The After-Room (The Apothecary Series) - Softcover

Meloy, Maile

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0147516943 ISBN 13: 9780147516947

Publisher: Puffin Books, 2017

Synopsis

The triumphant finale in the bestselling trilogy is now in paperback!

It’s 1955, and Benjamin Burrows and Janie Scott are trying to live a safe, normal life in America. It’s not easy, when they have the power to prevent nuclear disaster, and sinister forces are circling. Soon the advice of a mysterious, unscrupulous magician propels Janie and Benjamin into danger, and toward the land of the dead. Meanwhile, their friend Jin Lo washes up on a remote island where an American spy is stationed, and finds herself on the trail of a deadly threat in China. But she’s on the other side of the world—how can Janie and Benjamin reach her? The triumphant finale in the trilogy that began with Maile Meloy’s bestselling, critically acclaimed The Apothecary, and continued in its captivating sequel, The Apprentices, The After-Room is full of enchantment and heart, with Ian Schoenherr’s stunning illustrations throughout.

About this title

About the Author:

Maile Meloy is the award-winning author of The Apothecary and The Apprentices, as well as four books for adults: the short story collections Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. You can visit Maile at www.mailemeloy.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Green and gold streamers hung from the ceiling of the gym, and the band glowed under the stage lights, against the folded bleachers. The singer had a shiny black sweep of hair and wore a narrow blue satin tie. It was late in the evening, and the punch bowl had been emptied many times.

The school dance had posed a problem for Janie Scott and Benjamin Burrows, because he was enrolled as her cousin, although he wasn’t her cousin. They were not supposed to be a romantic couple. At Ann Arbor High, going to the spring formal together meant you were practically engaged. Janie wished they had spent more time thinking their cover story through.

Benjamin had wanted to just skip the dance.

“We have to try to have a normal life here,” Janie had said.

The look on Benjamin’s face said that he would never have a normal life. Ever. He lived underwater with grief.

Finally, Janie asked the Doyle twins to go with them. Nat Doyle was an excellent dancer, and had spun Janie all over the floor. His sister, Valentina, wore a pale blue strapless dress, her arms brown and strong from tennis, but Benjamin didn’t seem to have noticed.

As a schoolboy in London, Benjamin had taken dancing lessons, and he could waltz and foxtrot in an automatic way, but he steered Valentina with only a small corner of his mind, as he did everything now. The best part of him wasn’t there. He excused himself and wandered off toward the bathrooms.

The singer’s face dripped with sweat under the lights, beneath his shiny helmet of hair. Janie and the twins went outside to cool off, and stood near the open door in a fresh breeze. Valentina had a complicated look on her face, and Janie knew a question was coming.

“Where are Benjamin’s parents?” Valentina asked.

“His mother died when he was little,” Janie said. “His father died last year.”

“Oh,” Valentina said. “How?”

The question had been bound to come up sometime, but Janie still struggled for an answer. The suffocating smell of smoke came back to her, and the dark of a deep mine. “In an accident,” she said. “Smoke inhalation.”

“Was he your father’s brother?” Valentina asked.

This was another place the cover story broke down. Benjamin had an English accent, and Janie’s father was clearly American. They should have thought this all through, but it had been a difficult time. “Um—” Janie said.

“He’s not really your cousin, is he?” Valentina asked.

Janie shook her head.

“I didn’t think so,” Valentina said, smiling. “You don’t seem like cousins. Your family took him in?”

Janie nodded.

“It’s okay,” Valentina said. “You don’t have to explain.”

Janie was grateful that she didn’t push. The twins were private, too, and protective of each other. Their parents worked at the University of Michigan, like Janie’s parents did, and their mother was black and their father was white. Most of the kids at Ann Arbor High in 1955 were just white. The twins played on the tennis team—they were unbeatable at mixed doubles—and they were careful with their friendship. They had been nicer to Janie and Benjamin, the lonely midyear arrivals, than anyone else at the school had, but they always had a kind of reserve.

Benjamin had just joined them when the backup singer took the microphone, and the band played the slow opening bars of “Skylark.” It was Janie’s favorite song, and she took Benjamin’s hand. “We have to dance this one,” she said. “Just one.”

They walked out onto the dance floor, which had cleared for the slow song, and she stepped into Benjamin’s well-trained dancing position. One of his hands touched her back and the other lifted her hand, but in no sense was she in his arms. At least someone was keeping the cover story intact: He danced like he was her cousin.

The girl sang, “Skylark, have you anything to say to me? Won’t you tell me where my love can be?”

Benjamin looked over Janie’s shoulder. Even his incorrigible hair seemed subdued. The stubborn waves had given up, and lay neatly down. As they moved across the floor, the girl sang, “And in your lonely flight, haven’t you heard the music in the night?”

“This is your song,” Janie said.

“It’s not my song,” he said. “It’s someone talking to a skylark.”

At least Benjamin still had his tendency to argue the smallest points. She would take that as a good sign. “All right, then it’s my song,” she said.

It was her song because Benjamin’s father had disappeared in London, when she first met them, and had left behind a book full of strange instructions in Latin and Greek. An old gardener had helped Janie and Benjamin understand it, and made them an elixir that transformed people into birds. It all seemed unlikely and fantastical, now that they were in Michigan, surrounded by sensible Midwesterners with their feet planted firmly on the ground, but the avian elixir had really worked. Of all the things that had happened since Janie met Benjamin and his father, that moment of taking flight had been the most magical. To be suddenly free of the earth, to feel air currents in your outstretched wings, there was nothing else like it.

Janie had become an American robin: curious, a little proud, inconspicuous at home but noticeably out of place in England. Their friend Pip, a London pickpocket with acrobatic grace, had become a swallow with a long tail and a swooping dive. And Benjamin, with his shock of sandy hair, had become an English skylark, bright and quick and crowned with feathers.

Now he didn’t seem anything like a skylark. He didn’t take pleasure in anything. He was going through the motions of dancing, as he went through the motions at school. He hated doing algebra and identifying the metaphors in Romeo and Juliet, and did just enough work to keep the teachers off his back. He spent his spare time reading the Pharmacopoeia, his father’s book, in his bedroom.

When Janie came downstairs before the dance in a dress the color of a lemon ice, with her hair up in time-consuming curls, Benjamin had barely looked up. She thought maybe living in the same house was a very bad idea, and they were going to end up like brother and sister. But she couldn’t imagine being apart from him. There was no good answer.

The song ended and the band started a jangling fast number, to coax back the dancers who had wandered into the shadows. Janie dropped her arms and stood inside the cold fog of misery that Benjamin carried around with him.

“I know you miss your dad,” she said. “I do, too.”

He shook his head, staring at the parquet floor with its painted basketball markings. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“I do,” she said. “I think about it all the time. I didn’t want him to die.”

“But he—” Benjamin stopped himself. There was a look of frustration and also of defiant challenge in his eyes. It was the look he’d had on his face the first time she ever saw him, when he refused to get under the table during a school bomb drill in London. It was a look that said I am set apart. Around them, people danced, swinging and twirling, skirts flying.

“He what?” she asked.

“He’s still here,” he said in a harsh whisper, the words catching in his throat.

Janie frowned. “You mean in dreams?”

Benjamin shook his head with impatience. A girl somersaulted over a boy’s arm, behind him. “It’s not a dream,” he said. “I know it. My father’s still here.”

Chapter 2

Janie took Benjamin’s elbow and steered him off the dance floor, dodging flying legs and arms. The Doyle twins stood talking in the doorway, and Valentina gave Janie a questioning look.

“Just going to get some air,” Janie said.

“We’ll see you tomorrow?” Valentina asked.

“Of course!” Janie said. The Doyles were having an afternoon party. “Can’t wait!”

The air outside was cool and fresh, and Janie sat beside Benjamin on the lamplit steps of the school. Her skirt made a bell around her knees. “Tell me everything,” she said.

Benjamin took a deep breath and said, “It started after your parents sent me to that psychologist.”

Benjamin had been unhappy in Ann Arbor, and Janie’s parents had suggested that he talk to someone. His mother had died when he was three, so he had no one now that his father was gone. And living with Janie’s parents seemed to remind him of what he’d lost. They tried to be kind and understanding, although her father still called Benjamin “Figment” because of a forgotten, annoying joke. Benjamin had been reluctant to talk to the doctor.

“What did he say?” Janie asked.

“That it was normal for a kid to want to surpass his father, and replace him,” Benjamin said. “But it’s bad if your father actually dies. Destabilizing, he said. Because then it feels like your fantasy has come true, and you’ve defeated your own father, so you have all these feelings of guilt and responsibility.”

“That makes sense,” Janie said.

“No, it doesn’t!” Benjamin said. “Because the doctor didn’t know how actually guilty I am. He just knew that my father died in an accident. And what was I supposed to tell him? That my father was an international outlaw with quasi-magical powers, who was interfering with nuclear tests, and I poisoned him trying to make a smoke screen, when we were held captive underground?”

Janie winced. “I guess not.”

“So I skipped the second appointment,” Benjamin said. “It was pointless, talking to that guy. Lying to him. And then the dreams started. I would be thinking about my father, about how I’d failed him, and how much I missed him, and then I would be in a dark place where I couldn’t see anything. But I felt that he was there. When I came out of the dream each time, I felt dizzy. That should have tipped me off.”

“To what?” she asked.

“You remember the powder I sent you. How it worked.”

Benjamin had sent Janie a small glassine envelope of coarse powder, when she was at school in New Hampshire. He’d told her, in a note, to dissolve a few grains in water, drink it down, and close her eyes. It was something he’d been working on while he was on the run with his father, so that they could communicate.

“You thought about the other person,” Janie said. “And you could see where they were, through their eyes.”

“Right,” Benjamin said. “But it had a side effect.”

“It made you dizzy afterward.”

“Well, my father took the powder before he died,” he said.

“Oh—” she said. The full importance of what he was saying began to dawn on her.

“You see?” he said, excited. “It hasn’t worn off yet!”

“On you?” she asked.

“On either of us.”

“But where is he?” she asked, looking around at the pale light cast by the streetlamp, and the dark beyond it. She felt a chill of fear, but of what, she wasn’t sure—of ghosts? Of the possibility that Benjamin had lost his mind?

“I’ve been calling it the After-room,” Benjamin said. “But it’s not really a room. The walls aren’t really walls, they’re like—a screen, and beyond it is something else. Something farther. My father is there. I think he’s keeping himself in that place, somehow. He’s stalling, so he can communicate with me. Does that sound stupid?”

Janie shook her head. It sounded terrifying, but also somehow wonderful.

“The feeling is different from when we used the powder,” he said. “It’s not like being in someone else’s body, because my father doesn’t have a body. But he’s there, I know he is. I know I’m not alone there.”

Janie couldn’t keep the hurt expression from her face.

“I don’t mean that I’m alone here,” he said. “I just—you know.”

She nodded. “So what does he say?”

“That’s the thing, I don’t know. I can feel that he’s there, but I can’t get his voice. So I made some more of the mind-connection powder.”

Janie felt a stinging jolt of surprise. “Without me?” she said. “When did you make it?”

“When you went to the movies with your parents.”

“What?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“With words!” she said. “Like this!”

“I haven’t used it yet,” he said. “You came home before I could. And I was afraid to try it.”

“You shouldn’t do things like that alone!”

“But I think it might work,” he said. His voice was eager and strained. “I think it might make the connection stronger.”

A couple from the dance walked by, the girl’s heels clicking on the concrete steps, and Benjamin waited until they’d passed. In her confusion, Janie was thinking about the fact that she’d been watching Rear Window in a movie theater with her parents while Benjamin was home making the powder in the kitchen. He’d said he had algebra to do. It wasn’t right. She and Benjamin were supposed to work together.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked. “About my father?”

The old gardener who had helped them decipher the Pharmacopoeia had told them that they shouldn’t assume things were too far-fetched to be true. She nodded. “I do.”

Relief transformed Benjamin’s face, and his whole body relaxed. “I was afraid you would think I was crazy.”

She smiled. “I didn’t say I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said. “I just said I believe you.”

He smiled back, and she realized how close they were sitting in the lamplight. His knee was almost touching hers. He leaned toward her. They hadn’t kissed since they’d arrived in Michigan. Her parents were always around at home, and at school she was supposed to be his cousin, and he’d been so unhappy and preoccupied. But now the steps were deserted, and his face drew near in the dark. She caught his familiar clean smell beneath her own borrowed perfume. She could feel his breath on her face, and the warmth radiating from his skin. Their lips were half an inch apart when the sound of a rattling engine broke the silence of the street, and then a beeping horn.

They both pulled away. A noisy, well-traveled brown Studebaker nosed up to the curb.

“Lord Figment!” her father called from the driver’s seat. “Lady Jane! Your chariot awaits!”

Chapter 3

In the dawn light, a body appeared on the island’s northern beach. Ned Maddox spotted it from his observation platform in a banyan tree. He scanned the horizon through binoculars, but saw no boat, so he studied the body again. Thin, possibly a boy. Legs rocking in the shallow waves. It might be a trick to lure him down, a booby-trapped corpse. He tugged and scratched at his beard, thinking.

Finally curiosity got the better of him, and he climbed down the banyan tree and hiked through the brush to the beach. A wave gave the body another rolling push up onto the sand. The boy wore simple cotton clothes, sodden with seawater. As Ned approached, he saw a long black braid tucked under the shoulder. He circled slowly.

The castaway didn’t leap up to attack him. He saw no wires or explosives. He grabbed a slender ankle and a wrist, rolled the body over, then jumped back, but nothing happened. It was a girl, Chinese, and her lips and eyelids were blue. He felt her wrist for a pulse. It was thready and weak. She started to cough and throw up seawater.

Still wary, he looked around, but no one appeared. So he picked the girl up and slung her over his shoulder. Water streamed down his legs as he carried her into the safety of the brush. His tiny i...

About this edition

• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0147516943
• ISBN 13: 9780147516947
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448
• Illustrator: Schoenherr Ian