laughed. “Oh, boy. Dead people using smells to communicate. That’s such a hack story.”
“Don’t they?” Benjamin asked.
“Sure,” Doyle said. “But the message is usually ‘Hey, I stink, you should bury me.’”
“So you think this Rocco was lying?” Janie asked.
“Of course he was lying!” Doyle said. “His buddy got offed. He wants to know who killed him.”
“Why does he want to know?” Janie asked, although she was afraid she knew the answer. And this was not how Benjamin’s father had intended him to carry on their work.
Doyle rolled his eyes. “So he can whack the guy, of course.”
Chapter 32
The Capo
Salvatore Rocco, alone in his suite on the top floor of the hotel, looked at the jar of powder on the table. Fear was a strange emotion for him. In the war, he had lived in the mountains with the partisans, fighting the Germans. He was flush with youth and passion then, lean and flexible as a green branch. He had once scrambled up the side of a Panzer tank and dropped a grenade into the cockpit. He could still feel the hard, knobby surface of the grenade in his hand, and the expectation that any second it would explode. He could feel the impact in his knees as he jumped down to the ground, and hear the concussive blast behind him as he ran.
His friend Carlino had been with him in the mountains, and had fought and run by his side. They had been children together, like brothers. Carlino knew
He picked up the jar and shook it. It was not a true powder but was granulated, like coarse salt. He and Carlino had both grown up in the church, altar boys in white robes, watching the swinging incense hang in the air, listening to the priest tell stories of hellfire. They had seen the dark paintings of demons and torment. And they had both broken many commandments. Sal hadn’t counted lately. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. He had committed mortal sins. But there had always been a reason for what he had done. In the beginning, it was the Germans. The first thing Sal ever stole was potatoes from a barn when he and his fellow partisans were starving.
But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself.
One could confess, of course, but confessing was not in their line. So was it possible that Carlino was really in that place the priests had described, with the demons and the flames and the torment, the eternal suffering? The pitchforks? Would the powder take Sal there? The boy, Benjamin, claimed to have gone to an in-between place, a dark room where he could talk to his father. So was that limbo? Did Sal believe in limbo? Did he believe in hell? If he didn’t, then why were his hands trembling?
There was a light knock at the door. Sal Rocco hadn’t answered his own door in years. It wasn’t safe for a man like him, with many enemies, to go blithely opening doors, but he had sent his bodyguard away, because he’d wanted to contemplate the powder and its possibilities alone. He sat in his chair, unsure what to do.
There was another light knock, and then a girl’s voice called, “Mr. Rocco? Signore Rocco? Don Salvatore?”
He went to the door. Outside were Benjamin, who looked unhappy, and a girl. Her hair seemed not entirely under control, her eyes worried.
“I’m Janie, sir,” she said. “That powder’s not going to work, and I didn’t want you to be angry about it when nothing happened. You won’t see your friend, because he didn’t take any of the powder before he died. That’s how it works, you both have to take it. Benjamin is only connecting to his father’s mind, he’s not really—well, going anywhere.”
The first thing Sal felt was a flood of relief, like a drug in his bloodstream. He stumbled back into the room, leaving the door open. He didn’t have to try it. The girl took the jar of powder and slipped it into her pocket, but he didn’t care. An iron weight lifted from his heart. Then the relief was followed by a flush of shame, because it proved that he really had been afraid. He was becoming a coward, in his middle age. Then both sensations were replaced with bitter regret, because now he would never know who had killed his friend. He sat down, lowering himself into a chair.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Benjamin said, his eyes on the floor. “I should have realized it wouldn’t work for you. Since my father died, I don’t think clearly. It’s very frustrating.”
Sal nodded. “I understand.”
“Thank you, sir,” the boy said.
“But you gave me your word.”
The boy looked up, with the fear and uncertainty Sal had seen so many times in the eyes of his underlings. “Sir?”
“You will go for me, and ask your father what happened to Carlino,” Rocco said. He felt his old power flooding back. He was Salvatore Rocco. He could discover what had happened to Carlino, without having to go where Carlino was. He was not a sgarrista, running his own errands. Why had he ever thought he should be? People went to unpleasant places for him. It should have occurred to him to send the boy in the first place.
“Wait—he can’t go,” the girl said.
Sal Rocco looked at her, this impertinent child. “Why not?”
“Because he was just there,” she said. “It doesn’t work twice in a day, it just makes you dizzy and sick, and you don’t make contact.”
“Then he stays in this hotel until he can go,” he said.
“But he can’t!” she said. “My parents—”
Rocco drew himself up. “Your parents don’t concern me. What happened to Carlino concerns me. I will not let the boy leave. I can send you both to the bottom of the river, if I wish.”
“Wait,” the boy said, his eyes bright with intelligence. “There might be another way.”
Chapter 33
The Go-Between
Janie climbed the narrow stairs at the Keats House, wishing she had Benjamin beside her. He’d said it felt as if the poet had come through him, using Benjamin’s presence in the After-room to pass back into the world—and not just in the fleeting way that they had sensed him hovering around his house. Benjamin thought the poet would know what had happened to Rocco’s friend, or could find out. So now Janie was looking for a ghost, in the house where he had died over a hundred years ago.
The tall building was strangely quiet.
The girl selling tickets wasn’t at her desk at the top of the stairs, so Janie stood there for a moment, listening to the silent rooms, and then stepped into the wood-paneled library.
As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw a semitransparent young man in a double-breasted frock coat, his hair curling over his high collar, browsing the shelves. He reached for a book, but his hand passed right through it, and he swore quietly. Janie drew in a breath. Benjamin had been right. This wasn’t a vanishing reflection, or a vague feeling of haunting. The youngest and saddest of the Romantic poets was standing in front of her, in his nineteenth-century clothes. He’d been twenty-three when he died, and he looked even younger.
She cleared her throat. “Hello,” she said.
The ghost turned, startled. “Hello!” His voice was high and thin. “Can you see me?”
“Yes,” Janie said.
“That other girl couldn’t. She heard my voice and ran away. Is she a housemaid?” He had an English accent, more formal-sounding than Benjamin’s.
“No,” Janie said. “She sells tickets.”
“Tickets to what?”
“Your house. It’s a museum—about you.”
He smiled. “That’s absurd,” he said, though he seemed pleased. “Why can you see me?”
Janie hesitated. “I think because I took this powder,” she began. “It—well, you were an apothecary once, right?”
“For a short time,” the poet said.
“Were you—an ordinary apothecary?”
He gave her a hard look. “I have never been ordinary.”
Janie wasn’t sure that he had understood the question, but it would be time-consuming to explain, so she went on. “Well, my friend Benjamin isn’t an ordinary apothecary either, and he made a powder that allows two people to see through each other’s eyes.”
“Oh!” the poet said. “What a beautiful thought! Did he do it to communicate with you?”
Janie blushed. “Yes.”
“I imagined such a thing, with—a certain young person. When we were far apart.”
“You never tried it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Only in my mind.”
She could feel him drifting, getting caught up in memories, so she went on. “So, because of the powder, Benjamin still has a connection with his father, who died recently. So Benjamin went to talk to him—”
“Ah, your friend is the one who was there!” the poet said. “On the other side! Who was living!”
Janie nodded. ?
“It was irresistible, his presence,” he said. “Like a fire when you have been very cold, when you thought there was no more warmth in the world.”
“He says—you came through him?”
“I suppose so,” Keats said. “I just wanted to be close to this warm, living world. So I waited for the moment when I could feel that he was about to return, and I pounced.”
Janie felt uncomfortable. She was pretty sure that was not supposed to happen. “So—I think the reason I can see you is because I took the powder, too.”
“I see,” Keats said. “Well, perhaps you can help me. I am looking for a book with information about—this young person. Whom I loved. But I cannot open the books.” He passed his hand through the shelves to demonstrate.
“You’re looking for Fanny Brawne,” Janie said.
The poet looked shocked. “You know her?”
“Well, she’s—dead, of course. She’s been dead a long time.”
His face blurred with grief. “Of course,” he said. “Yes, of course. That would be so. But if I could discover when and where she died, then perhaps I could find her.”
“Okay,” Janie said.
“You’ll help me?” His face was suffused with happiness. For a transparent and misty face that didn’t always hold its shape, it was remarkably expressive.
“First I have a question,” Janie said.
“Yes?” he said, impatient.
“It’s about someone who was in that—other place. The in-between place.”
“Oh, they’re all terribly dull,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “Utterly single-minded. They’re obsessed only with getting back here.”
“I need to know who killed one of them,” she said.
The poet laughed. “Do you know how crowded it is there? I came here to escape those wretched bores!”
“Could you try?”
“No,” he said, turning back to the shelves. “It’s impossible.”