She takes the candle with her when she goes, so I’m in darkness again.
Chapter 24
I’m in Zalkenbourg, underground, waiting for some scary dude named Siegfried, with no cloak. I’m a dead man, and I’m not even a man yet. I’m just a kid. I think of every regret I have in the world, not saying good-bye to my mother, lying to Meg, going on this dangerous quest at all.
I hear noises, scratching. Is it Sieglinde or Siegfried? No. It’s just rats. And not the helpful, talking kind either. The kind with rabies.
I’m. So. Dead.
The place smells like dirt and rot. I feel the air being sucked from my lungs, and with the air I have left, I start praying, praying for my mother to be okay, for her to survive without me.
If I die here, no one will ever know what happened to me. I’ll be like the used-to-bes, people who vanished without a trace.
I step on something small. Probably a bug. But maybe, just maybe it’s the matchbook Sieglinde had.
I fall to my knees, looking for it. Light would be good. I don’t find a match, though. I feel in my pocket on the impossible chance I have anything that will help me, but all I find is a ring. Meg’s ring. Regret surges through my veins. I’ll never give Meg’s ring back.
That time I got locked in the storage closet, I panicked. I heard the door click locked behind me, and immediately, I felt my lungs collapsing, like now. I couldn’t even scream, so I passed out in sheer terror. My mother found me an hour later. Meg had told her that sometimes, when we played hide-and-seek, I hid in that closet. She’d saved my life.
I’ll never see Meg again.
I slide the ring onto my finger, remembering her giving it to me, for luck. I could use some luck now. I continue feeling around the room. Maybe there’s a trapdoor I’m not seeing. Or maybe I’m not really underground, and there are windows. Maybe.
“Hey, where am I?”
I freeze at the voice. She’s back. The witch.
“I don’t know where you are.” I try to keep my voice even. Maybe Siegfried’s not with her. “But if you give me back my cloak, I’ll—”
“Johnny?”
“Of course it’s Johnny. You know it’s—”
“Johnny, where are we? How’d we get here?”
The voice in the darkness doesn’t sound like Sieglinde’s anymore. Instead, it sounds exactly like the voice I want to hear more than any other. It sounds like Meg.
Which means it’s all a lie. Maybe I’ve passed out again, and my airless brain is playing tricks on me. Or maybe the witch is trying a new voice.
Or maybe I’m dead.
“Johnny?” Meg’s voice says.
“Stop it. You can’t make me believe it’s Meg.”
“But it is Meg.” The voice in the darkness comes closer. I shove at her, push her away. “Ow! Who else would it be?”
I flail my arms in the air, but she knows not to come close again.
“Johnny?” she says in the distance. “Who do you think it is?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe some ugly old crone who’s getting her son, Siegfried, to come kill me?”
“What?” She laughs, and it sounds just like Meg’s laugh. But Sieglinde has fooled me before. “How’d you get into this mess, Johnny? I knew when I gave you the ring, you’d probably need it. I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
“What? What ring? How’d you know about the ring?”
“I’m the one who gave it to you, dummy. Oh, I said it was for luck. But really, I knew you’d get in a jam sometime, looking for that frog prince. And then, you’d need my help.”
The room, which felt cold before, is hot now, closing in on me in all directions.
“Ha! That proves you’re not Meg. Meg didn’t know about the frog prince. I told her I was looking for my father.”
“Who won the Alabama lottery?”
“Yes, who . . .” I stop. “How’d you know about that?”
“Because I’m Meg. That’s what you told me. And I knew you were lying because there’s no lottery in Alabama. My aunt lives there, and they vote on it every few years, but it never passes. Some people drive to Florida to buy a ticket, but you said he didn’t do that. You said he won the Alabama lottery.”
They’ve been watching me, I realize. Watching me with Meg, watching me talk to my mother. Maybe even with Victoriana. That explains the frog at the bed-and-breakfast. The witch was there too. She created the frog, or the illusion of him.
“Why did you lie?” she says, still using Meg’s voice.
And it’s Meg’s voice that makes me respond, makes me have to respond. “I had to lie. I couldn’t tell Meg I was looking for the frog so I could—”
“Flirt with the princess? Why couldn’t you tell Meg that, Johnny?”
“Because it . . . I don’t need to explain this to you.”
“Because it would have hurt her feelings, right? Because she’s so ugly you know no one will ever look at her the way you look at Victoriana?”
“No! That’s not it. You’re pretty. I mean, Meg is. I mean . . .” I don’t know what I mean. I’m confused from the tightness, the lack of oxygen to my brain, the walls closing in. “Can you please just leave me? Isn’t it enough that you’ve lured me here, that you’re waiting for some guy named Siegfried to come smash my head in, without having to pretend you’re Meg, my best friend in the world?”
“I am Meg.”
“Fine. Prove it. Tell me something only Meg would know.”
“Okay.” The voice is small in the darkness.
“And it can’t be something from the past few weeks, since Victoriana checked in.”
“All right.” A pause. She’s thinking, and for a moment, I let myself hope. What if it is Meg? What if she’s here? If she could help me get out? Meg always knows what to do.
“I thought of something,” Meg’s voice says.
“What?”
“Imelda Marcos was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t have three thousand pairs of shoes. I had one thousand sixty.’”
Imelda Marcos. She was the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of the Philippines, long before I was born. The reason I know about her was she owned more than a thousand pairs of shoes.
Meg found that quote when we first started collecting them. She got it off a website. No one else I know would have a clue who Imelda Marcos is.
“Meg!”
“Yeah, dummy. It’s me.”
“But how’d you get here?” Even as I say it, relief washes over me.
“The ring I gave you, the opal ring. It’s magical.”
“Magical?” At one time, this would have surprised me. Not now.
“My grandmother on the Murphy side was a witch. She’s the one who gave me the ring. She used to make me carry it when I was little. She told me, ‘If you get lost, Meggie girl, just put it on your finger.’ Its power is that it makes the person who gave it to you come wherever you are.”
“But you don’t have any powers? I was hoping maybe you could get me out of here, or at least make some light so I can escape. Some guy named Siegfried’s coming to kill me.”