Ysabel

He was halfway back up their own steep road, leading to Villa Sans Souci at the top, when he realized something.

He stopped running, having actually shocked himself.

Why now? he had said, and the man in the grey leather jacket hadn’t replied. Maybe Ned had an answer, after all. Maybe it even mattered, for the first time, that when she was alive his grandmother had told him some of her old stories.

Ned walked thoughtfully up the last part of the hill and punched the gate code to get onto the property. He paced up and down the terrace for a bit, stretching. He thought about jumping in the pool, but it wasn’t that warm, and he went upstairs and showered instead, dropping his clothes in the hamper for the cleaning help. The villa had been rented with two women to work for them. Both were named Vera, which made for challenges. Greg had named them Veracook and Veraclean.

Pulling on his jeans, Ned went down and into the kitchen. He got a Coke from the fridge. Veracook, clad in black, grey hair pulled tightly in a bun, was there. She had baked some kind of hard biscuits. He took one. From by the stove, she smiled approval.

Greg was on his cellphone in front of the computer in the dining room, so the house line was free. Ned went back upstairs and into his father’s bedroom and dialed the mobile number Kate Wenger had given him.

“Bonjour?”

“Um, hi, I’m looking for Marie-Chantal.”

“Screw you, Ned.” But she laughed. “Miss me already? How sweet.”

He felt himself flush, was glad she couldn’t see it. “I just came in from a run. Um, I realized something.”

“That you did miss me? I’m flattered.” She was sassy on the phone, he thought. He wondered how she was on IM or texting. Everyone got looser online.

“No, listen. Um, it’s April thirtieth on Thursday. Then May Day.”

Kate was silent. He was wondering if he’d have to explain, then heard her say, “Jeez, Ned. Beltaine? That’s a major deal. Ghosts and souls, like Hallowe’en. How do you know this? You a closet nerd?”

“My mom’s family’s from Wales. My grandmother told me some of this stuff. We used to go on a picnic sometimes, on the first of May.”

“Want to go on a picnic?”

“If you bring Marie-Chantal.” He hesitated. “Kate, where were the Celts around here? Were they here?”

“Yeah, they were. I can find out where.”

“I can, too, I guess.”

“No, you leave the heavy lifting to me, Grasshopper. You just keep running and hopping. See you tomorrow after school?”

“See you.” He hung up, grinning in spite of himself. It was nice, he thought, to meet a girl in a situation where he didn’t have to explain her, or what was going down, to the other guys. Privacy, that was the thing. You didn’t get a lot of it back home.

they had dinner at the villa, French time: after eight o’clock. The clear understanding, Melanie explained seriously, was that they had to eat here every so often or Veracook would get insulted and depressed (“Veradepressed!” Greg said) and start burning their food and stuff like that.

Before they ate, Ned’s father took a vodka and tonic out on the terrace while the others went into the pool. Melanie, tiny as she was, looked pretty good in a bathing suit, Ned decided. She made a big deal about the water being freezing cold (it was) but got herself in. Steve was a swimmer, had the long arms and legs. He was methodically doing laps, or trying to—the pool wasn’t really big enough.

As Ned and his father sat watching them, Greg suddenly burst through the terrace doors, sprang down the wide stone steps, across the grass, and cannonballed into the water, wearing the baggiest, most worn-out bathing suit Ned had ever seen.

Edward Marriner, laughing, offered an immediate pay bonus if Greg promised to use their next coffee break to buy a new swimsuit in town and spare them the sight of this one again. Melanie shouted a suggestion that Greg could skinny-dip if he wanted to save the money. Greg, splashing and whooping in the frigid water, threatened to take her up on it.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

“And why not?”

Melanie laughed. “Shrinkage in cold water. Male pride. End of story.”

“You have,” Greg said after a moment, “a point.” Steve, who had stopped his laps, laughed aloud.

Up on the terrace, Ned looked at his father and they exchanged a smile.

“You okay so far?” his dad asked.

“I’m good.”

A small hesitation. “Mom’ll call tomorrow.”

“I know.”

They looked at the others in the water. “Veracook will have decided they are insane,” Edward Marriner said.

“She’d have figured it out eventually,” said Ned.

They left it at that. They didn’t talk a whole lot these days. Ned had overheard a couple of his parents’ conversations at night about “fifteen years old” and “mood swings.” It had made him think about being totally affectionate for a couple of weeks, just to mess with their heads, but it felt like too much work.

Ned didn’t mind his father, though. It got old after a while watching people go drop-jawed, the way Kate Wenger had, when they learned who he was, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. Mountains and Gods was one of the best-selling photography books of the past ten years, and Passageways, though less flashy (it didn’t have the Himalayas, his dad used to say), had won awards all over the place. His father was one of the few people who took pictures for both Vanity Fair and National Geographic. You had to admit that was cool, if only to yourself.

When the others came shivering out of the pool to dry off, Melanie said, “Hold it a sec. Forgot something.”

“What? You? Forget?” Steve said. His yellow hair was standing up in all directions. “No possible way!”

She stuck out her tongue at him, and disappeared inside. Her room was the only bedroom on the main floor. She came dripping back out, still wrapped in her towel, with another one around her hair now. She was holding a bag that said “France Telecom.” She dropped it on the table in front of Ned.

“In case Ground Control needs to reach Major Tom,” she said.

She’d gotten him a cellphone. It was, Ned decided, easy to be irritated with tiny Melanie and her hyper-efficiency, but it was kind of hard not to appreciate her.

“Thanks,” he said. “Really.”

Melanie handed him another of her index cards, with his new phone number written out in green on it, above another smiley face. “It has a camera, too. The package is open,” she added, as he pulled out the box and the fliptop phone. “I programmed all our numbers for you.”

Ned sighed. It was too easy to be irritated with her, he amended, inwardly. “I could have done that,” he said mildly. “I actually passed cellphone programming last year.”

“I did it in the cab coming back up here,” she said. “I have fast fingers.” She winked.

“Oh, ho!” said Greg, chortling.

“Be silent, baggy suit,” Melanie said to him. “Unless you are going to tell me that Arles is up and running.”

“Up and run your fast fingers over my baggy suit and I’ll tell you.”

Ned’s father shook his head and sipped his drink. “You’re making me feel old,” he said. “Stop it.”

“The house line is 1, your dad’s 2, I’m 3, Steven’s 4. Greg is star-pound key-star-865-star-pound-7,” Melanie said sweetly.

Ned had to laugh. Even Greg did. Melanie grinned triumphantly, and went back in to shower and change. Greg and Steve stayed out for a beer, drying off in the mild evening light. Greg said it was warmer on the terrace than in the pool.

It wasn’t even May yet, Ned’s father pointed out. The French didn’t start swimming until June, usually. There was water in the villa’s pool only as a courtesy to their idiocy. The sun was west, over the city. There was a shining to the air; the trees were brilliant.

A moment later, the serenity of that Provençal sunset was shattered by a startling sound. Then it came again. After a brain-cramp moment, Ned recognized it: the tune from Disneyland’s kiddie ride, “It’s a Small World.”

The four of them looked around. Their gazes fell, collectively, upon Ned’s new phone on the table. Warily, he picked it up, flipped it open, held it to his ear.

“Forgot to mention,” Melanie said from her own mobile in the house. He heard her trying not to laugh. “I programmed a ringtone for you, too. Tried to find something suitable.”

“This,” Ned said grimly into the phone, “means war. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, Ned!” she giggled, “I thought you’d like it!” She hung up.

Ned put the phone down on the glass tabletop. He looked out for a second at the lavender bushes planted beyond the cypresses and the pool, and then at the three men around the table. They were each, including his father, struggling to keep a straight face. When he looked at them, they gave up, toppling into laughter.

he couldn’t sleep.

How unsurprising, Ned thought, punching his pillow for the twentieth time and flipping it over again. Jet lag would be part of it, on this second night overseas. They were six hours ahead of Montreal. It was supposed to take a day for each hour before you adjusted. Unless you were an airline pilot or something.

But it wasn’t really the time difference and he knew it. He checked the clock by the bed again: almost three in the morning. The dead of night. On April 30 that might have another meaning, Ned thought.

He’d have to remember to tell that one to Kate Wenger later today. She’d get the joke. If he could keep his eyes open by then, the way tonight was going.

He got up and went to the window, which was open to the night air. He had the middle bedroom of the three upstairs. His dad was in the master, Greg and Steve shared the last one.

He pulled back the curtain. His window was over the terrace, looking out at the pool and the lavender bushes and a clump of trees on the slope by the roadway. If he leaned out and looked to his right, he could see Aix’s lights glowing in the distance. The moon was orangered, hanging over the city, close to full. He saw the summer triangle above him. Even with moonlight, the stars were a lot brighter than they were in Westmount, in the middle of Montreal.

He wondered how they looked above Darfur right now. His mom would phone this evening—or tomorrow evening—whatever you said when it was 3:00 a.m.

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but how did you control what you thought about, anyhow? Especially at this hour, half awake. The mind just…went places. Don’t think about pink elephants, or girls’ breasts, or when they wore skirts and uncrossed their legs. Sometimes in math class he’d wander off in his thoughts for a run, or think about music, or a movie he’d seen, or what some girl he’d never met had typed privately to him in a chatroom the night before. If it was a girl: there was always that to worry about online. His friend Doug was totally paranoid about it.

You thought about a lot of different things, minute by minute, through a day. Sometimes late at night you thought about a skull and a sculpted head in a corridor underground.

And that was going to be so helpful in getting to sleep, Ned knew. So would brooding about what had happened inside him this morning.

After another minute, irresolute, he made an attempt to access, locate—whatever word would suit—that place within himself again. The place where he’d somehow sensed the presence of the lean, nameless man on the roof above them. And where he had grasped another thing he had no proper way of knowing: that the person up there, today—right here, right now—had made the eight-hundred-year-old carving they’d been looking at.

Kate had been right, of course: the man’s response, hurtling down to confront them, white with rage, had told them what they needed to know.

But Ned couldn’t feel anything inside now, couldn’t find whatever he was looking for. He didn’t know if that was because it was over—a totally weird flicker of strangeness in the cloister—or if it was because there was nothing to find at this moment, looking out over dark grass and water and cypress trees in the night.

There wasn’t a whole lot of point standing here in sleep shorts thinking about it. He decided to go down for a glass of juice. On the way downstairs, barefoot in a sleeping house, he had an idea. A good one, actually. When you couldn’t do anything about the strange, hard things, you did what you could in other ways.

He had warned Melanie, after all.

She, the ever-efficient one, had rigged up a multi-charger station for all the mobile phones on the sideboard in the dining room. She had even been helpful enough to label everyone’s slot. In green ink.

It was almost too easy.

Working quickly through the options on each phone, Ned cheerfully changed Greg’s ring to the theme from “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and showed no mercy for Steve, innocent bystander though he might have been, rejigging his cell to play “The Teletubbies Song.” He left his father’s alone.

Then he took his time, scrolling thoughtfully through the choices on Melanie’s phone a couple of times before deciding.

Afterwards, pleased with himself and his contribution to justice in the world, he went and got his juice from the kitchen. He took it out on the terrace, standing shirtless in the night. It was cold now. His mother would have made him get a shirt or a robe if she’d been up. If she’d been here.

He tried, one more time, to see if he could find something within himself, feel attuned to anything. Nothing there. He looked out across the landscape and saw only night: pool and woods and grass to the south under stars. A low moon west. He heard an owl behind him. There were trees all around the villa, plenty of room for nests, and hunting.

As it happens, he is being watched.

In the small stand of trees beside the lavender bushes, the figure observing him has long ago learned how to keep from being sensed in any of the ways Ned Marriner might know or discover by searching inside himself.

Certain skills and knowledge are part of his heritage. Others have taken time and considerable effort. He has had time, and has never been fazed by difficulty.

He’d seen the boy appear at the open window upstairs, and then, a little later, watched him come outside, half naked, vulnerable and alone. The observing figure is amused by this, by almost all that has happened today, but he does think about killing him.

It is almost too easy.

Because of the day that is coming he holds himself in check. If you are in the midst of shaping something urgently awaited, you do not give way to impulses like this, however satisfying they might be. He is impulsive by nature, but hardly a fool. He has lived too long for that.

The boy, he has decided, is random, trivial, an accident, not anyone or anything that matters. And it is not a good idea to cause any disturbance now, among either the living or the spirits, some of them already beginning to stir. He knows about the spirits. He is waiting for them, diverting himself as best he can while he does so.

He lets the boy go back inside, alive and inconsequential.

The impulse to kill is still strong, however. He recognizes it, knows why it is building. When that desire comes, it is difficult to put away unslaked. He has found that to be so over time and is disinclined to deny himself.

He changes again—the skill he took so long in mastering—and goes hunting. Moonlight briefly finds his wings in flight, then they are lost again, entering the woods.

CHAPTER IV

When Ned came down to the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed from his disrupted sleep, the others had already gone into town. Second work session at the cathedral. There was a note from Melanie that said they’d be back by lunchtime. He’d neglected to put on a shirt and Veraclean, in the adjacent laundry room, smiled at him before pointedly glancing away. He’d forgotten about her. He quickly drank some orange juice and went back upstairs to dress.

Then he phoned Melanie.

Three rings.

“Yes?” A really frosty tone for one word, he thought. Impressive.

“Hi there!” he said cheerfully.

“Ned Marriner,” she said, low and intense, “you are in so much trouble. You have no idea. You are pushing up daisies, meeting your Maker, joining the choir.” He heard her beginning to laugh, fighting it.

“Damn!” he said. “I’m talented after all.”

“Talented and dead. Sleeping with the fishes.”

“But, Melanie!” he protested. “I’d thought you’d like it!”

“‘The Wedding March’? ‘The Wedding March’ as a ringtone? We’re in a goddamned cathedral! Greg is in hysterics. He’s holding a pillar to stay upright. He is peeing on it! You will be made to suffer!”

She sounded pleasingly hysterical herself. It was all very satisfying.

“I’m sure. In the meantime, you might want to phone Steve and Greg when you get a chance.”

She paused, lowered her voice. “Really? You got them, too?”

“Got them, too. See you at lunch.”

He hung up, grinning.

On considered reflection, he decided to keep his new phone hidden away for the next little while. There wasn’t much he could do if she decided to short-sheet his bed, but he doubted she’d like garden snails in hers, and an offhand mention of the possibility might stave off retaliation. He thought he could handle Greg and Steve. Melanie was the challenge.

He loafed around the house for the morning, energetically avoiding any thought of the papers he was supposed to be writing. He was still jet-lagged, wasn’t he? Who could possibly be expected to write an English or history essay while time-warped?

Despite what Kate Wenger had said, he spent a bit of time online googling Celts+Provence, and scribbled a few notes. Then he went outside in the bright morning and listened to music on the terrace till he saw the van making its way up the hill to the villa gates.

He took off the iPod and put it on the table. He had a premonition of what was coming. He sat up in the lounger and waved an enthusiastic hello to everyone. His father waved back from the driveway. Melanie stood by the van, hands on hips, trying to achieve a withering glare—which was hard when you were barely five feet tall, Ned thought.

Greg and Steve, smiling benignly, came up to the terrace together. Still smiling, they grabbed Ned by hands and legs (pretty strong guys, both of them) and began lugging him down the steps and across the grass to the pool.

“SpongeBob, spare me!” Ned cried, perhaps unwisely.

He heard Melanie and his father laugh, which was pleasing, but by then he was flying.

It was cold in the pool, it was really cold in the pool. Gasping and coughing, Ned surfaced. He knew what to say. There were time-honoured male ways of responding to this.

“Ahh,” he said. “Very refreshing. Thank you so much, guys.”

ned carefully mentioned snails, over lunch outside—how he’d heard they had a creepy habit of ending up in people’s beds here, especially in springtime.

Interestingly, it was Steve who grew thoughtful, hearing that. Melanie pretended to treat it as a dubious piece of misinformation. It was hard to tell if she was faking or not.

Ned’s father, in a surprisingly relaxed state, said he’d shot some potentially workable images in the baptistry, shooting towards the dome with soft flash bounces. They’d also done some of the columns in the cloister, and a zigzag pattern he’d noticed out there on the walkway. Ned hadn’t seen that, but he didn’t have his father’s eye, and he’d been just a bit unsettled the day before out there.

“I really liked your Queen of Sheba,” his father said. “The colour’s gorgeous. Like amber from some angles. We’ll check the images later. But I think I’m going to want to have her. I’ll go back if I need to before we go home, maybe try late in the day, too. Two good calls, Ned.”

He was meeting Oliver Lee at a café in town this afternoon, just the two of them, first actual encounter. Barrett, the art director, was coming over from New York next week and had wanted to be there, but both men had decided to get together without an intermediary.

“I may or may not like him, but it doesn’t matter in the end. We don’t have to work together.”

“And you know he’ll love you?” Ned grinned.

The cold water had woken him up pretty effectively. Long-lost cure for jet lag: freezing pools.

“Everyone loves me,” Edward Marriner said. “Even my son.”

“Your son,” said Melanie, darkly, “is a terrible person.”

“Really,” Greg agreed, shaking his head.

Steve kept quiet, possibly thinking about snails in his bed. Ned decided he was going to have to do the snail thing at some point, and live with the consequences.

it turned out the three others were going to drop his father in town then drive east towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Paul Cézanne had apparently painted, like a hundred times. The painter had been born and died here. He was Aix’s main celebrity and he’d made the mountain famous.

Ned remembered his father grumbling about Cézanne on the flight over, leafing through Barrett Reinhardt’s notes: how it was almost impossible to get a picture of that mountain that wasn’t a cliché or some sentimental tribute to the painter. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but Barrett had said it was simply not possible to be in Provence working on a book of photographs and not shoot that peak. Especially if you were Edward Marriner and known for your mountainscapes.

“Simply not possible,” his dad had repeated on the plane, imitating the art director’s voice.

This afternoon’s drive would be partly an outing in the country, and partly to check some places Barrett had marked on local maps as where they might set up. Ned’s father would make that call himself, but the others were good at eliminating locations they knew he wouldn’t go for.

“You coming?” Steve asked Ned.

“Ah, I have to be in town by five-ish, actually. I’m meeting someone.”

“Who? What? How?” Greg demanded. “We just got here!”

Ned sighed. “I met a girl yesterday morning. We’re having a Coke.”

“Holy-moly,” said Melanie, grinning.

Greg was staring. “A date? Already? Jeez, the boy’s a man among men!”

“Don’t rush him, or me,” Edward Marriner said. “I feel old enough as is.”

“We’ll get you back in time,” Melanie said, checking her watch. “But change into running shoes, Ned, we may climb a bit. Sandals are no good.”

“Okay. But will you tie my shoelaces for me?” Ned asked. Melanie grinned again. He was glad the subject had changed. This date thing was not something he was easy with.

They dropped his father in Aix and then took the ring road around the city and headed into the countryside along a winding route Melanie said Cézanne used to walk along to find places to paint.

It was a fair distance to the mountain if you were on foot. Ned thought about that: in the nineteenth century, the Middle Ages, Roman times, people walked, or rode donkeys or something, and the road would have been way rougher. Everything was farther, slower, back then.

And at the beginning of the twenty-first century here they were, cruising these curves in an air-conditioned Renault van, and they’d be out by the mountain in twenty minutes or something and then back in the middle of town in time for him to meet Kate Wenger.

Cézanne, or the priests who had paced the worn walkway of yesterday’s cloister, or those long-ago medieval students who’d prayed in the cathedral and then gone across the square to lectures, they had all moved through worlds with different speeds than this one—even if the students were late for class, and running. Ned wasn’t sure what all of that meant, but it meant something. Maybe he’d put it in an essay—when he decided to think about his essays.