Saundra Mitchell - Mistwalker

“You have work to do,” Bailey said. As if she hadn’t just been pressed to the window with me.

She only said it to prove she was trying to do her job. It didn’t stop her from scrambling after me. Since it was probably family business, she stopped at the top stair. I went down first, Bailey right behind me, to wait for Mom and Dad to come inside.

When they did, they were fire and ice. Mom’s face was scarlet, Daddy’s dirty white. They shut the door with Scott still on the other side of it. Startled to see me, Dad shook his head and set my mother’s arm free. “I’ll make coffee.”

He passed me without a word, and my heart sank. Reaching for my mother, I asked, “What’s wrong?”

“You should get back to work,” she said.

I refused to move. “Mom.”

“Scott’s not sure,” Mom said, her voice thick with judgment. “But he thinks something’s going on with the grand jury.”

Glancing up the stairs, I took comfort when Bailey pressed her hands to her chest. She didn’t have to say anything to know exactly how I was feeling: wounded and wary and afraid. I rubbed my mother’s back, like she used to rub mine when I was little and sick to my stomach. “What kind of something?”

Still furious, my mother snapped, “Like I said, Scott’s not sure. He came all the way over here to stir us up because ‘there’s chatter.’ I hear chatter all night on dispatch. There’s no need to run over, lights flashing, for chatter. ”

“There’s nothing wrong, though, is there?”

Daddy emerged from the kitchen. Behind him, the coffeepot gurgled—an ordinary sound that seemed so out of place. The house groaned, shifting beneath our feet. And in the distance, the foghorn went off again. It lowed in the dark, distant and lost.

“Bad news travels faster than good,” Daddy said.

“But I’m supposed to testify.” Turning between them, I couldn’t tell if I was talking or begging. Panic ran through me; it stole my reason and my sense. “I was there! Doesn’t that matter?”

Mom clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Willa, stop it. Until there’s something to know, you need to settle down. I’m sure Bailey has better things to do than tutor you. Get on up there and quit wasting her time.”

Nudging me toward the stairs, Mom waited for me to go. How she expected me to work I didn’t know.

The grand jury wasn’t even the trial. It was a bunch of shuffling papers and looking at evidence. The way Ms. Park explained it to me, the grand jury was there to decide if there was enough evidence to charge Terry Coyne with killing my brother.

I was there. I saw it. I felt it. I knew exactly who fired that gun. It was a damned given, so what was going wrong with the grand jury? I’d pointed out the right picture in the mug shot book. My feet pounded on the stairs. Bailey caught me by the shoulders.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

When our eyes met, though, I knew it wasn’t. Bailey was the one who had optimism on her side. Instead of certain, she looked worried. No doubt, I looked crazed. Between the two of us, I expected we had a right to be both.

Here I am, rampant.

I stand in the lamp gallery, a jar in hand. The light inside it doesn’t glow so bright as the one that spins behind me. When I hold the jar high, it seems almost empty.

Four in a hundred years. It’s an impossible task, and it always has been. Sisyphus and his rock. My humble self and these souls. I’d laugh, but nothing’s funny anymore.

I keep throwing myself off the lighthouse. Again and again, I plunge into the sea. Ripped apart and reincorporated, I find the smallest pleasure in the fact that it’s starting to hurt. My veins bear no blood, my flesh contains no bone. But whatever magic keeps me together, it’s exhausted and aching.

The masquerade of breakfasts and dinners is over. If I were a real boy, I’d be parched. Nothing to drink for days—could be a week or more. Letting time slip away is a gift to myself. Better than music boxes or books or nonsense, all the nonsense I used to wish for.

As autumn cedes to winter, I cede to the mist.

Like a monk, I shaved my head. Like an ascetic, I stripped to the waist. No shoes, no gloves. No tie, no hair oil. Now I realize the true choice I had when I took Susannah’s place. The soul collection only distracted me. It was more fundamental than that. Or should I say, more elemental.

Be human or be mist. Lure the next Grey to the island or surrender. All this time, the island knew, the lighthouse knew, that I was meant to succumb. Magic mocks me. It laughs and echoes through the trees.

The only reason Willa came was to put on a show. To delight whatever ancient god or demon that resides within this rock.

Reason tells me she was a pawn, but the elements have no reason. They’re capricious and unknowable; they contain no conscience. I hate her, I curse her. I stand here at the edge of my world with her brother’s soul in the palm of my hand.

I’ve no idea what will happen if I break the glass.

What happened when I captured him? It’s a question that only now occurs to me. Did I impede his progress to heaven or hell? Do those ethereal realms even exist? This bottled light could be anything—a breath, a thought. The whole sum of a being, and I keep it in a cupboard, like last summer’s jam.

Leaning over the rail, I hold the jar aloft. The lighthouse groans, the beam making another pass. When the light drowns me, I drop my prize. My whole purpose for being. Four souls in a hundred years; now I have but three.

The sea roars, and the gears grind. Everywhere, wind swirls and whispers. These raw aspects of nature clamor; they devour the sound of glass breaking on the rocks. Avidly, I watch. But there’s no light lifting ever skyward. No flicker delving into the deep. It seems—when I set free a collected soul—that nothing happens at all.

I’m disappointed.

Because I can, I call the fog until it’s thick around the light. I, too, am capricious, so I banish it by sheer force of will. Then I fling myself over the side again. The sensation of gravity gives way to a sudden, concussive ache.

When I come back together, I find myself standing in front of the cupboard. My remaining three jars tremble. Pulsing with light, they seem to react to one another. And when I reach for one, the lights within them dim. Perhaps they realize what comes next.

Perhaps they realize that I’m the monster on the rock.

Because the fog was so erratic, some of the juniors started gathering the little kids in groups to guide them to the school. Parents walked their kids to the base of the hill, then we waited until we had a whole class to lead.

The heat from the path thinned the haze, giving us a clear shot from the village to the school. As long as everybody stayed on the pavement, we could get up safely and back down again at the end of the day.

Somehow, it just got organized. Seth had kindergarteners, and Bailey scored the sixth-graders. They had no trouble herding their classes to Vandenbrook.

It wasn’t so easy for me. I ended up with fourth-graders. Though I couldn’t prove it, I suspected their parents gave them Red Bull and straight sugar for breakfast. They were old enough that they argued about holding hands, and little enough that they could disappear in two seconds.

I lost the Lamere twins the second day and nearly had a nervous breakdown. Calling my throat raw, I scoured the path from top to bottom four times. Right when I thought I’d have to call the police, I found them. They sat on a stump just off the path, building a faery house out of shells and sticks.