But this version of the Hazel Wood was perfect. It was mine. It was being pulled from me, from daydreams I’d thumbed over so often they were creased, and the preserved pages of Vanity Fair. I closed my eyes and opened them again slowly, half-expecting to see a tumbledown ruin, the truth behind the fantasy. But my vision held up.
The air smelled like crushed grass and chlorine, with the held-breath quiet of the hottest day of summer. I walked over the dewy cheek of perfectly stage-directed grass, past geometric flowerbeds and a faintly rustling fountain I was dying to drink from, but you’d have to be dumber than Persephone to drink anything in fairyland.
The house bobbed closer, gaining detail as I walked. It was perfect, from the lawn all the way to the widow’s walk circling the high attic tower, where I once imagined my bedroom would be when Althea finally invited me to stay.
I hesitated at the front door. Not because I thought it would be locked, but because I had no sense of what lay beyond it. The Vanity Fair photographer wasn’t allowed past the lawn, and my fantasies always took place out here: horseback riding, picnics. Even the daydreams about my bedroom mostly took the form of me pacing my widow’s walk, surveying the swells of green. I read too much Wilkie Collins as a kid.
So whatever I found inside might be closer to the truth. Though truth, I sensed, was a relative concept here. I grabbed the doorknob, a puffing golden face shaped like the Wind sliced apart by Hansa, and turned.
The foyer I stepped into was vast, flanked on each side by a curving staircase. Stubs of unlit candles perched between each spindle. Between the flights was a pink stone fountain so big you could swim in it. Three stone women glared impassively from its center. One held a birdcage, one a translucent quartz cube, the other a dagger. Through windows taller than me came the tilted, dust-colored light of Sunday afternoon.
The scale of everything was so vast, it took me a minute to take it all in. As I did I saw bits of humanity elbowing in on the splendor: A glittery, cheap-looking cardigan hanging over a banister. A blue toy boat floating in the fountain.
And a hum, just audible over the patter of water. When I listened hard, it resolved into the secretive tones of a child singing to herself. The tune was “Hickory Dickory Dock.”
I looked up and saw a little girl sitting in the bend of the left-hand staircase, watching me. When our eyes met, she went silent.
“Ella,” I said, only half-believing it. But it was her; it was my mother. I recognized her from the magazine spread. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. When she heard her name, she ran up the stairs and out of sight.
I followed, realizing with a start that my footsteps made no sound on the tile floor, or the marble stairs. It was instantly disorienting, like trying to talk when your ears are stuffed.
Ella swerved to the left. I followed. The hallway was so long it had to be a trick—I’d seen the house from the outside. It was big, but not like this. I jogged past one door after another, trying each one. I thought I heard a giggle behind the third, but it didn’t sound like it came from a child.
The seventh door I tried opened onto a tiny room. A typewriter sat on a writing desk between two windows. Next to it, a cigarette wedged into a green glass ashtray sizzled down to a stub. An inch of ash hung from its tip. Through the window was a different day than the one I’d left, one where a gray sky pressed against winter-crisped grass.
I tiptoed to the typewriter to see what was written on the page curling out of it, in dense, irregular print.
When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.
My neck tingled like someone was close behind me, reaching out with pinching fingers. I sprinted from the room and closed the door.
The hall had changed. Now it was a brighter place, shorter, ending in a glass-ceilinged conservatory flooded with green. Sunlight poured in over trees I recognized and some I didn’t, and some I swore I’d seen just now in the woods. I walked slowly forward with my arms held out. The air was dense and damp and sweet. On a pool of grass so bright it had to be fake sat a chrome-fronted radio the color of strawberry sherbet.
I crouched down and turned on the radio. The light outside dimmed as the music came up. It was the song I’d heard on the bus, sped up into a dance tune. When I snapped it off, the light outside bounced back and swelled, till the brightness hurt my eyes. I threw a hand over them, backing out of the room and into something warm and solid.
“My god,” he said, because it was a man I’d collided with. “Won’t you ever leave me alone?”
It was night again. He shrank away from me in a pool of artificial torchlight. We were in an orange-lit, faux-medieval billiard room with knotty wooden walls. The man wore a rumpled tuxedo. He looked like a duke Barbara Stanwyck might’ve fallen in love with on a steamship crossing, before ending up with a cabin boy played by Cary Grant.
He’d dropped a very full highball glass when I bumped him. The sharp scent of gin stung my nose. In the other hand he held a gun. Not like Harold’s, a blunt-nosed black thing made for violence—this gun was long and elegant as a greyhound. The man carried it propped over his shoulder like a boy playing army.
“You can see me?” I said. I wasn’t sure what the rules were here—whether I was a ghost. Whether I would die if shot by a gun.
“You’re all I see. It’s driving me mad. It’s driven me mad!” His voice was arch, but his eyes were wet and desperate.
“Who are you?” I asked, reaching for his sleeve. “Who do you think I am?”
He stumbled back. “Get away, you foul thing. I’m getting free of you even if she can’t. Your touch may be cold as the grave, but I know you come straight from hell.”
He walked unsteadily through a pool of whiskey-colored light, disappearing into the darkness on the other side. From the silence came a single gunshot.
When I ran from the room, my ears popped. Listing with vertigo, I staggered down a wide, ruined hall, its tiled floor grown over with moss. Ivy grew through a shattered windowpane, and everything smelled like rot. It ended in a sitting room with water-stained walls, where a pair of striped folding chairs flanked a crushed-velvet sofa. On the table between them lay a stack of fashion magazines. Christy Turlington stared vacantly from the cover of the yellowing Vogue Paris on top. November 1986.
Behind me, someone knocked out “Shave and a Haircut” against the doorframe. It was Ella, looking older now. Eight, maybe. She smiled self-consciously, her lips closed over her teeth, then ran away.
“Ella,” I said, but the air ate it up. When I moved a hand in front of my face, it warped a little, like I was looking at it through flawed glass.
I staggered forward, falling as I crossed the threshold. My knees landed in the deep nap of carpet the color of old ivory. To pull myself up, I grabbed onto the silken skirts of the bed sitting just within reach.
It was a fairy-tale bed, hung to the ground with tattered curtains. Where they were sheerest, I could see the shape of someone lying motionless inside. Dripping candles in tarnished silver holders circled them, releasing a honeysuckle fragrance that filled the air like a drug.
I didn’t want to see what lay on that bed. I didn’t want to be in this room, or in this place. None of it fit together; it was a scrapbook of times and places and someone else’s memories. Althea’s, or Ella’s, maybe. Was the Hazel Wood even real? Had it ever existed? Wherever I was, it wasn’t a house. It was a kaleidoscope. I moved to the window, thinking I could climb out, but I wasn’t on the second floor anymore—somehow I’d made it to the turret. The lawn was a taunting green sea below.
The thing in the bed made a tiny sound, a groan or a sigh, that set the hair from my scalp to the small of my back alight. I ran from the room—
And slid to a stop in a dingy yellow kitchen. A light buzzed overhead, and the stench of dill and old coffee turned my stomach. Thin spring light fell through a dirty window onto a sideboard cluttered with cups. Loneliness clung
to every surface, thick as dust. On a mint-colored Formica table sat an empty mug, a water-stained copy of Madame Bovary, a pair of scissors. And a stack of clipped-out newspaper articles.
My hand shook as I touched the top one, splaying out the stack. Upstate Community Rattled After Attack. Search for Missing Jogger Enters Second Week. Link Suspected in Upstate Homicides. Five Victims Later, Mystery Persists in Small-Town Murders. Remains Found, Questions Remain.
Althea had known, then. What she’d let escape, and what they did out there.
A long scream from behind me cut the air in half. I spun around, knocking the mug to the floor. A blue enamel kettle shrieked and steamed on the stove, and a creaking step sounded somewhere beyond the door.
For one electric second I considered running for the window. Instead I stayed still, muscles jumping in my shoulders. The step came closer, closer, then stopped outside the door.
Silence stretched till I couldn’t stand it—the thick, waiting quiet of someone listening for something. I slid forward on the tile, put my hand on the knob, and jerked the door open like ripping off a Band-Aid.
And stepped out into a wall of voices and music and bodies, wrapped in a haze of wax and perfume as thick as syrup.
I was in a ballroom, barely lit. A chandelier heavy with half-melted candles swayed over a crush of dancers, moving to glittery, atonal music that could’ve been the soundtrack to a party in hell.
The dancers swarmed so close together they looked like a mosh pit on a subway car, moving with the music’s headache rhythms. Bits of candlelight caught at teeth and eyes and sweat and the shine of white wax, dripping into their hair and hardening.
I thought I saw Ella in the swing of bodies—older again, but not yet grown. She smiled up at her partner, too worldly, and shifted out of sight. I moved closer, trying to reach her, and the crowd pushed back.
A man with a fresh black eye danced alone, blissed on something stronger than liquor. A trio of women with bodies like fronds wound around each other in a way that looked boneless, their edges meeting and melting together in a watercolor blur. I nearly stumbled over a small figure I thought was a child, until she tilted her face toward the candlelight. The look in her eyes made me step back.
Then I saw something that stopped me cold, filling me to the knuckles with starlight.
Finch. Unmistakably, in the heart of the dancers. Finch in a white shirt, his shoulders heavy with shadows. His eyes were alight and his mouth was soft and all of him bent toward the girl he danced with. She was short and fierce and her hair ran over her back in a bright Barbie sweep.
She was me, me with my hair grown long, and she was looking at Finch with an expression I didn’t think my face could hold.
It didn’t feel like an illusion, or a dream. I smelled sweat and spilled wine and candle wax, and tasted blood as I bit through the skin of my lip. I said his name, or tried to, but the music ghosted it away.
Then the candlelight stuttered like a strobe and the crowd changed, shifted, faces sifting through pockets of shadow and light. It came to me that I was seeing a hundred terrible parties melted down into one, full of people too strange and reckless to be anything but Hinterland. Ella was gone but Finch remained, always, at the center of everything, holding me.
The house was tugging at my mind again, unspooling things I’d dreamed, tucked-away things I might’ve wished for, and mashing them together with the memories that breathed from the Hazel Wood’s walls. My breath came short as the other me let Finch run his hands through the whole length of her heavy hair.
She lifted her face—my face—toward his. The music went shivering and slow, and all of me craned toward them as a feeling like jealousy cut its teeth on my heart. His eyes slid shut and his hair moved in an underwater drift. Even as she leaned into him I could see the glint of her open eyes, still watchful, always watchful. I leaned so far I thought I’d fall, waiting for the moment when their lips would touch.
When they did the music went to static. Someone in a half-mask and legs too long for their body grabbed my shoulder. The kiss sizzled like gunpowder in my chest; I felt too stunned to pull away.
“Join the dance or get out, daydreamer,” the person said into my ear, and gave me a hard shove.
It unplugged me from the party like something ripped, sparking, from a socket in the wall, and sent me tumbling back into a long, empty hall. Ella was gone, Finch was gone, and the girl I might have been had never existed. But the party clung to me in a hazy perfume; I could still smell wax on my clothes.
Then far, far down the hall I saw a closed door with light shining out around its seams. The light was warm and it felt right, like everything else I’d seen in this house was a dream, and this was the warm human light of waking up after a nightmare. The light in the cottage you stumble on in the dark, dark woods. I ran to it, and I threw open the door, and I walked into a child’s nightlight-lit bedroom.
And my heart sank, because I knew this wasn’t any more real than the rest of it. It couldn’t have been, because my grandmother was there waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette.
23
Althea looked good. She looked real. She wore cigarette pants and a striped boatneck shirt and, oddly, short white gloves. Like the Hazel Wood, she resembled exactly my idea of her—the level blue eyes, the elegant bones. Through the window behind her I saw snowy grounds and a strange white sky, bathing the room in a lunar glow. It made the shadows deeper. A nightlight cast a valiant circle of orange against the wall.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Althea asked.
I froze. Before I could respond, a mulish voice from the bed beat me to it. “No.”
Ella lay in the shadows, arms flung over her head and one foot on the floor. She looked older again—fifteen, maybe sixteen. Too old for bedtime stories.
Althea exhaled a thin haze of blue smoke. “Oh, yes, you do.”
“I really, really don’t.” But Ella didn’t move, beyond propping her head up on her hands. She was old enough now that she looked like herself, dark and fierce and distracted. It took all my strength not to rush to her, but I knew whatever I was seeing wasn’t real. Wasn’t happening now.
Althea began. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen and a brave princess and a castle in the middle of a forest.”
“I know that one.”
“Then I’ll go back a little further. Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen who thought words were stronger than anything. She used them to win love and money and gifts. She used them to carry her across the world.” Althea laid out her words like a dealer lays out cards, with a distant, mesmeric precision. “And one day when she was very, very bored, she used them to convince a noblewoman to lead her into another kingdom, a place out of legend, and far beyond her own kingdom’s borders.”
“The Hinterland.” There was a sharp edge to Ella’s voice that saved it from being indifferent.
“Hush. This is my story, not yours. As I was saying, this new kingdom—the Other Kingdom—was strange and dangerous and far from home. The queen quickly grew homesick and set about trying to find a way back. It was said there were doors that could take her where she wanted to go, but they hid themselves from her. And do you know what you do when you can’t find a door?” She itsy-bitsy-spidered her fingers across the air. “You build a bridge.”
I stood rooted halfway between the door and the bed. Althea’s voice worked on me like a shot, loosening my limbs and sharpening my vision, leaving a hot ache in my chest.
“In the Other Kingdom there were many kings and queens, each equally powerful. But the queen set out to find the kingdom’s true ruler—not royalty, but someone far more important. A storyteller. A master of words. When the queen found her, she very convincingly shared her plight—she was a master of words, too—and soon the storyteller whispered the secret of escape into the queen’s ear.
“But the storyteller made a mistake in trusting the queen. When she escaped from th
e Other Kingdom, she took something with her—something that held the walls of the world in place and kept the stars from coming down. Something she brought back to her own kingdom and shared with all of her subjects: stories. All the stories of the Other Kingdom. She told them, and told them again, and they were told and retold all over the realm.”
Althea’s voice was losing its soporific thrum, like the nap rubbing off velvet. Her eyes gleamed in the weird white light.
“The queen felt rich, richer than she’d ever been, until she realized what she’d done: by carrying the Other Kingdom’s greatest treasure across her bridge, she’d drawn the two kingdoms tight, tight together—until they were like two hills rising side by side, then the sun and the moon in eclipse, then a hand in a glove stitched too snug.”
Sew the worlds up with thread. The words sang in my head and passed away.
My grandmother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But nobody knew it except the queen. Nobody else noticed when terrible things started happening. When the queen threw festivals, demons arrived in dresses, and hid their red eyes behind masks. If she stayed in one castle too long, a darkness grew over everything and everyone around her, like briars. People from the Other Kingdom slipped through their hidden doors to mock her, for believing she’d escaped. For thinking she’d gotten away with her theft. Then one night, someone from the Other Kingdom snuck inside her castle and murdered her king.”
Her voice was raw now, her head bowed low. I blinked and the room seemed to stutter; Althea was standing, and the bed she’d been sitting on was cast in deeper shadow. The glow of moonlight on snow no longer came through the window.
Althea went on. “The queen realized it wasn’t the kingdoms that had changed—it was her. She didn’t need to find a door, she had become one. A bridge, too. A place where the demons could get in. So she and her daughter ran away to a castle in the woods. The Other Kingdom followed, and over time the woods around the castle became as twisted as an oak, torn between the two kingdoms.
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