The pink-haired photo-taker was still at the desk. She looked a little scared as I stalked over, a little thrilled.
“Hey. Is this hotel haunted?”
Her face relaxed. “Oh. Yeah. Of course it is.”
“By who?”
Now she looked downright skeptical. “Really? By us. By Hinterland. You think only the living came through?”
* * *
The ex-Stories carried ghosts with us. The figurative kind, mainly—all those who hadn’t made it here, or hadn’t chosen to come. The echoes of our stories, all the things we’d done or hadn’t when the Spinner still held us in her grip.
Some of our ghosts, though, were literal.
Fairy tales were thick with them. Slain brothers, punished parents, a skin-crawling volume of dead brides, all those white-wrapped girls perched on the spindle point between maidenhood and the wedding night. I couldn’t believe I’d never considered that some might have slipped from the Hinterland after the rest of us.
The pink-haired girl’s name was Vega, and it didn’t take much prompting to get her to tell me how I could summon a ghost.
“You could lay out a dish of cat’s milk,” she said, ticking it off. “Just don’t let your reflection show in it, whatever you do. Reciting poetry can do it, if the ghost likes your voice. Burn a bridal bouquet, that one’s easy. Pull out your eyeteeth and hold one in each hand. Let’s see, what else?”
“I think that’s enough,” I said hurriedly. “Really helpful, though, thanks.”
I started to walk away, then stopped.
“Did you take my picture earlier?”
“Um.” She fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Yes?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re her, right? Alice-Three-Times? The one who…” She made a series of furtive hand motions. “You know.”
“I’m nobody,” I said firmly. “I didn’t do anything. If anyone asks, if anyone talks about it, you tell them that. And watch out for yourself, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, looking disgruntled. Then, in a louder voice as I neared the door, “Another thing you could try is having sex. Ghosts are drawn by desire. Or they might just be nosy.”
Faced with the decision of coming back with a bunch of flowers or downloading a dating app, I headed to the good bodega a few blocks away, where flowers were sold but cat’s milk was in short supply. I grabbed a bouquet and a dollar lighter and a carton of whole milk just in case, and threw in two Kit Kats because I hadn’t eaten in ages.
Back at the hotel, Vega had left her post. I dropped a thank-you Kit Kat next to her bell and headed upstairs.
* * *
YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, said the message in the mirror. I hadn’t been. To the voice following me in and out of dreams, to the Trio, the words of the little one in white: Every story is a ghost story. If you’re looking for answers, seek out your ghosts. But I was ready to listen now.
I could attempt the summoning in the lobby, but Vega struck me as nosier than a pervy ghost. And I didn’t like the idea of inviting the dead into my room. The hallway, I decided. I’d head up to my floor and pick a patch of carpet.
I waited till dark, then crept out of my room, a clutch of cheap carnations hanging from one hand and the milk in the other. In a bag around my wrist was the lighter and a paper coffee cup. The hallway had the aggressive, destabilizing sameness of hotels everywhere, even the haunted kind. I walked down and around, till I found a little alcove holding a dusty rubber plant and a sconce with one burned-out bulb. I pushed the plant into the corner. Then I knelt, filled the coffee cup with milk, and lifted the lighter.
And realized I hadn’t thought this through. What would I do with the flowers when they really started to burn? How quickly could I stamp out the carpet if it caught?
Fuck it. I held the lighter up to a carnation’s frilly cup. The flame lapped at the petals, but they didn’t catch. Then it popped and blinked out, the lighter’s hot metal burning my thumb. I dropped it, cursing, and tried again. And again. Finally I pulled the receipt from my pocket and lit that, sticking it in among the flowers.
The flame took. The flowers released the barest breath of green before starting to stink. When they were just fiery enough to make panic bite at my neck, I started to recite.
“I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire—”
I shook my head and started again.
“Out of the ash,” I whispered. “I rise with my red hair. And I eat men like air.”
Daphne flashed in front of my eyes. I blinked her away.
And I thought of the ghosts who might be gathering over my head, even now. Thumbprints on their throats and bellies bright with blood. Yellowed lace, embroidered slippers. Eyes full of retribution. Or jealousy, because I lived.
Good thing I’d had a goth period. Or maybe I was a goth period. At any rate, I could still dredge up some Poe.
“The ring is on my hand, and the wreath is on my brow.” I raised my voice, and the hand holding the bouquet. “Satin and jewels grand, and many a rood of land, are all at my command, and I am happy now.”
The words were already spooky in the quiet room. But the last handful of them bent, refracted as they hit my ear, making my voice sound strange to me. The flowers smoldered, orange rills and blackening petals. I waited.
“Do you think it worked?”
The voice, right by my ear, made me shriek. I looked at the girl sitting cross-legged beside me and almost did it again.
She was, in fact, a bride. Her hair had been red, I think, her face lushly freckled. A wedding dress gripped her by the neck. She was a glass chess piece in a thousand shades of blue, hands resting on her knees.
She nudged at the milk with an incorporeal toe. “What am I, a fairy?”
“I … um…”
“Why don’t you try pouring it on the flowers.”
It took a few startled seconds for me to understand. Then I dropped the flaming carnations and tipped the entire gallon over them. Milk doused the flames, drenched the carpet, splashed and seeped onto my jeans. The bride rose a few inches off the ground, as if the milk might damage her dress.
“Sorry,” I gasped. “I didn’t mean to…”
“No harm. I hate this dress. I didn’t even die in it.” She looked down its long white body. “I died in a nightgown.”
What do you say to that? “It’s a pretty … it was a pretty dress.”
“It was a monstrosity. I was the first bride, you see. Before they learned to stop wasting the lace. Just a harbinger, really. A lesson for the final bride.”
“What happened to her?”
“Nothing good.”
I crouched in milk, beside the wreckage of burnt flowers, but I didn’t dare move. “Thank you for coming,” I said, too solemn, sounding like the host of the world’s saddest dinner party.
“Took you long enough to invite me.” Her fingers dipped into the mess of the milk. “Next time try whiskey. It made my husband’s breath sour but it looked like a jewel in the cup. I’ve always wanted to taste it.”
“Why did you want to talk to me?”
“I knew your grandmother. In the Hinterland. We were friends.”
Althea. “She wasn’t really my grandmother.”
“All the same. She asked me to tell her my story. I hadn’t known I had one.”
“Well, she wasn’t doing it to be nice. She was stealing it, to make money.”
Her voice cut its teeth against the air. “Two things can be true at once.” She wavered out, then in again, like her attention was elsewhere. It probably was. Maybe she could split herself into two pieces, or three, or ten, make the lights blink on Broadway and a phantom wind whistle down Second Avenue, all while sitting here with me.
“That’s really it? You wanted to talk to me because of Althea?”
“No. I’m willing to talk to you because of Althea. She helped me once, and a debt weighs heavier than a wedding ring. What I have to say has nothing to do with her.”
She closed the lit lamps of her eyes, appearing to breathe in deep. Then she flickered out completely. Every light in the place pulsed, one by one, like her spirit was a kite whipping through them. Then she was back in front of me, gaze keener than the rest of her.
“I forget,” she said, “what we were speaking of.”
“You have something to tell me.” My fingers made impatient indents in my thighs. “You’ve been trying to speak to me.”
“Oh.” She considered, tilting her head to the side. And tilting, till it hung unnatural, and I could see the mottled bruising around her throat. “Yes. I’ve been wanting to tell you that you’re haunted. Did you know it?”
My heart squeezed, quick as a fist. “Haunted by who?”
She reached out one thin blue hand and gently, gently placed it on my chest. The feeling was awful, an ice cream headache right down to my spine. “Ghost within, ghost without. How do you carry it?”
“What are you talking about?” I kept my voice level, just barely. “Who’s haunting me? What do you mean, ghost within? What does this have to do with the murders?”
“I mean just what I say, and that’s all you’ll get out of me.” She smiled, brightening as she did. I could count her freckles now, and see the gap between her front teeth. “I get to speak in puzzles if I like, it’s the purview of the dead.”
I was suddenly curious. “Are you happy, then? You don’t want to … to rest?”
“Rest where? In the Hinterland the dead could walk Death’s halls. We could eat at his table. If we pass on here, we only—”
“Stop,” I said quickly. “Please.” There were still some things I didn’t want to know.
“You’ll learn for yourself in time,” she said coolly. “And when it is your time, consider making a haunting if you can. This world is a far better place to be dead. I love it here. I curdle their milk. Beat the eggs in their shells. Turn their clothes inside out and rattle their windows with stones.” When she smiled, her teeth glistened like bits of sea glass. “Here, they call me nightmare, hallucination, curse. They don’t believe in ghosts.”
“So you really know nothing about the murders? No hints, even? You can tell it in riddles if you want.”
“It’s not such a disastrous thing, dying,” she said tartly. “It’s very nice once you’re used to it.” A tremor ran through her, like she was a flicked water glass, and she started to fade. She was dim as an Edison bulb when her eyes snapped back to me. I could see the long hollow of the hallway, visible behind her lips.
“One more thing. You have a friend who waits for Death. Yes?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Tell her I talk to him sometimes. Tell her she won’t have to wait too long.”
26
Finch wrote a love letter. At least he thought he did.
Back in the towered castle in the fossil world, in a spare gray bedroom on the second floor, he circled a few times before sitting down, gingerly, on the edge of the bed. He pulled out the silver pen, and for a long time he just thought.
About New York. About the first time he saw Alice, the spark that grew into curiosity, then fascination. That tumbled into and out of nightmare. Her skeptical eyes and cropped hair and husky, hard-won laugh that sounded twenty years older than her voice. He touched the pen to the blank inside cover of I Capture the Castle, the book that was nearest at hand when he’d packed, and the only one he’d taken from the Hinterland. Ink bled steadily into the page from its point, wicking away.
I am lost, he wrote.
I am lost and stupid and doing this all wrong. He watched the words disappear.
Then he was off, writing in a fever, the words vanishing into the page, barely remembering what he’d said from one line to the next. His head was full of giddy images of Alice. Her face tilted over the letter, the elfin bend of her ear peeking through yellow hair. Her fierce gaze eating up his words.
When he finished his eyes were so wide he could feel them drying out. Every time he closed them, a firework burst in his chest: of anticipation and anxiety and a kind of sweet panic. He recognized the feeling from the time he dropped a carefully copied-out Neruda poem into his ninth-grade crush’s locker.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, laughing at himself, then rolled over and shoved his face into the pillow. It smelled like dead people’s dandruff. He said her name into it, and felt shy.
* * *
Earlier that day—though Finch wasn’t sure how to account for days stretched across multiple worlds—Iolanthe had walked him to the six corners, then left him there as she darted back down the street. She returned carrying two bottles of a carbonated lemony drink, not sweet, and a stuffed, greasy-bottomed bag that smelled like heaven. They sat on a curb and ate right there.
“You don’t want to eat in the gray world,” she said, around a mouthful of something midway between a bao and a knish. “Death gets into everything, makes it taste like black licorice. It’s the same way in the Hinterland, in the land of the Dead.”
Finch was going hah, hah to cool his mouth after biting into a boiling-hot pastry; now he stopped short. “Wait. You went to the land of the Dead?”
“Of course. I went everywhere.”
“That’s…” Amazing, he could’ve said. Incredibly foolish. Terrifying, to be frank. “Extremely metal,” he finished finally. “How’d you get in?”
“I followed the Woodwife.” She looked at her hands, neatly sectioning her knish to let the steam out. “How about you? How did you get in?”
Finch stilled. He hadn’t told anyone he’d gone into the Hinterland’s underworld. He thought he never would. Those were dark days, best looked at sideways: his nihilistic expat period, when life was one long string of double-dog dares that could’ve killed him.
“I followed Ilsa’s golden thread,” he said quietly. “In, and out again.”
“I knew it. I could tell right away—that you’re like me, that you’ve come too close to it.” She smiled faintly and touched her neck where his was striped with a scar. “I think you’ve come too close to Death more than once.”
She had no scars he could see, but right then Finch had the oddest vision: of Iolanthe as a creature many times mended. He could almost see the cracks in her carapace, and the light that came through.
“I think you have, too,” he said, then looked away, unsettled.
They didn’t speak again till they were done eating. Iolanthe stood, pulling out the book that had brought them there.
“Brace yourself,” she said. “The doors can be rough on a full stomach.”
* * *
Back in the dead world, Iolanthe assigned them each a room on the castle’s second floor. He figured they’d be massive and opulent, like the library, but his had the constrictive, smoke-stained feeling of a chamber built in an age when everyone had ten kids and died before they were thirty. He’d had the sense, closing the door, of sealing himself away in a tomb.
He wrote his letter to Alice. Lay down, got up, lay down again. When he peered out the window, a glassless circle the size of his two hands cupped, he saw the kingdom laid out like fallen dominoes. Again came the tricksy flicker of distant movement. Finally he climbed under the bed’s moldering blanket, certain he’d never sleep.
The light hadn’t changed when he woke chilled with sweat, his body turned like the arm of a clock and his covers kicked to the floor.
In sleep he’d flown over the Hinterland, the land wrinkled beneath him like the surface of a globe. He’d watched as mermaids beached themselves, singing torch songs, and the last of the castles came down. It could’ve been just a dream. But maybe he’d seen a true vision of the world’s last gasp. Still caught in the drifting headspace between sleep and dreaming, he wrote Alice another letter. It felt like he was talking to himself; it felt like she was right beside him. He wasn’t sure which instinct to believe.
The dream and the letter left him with a heartburn hurt and the need to move. He laced up his shoes, slipping out of his room
and past Iolanthe’s. He figured he’d poke around the library. But halfway down the stairs he heard a woman’s voice.
Iolanthe’s, coming from below. His stomach seized, but when he found her, she was alone. Sitting at a long table singing a wordless song, breaking between verses to drink from her red glass bottle.
Finch stood in the shadow of the stairs. Against all odds, he knew the song. Ingrid sang it sometimes, on late nights with Janet in her lap and a glass or two of cider gone to her head. Ingrid had put words to it: of hope and longing, and the distant shores of home. Iolanthe’s voice turned it into something else. Something raw-edged and utterly alone. He could taste the salt on it, imagine her singing it as she sliced through the Hinterland Sea. A flyspeck on its waters, the stars peering down. When he couldn’t take any more, he crept back up the stairs.
Her room was next to his, a similarly medieval bolt-hole of rough walls, picturesquely lumpy bed, and washstand and basin. Her bed was undisturbed, her bag propped carefully against its foot. Before he could lose his nerve, Finch crouched down and opened it.
Inside, impressively rolled, was an all-black rainbow of clothes. An offbrand Walkman and a handful of unmarked tapes. Toiletries, an array of currencies in a leather pouch, four packs of Silver Siren brand cigarettes. Canteen, hairbrush, needle and thread. And below all that, wrapped in a pair of long johns, the things he figured he was looking for. The things she thought worth hiding: a book, a photo, and a little metal rabbit.
The rabbit looked like a game piece. It was heavy, its fur filigreed and its eyes inset with minuscule pink stones. He put it gently aside and inspected the photo. It was different from photos on Earth. More intense. It looked less like paper than a dark and bright window onto a breezy day when a younger Iolanthe had grinned, squinting, into the camera, snugged up against a slender, dark-haired man who looked like Rimbaud. His face held the kind of temporal beauty generally reserved for those who die young.
He stared at the photo awhile before placing it carefully back into her bag. Then he turned to the book. It was a children’s picture book. The Night Country, it was called, with illustrations the saturated colors of candied fruit.
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