Messenger was peering down at the street, not with the casual appreciation of a tourist but rather like someone looking for something very specific. Hopefulness and wistfulness momentarily defined his features until he composed himself and regained the impassivity he wore as a mask.
“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” he asked. “We see a great deal of pain. Beauty can be an antidote.”
It made sense, almost. But I didn’t believe him. He wasn’t here for a change of scenery. He was looking for something. Or someone.
“Tell me what you learned of Derek Grady,” he said, continuing to peer down into the town as he began to walk. He had long legs and walked quickly, in a hurry, searching. I had to rush to catch up. We were not alone on the wall—tourists passed by speaking half a dozen different languages—but as with doors and prison bars, they seemed to subtly relocate to avoid touching us. I was sure that we were quite invisible and inaudible.
“Derek’s a bully,” I said, thinking Messenger wanted the same economy of words from me that he practiced himself.
“More,” he said.
“Okay, he’s . . . well, he has a hard time in school, maybe because he doesn’t study very hard and maybe because he’s not very bright. He’s on the wrestling team, along with Boots. . . . That’s what I call the other boy, the one who died.”
“Charles,” Messenger said with a flash of anger. “Charles Francis Frohlick. That’s the name of the dead boy, a boy who was a bully and who may have grown up to be a worse bully, maybe a killer, even. But who might also have grown up to repent and change and to add something positive to this sorry world.”
“Charles,” I said, abashed at this passionate outburst. “Charles Frohlick. The dead boy. Okay, Derek and he were friends. Charles decided that Manolo was checking him out, in a sexual way.”
Messenger nodded, distracted now as he squinted down at someone passing by on the street. I followed the direction of his gaze. He was watching a girl, maybe seventeen years old, with auburn hair, long, wavy. The girl turned to look at something we could not see from our vantage point, and her face was clear in the spill of light from a doorway. Messenger had leaned forward, and now he retreated and could not conceal his disappointment.
“You’re looking for someone,” I said.
He did not answer.
“The girl Oriax mentioned. Ariadne.”
Both of his fists clenched and still he said nothing. Silence stretched between us as he began again to walk quickly along the battlement.
Was Ariadne a French name? Was Messenger French as well? Did such things as nationalities even matter to him?
“Continue,” Messenger snapped over his shoulder.
“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?