Page 56 of The Luminaries
There’s a general sketch of one at the top that is also in her xeroxed Compendium, and below, a more detailed anatomical breakdown. Normally, that’s what Winnie would focus on—trying to memorize it so she can reproduce it later. This time, though, her attention homes in on the orange Post-its stuck all over the page.
Winnie’s teeth start clicking.Unaffected by sunlight,one note reads.Bites—nontransmissible,reads another.No sentience in wolf form?reads a third. And last, in large all caps:SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY?
Winnie has no idea what that last Post-it might mean. The others, though, are pretty self-explanatory. They also make it clear Mario has known of a werewolf in the forest for a long time. But then why did he act like Winnie’s theory on Thursday was so far-fetched? She would be angry with him if she weren’t so confused—and so worried about the Whisperer.
That thought prompts Winnie to get moving again. She scribbles a quick note on Mario’s desk, then heads back into the rain.
Winnie is more wet than she knew was physically possible by the time she reaches the Friday estate. It’s raining hellions and banshees as she abandons her bike by the house’s side door. She reaches for the doorbell, hoping somewhat desperately that it has been repaired in the last four years.
It has. The dinging echoes inside the empty house beyond. Rain patters down, but she is protected by a slight overhang from the roof. This doorleads into a mudroom with old carpet that has gone from red to maroon to almost earthlike brown in the decade that Winnie has been coming here.
She is absolutely freezing when Jay finally appears at the door.
He looks, as per usual, like utter crap. His clothes are rumpled, and his jeans are torn over the left knee. His hair is at all angles, and the bags under his eyes have bags. He looks like he might vomit.
“You’re supposed to be at school,” Winnie snaps. She shoves inside, checking him with her shoulder. He absolutely stinks of stale cigarettes.
“Ow.” He grips at his forehead.
Which prompts Winnie to slam the door behind her. It reverberates across the house.
And Jay really looks like he might puke now. He has to lean against the doorframe, one hand over his face while his fingers dig into the wood. The rain beats against the windows on the mudroom, and out of habit, Winnie pulls off her shoes.
“Is your aunt home?” She flings one sopping sneaker to the floor. Then the second. “I need to see her.”
“Yeah,” Jay says, “she’s here.” If he adds anything more, Winnie doesn’t hear it. She is already stomping into the house on wet socks.
The kitchen opens up before her, enormous and almost never used except for during Friday clan dinners. Winnie has always thought it sad that only Jay and Lizzy live in this vast old home with its burned-out tower. The clan estates were built forfamilies,but with Lizzy being solo and Jay’s parents being dead, there’s no “family” to fill the halls. There are barely even enough clan members, since the Fridays are so small.
Winnie leaves the kitchen via a narrow hall to the rickety back stairwell that leads to the other floors. There’s a main staircase that leads up, but since only Jay and Lizzy live here year-round, they usually use this set of stairs that spirals upward on wood that loves to groan.
Winnie tromps up, the dark panel walls lit only by gray light filtering in through tall windows that span all the way from the bottom floor to the top. Rain flecks against the glass with the steady beat of a typewriter.
Winnie reaches the second floor, amazed by how much something can change, and also how little. She’d felt that at the Wednesday estate; she feels it a hundred times more now. Maybe because the Wednesday estate wasspecial—a reward that she only ever got to experience on those lucky nights of clan dinner. The Friday estate, though, was where she and Jay and Erica spent many a weekend, many an afternoon. If Winnie turns left right now, she will find Jay’s bedroom at the end of the hall. And if she goes right, she will reach Lizzy’s office, Lizzy’s laboratory, and after that, Lizzy’s bedroom.
It surprises Winnie how much she really wants to turn left.
But she doesn’t turn left, and instead she aims right for Lizzy’s lab and the familiar sound of tapping metal and a whooshing welding flame. When Winnie finally enters what used to be a sprawling living room, she finds Lizzy’s face encased in a protective shield over a lab table.
Lizzy glances up from a metal tripod. Then looks back down. Then snaps up her head again and the flame in her blowtorch winks off.
A few seconds pass, Lizzy clearly taking in Winnie and Winnie taking in the lab.
It looks like it used to but somehow even more cluttered than before, and the glass doors that open onto a balcony over the back garden (or what remains of it) have clearly not seen a bottle of Windex in several months. Possibly years. The mismatched shelves are laden with books, papers, and more beakers and vials than Lizzy can possibly ever need—especially since chemistry isn’t her specialty.
She’s an engineer, electric, mechanical, even a little software, as evidenced by the line of computers on the left wall that could be a museum display titled “Computers of the Last Three Decades.”
Lizzy lifts her face shield. She is a tall woman with broad shoulders and a strong frame, all beneath a devastatingly gorgeous face. Honey eyes and golden hair always tied in a set of braids around her head give her the look of a Scandinavian princess. She wears her usual gray coveralls.
“Wednesday Winona Wednesday,” Lizzy says.
And Winnie inwardly cringes at the use of her full name. Her Mom’s idea of “loyalty” is truly cruel. Outwardly, she sets her jaw and strides across the room.
“I can’t believe you’re in my lab.” Lizzy sets down her blowtorch. “And good lord, girl, you are soaking wet. You must be freezing. Let me get you something to wear—”
Winnie flings up a hand. “I need to talk.” And without waiting for an acknowledgment, she launches into her story. Yes, sheisfreezing, and she is definitely dripping water onto the lab floor, but she can’t care about that until someone—literallyanyone—has listened to her story about the Whisperer.
She tells the tale with more clarity than she used in her panicked ramblings for Aunt Rachel, though she still finds it impossible to actually describe what she saw. Words are even more limiting than her sketches. “Imagine a broken radio inside a car exhaust. Or… or a sledgehammer at the bottom of the sea. And then put a stained-glass window over it. That’s what it was like, Lizzy.”
