* * *
Thirty-seven thoughts, all present in three minutes.
You are here.
Something’s happened.
All I’ve wanted is for you to be here.
He’s been here.
I’m scared.
The fact that I’m scared is scaring me.
I need you.
Don’t cry.
I just want to stay like this, like this, like this.
You see me.
He is going to destroy us.
I should have never led you to this.
You would be so much better off without me.
I have done this to you.
He has done this to me.
Hold me.
Hold.
Hold on.
What’s happened?
I need to tell you.
I don’t need anything else besides this, this, this.
Not true. There is so much more to the world than two people.
I am cursed.
Loving me is what curses you.
I need to let you go.
Hold on.
We need to kill him, but if he dies, I will be like this forever.
If we try to kill him, he will kill us instead.
I am okay with dying, but you have to live.
I should not be thinking these thoughts.
I should just hold you.
Like this, like this.
I want this to be the sand that stays on my fingers.
You. When everything else is gone, I want to remember you.
I have to stop thinking like it’s over.
Twenty-three hours.
I wish we could stay like this until then.
* * *
Four knocks in quick succession on the door.
Laurie calls out from the other side. I let go, dissolve back into the room. Elizabeth answers the door, letting in not just Laurie, but Millie and Saul as well.
“The gang’s all here,” I say. “Even our favorite mover of furniture.” Although it seems like Elizabeth and Millie have forgiven him, I’m not entirely ready to let Saul off the hook for barricading us in the hexatorium.
Saul is unapologetic. “You would’ve been better off staying there,” he says.
“Are you safe?” Millie asks, looking around the room.
This is one of the good things about having them here: If Arbus were still around, they’d see him.
I explain what happened, and the four of them go through the whole apartment, just to make sure we’re alone. I feel like a kid who’s sent his parents off to banish a ghost in the middle of the night, one he is sure is just out of view, hovering in the deadly shadow zone where specters and monsters reside.
When they’re certain he’s gone, we regroup. Elizabeth and Laurie fill me in on why Saul did what he did, and I’m almost amused that Arbus can make so many people feel so vulnerable at once.
Say what you want about my grandfather, at least he leaves a mark.
* * *
“So,” Laurie says, looking at the clock on his phone, “we know he’s going to be back in twenty-two hours and forty minutes. That’s enough time to spring a trap, right?”
“If it were that easy,” Saul replies gruffly, “I think it would’ve been done by now.”
“We need to think,” Millie says, as if we’d been planning otherwise.
“We need to kill him,” Saul asserts.
“No!” Elizabeth says. “If we kill him, all the curses remain out there in the world.”
“And here in this room,” Laurie points out.
Saul shakes his head. “You children don’t understand. You’re not going to get Arbus to take back his curses. Never. The best you can hope for is that he revokes one curse in order to put on another—and you kill him in the space between. But even then, he can only revoke one curse at a time. So you’ve got one shot. And all the other curses will remain. You don’t kill him in order to kill the curses of the past. You kill him to prevent the curses of the future.”
I know Saul is unyielding in his convictions, so I turn to Millie. “Isn’t there another way?” I ask her. “Short of murder. Isn’t there some way of draining his power, turning him into someone ordinary?”
Millie shakes her head. “If there is, I’ve never come across it. I’ve looked. Believe me, I’ve looked. But death seems to be the only way to stop a cursecaster. In the old days, there was banishment or confinement. But that’s not how our world works anymore. You can’t just banish someone. They’ll only end up somewhere else.”
“So basically I have the choice between killing my grandfather and joining him?”
Millie looks alarmed. “It’s not really a choice, is it?”
I tell her no. But still, I’m thinking there has to be another way.
* * *
Saul is restless. He keeps looking at the door, shifting from foot to foot.
Finally, Millie says, “What?”
“If Arbus broke in here once, there’s nothing to stop him from coming in again,” Saul says. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”
Not all of us. Just her.
Millie notices this too.
“It’s not about me,” she gently chides. “We must look at the overall picture.”
“Well, let’s look at the overall picture from back home,” he says. “We can protect ourselves there.”
I can see Millie’s going to protest further, but the truth is that I want her and Saul gone. I am not going to figure this out with them around, especially if I know that Saul will throw me headfirst into Arbus’s clutches if it means saving Millie.
“How about this?” Elizabeth says. “Why don’t the two of you go back to the hexatorium for now? Laurie and I will stay with Stephen—we can even smuggle him into our apartment. If he’s with me, I’ll be able to see Arbus coming. And in the meantime, we can try to come up with a plan for tomorrow. Because there has to be a plan.”
Millie nods. “Come by at eight,” she says. “There are a few things I want to look into. Then we can figure out what to do next.”
We all cling to the illusion that we’re a team. But I think we all know: Arbus could break us apart in a second. Some of our loyalties are thinner than others.
* * *
When it’s just me, Elizabeth, and Laurie, I can let my guard down a little more. We might not have any answers, but at least I don’t have Saul glaring at me like I’m the Trojan who opened the gate for the horse.
“Why is it that there are five of us and only one of him, and I still feel like we’re outnumbered?” Laurie asks.