“And blood to bless it,” she said, half shrieking it, and shook out her hands.
Drops of blood, my blood, flung themselves over the pieces. The foot I’d let fall when she cut me, the sci-fi meat of the heart. Sophia’s golden eyes. Finch was talking in my ear, he was tending to my bleeding arm, but all I could hear was silence.
The silence of a turned corner. The wait between the drop and the crash. Maybe it won’t work, I thought desperately. Maybe she forgot one thing, did one thing wrong.
Then the singing began. Pure tone, high and sweet and cold as a spring. It came from Vega’s tongue.
I would never be able to explain it, how the air shuddered against the song. How it unpeeled itself, allowing something to crawl free of nothing. The tongue sang itself two rows of bright teeth. It sang itself a skull and the stacked ivory checkers of a spinal cord, the cage and cradle of ribs and pelvis. The long bones of the limbs swarmed toward severed hands and feet, one leg blooming odd and overextended to reach Hansa’s foot where I’d dropped it. The busy bloody tumult of muscle and organ and tendon, so ripe I couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe, then the relief of skin sliding over it like a paper window shade.
The singing stopped, but the notes still scraped against the air, arcs of hot sharp sound. I didn’t think my ears would ever be empty of it. I was pressed against Finch, both of us so sweaty I couldn’t tell what was him and what was me. When the body stood up we gasped in a breath together.
It was a girl. Bald-headed, its skin a calico patchwork, its eyes my dead friend’s. Its heart drummed so loud we could hear it through its new-sprung skin.
It stood like a child. Back swayed, belly out, Sophia’s eyes in its head a new kind of blank, washed clean of history. Finch was saying things under his breath as we stared, a stream of whispered disbelief, but I couldn’t speak at all. This wasn’t magic like I’d seen—the snarled labyrinth of the Hazel Wood, the unlatched cages of the Hinterland. It was older. Cruder. This magic was a blunt and wily animal, fed on horrors.
The creature began to move. First in a dizzy circle, like it was getting its bearings, bobbing on its one odd leg. Getting used to being alive, if that’s what it was. Then—it began to dance.
None of us could look away: me, Finch, the Spinner. There were things so strange even she had to pay them witness. The creature’s limbs swung on joints loose as baby teeth. Spectral red shoes swirled around its feet, kicking off sparks. It picked up speed, it began to whirl. Every other second it broke from its spin, making darts at the air like a hopped-up cat.
And then I got it: the creature was looking for a weakness. The air here was thinning. Lightening. Lessening: it was looking for the place where it might break through.
We felt the moment when it found it, when those searching fingers made a tear in the world’s skin. The room’s atmosphere swelled and popped with a tinny huff. The Spinner laughed, high and wild.
A black keyhole hung on the air. Floating, detached, I’d say impossible if that word hadn’t been used up. The blackness spread, till it formed an archway high as a church door. The creature turned away from it, opening its mouth wide, like the boy in the fable getting ready to swallow the sea.
It took in a breath. I felt that breath beneath my ribs. All the colors I could see went flabby, watered like a cheap drink. Then it turned and exhaled all the life it had taken into that flat black doorway.
The dark woke up. A wind blew out. It smelled crackling and undone, and filled my hair with static. The patchwork girl moved more clumsily now, her purpose complete. She’d made the dark hungry; now it would feast on its own. She spun as she unraveled, gums receding, molars dropping like dice, jawbone falling after them. Ribs and intestines and tissue nibbled away by the air, till all that was left were the parts she’d been made of, falling to the floor in a harmless patter.
It was done. In the end, I hadn’t stopped it. In the end, I’d barely known how to try. I could feel Finch beside me, his hand clamping a ripped-off strip of his T-shirt around the slice in my arm. I felt Ella distant from me, somewhere else in this city. I imagined her head lifting from her pillow, or from a book, if the eerie turning of the world had left her sleepless.
And I remembered another piece of the story she’d told me.
The Spinner had made the Night Country that became the Hinterland. But it hadn’t become hers till she stepped inside it, imprinting herself on its land. I held that idea in my mind like a key. Like a blade. My mother had always worked so hard to arm me against the dark.
The Spinner moved toward the doorway, her face as soft as I’d ever seen it.
“Hello,” she crooned to it. “Hello, again.”
Her voice had changed. I think it was her true one. I think she might’ve forgotten about us entirely if we’d let her—she had her parasite, her cannibal, she’d fatten it up on New York and everything that lay beyond it, and we’d go out with a whimper. She’d gathered us here to watch her gloat, then to die with this world. That was her revenge.
Finch touched my uninjured arm.
“Don’t,” he said. Like there was anything left to wait for.
I spoke through gritted teeth. “We cannot let her go in there first.”
The Spinner heard me and smiled. “Go ahead, then. Go on.” My confusion made her smile thicken. “You’re a Story, sweetheart. Potential, given form. Through that door is pure potential. You go in there first, it’ll dissolve you like a sugar cube.”
Before she was done speaking, Finch was on his feet. He was running toward the door. He trusted me that much, after everything.
She met him there, knife in hand. I saw him hold back for a crucial second, then duck away as she swiped. I followed, trying to put myself between them, pulling out my pocketknife.
Potential, given form. Fuck that. I held the knife like a killer in a slasher flick and, screaming, brought it down into her shoulder. It went in half an inch and stuck. She bared her teeth but made no sound. Finch had both hands around her wrist, holding back her hunting knife, as she drove a knee into his gut.
We grappled there on the edge of the infant world. But the dark had a mind of its own. It knew who it really wanted, among us three.
It reached for him. I know it did. With bare black arms the Night Country drew Finch into itself, and the Spinner screamed. I saw his feet touch down on the formless ground. I saw it when the place seized hold of him, the way he breathed in like a wave had just slapped him, his eyes going round as shooter marbles. Then the Night Country folded over his head.
The Spinner screamed again. She threw the hunting knife in after him, the knife in her shoulder, ripped out two fistfuls of her hair and threw that, too. She stamped her foot like Rumpelstiltskin. Then, breathing hard, she dove in after him.
Looking into the dark was like looking into black water. As unknowable. As frightening. I braced myself against the iron-laced air, and jumped.
39
Finch always thought he was the center of the story. Who didn’t? And he was heartbroken every time he learned, again, that he wasn’t. That he’d known nothing, or all the wrong things, all along.
He could’ve stayed on his knees listing his regrets as the Spinner swallowed the world, or he could respond to that note in Alice’s voice, that said all hope wasn’t gone, and made her words work on him like an incantation. We cannot let her go in there first.
So he’d run headlong toward an actual black hole, the scariest thing he’d ever seen or imagined. It wasn’t long, between deciding to do it and falling in, the Spinner screaming after him and Alice crying out and the jellied black air folding him up. But time slowed down for him. There was still so much he wanted to consider.
That Iolanthe had betrayed him. That Alice had gotten his letters. That his time on Earth was nothing but a layover. He couldn’t actually think about the world ending. It should go in fire or flood or supervirus. Not like this: its life sucked out like soda pop.
Then he went into the Night Cou
ntry and couldn’t think about anything at all.
He was himself, falling through. Then he was—bigger. He landed on all fours in a soft black nothing, and his sense of himself expanded in all directions. He was water flowing into a basin. He filled the endless dark—he was it, it was him—until a stray thought floated by like a message in a bottle. He seized it.
I’m so thirsty. The thought came with words, and with the words came the water: his feet were wet, he was standing in a river. He could see it shining silver, then it was gone; his terror dried it up.
Terror and elation: he’d done that, spun something out of the Night Country’s fertile air. He tried to hold reason around himself like a slicker, but the insidious air was the rain that got in, running into his nose and eyes and open mouth, as dim and drugged as the water of Lethe.
A teacup, he thought, and held it. Thin-sided, pink and gold, filled with an inch of milky tea. The last time he’d seen it was on the table of his mom’s apartment, years ago, before she’d died but after the divorce.
“Coffee,” he whispered, and the cup’s contents changed.
Mom? he thought, inside his mind, but without conviction. She didn’t appear in the dark.
He was glad. Then he shuddered, as the weight of this settled over him.
A new-struck world, his for the making. This was what Alice meant when she said they couldn’t let the Spinner in first—they couldn’t let her have a whole new canvas on which to paint her horrors.
What if she was wrong? The thought came crooked and cowardly. But what if it should have been the Spinner here, weaving reason out of the dark? He pictured all that she’d made out of nothing: the ice caves of the Hinterland, its deep woods and articulate stars. A secret part of him wished for them, and their ghosts rose up, spectral and shimmering, then drifted away.
The Spinner was a maker of worlds.
He was a boy in the dark with a teacup.
No. He fell to his knees. He dug his fingers into the ground, which was nothing before but became dirt under his nails as he wished for it. Daffodil, he thought. Daisy, clematis, rose. They grew from his dirty palms, petals raining from his hands and vines twining up his arms.
But he lost his words for the flowers, looking at them. They were red and yellow and blushing and white, and he couldn’t put names to their faces. That terrified him enough that he clamped down on his mind, don’t think don’t think, and of course that made him think of
Blacktop. And a basketball drumming
A yellow dog with a red collar
A table with three plates on it, salmon and rice
His father looking at the newspaper, shaking his head
All of it but his father came and went in the dark. After, he felt rubbery, wrung out. Like he used to feel just before sundown on Yom Kippur, watching out the window as the sun slipped below the tree line of Central Park.
(Trees grew up in the air around him, then blew away into molecules.)
“No,” he said. “No, no, no.” Everything he dreamed up siphoned more life from the world he’d left behind. What had just died so his visions could take stunted shape? He pictured the steps of the Met emptied out, gone pale as ash. The sun bleached out like a stain, the streets of his city preserved below dead skies like insects under glass.
The city. His abandoned city, now lost to him forever. In dreams he’d walked through Manhattan with his mother again. Paged through bookstores with Alice. Memories and longings swelled up, and the Night Country wanted them. It was hungry for them.
He wasn’t strong enough to deny it.
The city flowed from him. Streetlights, skyline, cherry blossoms and gutters and the sound of a street performer’s violin. Benches and buses and stolen wine on a rooftop. Streets of pitted blacktop lined with trees and ice cream trucks and stars you could barely see. An afternoon in summer so still the clouds looked like paint on blue enamel, and cast shadows on sunbathers in the park.
The memories rushed out of him on the back of a sweeping wind. It was cold and had a thousand hands and they reached into every corner. It’s a fearsome thing, to make a world. He was unmade in its making. The theft leached the black from his hair and the bend from his bones.
It might’ve stolen the bones, too, before it was through. But two figures came barreling out of the dark.
40
In her rage the Spinner ran like an animal, loping and low. Without her, I wouldn’t know where to find Finch. Already the Night Country had carried him away from the door.
I chased her, forward and on. Time was elastic, it stretched and contracted. I would’ve killed for a streetlamp, a star. If I lost her, I’d be lost, completely. So I ran through the sandy pain of a stitch in my side, and the distinctive terror of running through the nothing space of an unmade world. Until finally something broke the Night Country’s long, formless plain: Finch. Still too far off. I couldn’t go any faster and she’d almost reached him when something sprang up from the dark.
Trees. Birches elms sycamores, saplings delicate as wrists. The Spinner tried to stop herself but couldn’t, reeling into the place their trunks had been—they were already gone. Stars blinked on like track lighting, then off again. We both stopped, waiting to see what the dark would spit out next.
A golden retriever burst from the air, ran a sloppy circle and vanished. A set table, a newspaper fluttering its pages. There was a pause, darkness bleeding back into the cracks the phantoms had made. I could hear her breathing. Then:
A city. Not all at once, but piece by piece. A yellow cab. A trashcan. A street cart and a cherry blossom tree and a building traced in mist and silver, rising into clouds the color of steamed milk. In a space the size of a single block, blistering the air, the city flashed and faded.
In the middle of it all, Finch kneeled with his head bent down, fingers dug into dirt, flower vines winding from his wrists to his shoulders. His hair was shot through with white, and when he lifted his chin, my heart folded over.
He looked like someone had stirred gray paint into his skin. Tendons stood out at his temples, his lips were scored. His eyes were losing their light.
“Finch,” I said, my voice as cracked as the teacup he held in one hand, squeezed into shards. Blood ran through his fingers.
“It’ll kill him.” The Spinner’s voice was bitter as walnut skin, relentless. “It’ll be a hard death. He’ll be skinned away from himself piece by piece. A new world is a void, it’s a hunger. I withstood it—I shaped my world, poured into it all the things I could afford to lose. He doesn’t know how. It’ll hollow him out like an egg.”
Finch heard her. His chin snapped up. All the swarming, erratic pieces of his city scattered and faded, till nothing was left but me and him and her and the velvety grip of the dark. When he spoke, his words laid themselves against the air.
“Once upon a time.
“Once upon a time there was a monster. She called herself a spinner, and she was. But she destroyed things, too. She made a world and called it hers, but didn’t understand it when the people she filled it with wanted more. More than blood and death and a story they couldn’t change.” He looked at her. “She gave them all the worst parts of being human and none of the things that made it worth it.”
The Spinner stood perfectly still, watching him through hooded eyes.
“So a hero came to the world she’d made.”
She laughed. I did, too, but mine came soft and surprised.
“The hero unraveled a corner of her world, and the whole thing fell to pieces.”
“It won’t work,” she said, her voice wound through with warning.
“So she made another,” he continued, dogged, his eyes desperate points in his weary face. He still gripped the ground. “She did terrible things to make it, but in the end it wasn’t hers. It pledged itself to the hero instead. And the world turned on her.”
Nothing happened. I could feel all three of us waiting, but the dark stayed dark.
“You’ll die
,” said the Spinner. “You’ll die killing the world that made you. Oh, this is better than I planned.”
“The world found out her secrets,” he whispered. “It showed her as she really was. It showed her to the light.”
A light snapped on. Not a sun or a lamp but something in between, a molten ball of smokeless fire. By its illumination, the Spinner changed. Her hair shook out in yellow waves, her skin went the color of amber. She looked like me, once upon a time. Like a fairy-tale princess.
But her eyes. Still a frozen blue, they held the weight of centuries in them. Her shell was young, but the eyes peering out of it told the truth. She felt her face, fingers running over its contours. I could hear her thoughts clicking like beads.
Under her hands, her features solidified, strengthened. She looked older now, Ella’s age. Then older still, grown and beautiful, lines at the eyes.
“Oh,” she said. For the first and only time, I saw her look surprised.
Her skin loosened. It dropped at the chin and creased at the mouth. Those frightening eyes faded, wrinkled at the corners, and receded into seamed pockets, clouded over with a milky film.
“Stop it,” she said. Her voice was an old woman’s, but commanding. “Stop it now.”
Her bones warped and contracted, settling into arthritic curves. Her voice creaked like a stair. “If I die, my children go with me. If you kill this body, you’re killing them, too. You’re killing Alice.”
A beat passed.
“Wait,” he said. He didn’t lift his head.
The world waited. The Spinner didn’t die, she stood there in stasis. But I ran.
His hair was white all the way through, and I ran to him. Skidded to a stop in his patch of dirt. Before I could reach for him, a fence grew up between us, glittering with barbed wire.
“Don’t touch me,” he said, ragged. “I might kill you. I might dissolve you. You’re a Story. I’m a Spinner.”
I held on to my own arms. “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” Words were meaningless. They were all I could give him.
The Night Country Page 21