The Chaos Curse

by Sayantani DasGupta

  “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!” shrieked Tuni, as if out of habit. But then, a second later, the bird remembered that he knew how to fly, and just flapped his wings alongside us as the rest of us fell like stones.

  Tiktiki One, for its part, was pretty quiet on the way down, but Bunty and I pretty much yelled like the world was coming to an end. Which, for all we knew, it was.

  We fell for so long, I soon felt like maybe we’d be falling forever. We fell past rakkhosh masks and ancient paintings of snakes on the dirt walls. We fell past floating lemonade stalls and self-twirling jump ropes and skateboards without wheels whizzing by through the air. We dropped past giant billboards advertising romantic films with giant, colorful song-and-dance numbers. We fell past books that were turning their own pages, pirates with shiny swords, and a blinking solar system night-light that looked a lot like the one I’d destroyed recently in a fight with Neel’s mom, the Rakkhoshi Rani. We fell past desert fortresses and idyllic castles, blond Princess Pretty Pants™ dolls and brown-skinned ones too. We fell past stories that were familiar, some old and some brand-new. We also fell past butterflies of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Butterflies so bright and magical, they lit up everything around them.

  I started to doubt that we’d ever make it to Parsippany at this rate. At one point, I stopped being terrified and just got used to the feeling of being out of control and falling like some kind of unhinged-from-the-sky star.

  But finally, we landed with a hard thunk on the floor of the rabbit hole. “Ouch!” I complained. The floor wasn’t soft dirt, like I’d anticipated, but covered in hard black-and-white tiles.

  “Let’s not do that again,” squawked Tuni.

  “What are you complaining about? You just flew!” I rubbed my aching side.

  Bunty was running a paw over an ear, and moaning a little. Tiktiki One just sat there, blinking and flicking its tongue so long and retracting it so fast, it kept hitting itself in the eyeball like it had before. I took this to mean it was upset.

  “Do we get to have a tea party with the white rabbit now?” I wondered, looking around at the vaguely familiar surroundings—the chairs and tables hanging from the walls of the tunnel.

  “Nope, we’re in a different part of the story.” Tuni pointed a wing. In front of us were three tiny doors, far too small to get through in our present size. Pointing at the doors were all sorts of arrows on stands. All the arrows said the same thing: TO NEW JERSEY.

  “Well, that’s not how it goes,” I murmured. In the original tale, the girl Alice was not on her way to Jersey, and besides, she only had to deal with one tiny door. How was I supposed to deal with three?

  I stared at the three teeny-tiny doors in the wall. The first was brown-red, like earth, with intricate white alpona all over it—in the shapes of leaves and mangoes and vines. The second one was bright blue like the sea with the shapes of block-print fish stamped all around it. The third door was green like the leaves on trees with a painting in the center of two angry-looking peacocks. The strange thing was that the peacocks seemed to be dancing over an old-fashioned record player, the kind people had to crank before the music came out through an attached funnel-thing. Above the first door was a sign that read:

  A second sign, above the second door, read:

  And then the third sign read:

  “Okay, that’s not comforting,” I said. “Besides being rude.”

  “That third one doesn’t even rhyme,” Tuntuni sniffed.

  “Perhaps we should attempt to turn the doorknobs regardless,” Bunty said.

  It was hard to do, since they were so small. Neither Bunty nor I could grab on to the tiny doorknobs, but when Tuni tried to turn them with his beak, they didn’t move at all.

  “Locked, all of them!” announced the little yellow bird, landing on one of the road-sign arrows in an overly dramatic way. “I told you, we’re never getting to New Jersey, no matter what these arrows say. Besides which, we’re probably going to die.”

  “Not like we could have fit through them if they were open anyway,” I replied, studying the signs again. “So where are the three keys the poem’s talking about?”

  “A pointless distraction! It’s just a trick to keep us from realizing the fact that we’re going starve to death in this room!” Tuntuni grabbed at his throat with his wings and gasped dramatically. “How long have we been down here anyway? How long since we’ve eaten? A week? A month? Not a year? The days are blending into each other! I have no sense of time anymore!”

  I patted the panicky bird on his feathered head. “We’ve been down here about five minutes, dude.”

  Bunty ignored Tuni and instead turned their big head toward me. “There is of course the possibility of there being a smallness potion somewhere in this room. That would be narratively consistent with the original tale.”

  Tiktiki One just sat there wetly on the tile floor, swiveling its eyes and sticking out its tongue. Wait a minute, the lizard was actually sticking out its tongue at something! Something important!

  “Thanks, Tiktiki!” I held up a small purple bottle that the gecko had pointed out. In broad, elaborate handwriting, it said Slug Me! “This must be the smallness potion!”

  “Slug? A rather uncouth turn of phrase!” sniffed Bunty. “Bit of a lowbrow wormhole, this.”

  “Give it here! Give it here!” shouted Tuni. “I’m about to die of dehydration!”

  “Wait, Tuni!” I snatched the bottle back from the frantic bird. “What if it doesn’t work the way we want it to?”

  “What choice do we have?” argued Bunty. “You do want to make it through the wormhole to New Jersey, don’t you?”

  “You’re right.” I uncorked the bottle, wrinkling my nose at the smell. “Well, here goes nothing!” I said, and took a quick gulp before passing the bottle on to Tuni, Tiktiki One, and, finally, the tiger.

  Only, I was right. The magic potion didn’t exactly work the way I was expecting. Because, even though I grew smaller, but still me-shaped, as soon as they drank from the bottle, the tiger, bird, and lizard transformed into small gold keys that clattered noisily onto the tile floor.

  “Whoa! What the … ?” I let out a frustrated breath. “Bunty! I told you it might not work right!”

  The key that used to be Bunty said nothing in reply. And neither did the other keys. Because of course they couldn’t in their current state. Lacking mouths and whatnot.

  “Well, I did ask for three keys, I guess,” I sighed.

  The three keys on the floor bounced and jiggled, as if the animals were impatient for me to get going with solving the riddle. I picked them up in my hands and saw that one had a little tiger shape on the top, the other a little bird shape, and the third a little lizard shape. “Okay, guys, any of you got any bright ideas about how I’m supposed to solve this one now?”

  When the keys just lay there in my palm, I took it for a no. “All right, I guess I’m on my own, then.”

  I reread the signs above the doors yet again. Well, at least the first one. The second two were downright insulting, and I didn’t really need the negativity right now.

  “Okay, so I’ve just got to figure out how many tries max I’d need to find the right key for each of the doors,” I murmured to myself, looking carefully at each key and then each keyhole. But there weren’t any identifying marks on the doors, like little tiger-, bird-, and lizard-shaped keyholes. Noooo, that would be way too easy.

  “Is it nine?” I wondered. That seemed like it should be the answer, three keys times three doors equaling nine. But something didn’t seem right. What was it? I took a big breath, trying to concentrate on the problem again. I supposed I could just try the keys in the locks and see. But something felt really off. And I’d been in bad situations enough times lately to know to trust my feelings. When the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, I decided to leave aside the riddle a second and take a quick glance around the room.

  That’s when I noticed something more than a litt
le alarming. The room at the bottom of the rabbit hole felt way smaller than it had been before. How was that possible? I looked to the left and right, all around me, but everything looked the same. Then I looked up.

  Oh no. Where there had been a long, open tunnel stretching out above me, now there was a black-and-white-tiled roof that matched the floor. Only, it wasn’t at normal ceiling level but looming super close. When had that happened? And wait, was the ceiling actually moving—edging down even more toward me by the second? I remembered now how the sign on the third door had talked about a squishy death. The keys in my palm rattled and shook, as if in warning. Or maybe they were just scared. Well, them and me both.

  “Tuni, you were right, we are gonna die down here!” I moaned.

  I ran up to the first door, trying the tiger key. It didn’t open. Then I tried the tiger key in the second door, and it didn’t open either. The other two keys rattled in my hand, heating up to such a degree they almost burned. Oh no, the ceiling had already moved down a bunch more. Now there was barely enough room for me to raise my arm straight above my head. I hunched down, starting to breathe faster in my panic. Oh, this was really not good. I felt a little bit like Lola Morgana in that awful scene in Star Travels when she and her team are inside the trash compactor when it starts up, almost squishing them to death. And I didn’t have a robot on walkie-talkie I could call. I didn’t even have a Tiktiki cell phone anymore since the lizard had been turned into a magical key.

  Think, Kiran, think, I told myself, trying to ignore the rapidly squishifying room size. Okay, okay. If the tiger key didn’t work in either the brown-red door or the blue door, it was sure to work in the green door. So that was two tries for the first key.

  I jumped as the ceiling hit my head. Ouch! I bent over more, my back aching and vision blurring with the panicky sweat dripping into my eyes. Hurry, hurry, I told myself. The keys in my hands were boiling hot now, almost jumping out of my palm. I had to think faster. I tried to take deep breaths, forcing myself to not freak out. But, oh man, did every cell in my body want to just mutiny and run out of my body, screaming in panic.

  Breathe, Kiran! Breathe! I thought of Ma, Baba, and Zuzu waiting for me in New Jersey. I thought of Neel, Mati, and Naya relying on me to get to Lal. I thought of the animal keys in my hands, and of the sweet Prince Lalkamal, who’d never get rescued if I failed now. And I thought of Sesha, who was up to no good yet again. I had to make it home, I had to rescue Lal, and I had to return and stop Sesha. As the ceiling closed down even more, I took to my knees, kneeling before the three locked doors of the magical wormhole.

  My brain was going a million miles an hour. Okay, so if the tiger key fit the green door, then the bird key was either going to fit the brown-red or blue door. I’d just need one try to figure that out. Two plus one equaled three tries.

  The ceiling was almost down on me now. I went from my knees into a totally crouched-down position, my hands braced above my head. But I had the solution. I’d just have one key left and one door left, so that was an obvious answer. The lizard fit the last remaining door. No tries necessary.

  “Three tries!” I yelled to the room. “I’d need three tries max in any situation to figure out which of the three keys fit which of the three doors!”

  “Please do not mumble, young person!” said a disembodied voice from who knows where. “Please speak clearly and distinctly into the Victrola to halt your imminent death!”

  “The what?” I yelled. What in the heck was a Victrola? The ceiling was so low now I was on all fours, crawling around like a baby. A few more seconds and I’d be squished up like all these smooshed-together story threads.

  I looked desperately around the room, my eyes lighting on the third door and the record player thing below the dancing peacocks. Whereas it had just been a flat painting a few minutes before, it kind of popped out three-dimensionally now. Of course! A Victrola was what people called those old-fashioned windup record players!

  I crawled over to the green door, almost needing to be down on my belly because of the rapidly moving ceiling. “Three tries!” I yelled as loudly as I could into the Victrola’s funnel. “I would need three tries to figure out which of the three keys fit which of the three doors!”

  With a thudding screech, the ceiling stopped moving. And then it just up and disappeared, revealing the stretching tunnel again above my head. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I’d gotten it right! And not gotten squished to a horrible, pancake-like death! Then, before my eyes, the three tiny doors morphed into just one and the three keys changed back into the animals they were originally, just all tiny-sized, like me.

  “Well done, Princess,” said Bunty the tiger. “A scholarly achievement!”

  “I honestly didn’t think you’d be able to solve it,” said Tuni. “I was sure that was it!”

  “I was too there for a sec,” I said dryly, even as the little yellow bird flew toward the closed door and grabbed the doorknob with his beak. It opened easily. On the other side was a humming darkness full of promise.

  Tiktiki One just stuck out its tongue and blinked its giant round eyes.

  I put the lizard and bird on either of my shoulders. Bunty knelt down, and I got up on the tiger’s muscular striped back.

  “Let’s go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table …” said Bunty in a deep, poetic voice.

  “Um, could we just go like awake people instead?” I asked, wrinkling my nose at the thought.

  “Definitively!” laughed Bunty. “Let us vamoose!”

  “To New Jersey!” I cried, my fist in the air.

  “To New Jersey!” cried the tiger and bird as we leaped through the one small door and out into the ripped fabric of space-time.

  The thing about interdimensional travel that I’ve come to realize is that it’s way unpredictable. One minute I was on a tiger’s back with my bird and lizard friends, leaping through a wormhole in space-time, and the next moment, I was alone, freezing my butt off on the top branch of a giant tree in Parsippany. At least I was me-sized again.

  When I’d left the Kingdom Beyond, it was blazing summer. I’d entirely forgotten it was February in New Jersey. Which meant, when I landed in the big tree in front of my next-door neighbor Jovi’s house, the branches weren’t just covered in snow, but ice. My teeth were chattering, and within a few seconds, I was soaking wet. My summer salwar kameez from the Kingdom Beyond wasn’t exactly the warmest winter-weather wear.

  I teetered there, looking out at the snowy universe around me—Jovi’s house at the bend in the road, and my own house right next door. This had been what my moon mother had said to me, about Lal being in a tree at the bend in the road, and something about my enemy’s enemy being my friend. I sniffled, my teeth chattering, even as I realized this had to be where Lal had been held captive by that shape-shifting ghost. Even if I had no idea where the animals were, the intergalactic wormhole had somehow deposited me in the exact place I needed to be. I gave my ruby-red boots a little tap of appreciation. Okay, but how to get the trapped prince out?

  “Lal?” I called. “Lal, are you in here somewhere?”

  Nothing. I licked my numb lips and raised my voice. “Lal? Where are you?”

  Again, nothing. How was I supposed to know if this was the right tree, and even if it was, if he was in here? “Prince Lalkamal!” I shouted, knocking at the icy trunk with numb fingers. This was silly. I was getting nowhere, plus probably getting pneumonia. I needed some serious guidance. Why had I not asked my moon mother how I was supposed to get Lal out of the tree once I got to Parsippany? Wait, that was right, I had the multiverse’s most useful textbook to guide me!

  But when I reached toward my backpack to pull out my copy of Professor K. P. Das’s The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot, Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Codes, my bow and quiver got me off-balance. I struggled to right myself, but soon realized my weapons were actually hooked onto a
frosty branch. When I tried with a swing to get them free, I slipped right off the branch on which I was sitting!

  “Whoa!” I yelled as I crashed down, knocking down snow as I went. I scrambled for a hold as branch after branch whipped past my face, scratching me, and others slammed painfully into my shoulder, leg, chin, and hand.

  I would have kept falling too, maybe down into a broken pile of bones on the ground, had the boy not caught me. His warm hand gripped my frozen one, pulling me easily out of my fall and onto the relative safety of the cold tree branch he was sitting on.

  “Hey there, girl, slow your roll!” said a voice that sounded so smooth and confident, I wondered for a minute if I’d found Lal. But it wasn’t my old friend at all. It was someone I’d never seen before.

  It was a boy of strange handsomeness, with ice-blond hair peeking out from under his ski hat and clear-framed glasses like crystal over blue-blue eyes. He wasn’t just handsome; he was perfect—a sculpture out of a museum. I was reminded of the celebrities Zuzu and I liked to look up on websites like Cute Boys of the Ancient World. (I mean who doesn’t have a sweet tooth for ancient eye candy?)

  “Whoareyou?” I mumbled, my lips too numb to form the question right. My cheek prickled where I’d cut myself in a couple of places on branches.

  “Hey! Hey! Hold up. You’re bleeding, darlin’!” In a flash, the boy had his bright green scarf off and was dabbing my cheek with it. I realized his matching ski hat had words stitched on it in red letters. The hat read, weirdly enough, Kill the Chaos.

  “Thanks,” I said, grateful but a little worried about whether I should be talking to a strange boy like this. Plus, what the heck was he doing sitting in a tree in Jovi’s yard? Then I looked more closely at him. His blond good looks and accent made me wonder if maybe he was a cousin of Jovi’s visiting from Norway or something. Maybe that’s why he looked so comfortable sitting in this frozen tree. It was way cold up in those countries, wasn’t it? Oh, why had Tuni, Bunty, and Tiktiki One disappeared right when I needed backup? “Who’re you?”