The Night Country

by Melissa Albert

  “I messed up,” I said, low. “I did. I wasn’t thinking, I—”

  My breath gave out before my words did, juddering away as the panic rose, nibbling at the edges of my vision. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just, just wait.”

  I bolted for the bathroom—tiny, rank, walls papered in ancient stickers. I thought I’d vomit, but I couldn’t. Bent over the sink, I palmed cold water onto my face, breathing out, breathing in. I looked like shit in the mirror, my pupils sharpened to black beads and my skin yellowed by the light.

  I stared at my face, hating it in pieces, all the parts of me that would never look the way I felt. Mouth that would’ve been sweet set in anyone else’s face, the heart curve of my hairline. Eyes like a creature of the woods, set to startle. At least the hair was right, the kind of untamed mess that happens when you leave short hair to its own devices. It was choppy and rangy and in between, and it looked like me.

  “What are you?” I asked my reflection in a choked whisper. “What fucking are you? What do you want to be?”

  I had a vision then, a memory so saturated in color and sensation you could almost call it a flashback, of my mother cutting my hair in the bathroom mirror. A photo of Jean Seberg propped on the sink and the burn of her exhales wafting past my eyes, when she used to smoke while she trimmed.

  I breathed in, breathed the memory away. Then I tucked my overgrown ends behind my ears and left the bathroom. But my mother was already gone.

  * * *

  I was walking back toward the bookshop, along the rustling edge of Washington Square Park, when I felt something in the air. A funny cold little poke, as if someone had pushed aside the atmosphere like a curtain and stuck a finger through. A moment later, a paper airplane pirouetted over my shoulder like a Blue Angel, landing nose first in a laurel bush.

  I looked back, just in case a little kid was about to come running after it, but the sidewalk was empty. I swore I smelled a sinuous note in the air, the scent of not New York. Not laurel leaves or pollution or street food or perfume, but something compounded of the molecules and stardust of far, far away. Maybe I could catch it next time, I thought. Catch that little rift in the air with my fingernails, and peel it back to find him.

  For now, I could unfold the airplane and read his letter.

  30

  Dear Alice,

  Soon I’ll need a break from magical things. I’ll want to walk through a door that’s just a door. I’ll want to talk to a stranger who’s in no way mysterious. If you could see the view from where I’m writing this, you’d understand why.

  Fuck it, I think I want all that now. Right now, I want to read books that stay on the page and ride the subway and eat dim sum and I want to hold your hand. I wonder if I’d be brave enough to say this to your face. I think I would. I asked you out once, remember? I kind of want to take that sentence back, but that’s not the way the magic works.

  I’m almost ready to come home. I’ve got a way to get there, too, or at least the promise of one. There’s just one more wonder I’m out to see. It’s something out of a book again. It’s called the Night Country, and I don’t want to explain it till I’ve seen it. Someone called it the “very last secret,” whatever that means. I guess it means I won’t know what it is till I get there. It’ll either be heaven or it’ll be hell, but either way an adventure.

  I want to write to you again, but what I want even more is to watch your face when you look up from a book one day and see mine. One day soon. I’m gonna be so shy when I see you again. It’s just, by now I’ve said as much to you in letters as I did in life.

  Be patient with me, okay? When I see you and my tongue tangles up. Be patient.

  I’ll see you after the Night Country.

  31

  How did stories seep through the walls between worlds?

  They came in through the cracks. Althea’s stolen fairy tales, those bloody little coils of princesses and kings, they made the cracks.

  But the tale of the Night Country. Ella telling me here, Finch hearing it there, wherever there might be—it made me nervous. More than nervous. The coincidence of it was sand beneath my skin.

  When we’d first met, Finch and I, our meetings sang with a strange resonance. Something grew up between us, something gossamer fine. We’d torn it down, with my stupidity and his betrayal, and then the different things we wanted divided us. Now here we were, years and worlds between us, and still he could find me by letter.

  And one tale could find us both. Already fairy tales had brought us together, imprisoned us, spilled our blood, and carried us ruthlessly apart. What might this one do?

  I left Ella a rambling voicemail. I called Sophia, again, then sent a text.

  I know you’re not talking to me but this is important. Please please please just tell me where are you??

  She didn’t respond. For hours, as I dozed fitfully in the back room of the bookshop and sleepwalked under the sun and read Finch’s latest letter again and again, my eyes blurring and my hands gripping the page.

  When she finally responded the relief hit me like a sugar rush.

  I’m not not talking to you.

  I stared at my phone and understood, suddenly, how Ella must’ve felt, trying to chase me down by text and getting nothing but a cursory message after hours of silence.

  Okay but we need to talk NOW something’s happening. Where are you?

  Her response was unexpected.

  Going to a party

  There was a delay, long enough that I knew she was debating it, then:

  Want to come?

  Send the info, I texted. I’ll see you there.

  * * *

  Party could mean a lot of things, and I barely knew how to dress in the best of times. I changed into jeans and my cleanest shirt and put lipstick on, a burgundy that made me look like a little kid sneaking wine at a dinner party. Then I rubbed it off and put on eyeliner instead. With my mouth still bruised with leftover color and my hair a tangled cloud, dark below and pale at the roots, I looked older. Sophia would never make it past seventeen, but I was already on the other side. From here on out, I’d be leaving her behind.

  Unless she left me behind first.

  She hadn’t said whose party it was, or how she knew them. It was in a condo building in Tribeca, so new you could smell it. The entrance was all wasted space, granite walls and complicated light fixtures and the trickle of water running over stone. A bored guy sat behind the front desk, staring at his iPad.

  Ten stories up, the elevator opened onto a hallway spilling over with strangers and sound, the door across the way held open by a woman’s back. She leaned against it in spike heels and a short red dress, eyes tilted up, laughing at something a man was yelling over the music. As I edged past her, into the apartment, she looked at me and stuck out a pointed tongue. Quick as a wink, then her attention was back on the man. My feet stuttered but I couldn’t place her before she let the door swing shut.

  Stepping into the party felt like stepping into a mouth. There was art on the walls that looked real and a bar set up in the corner, which already made it way fancier than any party I’d ever creeped around the edges of, and either everyone was having fun or they were determined to look it. The music filled my head, loud and bright and beating like a heart, and I’d been there two minutes but already I couldn’t breathe. Across the room, doors opened onto a patio. I tunneled toward it.

  It was cooler outside, the air braided with cigarette smoke and performative laughter. I put my elbows on the railing, looking out. The sky was black with a red echo, like Ella’s hair after she rinsed it with henna. A pair of women to my left were laughing too hard to talk, and on my other side a man sat on the railing smoking a joint, his feet hooked around the bars. I hadn’t seen Sophia yet, and was starting to wonder if she was here. This wasn’t her scene. She didn’t know people like this.

  I’m here, I texted. Where are you?

  I waited for her answer, watching a guy with pornographic chest
hair struggle to get a lighter out of his painted-on jeans. My phone twitched twice.

  We’re everywhere

  We’re all around

  Dread dusted my skin like moths’ wings. I looked up and combed the crowd.

  Nobody I knew. Good-looking strangers in expensive clothes, with haircuts so ugly you just knew they cost two hundred bucks. I took a last breath of the balcony’s weird red air, and plunged back into the party.

  It took a while for me to notice them.

  There was no dance floor, but people danced in pockets, here and there. And wherever the dancing was too wild, too off-key, wherever it struck a note of odd discord, I saw them. A dark clock of them, counting down in a circle around me. Hinterland.

  The man with the blue-black beard and trim suit running his tongue up a woman’s neck: Hinterland. The girl who looked about fifteen, in a dress that might’ve been a nightshirt, jumping in place and screaming like she was at a punk show: Hinterland. And the narrow-cut boy in black, and the crone with the razor-blade smile, and the woman in the tiny green dress, her hair the color of fresh blood. Daphne. Blazing a rippling path through the party, tugging people’s heads to turning.

  Behind me, someone trailed their fingers over my bare arm and I swung around, expecting to see Sophia. It wasn’t Sophia, but I knew her. I’d last seen her in the hotel lobby. Dark skin and silvery hair, her eyes lined in the same starry color. She was one of the seven sisters who moved together in a pack, always gloved, always whispering. Her gloves were off tonight, her nails filed to rose-thorn points. She smirked at me, mouth malevolent, then slipped on through the crowd, her hands seeking exposed skin. The way she moved made it look like she was dancing, but it was deliberate. She executed a dizzy turn, running an index finger over a woman’s clavicle.

  She wasn’t alone. Her six sisters moved like pewter-headed matchsticks through the crowd, one of them climbing the stairs to the loft, all of them touching, touching, people turning around in confusion or anticipation, smiling at them or pulling away.

  I looked at my arm where her touch had been, expecting to see something left behind: a bruise, a trail of iridescence. There was nothing.

  “I can’t believe she touched you.” Sophia spoke into my ear.

  Relief threw me off balance. I grabbed her arm. “You’re here.”

  “I told you I would be.” Her face was tense. “Alice, you should go.”

  “Not till we talk. I’ve been looking for you, where’ve you been?”

  “I’m sorry about that. I really am. But right now, you need to go, or things are gonna get bad for you.”

  “Things aren’t bad enough?”

  She nodded toward the sister who’d touched me. “In the Hinterland their touch could make you hallucinate. They could make you see anything. They’re not as strong here, but still. You should go.”

  My heart went hummingbird. “But they’re touching … they’re touching everybody. What are they trying to do?”

  She spoke the words slowly, like she wanted me to really hear them. “Whatever they want to do.”

  There were easily a hundred people here. More. What would the sisters make them see—make us see? And what would it do to all these bodies, in this tight space?

  “Why are you here, then?” My voice was small. “What are you trying to do?”

  Her gaze flicked over my shoulder. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  I grabbed her hand. “You found me. Come on. There’s stuff I have to tell you, and I have to tell you now.”

  “I can’t go, but you’d better. They can only mess with your head if you’re close.”

  I had more to say, but just then every light in the room—every bulb and candle flame, the glowing end of every cigarette, the lit screen of every phone—shuddered and lifted. Blue and silver and orange and gold, rising to a soundtrack of gasps and screams. They shook out damp-looking wings made of light.

  Dragonflies. The size of postage stamps and playing cards, rising over our heads. The crowd looked up, mouths open in awe or shock or fear. When people lifted their phones to take photos, the fresh illumination gathered itself into winged form and flew away.

  “Are you seeing this?” I asked Sophia.

  She shook her head.

  I should leave. I knew I should leave. But it was just so beautiful. The dragonflies moved like the Hinterland stars, they wheeled and sparked. People lifted their hands and the insects lit on them softly, catching their faces in cupped circles of light. When I lifted mine, Sophia slapped them down.

  “Whatever you’re seeing isn’t real,” she snapped. “Pull yourself together.”

  I watched a man in a flat cap catch a dragonfly between his palms, tilting it from hand to hand like a Slinky. Then he yelped.

  “It bit me!”

  He shook his hand hard, but the thing held on. It got bigger. It curled its wings around his hand. The music was loud, his scream louder, but I swear I could hear his skin sizzle.

  More screaming. From across the room, then just behind me, then over by the door, like car alarms going off in rounds after a thunder clap. The dragonflies scuttled up sleeves and down shirtfronts, wrapped themselves around faces and necks and—I turned my head away, horrified—slipped into screaming mouths.

  On the wall behind Sophia hung a massive canvas painted the mellow green of verdigris, its bottom half covered with little black slash marks the shape of swollen penne pastas. From the corner of my eye, I saw them tremble. I saw them move. My skin creeped and a scream pooled in my throat as they swarmed into a ball, then marched in a teeming black line off the canvas and over the wall.

  Ella and I had roaches in Texas. Big fuckers, the kind that scattered when you turned on the kitchen light. The kind that flew, skimming over your hair and making you lose your mind. I wanted to lose my mind right then. I pointed wordlessly at the wall, pressing my lips together tight.

  Sophia looked. “There’s nothing there,” she said grimly, grabbing my arm. “Time to go.”

  But we couldn’t. The crowd had become a mob. There was more happening here than I could see; the sisters must’ve planted a different nightmare in each head. A woman in a beaded dress clawed at her front, ripping at the stitching, beads flying off her like water drops. A man bent over his knees, vomiting up a stream of light, like he’d swallowed a dozen vindictive dragonflies. Someone writhed on the ground, another person stamped and screamed. Panic spread like tear gas, till you couldn’t tell who the sisters had touched and who was just infected by the screaming.

  And above it all, around it, their faces blissed out or wicked or utterly unconcerned, the Hinterlanders. Felix was there, I might’ve seen Robin. The seven sisters moved like priestesses, possessed, and Daphne was up on the bar, dancing madly, wrapped in her falling red hair.

  Godless. Nora’s words at the wake came back to me, an icy jet turning my stomach cold. With the Spinner long gone and the Hinterland dead, she’d feared its creatures and their acts would grow wilder, godless.

  It’s happened, I thought. We’re here. Then the chain of little paint bugs was skittering toward me, over fallen bodies and around dancers, and I couldn’t help it: I screamed.

  Sophia pressed her hands over my eyes. “You’re fine,” she said. “You’re fine. Nothing real is happening here. I’ve got you, got it? You’re fine.”

  I couldn’t see her, but her hands were warm as a compress, her winey breath sour on my face. The rational line of her voice drew me back from terror, and other thoughts got in. I remembered why I was there, what I needed to tell her. I steadied myself.

  “When we get out of here—I need to talk to you.”

  “Talk now. Distract yourself.”

  Screams of anguish, sugary laughter.

  “Death, Soph. If he … if he found you. If he wanted you to—would you go with him?”

  “Alice.” She said it with such tenderness.

  My knees bent a little, but I stayed up. “You could wait,” I said. “Till I�
��m old. If I get old. We could go down together.”

  “Is that what you wanted to say to me?”

  “That, and … I don’t think they’re being murdered. Or, I don’t think that’s all it is.”

  She kept her hands over my eyes. Around us the partygoers shifted and shrieked, we rocked like a boat on a tide.

  “I talked to my mom. She told me a story.” I wasn’t sure how to tell it, didn’t want to try to in the middle of this haunted room. “Have you ever heard a tale called ‘The Night Country’?”

  Her hands fell from my eyes. Her face was too vulnerable, soft as a mollusk. “What did you say?”

  Then a scream came from above, and we both looked up.

  A woman teetered at the edge of the loft, in a blue dress and bare feet. She was half screaming, half laughing, hysterical and high, her hands grappling at some invisible thing around her throat.

  “Oh, shit.” I held up a hand. “Oh, wait—”

  She went down. Sideways, almost slipping over the railing but instead she hit the stairs, tumbling in an awful slapstick pinwheel.

  I didn’t see how it ended. Sophia wrapped an arm around my neck and the other around my waist and pulled me in tight.

  I spoke into her shoulder. “Tell me. Tell me that wasn’t real.”

  “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She tucked my hair behind my ears, the gesture so motherly I went still. Then she kissed me on the cheek, soft and open-eyed, and if I blinked I might’ve missed it: swimming in the lacquered amber canyon of her left eye, a round black absence. Like a freckle on her iris. If it had always been there, I’d never noticed.

  The insects crawling around my feet were gone, the wicked dragonflies winked out. Maybe even the sisters had had their fill of fun. Someone turned the music off and the lights on as people blinked at each other, stunned, or started to cry. They clotted around the bottom of the stairs, they pulled out their phones. I looked around for Daphne, but couldn’t find her. Voices rose, and someone flung open the apartment door. Half of them were turning toward it, the other half rubbernecking the woman at the bottom of the stairs.