The Fortress of Clouds Page 4

  Maybe a year or so ago, in the middle of a red-faced yelling match with Thomas over who was entitled to a certain, delicious cookie (as per the laws of cookies, the last cookie is always the tastiest), Hannah had bragged that she was smarter than him because she could hear things he couldn’t. She said that things, all things, made sounds that he was too dumb to hear. She could also see and smell voices. Thomas had snorted and rolled his eyes, but Ben and Alison had naturally become concerned. Later, once tempers had subsided and cookies had been split, they asked her to explain. “Oh, that,” she said with a dramatic wave of her arm. “I was just being stupid, silly.” She never referred to it again.

  Ben heard Thomas’s book snap shut and Hannah’s birdsong gradually fade into the exhales of sleep. A soft glow of the city’s lights brushed the ceiling.

  Ben couldn’t sleep. He tried lying on one side, and then the other. He was too hot, or too cold. He kept thinking about running away. Should he wait until morning, or just go now? He picked at a chip of paint on the wall and thought about what their mother had said, what the tears in her eyes had said. Who was their terrible father?

  Ben’s mind wandered in and out of sleep.

  Their father was a Himalayan mountaineer who would one day return home after finally conquering the hardest climbing route ever accomplished. He had lost several toes and two teammates in the ordeal, and instead of coming straight home, he had stayed in Nepal for a while to help build schools and hospitals. His letters to Ben were intercepted by an evil army general.

  Their father was an undercover international spy who could never contact them because his phone calls would be traced, but one day he would send word of his impending arrival through some sort of elaborate code. He drove a car with smoke screens and underwater weapons capability, but like many things about him, you couldn’t tell from the outside.

  Their father was a crocodile expert working in the Australian outback. He had somehow lost track of the years and when he next encountered another person who told him what the date was, he would run for the nearest plane to be with his family and any day now would arrive breathless and sweaty with the swamp slime still hanging from his hat.

  Their father was working on a cure for some mysterious disease and could not bring himself to miss one precious hour of research in case he was on the very cusp of saving all of mankind. His lab was in the depths of a massive building in the middle of a huge university campus. He usually slept at his desk and despite the urgings of his colleagues to go home and get some rest, he hadn’t gone outside in months. He was so close to the cure that it felt as easy as trying to fall off a cliff. But there were invisible things holding him back. It was so close he could see it, could feel it almost within him.

  But as Ben felt his brain get heavy and his eyes droop, he knew that none of this was true. Their father was somehow very bad, or had done something cruel enough to make their mother, who was usually so invincible, cry. There was no other possibility.

  And then another, far more troubling thought arrived, unwanted and bitter. Did all four of them actually have the same father? What if their mother was some sort of . . . No, that was impossible, Ben told himself. She wasn’t like that. Why would she appear to care so much for them, to give them chores and homework, to read to them, to guard them from the outside world, to tell them to take their vitamins, if she was like Mrs. Brodsky said?

  Ben had never seen their mother cry before.

  It was five, maybe six years back. They were living in a different apartment, one that faced north and into the mountains, which was nice since it was a bit cooler. But until the day she took them to the beach, Ben didn’t know that there had always been an ocean lumbering and lurking behind them. Stepping off the bus, with the bodies glistening about and the squiggly lines of heat waving through the air, it was as if they had always had their backs turned to half of the world. The half that never stopped moving, and was always showing itself off. A golden highway of sand stretched away as far as he could see.

  If they weren’t allowed to watch the “sadistic and sad television,” or have access to the “virulent and vapid internet,” then why on earth would their mother want them to see the flesh zoo at the beach? Strings and threads struggled to contain body parts. It was a meat market of plastic and sun tan smells. They managed to arrange a small blanket on what might have been the only part of the beach not covered by dripping flesh.

  It was almost peaceful for a while. Thomas had convinced Hannah to let him bury her in a cool, dark pit of sand, and Alison had been looking for sea shells, the languid waves rolling over her ankles. Ben had been trying to avoid staring at the way a neighboring woman’s red thong bikini disappeared into her posterior. And then, all of a sudden, their mother told them to pack up everything. The book she was reading was thrown to the sand. They had to go. Immediately. A frenzied dash through Frisbee games and barking dogs, under spitting showers and through clouds of hot dog smoke, across hard yellow grass, and into the streets where they jumped onto a moving bus.

  Throughout the sprint, Ben tried to crane his neck to see who it was they were running from. Was it the fat, sweating man puffing on a cigar? The bronzed bodybuilder sauntering proudly down the pavement? Or the man in the silver suit, obscured by the gyrating couple sucking each other’s faces off?

  Nothing was ever explained. After a few stops on the cramped, hot, garbage-smelling bus, their mother turned to them and asked in a cheery voice, “So, what would everyone like for dinner? Tacos okay?”

  A few days later she lost her job and they had to move. The four children never talked about that afternoon. Over time they had managed to shrug it off as some weird, unexplainable, adult, mom thing.

  Ben was awakened by a rustling in their mother’s room. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep. It was long enough that he struggled to understand what he was hearing. The moon was coming in through the window in a dusty glow. The distinct sleep wheezings of all three of his siblings were rising and falling like a three-wave ocean. Ben sat still for a minute or two with the moon in his face and the soft noises all around him. And then he heard it again. Someone was in the apartment. Someone else.

  The shadows of footsteps interrupted the slice of light under the door. Ben inched out of the creaky bunk bed, but a flash in his peripheral vision told him there was something outside. Maybe it was because he’d passed the window so many times that his eye knew exactly what was out there.

  Far below, down on the street, a sleek silver car stood idling. It was a car that didn’t belong in their neighborhood. All muscle and sinew, it looked like a taut animal on its haunches, a lion waiting to pounce on some innocent gazelle. Waiting on one side of the car was a man in a silver suit. He stared straight ahead and didn’t move.

  And then the noise in the next room started again.

  Their mother was clawing through her drawers. She didn’t look up, but seemed to sense that Ben was in the doorway rubbing his eyes, relieved that what he had thought was a burglar in their apartment was really just his mother looking for an earring. But there was a panic on her face. And more tears.

  “Ben, I’d always hoped I’d never have to tell you this, and then I came to realize that I would need to at some point. I tried not to think of the future, or how long we could go on like this . . . moving around and pretending there was nothing wrong.” She reached up, behind the back of the drawer. “I put this off for a long time until you were ready to know, waiting for some sign that it was time . . . but the time never came. And now it’s too late.”

  “What? What’s going on, Mom?”

  “Well, I knew they were closing in and I--”

  “Who . . . who is they?”

  “Some people I used to worked for. I’ve got something they want. I guess I just pretended this day would never come. I’ve tried to hide, as best I could, but I knew it could only go on for so long. Actually, I guess I’m surprised that we--I mean I--evaded them this long.” She smiled at
Ben and wiped her eyes with the sides of her hands.

  “I . . . I don’t understand . . . what’s happening, Mom?”

  “When you asked last night about your father and why you aren’t allowed to leave the building, I was about to tell you, but I didn’t know if you were ready for it.”

  Ben wanted to do something--anything--to prove to her that he was ready, that he was mature enough to know the truth. Yesterday had been a bad example. Thomas had run off and Ben had just plain forgot to do his chores and homework. Ben was about to say this when a shadow fell over him.

  The man wore a smooth silver suit that was like some sort of army uniform. He sized Ben up from behind curved silver sunglasses. “Ms. Graham, we must go now. You’ve had long enough.” He was identical to the man down on the street.

  “Goddamn it, leave me alone!” their mother shrieked. “I’m talking to my son! Give me two minutes.” Without changing his expression, the man retreated to the front door and stood guard. He wiggled his finger in his ear as if trying to unplug it.

  “Ben, I need you to listen carefully.” She crouched down close to him.

  “Okay, fine. Just tell me.”

  “Right. Well, all is not lost.” Before continuing, she looked up to see if the silver man was paying attention. He was staring at the ground and seemed preoccupied with whatever it was he was listening to in his ear. There was an urgency in his mother’s voice that Ben had never heard before. “First thing tomorrow morning, I want you to take Alison, Thomas, and Hannah and leave. Now, I’ve told you that the world outside the apartment is very dangerous, and I want you to remember that. You won’t know what to expect and you need to be extremely careful. Take enough food for two days. Remember to take your vitamins, all of you--that’s very important. Find a park to sleep in, under some trees or something. Don’t talk to anyone. Always stay among the crowds. If everything works out, I’ll meet you at the airport in two days--the spire we can see from here, in two days. We’ll take a plane somewhere else.” She stared at him, expecting him to say something. Her cheeks were streaked with tears and her glasses were smudged. “Promise me you’ll do this, Ben. I’m counting on you.”

  “Okay, Mom. I . . . I understand.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I think . . . I mean, yeah, of course. I can do this.”

  She stood up and was about to go, but hesitated. She bent back down, reached underneath one of the drawers, and pulled something out. Ben couldn’t see what it was, but she looked at it for a brief second while casting an eye over her shoulder at the waiting man. Her hair hung over her face in a circular black fringe, hiding her expression. She twisted the object in her hand.

  “If for some reason I can’t meet you at the spire, Ben, I want you to have this.” She put it in his hand, but immediately closed his fingers around it so that he couldn’t see what it was. It was sharp and prickly. She looked at Ben. Her face was a mess of tears. “Keep this very hidden and don’t show it to anyone. Don’t ever lose it. It’s nothing, but it might--”

  The man reappeared above them. “Time’s up.”

  He grabbed her by the arm. In the instant before she disappeared, his mother managed a grim, painful smile to Ben back over her shoulder. And then she was gone.

  Chapter Five: The Blinking Spire

  Ben didn’t know how much time passed between the moment he would remember for the rest of his life and when he heard his brother and sisters wake up as if it were any other day. It felt like only minutes, but the pounding in his head told him he had been awake the entire night.

  He remembered staring out the bedroom window for the longest time, watching his mother get pushed into the silver car and it slowly glide away. He remembered gazing at the spire off by the airport, where they were supposed to meet her in two days, absorbing the mass of the city that separated it from their apartment. At night, the spire was a spiky void capped by red and blue lights blinking dumbly every few seconds. Around it, the city glowed ominous and orangeblack, a sort of Hallowe’eny light bleeding into the fog and pollution.

  At about six o’clock, the sun began to throb over the mountains off in the distance. Ben went back to bed and tossed around, trying to think of some way he wouldn’t have to tell the others what had happened, trying to come up with some other story that made more sense.

  The clock in the bedroom read 7:11 when he heard Thomas digging through boxes and bins out in the hallway. On the other side of the room Hannah stirred and began telling Alison how she dreamed about these talking birds, how the dream had lasted “at least the entire night.” Ben hid under the covers. The girls went out to begin breakfast, Hannah yammering away and Alison trying to coax her into helping while still making it sound as if she was listening to her breathless story.

  “And there was this one bird that could sing across the entire country and talk to other birds on the other side of the ocean. And then--hey, you’re not listening, Alison!”

  “Oh, I am, Hannah. Here, cut these apples. Keep going, I’m listening.”

  “Okay, so there are these bigger birds that came along and they all flapped their wings to make this huge storm so that the other birds couldn’t sing, and the mean birds took over the bird kingdom since the good birds couldn’t call for help.”

  “I see,” Ben heard Alison say. “Here, put the apples on this plate, Hannah. Keep going.”

  “But then the good birds learned to talk to insects, which when you think about it are like birds in a lot of ways, and then they all ganged up on the bad birds and won in the end.”

  “Wow, that’s a crazy dream, Han. Can you get four bowls out of the cupboard?”

  Ben’s hand had remained closed around the spiky thing ever since his mother had put it there. Now he forced himself to look at it. His fingers uncurled. It was white and it glowed softly, pulsing pink in a heartbeat-like rhythm. About four inches long. Kind of like a tiny tree branch. There was faint writing all over it, geometric shapes intermixed with tiny pictures of strange animals.

  Thomas came bursting into the room trailing clouds of junk. “Okay, Ben, I’ve got some old flashlights here, but we’ll have to get some new batteries, and we need to find our boots ‘cause I bet it’ll be pretty wet down in those pipes but the last time we tried them most of them didn’t fit.” He didn’t even look up at Ben, but somehow noticed the twig-thing Ben was holding. “Hey, whatcha got there, it looks really interesting, like some sort of artifact or something.”

  “I, uh, found it,” said Ben.

  “Where? I know everything in this apartment and I’ve never seen that before. It doesn’t even look like a real thing. It’s more like a . . . madeupthing.”

  “Never mind, Thomas. It’s not important.” Ben didn’t know how he was going to explain the situation to his siblings, but it sure wasn’t going to start with Thomas trying to figure out what the twig was. Luckily, before he had to tell Thomas anything, Alison called from the kitchen, from where (in addition to Hannah’s crazed whistling) there was now a plume of smoke emerging. Ben got out of bed and left Thomas as quickly as he could.

  “Mom didn’t leave us any instructions or lists today,” said Alison from somewhere in the smoke. “So I guess we’ll carry on with all the things we were supposed to do yesterday. Right, Ben?” As if yesterday had been all Ben’s fault. Alison had abandoned her chores, too.

  Ben had to wave his hands to clear the smoky air. Alison would be the right person to talk to, he decided. She would know what to do. “Sure, I guess. Listen, Alison, I--”

  “Hey, Ben, help me with this,” Thomas ordered from out in the hallway. He was trying to reach a box of scuba fins at the top of the big closet. The box wavered on the tips of his fingers, and then tipped its entire contents onto his head. He was instantly submerged under a pile of Christmas decorations, picture books, movie cassettes, stuffed animals, and sweaters. At least he seemed to have forgotten about the madeupthing he’d seen Ben holding.

  “No, Thomas, y
ou come in here,” Ben struggled to say. “I need to tell you something. Listen, all of you. Hannah, please stop whistling for a second.” It was hard to breathe in all the smoke. Whatever they were cooking stank like burning plastic. He had managed to get them all to be still, but now he didn’t know where to start. Three faces waited intently in the smoke. “Um, well, you see . . . I . . . Mom . . . last night, she . . .” It wasn’t working. He looked into their eyes and froze. “I think I know why she didn’t leave us any instructions this morning.”

  “Oh god, she didn’t lose her job again, did she?” said Alison.

  “Well, no, um, maybe. I dunno.” The silent seconds ticked by while Ben thought of how to continue. “There were these men here last night, they . . .” His throat dried up. “You were all asleep.” He wanted to make up some story to hide the fact that their mother had been abducted by strange silver men, that she had given him a bizarre glowing amulet, that they all had to meet her at the airport in two days. And then he realized what the problem was. He was scared. Their mother was right: Ben wasn’t ready to deal with responsibility, if this was what responsibility was. Fortunately, it was this lag that allowed Alison to fully glimpse Thomas, who was now completely dressed for his subterranean adventure into the basement. In addition to the scuba gear, the boots, the flashlights, and the fully stocked backpack, he was now sporting on various parts of his body a big kitchen knife, a compass, and a set of radios.

  “And what . . . what in god’s name are you up to, Thomas?” asked Alison.

  “What, you mean Ben didn’t tell you about the voices we heard yesterday?” said Thomas.

  “No, he most certainly didn’t. Ben, what voices?”

  “Al, he thinks he heard voices down in the basement,” explained Ben. The tightness in his heart immediately lessened now that the subject had been changed, now that Thomas was receiving the scorn he so richly deserved. “That’s where I found him yesterday when he took off.”