“Alice,” he said. He’d always liked saying my name. “What should I do?”
I looked at the slope of his shoulders and the soft of his mouth and the faded crackle of his beautiful eyes. “You should finish the story.”
The Spinner waited, vision iced over with cataracts. She didn’t beg.
“A cage,” he said, in his roughed-up voice. “The hero captured the monster, and he caged her. She was so dangerous he used a whole world to hold it. The cage had golden bars, and in it the monster slept. She slept for an eternity. She didn’t hurt anyone, and she dreamed of fairy tales.”
The cage closed her in like a nightingale. The Spinner had no final words. She shuffled forward half a step, then lay down. She didn’t move again.
Finch let out a breath. The fence between us dissolved, the light going out with an audible click. And he fell onto his side.
When I touched him I didn’t die, or dissolve. His breath came shallow as varnish and his skin looked yellowed in the glow of the bars. I worked by their light, peeling his fingers back from the broken china, picking out the shards and wiping the blood away. My own arm had stopped bleeding, now it just hurt. His eyes were half closed and his breath came at odd intervals.
“Finch.” He didn’t answer.
He could die here. He could die here in the dark, and I would be all alone.
So I let myself fall, slowly. I let my head drift to his shoulder and closed my eyes.
“I loved your letters,” I told him. “I’m bad at talking. I’m bad at just about everything. But I loved your letters. I wrote back to you, in my head. I’ve told you so much, I can’t even remember what I’ve really said and what you don’t know yet.”
All my heart was in my words. My bruised, inhuman heart.
“Did you feel it?” I whispered. “Did you hear it, when I talked to you?”
A pause, then his cheek brushed over my hair as he shook his head.
“That’s okay. I can tell you everything again. But we need to … we need to stand up and find the door. Before…”
Before there was nothing left on the other side to find.
“Okay.” I felt his breath as he said it.
Slowly I tilted my chin up. Too shy to look at him till the last moment.
His eyes weren’t soft anymore. They were focused and steady and they held me in their light. In them I could see all the Finches I had known. The fanboy and the wanderer and the traitor and the hero. He said my name again, and raised his hands to cup my face.
A sudden breeze slid over my neck. I reached up and felt the bare length of it, and the shorn ends of my hair.
My body tingled like a bumped funny bone. My hair was shorter, cut right up to my skull, like it was when I’d met him. When I looked down I was wearing tight black jeans with holes over the knees. A blue striped shirt. Things I wore when I was seventeen.
Finch snatched his hands away. “Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how it works.”
“It’s okay,” I said again, numbly. Lying through my teeth, through the horror of being remade by him. Of being reminded that here, I was nothing but Story stuff.
“No, it’s not. I’m not—I don’t want to change you, I just…”
“Stop,” I said, with more force. “Let’s find the door.”
“I’m the Spinner.” He said it like he was sorry. “This is my world. I can make the door.”
He didn’t look strong enough to make anything, but he stood up slowly, holding his hands out like a conductor.
The door he made was plain, unpainted wood. It wasn’t there, then it was. We stared at it, and we looked back to where the Spinner lay in her cage. She slept on.
Finch reached for my hand, before remembering. “Hold on to my shirt,” he said.
I grabbed him by the T-shirt, and hooked a finger through the frayed loop of his jeans. That was how we walked out of that world.
41
We stepped through into cold and the smell of dust and a flare of white light I tried to blink away, before realizing it wasn’t light, it was color. The warehouse wasn’t the place we’d left, fluorescent-lit and enunciated. It was smudged out, a pale ruin. We stepped over a clatter of little bones: all that was left of the creature the Spinner had made, who’d scratched at the Night Country door and let us in.
“How far do you think it goes?” His voice was as wrung-out as the room.
My phone was dead in my pocket. I wrapped my hand around it anyway. “I don’t know.”
“I did this,” Finch said. He spun in place slowly. “I did this.”
“Don’t you dare. Anything that’s left, it’s because of you. You did that.”
His bones pressed too close to the surface of his skin. Both of us were filthy, we stank of blood. I reached up and peeled away a petal that had stuck to his cheek, and thought of the letter he’d sent in the heart of a flower.
“You need to end it. You need to close the door.”
“End it?”
He looked so confused my heart spiked. “What’s wrong? Don’t you think you can? Do you not know how?”
“I know how to do it,” he said, sharp and certain. “I can feel how to do it. But … you heard what the Spinner said.”
The Spinner. Daphne. The monster and the woman who never existed. They blurred in my mind, a double image. “She said a lot of things.”
“You know what I’m talking about. If I end it—if I kill the world, and the Spinner in it—what happens to you?”
Not just me, but all of us. If the Spinner died along with Finch’s world, would her children really go with her? My throat ached thinking of Sophia, already gone.
“We know she’s a liar,” I said.
“I don’t think she was lying about that. And what if it’s too late anyway? What if I’ve already made too much? And I close the door and you die, too, and it’s just me, all alone here, like some shitty episode of The Twilight Zone?”
His rising panic made me calmer. I thought of the silver tracings of his city, the soil and flowers and the sizzling golden cage. I weighed it against the entirety of this world.
I thought of Ella. I closed my eyes and reached for her, feeling for that thread that connected us. I couldn’t feel it, but that didn’t mean it was gone. I though it just meant we were untwining, growing into two distinct people, in the way that moms and daughters do. Maybe that was the most human thing that could happen to me.
“I don’t think it’s too late,” I told him. “It’s not too late.”
“What if we just leave it? For now. Go out, see how far this spreads. Then we decide what to do.”
“Finch,” I said quietly.
“You can’t make me,” he said, just as quiet. “You can’t ask me to do this. What’ll it be like, if you die? How will you go? Do you melt? Disintegrate? Fuck. Why am I saying this to you?”
He straightened, like something had struck him. “I bet there’s another world we could go to. Iolanthe”—his face flashed something complex—“Iolanthe showed me. There are whole shelves of worlds, too many to fit in a letter. Alice, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to another world.”
His eyes widened, before he understood. I reached for him. I felt the scars over his knuckles and wondered about their stories. We looked at each other over our clasped hands, and the words we didn’t say were hello, and goodbye, and a love song with no words to it.
Maybe in another world they spoke a language you could sing it in. Maybe I could find it. Alone, with Ella, with Finch. Maybe I’d stay right here, and live. Maybe I’d unwind altogether, dissipate into strands of story stuff, unpack myself like a Roman candle glittering with every last thing my mother had ever done for me, and the brown eyes of a boy who walked worlds, and the fast-working fingers of the creature who’d shaped me, so arrogant she’d nearly made herself a god.
Finch pressed his lips to my hands, one then the
other. He looked at me and I remembered you could slice a moment into a million million stories, a million ways it could go. I figured this could be my very last page.
And it was the way his chest rose and fell. The shift of his Adam’s apple beneath the scar on his throat. I had the weirdest feeling like I was swimming, held weightless by a bubble of enchanted air. I leaned closer and it was like stepping, one more time, into the winds of another world. When I pressed my lips to the old scar over his throat I realized how cold I must’ve been, how warm he was by contrast. He breathed out and swallowed hard under my lips and it was
it was
My mind was never quiet. It was always full of words, always teeming with them, often the wrong ones and never silent even when I slept.
But when I pressed my lips to Ellery Finch’s throat and felt his hand come up to cup my neck, to tangle in my hair, all the words fell away. And when I moved my mouth up to his, my mind was finally quiet.
I don’t know how long we held each other. But I know the moment came when we let go. When he moved away from me, toward the door to the Night Country. All that impossible possibility. All that endless, devouring want. On this side the door looked waterlogged. I watched him press his hands to it, and closed my eyes.
I didn’t think about dying. I couldn’t think about how I might be leaving Ella behind. I dreamed instead of another world. A place that could reach out and catch the people I loved. The broken and the frail of them. The solid and the already gone.
I heard Finch curse, then a distant, submarine howling, and the creak of wood below his palms. I squeezed my eyes tighter.
There was a world where this could work. There was a world where all of it fell into place. There was a world. There was a world. There was a world.
42
On a cool, unnaturally still night in June, a piece of sky over Manhattan went white. What happened beneath it was stranger.
There was a circle of city—a true circle, like the eye of god had cast itself over a patch of about twelve city blocks—where a plague struck.
Birds fell from the sky, dead insects littered the ground like shotgun casings. Cars idled and ran down, or crashed, or hunkered down in rows along the sidewalks, eaten away with a powdery, pale kind of rust. Buildings within the plague site grew scoured and worn.
And the people within the circle fell asleep. In restaurants and houses and smashed-up cars. In bathrooms and crosswalks, across curbs and on sidewalks. For a day and a night, the crisis site spread like an inkblot and police barriers were put up then moved back, and people in hazmat suits waded around unconscious bodies like astronauts, till they, too, succumbed to the sleeping.
The sleepers dreamed of the soft black velvet of an unmade world. In their dreams they filled that world with the things they wished for and the things they feared, and in some heads you couldn’t tell which was which. Some woke up screaming, and some were followed out of their dreams by longing, a silent gray shadow that would walk with them to the end of their days.
Parts of the borough were evacuated. A national emergency was called. Schools closed and flights were rerouted and the bridges all ran one way, clogged up with people trying to get out. The subway, I heard, was an absolute shitshow.
I didn’t disappear when Ellery Finch killed off his night country. I didn’t disintegrate or burn into ash. His world didn’t die screaming, or in flames. After all the blood and dismemberment, the death and the waste, it whined and rolled over beneath his hands. It winked out.
The door did, at least. I had to trust him when he told me the world was gone.
I’d opened my eyes and found Finch standing in front of me, looking at me like I was a door, too. The kind he wanted to walk through.
Hand in hand, we’d made our way out into the city, to see how far the damage spread. We found a world rendered in gray scale, littered with sleepers. Near its edges were silent police cars whirling their carnival lights, officers slumped inside them. Beyond that, a press of camera crews and bystanders, too thick to walk through without being caught.
We stole a car—borrowed it. Its driver-side door was open, the keys still in the ignition. We drove it slowly through the crowd, who scrambled away from us like the car was infected, too. It took some tricky driving to get clear of the ones who tried to follow us. I wanted to take it all the way to Brooklyn, but Finch argued that overstretched the definition of borrowed.
My phone didn’t work, neither of us had a watch, and we couldn’t tell if it was dusk or dawn. The sidewalks were full, the city ground down to observe the arrival of some strange disaster. We couldn’t get a cab to stop for us, didn’t dare try the train. Later we learned more than twenty-four hours had passed while we were in the Night Country. The sun was rising over an altered world as we walked together over the bridge.
We didn’t understood yet how big it all was. That even if we’d had a working phone between us, cell service was out around the city. We walked all the way home, Finch so weak by the end I worried I’d have to carry him. The keys still in my pocket were a miracle, but the apartment was empty when I let us in.
It was hours before she came home. Finch ate the ice cream from the freezer and all the pasta we had in the cabinet, with butter and pepper and Parmesan. I brewed him cups of coffee and watched him run his eyes over the surfaces of all the things he must’ve thought he’d never see again. We played every Beatles album we had. We took showers one at a time and stared at each other when we thought we might not get caught and it wasn’t till I was in clean clothes and he was in a towel and Ella’s biggest, oldest T-shirt that we kissed again, in the dark of the hall, because it’s harder to be brave when you’re not facing down the end of the world.
Her purse was gone, and her phone and her keys. That told me she’d gone out, that she’d be back, and I was too exhausted to believe anything else. I felt her imprint on the space, and I felt Sophia’s, too. Finch didn’t ask why I ducked my head out to check the fire escape, but he opened his arms when he saw I’d started to cry.
He let himself sleep, finally. I took the cushions off so we could both fit on the couch, Sam Cooke playing low and the pale sun dropping. All day we’d heard sirens come and go, like the whole city couldn’t settle, but now it was quiet at last, that incomplete, city kind of quiet.
I was drowsing off, too, when she came in like a hurricane, feet pounding up the stairs and key a panicked jangle in the lock, because she’d seen the lights on from the street.
I didn’t tell her much right then. Ella knew—she knew what had happened had something to do with me, and the Hinterland, and the hunch I’d been chasing. She’d been running around town looking for me, for other ex-Stories, anyone who could help her track me down.
She never found them. Neither did I. Whether they were lying low after what happened at the party, or had gotten wind of what Daphne really was and skipped town, or whether it was something else completely, they were unfindable. The hotel when I visited it a few days later was a ghost town, the lobby empty and the halls quiet. Half the keys were still behind the desk; Finch and I tried a few of the rooms, just to see. But the dust was already gathering. The whole place had a whiff of the condemned. And I wondered. What had really become of them, what manner of gone they were.
But first. There, in our apartment, hours after the cataclysm. Ella rushed me, so fierce I really thought she’d slap me this time, but she just pulled me in. Then she saw Finch, dead to the world, and pressed a hand to her mouth. I remembered then that I’d told her nothing about his letters.
“That’s him, isn’t it? That’s the boy who saved you.”
In the Hinterland, she meant. From my story. I didn’t know how to tell her everything he’d done, everything he’d saved. I just kissed her cheek, and reminded her.
“You saved me first.”
They liked each other. Once he’d woken up bleary-eyed and blinking, to the smell of the microwave burritos I’d run to the corner for. Of course they did.
They had some very weird shit in common, and Finch was smart enough not to mention her mother.
Two days later I drove him to the Upper East Side. The city was a sluggish blend of empty and overrun, with an apocalyptic, carnival feel. We’d coast for a mile, treating red lights like stop signs, then spend twenty minutes crawling down a single block.
I sat on the hood of the car while he went up to see his dad. He was gone one hour, two. I jogged a couple of blocks to find a sandwich. After the third hour, I became paranoid: that his dad would try to keep him. Against his will, away from me. But when he finally came out, his father came with him. The man looked smaller than I’d imagined. Gray hair, shoulders bowed, hands gripping the back of his son’s shirt as he held him. They held each other long enough that I knew to look away.
When Finch got to the car, he’d been crying. He still was, a little, and didn’t try to hide it.
He still hasn’t told me what they talked about, but he knows I’ll listen if he does.
He did tell me about Iolanthe, the blood door, the string of worlds they walked through. That the air in Death’s kingdom tastes like fennel seeds and somewhere there’s a library in a dead land whose shelves are lined with doors. I told him about Sophia and Daphne and the Hinterland meetings. How his letters came to me, one by one. He laughed till he cried when I told him about the time a squirrel got into Edgar’s bookshop, and Edgar went into battle with a broomstick and an atlas belted over his chest. We were sitting by the fountain at Grand Army Plaza, watching water refract itself over all the stone merfolk, when I told him about running into Janet and Ingrid in Manhattan so many months ago. How Janet had told me about his adventures, and I thought I’d never see him again.
“They were tourists,” I told him. “World-hopping with their magical passports and their money belts.”
“We could do that,” he said offhandedly. When I looked at him, he was staring at a laughing merman.
“Do what?”
“Travel. We could look for them, even. I’m going to see them again.” It was a little prayer, I think, spoken like a certainty.
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