I didn’t like to hear the dead’s names in their mouths. “Murder isn’t sacrifice—they didn’t want to die. Saying it was a sacrifice implies there’s something they died for.”
Red turned to Black. “Assumes she knows everything, this girl.”
“And knows less than most.”
Red looked back at me. “Don’t you know the story of Saint Alixia? He cut off pieces of himself to feed the gateway between Heaven and Earth, to keep it always open for his kin. He cut off pieces till he fell down dead, and his blood became a river. His wife paddled down it to her divine reward.”
“That’s not a real story,” I said, though I supposed it could be. You never knew with saints.
“We’ve nothing more to say to you, child.”
“Child?”
“We’ve nothing more to say,” Red repeated. “You asked your questions and we answered them. If you won’t listen, bother us no more.”
“Let’s take her out of our prayers,” Black whispered.
There was more I wanted to say to that, but a harassed-looking man was hurrying over, hem trailing behind. He clapped his hands gently, looking past me.
“You three cannot be in here. I’ve already told you, no unattended children in the church.”
The thing in white piped up then. Her voice was bell-sweet and lightly turned. She looked not at the man but up, like she was practicing her Joan of Arc. “‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” Her voice flattened, and her eyes met his. “Never, not ever. Never ever.”
Whether it was the scripture or her spooky little face, the man fell back, uncertain. “Well, that’s…” Without finishing his thought, he swept off toward the altar.
“Our advice to you,” said Red, turning back toward me.
“Is to listen when your betters speak,” said Black.
White looked at me, and I held my breath.
“And to remember every story is a ghost story,” she said. She reached out and pressed one cold little hand to my chest. Its nails were painted ballerina pink. “If you’re looking for answers, seek out your ghosts.”
The painted eyes of the saints watched me walk away. The lit candles guttered as I passed; I wondered what would happen if I trailed my fingers through the pool of holy water.
I looked back, just before opening the door, at the three dark beads of their heads over the pew back.
Four. For a moment, I thought I saw a fourth head. Then the door behind me opened and the sun sliced in, and I blinked the vision away.
22
What did Finch think they’d find through the door?
A goblin market. The wood between the worlds. An underworld of smoke and fire.
Not this: a few rippingly painful seconds spent falling through an icy fog. Then his body tipped onto dusty stone, hard through the patched-over knees of his jeans. He was certain he was upside down, clinging like a spider, till the world righted itself. Iolanthe was already standing, swatting the dust away, as Finch rose slowly to his feet.
They stood in a cracked courtyard circled with crumbling pillars, under a blank gray sky. But courtyard didn’t feel like an old enough word. It was an agora, then, vast and ancient and empty. Finch couldn’t tell if it was night or day, or whether those words had any meaning here. The pillars were neatly spaced, flanking wide stone roads, each angling steeply upward toward the broken teeth of the city encircling them.
This world was dead. Finch thought he understood what that could mean, having watched the disintegration of the Hinterland. But that was a bleeding world, running with life and rage and sentient stars, bucking against the insult of its own collapse.
He hadn’t understood what death could look like when the corpse was made of stone and wind and dust and all the million, million elements that sifted and slept the big sleep under a voided-out sky. The weight of it was unimaginable.
Iolanthe’s hand was friendly on his shoulder. Her calm was a lifeline, and the casual lilt of her voice. “Scary, isn’t it? We can’t stay too long without shelter—it gets under your skin out here. In your head. But look around while you can, hardly anyone gets to see a fossil world.”
Finch found his words at last. “What happened here?”
She was turning in place, looking at each road. Something about the one directly to Finch’s right must’ve appealed to her, and she started toward it. Far, far above them—though it was hard to say how far, because of the place’s surreal flatness—stood a palace of high gray towers, edgeless against the sky.
“A parasite happened,” she said. “Now follow me, and save your breath. It’s a long walk.”
The city seemed distant till suddenly they were in it, among the falling-down slabs of walls and shops and houses. They walked in silence, but inside Finch’s head was a rising fire. A building whose windows were great black eyes had on its roof a stone symbol like a thumbless hand, clearly some kind of long-fallen temple. There was a moment when he thought he saw a sign of life—an undulation in his vision, like the flicker of distant light—but Iolanthe didn’t seem to notice it, and then he wasn’t sure.
The towered palace, when they reached it, was surrounded by an expanse of open pavement cracked into gray mosaic. They picked their way across it, toward the structure’s arched, iron-girded doors. There, Iolanthe looked again at the blank face of her pocket watch. She replaced it and pulled a key from her bag—bronze, ridiculously oversized, straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
“Skeleton key,” she said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Finch replied.
She looked at him to see if he was kidding. He was not. “Now you ask me?” Her face was half in shadow and half in gray light. Tramping in her cloak through this hollow land, she looked more like the progeny of Prospero than the grungy wanderer he’d pegged her for.
“I’m a traveler,” she told him. “A survivor. Most of all, I’m the person who got you into this gray fart of a world, and I’m the person who’s going to get you out. Good enough?”
“For now.”
“Oh, good. Now stay close, it’s gonna be dark for a while.” She cranked the door open with her outlandish key, and they slipped through. Finch hadn’t noticed the enervating breeze soughing in his ears till they stepped inside and it was gone. Immediately his head felt clearer.
Iolanthe slid through the dark. Her cloak had metallic stitching on the back, too; Finch followed its faint radiance. Through a series of connected rooms like the sections of a centipede, down a long corridor, and into the sudden gray light of a window-paneled atrium, where, at last, the air was filled with the scent of something familiar.
Books. The drowsy odor of paper and leather and dust and age, and none of the scents you’d expect: of mildew and water damage, pages gone to rot. They stood in a library.
Finch darted ahead. The books climbed up and up, shelves alternating with windows through which he could see scraps of the building’s towers. He hadn’t seen this many books in one place since before the Hinterland. Janet had a yellowing collection she cherished, and the refugees a teeny lending library that boasted the pooled resources of Earth’s displaced travelers—Wuthering Heights, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a Turkish translation of A Wrinkle in Time—but that was fifty titles at most. These brimming shelves tugged him in like a moon. He almost didn’t hear Iolanthe’s mild “Careful” as he pulled down a book.
It was gray as the rest of the room before he touched it, but once it was in his hands he could see that it was bound in pale blue, embossed, front and back, with an intricate spiderweb. Tiny women were caught in its net in various attitudes of peril: arms up, heads thrown back, hands to mouths. They looked like a pack of Fay Wrays. It was creepy enough that he paused, before opening it anyway.
The print was made up of intensely black, closely clustered characters. Though he couldn’t read them, he could feel their inherent narrative thrust: they wanted to be read. They
wanted to tell him a story. Staring at the text was like staring at churned-up water, slowly clearing, till he could see what lay on the seabed below.
What came into slow focus was a cautionary tale. A tale of silver scissors and red fruit, of green leaves and dark earth, of dangerous and endangered girls. It was, if he had to guess, a fairy tale.
He peered into the deep water of the book till he could hear the wheedling bite of the scissors and feel the sweet give of poisoned fruit and the leaves circling his brow were cool and wet like they’d been plucked just after a rain and—
“Hey, now.” Iolanthe stood over him. The book was in her hands, firmly shut. Finch blinked, trying to remember when he’d gotten to his knees. “This isn’t the book we’re looking for.”
Finch breathed to steady himself. “What was that? What the hell was that?”
“I had to let you do it once,” she said, unapologetic. “So you won’t do it again.”
A card catalog stood between the double helix staircases. She chose a drawer near the bottom, flicking through it for a minute before emerging with a card. The book she wanted was two stories up, and she made Finch fetch it. He scurried up a wet dream of a library ladder, all sturdy wood and metal fittings. His perspective shifted as he climbed, books altering their size and height and sparking with roving flares of color, like optical illusions.
“Stop!” Iolanthe called when Finch had reached the second landing. The book she directed him toward gained heft and density in his hands, like one of those little Bibles made up of a zillion onionskin pages. He tucked it under an arm and took the staircase down.
“What now?” he said, a little breathless. Iolanthe had pushed her sleeves back again; Finch was worried she’d slice up the other arm.
“Now I show you a less bloody way of walking through a door.”
“Jesus,” Finch breathed. “Are all these books doors?”
“A book is always a door.”
“Sure, yeah, but not a—usually not a literal door. Have you done this before? Have you gone into these books?”
An odd look flashed over Iolanthe’s face, sharp as a sunbeam caught in a hand mirror. “I came out of one of these books.”
The air in Finch’s lungs went fizzy. He’d suspected she wasn’t from Earth, but it was different to hear it confirmed. This girl with the ice-colored braids and the wanderlust might have more secrets than he did. “Which one?”
She climbed up a few steps, leaned far over, and stuck a finger in the empty space between two books. “This one.”
“What happened to it?”
Her face was still turned away. “It’s been checked out.”
“I’m sorry,” Finch said softly. When she didn’t respond, he went on. “Whose library was this? What was this place?”
“It belonged to a magician. A powerful one.”
“All these books—all these worlds—were his?”
“Hers. Only one world is hers.”
“Is? She’s still alive? Who is she?”
“Shh. Come here.” She walked back down and extended a hand. Finch took it. With her free hand Iolanthe fumbled open the book, and began to read.
The words weren’t the fleet, wild-winged things that opened the blood door out of the Hinterland. They were slower, sweeter. They beguiled. Finch wanted to see when it happened, when the door appeared, but he couldn’t keep his lids from closing.
“Keep them closed,” Iolanthe said, her voice wobbling toward Finch’s ear like sun through water. Her fingers tightened around his, and the pair of them stepped forward into something that felt like Finch once imagined a cloud would feel, back when he was a little kid looking out the window of an airplane. It was soft and giving and it smelled like the sweet wood of a cigar box. Then the air cleared, went thin and smoky and cool.
When he opened his eyes they were standing uneven on a cobblestone street, the cutout square of a doorway hanging in the air behind them.
23
Outside the church, the sun was higher, the heat heavy as a hand. Tourists and commuters in sweat-stained business clothes moved like sleepwalkers. My eyes caught on exposed arms and bellies and feet, the sweat-shining canals flowing between women’s clavicles. The glare of it boiled together with incense smoke, the sad-eyed Virgin, the candles lit like so many life-lights. And the message the Trio had for me: that the deaths weren’t murders, but martyrdom.
Martyrdom to what?
I backed into a square of shade and called a car, unable to bear the prospect of twenty blocks of hard sun, or wading through the morning rush in Times Square. A few minutes later a black sedan pulled up and the driver ducked her head down, looking at me.
Sun-dazzled and suddenly starving, I collapsed into its back seat.
Maybe martyrdom wasn’t the crux of it: I’d almost been killed, and there was nothing I’d been ready to die for. The child in white told me to seek out my ghosts. Maybe that was the real message. But what did it mean? I sighed, craving the solitude of my room, ice water, and a shower. I lay my head against the seat.
And heard the click of the child locks. I looked up.
“What are you—”
“Shut up,” the driver snarled. “Don’t say another word till I say you can. And put your hands up—cross ’em, up on your shoulders, where I can see them.”
Her face, what I could catch of it in the rearview mirror, had a wicked Morgan le Fay look to it, fleshy and lush. Her head grazed the top of the car, all of her built on a grand scale. She was Hinterland, of course, but I wasn’t panicking yet; no chance was she the quicksilver thing who’d attacked me on the subway. Mainly I was kicking myself for getting in the wrong damned car.
“Look, what do you want?”
“I told you to be—hey!” She leaned on her horn and shrieked a string of expletives as a tank-topped school of pedestrians bearing Disney Store bags darted in front of the car.
“It’s Midtown,” I snapped. “What did you expect?”
“Shut up.”
There was such focused rage in the words that I did go quiet. When I tried to sneak a hand to my phone she braked hard, glaring at me, and I pulled my hand back. Traffic was stop and go, past chain stores and Netflix ads and people dressed in unlicensed Anna and Elsa costumes and it all felt so surreal I didn’t really get scared till she veered hard into a parking garage. Past the booth, attendantless, and barreling upward, around and around in dizzy circles through the dim, taking every corner too tight and making me dig my nails into my skin. Then we burst out into sunlight glinting off chrome fenders and pearlized finish, so assaultive after the dark I didn’t see the man right away.
Sitting on the hood of a parked car, holding a dark metal wrench.
And it struck me that I should be arming myself, if I could.
Cold, I was thinking dizzily, squeezing my eyes shut and pressing my fingers into my collarbone. Cold, cold—
The woman flung open the door and dragged me out by my arm and a fistful of shirt, throwing me onto the ground. Glittery bits of it dug into the heels of my hands and my bare knees as I pushed up, tried to push to standing. Then she had me again, her hand palming my neck like I was a kitten. She forced me to kneel and I felt the beginnings of it: that burn in my throat, that ice-pick ache in my eyes. The man stood in front of me with his wrench over his shoulder, black boots planted. Him I recognized. Brown skin, dressed all in green. I’d seen him in meetings before, even heard him talking about his daughter, but it wasn’t till now that I put it together. The cresting cold in me guttered and fled. I pressed my palms, placating, to the ground.
“You’re Hansa’s parents, aren’t you?”
The hand on my neck tightened and jerked, shaking me till my vision snapped with stars.
“Listen to me,” I gasped. “I didn’t do anything, I—”
Then she was lifting me, easy as a puppet, hauled up under my armpits. When I was back on my feet she moved next to the man, looming over him by a head. He flexed his hands ar
ound the wrench, and she held her own hands up like they were weapons, like they were as deadly as mine. I believed it.
“Tell me to my face you didn’t kill my daughter.”
I looked straight into her wild blue eyes, ready to deny it. As they met mine, caught mine, I felt an aqueous click in my brain. A hypnotic tug that reeled me in and sent me tumbling headlong down a cool blue hallway the exact color of her eyes. When she spoke the words again, they came from inside my head.
Tell me you didn’t kill my daughter.
I couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink, couldn’t move anything but my mouth.
“I didn’t kill Hansa. I didn’t touch her.”
Her pause was long, and I was falling. Or maybe I was suspended, in an endless tunnel of light. My body felt warm and weightless, sheathed in calm, panic scrabbling at its underside. Then a jerk behind my belly button heaved me up and out of that serene blue place, dropping me back onto the rooftop of a Manhattan parking garage, sweat-sticky and spitting curses on my hands and knees.
“What was that?” I half screamed.
The man looked down at me, impassive, the wrench now at his side. But the woman was even angrier, crouched beside me.
“If you didn’t kill her, who did?” Her breath was hot on my face.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”
“I’ll know if you’re lying. Do you want me to find out if you’re lying?”
“No, no.” I put up a hand, scrambled backward. “I’m not lying. Whoever did it, they’re trying to make it look like it was me. Whoever did it, they tried to—”
Kill me, too, I was going to say. But suddenly I wondered. If whoever was doing this was trying to frame me, why would they want to kill me? Which half was I wrong about?
“Tried to what?” she said, pushing her face into mine.
“They’re trying to do something,” I said, changing course. “Why else would they do what they did, taking pieces away?”
Her big vivid mouth went bloodless. Behind her, the silent man shifted.
“You’re going to find out who did it,” she said. It wasn’t a question, it was marching orders. “And when you find out, you’re not going to do anything else about it until you come to me.”
The Night Country Page 13