Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

A car alarm went off outside. Stephen tightened the curtains, making sure there was no view of us from outside, though it was hardly possible to close them more than he already had.

“Can you really do all those things you said to Jane?” I asked. “Make cameras turn around when she walks down the street, stuff like that?”

“Maybe half of it. But your parents will be all right, I promise. And so will Charlotte. Our business can be unpredictable, but the police are good at preventing crime and finding kidnap victims. Their house is being turned over as we speak. She’ll be found.”

“Why didn’t you arrest them?”

“Arresting them meant reporting you. And I’d just deliberately crashed into their car. We have to lay low until that mess is taken care of. I wish I could have come up with a more elegant solution, but there was no time. Thorpe already thinks I take too many risks…”

He sat on the end of the bed. I sat next to him. I meant to sit a bit further away, but the way I landed, I was right up against him. I expected him to shift over, but he didn’t.

“I know you’re angry at me,” he said. “About what I said at Dawn’s flat.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“No, not whatever. I want to explain. I don’t want you to think it’s because I think you can’t do it, or that I’m upset that you can do more than I can. It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable…I wasn’t just going to let you sign up for this because your exams weren’t going well and you had nothing else to do.”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t put that the way I wanted to,” he said. “If you joined us, your family could never know what you were doing. Your relationship with them would be severed in many ways. I do this because I have nowhere else to go. My sister was my family, and I barely knew her. I had nothing. I’ve heard you talk about your family, your home. You have somewhere else to go. How would you really feel if you couldn’t go home again?”

“I could go home…”

“No. You couldn’t. Not easily. And everything your family knew about you would be a lie. You would never be able to tell them what was going on in your life. If I enlist you, if people higher up than Thorpe actually realize what you are and what you might be able to do, I don’t think you would just be treated like a member of an agency. You’d be treated like an asset. And assets don’t get to have lives.”

“I never said I wanted to join,” I pointed out. “But if I did, at least I’d be with you guys.”

“And if something happened to us, you’d get whatever sad weirdos they managed to recruit after us. Or you’d have no one. If we were disbanded, this whole part of your life would be a big, blank space. You still have a chance to get out and do something else. I do this because it keeps me sane. I don’t know if I could do anything else. But it’s not easy. A big part of me wishes that I’d been given some other option, but I wasn’t. I’m not saying that’s easy. I’m not even saying that’s what I want. I’m saying you have a chance to have some other kind of life.”

“Maybe I need this life,” I said.

“Has it really gone that well for you so far?”

I shrugged. “I’ve seen worse,” I said.

That got a little smile from him.

“There you go,” I said, elbowing him. “A little smile. I knew you could do it.”

“I’m such a miserable sod.”

“You’re not that bad.”

“I know I am. I don’t want you to end up like me.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I am not going to end up like you.”

His neck was long, and there was just a bit of stubble on it. His mouth, which was so often set in an expressionless straight line, there was a shape to that too. His nose had just a bit of a tiny downward turn. And his eyes, deep set, very tired, were fixed firmly on me.

“Everything is so messed up,” I said. “My parents…I need to call them.”

“That’s not advisable right now. Just wait until we’ve gotten this mess cleared up, at least until morning.”

“Why did I do it? Why did I listen to her?” I hung my head and rubbed my eyes, then pulled myself upright again. “They gave me some drugs. They put it in the food. No wonder the therapy always seemed so intense.”

“Drugs make people suggestible,” Stephen said.

“These people—they’re a cult. I’m telling you. They were talking to me about these El…these mystery things in ancient Greece. Something about Demeter and Persephone and…”

“The Eleusinian Mysteries?” he said.

“That’s the one. Of course you know it.”

“Five years of Latin, four of Greek.”

“God, what am I going to do? Do I go home?”

“We decide nothing tonight, all right? It will all be fine, I promise you. We’ll make it fine.”

He put his arm over my shoulders, which was understandable, because I was upset. But it also seemed very…

I wasn’t sure what it was.

“How can you promise to make it fine?” I asked.

“You’re alive. You’re safe and with us. It’s already fine. The rest is window dressing.”

“You say that.”

“Because it is.”

The hand that rested on my shoulder rubbed it a bit, comfortingly. Then it gave my shoulder a little squeeze. I leaned into him.

Maybe it was that I was broken. Maybe it was just that I was out of my mind. But it occurred to me that I was going to kiss him. The thought just arrived, certain knowledge, delivered from some greater, more knowledgeable place. I was going to kiss him. Stephen would not want to kiss me. He would back up in horror. And yet, I was still going to do it. I reached over, and I put my hand against his chest, then I moved closer. I could feel just the very tips of the gentle stubble on his cheek brushing against my skin.

“Rory,” he said. But it was a quiet protest, and it went nowhere.

For the first few seconds, he didn’t move—he accepted the kiss like you might accept a spoonful of medicine. Then I heard it, a sigh, like he had finally set down a heavy weight.

I was pretty sure we were both kind of terrified, but I was completely sure that we were both doing this. We kissed slowly, very deliberately, coming together and then pulling apart and looking at each other. Then each kiss got longer, and then it didn’t stop. Stephen put his hand just under the edge of my shirt, holding it on the spot where the scar was. Sometimes the skin around the scar got cold—now it was warm. Now it was alive.

“So Thorpe says that—Seriously?”

Callum was in the doorway.

Stephen mumbled what I think was a very obscene word right against my mouth.

“You realize I now owe Boo five pounds?” Callum said. “Boo! I owe you five pounds!”

“What?” Boo yelled. “In the toilet.”

“She’s in the toilet,” Callum explained. “Can you not mention this? She said this would happen. She’s going to lord this over me.”

Stephen and I separated politely. I stared at my shoes, and Stephen buttoned his shirt.

“You were saying about Thorpe?”

“The freaks have cleared out of the house in Chelsea. Thorpe is having people pull records and look at CCTV. No hit on the house in the West Country yet. And someone’s being dispatched to Rory’s parents. Rory’s parents have registered her as missing.”

“Right,” Stephen said. “It sounds like there’s little we can do right now. We should try to rest. Tomorrow could be a very long day.”

Boo had joined us by then.

“What were you yelling?” she asked Callum.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just telling them what Thorpe said.”

“And I said we should try to get some rest,” Stephen replied.