by Iva Viddal
Gingerly, he restacked the containers, careful not to make a sound. When they had all been moved to one side, he climbed atop the counter and folded himself into the tight space, pulling the cupboard door shut behind him.
He sat like this for a long time, his legs drawn up to his chest and his head smashed against his knees, until his neck began to ache, and his ankles became stiff.
Minutes seemed to stretch into hours as sounds of the hunt traveled through the walls into his little hiding place. Throughout the building, doors were wrenched open and slammed, chairs were dragged across floors, and shouts between the Doctors and their attendants filled every shadowy corner.
October was sure he would be caught any moment.
The quiet moments were the worst, though, for they gnawed at October’s nerves until he was tempted to scream, “Here I am! In the kitchen!”
His thoughts began to wander, and he wondered if night had fallen and where Ron and Ted were at that moment. He thought about Nerma, alone upstairs in the Gold Room. Or perhaps she had joined in on the search. Would she turn him over to the Doctors if she found him, or would she keep silent and help him escape? He wasn’t sure. He had bound her in his spider’s silk and arrested her, after all. He deserved to be turned over to the Doctors—especially now that he had failed to rescue her.
At last, during one of those long moments of silence, October decided to open the cupboard door, just a bit, in order to stretch his legs—just a bit. He pushed it open a few inches and rotated his right ankle. Then, he rotated his left, and—thwack—out of the cupboard toppled the largest glass canister of tea. It bounced with a heavy thud against the countertop before falling to the floor and shattering with a magnificent, jangling clatter. Shards of glass and dried tea leaves covered the floor.
October scrambled from the cupboard as the sound of heavy footsteps exploded on the floor above him.
He looked about, knowing that any hope of escape was gone, and did the first thing that came to his mind.
He grabbed a china teacup from the farthest cupboard and quickly scooped up some of the spilled tea. Racing to the sink, he filled the cup with cool water. Then he sat at the table. He calmed his racing heart, adopted a look of absolute serenity, and leaned back, as though he had been sitting there all afternoon, relaxing over a cooling cup of tea.
The door flew open. “My tea!” Doctor Mapple thundered. Sweat dripped from the gnarled base of his stem and down his glistening forehead. “Not my Ferret Dung tea from Illyria! You—you—you thief!” He roared.
Despite himself, October smiled.
27
No Way Out
At the end of Nerma’s first night as the star of Bluff & Lure’s Freak Show, she had been returned to the Gold Room, and her “Business Associates Deluxe” had promised to pick her up the following evening. “So as we can suck more profits from the public,” Lure had purred, dollar signs in her eyes.
Nerma, of course, knew nothing of October’s adventures in the Doctors’ quarters or how he had wound up in the pillory. She didn’t know if anyone would ever rescue her. But she knew she couldn’t spend another day in that awful wagon, listening to Bluff and Lure’s horrendous sales jingles. On the way back to the Sanatorium, Bluff had sung a particularly atrocious one:
Come and see our little Stranger!
She sleeps within this little manger!
Teeth as sharp as wolfy danger!
You ain’t seen nothing ever stranger!
Nerma had groaned within her wagon “manger” when she heard that one, but it was Lure’s rendition of “Yankee Doodle” that made her run her hands through her hair in exasperation.
Stranger Danger came to town,
Just like a one-girl circus,
Stuck a spoony to her head
And called Purpose-wurpose.
Stranger Danger, keep it up,
Stranger Danger, gravy!
Mind your masters, Lure and Bluff,
And say ‘hello’ to Davy!
“Who is ‘Davy’?” Nerma had asked from under the blanket. “And what does any of this have to do with gravy?”
“Leave the thinking up to the experts, darlin’,” Bluff had admonished before turning to Lure to ask, “Yeah, who is Davy?”
Now, Nerma was back in the Gold Room, and that ridiculous song kept running through her head, over, and over, and over again. She hummed it while she kicked her heels at the bed’s metal footboard and when she paced the cold floor, while she washed her face in the icy basin and when she stared out the window. Stranger Danger, keep it up. Stranger Danger, gravy . . .
She had to get out of the Gold Room.
She had to go home.
Why hadn’t she just jumped from the wagon last night and made a run for it? She could have gone to Ron and Ted’s apartment. What had she been thinking, just sitting in that wagon, as though she had no choice?
But what if she had escaped? Then what? No one knew how to get to Harmony Hill—no one. It was hopeless.
She lay limply in the sagging bed and closed her eyes, but sleep evaded her. Images of her parents, Julian, and Benny floated through her mind. She missed their smiles and laughter and wished with all her might that she were home—even if “home” had to be Harmony Hill, with all of its boring, irritating sameness.
A sound roused her from her thoughts. Outside her door, a muted footstep was followed by the muffled sound of clinking metal.
Nerma kept her eyes closed. Maybe whoever it was would just leave if they believed she was asleep.
She heard the door click open, and her mind raced. She tensed, ready to kick or run for the door.
She heard nothing but the quiet swish of skirts and thought that her visitor must be Doctor Leech, there to check on her again. But the wet squelch of Doctor Leech’s tail was absent, and the odor that permeated the room was one of dried herbs and woodsmoke, not the pungent perfume that always hovered around Doctor Leech like flies around rotting fruit.
A cool, dry hand brushed Nerma’s forehead, and the sound of a pen upon rough paper whispered at the bedside.
“Hm, done,” a female voice muttered.
Done? Another moment passed, and then a swish of skirts and the click of the door told Nerma that her visitor was gone.
She opened her eyes.
Who had that been? Something about her seemed familiar, and yet . . . The thought evaporated, gone before she could grasp it.
Nerma climbed from the bed and went to the window. Outside, watery sunlight filtered through clouds ready to burst with rain. Nerma pressed her face to the chilled glass. The streets below were empty. Small Hours slumbered.
If she craned her neck, she could just make out the sign over the Doctors’ door: “Doctors Leech & Mapple, M.D.Min.” She should have ignored it that first night. She should never have touched that ugly black door knocker.
Her mind trailed, and she almost missed the woman in black who stepped from the building onto the stoop below, but the woman’s furtive movements caught her eye. Nerma recognized her immediately. It was the Midwife Cardea, the woman whose third eye had stared so deeply, so eerily, into Nerma during her first hours in Small Hours.
Nerma froze, a clear image taking shape in her mind. The Midwife’s house—it was hardly a stone’s throw from Wishers Warsh. If she could get there, she could get back to Harmony Hill!
She had to follow the woman! She raised her hand to rap at the window but stopped herself. She couldn’t let anyone hear her, but she must get out of the Gold Room, and now.
She rushed to the door and pushed upon it, but as she expected, it didn’t budge. She bent at the waist and tried to insert her spoon into the pentadagger slots, but its edge was too curved, so she pulled hard at it, hoping to dislodge it and use its handle as a single pentadagger point. The spoon wouldn’t budge.
She looked out the window again. Miraculously, the Midwife was still there on the stoop, struggling with her umbrella. The sky was beginning to drip onto the town below.
/> Nerma was growing frantic and wished desperately that she had a Purpose like October’s. What she wouldn’t give to have the ability to shoot webs from her thumbs and climb walls right now.
October. What was it that he had said? “We’ll get you.” Was that it? Hadn’t he said something else, too? Something about what to do if things went wrong?
Yes, he had. He said, “If something goes wrong, look down.”
Things had gone wrong. Many things had gone very, very wrong, and Nerma now looked down at Small Hours. Down at the cobblestoned lanes, down at the gray rooftops. Down at the Midwife Cardea. There was nothing else to be seen.
She swept her eyes back and forth, searching for something, anything.
The Midwife was turning to leave. She had fixed her umbrella, and now its black circle glided slowly toward the alleyway. Soon, Nerma wouldn’t be able to see it anymore.
With anxious fingers, Nerma undid the latch on the window. The frigid, wet air hit her face, and she gasped. She looked down the side of the building, but there were no ledges to grab hold of or use as toeholds.
She looked to the right. The Midwife had disappeared.
Grief washed over Nerma with the force of a tidal wave. She would never leave Small Hours, never see her family again.
“Look down?” she wailed into the gray air. “Look down? How is that helpful, October? Why couldn’t you have spun me a—”
Her breath caught in her throat.
“A web.”
There, far below her window but high enough off the ground to be invisible to passersby, an enormous spider’s web glistened in the falling rain. Without the rain, she wouldn’t have seen it at all.
There was no time to think, no time for second thoughts. She pulled herself up onto the windowsill and jumped.
28
The Final Chase
Nerma’s black dress billowed around her as she plummeted toward the hard ground. With a forceful SLAP that knocked the wind out of her, her body smacked into the wet, elastic webbing. It stretched beneath her before slinging her back up into the air. She reached wildly to grab hold of it but grasped only rain. Downward she fell again, and this time when the web heaved and tried to throw her back up toward the clouds, she managed to hold onto its slick strands. The web snapped with a jerk, and Nerma lay upon it, dizzy and disoriented.
She had fallen quite a long way, but the ground was still far enough below to make her stomach turn queasily. How would she get down now? She looked around, panicked.
She saw that the web was attached to a wide ledge on the building across from the Sanatorium, and she whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, October!”
She scrambled over the slippery silk ropes and clambered onto the wet ledge. Placing one foot carefully in front of the other, she made her way along it in the direction Midwife Cardea had disappeared,
The ledge stretched the length of the block and was nearly two stories off the ground, but Nerma hurried along it, fearful that she wouldn’t be able to catch up in time. At the corner, the stone gave way to open space. The house across the alleyway leaned at such a crooked angle, though, that she was confident she could reach its gutter with a running start. Nerma backed up, braced herself, and sprinted toward the ledge’s edge. She pushed off against the slick granite, and the alleyway yawned darkly beneath her as she flew through the wet air. When she landed on the house’s shingled roof with a crash, relief coursed through her, and she laughed aloud.
She hoped the people below hadn’t heard her, but she didn’t pause to find out. She scrambled across the roof and didn’t hesitate to jump when she reached the next gap. Onward she moved, her bare feet slipping over roof tiles as she leapt from one rooftop to the next, until at last, she landed on a building with a fire escape. It was broken, and its iron skeleton slumped against the neighboring building with only a few rusted bolts left to hold it together. She gripped the metal handrail and stepped onto a slanted rung. The metal shifted and groaned under her weight, and she stepped back onto the roof, but then a movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. It was the Midwife’s umbrella, disappearing around a bend in a misty alleyway.
Nerma took a trembling breath and climbed onto the iron frame. It swung beneath her but then steadied. She stepped down—one-step, two-step, three—and the stairs shivered under her but didn’t give.
And then, with a tremble that skipped like a stone across water, the sound of pealing bells thundered across the town’s skyline and shattered her focus. The Doctors had discovered the empty Gold Room. They knew she had escaped and were now alerting the town. “BE-WARE, BE-WARE,” the bells seemed to cry, “STRANGER-DANGER, STRANGER-DANGER!”
Panicked, Nerma raced down the steps, but the movement was too much for the dying fire escape and it veered violently sideways. The handrail slid through her wet hand, and before she knew what was happening, she was again airborne.
This time, there was no webbing to soften her blow, but Nerma’s luck had not run out yet. She fell headlong into a flowerbed teeming with white leadwort. The bushes softened her fall but scratched at her face and neck. She struggled to untangle herself, swiping at the twigs that pricked her and pulled at her hair.
Like a disturbed hornets’ nest, the bush came to life, and hundreds of tiny white blossoms nipped and bit at her skin. She let out a blood-curdling scream and whacked wildly at her head and arms, her legs kicking at the air above.
“Stop! Stop!” she screamed.
One by one, the blossoms closed in on themselves and hid from her counterattack, and Nerma scrambled away from the bush, shaken.
The bells pealed from every direction, and she hoped that their ringing had at least covered up the sounds of her screams. But townspeople were already peeking through windows and front doors were already opening. Behind the white leadwort bush, a door opened, and Verdura and Flora pushed their way out onto a front porch.
“Mommy!” one cried out.
“Daddy!” the other cried. “The Stranger has come to kill us!”
The girls raised their gardening shear hands to their pale faces.
“Verdura, save me!”
“No, you save me, Flora!”
Another door opened across the narrow road, and out stepped Hexor, the bad-tempered young man with Allen-wrench hands. He had gone from bad-tempered to worse-tempered, and now he stepped forward, his wrenches raised like icepicks.
“Did this Stranger hurt you girls?” he growled.
“Yes!” Verdura and Flora shrieked in unison. “She crushed our flowers and tried to kill us!”
Hexor lunged, but Nerma ducked. She sprinted down a tight alley and kept running. She turned at the next corner, then turned again. She looked behind her. Hexor was nowhere in sight, but the ringing bells were calling other villagers from their homes, and shouts rang up all around her.
“The Stranger has escaped!”
“Catch it!
“Bash it!”
“Give me the monster and I’ll feed ‘er to me piggies!”
“Don’t let it get my baby!”
“Stranger!”
“Monster!”
The cries became a flood that threatened to swallow Nerma, and she ran blindly. The falls of footsteps echoed against the alley walls behind her, growing ever louder.
“Stop, ye Witch!” came a cry from only a few feet behind her.
A door opened ahead, and a man stepped out with his arm raised. At the end of his arm, his wrist narrowed into the handle of a sharp cleaver, which he brought down in Nerma’s direction with a great roar.
Nerma screamed and rolled to the ground as the man chopped at the air above her head. He roared again and raised his cleaver once more, but Nerma scrambled to her feet and escaped through a low passageway.
The mob followed, and Nerma could tell by the increasing volume of their cries that they were gaining on her. She sped down the passageway, and it grew ever narrower, until it was no wider than her shoulders. Af
ter a few more paces, she had to turn sideways and move like a crab—a crab being chased by a pack of hungry sea lions.
When shouts of pursuit gave way to bellows of anger, Nerma realized that none of the townspeople were small enough to follow her this deep into the passage. Up ahead, it narrowed even further, and she was just able to squeeze through to the other side.
She found herself in a courtyard. It was empty and its walls were high, but a single wooden door had been built into the far wall. Rain poured down from the sky above, blurring her vision, and the muffled cries of the angry mob spurred her onward. She opened the door.
29
Angels and Demons
Nerma was in a small, dark space. It seemed to be a closet of some kind. Buckets and brooms were stacked against one wall, and she could just make out a rack of jackets against another. She pulled one down and slipped her arms into it before realizing that it had four sleeves, all of which were far too long for her. She rolled two of them up for her arms and let the other two hang to her knees. It would keep her warm and might help disguise her if she were spotted again, she thought.
Another door led from the closet, and she opened it slowly. Cautiously, she peeked her head out. There was no one in sight, and she stepped forward into an empty corridor. Half a dozen doors led off of it, and dust motes floated in the sappy light from a leaded window.
The chiming of the alarm bells was muffled here, and their quiet peels brought to Nerma’s mind a memory of the time she had gotten lost in a church. She was six, and her abuela had taken her to mass on a day when the old building had been almost empty. Nerma had wandered off, first to the sacristy to explore its hundred tiny drawers and cabinets, and finally into a confessional booth, where colored light from the glass windows broke into a hundred little dots and covered her small arms and face. When she’d looked up at the intricate screen beside her, dark and silent, she’d felt certain that whatever was behind it went on forever and ever.
The house she was in now had the same abandoned, watchful feeling, as though it had been waiting for her arrival for years upon years, half awake and half asleep, with one leaded eye open, the air frozen in place while the building slumbered, its dreams stretching into eternity.