by Iva Viddal
She glowered at the man with two of her eyes. The third swiveled in its socket, daring the people of Small Hours to argue with her, and then it settled once again upon Nerma with a twitch of its eyelid.
The man dared to speak again. “Still, Madam Midwife, what if she were to come to Diviner’s Ditch and meet the Oracle. Mayhap she has a Purpose what none of us can see.”
Doctor Mapple stepped forward. “Perhaps, Jon. We thank you for the suggestion.”
The man replaced his cap and sat back down.
“If there are no other concerns—” Doctor Mapple paused, but no one spoke. “—then we may conclude this meeting.”
The hall filled with a thundering music, and Nerma started. She looked about for its source and realized that it emanated from the mouths of some of the villagers. Like a church organ that hadn’t been tuned in years, their voices rose and mixed, creating a haunting melody that shook the benches and walls and made the hairs on the back of Nerma’s neck stand up.
Around her, the townspeople bowed their heads and began to sing in unison:
O! His mighty tools have wrought the wretched,
Twisted round to make them right.
O! Eyes and teeth and limbs decrepit,
Give’d and taken for his sight.
Cast of metal, bone, and wood,
Purpose fleshes out the night!
The eerie music continued to pour from the mouths of the human instruments, and the villagers began a second verse, their heads still low.
Nerma, however, was no longer listening to the words of the song. She backed away slowly, one foot behind the other, until she reached the other side of the dais. Quickly, sure that no one was looking, she sprinted for an arch that led into a hark hallway. She ducked into the shadows, breathless. She needed to find a way out of the building without drawing attention to herself.
On tiptoe, she felt her way along the unlit wall of the hallway, moving as fast as she dared. She had only made it twenty feet or so when the music ended, and a confused rumble emerged from the main hall. She moved faster, blindly feeling her way around bulky shapes that she hoped were tables and chairs and not people—or monsters—lying in wait.
She rounded a corner, and a window loomed into view, the night sky outlined faintly against the blackness of the abbey. Wondering how she could break the glass and climb through the window without being hurt or heard, she hurried forward. Her hands grazed a low ledge and she pulled herself up onto it. The glass of the window felt thick and unbreakable to her mittened hands, but she pulled her right arm back, curled her hand into a small fist, and drove it forward.
Something grabbed her wrist before it hit the glass.
“Stop,” whispered a voice close to her ear.
An arm coiled around her waist, and before she could react, Nerma was swept upward, into the dark recesses of the domed ceiling.
9
A Fly in a Trap
October tried to hide his fear, but he knew he was failing. His heart was still racing, and every time he tried to speak, he could only stammer unintelligibly.
He couldn’t believe he had touched a Stranger, had carried her and even held her hand as they ran through the streets of Small Hours. And now here she was, in his apartment.
He wiped the cold sweat from his lip.
There was no reason to be afraid, not really. After all, the Stranger was pitifully helpless. She had spent the past twenty minutes crying quietly into her strange, normal-fingered hands.
And yet, he knew she must be quite dangerous. Doctor Leech and Doctor Mapple would never have warned Small Hours to beware her Purposelessness if it didn’t indeed pose a great threat to the village’s wellbeing.
But still, there was that feeling. He couldn’t stand to watch her cry without doing something.
“Itit will be alright,” he managed to say at last. “They will not find you here.”
The Stranger looked up. She sniffled.
Her face was remarkably unremarkable in every way imaginable: two brown eyes with normal irises and pupils, one nose with two small nostrils, one mouth with two lips, squarish white teeth, two ears, and a head of dark hair. The rest of her was equally strange: non-scaled and non-feathered skin, ten fleshy fingers and ten fleshy toes, no tail to speak of, no interesting angles or joints, no flame-shooting spouts or acid-spewing tentacles.
She was just . . . pitiful.
October smoothed his hair and smiled reassuringly at the girl. She flinched.
“Are you . . . are you hungry?” he tried.
The girl seemed to think for a minute and then nodded.
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast . . . this morning, or last morning. I don’t know what day it is.”
“It’s nighttime, of course, not day.” October puzzled, hoping the girl’s brain functioned normally.
From an old cupboard he pulled several dishes, thankful that he had saved some of his midnight meal. He laid two place settings upon a small table and beckoned the girl to join him. She sat down across from him, her arms rigid at her sides.
October didn’t know if he would be able to eat alongside such an odd creature, but he made himself take a bite of his pie. After a while, Nerma poked at hers.
“What is this?” she asked in her small voice.
“Half of a meat pie I saved from earlier. Toast. Jellied berries.” October shoveled a bite past his fangs.
The girl nibbled hesitantly at each thing on her plate and, apparently finding everything to be edible, finally began to eat with gusto. She finished hers before October was halfway through and began to explore his tiny flat.
October lived within the smallest but highest tower of Corpescule College in exchange for the odd jobs he did for professors and staff. The hexagonal space was twenty feet across in every direction and rose to a densely cobwebbed point from which a single lantern hung on a chain. Nerma looked closely at the lantern, which crawled with the yellow-green glimmer of nightglows. October wished he could afford better, but he was lucky enough to have this small room and his weekly allowance of lighting.
“This light is so . . . eerie,” said the girl.
“Don’t you have nightglows where you’re from?”
She shook her head and then turned to pace the room, pausing frequently to pick up a picture frame or knickknack, crumble the petal of a black rose (onto October’s carefully dusted rug), or peek through the crooked shutters at the university gardens. In the meek light of the approaching dawn, the garden could be seen in all its blooming glory. Deadly nightshade the color of old bruises crept over the wrought iron figures of the Seven Severed Souls, mandrake stars mingled with white oleander buds at their feet, and clumps of ghostly calla lilies and slate-colored roses haunted the walkways.
October watched the girl from the corner of his eye. He recalled what Jon the Seer had said at the meeting earlier. Perhaps Nerma did have a Purpose after all, and it was merely hidden. Perhaps she was reading his mind right now.
He shivered at the thought.
Spiced fly organs, he thought. He pictured the words clearly in his head. He imagined taking a bite of the oozing delicacy.
The girl didn’t react.
Can you hear what I’m thinking? he thought even harder.
Nerma merely sighed and ran her finger along the edge of the windowsill.
Stranger! Nerma! Read my mind! October shouted in his head.
The girl scratched her nose.
Perhaps her Purpose wasn’t mindreading, October thought—but perhaps she could predict the future.
“What will happen on the night of February fourteenth, ten years in the future?” he asked her.
“What?” the girl looked at him, her face blank.
October repeated the question, speaking slowly and clearly in case she had trouble understanding him.
The girl appeared to think for a minute.
“People will get lots of chocolate truffles in cardboard hearts, and parents will go on romant
ic dates?” she ventured.
October whooped. “So, you can tell the future!”
Nerma frowned. “You asked me about February fourteenth, Valentine’s Day. I can’t tell the future.”
“Try another one,” October prompted. “Who will knock on the door in five minutes?”
“Someone is going to knock on the door?” What a strange accent the girl had, October thought.
Nerma looked anxiously at the rickety door that separated October’s apartment from the cold morning outside.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant.” October thought. “What I meant was—” Without warning, he shot webbing from his thumb at the girl’s face.
She shrieked and ducked, but too late.
“I guess that proves that you cannot predict the future,” October muttered, helping to untangle the girl’s hair from the sticky web. When she was free, she scurried under the table and covered her head with her cloak.
“No,” came a muffled voice from beneath it. “I cannot predict the future. I have no Purpose, whatever that means.”
Hearing it spoken aloud so plainly made October’s skin crawl.
“I am afraid that they will never let you stay here the way you are,” he said. He didn’t add that he too found her terribly frightening. “We must come up with a way to convince them to let you stay.”
Nerma’s head emerged from the cloak. “But I want to go home,” she said. Her eyebrows were knotted in anger.
October nodded absently, distracted by an idea that was taking shape in his mind. “Yes, of course. Let me think . . . . Ah! Yes!” he exclaimed. He held up a spoon. “Your Purpose!”
Nerma blinked. “What?”
Half an hour later, Nerma stood before October’s cracked mirror.
She looked ridiculous.
“You look so—so normal now,” October declared, awestruck by the transformed girl before him.
Fastened to Nerma’s forehead with gobs of October’s stickiest string, the spoon jutted upward, casting a serpent-like shadow over Nerma’s face in the light of the nightglows.
“I look like a unicorn. A Spoonicorn,” Nerma muttered.
“I know.” October glowed with pride at his handiwork. “It’s perfect.”
“And this is supposed to be my Purpose?” For the first time since stepping foot within Small Hours, Nerma’s face broke into a bemused grin. “A spoon on my head?” She giggled.
October stepped back, aghast. “We must not speak of our Purpose in such a manner,” he reprimanded. “You may not understand, but some things in life are—are sacred. You cannot laugh at them.”
Nerma’s grin lingered for a moment and then faded. She shrugged. “Sorry.” She turned away from the mirror, afraid she might laugh again if she caught another glimpse of herself.
October chewed at his lip with a fang, and Nerma cringed.
“Are you, like, Spiderman, or Spiderboy, or something?” she asked.
October tried not to show how deeply offensive this comment was. After all, the girl was only a Stranger and could ever understand what it meant to be human. Instead of responding, he shot a string of webbing from his right thumb and another from his left, crisscrossing and weaving them together before securing them to the walls. Then he touched the tips of his fingers to one wall climbed up onto the giant web that now hung beneath the tall ceiling. He next braided a rope, pulling more string from the tips of his thumbs as needed. When he’d finished, he lowered one end of it to the ground.
“Hold on,” he said.
Nerma gripped the rope. It was sticky, and before she had even secured a firm grasp on it, October was hauling her upward. When she reached the enormous spiderweb, she heaved herself over its edge.
“It’s so strong!” she cried, peeling her hands from the gooey rope and pressed them into the wondrously soft webbing beneath her.
October beamed proudly, his fangs flashing in the lantern light that hung just above his head.
“It is my Purpose,” he said.
He curled up into a ball and laid his glasses beside him on the web. “It is late. Let us sleep. Tomorrow, we test out your new Purpose. Gory morn, Stranger.” And then October was still.
But Nerma lay awake for a long time. She tossed and turned, but gently, afraid to wake her rescuer or dislodge the spoon from her forehead.
Images floated through her mind, memories of long necks and flaming nostrils, crooked wings and pointy fangs—of a boy with the ability to climb walls and spin webs who had hidden high up in the shadowy ceilings of Grackleswot Abbey before swooping in to rescue her from a village of monsters.
As Nerma drifted to sleep, a final image played itself again and again behind her closed eyelids: October’s eyes. For just a moment, after he had taken his glasses off for bed, his bare eyes had been illuminated by the lantern light. Like Nerma, October had two eyes, but within each of his amber irises, four pupils had clustered like caviar.
It was with these eight beady pupils that October had watched her all evening. He had watched her, eaten alongside her, and spoken to her, yet he had seen nothing within her. To him, she was just emptiness, an old spoon, and a bit of spider’s silk.
10
A Bad Apple and a Good Worm
When Nerma woke in the morning, she found that her spoon—her Purpose—had detached itself from her forehead and fallen through the giant spider’s web onto the floor below. This time, when October attached it, he used yard after yard of his stickiest webbing, wrapping it round and round her head until the spoon was held fast.
Nerma thought she looked more like an Egyptian Spoon Goddess than a Spoonicorn and said so to October.
“I’m not sure you understand how serious this is, Nerma,” he said, frowning.
Nerma was simply pleased to hear her name spoken aloud. It felt like a good sign, especially when October announced that there was no time like the present to reintroduce the “New and Improved Nerma” to the townspeople. They would visit a place called the Midnight Market.
Outside, the village was just rousing, and the evening was a pleasant one. Nerma left her cloak and mittens behind, and she felt free and nimble in her loose-fitting dress. She followed October down the quiet alleys, past Grackleswot Abbey, and under several rickety looking bridges, until they emerged into a wide marketplace. There, vendors were just beginning to set up their stands and lay out their wares for the night ahead.
“The Midnight Market,” October whispered. “Just act normal.”
Nerma glanced at him. What was normal in Small Hours?
“Oy, Octo-Berto, I figured it was you that hid the Stranger,” called a young man who was busy assembling a rack for textiles. Instead of fingers and thumbs, the man had L-shaped Allen wrenches protruding from his hands. Beside him was the teenage boy who had sat behind Nerma at the town meeting. He nodded at her, his expression guarded.
“Gory night, Hex. This is Nerma. Nerma, Hexor.”
Nerma reached out to shake hands, and Hexor jumped as though she’d held out a snake.
“I told you—act normal,” October muttered in her ear.
Nerma withdrew her hand and stood stark still, afraid to make another mistake. The two young men watched her cautiously.
According to plan, October pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “You see, Nerma has a Purpose now.” He grinned triumphantly. “She is one of us.”
Hexor’s eyebrows arched doubtfully as he examined Nerma’s new headdress.
“Fine work, Oct,” he said, feigning an attitude of seriousness. “You always did have a soft heart, eh?” He met Nerma’s eyes for an uncomfortable second and then looked away.
“See you later, Hex,” October muttered. “Come on, let’s get some breakfast,” he suggested to Nerma, urging her further into the market.
“Meat pies! Hearty, meaty pies with fascinatin’ gravy and flaky crust!” A woman shouted from a nearby stand. Piled before her was a mountain of steaming golden pastries. “Ev’ry f
lavor you can imagine! Meat pies!”
When the woman saw October, she smiled, revealing not teeth but the curved, serrated edge of a knife. “I suppose you want the usual, dear,” she said to him, the blade in her mouth glinting.
“Two please,” October ordered.
The woman’s grin disappeared (to Nerma’s initial relief) and was replaced by an open-mouthed stare when she noticed Nerma.
“I seen you yesterday, at the Abbey,” the woman said. “You ain’t natural.”
October pointed to Nerma’s forehead. “She now has a Purpose.”
The woman ogled the vertical spoon and let her eyes sweep downward, taking in every inch of the girl before her. “Well, I’ll be. Miracles never cease,” she muttered. “Take another pie, on the house.”
Moving on, October mused, “This may be the best decision I ever made. Nobody makes pies like Mrs. Boyled. Here, these are the same as last night.” He passed Nerma a warm, golden pie.
She took a hefty bite, enjoying the rich buttery crust and warm filling. A dollop of gravy dripped down her chin.
“You like badger brain custard, too?” October asked. “It happens to be my favorite.”
Nerma froze. “Badger brain . . . custard?”
October nodded at the meat pie cupped in Nerma’s hands.
“Mrs. Boyled’s specialty,” he said. He held up the third pie. “Want to try a pickled rat tail and snail egg pie?”
Nerma’s stomach was suddenly as heavy as a wad of wet cement. She shook her head and thrust the half-eaten badger brain pie at October. Until she made it home, she decided, she would eat only fresh fruits and vegetables.
“I’ll get you some blood berry salad.” October pointed as they approached a stand. A sign above it read, “‘Fresh’ Fruites and Vegtabbles.”
Nerma started to decline, but a thunderous voice interrupted.
“I do believe we have found our culprit!”