“Well . . . Charles was upset because someone teased him about Manolo. Someone teased him and asked, joking, I thought, if Charles was gay. That set Charles off but not to the point of being really angry. I mean, yeah, angry, but not crazy angry like he got later.”
“And why did he become crazy angry, as you put it?”
I shrugged, frowned, scrolled back in my mind through what I had witnessed in the last hours of observing Charles’s life. “Derek,” I said. “He kind of . . . pushed it. At first he was teasing, joking, but he wouldn’t drop it. Actually, he was the one who said they should teach Manolo a lesson.”
Messenger nodded. He stopped walking. The sun was going down fast. Floodlights snapped on, illuminating the walls, the towers, turning the crenellations dark by contrast. We had come to a mounting tangle of towers and a square building, a sort of castle that grew out of the walls and lorded its grandeur over the walled village below as well as the town beyond the river.
“Derek egged him on. Pushed him,” I said.
“Why?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Messenger turned finally to face me. The low, slanting rays of a setting sun put sharp edges on his features, concealing his eyes but lighting his cheekbones, the side of his nose, his lips.
He was good-looking, bordering on beautiful. And this particular light, picking out some features while obscuring others, did nothing to make him less attractive. He would certainly have stopped conversation in any schoolroom he ever walked into. If he had ever walked into a schoolroom.
Had he? Had this . . . boy, though that word didn’t seem anything like correct . . . had this boy once attended school? Had a home? A mother and a father? A room with favorite objects on a desk, and items of clothing tossed about so that his mother had to chide him and demand that he clean up the mess?
Had he taken out the trash? Pulled all-nighters to finish the homework he had procrastinated on? Had he gone to movies with friends? Played around on the internet? Gotten his learner’s permit?
Was he even from the same era as me? Did he live in my time, or was he from some very different time and some place unimaginable to me?
All that I knew of him was that he was different from any person I had ever met or imagined meeting. But was that because of who he was, or because of what he was? Was it possible to be the Messenger of Fear and remain somehow normal? It was no idle question if I was somehow destined (or was it doomed?) to become the Messenger myself.
Was I odd enough to become him? Or someone like him? Would I inevitably become solemn and taciturn? Would my habitual flood of words slow to a trickle as this life, this experience, this power, took their toll on me?
“There is evil in the world,” Messenger said. “It comes from within us, but there are times as well when it is . . . suggested to us.”
“Like Derek did with Charles?”
“And in another way as Derek and Charles did to Manolo. That is the evil that calls for justice.” He cast another longing look down at the darkening streets and said, “I can’t spend any more time here. We have our duties.”
“Who is Ariadne? Why would she be here?” I asked. But I didn’t really expect an answer, and got none.
With no sensation of movement we were thousands of miles away, standing in a noisy, bright-lit gymnasium. The bleachers were half-filled, but the kids and parents there were enthusiastic, shouting encouragement and occasionally cheering in a disorganized but sincere way.
Out on the polished wood floor two boys in spandex uniforms, heads encased in the insectile helmets used by high school wrestlers, circled each other, crouched, cautious. One was Derek.
Derek lunged, caught the other boy’s leg, pulled, and then fell atop the boy as he squirmed out of the hold, reversed with a smooth twist, and locked his arms around Derek’s shoulders.
The cheering fell silent. The referee’s whistle was stilled. The boy on top went limp and Derek, imagining he had just gained advantage, swarmed out of his grip, threw his opponent down onto the mat, and only after nearly a minute realized that no one but him was moving.
Bewildered, he looked up. He fixed his eyes on me first, then, nervous, shifted to Messenger.
“Derek Grady,” Messenger said. “You are called to account for your actions.”
Derek looked left, right. It would almost have been comical, had I not known some of what awaited him.
“What’s going on?” Derek asked. He disentangled himself from his limp, blank-faced opponent, and stood up. He looked all around and yelled, “Hey! Hey, people! Hey! What the . . .”
His words trailed away as he saw a yellow mist begin to seep between the bleachers, through the frozen crowd, along the raftered ceiling, across the polished wood floor.
“What is this?” he demanded of me, choosing me, I supposed, as the one more likely to be intimidated by his belligerence.
I did not answer. Neither did Messenger. I had already begun to adopt Messenger’s solemnity, though it had not been a conscious decision on my part.
“Derek Grady, I offer you a game,” Messenger said.
“Who the . . . What . . . Go away. Get lost. Creeps.”
“If you accept the invitation to the game and lose, you will suffer a punishment,” Messenger said. “If you refuse the game, you will suffer punishment. If you accept the game and win, you will be allowed to go on without any further interference.”
“Are you threatening me?” Derek demanded.
“I am offering you a choice,” Messenger said.