“Orientation?” I echoed, glancing back toward the girl. She was gone, the tree trunk seamless. “And what did you say before? About a story and a story?”
“Jesus, no wonder you almost followed the Woodwife into hell. You’re green, aren’t you? Like, just-fell-through-a-mirror-in-Tunisia green?”
I thought about telling him I was Alice-Three-Times, seeing if he’d give me the rest of his candy bar. But I decided against it. “Is that how you got here?” I asked. “A mirror in Tunisia? Are you the only one?”
“Agh.” He shoved the rest of the chocolate in his mouth, stared at me while he chewed. “Okay, I’ll tell you the basic deal. The very basic deal, then you’ve got to find someone who’s actually good at this. First off, of course I’m not the only one, assuming by ‘only one’ you mean the only jackass stupid enough to think it was a good idea to beg, borrow, or steal his way into a place without record players, bourbon, or chocolate. There are lots of refugees here. From Earth and from other places—or so I’ve heard. Second, stay away from the Stories. You’ll know them when you see them. If they glow at the edges, move like they’re in a trance, smell like smoke or flowers or salt, or generally look like they belong in a murder ballad, steer very, very clear. I knew a guy, a classicist from Cambridge—got in through a wishing well—who tried to save the Skinned Maiden before she got skinned. Christ, was that a bad idea.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t make me spell it out for you. Look, did you mean to get in? Because it kind of seems like you didn’t.”
Against his will, it seemed, he was becoming interested in me. “I didn’t mean to get in. Someone pushed me,” I clarified.
“Well, that’s … that’s maybe more than I want to get involved in.” He looked shifty. “I don’t want to be a dick, but I’ve got a decent thing going here. Finally. I’ve got a girlfriend—ex-Story, so that keeps things pretty interesting—and I was taking a walk so I could eat this without her staring at me. They think packaged food is disgusting.”
He kept talking, but I didn’t hear anything after ex-Story. “What do you mean, ex-Story?” I interrupted sharply. “Does that mean she used to be a, uh, a character?”
“Pretty much.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder; he was getting bored of me. “Look, if you follow this path long enough you’ll find a little old woman who’ll ask you to do something—carry her pail, chop her wood, whatever. Just do it, and use the wish she grants you to find Janet. You understand? Don’t ask to be sent home, or to be made into a princess or whatever. She can’t do that much anymore; she’s ex-Story, too. Tell her to send you to Janet, and she’ll know who you mean.”
“Old woman, Janet,” I murmured. “Got it.” My mind was spinning around on a hamster wheel, thinking of the implications of being ex-Story. Even from inside the Hinterland, maybe I could find a way to get free.
“That way,” he said, pointing me down the path. “It might take five minutes, it might take an hour. Good travels.”
“Thanks,” I said, sticking out my hand.
He took it, then yelled, pulling his fingers back like I bit him.
“What? What happened?” I asked. He held his fingers to his mouth, staring at me. Staring at my hands.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re Story, aren’t you?”
“Huh?” I looked down at my hands and gasped.
They were the blitzed white of a cheap wedding dress, so pale they were almost blue. My nails were translucent, chunks of carved ice. “What the hell!” I said, jumping backward like I could get away from them.
“I meant no disrespect, my lady!” The man bowed, walking backward. “I didn’t mean to meddle. Good travels to you!”
“Wait!” I cried, and threw out one hand. He froze, like I might have the power to shoot ice rays at him. For all I knew, I did.
“I need gloves,” I said.
He hesitated before shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, coming up with worn leather gloves. He balled them up, tossed them to me, and ran.
I caught them against my chest. They were too big and smelled like cheap chocolate, but I felt better as soon as the white of my fingers had disappeared. My heart squeezed when I remembered the story Finch told me in the diner: Alice-Three-Times swallowed ice, and it made her—me—into a frozen zombie. Katherine’s fiery touch in the parking lot—that cold, awful feeling wasn’t hers, it was mine. Her touch, the touch of the Hinterland, woke it up.
It was too much, too strange, too big to think about all at once. So I set off in the direction the man had pointed me. The path took me past a tiny hut built between two massive trees. An old man sat on a stump out front, watching me with distant eyes. He held something pressed to his ear. I nodded at him, jamming my gloved hands into my pockets.
The thing in his hand squawked, and a string of nonsense words came out. Green scene mean. Stick quick trick. Tokyo alabaster red. King queen chick.
“Is that a … is that a transistor radio?”
The man grunted, writing something down on a square of rough paper. He wrote with a Bic.
“Who are you talking to?” I tried again.
He didn’t seem inclined to answer, so I turned away.
“Whoever’s listening,” he said to my back. “In this world or another.”
“Any luck yet?”
The radio crackled again and let out a descending series of hums in a woman’s voice. It sounded like a vocal exercise.
“Heard lots of things,” he muttered. “But no luck.”
I nodded. “Good travels,” I said, because I thought it might be the greeting here. The old man stared at me strangely and went back to his radio.
The light started to change, going tawny as the sharp shadows lengthened. Where the path petered out to a tiny foot road, I nearly collided with a tall man in black. He had a handsome, avid face covered nose to temples in thin, branching tattoos, and he smelled … awful. And somehow familiar.
He was a Story for sure. It came off him like a hum. I stared straight ahead, adrenaline fizzing in my fingers.
“Good travels,” he said.
I nodded and tried to slip by, but he grabbed my hand. Before I could take it back, he tugged off one glove. My stomach lurched: the freeze was climbing. Unworldly white inched over my wrists.
“Hello, little Story,” he said, and grinned. His teeth were thin and needle sharp.
Then I recognized it—his stink, of rot and ruin with a wild green heart. It was a scent from another lifetime. It was the sickening smell of Harold’s apartment the day I’d come home to find my mother gone—here was the one who’d taken her.
Briar King. The name floated to the surface of my mind like a whisper down a phone line. The Hinterland, revealing its secrets to me. Secrets I already knew, because I was of it.
“You,” I said.
“That’s a very good start,” he said. “Me?”
“You took her. Ella Proserpine. Where is she?”
He pouted at me, childish, his gaze growing dim. “Ella, Ella, Ella. I can’t recall the name.”
Every time his mouth formed around her name, my hands pulsed with barbed cold. “In New York, on the other side of the Halfway Wood. You took her, you left something for me—a page out of the book. Tales from the Hinterland.”
His eyes refocused with a snap. “Oh, yes, I do remember her. Ella Proserpine, the thief. And you’re the little Story girl she stole away.” For just a moment, he looked troubled. “But what are you doing here? Katherine had plans for you in the Halfway Wood.”
“I asked you about Ella. Where is she? What did you do to her?”
“It’s hard to remember what happens out there, don’t you find?” He showed his needle teeth, all at once. “Whatever I did, I assure you she liked it. That world is such a good place to have fun.”
I darted forward and slammed my ice-white palm to his neck.
He gasped. Hoarfrost bloomed under my hand, crawled up his neck, snaked into his ope
n mouth.
I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t stop. And wanting it scared me enough that I dropped my hand, breathing hard. Oh, I was cold. I was chilled through to my elbows now. I tucked them into my body like broken wings.
“What did you do to my mother?” I said it slow, so he would hear me.
The tattoos on his face had gone white; now they pulsed and juddered, warming back to black. He bared sharpened teeth at me and rolled his neck. “I can’t tell you a thing, no matter what you do to me. I never remember much from out there. Though I do remember her.” He shivered with pleasure. “Ella Proserpine. The blood in her sings to me. Her father’s blood, her blood—the same. I never forget the sound, not once I’ve heard it.”
Her father … Ella’s father. My skin shuddered back on my bones. Ella’s father died in the Village before she was born, leaving Althea a pregnant widow. Killed by a junkie, supposedly.
Or by something worse. Something shark-stupid and hungry that followed the scent of an old victim’s blood, pulsing in his daughter’s veins.
How much of our bad luck was him? And how much of it was the other monsters of the Hinterland, slipping in like shadows when we stayed in one place too long? I thought of the stack of newspaper clippings in Althea’s sad yellow kitchen, a history of deaths kept by their accidental enabler. The Hinterland’s sociopaths weren’t just our bad luck, they were the curse of anyone who wandered too close to the Hazel Wood, an acid-burned wall between the worlds where terrible things crawled in.
“If you hurt my mother, I will kill you.” I made my voice patient and calm. “I don’t care if you’re invincible here, or royalty. I’ll kill you, and I’ll make sure it hurts.”
“She’s not your mother, Alice-Three-Times,” he hissed. “And I think you’d be very glad indeed if I hurt the woman who is.”
Then his head twitched on his neck, the animal click of a predator scenting prey.
I followed his gaze to a point of moving green among the trees—a girl walking past us, nearly invisible in a leaf-colored dress. My stomach lurched: she stood chin up like a queen, and there was a head slung over her shoulder like a knapsack. She held it by a fistful of its bright yellow hair.
“Some of us have stories to attend to,” the Briar King said. “You’ll forgive me for not tending further to you.”
He gave me a look that made me want to take a shower in Pine-Sol, and set off after the girl.
When he was gone I picked up the glove where he’d dropped it. Stuffed it in my pocket. Ran.
I ran like something with sharp, pointy teeth was on my trail. It took me five minutes of tearing through trees to outrun the feeling of hands grabbing at me, breath on my neck.
The Briar King. I’d touched him, but he’d touched me, too. My hands thrummed with a poisonous feeling, like I’d picked up something toxic from his skin.
When I finally stopped to breathe, bent over my knees, I realized I’d left the path behind. Before I could curse my stupidity, I looked up and saw an old woman sitting cross-legged under an apple tree.
Aside from her eyes, which were bird-black, she looked like one of the old women you see carrying mesh shopping bags full of knobby brown roots in Chinatown, right down to the pink Crocs. She eyed my bare white hand.
“Hello, child,” she said.
“Hello, Grandmother,” I replied, panting. I’d read enough fairy tales to know the address.
“My back aches with the weight of all my years, but I am so hungry. Would you do me a kindness and pull down an apple from that tree?”
She looked spry enough to outrun me, honestly, but I wasn’t about to argue. The tree she sat beneath winked with green apples.
“Of course, Grandmother,” I said politely. The tree held its breath as I circled it, looking for a foothold. Its bark was smooth, its branches higher than my head.
“I grow weak with hunger, Granddaughter,” the woman said pleasantly.
I rolled my eyes when she couldn’t see me, and put one palm on the tree’s trunk.
It shivered at my touch, curling its branches in like petals, then flailing them out again. A bushel’s worth of apples rained down. The woman put up a pink silk parasol and waited it out. After one clocked me on the temple, I went into a hurricane crouch till they stopped.
“Thank you, Granddaughter,” the old woman said dryly, as I passed her a bruised apple. She dropped the parasol and rose to her feet. Her shoes were looking less like Crocs and more like rose-colored slippers, and her tracksuit unfolded into a glittering gown. Her wrinkles dropped away, leaving a face as fine-etched as a cameo.
“You were kind to me when you thought me an inconsequential old woman,” she droned, like a waitress going through the specials for the last table of the night. “I will repay that kindness by granting you a wish. Only one, so choose wisely.”
Despite the warnings of the Hershey’s man, my mind flashed to all the wishes I might ask for. Answers, for one. A magic mirror, to find Ella. Seven-league boots. Finch, alive beside me—but I didn’t think her powers stretched as far as that. So I sighed and followed his advice. “Send me to Janet.”
Her face fell. “Huh. Too easy.” She grabbed my shoulders, turned me around, and shoved. I stumbled forward. For a moment the world blinked around me like a camera shutter. I fell not onto grass but cobblestones.
Traveling around the Hazel Wood had given me vertigo, but this felt different. It felt exhilarating. When I looked up, I was standing in front of the red-painted door of a pretty cottage. The woods were at my back, and it was nearly night.
25
Without trees in the way, I could see the sky. The moon’s face was clearer here, that of a beautiful woman with grief lines around her eyes and mouth. Stars tried to crowd in around her, but she kept them at a distance.
The door clicked open, letting out flickering warm light and the civilized smell of cooking meat. The woman who stood in the doorway looked farm strong and fiftyish, her hair in a fat, chest-length blonde braid pulled over one shoulder. She eyed me with open displeasure.
“Are you Janet?” I asked at the same time she yelled, “Janet, one of your strays!” Then, “Make yourself welcome.” She said it grudgingly, standing away from the door.
I walked into a room so warm with food and fire I could’ve cried. I nearly stretched my hands toward the blaze in the open hearth on one end of the large, plain room, before remembering and fumbling the glove onto my bare hand behind my back.
“Look at that,” she said. My heart jumped, but she was inspecting the ink that showed over my collar—the top of my spiky tattoo. “How does a new arrival have a Hinterland flower on her skin?” Her voice rang with a stronger version of the clipped accent I’d heard on the Hershey’s man.
“I didn’t know it was a Hinterland flower.” But it made sense. I’d always been fascinated by the piece of alien flora climbing my mother’s arm, and never understood her horror when I had it inked on my own in tribute. Now I got it: this place was in me, of me. The tattoo meant she had to see it on me, too.
“Let her breathe a minute, Tam, she just got here.” The woman who said it had come through a door in the back of the room. She wore overalls that were more patches than denim, and her wet, graying hair hung loose down her back.
“You’re Janet.”
“I am. And this is my Tam Lin. Though you can call her Ingrid.” She gestured at the blonde, who’d come protectively to her side.
I nodded to show I got the reference, though I wondered what their story was, that it fit. “Someone told me you were the one to see, if I were a refugee.”
“Someone was right, if you’re a refugee. I’ll admit the tattoo is surprising. You’re sure you’re a new arrival?” Her voice was good-natured, but her eyes were sharp. She took in the gloves I was wearing, the cheap, shiny material of my new jeans, whatever was left of the eyeliner I’d put on that morning.
“I’m sure.”
Ingrid muttered a word I’d never h
eard before, in a voice I didn’t like.
“Here.” From a cabinet against the wall Janet pulled out an opaque bottle and three thin-necked glasses, laying them out on a wooden table that had had a former life as a stump. She opened the bottle and poured an inch of liquid into each. It hit the glass like vapor, then resolved into something clear and colorless. “Ingrid will like you better if we drink to our friendship first.”
Janet was better at subterfuge than her girlfriend. She lifted a glass easily, but Ingrid gripped hers like it was a bomb, watching carefully to see if I would take a sip.
I’d lost my fear of fairy food since Althea told me a bedtime story in the dark, but that didn’t mean I wanted to drink something that was probably brewed in a bathtub. “Is it poison?” I asked.
Janet grinned. “You’ve a wretched poker face, Tam. Here, look—to your health.” She took a swig, pressed her lips together.
I sniffed mine—no scent—and did the same. It passed over my tongue like water, but landed in my chest like liquor. Then the taste hit. “Apple Jolly Ranchers,” I said, confused. They were my favorite candy when I was little. “Or, wait. Flowers. Violet candies. No, no, it’s like butterscotch sauce.” I saw Ella, simmering sugar and butter in the pan. “Now it’s sort of, God, it tastes like a latte.” Specifically, the off-menu kind I made for myself at Salty Dog, with honey and lavender syrup. I felt like Violet Beauregarde, babbling about what she was tasting right before she blew up like a blueberry. “What is that stuff?” I gasped.
“Truth serum, more or less.” Janet smiled sympathetically at my expression. “We might’ve believed you without it, dear, but this keeps everyone honest.”
“But you took it, too.”
“We don’t have many secrets between us, Tam and I. And it’s more sportsmanlike this way. You look like absolute hell, I have to say. Maybe let that mess on your head grow out a bit.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.
“It works quick,” I said dryly.
The Hazel Wood Page 20