Ramsey Shehadeh: Red

“No.”

The scritch of pen on paper. “When was the last time anyone saw her?”

“At around 9:30 last night.”

“Who was she with?”

Another pause, this one longer. “Ansel.”

“Ansel?”

“Her brother.”

The pen, again. “Where was this?”

“Where he left her.” His mother’s voice now, pitched low.

She never said anything about Louise to him, not after that first day. But sometimes he’d look up from his dinner, or turn around when she wasn’t expecting him to, and find her staring at him. A flat, affectless gaze: not accusation or forgiveness, not hatred or love, not rancor or sadness or recrimination. It was nothing. It was empty.

Ansel felt that emptiness now, curling out of their bedroom, coiling around him like smoke.

He turned and padded downstairs and let himself out of the house.

The sun hadn’t risen but there was a hint of it in the pre-dawn mist: it glowed softly, as if lit from within. He resettled his backpack on his shoulders and walked the short distance to Old Georgetown.

He stopped there and peered north, toward the school, feeling the familiar temptation to retrace her path: studying the sidewalk, the grass beside it, the occasional clutch of trees shielding the neighborhoods from Old Georgetown. That urge to walk through each of those neighborhoods, looking for clues.

He’d searched through spring and then spring became summer and summer lapsed into fall and now fall was fading into winter. The trees had lost all their leaves. He looked up at their bare branches, at the skein of powerlines sloping through them, at the roof of sky: a troubled shade of pewter, promising rain.

He turned south, and started walking.

This southwest quadrant of downtown was dominated by the WAREHOUSE and the GARAGE. The divining rod led him past those buildings to the lower left corner of the board, and then, quite suddenly, fell still.

The alley. He should have known.

He’d never been here before: the clues never led anyone down this way. The alley was just a narrow opening in the side of the board, between two buildings, the only route out of downtown.

Mom and Dad always said it was just a mistake—a wall they’d neglected to draw. Ansel thought it was part of an expansion that never materialized. But Louise had the best answer: “It’s where you go when you get tired of looking,” she said.

The alleyway was filled with a roiling mist, opaque and illuminated from within. He dropped the divining rod and opened the book the LIBRARIAN found for him, his heart already sinking.

The first page was blank.

He turned to the second. Also blank. There might had been something on the third, but it was almost entirely faded. The fourth was blank, the fifth a dissonant riot of letters, strewn across the page like confetti.

“Ok,” he said. “I get it.” He looked up and saw that the POLICEMAN was standing at the head of LIGHT STREET, beside the WAREHOUSE, watching him. “I get it.”

The POLICEMAN nodded.

He dropped the book and squinted into the mist, fear blooming in his chest.

He stepped inside.

The mist felt cool on his skin. He took another step, and then another, and then another, peering into the murk, the world dropping further away with each step. Silence enclosed him, pressing inward.

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Copyright © 2017 by Ramsey Shehadeh

Art copyright © 2017 by Chris Buzelli