Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Of course: she kept the damn hat to lure me here. Bait. Kay squeaks and rustles onto my back. I glance around; there’s nothing to use as a weapon. Just sticks. I pick up the thickest branch I can find, maybe five feet long and full of leaves as small as sequins. I drag it behind me with my left hand, keeping my right free.

  “Ksenia, dearling! Poppling, how our Prince weeps for such a naughty. And you will weep too, for your ungratefulness. Sneakitting up such wicked stairs!”

  I cut through the trees with my teeth grinding. “You know why I’m here.”

  “Ever so, I know. I can taste you on the air, Ksenia, as you are coming. Why put to the trouble of catching you, when I know you catch yourself? Again, and again, and again you will. Bound to what we own.”

  She’s up on her snarled-mist horse, towering over me. Her horrible, unbalanced grin gleams in the center of her face, but as I get closer it turns into a rictus, her upper lip hiked almost to her tiny nose. The mink on her chest sniffs dramatically, then starts a sustained, rumbling growl.

  I don’t wonder why. They’ve just scented it on me, that I’m free now.

  She swings the hat down, wobbles it in my direction, just waiting to yank it back out of my reach. I don’t bother.

  “You don’t take, Ksenia? But we wish you to have it, Prince and I! Your own pretty hat, to tipsy onto your pretty head. And be devoured by it, to where we may take of you at our leisure. You think, oh, you are not belonging to us now, you will not eat of our food again? Soon enough you will claw the crawlings from the walls, and eat what you do not see.” She pauses. “So will Alexandra.”

  My back goes tight; I should have guessed that was their plan, to starve Lexi into submission. “Just drop it, then.”

  “No, no. Perhaps it bounces, perhaps it rolls and flips about. Not for this world anymore, is your hat. Our world, it gives forth; it births and bubbles, goblins and green eyes. Here? One slip upsidesie, and it eats.”

  Right: Josh said to be careful to keep the hat brim down, over there, so that nothing would come out of it. Here, even as Unselle flicks my hat from hand to hand, I can tell that she’s being careful to hold it brim up. It makes a weird kind of sense, that it would have the opposite polarity here. That it would flow in a contrary direction.

  She proffers the hat again, smiling as sweetly as she can, which isn’t saying much. And I know I need it. Being eaten by my own hat is probably my last hope of rescuing the people I love.

  But something tells me, not like this. Not as Unselle’s docile pet, gratefully taking the tidbits she offers me, and nothing more. Nothing that they don’t want me to have. Even the mink is trying to look friendly, welcoming.

  I told Kay I would take the hat from Unselle, not let her hand it to me like a cookie.

  I reach for it, scowling furiously. Anything less would tip Unselle off. She grins and inclines her body, her lacy sleeve trailing past her sharp-clawed hand. Her skin looks phosphorescent, like an ice-colored corpse reflecting moonlight.

  Before my fingers quite touch the black brim, I bring the branch up and around with my left hand, swinging it as hard as I can into the back of Unselle’s neck.

  As far as I know, there’s no way to do real damage to these things. But you can take them by surprise. Unselle gives a startled yelp, but—damn her—she still keeps her grip on my hat. Off-balance as she already was, she pitches forward, scrabbling one-handed at her horse’s neck to keep from falling. And just like a real horse might do, it rears. For a moment I see it high above me, beams of sun piercing its heart, rainbow shimmer jetting out like blood.

  As it thuds back down, the hat flies free of Unselle’s grasp. She screams: a rusty, grating ribbon of noise, her body lurching off her horse’s side as she snatches at the air. The hat spins through the green twilight of the woods, still brim up but angling dangerously. I dart toward it with the full awareness that I’ll never reach it in time.

  If the hat gets knocked with the hole turned down as it lands, what will it do? Eat a crater in the world? Glut that awful parallel world with heaps of mulch and leaves and stone, until magma boils through and streams in fever-bright rivers through the streets?

  That would be fine with me. If it weren’t for the risk that Josh and Lexi would be buried alive at the core of it, that is. What’s wrong with me, that I didn’t think of that in time?

  The hat lands in a tangle of vines. Still brim up. Unselle is off her horse now, leaping for it in a smear of frills and crimson.

  My fingers are three inches ahead of hers, snatching my old black bowler out of the vines. She’s gibbering at me in a voice so warped and metallic I can’t begin to guess if it’s still human language. But I can identify the emotion gurgling through it.

  Fear. Ah, she doesn’t like it at all, that I took the hat from her by force. Whatever she was planning, I can tell I’ve messed it up.

  It’s the first time I’ve seen one of these creeps truly afraid, and a hard grin breaks through my face. Maybe I couldn’t burn Prince alive, but making Unselle suffer, even a fraction as much as I have?

  I’ll take it.

  “You blew it, didn’t you? The hat is going to take me exactly where you don’t want me to go.” I drive my stick into her neck so that she staggers back, hissing at me. She’s so light, so brittle. “I’ll be sure to tell Prince, if I see him.” And I bring the hat down on my head. I still half-expect to feel it touch down, but instead it just keeps coming: a black velvet rain that cancels everything else.

  I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what darkness is—from going up those stairs, say—but yeah, not really. Not like this. The void inside my bowler hat devours everything, gnaws even the memory of vision from my mind, and the self from inside my skin. I have a momentary sensation of my body as a rag with all the substance sucked out of it. And then the only definite thing I can still hold on to is Unselle’s scream coming from behind me, its terrible scraping-metal echoes.

  I touch down. My bowler hat is perched innocently on my head, like it’s through with devouring anyone.

  I’m in the same woods, but with the faintest glaze of late-summer gold, and the flowers all vanished. With a palpable sense that every leaf is altered, slightly tinged with something false and wrong. Even the birds’ warbling sounds thinned-out, tinny and frail. Still, on a superficial level, it’s nowhere near as horrible as Unselle was just threatening.

  If I’d let her hand me the hat, I’m pretty clear on what would have happened. I would have arrived in this world, but embedded in solid rock, or lost in a maze: someplace where I would have been helpless to find them.

  “Josh?” I yell. “Lexi?”

  I walk forward ten paces before I remember that I’m not on my own. “Hey, Kay?” I call—softly this time, because now it’s occurred to me that there might be things nearby I’d rather not put on alert. “Can you get any kind of read on where they are?”

  Kay rustles out of my vest and sort of pleats around my upper arm. I’m really having trouble getting used to it, her dry scratching against my skin. “Sennie? I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t like what?” I ask her, kind of roughly. “We have exactly one reason for being back in this place, okay? Liking anything is beside the point.”

  “But—bad things there, Sennie! Where—Josh and Lexi? I don’t like it for you.”

  “I don’t care,” I snap. “And that means you can’t either. If I can get them out, then that’s what I need out of life. Whatever happens to me—we both have to let go of giving a damn. Got it?”

  Kay is my creature. She better listen to me. She sighs with a shrill, theatrical wheeze. Then: “The gorge. Sennie? In the gorge.”

  Maybe I knew that, on some level. I can make out the rocks of the gorge’s rim through the broken darkness of the trunks, and then a shadowed fall into the depths. Violet-black, and it strikes me now that it’s unnaturally dim, considering how bright the day is.

  That’s what Unselle was talking about, then. The gorge i
s what they’re using as a prison, or maybe something deep inside it. Speaking of Unselle, I’d feel a little better if I knew where she was. I’m sure she’ll be coming after me, to fix her screwup while she still can.

  Doesn’t matter. None of it matters except what I do. In the real world, there’s a narrow path that winds down the side of the gorge, if you know where to look for it. I’m going to assume it’s here too. I walk over, and as I get closer the shadows down there seem to rise up, gurgling out of the gap in the earth. Once I reach the brink, I can see a few fitful gleams through the murk, but that’s it: not the creek bed that should be a dusty skein at the bottom, not the trees slanting at weird angles from the rocks. A few more minutes of scuffling through the undergrowth, and I catch sight of the path. Thin and slippery, kind of dicey even when you can see where you’re stepping.

  Ever since I was a kid, people have complained about me: that I’m cold and withdrawn and unfriendly. That I’m incapable of attachment—except to Josh, and then only in a pathologically extreme form. That I don’t have the first idea of what it means to truly love anyone. Mitch said that once, to Emma, not realizing I could hear him.

  Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t. Maybe being ready to die for my friend and my brother doesn’t count as love, not in the way that normal people think of it. I’m even ready to stay trapped here forever as Prince’s toy, if that’s the price of Josh and Lexi’s freedom, and to me that seems a lot worse than dying.

  Maybe real love is somehow better or gentler or simpler than what I can feel. But if it comes to that, if I never make it out of here again, I hope Josh and Lexi will think my version of love was close enough.

  If it counts to them, then that’s all I care about.

  “Kay?” I say. “We’re going down.”

  i’ll set my own criteria

  For the first few steps I can make out the path. It’s muddy and eroded on the right side, where it plunges into purplish vacancy. One wrong step, and as far as I can tell there will be nothing to break my fall. Whatever it is that fills the gorge, it’s thicker than ordinary darkness. More like a dense vapor, spindling around my legs, hiding the rocks behind heavy whorls. The consistency varies enough that I can distinguish the shapes it makes: lethargic spirals, eddies as sluggish as glue.

  My feet and ankles disappear inside it first. I go cautiously, testing the ground at each step before I shift my weight forward. Then there’s an unsettling moment where I’m in it past my waist, and my hands seem to float like sickly leaves on a violet stream. A few seconds after that and I can’t see anything at all, apart from the murk. I keep my left hand on the dripping wall, though now and then sharp chips in the rock gouge my skin. Kay still clings to my right bicep, sometimes rustling in a dead-leaf way when the wind hits her.

  “Josh?” I try calling; my voice doesn’t seem to go anywhere. “Lexi?” But I know it’s futile. I won’t find them until I reach the deepest recesses of this place.

  All at once my right foot skids out from under me; my body tilts off its axis. I let out a gagged shriek, sure I’m about to go down—then my left foot catches on something. I wind up splayed in the mud, my right leg kicking into emptiness, my body swinging on the lip between solid ground and the drop. I roll back toward the gorge’s wall with my heart hammering, and reach down to feel what saved me. My boot’s heel is snagged on a gnarled elbow of wood, probably an exposed root.

  I feel for my bowler hat. Luckily it’s wedged on pretty well and didn’t go hurtling into space.

  Fine. I get up and go on. In all this vaguely purple confusion, the sensory deprivation is starting to get to me. Every distant drip of water seems to tap down, muffled and dull, in every direction at once. Each breath keeps rasping long after it leaves my lungs, then goes on muttering in circles around my head.

  Soon it starts to sound like more than just breath.

  Kezzer, aren’t these just amazing? That was what Josh said when he held up the boots that just kept me from plunging into nothing. Shiny, pointy, slick-soled things with lots of weird little crisscrossing straps, not exactly meant for clambering around in sludge. Remember how I used to get so upset with you for stealing? But now it isn’t stealing anymore, because everything here exists just for us! Well, for us and the kids, anyway. Like, there are ten pairs of these boots piled up back here, but we’re their whole reason for being! Even the pairs that won’t fit! Every last thing in this mall. It all literally revolves around us, like we could blast all this crap into space and make it into a new ring. Like Saturn’s. Can you imagine?

  The price on the box was upward of a grand. Josh swung the boots by their straps, waiting for me to be impressed. I like them, I told him, but not right off. I let him wait, let him feel the grudge in my reply.

  I don’t mean to say that you don’t look awesome in your thrift-store stuff, Josh pursued. But it makes no sense, where we were before? That all the really cool things go to people who have nothing going on but money. Not to the people who could actually, like, bring out the magic in them. That is so totally unjust!

  I’m wavering into the unreality of our voices, is the problem. Logically, this whole conversation must be just a memory replaying in my head, but I’m hearing it. Josh’s warm tenor hovers like a breathy ache in my ears. “Baby?” I try, but I know—I think I know—that I’m talking to nothing.

  So that’s how we know this is a better world, Kezzer. Because everything you deserve, you can have now.

  The boots were beautiful, stunning even, like everything Josh had picked out for me. I did want them, with a sharpness like pain, but that only made me pissier. I’m not sure anybody deserves anything, I snapped. Except for maybe a kick in the ass.

  I almost slip again. My heart slams into my throat and I halt for a moment, leaning on the wall and breathing as deeply as I can. I can’t let these garbled, chattering memories distract me from the here and now: from step after step after step, placed precisely in the purple blindness.

  “Careful, Sennie!” Kay chirps. I almost forgot she’s still here.

  “Kay?” I say. “Maybe you should keep talking to me. To keep me, like, anchored to where we are? I’m starting to hear things.”

  And then I hear Josh sob. Tender and openhearted and totally without calculation. The way he used to sound when we were both kids, long before we ever came to this place. Back when we were both—more innocent than we are now, anyway, though I would have spit at anyone who’d called me that. The sob sounds both close by, so close it whirls around inside my skull, and terribly distant. It’s really only that, the lack of a location I can point to, that tells me it can’t be real.

  But knowing that isn’t enough to keep longing from whipping through my body. And it’s not enough for me to keep my mouth shut.

  “Josh?” I shout. “It’s me. I’m coming for you.”

  “Sennie,” Kay is babbling, right in my ear, “Sennie, talk about what? You don’t be listening to the not-things! Make you fall!”

  I totally get that, in theory. But in practice Josh is calling for me.

  Kezzer, Kezzer, you came! We’re so lost here, so alone. It’s like the air is tearing us apart. I know Lexi is here too, but I can’t even see her. Kezzer, please hurry!

  I hear him. Or maybe I know in my heart that the voice is too drifty, too scattered to be him. Maybe even the intonation is a shade off, like a decent imitation of the real thing, but with just a tiny clang of wrongness.

  Still, even the idea of Josh, of Lexi, lost and calling to me in this dimness: it fires through my body in percussive blasts. I don’t make a decision to run. I can’t see a damned thing and I’m on a slippery, nine-inch-wide path adjacent to a precipitous drop. Charging blindly into purple-smeared nothing would be too idiotic to contemplate.

  I don’t decide to run, because I’m already doing it.

  “Sennie, Sennie, stop!” Kay is squeaking. “Nice and slow, no hurry, no hurry at all!”

  I ignore her, like I ignore the pai
n where that knife was lodged in my hip. I do have the sense, at least, to keep my left hand skimming along the wall, so that I don’t just veer clear off the path. But that doesn’t stop the loose, greasy mud from catching me in a long forward slide, horribly fast. My fingertips scrape over the wet stone, but there’s nothing to grab, no way to stop myself. I can barely focus on what’s happening, though, because I still hear Josh.

  Kezzer, I can think now. But they’ll steal me from myself again, soon. Please come!

  Steal me from myself. Isn’t that pretty much what I said to my changeling, up in our forbidden second story? And Prince and them, they always seemed to hear everything we said in that house.

  It’s almost enough to halt the momentum driving me, because I can’t help realizing: it’s not Josh at all. Josh probably didn’t overhear that conversation, and even if he did, he wouldn’t swipe the words out of my mouth that way. He has his problems, he’s done some messed-up things. Whatever. But he’s not some damned parrot.

  The realization would be enough to stop me. At least make me think about what I’m doing. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m already falling.

  I can’t tell if I missed the path, or if it just vanished from under me. All I know is that I’m wheeling in midair—not crashing down a steep and ragged slope, which is what I would have expected. I feel my hat go flying off my head and grab for it at random, but I miss it. It seemed important to hold on to it—it was the most powerful thing I had—but there’s nothing I can do.

  I should be terrified, but I’m not, really. I don’t seem to be falling that quickly, and I have time to wonder if the unreality of this place means that we can’t actually die here either. It’s an experiment I haven’t tried, though I won’t pretend I didn’t think about it, back when it seemed like the only possible way to escape. I just couldn’t do that to Josh.

  That’s the real reason I don’t think this fall will kill me. Death is nowhere near cruel enough to keep Prince happy.