Michael Grant - Messenger of Fear

—Sam

I found that I could not look up from the words. I felt that if I looked away, I must look at the dead girl, and I didn’t want to see her. She had still lived when she had written these words.

Then I realized that he was looking at me.

“Why is this happening?” I asked him.

He touched the note reverently with one finger.

“Why am I here?” I asked with sudden vehemence.

“The same reason we are all here,” the boy said. “To learn.”

But I had lost patience with cryptic answers. “Hey. Enough. If this is a dream, then I don’t have to put up with you!”

“Mara,” he said, though I had never told him my name. “This is not a dream.”

“Then what is it, huh?” My voice was ragged. I was sick through and through, sick with what I had just witnessed, sick with what I feared about myself. “What is it and what are you?”

“I am . . .” he began, then hesitated, considered, and again showed that slight lessening in the grim lines of his face. “I am the messenger.”

“Messenger? What’s your message, showing me this poor dead girl? I never wanted to see that. I don’t want it in my head. Is that your message? Showing me this?”

“My message?” He seemed almost surprised by the question. “My message? My message is that a price must be paid. A price paid with terror.”

I reached to grab him angrily, but he moved easily out of range. I had wanted to grab him by the throat, though I had instead reached for his arm. It was not that I blamed him for what I was now enduring, it was rather that I simply needed to hurt someone, something, because of what I had seen, and what I had felt since waking to find myself in the mist. It was like an acid inside of me, churning and burning me from the inside.

I wanted to kick something, to shout, to throw things, to scream and then to cry.

To save that poor girl.

To wipe the memory from my mind.

“You’re the messenger?” I asked in a shrill, nasty, mocking voice. “And your message is to be afraid?”

He was unmoved by my emotion . . . No, that’s not quite right. It was more accurate to say that he was not taken aback. He was not unmoved, he was . . . pleased. Reassured?

“Yes, Mara,” he said with a sense of finality, as though now we could begin to understand each other, though I yet understood nothing. “I am the messenger. The Messenger of Fear.”

It would be a long time before I came to know him by any other name.

Calmer now, having released some of my boiling anger and worry, I turned my unwilling eyes back to Samantha Early. Her life’s blood was running out, soaking into the carpet.

“Why did she do it?” I asked.

“We will see,” Messenger said.

Samantha Early looks at the clothes hanging in her closet. She clenches her fists. The veins on her forearms stand out. Her body seems to vibrate with tension.

I see this. It is happening. I can neither look away nor remain indifferent. Messenger has shown me the outcome, so I cannot tell myself that all I am witnessing is teen angst.

By means I can neither explain nor ignore, I know her thoughts. I know what she feels as she gazes, frightened, frightened by nothing but a closetful of clothing.

What will not draw ridicule? That is the question she asks herself. She dresses defensively: What will avoid giving anyone an excuse to ridicule? It should have been easy, getting dressed. It should have been as simple as what top goes with which jeans or shorts or skirt, no, no, not skirt.

No, not skirt. She remembers that day when she tripped in a skirt, when she’d sprawled out across the hallway, finger still stuck in the loop of her locker’s combo lock, books strewn out into the path of oncoming students, who stepped aside indifferently or made a show of it, made a thing of it and laughed.

Spazmantha.

Not even original, that. She had first heard Spazmantha when she was eleven.

It shouldn’t bother her. She knows that. Her mother has told her that. Her shrink has told her that. Actually, the shrink said, “You have bigger issues than that to concern yourself with.”

How do I know this? How am I seeing this? This dream is a very strange movie in which I watch Samantha and watch her thoughts at the same time.

The shrink’s bigger issue was obsessive–compulsive disorder. OCD for short. Everyone threw that term around like it was nothing, like it was cute, OCD. “Yeah, I’m a little OCD? Hah hah.” It wasn’t cute, and Samantha did not have a little of it.

Samantha goes to the bathroom and washes her hands. She uses Cetaphil soap because it’s mild, but she uses a brush as well, a wooden-handled bristle brush. First, the hot water. Then the Cetaphil, taking care that every single square inch of her hands—and for purposes of her compulsion, her hands end at the first crease in her wrist—is covered. Then the brush. She brushes hard. Then she rinses.

And that’s one.

I watch as Samantha begins the process all over again. The Messenger stands behind her. Samantha sees neither of us. This isn’t happening, this has already happened. The Samantha movie is in a flashback.

“Can she hear us?” I ask, but the answer is obvious: Samantha can neither see nor hear us. She is washing her hands, has already washed her hands, done all this already. I’m seeing it, here, in my present, but it’s in the past.

I can smell the soap. I feel the steam rising from the too-hot water. When I step to one side, I can see myself and Messenger in the mirror.

He’s taller than I am. He’s white, I’m Asian. He’s . . . beautiful? I’m . . . pretty? Maybe that, maybe pretty, but not beautiful. I’m not sure many girls could call themselves beautiful while sharing a mirror with Messenger.

There’s something about him that seems unnatural. He’s a marble statue brought to life, unreal. Isn’t he? He can’t be real, not really real, if for no other reason than no one dresses that way. And yet there is a weight to him, like a distortion of gravity, a bending of light, as if he was made of the stuff of collapsed stars.

I force my gaze from him and back to a more distressing vision: Samantha Early begins a third round of washing. Her hands are obviously spotless—she could perform open heart surgery without wearing gloves—yet, caught in the compulsion, she washes her hands a fourth time. The backs of her hands are bright-pink now, like sliced ham, with fingertips so raw that the cuticles are tearing away in tiny shreds. She wields the brush with a ferocity that is necessary to her, energy that she must expend, pain that she must endure.

On the fifth washing little drops of blood ooze from the cuticle of her ring finger.

“Can’t she stop?” I ask.

“If she fails to wash her hands seven times, her family will die,” Messenger says.

“What?” I snap. “That’s crazy.”

“Compulsion is very like insanity,” Messenger says.

He is not indifferent, that’s the thing. His too-near voice that seems always to be whispering in my ear is held to a standard of cool detachment, but his eyes and his mouth and his forehead and the way he swallows all speak of reflected pain.

He understands. He feels. I’m convinced of that at least. There’s a humanity to him. He’s not entirely cold and beautiful and strange—there’s something of flesh and blood there as well. That reassures me. He may be only a figment of a dream I’ll forget upon waking, but still I am relieved.

It is still a dream. What else could it be? I wake in a field with a mist covering me, and then, all of this?

Wait, had I fallen asleep? I try to recall, I strain to dredge some memory out of my foggy brain. But again it is as if all I can see of my waking life is a sort of clip-art version, a stock photo version with generic people acting generically, none of it possessing the detail and grain of reality.