The Light of the World, page 24
“The seal?”
“Don’t ask me to explain that, Eva, please.”
Biting her lip, Eva fell silent. She wanted to know more, and the urge to needle Liv until she received a satisfactory answer was strong. She knew better than to ask. Liv had never been so open, and it would be foolish to exploit this openness by asking questions now that Eva was sure Liv would answer in time.
“Theo can never find out about what that room hides. With the knowledge he has now, if he ever were to find his way back down there again… I don’t know what would happen to him.”
Eva hummed her agreement. “You don’t think that he’d try something, like… to get the diaries or something?”
“Honestly, it remains to be seen what he will do,” Liv replied.
Eva closed her eyes. The sun was rising now, and the kitchen was bathed in the same warm light that the necklace had pulled from darkness. Theo wouldn’t hurt anyone; he wasn’t that sort of person. The morning was gray above the little patch of sunlight that hit the window perfectly. Soon, it too, was gone. The day looked cold and rainy, bleak. The sort of weather one expects in autumn.
“Where did you go last night?” Eva asked. “You look like you got caught in the rain.”
“I did.” Liv sighed. “I was about. I had to think, rustle up a game plan.”
Eva wondered where “about” was. She wondered where Liv had been when she’d realized that Theo was going to discover the truth about the light of the world no matter what she did to stop it. Had she gone back down to the room under the city? Was it a sanctuary for her, too?
Eva reasoned that it wasn’t particularly prudent to ask. Liv had shared a great deal about what it was that she did. These were secrets that Eva should not know. Secrets that her grandmother had never told anyone. She’d taken them to her grave.
Theo was stumbling closer to the secrets. The diaries held clues that were carefully coded into the tragic love story of Mary and Wren. Tragedy awaited them, and Eva longed to change the outcome of the story.
“Should I hide them?” Eva gestured toward the living room. The diaries were still nestled in their box on the coffee table, with the July volume resting on top of the box.
Liv shook her head. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Liv stood and took her coffee cup to the sink, then picked up the milk bottle and put it back in the refrigerator. She seemed to struggle to say something, her mouth opening several times with no sound coming out. Instead, she stood with her hand on the refrigerator handle.
“What should I do with this?” Eva gestured to the space between them. Her cheeks were burning. There was still that other matter, the gentle kiss pressed to her lips and Liv’s sad smile. She wasn’t touching that one, but with the knowledge of who Liv was, the final pieces to the puzzle of Catherine Monroe fell into place.
They knew what had happened to Catherine Monroe, and Liv had said all that she was willing to say on the matter.
Liv’s shoulders slumped. “I think you should do whatever you want with it,” she answered. “You’ve found out who your grandmother’s mysterious Wren was and you’ve found out why she vanished from your grandmother’s life. I don’t know what else you can do. There’s no family. None of us have family. We’re supposed to cut all ties, let go of all worldly attachments. Wren didn’t do that with her family.”
Eva sighed. “What about the attachment Wren had to my grandmother?” What about the attachment you have to me?
Liv was silent. Her expression was clouded and unreadable. The question was on Eva’s lips, threatening to bubble over.
You kissed me. Not the other way around. It can’t just be me feeling this.
The question would not come freely. Eva swallowed it down and changed the subject. She’d promised she wouldn’t ask any more questions, but it was better than the alternative. She was so unsure of herself when it came to Liv that even discussing the fantastic and impossible seemed easier. “What is the light of the world, really? It’s a necklace, but what does it do?”
“Do you know the story of the light?” Liv asked. She shrugged off her jacket.
Eva inclined her head to one side. “There are thousands of them…” she started, before looking sharply at the greenish-black slime that was tracing a strange veiny pattern down Liv’s neck. “Hey, this can wait. Do you want to shower?”
Liv seemed to practically melt with relief, her shoulders drooping and her jacket dangling dangerously from one hand. “That would be amazing,” she practically groaned. “Don’t think I won’t tell you, Eva. But god, being clean after the night I’ve had.” She leaned forward and pressed her lips to Eva’s cheek. “Thank you.”
Her cheek felt like it was on fire, a flush she could not quell. Eva smiled. This wasn’t a one-sided thing. Liv was blushing right back at her.
Standing up, she put her empty cup into the sink beside Liv’s and opened the cabinet underneath the sink. After a moment of rummaging, she found one of Mr. Bertelli’s store’s canvas grocery bags. “Put your dirty clothes in there,” she said. “I’ll loan you some clean ones.”
The words came more easily after Liv’s shower. She sat on the corner of Eva’s bed and told the story in bits and pieces, leaving out details where necessary, but not shrinking away from the general gist of it. Her idle fingers tugged at fraying corners of the quilt’s stitching and she looked lost in one of Eva’s dad’s shirts slung over her shoulders. Baggy sweatpants that had once belonged to a high school boyfriend of Eva’s practically fell off her hips.
“These aren’t yours.” Liv joked.
“Ex-boyfriend’s,” Eva explained.
“Wait. I thought you were…” Liv tilted her head to one side.
I thought you were gay. The word did not need to be spoken in order for Eva to know what was on Liv’s mind.
Eva laughed. “Nah, I don’t care one way or the other. Bi and all that.”
“They’re still huge. How big was the guy?”
“Big enough to be a colossal jerk when I got diagnosed.” Eva shook her head. “But it doesn’t matter.” She curled up at the head of the bed, a pillow in her arms. “Tell your story.”
“Oh, okay. Fine.” Liv rolled her eyes. “Before there was light there was darkness.” She looked uncomfortable, being cast as the storyteller, but she was trying, which Eva appreciated. She was quite sure that no one had ever asked Liv to tell this story before. She snuggled down under the covers, her cardigan bunching up around her ears as she leaned back and tried to soak in as much of this moment as possible. She imagined that her grandmother and Wren had a moment similar to this, and she wondered if she was somehow repeating the pattern.
“And into the darkness there came a light, you know, like in the Bible. Only no one knows where the light came from. Some people say that it’s a fallen star, other say it is the tear of God himself, weeping at the darkness he created. Either way, it’s something that’s been around since the dawn of time in one way or another. I’ve always been more inclined to believe the fallen star mythos myself, because it almost seems plausible.”
“Yeah,” Eva agreed. “The overtly Judeo-Christian overtones get to be a little much otherwise. Plus, the light of the world could be Jesus.”
“Only it really isn’t. Perhaps once it was where those stories drew their origin from, but the light has always been just that, a light.” Liv inclined her head and cracked a smile. “The light was a shining beacon that drove away all that was evil in the world. It was an act of mercy that the shadows were allowed to survive. Over time the shadows began to grow resentful of the darkness that they were cast into, and grew to hate the light and all that it stood for. The light of the world can chase the darkness from people’s hearts and lock it away in a place like the vault where all other shadows were kept.” Liv leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. “The problem is that the vault grew weak over time, and soon shadows began escaping the void.”
Eva blinked. “So they were trapped there but the, um…the seal grew weak? The seal that ate Wren?”
“I wouldn’t say it ate her. That’s not how it works. But yeah, something along those lines. Once there was a whole order of people who worshiped the light and dedicated their entire lives to its preservation and the containment of the shadows. As the shadows started to rebel, they built a stronger seal to place over the void, using the power of the light of the world to trap the shadows and lock them away from humanity forever.”
“Why would they want to lock away the shadows? Like, did they do something bad?”
Liv thought for a moment before responding. Eva watched the expression on her face shift from contemplative to amused, in seconds. “Well,” she began, almost giggling. Her smile was dimpled and Eva could not look away. “They were all the darkness in the world. The initial breaking of the seal on the place where they were held was a story borrowed by the Greeks and then the Romans.”
“Pandora’s box?” Eva’s eyes were wide at the revelation, but it made sense. Theo had said that the light had flirted with the edges of religious narrative since the stories had started being recorded.
“And the hope that remained was the light and its guardians.” Liv looked down at her crossed legs, fingers splayed out across the warm colors of the quilt. “Over time the guardians have dwindled down to just one. That one’s duty is to watch the vault and make sure that nothing ever threatens the seal that’s been placed upon it.”
“What would you do, should it be threatened?” Eva asked.
Liv pulled the necklace out from under her shirt and stared at it with a contemplative air. Eva couldn’t help but feel very aware of the circumstances they found themselves in now, two people sitting on a bed with very little space between them. This wasn’t the sort of thing that she could simply pass off as a quiet moment of revelation between two friends. This felt like so much more than that.
“Probably the same thing that Catherine Monroe did,” Liv replied.
“Catherine Monroe’s leaving absolutely devastated my grandmother.” There was something that Liv hadn’t read yet in the diaries that Eva had kept away from Theo and the others. She hadn’t wanted to share the devastation and the anguish of the loss with them. She pushed herself out of the bed. “Hang on; I have to show you this.”
She ducked out of the bedroom and hurried down the hall.
Eva reached under the September and October diaries for the volume that documented November. This one was far more worn than the others, and the edges were frayed as though it had been read and re-read many times over. Eva could picture her grandmother staring at the pages and wondering what went wrong.
This one diary was probably the reason her grandmother had kept all the rest. There were blotchy smears in the ink here and there, in the documents and small scraps of paper. Everything her grandmother remembered about Wren. Some of the information had been added later, and at the very end were updates from every November 20 for the nine years that Wren was missing before she was officially declared dead and a headstone was erected in the cemetery where Eva’s grandmother would be buried eighty years later.
Liv was sitting on the edge of the bed with one of Eva’s pillows in her lap. She leaned forward, her arms wrapped around it. Eva sat down next to her, their shoulders brushing, and handed her the diary. “This is when it stops. The December journal is about her search too, but she documented most of it in here. I think that this is the only reason that the police even investigated Wren’s disappearance.”
Taking the diary in both hands, Liv read the words that Eva had read the night before, probably committing them to memory in much the same way that Eva had found herself doing.
November 20, 1925
She is gone.
She vanished into the nothingness that is this city. There is no light now, only the darkness that she swore to always protect me against. It closes around me, pressing in at the edges of my vision like an electric light snuffed out. There is nothing here anymore. She has gone and has taken my heart with her.
I have spoken to everyone I believe her to have known, everyone who might have known her. No one seems to know anything about where she might have gone. The police are living up to their name, bull and terrible. They laughed at me when I told them that there was a girl missing, and said to check the whorehouses before coming back to see them. Wren is not like that at all. She had a job, she had friends, she had a family.
She had me.
I was not good enough, it seems. I was not enough.
She is gone and I do not know how I will ever feel right again.
Liv stared down at the open book before her, her eyes half closed and her body seeming to collapse as she rested the diary carefully on Eva’s spare pillow. She looked as though she had come face to face with being cast into the same role as Catherine Monroe.
“She said in her unsent letter that the seekers were after her,” Eva said after the silence had grown almost uncomfortable. Liv was still sitting, immobile, next to her.
Eva placed a hand tentatively on Liv’s shoulder and was shocked when Liv flinched at her touch.
“The guardian can tell only one person of the light, before they lose all ability to speak of it,” Liv said quietly. Her voice sounded hoarse, as though she were struggling not to cry. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but this… Eva, she hurt your grandmother to keep her safe, to keep her away from the light of the world. She would have sent that letter, if she had been able to. The seekers made that impossible, Eva. The seekers took away her ability to speak the truth to anyone.”
“Why would anyone willingly do that to someone they loved?” Eva felt like crying.
“I don’t know,” Liv replied. “I suppose it was the only way to keep Mary safe.”
Throwing caution into the wind, Eva reached forward, twining her fingers around Liv’s and letting their joined hands rest on Mary Oglesby’s journal, on the tear-stained pages that told how love had gone from her life. Eva didn’t know what she was offering. Maybe it was a promise, or maybe it was recognition of what Liv had just said. If the guardian could only tell one person, it meant that Eva was that person Liv deemed important enough to share her story with.
Somehow, staring at their two hands so tightly clasped on Mary’s journal, Eva believed everything might be all right.
Part Three
The Light of the World
Chapter 22
A Lie of Omission
Eva didn’t go to the bookstore for nearly a week. She begged off requests from Theo to come down, saying that she was buried in work on the apartment in the evenings. It was a lie, but it was one that Eva told easily. She couldn’t stomach the idea of looking at Theo. The worry that he might see that she knew more than she was supposed to almost paralyzed her. It was better to stay away. She didn’t know if she could lie to his face.
Al came by the apartment on Tuesday night and tried to apologize for what his father had said. The hollow feeling of knowing beyond all doubt that Theo did not care about her grandmother, and saw her as only a means to the ends of his own agenda, was enough to make Eva feel sick with unease.
There were no words for what he had done. She thought he should have come himself and not made a martyr out of his son. Al’s apologies fell onto Eva’s deaf ears. She had no interest in his apologies when he was just the messenger. Besides, Theo was trying to rationalize why he had decided to focus more on the light of the world now that they knew who Wren was.
All Eva wanted was help. She wanted closure for her grandmother and to understand what had happened to her when she was younger. She didn’t want to get dragged into an increasingly supernatural mystery and a struggle between of good and evil.
Liv made it very clear that this was about good and evil. Catherine Monroe was the sole line of defense of the great seal that the mural in the cavern underneath Penn Station covered. She had been killed by that seal, sucked into the darkness where no human could survive, and another guardian had taken her place. That guardian, a boy named Lewis Marconi, also was killed by the seal. And then another, Ja’nae Christian. Now it was Liv who carried their burden, the same burden that guardians of the light had carried since time began.
Theo’s ambition and what might happen to him should he get too close to this made her uneasy. Liv was very clear that those who seek the light of the world are enemies. They want to use its power for themselves, to let loose the shadows upon the world, and they are not to be trusted.
The truth bit at her, fearful and unpleasant. It gnawed at her stomach and made her turn Al away. “I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Don’t be,” he replied. He was already halfway down the first flight of stairs, looking up at her. “I don’t blame you for being upset.”
“It isn’t you,” Eva explained.
“I know. This isn’t the first time the light of the world has gotten in the way of things for me, Eva. I’m used to it.”
Eva watched him go. It was cold outside the apartment, and a chill settled against her spine that she could not shake off. When the door on the ground floor closed behind Al with a sharp bang, Eva slipped back inside. She went to the box on the coffee table and counted out the twelve diaries. She trusted Al, but she could not get rid of the worry.
Her fingers caressed the smooth bindings of the journals. She was starting to doubt things that she knew to be real. The truth was so strange.
When Eva was younger, she used to imagine a world where magic and the supernatural fused together into a perception of reality that was very different from the world where she lived. She would get caught up on those fantasies, and the ease with which she slipped in and out of them was a comfort as she sank into funks. Magic wasn’t real, though. She grew up to become a romantic, yes, but she knew how to keep herself grounded in reality.
