Messenger of Fear Read Free Page A

and what are you?”
    “I am . . . ,” he began, then hesitated, considered, and again showed that slight lessening in the grim lines of his face. “I am the messenger.”
    “Messenger? What’s your message, showing me this poor dead girl? I never wanted to see that. I don’t want it in my head. Is that your message? Showing me this?”
    “My message?” He seemed almost surprised by the question. “My message? My message is that a price must be paid. A price paid with terror.”
    I reached to grab him angrily, but he moved easily out of range. I had wanted to grab him by the throat, though I had instead reached for his arm. It was not that I blamed him for what I was now enduring, it was rather that I simply needed to hurt someone, something, because of what I had seen, and what I had felt since waking to find myself in the mist. It was like an acid inside of me, churning and burning me from the inside.
    I wanted to kick something, to shout, to throw things, to scream and then to cry.
    To save that poor girl.
    To wipe the memory from my mind.
    “You’re the messenger?” I asked in a shrill, nasty, mocking voice. “And your message is to be afraid?”
    He was unmoved by my emotion. . . . No, that’s not quite right. It was more accurate to say that he was not taken aback. He was not unmoved, he was . . . pleased. Reassured?
    “Yes, Mara,” he said with a sense of finality, as though now we could begin to understand each other, though I yet understood nothing. “I am the messenger. The Messenger of Fear.”
    It would be a long time before I came to know him by any other name.
    Calmer now, having released some of my boiling anger and worry, I turned my unwilling eyes back to Samantha Early. Her life’s blood was running out, soaking into the carpet.
    “Why did she do it?” I asked.
    “We will see,” Messenger said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ..................................................................

    SAMANTHA EARLY LOOKS AT THE CLOTHES hanging in her closet. She clenches her fists. The veins on her forearms stand out. Her body seems to vibrate with tension.
    I see this. It is happening. I can neither look away nor remain indifferent. Messenger has shown me the outcome, so I cannot tell myself that all I am witnessing is teen angst.
    By means I can neither explain nor ignore, I know her thoughts. I know what she feels as she gazes, frightened, frightened by nothing but a closetful of clothing.
    What would not draw ridicule? That is the question she asks herself. She dresses defensively: What will avoid giving anyone an excuse to ridicule? It should have been easy, getting dressed. It should have been as simple as what top goes with which jeans or shorts or skirt, no, no, not skirt.
    No, not skirt. She remembers that day when she tripped in a skirt, when she’d sprawled out across the hallway, finger still stuck in the loop of her locker’s combo lock, books strewn out into the path of oncoming students, who stepped aside indifferently or made a show of it, made a thing of it and laughed.
    Spazmantha.
    Not even original, that. She’d first heard Spazmantha when she was eleven.
    It shouldn’t bother her. She knows that. Her mother has told her that. Her shrink has told her that. Actually, the shrink said, “You have bigger issues than that to concern yourself with.”
    How do I know this? How am I seeing this? This dream is a very strange movie in which I watch Samantha and watch her thoughts at the same time.
    The shrink’s bigger issue was obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD for short. Everyone threw that term around like it was nothing, like it was cute, OCD. “Yeah, I’m a little OCD? Hah hah.” It wasn’t cute, and Samantha did not have a little of it.
    Samantha goes to the bathroom and washes her hands. She uses Cetaphil soap because it’s mild, but she uses a brush as well, a wooden-handled bristle brush. First, the hot water. Then the