The Cracks in the Kingdom Page 30

  I believe in you. You believe in me.

  You play with magnets there. I’ll play with magnets here.

  The misaligned centre of you. The misaligned centre of me.

  In a rush, she was standing, slipping on papers as if on autumn leaves, wide awake, breathing hard, looking for her jacket and shoes.

  8.

  11:55 P.M., Elliot arrived in the Bonfire High schoolyard.

  11:57 P.M., Madeleine turned onto a narrow Cambridge street.

  He approached the sculpture. She ran toward the parking meter. They both hesitated, then scribbled notes. Their notes crossed.

  I know you don’t want to try anymore, Madeleine, but it’s something to do with a mirror and candlelight.

  Hey, Elliot, it’s mirrors and lights.

  They saw each other’s notes and wrote again:

  Are you there NOW?

  Did you just say the same THING as me?

  Elliot started to write another note, then, “Ah, for crying out loud,” he said, and he dug through his backpack, sliding out the mirror he’d unhooked from the wall on his way out.

  It was heavy, the size of a painting. It occurred to him that there might have been a smaller, more efficient mirror somewhere in his house, but he shrugged and leaned this one against the base of the sculpture.

  Next he took out his flashlight.

  He’d also brought along a couple of candlesticks from the dining room dresser, but he figured he’d try the flashlight first. It might be just a question of light: He’d move on to candles if it had to be literal.

  Madeleine, in Cambridge, was scribbling fast. She’d covered a page, flipped it over, and was trying to draw little sketches of electrical and magnetic fields. The sketches looked wrong.

  She stopped. What was she doing? Why did Elliot need to know how electrical and magnetic fields worked? She wasn’t even sure she understood it herself, to be honest.

  She dropped the notepad to the path and took out the matches and teaspoon instead. The teaspoon still had a streak of cocoa on it.

  Should have brought a real mirror, she guessed, but she’d been in a rush.

  Who knew what to do?

  In Bonfire, Elliot shone the flashlight at the back of the TV. He hoisted up the mirror, awkwardly under the other arm, and tried to tilt it in the same direction.

  In Cambridge, Madeleine lit a match. She held it up carefully, sheltering it from the breeze. It flickered faintly. She kept one eye on the match, and in the other hand twisted the teaspoon, aiming it at the parking meter. She spun it around, and spun it back —

  The mirror crashed; the flashlight rolled. The match touched the footpath, flame vanishing; teaspoon clattered.

  There was shove and clutter, blaze of darkness, clatter of light. There was the deafening blast and bellow of wind, their bodies were yanked, stretched, tossed.

  They were folded into darkness. They were rolled into layers and layers of darkness. Their hands reached out and found each other’s hands.

  They gripped so hard that their nails cut flesh and the tension seized them right up to their shoulder blades.

  The roaring slowed. The blasting settled. There was the sense of a ferocious mood abruptly slipping — shrugging and moving on. Maybe throwing a warning shout behind its shoulder as it left.

  They were suspended, hands clutched, in perfect blackness.

  Their grip relaxed a little but not much. They could hear each other breathing, feel the breathing rise and fall in the shifts of the other’s hands.

  Elliot spoke.

  “Are you okay?” he said, and there, for the first time, was his voice.

  She’d never heard it before, its tone, the song and warmth of it, and he squeezed her hands a little as he spoke, as if to say he knew that she was not okay. Or maybe that her answer mattered.

  That voice in the stillness after all the noise and bluster. The gentle squeeze of his hands — Madeleine found herself shuddering into tears.

  “I’m so stupid,” she sobbed, “— what I said about your dad — and that you don’t know silence — of course, you do — your dad’s been missing all this — and you didn’t even know where — or why — or if he’d ever — I was just scared — and you called me a quitter — and I was scared of the dark — of getting lost — in the space in between — and scared that my mum will get sick again — and I don’t think my dad’s ever coming — and it’s like now I know he’s a loser — but I’m glad that your dad’s a hero — and I’m glad that your dad’s coming back — and I —”

  Elliot was pulling her closer as she cried, and now her face was against something soft — his cotton T-shirt — and hard, his chest behind the shirt, and there was the warmth and the bones of his arms tightening around her.

  She grew quiet as she realized this: his arms and his body. She felt his body close to hers, his face close to her hair, then he spoke.

  “One thing,” he said, speaking into her hair. “One thing you should know is that my dad — it’s not as simple as him being a hero. Nobody’s talking about the woman much — Mischka Tegan, the teacher who tricked him and my uncle. It could be he was in love with her — could be there was an affair. So yeah, he’s my dad and he’s a hero — but he’s also kinda flawed. And you don’t have to give up on your dad yet. He might be more a hero than you think.”

  Madeleine was silent.

  “You just said you’re scared of the dark?” Elliot said.

  “Yeah.”

  She felt him shift a little, turning his head this way and that, felt him trying to penetrate the darkness. “Perfect place for you, then,” he said, deadpan and bemused.

  “Where are we?” Madeleine said, and they broke their close hold a little, but kept their hands grasped.

  “Don’t let go,” Elliot said.

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  The darkness seemed complete, and then, in some remote distance, there was a faint drizzle of light.

  They both saw it and breathed in sharply, but then it was gone.

  “I guess we’re in the space between our worlds,” Elliot said. “I guess the mirrors and the lights got us here?”

  He told her what he’d found in the account, and she tried to explain about electromagnetism and light.

  “It sort of made sense to me for a moment,” she said, “while I was falling towards sleep. Something to do with how your world and our world are the same — like we’re reflections of each other — and if we shine a light on that reflection then we’re drawn together. So, before, when we focused on the links between us — our misaligned centers or whatever — when we focused on the ways that we reflected one another — that sort of worked too.”

  She was quiet, thinking.

  “Or maybe it’s not that our worlds are the same,” she said. “Maybe it’s more us. Like people are the same. Maybe the idea is that we’re drawn to each other, drawn to reflections of each other — the light of each other. I don’t know.”

  Elliot withdrew a hand briefly, to scratch his eyebrow, then found his way back to her hand.

  “Well,” he said, “my mother says we’re the same. I mean, she says people in Cello and the World are identical, except that we have a little sprinkle of color in our inner elbows that you guys don’t.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair. I wouldn’t mind a sprinkle of color in my inner elbow.”

  “You can only see it if you squeeze lemon juice on your skin.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I’m not serious about it, I’m fairly lighthearted. But I think it’s true.”

  They both turned as another streak of light flared in the distance.

  “This is making me crazy,” Elliot said. “I can’t see you. I keep feeling like my eyes just need to adjust, and your outline will appear — or I’ll start to catch the light in your eyes — but even when that distant lightning strikes, it’s still total blackness.”

  “Do you think that’s lightning?”


  “I haven’t got a clue.”

  They were quiet again, pressing each other’s hands.

  “What’s holding us up here?” Elliot said. “It’s like we’re suspended in nothing.”

  “And I get the feeling it’s not going to last much longer. I think we’ll fall back to our own worlds any moment. We should talk fast here.”

  “You already do talk fast. You talk like your notes. Like you’re rocket-propelled.”

  “Ah, cut it out, farm boy.”

  “It’s not a criticism. Your rocket-propelled, lightning-fast voice is beautiful. It’s just, I honestly don’t see how you could talk any faster than you already do.”

  “I don’t mean we should literally talk faster, I just meant we should get to the point. Like, figure out what all this means. The mirrors and light thing must have kind of worked, cause here we are — wherever we are — and for longer than we ever have been. But we’re not exactly walking around each other’s streets, so …”

  There was a sound somewhere, like chimes fading.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes.”

  They waited. But the silence returned, draping itself into the darkness.

  “Well,” Elliot said. “I’m thinking the problem all along has been that this crack is too small. It’s not meant for people. We’ll only ever get pieces of ourselves through, and this is as good as it gets. I think you were right when you said it’s dangerous to try.”

  “I don’t know if it’s really dangerous,” Madeleine admitted. “I was just scared of being trapped — in this space — with all the darkness. I never used to be scared of the dark — I used to like it even — it’s only since Mum …”

  Elliot was quiet. It was like she could feel him listening — his listening seemed as slow and thoughtful as his speech. She could feel his thoughts moving around in the subtle shifts in his hands.

  “Makes sense,” he said eventually, “for the dark to scare you now. It’s like, if there’s no light, there isn’t any hope.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not just about my mother getting sick, it’s also about my dad. Like I don’t want to give up on him. And maybe about me too — I don’t want to be this self-obsessed person, I want there to be light inside me too.”

  “There’s plenty of light in you,” Elliot said easily, and this time he spoke without pausing first. “And actually, me going on about your fear of dark representing your fears about your mother, that could be plain bollocks. As you would say. The fact is, it makes perfect sense to be afraid of this place. You’d be a damn fool if you weren’t afraid.” He stopped and they both felt it, the darkness and silence rolling and pressing around them. “If you weren’t here with me right now,” Elliot continued, “I might just lose my mind. But I think I’m more afraid of something else — it came to me in the night a couple weeks back. I woke up and I was running through ideas about how to get through the crack, and I was thinking back to the jackhammer idea — like tear up the sculpture and see if the crack opens underneath it. I was half asleep, I guess, and I was half serious, thinking I might get my buddy Shelby to come and blow the sculpture up, and I was sort of laughing to myself thinking how pissed Cody would be, cause it’s his artwork — and then halfway through the laugh I felt something streak right through me like ice. It hit me out of nowhere: If I blew up the sculpture, you might be gone forever. Your world might be gone.”

  He twisted around a little, brushed his thumb against her palm, readjusted his grip. There was a different sort of glimmer, a little closer, and something like a faint breeze brushed against them and was gone.

  Madeleine waited. Elliot spoke again.

  “What if our two worlds are hinged at this crack?” he said. “I mean, that’s what I thought in the night. I know you have time zones that change all over the World — but I also know that here, at this crack, our times match up. So what if this crack is not just a way through, but a connection — a link — and what if I killed it off somehow, by taking a wrong step? So you and your world just blew away. Gone forever. Utterly unreachable. It hit me like a boulder.”

  There was another crack of light, and they tightened their grip against Elliot’s words: the terrible possibility of a loss like that, the strangeness and density of the idea, bigger than death. It was like picking at the edges of the concept of despair.

  “I know,” said Madeleine. “I’ve only just caught you — I mean, I’ve only just started to understand that your Kingdom really exists. It’s like with all the science I’ve been reading — about what the universe is made of — I keep realizing it’s mostly just theories. Like ideas — metaphors even — to describe things. Ways of looking sideways to see what can’t be seen. And it’s like your royal family are escaping electrons, and it’s left you with a charge — with — I don’t know where I’m going with that — I’m just trying to say …”

  Madeleine paused and Elliot looked at her words, because that’s all he could see in the darkness. The notes in her voice, the strange corners it turned, the way she laughed unexpectedly in the middle of a phrase, then picked up the phrase and carried on, pieces of the laughter strewn behind her.

  “So, the scientists make up stories,” she said now, “to imagine how things work, then they do experiments — to see if the truth matches up with their imaginings — and I was reading about this cat. This imaginary cat in a box, and you don’t know, until you open the box, if the cat exists or not. And I just now read that light is both wave and particle, but so is everything. But it can’t be: They’re opposites. And you don’t know if something’s a wave or particle until you measure it — but measuring makes it one thing or the other — you measure it into existence — so I’m thinking, did I just measure you and Cello into existence? Imagine you into existence, I mean? If I open up the parking meter, will Cello be there? Is Cello a cat? And is there any point, if the box can’t be opened? I mean, there’s a cat or there isn’t, but what’s the point if the box stays closed? And if I stop imagining, if the box stays closed, if I get on with my life and leave you here — it’s like, you’re an effort of imagination, and so —”

  Elliot wove his fingers through hers.

  “Okay,” he said, “you’re doing the egocentric thing again. These particles or whatever — if the scientists stop thinking about them, they’re still there, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Cello too. Me too. I’m not blowing away. I’m not a cat or a wave, I’m me.”

  They were both quiet, holding hands, and his words seemed to blow away in the darkness. Elliot could be here or he could not. They could be holding hands, right now, or empty-handed.

  “My father’s afraid of the dark,” Elliot remembered suddenly. He chuckled to himself, and it was an unexpectedly deep, wicked chuckle. It made his hands tremble in Madeleine’s hands, and she felt something swift inside her chest.

  “There was this day we went to the Sugarloaf Fair,” Elliot said. “I was ten years old, and — well, my parents are both tall people — I mean, literally, and also in themselves. The sort of people with big strides and long reaches. They look people in the eye and get things done. If you see what I mean. But this day at the Sugarloaf Fair, I saw the cracks in both of them.” He stopped and lifted one of her hands along with his, so he could brush something away, some itch from his arm, then their hands fell down between them again, still intertwined.

  “Both in one day,” he reflected. “How about that. Anyhow, the first thing that happened was we all went up in the Big Wheel. As soon as it got to its halfway point, my mother was down on the floor. Right on the floor of the carriage. By my feet.” He pushed their hands down a little, pointing into the darkness below. “She’s crouching down there like she’s examining the floor, and I was going, ‘What are you LOOKING at?’ ” Elliot laughed aloud now. “And she’s going, ‘Just checking how they’ve nailed this thing together here, it’s real interesting, see’ — and I look across at Dad, and he’s laughing in his
silent way, rocking back and forth, his eyes kind of squinting with his laughter, at the same time as he’s reaching out and stroking her back, like he loved her even more than usual. He looked over at me and said, ‘Your mother’s afraid of heights — didn’t you know?’ and I grinned back at him, and laughed too, but I remember it was a sort of jolt. I’d never known my mother to be afraid of anything. She’s still down there on the floor going, ‘No, no, just checking how they put this thing together’ — and my dad’s shaking his head at me, still laughing.

  “Anyhow, same day, my dad and I went in the ghost ride they had. That’s when I knew he was afraid of the dark. He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t do a thing. It was just, the train turned a corner into blackness — and I suddenly knew. There was a moment and I felt him change. He felt different beside me. A year or so later he actually told me he was scared of the dark. He didn’t say it like he was ashamed, more like it was a really dumb fact about himself, but just a fact. But I knew it already — I’d known it from that day, and I felt the same jolt about my dad, only this time it was a quieter jolt, cause the thing with my mother meant I was sort of prepared.

  “I remember the three of us taking the train home from Sugarloaf, and eating our sugar candy and pecan pies with all our showbags and prizes piled on the seat, and I remember feeling kind of sad, but also kind of proud. Like I was tall myself now. Like I had a sense that now I had a job — that it was my job, if my mother was ever stuck on the edge of a cliff, say — or my dad was somewhere in the dark — well, that’s when my job would come into play, and it’d be my job to bring them both —”

  Out of nowhere his voice, which had been perfectly ordinary, cracked.

  It broke into pieces, and then there were the strange sounds of Elliot trying not to cry, grabbing on to his sobs, and then the sound of the sobs getting the better of him.

  Madeleine could feel that his shoulders were heaving, and she could hear the strange, dry rasping, and she slid her hands along his arms so she could reach around his back and hold him close.

  Eventually, some broken phrases scratched their way between his sobs: “And I’m not doing my job — he was afraid of the dark — and he was taken in the dark — so the things that you’re afraid of do come true — and what if it goes wrong? — he’s coming back tomorrow, but what if it goes wrong? — he could come back — or he might not come back — it could go wrong — it could go wrong, it could go —”