This is not a fairy tale, it began. This is a true story.
Finch paged through the book. It was a tale sparely told, of a mischievous little girl, the daughter of a court magician. When her kingdom is descended upon by a plague of golden locusts, the little girl and her best friend, the king’s youngest son, steal her father’s books to try to discover a way to save it. First, they accidentally enchant every mirror in the castle to say true and embarrassing things to anyone who looks into them. Then they summon a lazy demoness who tries to lead them astray. Finally, they find a spell that could save them: a spell that conjures a door into another world. That world is called the Night Country, and in its fertile air the children rebuild their kingdom as they please, simply by dreaming it up.
They create a world without vegetables or tutors or bedtime. Full of rainbow-flanked ponies and candy fountains and an underclass of hardworking gnomes who build them stained-glass cakes and clockwork wonders, like a beautiful pantomime princess to read to them and an old wizard who sends them flying around the room. In the end, they don’t let anyone else into their Night Country. They shut the door, leaving their parents and siblings and everyone else to the plague of the golden locusts.
Finch closed the book, feeling uneasy.
Then he reopened it. Just to see the illustrations one more time. There wasn’t much to the story, but it gave him a feeling he couldn’t place. He’d just reached the bit where the king finds the first golden locust inside his royal egg cup when the door swung open.
Iolanthe hung in the doorway, her posture dangerous. He crouched in place, her open bag beside him. For a long time they just looked at each other.
“Did you read it?” she asked brusquely.
Finch nodded.
“Good.” She stayed, lightly swaying, in the doorway. “It’s a true story, you know.”
Finch wasn’t sure whether he should stand or remain seated. He settled for rising up on one knee. The pieces of what he knew about Iolanthe were stirring together like alphabet soup: The missing book in the library that she came out of. The picture book in his hands, and the pocket watch in hers. Her sail across the Hinterland’s storied sea, and her journey through its underworld. The photo of the beautiful young man tucked away like a secret.
“Who are you?” he asked her. Not for the first time. He should’ve demanded a better answer before walking through a door traced in her blood.
“I’m like you,” she said. “One of the lost. A wanderer, worldless.”
“How do you know I’m worldless?”
“Same way I knew you’d seen a door into Death, and walked through it.” She knelt beside him and put a fingertip to the line over his throat, pressing closer to keep it there when he recoiled. “Same way I knew this would work, you and me.”
He spoke around the permanent gravel in his throat. “What do you mean, work?”
“You’re a searcher. We both are. Trying to get back something we lost—a home that no longer exists.”
She said it like she was a seer. But Finch was used to people telling him stories about who and what he was. It had been happening all his life.
“Actually I’m thinking about getting back to a girl,” he said. “So I guess you don’t know me too well.”
That broke the spell. Iolanthe fell back, her laughter short and surprised. “So let me get to know you.” She held his gaze, still so near he could smell the liquor on her breath. For an awkward moment he worried she was hitting on him. Then she grabbed the book.
“True story,” she said again, pointing to its cover.
“What part of it is true?”
“Maybe all of it. But the part that matters, the Night Country, that is true. I meant for you to read it. It’s what we’re waiting for. It’s what we’re seeking.”
“We? We’re not seeking anything. I don’t even understand what that means.”
“A world made to order, full of everything you’d like. That’s what a night country is. Doesn’t that sound pretty? Doesn’t that sound nice?”
It did, for a minute. Finch’s mind sparked like a flint against all the things he wanted. Then the sparks went out.
“It sounds like a nightmare,” he said. Because it did, when you thought about it. A world where you glutted yourself on your own desires till you were as awful as the little girl in the picture book. There were enough worlds that could make you into monsters out there. Why make another one?
“It’s the very last secret,” Iolanthe whispered. She poked him again, this time in the chest. “How many can say they’ve walked through a world made from pieces of their own heart? I saw your face when I talked about sailing the Hinterland Sea. You wanted to do that, too. And now you never will, oh, well. You want to read every book in the library, visit every world. How can you say no to the Night Country? You can’t,” she answered herself. “It’ll be one more thing to haunt you.”
“Don’t touch me,” he said, rubbing his sternum. “Back up, I can’t think.”
She sat on her ass, feet on the floor and eyes amused. “Sorry. I’m drunk. But I’m also certain. I’m inviting you to be my companion. Not that kind of companion, we’ll get you back to this girl. But first: let’s have an adventure.”
“Why would I go with you? I know nothing about you. What’s with the pocket watch? Why didn’t Grandma June let you look through the spyglass? Where do you even come from?”
“You need to hear my sad story to trust me?” She shrugged. “All right. I come from a world you’ve never heard of, so it’s no good my telling you its name. I lost someone I loved and it was at least a little bit my fault, and I ran away from that. I ran so far I couldn’t find my way back. I’ve been gone so long I don’t know what I’d be finding my way back to.” Her voice went a little mean. “How about you? Think that girl will still remember your name? Your face? Time gets slippery when you start walking through doors. She could be married by now. She could be dead.”
Her words were infecting him with a buzzing, low-grade panic. Alice married, Alice dead. Alice thirty years old, say, smiling at him politely. Letters? What letters?
“So why would I let any more time pass?” he asked. “If too much has gone already?”
“Because if you do this for me, with me—if you do this for yourself—I’ll make sure you get exactly where you need to go, and when.”
“That’s something you can do?”
She held up her pocket watch. “I’ve got a few tricks.”
“But why do you…”
“Because I’m scared.” She laughed a little. “I’m finally going to get what I want. And I’m scared now. Don’t make me do this alone.”
The last scavenger hunt Finch had gone on took him to a heavily fortified castle at the foot of the ice mountains. Its moat swam with annihilating mist, but its drawbridge was down.
He’d run across it. He’d moved through a torch-hung hall that felt like something out of a video game. Down a winding staircase into echoing dungeons, and below them into a crypt, each walled-in corpse marked by a bigger-than-life-size statue that peered at him with glimmering enamel eyes. He’d taken a rusted metal crown from the head of a surly-mouthed queen, and a misty orb from the hand of a mage.
Crouching next to this slippery, avid-eyed woman in her faded blacks, Finch felt the same way he had walking through that castle’s courtyard. It was addictive, that cocktail of trepidation and desire, walking on when you knew you should turn back. Saying yes when the right answer was so likely no.
“First promise me,” he said. “After the adventure—promise you’ll get me back to her.”
27
“Pick up your goddamn phone, pick up pick up pick up.”
Sophia did not pick up her goddamn phone. And the ghost hadn’t come back. Not when I’d yelled for her, not when I’d recited “The Raven.” I thought about running out for whiskey, but I didn’t want to waste the time.
Instead, I walked the winding hallway and let myself back int
o room 549. I’d shower again first, then head to Sophia’s place. I stank, like curdling milk and burnt carnations and the solemn breath of the dead, and my ears rang with the ghost bride’s prophecies. Ghost within, ghost without. Tell her she won’t have to wait too long. I threw the chain and security locks before stripping down and stepping into the shower.
The water took ages to get hot. I looked at it running around my feet and saw
Genevieve in the bathtub, blue and white
I closed my eyes. Counted to ten, twenty, thirty. Imagined Ella’s hands in my hair. Soaped away the outward traces of the night. But when I left the bathroom, I could still smell something awful, like the scent had crawled into my nose and roosted there. Or like it had been in the room all along, covered up by everything I’d just showered away.
I took a step forward, and stopped.
There was someone in the room. In the bed.
“Soph?”
No reply. I watched the long lump under the bedclothes, waiting for them to sit up and reveal themselves. The covers were over their head, but there was something showing on the pillow, the unlikely color of cotton candy.
Hair. Pink hair. I sagged against the wall, relief and confusion striping through me. It was the woman from the front desk.
“Hey. Vega. Wake up.”
No response.
Gingerly I walked toward the bed, wondering if she was messing with me. “Vega. Hi, good morning. Night. Whatever.” I poked where I thought her shoulder might be. “Excuse me. I’ve had a very shit night, and I need my bed back.”
Nothing. My body was trying to tell me something, pumping a queasy poison into my stomach and my limbs, telling me no good would come of staying in this room, but I didn’t listen. Instead I pulled the blanket back, and back, peeling it away from the figure on the bed.
First I saw the full fall of her flossy hair, then her startled, mottled face. Ice crystals gathered under her skin, bruises raised like the ghosts of old traumas. Her mouth hung open and there was so much
Blood. A broad black road of it. Maybe there’d be even more if she hadn’t been frozen like a butchered animal before she was cut. Before she was plundered. The blood came from her mouth, from the root of her stolen tongue.
If I screamed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound in my head.
* * *
Bare feet and a towel, running down the carpeted hall. The elevator or the stairwell, each felt equally perilous; I chose the elevator. Four floors up and down the hall to Daphne’s room.
Her caps were off, and her lipstick. The fine needles of her teeth flashed behind her pale mouth.
“Another?”
I nodded, wordless.
In my room she turned on every light, pulled the blanket over the dead, opened the window. Took a bottle from her robe pocket and put it into my hand while she made a phone call. I drank it down. Much later, when my head was clear enough to think, I figured it must’ve been something more than alcohol, something she got from Robin, I’d bet, because from that point on I felt okay. I felt detached, like I was watching a movie. The liquor turned up all the lights in my head and took the fearsomeness from the shadows. The room filled with people whose faces I couldn’t keep straight, till I realized they were three people with the same face: the creepy milk-pale brothers who lived with Sophia.
They’ll take care of it, Daphne told me, her words pressing funny on my ears.
It was the body. It was a woman who was alive a few hours ago, till she made the mistake of talking to me.
More activity, lights turned higher—no, it was the sun coming up. Then the room was empty and my bed was stripped, and when I looked at my face in the mirror the imprint of Daphne’s lips lay over my temple, like she’d tried to kiss the worst of my thoughts away.
Her words before she kissed me came trickling through, hours after she’d spoken them. They’ll think it was you. Then the kiss, cold and glittering, as the room turned gray. Watch yourself carefully now, they all think it’s you.
* * *
I let myself into Sophia’s building, twitching with nerves and sleeplessness. Banged on the apartment door till Jenny opened it, then immediately slammed it with a shriek.
“Go away, murderer!”
“Jenny, goddammit, I didn’t do anything! Get Sophia!”
“What, so you can murder her? No way!”
I rested my head against the door and changed tactics. “You really think I can’t kill you through a door? I’m fucking dying to. Get her.”
A few seconds of silence before she spoke. “She’s not here. And that’s not my fault, so you just leave me alone!”
I believed her. Jenny would sell her own mother up the river for a peppermint stick.
Now I was walking down Seventh Avenue, tracing my night, looking for pockets of lost time. I reviewed my path at the wake, ran my nails over the sealed black box that held my memories of the night I broke into the apartment in Red Hook. I hadn’t seen my attacker on the subway, but I’d heard them. I couldn’t have been fighting myself in the dark.
Unless I was losing more than just time. Unless some crucial part of me had come undone.
I was heading back to the bookstore, planning to sleep behind the desk till Edgar got in. The hotel was two kinds of haunted for me now, and whoever killed Vega had no trouble getting into my room.
I saw her right away when I turned onto Sullivan Street. Half a block down, back against the bookstore’s front window. When she spotted me she stood up straight and rushed forward, her arms half open like she didn’t know if she wanted to hug me or hit me.
“So you are alive. You unbelievable, irresponsible, thoughtless asshole.”
I was already crying. Just the sight of her face had done it.
“Mom,” I said, and ran into her arms.
* * *
I didn’t know till that morning that some bars stayed open twenty-four hours.
I don’t think either of us could’ve handled the grind and chatter of a coffee shop, and I didn’t want to talk on the street. So we found a no-name place with a lit Amstel sign in the window and an unlocked door. Inside, we breathed the sour overlay of decades of spilled beer and watched a bartender cutting limes down at the far end of the gouged-to-shit bar. The only other patron was slumped next to the sleeping jukebox, one hand around a bottle.
“Tell me,” she said.
And I did. I was exhausted, clinging to reason. I wanted someone to hold all the unwieldy, sharp-edged pieces of my slipshod investigation, to tell me what they meant or just to take the weight for a while. I wanted someone to tell me I was good, way down at the very bottom where it counts, and not capable of the things some of them thought I’d done.
I told her about the meeting in the psychic’s shop on graduation day, what I’d drunk at Robin’s. Red Hook, the necklace of blood. I told her about the murders. The shortest version, no details. It was harder to save her when I got to the stalled subway car. She gripped the table’s edge and glared at me, gesturing fiercely for me to continue when I faltered.
The knife, the rhyme; the Hinterland, the ice.
The hardest thing was telling her I’d gone to Daphne when I was hurt, instead of coming home. Then I had to tell her about the wake, Genevieve’s body and the blood on my knees, and that was even harder. I told her just about everything but that Finch was sending me letters. For now, those were just for me.
I thought she’d look wrung out when I was done. Broken. Instead she looked hard, her eyes flinty and her mouth pressed thin.
“It’s not me. I would never—I don’t understand how it’s happening, but it’s not me.”
“Of course it’s not,” she said, her voice so scornful and certain I breathed deeply for the first time in days.
“There’s one more thing.” My stomach turned; it was, quite possibly, the ugliest thing. “The person—the murderer—whoever’s doing this. They’re taking something from each body. They’re taking a part.”
&n
bsp; Ella was holding her lime and tonic loosely, rolling it from hand to hand. Now her hands went still.
“What parts?”
Her voice was taut.
“Um. Feet. Hands. And Vega … Vega’s tongue.”
“Oh,” she said in an altered tone.
“What? Does that mean something to you? What does it mean?”
She lifted a hand, signaled to the bartender. Reluctantly he sloped over, tossing a dirty towel over his shoulder.
“Can I get a glass of whiskey, neat?”
“We don’t serve till eight.” He looked pointedly at the clock hanging over the bar, a giveaway from some prescription drug company. “It’s seven forty-five.”
Ella pulled out her wallet and laid two twenties on the bar. “How about you give me the whiskey now, and you take my money at eight?”
He shrugged, poured a long few fingers of Wild Turkey into a Solo cup because it was that kind of place, and took the money.
She picked up the cup and drank half of it down, not even a wince. Then she placed it gently back on the bar.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
In my family, that was a loaded question. I wasn’t so sure I did.
“There’s a tale I almost forgot I knew. Althea told it to me once, a long time ago. Did I ever tell you—” She stopped, shaking her head. “Of course I didn’t. I never told you shit about my mother. I still don’t, even now.”
“It’s okay. It’s hard for you, I get it.”
“No, you don’t. You never will. It’s nineteen years’ worth of complicated, and we’re not getting into it now. I grew up in the Hazel Wood, remember. I grew up in that cracked-up, fucked-up, broken place. Between two worlds. Not of one, not of the other.
“You can’t imagine what it was like, living there with her getting sicker and sicker. And those creatures crawling in from the woods, and me sneaking out, half convinced I was one of them. But that’s—” She took another swallow. “That’s a story for another day.”
The Night Country Page 16