The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

the boards creaking beneath him. The morning light framed him in silhouette as he offered me a hand for the second time that morning.

“Well,” he began. “Now you have a reason to skip school.”

III

Fortunately, Neal broadcast the location of the ash to the entire world (or, at least, the people who were watching his broadcast, who probably numbered well under a dozen).

It didn’t take long for us to find him.

There were two reasons for this.

The first was that there was a commotion in the parking lot. Half Moon Bay doesn’t have commotions very often, partly because most people are pretty solitary and partly because the fog makes it hard for anyone to see each other well enough to argue. So the yelling and general fuss drew us before we even confirmed the address.

The parking lot was unremarkable, its lines almost completely erased by the weather. Trucks lined one side, fenders to the clapboard exterior of one of the multitudinous ocean-themed restaurants that lined Main Street. On the other side were a row of plastic tables, metal chairs behind them, occupied by Neal and his friends.

Well, formerly occupied. It seemed the group had congealed around something in the center of the parking lot and they didn’t look as though they’d disperse any time soon.

“Hey!” Neal called from behind me, jovial as usual. “How are you? It’s been a while—did you see my broadcast? Did you like it?”

Neal ended every sentence with a question, except when he was exclaiming. He was one of my favorite people in the world, although he was also one of the biggest inconveniences ever to peruse the shelves of the library. He was my only major competition for occult volumes.

The difference between us? I’d seen real magic. He just thought he had.

To be fair, that difference was only confirmed the day Mint clambered through the soil of the burned clearing, but I’d felt that way for a while. Maybe it was a bit of a superiority complex. Knowing that I was right, though, made it much easier to deal with Neal civilly, so I extended my hand to shake his.

Being old-fashioned, he gave my hand a paternalistic pat and gestured behind him to the pile of ash he’d photographed and plastered across his channel.

“There she is,” he said. “Marie.”

I had never before felt that kind of dread at the prospect of magic. It was odd, since I’d always prided myself in being unafraid of things that haunted horror movies: the dead, the darkness, fire, heights, clowns.

There was something about that ash, though, and the way it shifted every so often. It was awful, truly awful, in the way that roadkill is awful to look at. There is, after all, a fine line between pity and disgust.

“It’s…” Indigo began, swallowing nausea. “It’s moving.”

“Moving?” Neal asked. He glanced from Indigo to the ash and back again. “Uh, no, it’s not. Are you okay, son?”

Indigo didn’t say anything. He couldn’t look away from the ash. It took a monumental effort for me to tear my eyes away. Neal was glancing between us as though he’d just uncovered a greater mystery than Marie’s death.

Presumed death, I corrected myself, although nobody really expects a pile of ash to come back to life.

“Who’s this?” Neal asked me. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“Uh,” I began, distracted by the rolling waves of the ash-formerly-known-as-Marie. “He’s a friend. His name is, uh, In—Inigo?”

Despite his horror, Indigo stifled a chuckle at that.

“Inigo like...like in The Princess Bride?” Neal asked, increasingly curious and confused.

“My parents were big fans,” Indigo explained. “You killed my father, prepare to die, right?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Neal left to return to his friends, thoroughly creeped out by this strange young man issuing death threats, and I had to slap a hand over Indigo’s mouth to keep him from bursting into half-nervous, half-hysterical laughter.

“Shut up,” I said. “Breathe. You have The Princess Bride in your world?”

He nodded. “Inigo Montoya spans the multiverse.”

He batted my hand away, looped his arm through mine, and followed Neal to the group of old people, probably assuming he couldn’t embarrass himself more than he just had.

I didn’t recognize Neal’s friends—well, more specifically, I had seen their faces on Neal’s channel, but couldn’t name them easily. They looked like any group of retirees in NorCal: fleece-clad, dressed-down, carrying water bottles and Golden Gate-branded fanny packs.

“Glad somebody under sixty-five watches us,” said one old lady. She looked small and frail enough to be blown away by the freezing ocean wind as it whipped in from the west, but she nodded an easy hello to me as if the cold didn’t bother her. “You came to see Marie?”

“To pay our respects,” Indigo said.

“Did you know her?”

“No,” he admitted, “but I saw your broadcast and was moved. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

Both of us knew that better than most. I’d forgotten to ask him (and now I liked him enough to not ask him outright) who he’d lost. Maybe it was better not to. The reality of it was that we both had ghosts watching over our shoulders.

Speaking of ghosts...where was Vivi?

She’d disappeared the night before, gone for the first time in months. I had expected her to come back by that morning—she was never gone for long—but there was no sign of her. There wasn’t even even the feeling of eyes on the back of my neck, or a subtle whisper in my ear.

Weird.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?” I asked the elderly woman.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice cracking a little despite her effort. She shuffled a bit on the asphalt and turned toward the ash. “Neal saw it happen. He said he saw her here, talking to a man in a jean jacket. She dissolved into ash right then. He didn’t even touch her.”

Indigo was looking at me to confirm the truth (that this death was the same as the ones we had witnessed), but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. This was all just...too