by Sarah Porter
We’re dropping in a violent, lashing mass. It’s a fight without shapes or limbs, and I can’t tell if his mind is wrapped around mine and strangling it, or if I’m rupturing him from inside. But we’re falling, and that’s all I care about: out of control, out of light.
Out of my body. What will happen to it without anyone left to maneuver it at all? But I can’t think about that. All I can do is keep Aloysius wrapped up inextricably, his essence bundled into mine. I feel him like I never have before, his cruelty like cold links chaining my mind and gouging into it. I feel him scrambling for some purchase, some way to stop us from whistling deeper and deeper into the dark.
And I feel his terror. What I thought was the speed of our fall shrilling through me begins to feel more like a scream, too high-pitched to hear.
Or, God, maybe that scream is Paige’s after all. Maybe my hand was already driving forward at the same time that my body went haywire and the blade slashed into her, spiraled across her bare skin, opened an artery. Her blood could be fountaining across my face and I wouldn’t know, not even if I was choking on it. I’m thrashing in a shapeless mess, trying to get back to her, but it’s like I’ve grown a hundred liquid arms that bubble out and merge again and I’m still going down.
Then the scream gets louder, or somehow my consciousness tunes in on it more, and I can identify Aloysius’s fizzly voice with complete certainty. There’s some potential danger in the Land of the Dead that sends fear wheeling through him, I know that now. All at once I understand: he hasn’t just been possessing me as a way to get back at Dashiell.
He’s been on the run. He’s been using my body as a hideout. And I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve ripped him out of his refuge.
A dim, rattling chime reverberates through here. I’m almost sure it was the sound of the knife blade striking against the pavement, far away from us.
We touch down at the same time as the sound. I know we don’t have bodies in this place, not exactly, but hey, at least I have my normal appearance back. I’m separate from him, doubled up on the riverbank and clutching my knees.
“Boy,” Aloysius snarls, “have you the faintest conception of how I’ll make you suffer for this?”
Uh, what is he now, exactly? That grating voice came from something but it’s not remotely humanoid. A gray, intestinal tangle on spindly legs—like a flamingo’s, maybe. It waddles at me, trying to be menacing.
And I’m so relieved and emptied, so heart-shredded and bewildered all at once, that I just plain crack up laughing at the sight. Even though I’m still in danger. Even though he can still crawl back into my body and go after Paige all over again, and probably Elena too, now. The reality is that all I’ve accomplished is to maybe buy Paige some time.
No matter what happened, she must have heard the knife drop. She must have seen me doing who knows what, weaving around or spilling face-first onto the pavement. I’m pretty sure now that she wasn’t hurt, though, or Aloysius wouldn’t be so enraged. Paige will probably have the sense to decide that I’m a homicidal maniac and barricade herself in her apartment. It’s horrible but I have to be thankful for it.
I have to be thankful for anything I can get.
I’m laughing in hysterics, halfway sobbing, but it’s obvious that Aloysius isn’t used to anybody laughing at him at all. It’s obvious that he’s not sure how to react, at first; I mean, ordering someone not to laugh is only going to make him seem that much more ridiculous.
“Will you be laughing when I carve ribbons of flesh from your Elena, boy? When she watches you twist the knife in her guts, and you hear her screaming?”
“Yeah,” I say, but I’m laughing so hard it seems like I might disintegrate at any moment. “Using me to maim and kill has been working out great for you. I mean, the greatest.”
And now it’s really hitting me: as powerful as he is, I’ve beaten him back twice. He’s been completely astounded both times. I’m sure he’s used people he possessed to carry out his murders before; I could feel that. But somehow I must be almost a match for him, because nobody has died at my hands. Not yet.
There’s a sensation of sudden movement, but I can’t tell if I’m plummeting down or being yanked up. But half a second later I feel cold, definite breath coming in shallow bursts through my nose. Pain burns me with every inhalation, smokes its way up to my shoulder.
I’m lying curled on the pavement with my eyes closed. Whatever is wrong with my lungs, it’s obviously way worse than my usual asthma. My heart is pattering in this frantic, airy way.
There’s enough foggy streetlamp light on my eyelids that I can detect the darkness of someone bending over me. I don’t want to look, but I’m pretty sure I know who it is. So he’s finally here, and it’ll be easy enough for him to pick up that knife. Slide it into me and break the circuit, and then the horror will finally be over.
I can feel the blade above me. Cold steel disrupting the night.
It’s how I’ve died, twice, in the Land of the Dead. It feels right, natural, like I’ve been practicing for this. And anyway, what’s one more?
“Dash?” I say. “It’s okay. Really. You can tell Ruby I said so. Just get it over with.”
I break out coughing, and the pain is so bad that it wipes out everything else. If he’s answering—hell, even if he’s stabbing me—my chest is so crowded with saw-toothed stars that I don’t think I’d know the difference.
MABEL
Ruby-girl is here and they’re all around her, grabbing and poking and rumpling in her clothes, and she makes their heads look like bedrooms with black walls and strange pictures slapped up willy-nilly. Some of them have bright red writing on the black, like squirming threads, but the same lines over and over, like in a copybook from school. Aloysius’s guards are men but their faces are empty blocks, all with the same bedroom inside them, and Ruby fights in their arms but she can’t get away.
“She doesn’t have it,” Charlie says. “The boss was positive she would have it, but it’s nowhere.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Ruby squeals. “I don’t know how—oh, I must have lost it on the way down here.” The empty rooms turn at each other: isittrue isittrue showing in them, almost the way the letters written on their walls show. Itbetterbetrue, ifit’snottrue, andwecallhim. Verybad.
I don’t like her to be so upset, with her face scrunched and spotted bright by tears. Hot red in her cheeks. I go running over the lumpy ground—and you see, I knew Ruby was nice, I knew it, because now it’s so easy to be pretty as a doll with her looking at me. Nothing is crawling on me and my dress floats like perfect clouds.
“Let her go,” I beg. “Please, you have to let her go! Ruby, it’s me, it’s Mabel, and I’m here to help you! Everett is in big trouble.”
They’re going to let her go. That’s what Aloysius told them to do, but they have to act mad first. “I don’t think so,” Charlie sneers. “Mabel, why would anyone listen to you?”
“Dashiell is about to chop up her brother Everett! Dashiell’s got the knife right now, and he’s following Everett, but if we take Ruby to her body she can make it stop!”
Aloysius told me. I say exactly what he hissed into my head and made me repeat back until I had it just right, and I remember him saying each word in the instant that I recite it. I say my lessons perfectly and so he can’t be mad at me.
The rooms turn to stare into one another; no eyes but they don’t need eyes to see here. This time they turn, acting it all out for Ruby.
“And where did you learn that tidbit, Mabel? You don’t know anything. You’re just making up nonsense.”
“But you know I have Old Body!” I yell at them. Act desperate, Aloysius told me. She hasn’t the slightest idea you’ve lost your Old Body, has she? Assuming dear Dashiell has neglected to inform her, which would be perfectly in keeping with his deceitful, low-down character. So she’ll have no reason to suspect that what you say is a lie. Act as if monkeys were rending your own mother li
mb from limb, there’s a pet. “I was following Dashiell—he’s in Ruby’s body, and I was afraid of what he would do, so I went after him, through the subways and everywhere. And now he’s going to kill Everett, and Everett’s been so kind to me. I can’t let Dashiell do it!”
Ruby’s gone the color of bones. She’s swaying.
“Oh, God. Everett said this would happen. He warned me and I didn’t want to believe it. He warned me.”
We know all about that already, so Ruby doesn’t need to tell us anything. Aloysius was listening inside Everett when Everett said that warning to her, and Aloysius was laughing, laughing where no one could hear him, because it gave him the best idea for how to fool her.
I don’t like lying to her. But I have to do it so we can be together. When everything is all better and I’m living in her, I’ll confess I was bad and she’ll forgive me.
“We have to go right now, Ruby!” I yell. “Please, please let her go! It isn’t far away!”
The rooms spin and their curtains wave and I can see boy clothes, black and gray, piled on the floors of their faces.
“Well … we can ask Aloysius. We can ask if he thinks it’s the proper thing to do. You know it’s against policy, Mabel, to let a living person reclaim their body. Even if it is Dashiell Bohnacker we’re talking about, it doesn’t seem right.”
“But there’s no time!” I scream, and Ruby drops her face and covers it with her hands. Her back moves like the ocean. “There’s no time, because Dashiell’s right behind Everett, and as soon as he gets somewhere dark enough, he’ll start to stab and stab! But Ruby never said he could use her body that way!”
I told Ruby about the gun that Old Body dreamed for me. I didn’t know when I said it what a clever girl I was, but now I know, because I put the thought gun in Ruby’s head and that made her so nervous she kept thinking it, until her thought put the gun in my pocket. I keep my hand covering it so she won’t see the shape bulging in the white lace. I won’t be mean to her like I was to Old Body, I promise, I promise I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll be so nice that she’ll be happy every day to live with me. She just has to do things my way, that’s all.
Charlie sighs, big, like he’s on stage. “Teddy, run and find Aloysius. Mabel, I guess we’ll have to risk it that the boss might not approve, if he doesn’t get here in time. You can escort Ruby to her corpse and explain to her what she has to do to stop Everett from being knifed in cold blood by his own big brother. But you’ve got to understand, I’m coming too.”
I reach up to pull Ruby’s hand off her face. “But—what can I do to stop Dash? What you’re talking about—tell me it won’t hurt him!”
“It won’t hurt, Ruby, I promise. It will just take him out of you so he can’t do anything to Everett where he needs your hands. It doesn’t hurt, not even a teeny bit. Not even as much as a pin.” I singsong it, croon it to her as sweetly as a little bird. Aloysius didn’t give me clear words for this part so I have to make them up by myself, but it’s true. It’s true that getting knocked out of Ruby won’t hurt Dashiell, except for his feelings.
It’s what Aloysius will do to Dashiell once he’s back here and can’t escape that will hurt, hurt and burn and rip until there’s not one speck left. No ashes, no potato peels, no silk ribbons, no dust. Finished.
But Ruby mustn’t know that. It will make her sad and I want her to neverever be sad.
I have her hand in mine and she is soft and fresh and I am pulling her between the shacks that she sees out of nothing. I know where to go. Ruby is stumbling like Old Body used to do late at night after too many spirits, but it is sad-and-worried that is making Ruby drunk. It hurts me to see so I pull her faster, because the sooner she does it the sooner I can live in her and comfort her from inside. Therethere Rubygirl we’retogethernow, I’ll say, and hold her heart like a lamp.
“Think of Everett,” I say, coo and song and chirp in the trees, “your sweet, good brother Everett. Dashiell already had his turn to live, didn’t he? And it will be too, too sad if Everett has to lose his only chance to be alive so, so young. He shouldn’t lose it just because Dashiell made big mistakes. It wouldn’t be fair.”
Charlie walking to the side tilts his room-head at me, to let me know I’m doing good, a good job, saying just-right things.
Ruby is so scared and sad that the clouds have sunk down just above us and they have dark mouths that slip and slide and moan. She is staring sad at her red boots and I hope she won’t look up and see clouds like that.
“You’re talking about—about forcing Dashiell out of me, aren’t you? Like what Everett did to him. But if he doesn’t have me to live in then we’ll lose him again, Mabel! We’ll lose him forever this time, and I love him so much. I can’t go through that a second time.”
I don’t like hearing her talking this way, and I can tell Charlie doesn’t like it either. She’s walking with her head spilled toward the ground, but she’s still coming with me, letting me lead her through. The maze is here without her, but we just know it’s there; we can’t see or feel anything. Now every open door is a black moon sucking out the light.
No matter what she’s saying, she hasn’t pulled her hand away. No matter what she’s saying, she’s still dragging along like me going with my mother to church. So maybe that’s her real answer and I shouldn’t worry so terribly that she’ll say no when we get there?
“But Everett,” I say, thinking of angels singing hymns. Trying to make it sound that way. “Everett, your good brother, your kind brother. You know how brave he is. You have to do it, to save his life! Ruby, I know! It’s very, very terrible to be dead like me. You keep losing everything you loved, all the time, and memories are all you have left instead of the whole world! You can’t let Dashiell do that to him. Even Dashiell knows that! He knows he’s doing a very bad thing now!”
Poor Ruby. She’s weeping and tripping over a smooth flat world. She’s sobbing like my mother did when the doctor said I’d be dead before morning, not knowing I could hear. All because I’m lying to her, and Charlie nodding secretly where she doesn’t see. Nodding: that’srightMabel, that’sagoodgirl.
Good girl. I am a good girl when bad men, evil men, tell me to be. I’m sorry, Ruby. I hope you won’t be angry at me.
Ruby sobs all the way to the dark door that eats a hole right through the night. “In there, Ruby,” I whisper. “You’ll see. It’s your body that Dashiell drowned. You just have to give it a big hug. If you don’t then poor, good Everett will die any minute, so you have to hurry! And then come out. Come back to me.”
She’s almost falling into the dark. Charlie and I, we let her go on alone. I don’t like it but it’s what Aloysius said to do. “First introduce the dread and guilt, and then step back. Let them devour her in their own good time.”
Just like what Dashiell did to me. You see?
Aloysius has made you promises he can’t keep, Mabel, assuming he ever had the slightest intention of trying. I think you know that.
That’s what Dashiell said to me, and there’s the dread, the thumping secret dread. Maybe Aloysius doesn’t mean anything he promised. That might be the reason they aren’t saying, that they’ve run so fast to fetch him, and that Charlie won’t stop watching me.
Maybe he’ll steal my Ruby from me? And she’s much too nice for him!
Footsteps footsteps footsteps. Very softly. But I’m so angry thinking about it, that Aloysius might try to take her from me, that I just tip up my chin. I don’t say one word to Charlie, about the footsteps whispering. And now Aloysius is waiting beside him.
EVERETT
Why isn’t it finished? The shadow hangs over me, unmoving, while every short, hacking breath tears me apart. Then—damn him—he reaches down and strokes my cheek. “Dash, enough already! Just make it stop.”
I finally open my eyes, though even that much movement hurts, or maybe it’s the random fragments of nighttime light that hurt me. Sure enough, it’s Dashiell in Ruby’s body, looking at me in a
way I can’t make out. His expression is blotted into darkness by a streetlamp behind his head—or, right, Ruby’s head, if there’s even a serious distinction between them anymore. I can see the knife in his hand, resting casually on one thigh as he kneels there.
“Never-Ever, I recognize that this isn’t an ideal moment for us to talk. But it might be the last opportunity we’ll have, so I’d appreciate if you could try to bear with me.”
“Why can’t we talk after you kill me? Being dead didn’t shut you up any.”
Dashiell laughs at that and ruffles my hair. He’s got all the time in the world, I guess; Aloysius probably won’t bother taking me over again while I’m in such crappy condition. Why should Dash care that I’m suffering?
“There are some things you should understand, Never. About yourself. For instance, that you truly are brave, and noble, and pure of heart. You’re worth five of me, in fact. I’m sure our father knows that, beyond question. And so does our Ruby Slippers, deep down, loath as she’d be to admit it.”
Great, so I have to listen to him trying to make himself feel better before he’ll finally end this.
“Dash, I really, really don’t need your excuses, all right? I already told you I’m okay with it. I mean, I know Aloysius can keep coming back, as long as I live. I’d rather you just cancel me out than have Aloysius make me into a murderer.”
He’s looking off like he’s not listening to me at all, though. His face has turned enough that the light catches it in yellowish curves, and I notice how Ruby’s mouth has dropped. There are tears—Dashiell’s tears?—welling in her green eyes.
“You’ve had some firsthand experience of being me now, Never. You know what it’s like. So treat it as an education and keep the parts of me you can use.” He smiles and shrugs and gives me one quick glance: that ultra-Dashiell sly quirk of a smile, that extreme-whatever shrug he does. “Keep what you need, and forget the rest.”
Here we go again: Dashiell spinning his oblique phrases at me. Dashiell making me guess what the hell he’s going on about. And my body feels like ice, jerking with tremors and stabbed through by pain, and I’m just plain done with asking him what he means. He can say shit that makes sense, or not.