by Daryl Banner
Walking blindly, my head down to shield my face from the unrelenting wind, sight robbed from me, I resort to seeing other things. Like my mother in her wheelchair. Like her disapproving, heavy-lidded eyes.
Then those eyes change. Claire? they seem to say. I see her mending my red dress, even though I never witnessed the actual mending of it. Carefully choosing the thread that would perfectly match it. Painstakingly needling the dress, sewing up the hole she’d made. The thoughts in her mind, regret, deep apology, kindness. She isn’t all monster and madness. Surely there’s more to her than that.
And what of me? If there’s kindness in her, then there must be kindness in me. I have to be made of those things too. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper into the wind. The wind takes away my words, uncaring, and the bitter bite of winter crawls down my throat.
The trees part and I’m crossing a great wintry expanse. White in all directions. I miss the summer. At my old houses, the one by the beach, the one in the city, the giant mansion by the park, it was always summer. Here it’s a joyless, lifeless hell. The trees near me even cry frozen tears.
Ahead, I think I see Gill. Or Grimsky. Or both of them. I think—I think he’s just a bit further on, surely …
Nothing decent comes from a person who doesn’t make right by her wrongs. I know, mom. You don’t have to keep saying that. There’s more than one kind of poison. I know, dad. I’m not poisoned. There’s a poison of the soul, Claire.
I’m not poisoned, dad.
No. The world is.
“I changed my mind,” I call out, wanting for the warmth of my bedroom again, wanting for the pillow I smothered myself with, crying, bawling, anger spilling out from my eyes and my slobbering mouth. By now, my mom would be making me a sandwich in the kitchen. She’d have to make it herself because we let go of our chefs and maid services after leaving the last house. We would be talking about how lame prom would’ve been. We would be casually tossing out ideas about college. I would make a joke about the boys I’ll meet, and she’ll make a joke about the sororities I’d join, and we’d laugh and, for the first time, I’d feel like my mom was a friend.
“Mom, I’m so sorry, I changed my mind.”
Or maybe she mended the red dress for another reason. Maybe she thought it a means to encourage me to break free from my tower. Maybe this was planned all along. The only one left to blame …
But maybe the one to blame is no one at all. In death, we are all blameless. In death, we are all equal. Kings. Queens. Rich and poor, frozen or burnt alive.
“Mom.”
Then the ice opens below to swallow me intact.
There is a moment of clarity that happens when you die. It’s a merciful reprieve from all the chains that, during your Life, hold you back from Life’s greatest revelations. In that instant, you’re free from everything your mother and father taught you. You’re free from your stubborn emotions that don’t let you see truth. You’re free from your own intellectual limitations. You’re free from your friend’s opinions. You’re free from feeling judged, no matter how dark or embarrassing or frightening your discovery. You’re free from government, free from religion, free from sexuality, from inner fear, from habit, from expectation, from desire, from lack, from society, from material, from skin and body and ability.
In this moment of clarity, I realize I love my dad. I realize I love my mom. I realize I’m always inclined to fight things before learning to love them. I realize …
I realize …
“WINTER!! HELP!!”
My eyes snap open.
C H A P T E R – S I X T E E N
A T H R O N E O F B O N E S
The world shatters into screams and the tittering of spider legs. I’m hanging upside-down again, the dream of my death vanishing in one horribly jarring instant. The spiders have returned for the rest of us. I twist to my left and find long strands of spider silk hanging, which startle me, as I realize Lynx’s cocoon is missing. Was he cut down already?
Before I’ve had a chance to orient myself properly, I feel a tug near my feet, and then the weightlessness of falling turns my stomach twice. I slam into the cave floor face first—insert crunching sound here—and the only thought I have is: I hope I’m still pretty.
Instantly, the ever-diligent spider drags me away. Facedown, it’s not the most comfortable experience I’ve ever had. My forehead and nose seem to catch on every stray fissure or bump in the cave floor. I don’t remember much of the experience of being brought into the cave, but I am delighted with the experience of suffering my way out of it. The ground slopes upward and my nose carves a pretty line in the dirt. I’m certain with another five minutes of this, my nose will be ground to nothing.
Then abruptly my orientation shifts as I’m hauled up a vertical passage just as quickly as I was dragged through the horizontal one. I dangle beneath the spider as he pulls me effortlessly up the passage. The screams of Marigold still echo through the tunnels, though they are notably distorted by now. “WINTER!” she cries, far off, figuring me to be the only person who can help her apparently. “HELP! HELP!”
And then I spill into a cavern twenty times the size of the previous one. It is so vast, I can’t even see the walls. I’m pulled deeper into it, then am dumped into what I perceive to be its center. The silk is torn off me and my limbs feel the first freedom of movement in hours. But it is short-lived. Too soon, the spider has oriented me into a kneeling position and silk is expertly wrapped around my thighs to my feet, trapping me in this position. Just the same, my hands are bound by spider-goo in the front. Even struggling all the while, the spider keeps perfect grip on my body and I can’t in any way find a means to resist.
Then the spider vanishes and I’m left to observe yet another tall mound of bones, about five feet high if I had to guess. Surrounding this deathly throne in a misshapen circle are my companions, all of them bound, kneeling, their faces and bodies exposed. Some of them have lost clothes. None of them wear armor anymore, either.
Four people to my left, I see John.
I feel my face contort just at the sight of him. Emotion pounds against my chest, against my face, against my bound hands and legs, and for a moment I could almost trick myself into believing that I’m still dreaming, that I’m still a stupid Human girl on prom night. If I focus hard enough, I can still feel her heart beating in my chest.
There is movement on the bone pile, and when I turn my head, I am truly terrified by the sight of Empress Shee perched at its top. Her pink hair is striking and gathers into two bunches of curls where her breasts would be and she carries in one of her hands a sword—the Judge’s sword—and the enormous half spider legs still protrude from her ears like two antennae. They even seem to move and twitch with her, twitching and irritated.
She twists her head, showing me her beautiful face. Yes, she is, despite it all. Then those fierce red-purple eyes focus on me, and her expression is not tender. Fury and pain fill her eyes, and the coldness of dread fills mine.
Even in this moment, I think on what I learned of Shee and how the Humans of the Necropolis would not accept her. The laughter. The jeering. How she traded her legs for Human ones and even that wasn’t enough. I think of all these things, despite the horror of my current circumstance, and what I realize I’m seeing before me is a creature that has exhausted all possible avenues of trying to fit in to the happy-smiley world. What I see now before me is a person who has given up on pleasing others and, instead, works only to please herself. The world of the Living and the Dead have exiled her, and so she’s exiled them. She is the freak of freaks, the oddity, the anomaly.
I was once the freak, the oddity, the anomaly.
“Win … ter,” she sings, ever slowly, pulling apart my name into syllables. “Wiiiin … terrrrr.” She repeats it, tasting the two syllables of my name over and over and over until it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore. “Winter, Winter, Winter.” She’s tapping her fingers together again, tap, tap, tap, and I realize only
now that her fingertips are missing flesh; she has skeleton bones for fingers. It gives her hands the appearance of fingerless gloves, only her gloves are made of flesh.
Is it strange that my thought in this moment is, who should I mentally say goodbye to first? The list of things I wish I’d had time to do in this Second Life is so long, I can’t grasp at or name a single thing. I am about to die. I am about to turn to dust. This woman-thing is going to end my existence. Goodbye Second Life.
Next to her, Grim is seated. His legs are sprawled out carelessly, the way a person might collapse into a big armchair after a long day at the office. Even his head droops tiredly, his jaw hanging slack. But when he hears my name, he lifts his chin only a little bit, just a miniscule amount, so subtly it goes almost unnoticed.
“I want to kill you,” Empress Shee declares proudly, as if it were the headline of today’s news. “You are the reason for all of my dear Grimsky’s suffering. The poor thing.” She regards him with a tiny sigh. “You’re also the reason I can no longer fly.” Though I can’t see it, she seems to flex her back at those words—only one torn wing flutters near her shoulder. I’d torn off the other one entirely, twelve years ago. “No more large fly-beasts in the world, I’m afraid.” Her eyes turn dark, hungry. “Grim needs me and I need him. My Grimmy. He’s the sweetest. And I know how to take care of sweet things.” Shee puts a hand in his black-as-night hair, her skeletal fingers playing in it like she might at some furry kitten’s ears.
My eyes flick over to John. He’s staring straight ahead, emotionless, expressionless, almost as if he’s been turned to stone. The sight of it kills me.
“We could’ve been friends,” Shee whispers, and her last word seems to hiss throughout the cavern like a great, monstrous snake in the shadows.
“I … am … friend.”
Shee turns her head, annoyed at the interruption, and I realize Brains is immediately to my right, just next to me. Her strange, aloof face stares unblinkingly at Shee, and her lips seem to be trying to smile.
“What in the world are you?” asks Empress Shee.
“I … am … sssssspider.”
Is Brains truly as brainless as she seems, or is my Raise actually showing signs of intelligence and working some sort of angle here?
“Please don’t speak while I’m speaking, dear, it’s just rude.” The Empress shudders, as if putting away the memory that this queer little exchange happened, then turns her full attention back onto me. “Anyway. I had thought I’d caught just another stray band of Humans. Just like the last ten or eleven bands who dared to straggle through my Sheewoods. That’s what I call them: my Sheewoods.” She titters excitedly, overjoyed at having named a forest after herself, a forest she has no right to name. “When I heard there were Dead among you, oh … Yes, I was quite excited by that prospect.”
“I … am …”
“And so,” Shee goes on, talking over my Raise’s odd and ill-timed attempts at communicating, “I told myself I would pick out the useful ones from the bunch. And if you’re among them, well …” She smirks.
I debate quite hard whether or not I should speak. For some reason, I worry any word I utter might mean another Shee-caliber temper tantrum, and that could result in half my friends shattering to dust before my eyes, including John, including myself. I opt to hold my tongue.
“Bad things make good things go bad,” Shee decides, speaking to me so directly I feel a cold focused needle pressing into me, her every word pressing it harder. “Grim was good and you made him bad. I was good and you made me bad. The Deathless King was good and …”
The Empress shudders, suddenly quite bothered. She takes a moment to recompose herself, and then her eyes, deadly and full purple now, reel in on me again.
“First, to make you feel the unkindness that Grim feels, I am going to pull your friends apart one at a time and make a house using their arms and legs.” She cackles suddenly, finding that imagery amusing, I guess. “And then I’m going to add their heads to my throne. I learned how to cut them off the right way so they don’t speak. Do you know who I learned that from? The Deathless King herself. I met her, I did. She teached me things.”
Teached. I doubt her lessons included grammar. My eyes grow small, the world feeling suddenly like a tunnel. I’d been hoping all this time that my mother had turned to dust or never ran into Shee at all, but it never occurred to me that Shee might’ve caught her, used her …
“I am the Neo-Deathless and this is my kingdom. Do you know what my Deathless believe in? Suffering. That’s all Life was. That’s all Death is. Regrets and suffering and never getting what you want. Grim didn’t get what he wanted. I didn’t get what I wanted. And now I get to waste your dumb little Second Life and teach you a thing or two about wanting. Hey, pay attention!” Empress Shee skitters off her mound of bones and comes right up to me, unsettlingly close. My face is inches from where her waist turns into insect parts and I stretch back, bending as far away from her as my stupid, sticky binds will allow.
“Y-Yes,” I say. “Suffering. Wanting. I’m listening.”
Listen, the little Lock advised me. Listen. That was his strength. Just listen and you will hear all you need to hear. Listening has become my only weapon.
I give a quick glance to some others nearest me, but realize I can’t find Lynx’s gritty face. Marigold. John. The Chief. Jasmine. The other teen girl to my left. Brains. Ash. Willie. Red-faced Jimmy … Where’s the little Lock?
“Good.” She does not smile. “Good, very good.” Her face is cold and unflinching. Her eyes turning muddy, their color indeterminate. She lifts the sword and touches it to my neck. “I could cut off your head and turn you into that other head-thing I found. A head without a body.”
Ann. I hear a grunt from somewhere in the circle. If I had to guess, it was a reaction from Jimmy at hearing Shee mention his girlfriend.
“I keep little things safe,” Shee says. “I had my spiders bury her big ugly head deep, deep, deep within the walls. I don’t even know where it is. I made sure to cut her neck just right beforehand, sliced just as I was teached. That way, no one will hear her screams.”
“YOU DIDN’T!” cries the only Human in the room. “NO! NOOO!”
“And I’ll do that to yours. And to your friends.” Shee grins, her chest tittering with a maniacal laugh she hasn’t quite released. “You thought I’d get angry and turn you to dust? No, no. That was an accident. It’s always an accident.” Her face turns worried suddenly, staring off, recollecting something. “My tummy gets all funny when I’m mad and … and then Dead things fall apart. I’m always so scared I’ll get mad and … and I’ll fall apart.”
When she’s mad, her tummy gets all funny. I squint at her. I’m listening. And I picture Ann’s severed, mute head buried deep in the walls somewhere … anywhere in this massive underground network of tunnels and caverns and holes. She could be anywhere. And soon, we’ll all be silently joining her, each of us somewhere else in the ground, each of us apart, each of us waiting for the rest of eternity to turn to dust … the rest of our Second Lives spent suffering and silent and alone.
Jimmy is sobbing now all over again. He makes no effort at quieting down and Shee doesn’t even seem to notice him. “My spiders do what I say now. It’s sweet. They even do what I think.” To demonstrate, I guess, she squints her eyes and suddenly there are four spiders crawling from different shadows in the room. They come to flank her, each of them bigger and hairier than the next. “They’re like a part of me now. Family. I’ve never had a family. Now I have a big family.” Shee grins, putting a hand on one of the spiders, petting it like a lover. “And I have a Prince.” She giggles, turning her head to give Grim the slightest glance. He’s still lying there, ragged as a doll that’s been thrashed about for years by a psychotic child.
And I’m still listening.
“How big is your family?” I quietly ask.
Thankfully, Shee seems softened, her voice nearly singing when she answer
s, “Twenty-one spiderlings. I named them all Neo-Deathless, just like the Deathless used to do. We’re all Neo-Deathless. But I am Empress Shee.” She frowns, making sure that last sentence stuck.
Her demeanor is like some hyper-imaginative girl on the playground, sulky and bossy and a hundred ideas in her head at any moment. I fear such chaos in one mind.
We were once twenty-one. Now we’re eleven.
Twelve, if you count Ann’s head buried somewhere deep, far away, trapped in the bowels of the planet.
Soon we’ll be ten. Then nine. Eight. Seven.
Soon we’ll be one.
Soon we’ll be gone.
“Empress Shee,” I say aloud, figuring I’ve nothing to lose. “You are Empress. That means you rule an Empire.”
“A planet,” she corrects me, taking a tone.
I was trying to go in a different direction, but okay. Let’s try hers. “You rule the planet,” I agree lamely. “You rule the planet and you are Empress Shee, Empress of the planet. But … but after you’ve taken all our heads and have destroyed everything … what will be left to rule?”
“You have nothing to offer, stupid Winter. Just saying your name makes me want to cut off all your hair and boil it into spaghetti noodle foods!” The sword still rests disquietingly on my neck. “I have my Neo-Deathless now. I have my Grimmy now. I don’t need anything anymore. It rains outside and the rain hurts and it doesn’t rain in here and so I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe. You’re not safe. You’re stupid. You came here and that makes you …” Her eyes narrow, bleeding with dark intensity. “I have everything. I don’t need anything from you anymore. Not even our friendship-that-could-have-been.”
“I have nothing to offer but my words.”
“I don’t want your words, especially!” Her sword arm flinches, as though preparing to hack off my head in a quick and horrible impulse to forever end said words.