All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [2]
I think it scares her. I know it scares me.
I learned how to use the violin. My father showed me the basics, but I play like I’ve been practicing all my life . . . and my music makes things happen. Magical things, like conjuring a fog filled with ghosts or charming a million hungry sewer rats so they wouldn’t eat me.
Then, once, I got a glimpse of the end of the world. I played a song about the end of things, which I call “The Symphony of Existence.” If that sounds dangerous, it was, but I had to, believe me, because I was facing the Infernal Beelzebub, Lord of All That Flies, who was trying to part my right side from the left with a gigantic obsidian knife.
When I played that song, I felt the world come apart around me, and I heard the death rattle of the universe as protons and neutrons and electrons tore into smaller subatomic bits . . . and then into void.
I still hear it in my dreams. It worries me sometimes.
I’ve learned a lot this summer, but I’m ready to learn more at Paxington and find out what I’m supposed to be doing with these amazing and dangerous gifts.
September 22, San Francisco
________
Eliot watched and worried as his sister read his essay.
Her brows furrowed.
Eliot knew people liked his writing style better, but Fiona was good at putting facts together and impressing people with her logic. Besides, her essay pretty much told the entire story of what had happened to them this summer. He hoped the teachers at Paxington read his paper first.
“Well?” he asked her. “What do you think?”
“Just a second.” She held up a hand, rereading from the top of the page.
Eliot paced. Sunlight filtered into his new bedroom from the garden. Outside were rows of pink and yellow daisies, and beyond, he could make out misty San Francisco Bay—a spectacular view.
Inside their new house, however, especially in his bedroom, the view was not so spectacular—crowded with mountains and mazes of cardboard U-Haul boxes, each one filled with a hundred pounds of books. If there was the slightest shudder from the San Andreas Fault, Eliot knew he’d be buried under an avalanche of Chaucer, Twain, and Shakespeare.
Fiona looked up from his essay and brushed her long, dark hair from her face. “You don’t have all the facts,” she said. “You should have added something about your girlfriend.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend,” Eliot replied.
Fiona meant Julie Marks, the girl he had met this summer, the girl he had liked an awful lot. She’d even kissed him . . . but then ended up leaving. Every time he thought about her, he felt that he had done something to drive her away. Fiona had never liked Julie, for some reason.
He glared at his sister, suddenly irritated.
Then he understood: Fiona wasn’t trying to be mean on purpose. She couldn’t help it. Anyone would be a little nasty if they looked the way she did this morning.
Normally, he and his sister had to wear their great-grandmother’s handmade clothing—bad enough because it looked like something out of the “wrong clothes that didn’t fit” catalog.
Today was worse. They had on their new Paxington school uniforms.
The new clothes looked fine when Eliot and Fiona had first gotten them: khaki slacks for him, pleated tartan skirt for his sister, white button-down linen shirts and navy blue blazers for them both. No ties, thank goodness—they probably would have strangled themselves. Fiona had stockings and flats. He had leather loafers with no heels that made him look (if possible) shorter than usual.
All well and good, Eliot supposed . . . if you actually knew how to wear such things.
But Fiona had never owned, let alone worn, a pair of stockings. Her skinny legs looked like crumpled caterpillars that had cocooned themselves and died there. Add to this that no one in the Post family knew how to use an iron (or at least, no one was willing to let the doddering 104-year-old Cecilia near an iron), and they both ended up looking like they had