скачать книгу бесплатно
Boa’s appearance was so appalling that Candy forgot her exhaustion and scrambled to get out of her way. With a sudden rush of energy, Candy pushed herself up off the chamber floor, catching Boa off guard, and knocking her to the floor.
“Be still, witch!” Boa yelled. “Let’s have this over with, once and for all!”
Candy lurched toward the door, avoiding the coils which, had they encircled her and tightened their grip once more, would have ground her ribs to powder and her guts to meat and excrement.
She reached out to the shadow, which marked her destination, and slid her fingers around the door. It was no illusion. It was solid and real in her grip. She pulled, half expecting the door to protest its opening, but no. Despite its massive size, it was served by some kind of counterweight, which allowed it to swing open with only the most modest of effort on Candy’s part.
Her surprise made her careless. As she pulled the door open, Boa’s forefinger wrapped itself around her throat, tightening with the efficiency of a noose.
Candy instantly let go of the door, and forced her fingers down between neck and noose. But it wasn’t enough to keep Boa from putting so much pressure on Candy’s windpipe that she could no longer draw breath.
Candy’s thoughts were already in swift decay thanks to Boa’s theft. Now the sudden loss of oxygen robbed her mind of still more functions. Her thoughts became increasingly confused. What was she doing in this place? And the woman with the hole for a mouth; who was she?
Boa’s skills with her body were growing as fast as Candy’s body was drained. She spoke now, her voice crude.
“This is no way to die,” Boa said. “Where’s your dignity, girl? Stop struggling, and let me take what’s mine. You lived a fine life because of me. Brief, yes, but full of my insights. My lessons. My magic.”
Somebody outside the chamber walls, but close enough to have heard Boa’s speech, apparently found it very funny. Her mockery echoed around the chamber.
“Listen to yourself.” It was Laguna Munn. Again, the laughter ignited. “Such pretension. And from what? A cannibal. Yes, that’s the truth of it when you get down to the facts. You are able to devour the life of a girl who gave you sanctuary from those who had taken yours and would gladly have extinguished your soul. Let Candy go.”
“Oh no . . . there’s no letting go.”
“Is there not? We shall see about that.”
As she spoke, the wall opposite the door began to fold in upon itself, and the incantatrix came into view.
She was pointing at Boa, as she continued her accusations.
“Whatever was good in you, and bright, has gone to corruption.”
“You can say whatever you like, old woman,” Boa replied. “Your time’s over. There’s a new world about to be born.”
“Funny. I hear that a lot,” Laguna Munn said, her voice thick with contempt. “Now let the commoner go, Princess. If you really want to dine on flesh, you shouldn’t be eating the hoi polloi.”
The expression on Boa’s face suddenly cleared.
“Oh my. She is, isn’t she?”
“She’s not of noble birth, like you, Princess.”
“No,” Boa said, her tone deeply grateful. “If you hadn’t stopped me—” She released Candy from her grip. “I could have tainted myself.”
“And what a sad day that would have been for all those poor suffering aristocrats like yourself who would have lost a beloved sister.”
“Oh me! Oh, poor beloved me.”
As Candy stumbled out of Boa’s hold she turned and the subtle signs of deceit upon Boa’s face caught Candy’s attention. Boa didn’t wait to let Candy speak. She quickly was gone, out of the chamber and off up the wooded slope. Candy did her best to recover her equilibrium, but it was difficult. Boa’s thefts had left her body weak, and her thoughts ragged. She was only certain of one thing.
“She would have killed me . . .”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Mrs. Munn replied. “But this is my rock, girl, and she has no—”
“Mama!”
The cry came from Covenantis. And as heart wrenching as his wails were, the terrible howl of anguish that followed was infinitely worse.
Laguna was clearly torn between her responsibilities to her injured guest, and those she had to her son. Candy simplified things:
“Go to the boy! I’ll be fine. I just need to recover my breath.” She looked up at Mrs. Munn. “Please,” she said, “don’t worry about me!”
Her plea was lent force by another sobbing cry from her son.
“Where are you, Mama?”
Laguna Munn looked at Candy one more time.
“Go!” Candy said.
Laguna Munn didn’t put up any further argument. Instead, she addressed the walls of the chamber.
“This girl is here as my guest. She’s hurt. Heal her.” She turned her attentions back toward Candy for a moment. “Stay here and let the chamber do its work. I’ll be back with my boys.”
“Be careful . . .”
“I know, girl, I know. Boa’s dangerous. But believe me, so am I. I’ve got a few tricks she wouldn’t want to see. Now heal. The dark Hours that are coming won’t wait for you to put yourself back together. Hurry up. The beginning’s been a long time over. And the end always comes sooner than you expect.”
And so saying, she left the girl who was truly Candy Quackenbush, nothing added or taken away, to the healing hush of the chamber.
Chapter 14 Empty (#ulink_93b37578-8f75-5b3b-b274-1a58275c6e1b)
NEVER IN HER SIXTEEN years had Candy felt as alone as she felt now. Though she’d tried many times to imagine what it would be like without Boa in her head, her attempts had failed miserably. Only now, alone in the vastness of her thoughts did she sense the horror of such solitude. There would never again be a presence to silently share the state of being as Boa had. She was utterly, unconditionally alone.
How did people, ordinary people like those on Followell Street—even her own mother, even her father—deal with the loneliness? Did her dad drink himself senseless every night because it made the emptiness she was feeling right now hurt a little less? For them, was it the constant chattering of the television that helped them through the bad times? Or hurtful little power games like those Miss Schwartz played that helped them forget the hush in their heads?
Candy suddenly recalled the big billboard outside the Presbyterian Church on Munrow Street in Chickentown that had carried the same message for as long as Candy could remember:
THE LORD IS WITH YOU ALWAYS. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Well he’s not with me now, Candy thought. Nobody’s with me. And I just have to live with things being like this from now on, because nobody’s going to step in to help change it. All I can do is—
A shriek interrupted her thoughts. Laguna Munn was shouting one word, its force fueled by horror and rage.
“NO!”
She stopped only when she ran out of breath. She inhaled and began again.
“NO!”
Finally, she let the word fall off into silence. Several seconds passed and then Candy heard her say, “My son. What have you done to my son?”
Candy didn’t wait for any more clues as to what had taken place. She got up headed for the door, realizing as she did so that while she’d been contemplating her loneliness, the sentient chamber had obeyed Laguna Munn’s instructions and begun the process of healing her. She was no longer shaking as she had been just a few minutes earlier. And her weakened legs had recovered some of their strength. Even her thoughts, which had been left muddied by Boa’s attacks, were clearer now.
Exiting the chamber, she didn’t need any further cries from the incantrix in order to discover her whereabouts. The powers she feared she’d lost to Boa’s devouring were unharmed. Once the chamber had washed from her thoughts the grime of Boa’s appetite, she remembered without effort how to locate Mrs. Munn in the darkness. All she had to do was follow the vibration that moved ahead of her, trusting it to choose a safe path up the slope.
The temperature quickly warmed up as she ascended; the air carried with it a smell like rotted meat that had been burned on a barbecue.
Bad magic, she thought.
Then she heard Mrs. Munn again, speaking softly somewhere ahead of her.
“What’s she done to you, child? Now you hush your weepin’. I’m right here. Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere, Mama.”
Candy saw a light now, no brighter than two candle flames, hovering in the air a few feet above the ground. The scene illuminated was a grim one.
Mrs. Munn was kneeling on the ground, tending to her favorite son, Jollo B’gog. He was in a terrible state. All the dark beauty he’d possessed when Candy and Malingo had first met him had gone. He was emaciated now, his bones jutting through his withered skin. His teeth were chattering, his eyes rolled up behind his lids.
“Listen to me, Jollo dear,” Mrs. Munn was telling him. “You’re not going to die. You hear me? I’m here.”
She stopped talking, and looked up in rage, her gaze instantly locating Candy. There was a flicker of lightning in her eyes.
“It’s only me,” Candy said. “Don’t—”
The lightning receded, and Laguna Munn looked back down at her son. “I want you to stay here with him. Keep him from any further harm while I find her.”
“Boa . . .” Candy growled.
Laguna Munn nodded. “She took from the child what I stopped her taking from you.” She tenderly stroked her son’s cheek. “You just stay here, sweet one,” she said to him. “Mama will be back in just a few moments.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find her. And take back what she took from him.”
She got to her feet, rising with surprising ease for so large boned a woman, looking down at Jollo all the while. It was only with the greatest difficulty that she finally separated her gaze from him.
“I’m so sorry,” Candy said. “If I’d known what she was capable of doing—”
“Don’t,” Mrs. Munn said, waving Candy’s apology away. “We have more urgent business than talk. Will you please stay with him, maybe talk to him a little so his spirit stays near?”
“Of course.”
“She’s not a real Princess, you know,” Mrs. Munn said with an odd deliberation in her voice, like an amateur actor reciting lines. “She may have a crown and a title but they mean nothing. True royalty is a state of the soul. It belongs to those who have the gift of empathy, of compassion, of vision. That’s how people are led to do great things, even in cold, brutal times. But this . . . Boa . . .” Her lips curled when she spoke the two syllables: Bow-ah. “. . . attempted to first take your life, and then my Jollo’s, just to put some flesh on her spirit. That’s not the act of a Princess. To attack someone who had been her sanctuary? And then a child? Where is the nobility in that? I’ll tell you. There is none. Because your Princess Boa is a fake! She has no more royal blood in her than I do.”
There was a furious shriek from overhead—
“Liar! Liar!”
—and the branches shook so violently that a green rain of torn leaves fluttered down.
“There you are,” Candy heard Laguna Munn mutter under her breath. “I knew you were up there somewhere, you vicious little—”
A branch overhead creaked loudly, drawing Candy’s gaze up through the knotted branches to the place where Boa was squatting, her form delineated by narrow rays of violet light that passed up through her body from her soles to her scalp and from her head to her heels, throwing off a loop of incandescence when they crossed at her waist. She rocked back and forth on the branch, and then suddenly spat on Laguna Munn’s now upturned face.
“What are you staring at, you fat, old buzzard?” Boa said.
Mrs. Munn pulled a large handkerchief out of the sleeve of her dress. “Nothing of any worth,” she replied as she wiped her face. “Just you!”
And with that she sprang up from the ground into the canopy where Boa was squatting, leaving her handkerchief to drop to the ground.
“Take care of Jollo!” she yelled to Candy as she disappeared into the shadowed canopy. Then the nearby trees shook as Boa attempted her escape into it, and the chase overhead moved off up the slope, leaving Candy alone with the sick child.
Chapter 15 Face-to-Face (#ulink_a92f4561-8de2-5ffa-8866-724aa328e32d)
MAMA?” JOLLO SAID WHEN Candy sat down beside him. She didn’t need to correct his error. “Wait, you’re not Mama.”
“Your mom won’t be long,” Candy told him. “I’m just here to look after you until she comes back.”
“Candy.”
“Yes.”
“She came out of you, didn’t she? The girl who killed me.”
“You’re not dead, Jollo. And your mom’s not going to let you die.”
“There’s some things even Mama can’t control,” Jollo said. His voice was getting weaker, word by word.
“Listen to me,” Candy said. “I know what the Princess did to you was horrible. She tried to do the same thing to me. But hold on. Please.”
“What for?”
“What for?”
“Don’t worry. You don’t have to answer that.” He raised his head off the ground and squinted at Candy. “Tell me about the Constrictor.”
“The what?”
“Boa,” he said, his face suddenly becoming a playground of mischief. “Get it? Ha! I just made that up.”
At the moment death was forgotten, anything was possible. Candy grinned. There was such sweetness in him she saw, hidden behind his melancholy.
“She was there inside you all the time?”
“Yes, she was there.”
“But you didn’t know what a monster she was, did you?”
