Flytrap

by Stephanie Ahn

  “Shit,” I whisper. “Last time I was in a place this expensive, I got a demon to break me in through the window.”

  Forty floors up and a much thinner crowd later, Bautista exits. She leads me down the lushly carpeted hall, pulls a keycard out of her blazer, and lets us both into her room.

  Her place doesn’t look like a hotel room at all. She has her own little kitchen area, a separation between the living space and bedroom, and lots and lots of plants. Directed ivy drapes over wicker furniture, like you’re inside yet outside at the same time. A comfortable middle ground created in the heart of urbanness. I thumb a thick, turquoise-green leaf shooting up out of a pot.

  “Plants. There was a plant in the dream you had me in last time.”

  Bautista fondly brushes her hand over a tall fern. “I do like them. They act as a buffer for the voices.”

  “They do? How?”

  “Plants also think. Not quite as complicated, conflicted thoughts. It’s a pet project of mine, learning their language.”

  “Demons speak tongues, and some of them are botanists. I’m sure the knowledge is written down somewhere, if you look hard enough.”

  She smiles, putting her fedora down on a glass table. “But I don’t want to be told, mi hija. I want to learn. And I want to understand.”

  “I thought Council members were… I don’t know, more power-hungry.”

  “Why would I be hungry for something I have in abundance? Besides, I mostly keep the Council seat to prevent a vacuum. And up until last month, I kept Nádasdy in check. It’s almost disorienting, not having her spewing her vileness around anymore. She was a terrible person, but an interesting opponent.”

  I put up my hands. “I’m not even going to say anything about that. You knew her, not me. I’m just the bitch who killed her.”

  She shows me to her bed, white linen sheets covered in a patchwork quilt. I run my hand over the patches; the colors and disorganized harmony remind me of Joy’s tapestry work.

  “Take your shoes off before you lie down,” Bautista instructs.

  “Of course. I wasn’t raised by Americans.”

  I shuck off my boots and lie back, and Bautista puts her soft, wrinkled fingertips on my temples. I feel a slight jolt, like a harmless little laser, and my head gets woozy.

  “Why do I feel like I’m getting drugged?”

  “You are. It’s the equivalent of dilating pupils in preparation for an eye exam.”

  “Dilating… holes. Heh. Psychic poppers.”

  An exasperated patience creeps into Bautista’s voice. “I will not be fucking your mind, Harrietta.”

  “I wouldn’t be super opposed. I got a thing for older women, ya know.” I’m trying to waggle my eyebrows, but the muscles in my face slip like soap.

  “Once this has ended, I never want to see you inebriated again. Now, tell me your name.”

  I scringle my nose. “…Harrietta Lee?”

  “Your true name.”

  My mouth twists in distaste. “Choi Woojin.”

  “No, not the one your parents gave you. Your true name. The one that simply is, when no one else is there to impose titles on you, when you sit alone and speak only with yourself.”

  I chew on it for a bit. “…Harrietta Woojin Lee.”

  Whatever happens next feels like… dissolving, like becoming a liquid blackness that spreads across the bed’s surface and drips over the sides. A sense of becoming so comfortable in my body that I don’t even register it anymore, like when you spend enough time in a cold swimming pool to stop feeling the temperature difference. Or when you stop being able to think of similes, because the voice in your head is forgetting language, babbling like a baaa… baab… bbb…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Bautistaland

  When I coalesce again, I know that I’m wearing my black coat, but I can’t quite feel its weight on my shoulders. My hair is up, but miraculously I have no loose strands falling over my eyes to obstruct my view. I exist just because I know I exist, even though the usual evidence is lacking. If I didn’t have so much practice with this, I might not even know I was dreaming.

  Bautista rises out of the carpet next to me, hat-first. Something about the carpet draws my attention; I bend and peer between my toes to get a better look. Navy blue, patterned with bright yellow and red rocket ships. Achingly familiar in some strange, deeply embarrassing way.

  “What is this place?” Bautista asks, adjusting her blazer.

  I look around. The room is wide but not tall. Past the carpet where we stand are rows and rows of wooden bookshelves that only come up to my chest.

  “This is the library at my elementary school. Wow, look how short those shelves are. They looked so tall when I was a kid.”

  A large, L-shaped desk sits in the corner, where a slight Korean woman with her hair in a bun leans over to kiss a little boy on the forehead. The boy, clutching a book, runs past the L-shaped desk, past round wooden tables ringed with blue plastic chairs, and disappears into the section of bookshelves labeled “TAM-TOL.”

  “Is this a safe place?” Bautista asks.

  I’m distracted, already walking down the row of shelves. “Yeah, for sure. This is where I hung out to get away from bullies. I met my best friend here.”

  I peer into the T section, where the little boy is hunched over, criss-cross applesauce, on the floor. He has a thick tome in his lap, and two others on the floor beside him. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I can only see his head of messy, jet black hair that needs a trim, but I know who he is. I smile.

  “Hey, Brian.”

  He doesn’t hear me. He has another stack of books next to him: thin, flimsy comic books. The ones he got from his dad and kept for me.

  Brian and I met because we were both hiding from the same bullies, and his mom worked as the librarian, so she let us camp out here after school. Brian read his Tolkien, and I read the superhero comics Brian’s absentee dad kept sending him in the mail despite Brian’s obvious disinterest in them. Supposedly, Brian’s dad was a golfer, which was why he was always in the US—I wished I had family in the US, even shitty family, that might be able to take me back to the city I was born in, a city where I spoke the language without quite as much stumbling. But in the end, it was Brian who ended up moving to California right before our second year of high school—Irvine, he said, because his shitty dad’s family had a really nice house there and were offering to pay his college tuition. How could a single mother in Seoul with two dead-end jobs say no?

  I didn’t see Brian for eight years after that.

  I walk further down the row of shelves, and the floor changes under my feet. No more carpet, only deep, dark wood paneling. Here, the shelves are ornately carved, and they tower above my head. The ceiling is patterned with Celtic knots. Books lie open at my feet, priceless illuminated manuscripts strewn like dead leaves. Further away are a toppled shelf and a couch, still blackened and smoldering. Razor-sharp paper arrows stuck in the wall. Blood, spattered, pooling in the cracks between floorboards.

  “What’s this one?” Bautista asks.

  “A Bookmakers’ Guild library. The place where I… I…” I look down. A crumpled body lies, face-down, blood leaking beneath a head of brown hair.

  I look down at my hand. There’s a crystal red shard held in it, still vibrating with the terror and pain I shaped it from, dripping.

  “This was where I really learned the meaning of self-defense,” I say.

  “Was this with Johanna?”

  “Y-yeah. She told me… it was me, or him. That it wasn’t my fault. And that… this wasn’t the last time this would happen.”

  “A loss of innocence, of sorts.”

  “…Yeah. You could call it that.”

  “Ah. The safe space of your childhood, it no longer exists as its own entity. We can’t use this space.”

  I turn around—and stumble to a ha
lt as a wooden ladder folds down from the ceiling, right in my face. I test it with a hand, then climb up. Up, up, to a trapdoor—and through, into an attic. The floorboard to the right creaks, just as I remember it. The Christmas lights draped all around are half-guttered and flickering. Cold light beams in from a circular window, its frame repaired with criss-crossing blue and silver duct tape. Odd furniture, more trash than antiques, fraying and worn. Posters of She Wants Revenge and Siouxsie and the Banshees hang on the walls, along with paintings of naked women in neon hues; not particularly well-painted, but I admired them all the same.

  Bautista enters behind me. “Where is this?”

  “An attic, in Massachusetts. Where my second girlfriend lived while commuting to university. Well, technically she lived downstairs in the bedroom, but this is where she was most of the time. Her parents didn’t like to come up here, so it was… mostly safe. Safe for the two of us to fool around, anyway. Her parents were passive-aggressive, they removed the lock on her bedroom door without telling her—but they couldn’t do that with the attic trapdoor, all you had to do to block it was put some furniture over it.”

  “So it can be barricaded. Good candidate for a safe space.”

  “Well…”

  I turn and there’s a pentagram painted on the floor, punctuated by candles yellow-white like old bedsheets. Addy stands with her back to me, her limp, black hair falling over her favorite hoodie, the one with blue and white stripes. She’s reaching forward, and something—someone is reaching back—a tall, willowy figure a peachy white color across her entire naked body, with big, black eyes that take up half her face. She spreads gossamer blue butterfly wings behind her, her pinched little mouth giving a pinched little smile, earrings with human eyes as charms swinging from her earlobes, human ears and noses strung around her neck like Mardi Gras beads. Her hand hovers a centimeter from Addy’s, crackling with the energy of a half-baked contract. The true face of the woman I thought I saw in the New York Public Library. I breathe deep, staring into her image.

  Bautista comes to stand beside me. “Harrietta… tell me what happened to your second girlfriend.”

  “She… found a book, in a metaphysical store. You know, crystals, tarot readings, that sort of thing. She was guided to it, by the shop owner. That’s the lady, right there.” I point at the butterfly-winged demon. Dolly. “She gave Adrienne a spell to summon her for a deal. I tried to stop it, but… Addy fought me. Pushed me into a wardrobe. I hit my head… when I woke up, the deal was already happening.”

  “Did you stop it?”

  A thin cord of floating, wafting red materializes between my chest and Adrienne’s back. I hold it delicately, the way you’d hold a spiderweb if you didn’t want to snap it.

  “I cut ties with her, right as the deal was happening. It wasn’t as clean as when I did it with my parents. I still don’t know if I… hurt her with it, somehow. But I protected her. Dolly can’t get to her anymore, now and forever. That’s all that matters, right?”

  I watch my hands move of their own accord—taking the thread in my fist, desperately. Ripping it from my own chest the way I’d yank out an electrical cord. The thread curls around Adrienne, between her hand and the demon’s. She rocks back and out of Dolly’s reach, her knees buckling just quickly enough to keep her head from striking a metal bucket.

  I double over, gasping for breath, reliving the pain of that moment—the hollow ache behind my ribs, a vacuum roaring like it’s trying to devour me whole. Not necessarily a feeling I’m foreign to; it’s just loneliness, the same, empty hurt I nursed as a kid in a quiet apartment, the thing in my chest that crowds my lungs even nowadays as I lie in bed on my side, curled up and freezing cold with my arms folded tightly over my chest.

  “Are you alright?” Bautista asks softly, laying a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I gasp. “Yeah. Cutting ties—you know how it is. Gods, even remembering it hurts.”

  “You aren’t meant to cut ties that suddenly with anyone, and not without preparation. The cost of protective magic that repels even demons is too high. But for it to have worked, you must have loved her.”

  Adrienne is frozen, mid-fall. Likewise, Dolly’s face is hardened in a mask of furious realization, her upper lip curling, cracked wrinkles appearing where her nose should be, her wings stretching behind her like raised hackles. She’s harmless, same as she was six years ago when this actually happened; demons can’t directly, physically harm humans, not without some kind of consent, a contractual clause, or as retaliation for the human attacking first. You’d think that’d give humans the upper hand, keep us from getting dragged to Hell en masse—but no. There’ll always be people desperate or impulsive enough to take a deal, to think it’s worth it in the moment. People like Addy… but without people like me to pull them away at the last second.

  As I stare at the frozen tableau, Bautista gently pulls me away.

  “This isn’t a safe place for you. Not anymore.”

  I hang my head. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

  The wooden rafters of the attic peel away, revealing a starless, polluted night sky. Behind me, the lights of a basement cafe glow gently. Storefronts emerge from the shadows, displaying narrow neon signs in English and Korean, racks of clothing spilling out of buildings to encroach on the sidewalk. Shadow figures blur past. Silhouettes, the flash of smiling teeth. Scarves wrapped around throats, white cloth masks and fogged-up glasses, couples holding hands, cliques of half-drunk teenagers with fake IDs. A honking car. A yapping dog. The alluring smell of kebab…

  “This is the street where me and my band hung out, playing in basement cafes and small venues. With my first girlfriend, Daisy Moon. Well, that was her stage name—she gave me a stage name too.”

  “Harrietta Lee.”

  “Didn’t sound like such a mouthful back then, but yeah. Right up ’til then, I was only Choi Woojin. Never imagined I could be anyone else. Never thought to dream of Hollywood, or Berlin. Daisy changed that for me. Even though we didn’t work out. First loves are… you know. Significant.” I point. “Look, over there. That’s the club where I saw Johanna for the first time. She was just watching the crowd, perfectly still. Until she wasn’t still, and she was looking at me. Moving like she wanted me to follow her. So I did. I followed her out onto the street, into an alleyway—she snuck up on me quick, scared me so bad I pulled a dinky little boxcutter on her. And then she bought me a cup of tea. And we talked.”

  “What did you feel when you were here?”

  “I don’t know… swept up? I came here to forget shit. My mom. Daisy, after we broke up. My stupid Christian school with the gropey vice principal.”

  Bautista is thoughtfully tapping her chin, moving side to side, backward, forward. She maps out a rectangle and angles of perspective with her feet. “This, this space will work.”

  I look all around. “As a fortress? But it’s an open street!”

  “And when you were an adolescent, you came here to disappear into the crowd. There is more than one way for a place to be protective.”

  Bautista walks to the nearest intersection. I recognize the bare cherry blossom trees in the distance as the ones framing the walkway up to my high school. She stops in the middle of the street; cars harmlessly phase through her form. She faces down one direction, and the air in front of her just… doubles. She does the same down the street behind her, then to her left, and to her right. No matter where I look, the view is looping over and over and over again. The endless street of my teenagerhood, a never-ending night of never-ending people, music, food. A forever escape. Self-contained, and…

  “Safe,” I say, quietly. I breathe out, and something in my chest unspools. I close my eyes, turn my face to the sky, and let myself just… exist.

  And I hear skittering.

  I keep my eyes closed, just for a few extra seconds. Will myself to stay in the moment. If I see no evil… hear no evil…<
br />
  It tugs on my pant leg. I grit my teeth, and look down.

  A hornet the size of my pinky finger crawls up my leg. And more, buzzing, swarming out of a storm drain.

  Bautista shouts a warning behind me. I don’t need it. I’m just watching. Watching the insects fly out of the gutter, watching them crawl under the cuff of my pants, feeling them up my bare leg. That overwhelming ticklish feeling that turns into fire with claws, the one that I’m so used to at this point that I can just swallow the urge to scream, and scream, and scream.

  I close my eyes.

  You’ve redecorated. Can’t say I like it, luv.

  I hear something underground, below the sidewalk; a bellowing, roaring, like that of a massive train hurtling across a miles-long track. I open my eyes, just in time to see long, curved mandibles bursting out of the storm drain, opening up like a lotus flower, like a paper fortune teller, and crushing both my ankles as they snap shut.

  ***

  Bautista and I both wake up on the floor, on opposite sides of her bed. I groan, feeling a bruise on the back of my head, and stumble to help Bautista up.

  “Well. That was… unpleasant,” she says, holding her hip as I pull her to her feet.

  “What happened? Was he watching the whole time?”

  “Perhaps not the whole time, but he sensed my presence and came to intercept me.”

  I lean on an armchair to catch my breath. “So, what, protecting my mind is impossible?”

  Bautista picks up the patchwork quilt from her bed, wrapping it around her shoulders as a shawl. “Not quite. We could try again, but Beelzebub would have to be—distracted, somehow. Or dormant, as he was the last time we met. Dead would be preferable.”