Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 11

  With a hearty belch, she signaled she was finished. Then she leaned back in her chair to tell them about Bykov, the survey mission gone wrong, the bunker, and her escape. When Emma finished, Ms. Chiostro said, “You shouldn’t have brought that meteor here.”

  “Do you think it’s magical?”

  “No, but there’s something wrong with it. I can tell that much.”

  “There’s something wrong with her,” Sylvia said.

  “Me? What is it?” Emma asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure, dear,” Ms. Chiostro said.

  “I felt it too,” Emma said. “Is it dangerous?”

  “That’s hard to say. We’ll have to find out what it is first. In the meantime I think you should go upstairs and rest.”

  “I don’t have time to rest. I need to see Marlin. Where is he?”

  “I’m not sure but he’s been trying to find you for weeks.”

  “If he shows up here, tell him I’m going to the Sanctuary.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, dear. You just got cleaned up. You don’t want to go down into those sewers, do you?”

  “I have to. I made a promise to the farmer and his wife.”

  “I see. Well, try to be careful, dear. You’re not exactly in fighting condition yet.”

  “I understand.” Before she left, Emma took Becky aside. “I’m sorry about earlier. Thank you for picking me up.”

  “It’s all right, kid.” Becky looked down at the floor. “I think you really should stay here and rest. You look like shit.”

  “I’ll be fine. I won’t push it.”

  “Of course you will. You always do.” Becky smiled at her. “Just come back in one piece, all right?”

  “I will.”

  ***

  The sewers of Rampart City were an improvement over some of the places she had been in the last three weeks. There wasn’t as much noise as in the compartment of the merchant ship. And there was no bear or chickens to attack her. There were only the rats.

  The rats—those friendly with Jim Rizzard—usually came close to her to greet her like one of their own. This time they scattered around her to remain only on the edge of her vision. Maybe she had been gone so long they didn’t recognize her; they were only animals after all.

  Then she saw Pepe among the rats; his silver stripe made him stand out. She spoke to him in ratspeak. He stared back at her and then hissed the rat equivalent of the middle finger before he scurried off into the darkness. The other rats followed his lead.

  Was he angry with her for being gone so long? Perhaps Jim was angry with her too because she hadn’t said goodbye before she left for Russia. She would have to find out later, but for the moment she had more immediate concerns.

  She climbed up into the old bomb shelter beneath the Plaine Museum and then crawled through the opening into the ruins of the Sanctuary. Marlin waited for her there, his arms crossed over his transparent chest. “About time you showed up,” he said. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to find you for three weeks.”

  She gave him an abbreviated version of her flight from Bykov’s compound. “I tried calling for the armor but it wouldn’t come to me. Did you find someone else?”

  “Of course not. Maybe the armor didn’t want to go all the way to Russia. Or maybe it’s angry with you for trying to quit.”

  “Can it get angry?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past it. It is magical.”

  “I suppose.” She forced a smile to her face. “Well, I’m here now. I need to see Captain Donovan and see what she can find out about Bykov. Then I’m going back there.”

  “And if the armor won’t come when you call it, what are you going to do, ship it with Fed Ex? Or maybe you’ll just wear it on the plane.”

  “We’ll figure that out later.” She knelt down in front of the red case. Usually the case would sense her presence; angelic faces would appear on the case to welcome her before it opened. This time nothing happened. She looked up at Marlin. “Becky said everything’s been fine here without me.”

  “That’s what she says. Don Vendetta has been running rampant lately. Of course she’s been careful to keep it on the back pages, but something major is in the works.”

  “Just great. After I’m done with Bykov—”

  “If you live long enough.”

  “After I’m done with him, we’ll get back on Don Vendetta, OK?”

  “Fine. I’m just the Keeper of the Lore.”

  “Don’t pout. I don’t need it right now.”

  “I’d forgotten how much I missed you. I’m going upstairs for a spin. I’ll find you later—if I can.” The ghost floated up through the ceiling to fly around the Plaine Museum as he usually did when not helping her on a case.

  With a sigh she turned back to the red case. As her hands came closer to the smooth finish of the case, the angelic faces appeared. But unlike previous times, these faces didn’t grin at her; instead they glared at her, their eyes red. “What—”

  Her hand touched the surface of the case. It felt like a stove burner turned up to its highest setting. She tried to pull her hand back, but it was stuck against the case. An electric charge ran from the case to her hand, then up her arm, and finally to her head. She screamed as she was launched into the air. Before she landed, the darkness swallowed her.

  Chapter 13

  Emma has never found her math homework difficult before. She has already progressed beyond what the other fifth graders are doing, into calculus and trigonometry better suited to college sophomores. It soothes her to solve the equations; it allows her mind to focus on something other than thoughts of her parents’s murder.

  Tonight is different. Tonight she sits in her room and stares blankly at the page. It’s not even a textbook, just a sheet of paper with equations written on them. They’re the strangest equations she’s ever seen. She can’t tell if they’re supposed to be algebra, calculus, trigonometry or some combination of them all.

  She looks up and feels something strange. It’s as if someone is in the room with her, but when she looks around, she can’t see anyone. She stares at the paper and then quickly darts her eyes to the left to catch it, but it’s already gone. She thinks back to when she was a little girl, afraid of the bogeyman in her closet. Back then she had been so sure there was something there in the darkness to devour her. It’s the same feeling she has now.

  “Aunt Gladys?” she calls out softly. “Becky? Are you there? You’d better not be playing a trick on me.”

  No one answers. Emma waits for a few moments before she turns back to her homework. The strange thing is, she can’t remember when the teacher gave her this assignment. That’s not all that unusual as she often creates her own homework from borrowed college textbooks. But she doesn’t remember this in one of those textbooks either. Where had it come from? To figure that out would go a long way to determining how she is supposed to solve the equations.

  She feels cold air on the back of her neck. She turns around, but there’s no one there. “Becky, that’s not funny,” Emma says. She gets up from her chair to look around the bedroom. First she opens the closet door, just as her father used to do. She pushes aside the racks of clothes and piles of old stuffed toys in case Becky is behind these. There’s no one in the closet except for her.

  She looks to the same corner as she did when she was little. She sees the same shadows as she did then. When she runs her hand along this corner, she gets the same result as her father—nothing. There’s nothing more than a presence there, an ambiguous feeling of something out of place.

  She returns to her seat to turn back to the equations. She looks at the first one and studies the symbols. The symbols aren’t like anything she’s ever seen before. Instead of plus, minus, and equal signs she sees vague squiggles. It’s like she’s become mathematically illiterate in the last few minutes. In disgust she throws down her pencil. “I don’t understand. What are they trying to say?”

  The door to
her room opens. She nearly falls out of the chair to see herself walk through the door. “Aunt Gladys says it’s time to go home,” the other Emma Earl says.

  “Home? But I am home,” Emma says, but something’s not right; her voice sounds different in her own ears.

  “I wish you were,” the other Emma says.

  Aunt Gladys sticks her head into the room. “Becky, are you almost ready to go? You know you aren’t supposed to sleep over on school nights.”

  “Becky?” Emma says in disbelief. “I’m not—”

  She looks down at her hands to see the fingers have suddenly turned shorter and pudgier. The chair creaks ominously beneath her and she can feel the edges of the seat bite into her rear where it spills over the sides. “What’s going on?” she asks in Becky’s voice.

  She stands up to find her feet have disappeared beneath her stomach. She runs over to the dresser and looks into the mirror only to see Becky’s face. “No, I’m not Becky. I’m Emma,” she says and begins to cry.

  Aunt Gladys puts a hand on her shoulder while the other Emma—the real Emma—edges into a corner, her face deathly pale. “Becky, honey, I know you don’t like it over there and I wish you didn’t have to go back, but you’re scaring Emma.”

  “I’m Emma!”

  “Now you know that isn’t true.” In the mirror Aunt Gladys pinches one of Becky’s pudgy cheeks. A sharp pain runs through Emma. It’s real. She’s Becky. The tears continue to pour down her red cheeks. Aunt Gladys leads her to the bathroom so she won’t scare Emma anymore.

  “It’ll be all right, sweetheart,” Aunt Gladys says. “You’ll be fine. But you have to accept who you are.”

  Emma looks in the mirror and again sees Becky’s face. “I’m Becky,” she says.

  “That’s right.” Aunt Gladys smiles at her and then holds up a washcloth. “Now, let’s get you cleaned up before you go back.”

  Emma lets Aunt Gladys dab at her cheeks with the washcloth. Then she waddles out to the car to go to Becky’s home.

  Chapter 14

  Emma awoke in bed. She lay on the soft mattress for a full minute, as the last bits of the dream faded away. She supposed the dream was in response to the rift that had formed between her and Becky; maybe it was a subconscious message to show more empathy to her best friend. She would have to try that later, but for now she had more important matters on her mind.

  Only then did she replay her last moments of consciousness. She had gone into the Sanctuary to open the case of red armor. But something had gone wrong. When she tried to open it, the case sent a shock through her similar to the one she’d felt when she touched Bykov’s meteor. It must have knocked her out. Then how did she get back to her bedroom?

  She turned her head, but the only thing she could see in the darkness was the face of a clock. Something was wrong as this clock had red digital numbers; the clock in Ms. Chiostro’s guestroom was an old analog model. Had the witches decided to replace the clock? Or maybe they had put her in a different guestroom.

  But how had she gotten back to the house? Marlin had probably come back down and seen her unconscious and then alerted the witches. They might have carried her back through the sewers or used their power to teleport her to the house. It didn’t make any difference how or why; she had to get up and return to the Sanctuary to find out why the case had shocked her. Had the Order decided she was no longer worthy to be the Scarlet Knight? Had it acceded to her former demand to quit?

  Too many questions. With a weary sigh she sat up in bed—or tried to sit up in bed. Her body felt as if weights had been tied to her back. She collapsed back onto the mattress. She must have taken a worse shock from the case than she had thought. It might be better to rest for a while longer, until her strength returned.

  She closed her eyes and fell to sleep again. This time she did not dream, or at least she couldn’t remember any dreams. Her eyes fluttered open to sunlight on her face. It must be mid-morning at least, if not noon. Injury or no, she had wasted far too much time.

  She turned her head from the light and confirmed she was not in her room at Ms. Chiostro’s house. The beige walls were familiar, but not from Ms. Chiostro’s house. She was in Becky’s bedroom! The witches must have brought her here or maybe Marlin had fetched Becky to drag her from the Sanctuary. After Becky’s previous rejections this didn’t seem likely.

  She looked down at the foot of the bed. Someone seemed to have stacked a couple of pillows in the middle of the bed, right on her midsection. Underneath the blankets, Emma’s hand searched for these pillows to pull them away.

  Her hand touched something soft, but it was not a pillow. Her hands began to tremble as she peeled back the covers to confirm her suspicions: the pillow was in actuality a flabby stomach. Her flabby stomach!

  She held up her hands and noted how her fingers had swollen to look almost like sausage links. She thought back to the dream she’d had after the case had shocked her. “Oh no,” she whispered, but it was not her voice.

  She swung her pudgy legs over the bed and grunted as she levered herself upright. Then she ran—more of a high-speed waddle—across the hall into the bathroom. When she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she screamed, only it was with Becky’s voice.

  Emma leaned forward and took a closer look at Becky’s brown eyes. The reflection in the mirror reached up to take a handful of dark hair, as did Emma. She and her reflection tugged at the hair; both winced in pain at this. Emma let go of the dark hair to take a handful of stomach fat. She pinched it until pain lanced through her. Conventional wisdom said if you could feel pain it wasn’t a dream.

  This wasn’t a dream, but it was just like the dream she’d experienced. She had become Becky. “Oh no,” she said and heard Becky’s voice in her ears.

  The question then became: what about her body? She put a hand to her mouth as she wondered if perhaps the case had done more than knock her unconscious; perhaps it had disintegrated her body—that of Emma Earl. Or maybe her real body had become so badly injured that the witches had somehow transferred her into Becky’s to save her life. What about Becky? Were they cohabitating in the same body right now? Or had Becky disappeared?

  She watched in the mirror as her chubby cheeks turned bright red. Tears formed in her brown eyes. “This can’t be happening,” she whimpered.

  She turned away from the mirror and hurried back to the bedroom. She threw open the closet doors to find something to wear. She snatched the first blouse and pants she came across; she didn’t care that the blouse was green and the pants pink.

  The problem then became to find where Becky left her car keys. Emma searched the bedroom without any luck. She waddled downstairs to check the foyer, living room, and finally the kitchen. Becky had left the keys next to the refrigerator, along with an empty pint of rocky road ice cream. Emma put a hand to her stomach and grimaced at the thought that Becky had eaten the entire pint of chocolate ice cream to suppress her pain. “Oh Becky,” she whispered. “We’ll fix this.”

  She grabbed the keys and then went into the garage. She didn’t have much experience with driving a car, not to mention her body felt so unfamiliar, so she backed slowly out of the garage. On the street she didn’t drive much faster, which prompted many drivers to honk and flash their lights at her. She hardly noticed this; she kept her eyes on the road and her pudgy hands on the steering wheel. It still didn’t feel right that these were her hands—at least for the moment. Occasionally she took one hand off the wheel to flex it to confirm she was still in control of the limb.

  With a grateful sigh she pulled along the curb in front of Ms. Chiostro’s house. When she got out she stumbled over her own feet, but managed to grab the door before she could fall. Ms. Chiostro was already out of the door, racing towards her. “Rebecca? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not Rebecca. I’m Emma.”

  The witch stared at her for a moment. Then she took Emma by the elbow. “Come inside, dear and let’s talk.”

  ***


  Ms. Chiostro led Emma into the parlor to an overstuffed armchair. The witch squatted down to again look Emma in the eye. “Tell me what happened.” Emma told her about when she’d touched the case, the shock that had knocked her out, the dream that she’d become Becky, and then how she’d woke up to find the dream had come true. “Oh my. So you’re really Emma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Prove it. What’s the atomic weight of gold?” she asked. Emma told her. “You’re Emma all right. This is bad, very bad. Stay here for a moment, dear.”

  “Where are you going?” Right now Emma didn’t want to be alone, though she knew a reoccurrence was unlikely.

  “I just need to see Sylvia for a moment.” Ms. Chiostro brushed a tress of dark hair away from Emma’s face. “We’re going to help you. All right?”

  “All right.” While Ms. Chiostro went downstairs, Emma looked down. She tried to see her feet, but her stomach got in the way. She had to swing her feet out a few inches before she could finally see them. She swung her feet back and forth and watched in fascination as they disappeared beneath her shelf of fat. Though she tried not to think about it, she couldn’t help but wonder if she would be stuck like this for the rest of her life.

  She still swung her legs as Ms. Chiostro returned with her sister in tow. Emma hoped they would have some kind of potion or at least a spell book they might use to help her—and Becky. Instead, Ms. Chiostro only carried a polished leg bone that Emma guessed was a turkey bone. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “We have to examine you. Hold very still.” Ms. Chiostro let the bone dangle from a leather strap. The bone hovered over Emma’s forehead for a moment before it rocketed backwards. The leather strap snapped as the bone sailed from Ms. Chiostro’s hand to break through the front window.