The Tattooed Heart Read online

“Hide! Hide!” he yelled. “All the girls must hide!”

  But by the time his shouts were noticed and conversation had fallen silent and all heads had turned toward the truck, two men were already leaping from the back and both were armed with assault rifles.

  “Run! Run!” Aimal shouted.

  Some of the girls responded now. There were only six of them, ranging in age from ten to perhaps fifteen. But now they saw what Aimal saw and understood what Aimal understood, so they ran.

  POP! POP POP POP!

  That’s what it sounded like, the gunfire.

  One of the girls fell facedown in the dirt. A cloud of dust rose from the impact.

  A second girl ran to the fallen one and a piece of her shoulder blew away, a twirling chunk of bone and meat, trailing blood.

  Now everyone, boy and girl, was screaming, screaming, but only Aimal was running the wrong way. Not away from the guns. Toward them.

  He waved his arms and shouted, “No, stop, stop, this is against Islam, this is against God, you must stop.”

  He ran until he was between the gunmen and the girls, some of whom kept running. But two of them seemed to have collapsed in sheer terror.

  “Get out of the way!” a gunman yelled, and waved his rifle at Aimal. “It’s not you we want.”

  Aimal shook his head, almost a spasm it was so quick and violent, like he could not control his bodily movement. He was terrified. He was terrified and barely able to keep his knees from buckling.

  He saw what would happen.

  He saw and knew and understood what would happen and still he did not back away.

  “Go away! Leave us be!” he shouted at the gunmen.

  “We are only here for the girls, get out of the way!”

  He shook his head again, slower this time, slower, knowing . . . knowing that—

  POP! POP POP! POP POP POP POP!

  The two men standing, and one still in the truck, opened fire.

  The high-powered rounds did not simply strike Aimal’s body, they dismantled it. Before he could fall his right arm was hanging by a spurting artery and his spine had exploded through his back like a bony red alien, and the side of his face was obliterated, turned to red mist and flying chunks of meat and bone.

  He fell and now the two girls who had been unable to move cowered and screamed and died, their bodies jerking and jerking and jerking as the gunmen emptied their magazines into them.

  One of the gunmen ran into the tiny schoolhouse and came out with a man so undone by fear that he had stained his clothing. The teacher was forced to his knees.

  “School is not for girls,” a gunman said, and fired two rounds into the teacher’s groin. The teacher howled in pain and writhed on the ground.

  “And since you are a girl now, it is no place for you, either.”

  They executed the teacher with bullets in his head and neck.

  Someone, Messenger or maybe even me, froze the scene then.

  Shocked boys stood staring. One surviving girl lay slumped over her dead classmate. In the distance another girl was frozen in midstep, running. Aimal lay in dirt turned to mud by his blood.

  I felt as frozen as the scene around me. I knew I was panting and yet did not feel I was getting air. The very skin on my body seemed to reverberate with the concussion of those gunshots.

  We’ve all seen movies and games with shooting. Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes it’s played for laughs, sometimes it’s shown as tragic and awful, but nothing in media prepared me for the real thing. For murder.

  It’s always been an ugly word, murder, but still we manage to sanitize it. We jokingly say we’ll murder someone. I’ve said it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder, you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.

  Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?

  What could possibly justify that?

  What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?

  The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?

  “Are we here for him?” I asked.

  “No,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”

  He was looking at me with something very like concern.

  “If you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.

  “I don’t know if it gets easier over time,” he said. “But whatever time has passed for me, it has not been enough to make it less terrible.”

  He let time flow again, and now I watched as the killers drove away. And I watched as the stunned and shattered survivors lifted themselves up off the ground and rushed to the dead. They cried. They wailed. They sobbed that God is great, and maybe he is, but he wasn’t there on that day.

  Something happened to me then, a spinning feeling, a feeling of being sucked down into the earth. But I suppose it was nothing that supernatural. In fact, I just fainted.

  I woke with a start.

  My first feeling was confusion. Just where was I?

  I was no longer at the blood-soaked school yard.

  I was lying on cold stone. Beside me on my left was a large rectangular pool with greenish water. On my right was an outdoor café with umbrellas shielding round wooden tables and canvas director’s chairs. Many of those chairs were occupied by people dressed for tropical weather drinking cups of espresso or mineral water or tiny bottles of unfamiliar sodas.

  I sat up, self-conscious at being passed out in a strange place with people chatting not five feet away. The language being spoken was not one I recognized. The people were a mix of white and black and a few who were Asian, like me.

  Of course they could not see me. At least I hoped they couldn’t as I wiped away a trickle of sleep drool. Then I raised my eyes above the tables that had preoccupied me and was stunned to find myself in the courtyard of what looked like a white limestone palace. There were pillars and arches all around me. And at one end of the courtyard a sort of open tower rose. Beyond that moldering tower, great trees pressed close all around, almost menacing in their insistence. And farther still, above the immediate foliage, rose vivid green mountains that soared up into mist.

  Not the sinister yellow mist that so often appeared in the demimonde I now occupied, but a genuine mist, the steam of low-flying clouds.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said, searching for Messenger. But no, that wasn’t quite true, was it? There was familiarity to the location, but it was not a memory of my own experience, rather it was a memory of . . . of a video.

  It took me a few minutes to clear my confused thoughts and put my finger on it. A music video. An old one. Something I’d come across on YouTube. Snoop! That was it, Snoop and Pharrell.

  And the song was . . . “Beautiful.”

  I was probably more proud of myself than I should have been for a simple feat of memory, but this world I now inhabited is strange at the best of times, and it is very easy to lose your way when not only space but time can be rearranged according to Messenger’s whim.

  I did not know what the place was called. But I knew it was in Brazil.

  I closed my eyes and saw the school yard. I saw, as if it was on a loop, the bullets tear into helpless children. I wanted to be sick but fought the urge. My feelings were unimportant, my emotions secondary: I had witnessed terrible evil. It had made me sick. But how small were my emotions when weighed against what I had seen?

  I stood up and had the passing thought that I was a very long way from home with no airline ticket, no passport . . . It takes a while to adjust to this new reality—I’d lived sixteen years in a world where airplanes carried you across vast distances and time could not be traversed except in one direction and at one speed.

  At leas
t I was not there in that school yard. I was in a green, humid place where people sat at ease drinking soda and laughing. Of course no scene is so innocent that it reassures me entirely. The world I now occupied seemed to demand a permanent state of readiness, a constant flinch.

  I walked to the nearest table and waved my hand in front of a woman’s face. No reaction. I was still invisible to her. I breathed a sigh of relief at that. If I were visible I’d be questioned, and all my answers would be likely to suggest that I was insane.

  Messenger had to be nearby, so I went in search of him, passing through an arched passage and out onto stone steps. From that elevation I looked out over what must be a park. There was a lawn and beyond it tall trees.

  I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, pushed my hands down to press the palms against my thighs, holding myself there, feeling my own physical reality.

  It is a cliché—one I’ve seen in many books—to say that you feel the earth spinning beneath you. But that is how I felt, as if the planet had wobbled a bit on its axis and its spin through space could be felt.

  The world I had known was fraying, coming apart. My world now encompassed ancient gods, messengers who could move through time as easily as flip through a calendar app. My world now contained Oriax, Daniel, and the Master of the Game, and far more evil than I wanted to acknowledge.

  What else existed unseen? What other disruptions and horrors would Messenger show me? What would be left of what I used to know?

  I caught a glimpse of a dark figure moving through the trees and ran down the steps and across the lawn and paused, realizing that I did not need to run. I could simply decide to be there, beside that dark figure. I could do what Messenger could do, couldn’t I? At least I could when he told me to. Did I need his proximity to use my new powers?

  The idea made me queasy. What if I did it wrong? What if I ended up in some entirely different place?

  So I ran across a lawn so it was like running on a mattress. I found a wide and leafy trail through the trees and followed it, slowing my pace a little so as not to look like an anxious puppy in search of its master, or like a lost child looking for a parent.

  Coming around a bend I spotted an old stone tower, something that might have been lifted from a medieval castle. And there below it stood Messenger.

  He was not alone. He was in heated conversation with Daniel.

  I don’t know what Daniel is. To all appearances he’s a casually dressed youngish man, not imposing in the least. But from Messenger’s hints, and more from Messenger’s obvious deference, I judged Daniel to be a powerful being, someone with a sort of supervisory role over Messenger and by extension, me.

  I stopped, stepped off the path into deeper shadow to be less visible, and shamelessly eavesdropped.

  “I was not aware that I was never to stray, even for a few minutes, from the path of duty.” This was Messenger, and he did not sound deferential, he sounded defiant.

  “It is not a rule,” Daniel said calmly. “You perform your duties well, Messenger, I have no complaints.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I am concerned for you,” Daniel said. Where Messenger was defiant, Daniel was understanding.

  “I would have thought I’d earned some trust,” Messenger said, still huffy in a low-key sort of way.

  Daniel put his hand on Messenger’s shoulder. “You have. And beyond that, you have earned some affection.”

  Messenger slumped and the defiance was gone from his body language and his tone. “I know you think I’m obsessed.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said, and smiled sadly. “I wish I could help you.”

  “I know that you may not,” Messenger admitted. “And I know that my searches are in vain. I know, Daniel. I know the chances of seeing her, it’s just that . . .”

  “The search has become an expression of faith,” Daniel said.

  “My only faith is in Isthil. And, of course, in her servants.”

  “Yes, Messenger, I know the correct answer. But the truth is otherwise. Isthil is only your second love. Ariadne is your first. You search for a glimpse of her, knowing how improbable it is, but the act of searching is, for you, an expression of love.”

  Messenger had nothing to say to that. He hung his head and the two of them stood in silence until Messenger said, “She once told me there were a dozen places she wanted to see before she died. She loved old places, places that were unique, places that seemed to hold a mystique.”

  “She sensed even then the presence of our world,” Daniel said. He emphasized the word our so that there was no doubt he was referring to whatever impossible dimension we occupied. Daniel looked around, saw me, let me know that he had seen me, and said, “She was not mistaken. This place has meaning to the gods.”

  “But she is not here.”

  “You know I cannot answer that.”

  Silence again as Messenger absorbed that answer, and after a moment nodded his acquiescence.

  “I do not forbid you, Messenger. Even you are allowed a life, pleasures, as you carry out your destiny. But as a friend, I wonder if you do yourself harm. I wonder if your already burdened heart only becomes heavier.”

  “I can’t give up,” Messenger said with a note of helplessness. “That would be despair. That would do more than burden my heart, it would destroy me.”

  Daniel nodded and smiled wistfully. “Love is a power to equal that of the gods. Your apprentice is with us.”

  Messenger turned his gaze on me, not searching, knowing where I was. “She needed rest. She has seen terrible things.”

  Without willing it, I was with them.

  Daniel said, “You have begun to see the nature of your duty, and the pain it will cause you. But you have not broken.”

  “I . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” I was about to say I had not meant to eavesdrop, but of course I had, and there is little point in lying to people who know instantly whether you are speaking truth. “I don’t understand why—”

  “You are not my apprentice,” Daniel said, cutting me off. “I am not your master.”

  With a nod to Messenger he was gone.

  An uncomfortable silence stretched between me and Messenger. Then he took an audible breath and said, “This place is called Parque Lago Azul. It is in Brazil.”

  “I recognized it.”

  “Did you? Ah.”

  I wanted to ask him about Ariadne. The shadow of Ariadne had been on him since our first encounter and at times his obvious devotion to this girl annoyed me. Oriax would no doubt have some snarky remark to offer on the subject, along with the rude suggestion that I was attracted to Messenger in a most un-apprentice-like way, and thus jealous.

  Was I jealous of Ariadne for being the object of such love? How could I not be? Who does not want to be loved beyond all reason? Who does not want to be needed as Messenger needed his Ariadne?

  For Messenger I felt sadness. He did not speak of his pain, but knowing some small part of what his life had been during his service as Messenger, having touched him for a fleeting second and thus felt viscerally some fraction of what he had felt, I could only be sad.

  But another part of me was jealous in a different way, not of him as a boy in love with someone else, but of the fact that he had something to hold on to.

  Did I?

  Had I ever loved anyone in that way? Could I ever love someone that way?

  Yes, I thought, in time. But the one I might someday come to love was not to be touched.

  4

  WE WERE BACK AT THE IOWA SCHOOL. IT WAS TIME to see what was happening with Trent.

  Trent was in the office of the school’s vice principal, along with Pete. The vice principal’s name—on her desktop nameplate—was Constance Conamarra.

  “I’ve got a report of an incident between the two of you and a Muslim student yesterday,” she was saying.

  Messenger and I stood in the corner of the cramped room, invisible, of course, inaudible. But I felt conspicuous just the same.r />
  “That’s bull . . . um, not true at all,” Trent said. “Is it, Pete?”

  “Totally not true. Whatever that chick said—”

  “I never mentioned it was a girl,” Conamarra said.

  That stopped Pete, but not Trent, who said, “Whatever. Okay, look, I was just playing around, no big deal.”

  “Actually it is quite a big deal. It’s a three-day suspension big deal. And I’d be within my rights to make it much worse, believe me.”

  Pete groaned but Trent’s face turned sullen with rising fury.

  “No way,” he said. “You can’t suspend me just for grabbing some towel-head’s scarf, that’s b.s.”

  “I can and I have,” Conamarra said.

  “This is crap! Special treatment just because she’s some terrorist.”

  “Samira Kharoti is a terrorist?” The vice principal’s voice dripped scorn.

  “They’re all terrorists. Bunch of foreigners come over here and start getting treated like celebrities. She’s not special. She’s not some big thing.” He did a hand-waving gesture around that “big thing” that started off sarcastic and ended with a violent thrust. He practically spit when he did it.

  “All you had to do was leave her alone, Trent. And this is not your first incident. Last month you—”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Trent said, shoved his chair back, and stood up. Conamarra was a small woman, and between Trent and Pete they made an intimidating pair. “Everyone’s special, because they’re girls or black or Mexican or a towel-head or—”

  “That. Is. Enough. You can come back to school on Monday. Until then, you are not to come on to school grounds.”

  They left on a wave of muttered curse words and slammed the door behind them.

  In the hallway Trent said, “I’m going to find that bitch and give her something to complain about!”

  “What are you talking about?” Pete asked.

  “That Samira bitch. I’m going to have a little talk with her.”

  “Dude . . .”

  “What?” Trent snapped.

  Pete put up his hands defensively. “Hey, I’m already suspended, I don’t want—”

  “Are you pussing out on me?”