I shot up. Her face was defiant. I’d seen that expression before.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’ll go somewhere beautiful.”
Oh, shit, I’d heard that voice before. That exact promise.
“We could live on a farm. We’ve still got money left over from the Hazel Wood sale, enough to live on while we wait to sell this place. We could live in a place with red rocks, where you can see the Milky Way. We could finally get a dog.”
I breathed in and out before I answered. “We can’t keep doing this. Promising me rocks and dogs—it’s not enough for us to keep doing this.”
She lifted her chin, looked me in the aching eyes. “I once promised you a whole world. Did I not make good on that promise?”
“I can’t move again,” I said. “I can’t.”
Because my life here wasn’t just blood and violence and secrets I didn’t want to keep. It was walking over the bridge with Sophia at two a.m. It was hiding a deck of vintage playing cards in the books on Edgar’s shelves, little unsigned notes to fifty-two buyers. It was having the world’s best Danish on Church Street and the world’s worst coffee on Cortelyou and seeing the divot in my bedroom wall from all the times I’d opened the door too hard, a divot that was mine, in a room that was mine, in a city that belonged to no one but at least you could borrow it, in pieces, and pretend it loved you back.
“So what do we do? Just go on like this? On and on like this?” She stalked over to the junk drawer, where rubber-banded takeout menus bred like rabbits. Yanked it open, pulled out a shiny-covered something and held it up.
It was a college brochure. Two sweatered people laughed together over their books, a manicured lawn glowing green around them. She pushed the bottom edge of it hard into my chest.
“Look at this.” She was half laughing, but her face was wet. “I look at these things all the time when you’re not home. I hide them like they’re porn. It’s not even—you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to. I just want you to act like you’re here, act like you’ll be here, start putting down some roots with me.” She cupped my face in her hands. “Or not with me. Whatever you need. Alice. My god, what more needs to happen for you to stay away from them?”
I put my hand over hers and slid it gently from my face. Then I stepped back.
“Mama.” She stood up straighter when I said the word. I hadn’t said it in years. “What more needs to happen for you to understand that I am them?”
Smoke played like ghosts over the ceiling. The morning light was a lie. And my mother was a forlorn figure in a room where she lived with a girl who was only a figment, really.
11
She wouldn’t let me touch her. Her hand or her cheek or the ends of her black hair. My mother pressed herself small against the counter so I couldn’t reach her. Finally I left the kitchen, stumbling down the hall to my room.
I was parched and starving. I had to pee, and pain sawed at me all over. But after twenty-four hours without it, sleep took me down.
I woke up shaking.
I was hot, then cold, then both at once. The midday light through the blinds was heavy, pouring over me in scalding stripes. I was too weak to roll away.
“Mom,” I said. But the apartment was empty. I could feel it.
Infection. My attacker’s nails that had sliced over me, there must’ve been something on them. It took three tries to pull up my shirt. My ribs looked like shit, the Band-Aids puffed with blood, but the skin around them seemed okay.
My shoulder itched. I scratched through my T-shirt, then under the fabric, finally dragging it over my head. A Hinterland flower was tattooed up my arm, and it itched. The tattoo was years old, it didn’t make sense. The itching deepened to a burn.
I lay down for just a minute, closed my eyes. When I opened them, the light had changed. Time had come unstuck, hours passing without my seeing them go.
Something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just my injuries, I was sick. I thought of ice water gliding down my throat, soaked into a compress laid across my head. I pictured my phone where I’d left it, with my keys by the door. Tears slid over my temples.
It got worse every hour. By early evening I was twisting under the sheets, watching leaf shadows play on the walls. I had to close my eyes and turn away when they became little faces, winking at me.
When my mother finally walked in, I thought she was a hallucination, too. Her face was stricken, her hand on my forehead cool.
“What is this?” she said. “You’re burning up. You.”
I’d never been sick. Never, not once. I’d sprained an ankle, gotten a concussion, been hungover, had headaches, broken a rib once, vomited from bad shrimp tacos, and gouged the absolute shit out of my chin on a coffee table, but I’d never even had a cold. Ella crouched beside me.
“Do we need to go to the emergency room?”
She sounded so young. She had no script for this. Everything she’d dealt with, raising me alone, almost losing me, she’d never had to figure out a sick kid. “No, I’m—” I pushed up a few inches, tasting something in the back of my throat. Something bilious and thin. “I need water. And something to throw up in.”
She brought what I’d asked for, plus a sleeve of crackers and a skimpy sampling from our medicine cabinet. Her steady hands propped me up with pillows, fed me water and crackers and aspirin, and touched a hydrogen peroxide–soaked cotton ball to my chin. I thought of Daphne patching up my ribs, then giving them a slap. The image broke as Ella climbed into bed with me and took my hand.
“Christ. Your head’s on fire, but your hands are freezing.”
I had a sudden terror that my eyes would go black. But I was too tired to do anything about it, too weak even to walk to the bathroom; when I thought I might actually wet the bed, my mom had to help me down the hall.
Back in bed, the cold warring in me finally won out over the heat. Ella wrapped me in a robe and buried me in blankets dug out of summer storage. Her voice was drawn up tight.
“If you’re not better soon we’re going to the hospital.”
It can’t get worse than this, I kept thinking. This is as bad as it’ll get. But I was always wrong.
I drifted off eventually, me under the covers and Ella on top, holding the lump that was my hand below. The long white road between waking and sleep stretched like taffy. My bed and my mother and the walls of my room melted into trees and castle walls and a courtyard spinning with snow.
It was the Hinterland, trying to break through. I wavered there, on the precipice of dreaming, and I fought it. But I was weak, and I staggered, and I fell.
When I stood up, I stood on a curve of sand, lapped at by dark water. Behind me huddled a line of shivering trees. The sky was so low I could touch it, like there was no air here that wasn’t sky.
I was in the Hinterland. Not a dream of it, but the thing itself. It was altered: the land felt wilder. Unlatched. There was a looseness to it and a saturation too, the trees too close to the sea too close to the sky, like someone had grabbed up a fistful of the Spinner’s dark country and squeezed. The trees were bedded in a roiling black mist and stars crowded overhead, so beautiful and bright I forgot to be afraid. I was alone, watching the stars watching me.
Then one of them trembled.
It stepped out of its constellation. In the big, soft, humming silence, the star pitched itself into the sea. It was a fizzing ball of sodium white that became a girl as it drew nearer, with streaming hair and the noble, blunt-cut face of a figurehead. It slipped silently into the water, shining briefly below the surface before its light went out.
Others followed. One by one, then whole constellations, drawing courage from one another’s plunge. The air thickened with plummeting stars like sparks thrown off a downed power line, till my sight sang purple and white.
After the last star fell, the moon hung like a lonely searchlight. I wondered if she knew that her granddaughter, Hansa, was dead. I wondered if she mo
urned her. I watched as she lowered herself through the dark.
She was an old woman in her perch in the sky, a maiden crossing the horizon line, and a child when she touched the surface of the sea. She glowed beneath the water for a long time, lighting it the dreamy mermaid green of a motel pool.
I stood on the beach and watched her wane, feeling the shift of sand under my feet and smelling the sulfur of the fallen stars.
When the moon went out, there was nothing left but sand and water and empty sky. The trees whipped up wilder and the sea slid higher, moonless and misguided, till its cold fingers locked around my ankles, my knees, my hips. I heard a sound like splintering and a faraway singing, so high it made my scalp prickle, so low it made my knees bow, then the endless rushing of water falling over the edge of the world.
I could hear someone crying, someone moaning, someone writhing in their sleep. I knew it was me, that Earthbound version of me, but I couldn’t reach her. The water was to my chest now, to my throat, and I was lifted.
Something was being taken from me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was precious. I was back on the precipice: here, in a Hinterland running together like finger paints, and there, in Brooklyn, the press of my mother’s arms holding me together.
For a moment both worlds held me in their grip, one of them dying but both of them strong, and I was wrung like a rag between them. At every joint and join I came apart and I thought that was the end of me, but I reconnected with an electric pop, and when I screamed, I screamed in both worlds. And though I couldn’t hear it, I knew every Hinterlander on Earth screamed with me.
Then that world let go, dropping me back on my bed, in the city, with my mother’s face over mine, terrified and smeared with tears.
“Alice, hold on. Alice, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”
She said it like she was speaking every promise over a rosary bead, till she understood that I was looking back, that I was awake again, returned from wherever I’d been taken. My eyes burned with falling stars and my skin puckered with the chill of a dying land beneath an emptied sky.
“It’s dead.” I gripped her hands so tightly she winced. “The Hinterland is dead.”
12
Everyone felt it.
Sophia and Daphne and Robin and the rest of them. All the fallen kings and eldest sons and cruel queens and maidens cast in colors of ebony and copper, blood and salt. Everyone knew it in their bones when the world we’d abandoned left us for good.
I didn’t know that yet when I woke up, sweat-soaked and thirstier than I’d ever been. Ella lay on the floor beside my bed, watching The Good Place on her laptop with the sound on low.
I watched her for a minute before she noticed I was awake. Her mouth turned down, hair sweaty at the temples. She’d pulled off all her rings, her hands looked undressed.
I wondered if Finch had felt it, wherever he was. Probably not. He was born here, he was of the Earth. I guess he’d feel it if his was the world that drowned its stars and spun out into particles.
“Mom,” I said, my voice a rasp.
She looked at me quickly, and smiled.
* * *
My phone was thick with texts from Sophia. The oldest just said my name.
Alice
Are you feeling this
Text me back
Text me back
Text me back
CALL ME
Then one from a number I didn’t recognize.
Sophia’s apartment tonight at 10. We’re having a wake.
It was from Daphne. It had to be. Drawing all of us to one place: me, her, Sophia, the rest. The figure from the subway might be there, too. Maybe they’d bring their rhyme and a hidden knife. Maybe they’d want to finish what they started.
I texted back.
Do you think that’s a good idea?
She never replied. When I called Sophia, her phone was dead, which wasn’t unusual but worried me all the same. I told myself I might not go, that I shouldn’t go, but I knew I would. I had to. I had to grieve for the Hinterland.
After a day spent lying low, drinking chicken broth and watching TV and picking at Thai takeout, I put on black jeans and black high-tops and a black T-shirt. I tried a Zelda Fitzgerald thing with my hair and a New Wave thing with my eyeliner, and I got both of them halfway right. I tucked a pocketknife into my jeans.
When I told Ella about the wake, she nodded, then turned away. We were still being delicate with each other, unsure where we stood after our fight. My sickness had drawn us into a tentative détente.
I stared out the window on the cab ride up, seeing nothing. When I closed my eyes I saw the faces of the stars, the moon in her declining phases. The Hinterland was dead. Hansa, the Prince, and Abigail were dead. I could’ve been dead, too. My brain sputtered, trying to forge a connection among those pieces. It was there, it had to be. But I couldn’t see it. When we got to Sophia’s, the driver had to tell me twice.
She lived in Lower Manhattan in a seedy old building you could tell had once been gorgeous. At some point it had been gutted, mostly rebuilt, then abandoned. It reminded me of those half-finished development projects you find sometimes off the highway. Ella and I used to pull over to explore them: cracked black streets petering to nothing, lonely cul-de-sacs, empty houses looking like they’d been dropped by a neat-fingered tornado.
I let myself in—the street door lock was broken—and climbed to the seventh floor.
The apartment where Sophia lived with five other ex-Stories had good bones, but that was about it. Construction dust clung to the corners, and patches of exposed drywall freckled the rooms. It was a temporary place, loose and rotten. Usually it was empty as an ice rink, but tonight it was haunted by forlorn figures. The long windows were bare and moonlight poured through, casting everyone in silver. Pockets of candles lined the sills and clustered like mushrooms on the ground; if we ended the night not dead in a fire, that’d be ten points for Slytherin.
There were more of us here than I thought still existed. Meetings were usually twenty, twenty-five of us, tops. But there had to be forty Hinterlanders in this room, with more arriving. I felt like a rat lifting its head to watch a tide of other rats running from a storm drain, and shuddering.
The murderer could’ve been anyone. That reedy boy, all deep dimples and curls to his shoulders, stone-cold putting away vodka like a sailor. That woman with the crown of blue-black hair, who looked like a consumptive Snow White and glared at me before I could turn away. Had it been her whispering to me in the dark?
There were cliques here and there—packs of siblings, some pairs—but mainly we were a roomful of loners, unmixed. I saw the three brothers who lived in the pin-neat room next to Sophia’s lined up against the wall drinking beer, T-shirts tucked in and pale hair pasted to their paler skulls. They looked like inbred royal cousins, perishing in the corner of some dusty Flemish painting. Genevieve was there, sitting alone on a windowsill drinking from a bottle of Stoli, her ridiculous Ren Faire sleeves almost dipping into a clutch of candles. Across the room, the Hinterland’s creepiest kid, Jenny, perched on a stool wearing a ruffled dress, eyes ticking back and forth to see who was noticing her.
Even among the loners, I felt out of place. The eyes that met mine were cold, or slid away too fast. I nodded at a few whom I knew, whom I’d talked with sometimes when I was a part of things, and two of them looked right past me. The third stared a moment before spitting through her teeth.
Well, fuck Daphne. Whatever she’d been telling them about me, it had clearly worked.
“Alice.”
I turned and smiled, my first genuine smile of the night. My favorite of Sophia’s roommates had an executioner’s build and the hard hatchet face of a murderess. But Nora’s looks lied. She talked with the prim rhythms of a grammar primer, was fascinated by Earthly religions, and was deeply shy. I liked her a lot.
“My condolences to you on our loss,” she said. Her tone was dry.
“Same to yo
u,” I said carefully. The Spinner had unwound Nora’s story a long time ago. While she wouldn’t talk about it, anyone could look at her and know she’d been built for villainy. It made me hate the Spinner more, to think of Nora’s gentle nature bottled inside a weapon.
“Look at that,” she said, jerking her chin at something over my shoulder. “A bit full out for a funeral, isn’t it?”
Daphne, her lips red, her eyes bedded in sparkling shadow. She wore a brief black dress that made her skin and hair look like something you’d display on velvet in a jewelry shop window. I felt the oddest stab of irresolution, seeing her again in her lipstick and glitter. It struck me that I spent more time than I should deciding whether and how I despised this woman.
“Has she told you yet?”
Nora frowned. “Told me what?”
“Not you, I mean all of you—has she told you what happened to me?”
“She tells us lots of things,” she said evenly. “It’s hard keeping track.”
I glanced at her. “How did she hook us, do you think? How did it get to where she snaps her fingers and we all come running? It’s not really what we are.”
Nora had green eyes clear as spring water. Even in the tarnished glow of moonlight and candles I could see them darken. “What we were. What are we now, but the lost children of a dead world?”
That was a bit too much poetry, even for me. “What does that mean? We already left the Hinterland. So it’s gone now—what does that change?”
Her eyebrows went up, like she’d been stung by my stupid. But it wasn’t rhetorical, I was really asking.
“People in this world have a thing they call god,” she said. “Or gods. Yes?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“And they do good acts and take care to justify their bad ones to please their god or gods.”
“Right.”
“There are some among us who began to think of the promise of a return to the Hinterland as a sort of promise of paradise. They thought of the Hinterland, or the Spinner, perhaps, as a god. With the Hinterland gone, what’s left to serve as our god?”
The Night Country Page 7