The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Your brother is in here somewhere,” Lord Snow said. “Find him and he’s yours.”

  Sasha was angry and frustrated. If she knew what her brother looked like, maybe she’d have a chance of finding him. But she had no memory of Roland whatsoever.

  But Mr. Chesterton did. And Mr. Chesterton was here with her, and on her side. He would take care of everything. He would–

  Then she saw that Mr. Chesterton had abandoned his two-legged posture. He was sitting at Lord Snow’s feet, rump down and front legs straight. His tongue lolled and his tail thumped heavily on the floor. Lord Snow, for his part, had unlocked a mahogany liquor cabinet that stood all by itself in the center of the room, and removed from it a cut-crystal double old-fashioned glass and a dusty bottle with just a splash of amber liquid sloshing about the bottom.

  Lord Snow uncorked the bottle. “This is the last bottle of Fomorian whisky in existence. It predates Scotland. Indeed, it was ancient when Atlantis first emerged from the waters.” The liquor he poured into the glass was a golden-red topaz with hints of flame at its heart. When the bottle was empty, he placed the glass in the back of an empty cage. “It’s yours if you can get it out before the door snaps shut.”

  Mr. Chesterton turned his back on the cage. “How little you understand me, Snow. It is true that I enjoy a nip of the good stuff now and again. But my passion is reserved for duty. ‘I could not love hard drink so much, loved I not honor more,’ as the poet said. So, you see–”

  All in one blur of an instant, Mr. Chesterton threw his cane directly at Lord Snow, whirled about, and raced full-tilt into the cage. Simultaneously, the cane shattered into a thousand shards of glass and the cage rattled with the force of him hitting its back. Faster than lightning, he pushed off against the wall and out to freedom again–almost.

  The door snapped shut and Mr. Chesterton was caught.

  He looked up at Sasha, his expression stricken. Tears of guilt and shame ran down his cheeks and into the glass of whisky he still held.

  Lord Snow reached through the bars and took the glass from him. He held it up to the light, admiring its color, now a granular and undistinguished grey. Then he drank it down in one gulp. “Humbug and humiliation! What could taste better?” He turned to Sasha. “This was your second test and you failed it, miserable child. Such a pathetic little whelp you are.”

  “What test? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Exactly. Your task, whether you knew it or not, was to keep Chesterton away from the drink, and you failed.” His disdain was absolute. “Had it been my job, and my dog, I would not have failed to control him, dissolute and dipsomaniac though he be. Mr. Chesterton, as you call him, is now my chattel.” He grabbed Sasha by the back of her dress, just behind her neck, and hoisted her painfully to her tiptoes. “As are you. Later, I will take you to the Terminus. But for now–”

  He thrust her into a cage, halfway up one of the walls. A snap of his fingers summoned two liveried servants, who wheeled away the cage that held Mr. Chesterton.

  The cage into which Sasha had been shoved smelled bad and it was very dim. Sasha wasn’t sure what was in the cage above her, but it snarled a warning when she bumped her head against the overhead bars. There was a stiff rug on the bottom of the cage overhead, which was just as well, although that undoubtedly was what smelled. She was livid with anger and frustration, and now she had no hope that Mr. Chesterton would take charge. She wanted to throw herself against the bars and thrash her arms and kick at the lock and scream and make everyone within earshot miserable. But before she could do so, a voice from the lightless cage beside hers said, “Hello. My name is Roland, what’s yours?”

  “Roland?” Reason told Sasha the name could have been mere coincidence. The way her heart leapt up at the sound of his voice assured her it was not. “I’m your sister, Sasha.”

  “I have a sister?”

  “Yes,” Sasha said firmly. “Me. I came all the way up the Winter Tree to rescue you.” Her heart sank again. “Not that I’ve done a very good job of it. Now we’re both locked in these cages and unable to get out.”

  “Oh, I figured out how to get out of these cages a long time ago.”

  “What? Then why are you still here?”

  “Well, I have no place else to go, and no way to get there either. Do you?”

  Into Sasha’s mind flashed the friendly face of the Pullman porter who had promised her a ride home. Surely Mr. Big Bill–or his Brotherhood–wouldn’t mind extending the courtesy to her brother as well?

  “I do,” she said.

  “Okay, wait.”

  Sasha waited. After a time, there came a glimmer of light from her brother’s cage. Slowly it grew, and by it she could see that he had plunged his hand into his own chest and was now extracting something from within. It was so large that his hand could barely hold it and it seemed to be made of light. It looked like a heart and it beat like a heart, but somehow Sasha knew it was something more.

  “It’s my soul,” Roland explained. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to do this, but I figured out how anyway.”

  His soul was free now. He touched it to the lock.

  The door flew open.

  Roland touched the soul to Sasha’s lock and the door of her cage opened as well. He cupped the soul in his hands for a few seconds, staring at it intently. Then he patted it and put it back into his chest, which glowed with a dim and lessening light. He smiled shyly at Sasha. “Lead the way.” He seemed to be a nice boy.

  They climbed down the wall of cages, while the children within cursed and spat at them. There didn’t seem to be any good children in the cages, which simultaneously made Sasha feel better for not freeing them as well, and made her wonder if maybe she wasn’t as good a girl as she’d always thought–else, why would she be there? She was glad when they reached the doorway out and could put the child-kennels behind them.

  As her hand closed on the doorway, she again felt a flash of heat and saw her hand grown long and elegant. Reflexively, she glanced toward Roland to make sure he was all right…and saw a tall, slim grownup in a tailored suit. He smiled down at her, fondly and with just a touch of sadness.

  She blinked in astonishment and, where the stranger had been, she saw only Roland, staring worriedly at her.

  “Stop woolgathering,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  They ran down the corridor, through its not-smells and unfelt pains. Faster and faster they went, until it seemed to Sasha that she was racing full-tilt down a long and steepening slope. Her hair flew out behind her, like Alice’s in the caucus-race, and still Roland sped up, tugging her after him down the corridor, which kept bending away from them until suddenly Sasha realized that she wasn’t running any longer but falling.

  “Roland!” she cried. “What’ll we do?”

  “Keep calm,” Roland said in a surprisingly mature voice. “It’s rather fun, don’t you think? Perhaps there will be cotton candy for us when we finish.”

  Sasha had to admit that if she thought of it as a game or an amusement ride, it was indeed rather fun. But it wasn’t an amusement ride! It was real, and Lord Snow was undoubtedly behind it.

  Roland twisted around as he tumbled down. “Use your imagination, Sister Sasha! Perhaps there’s a big pile of cushions below us. Or a haystack! I would love to land in a haystack. Maybe we’ll fall into an enormous pile of soft, fluffy snow”–Sasha shivered–“only warm, you see. Warm snow! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “How can you think those things?” she cried. “It makes no sense!” She wondered if the time he spent in the cage had unhinged his mind. Since she had had no recollections of him, she had no way of knowing whether he had always been such a cheery fellow. Mr. Chesterton, although he took a very positive attitude, had generally leavened it with a reassuring grumpiness.

  “Not everything makes sense,” Roland said. “I thought about this in the cage. For one thing, playing with trains–what’s the sense in that? Tiny l
ittle people made of metal, with tiny metal coats and hats.” He waved his hands, which made him tumble faster, and shouted back at her, “Toy trains don’t go anywhere. Coats and hats and people are not metal!”

  Then he stretched out his jacket to slow himself down, almost like a parachute, and took a deep breath. “But a real train that goes straight up the Winter Tree is not necessarily an improvement. It ought to be, but somehow it’s just not! So what I think is this: There are things in life make no sense at all, but that’s no reason not to enjoy them.”

  Sasha was trying to make sense of her brother’s words when suddenly–just as he had predicted–they fell (whoomp!) onto an enormous pile of soft, fluffy cushions.

  “There you are. I must say it took you long enough to get here.” Out of the darkness loomed a strangely familiar figure. “Let me just light a candelabrum, so we can see what we shall see.” A match skritched. Shadows danced. Sasha saw the speaker.

  It was Aunt Adelaide.

  “I suppose you’re full of questions,” Aunt Adelaide said. “I know I would be, were I in your place. Very well, then, I’ll answer them all, and then it’s back to your cages with the both of you.” She fell silent. Then, arching an eyebrow, “Well?”

  “I–” Sasha began.

  “Stop!” Roland cried. He stepped between her and Aunt Adelaide, as if the old woman were a physical danger that Sasha had to be protected from. “No. We have no questions whatsoever. We don’t want to know and we’re not going to ask.”

  “Really?” The old woman’s grin was wide and froglike, her teeth pointy, her lips and tongue bright red. Her face grew ghostly white. And snap!–just like that!–it was obvious that she was in no way human. Under her gaze Roland fanned out like a hand of cards into dozens of Rolands, swelling up on one side from small boys to tall men and dwindling down on the other side, older and older, to a hairless, wizened old figure that was not identifiably male or female. Aunt Adelaide reached out with impossibly long arms and shuffled the Rolands vigorously. Then she dealt out three, one on top of the other.

  First a toddler. “Shall I tell you whether you’ll always be safe and loved?”

  Then a grown man. “Or whether your darling Victoria will always be faithful to you or not?”

  Finally, Roland as he was now. “Or whether you will ever find the real Aunt Adelaide?” Then, in a deceptively gentle voice, “Or your mother and father?”

  All the Rolands collapsed into one angry little boy. “No! We don’t want to hear anything that you have to tell us.”

  Sasha pushed Roland out of her way. “It’s easy for you to say that,” she said heatedly. “You don’t remember any of them. But I do.” She turned on the false Aunt Adelaide. “So–yes! I want to know what you did with Mother and Father and Grandmother and Aunt Adelaide. I want to know what I have to do to get them back. Tell me!”

  The inhuman red-tongued grin broadened, but the voice was as kindly and solicitous as ever. “Why, child,” she said, shaking her head. “My dear, dear child, we killed them. We came out of the mirrors and we killed them all. Now they’re dead and they’re never coming back. It’s possible you’ll still manage to rescue yourselves, though I wouldn’t bet money on it. You might even manage to save Mr. Chesterton, quixotic though that would be. But you’ll never, ever see your parents again. Even Lord Snow himself couldn’t arrange that. I’m quite sure that you’ll never even find their corpses.”

  The shock of her words hit Sasha with all the force of a slap. Her flesh turned as stinging cold as Arctic ice. All the world grew small and distant and still. It felt as though she were turning to stone.

  “That’s right, dear, hold it all in,” the creature cooed. She was softening and sagging, so that she no longer looked like Aunt Adelaide; her hair had turned to white foam and her dress to whipped cream. But needle-sharp teeth still gleamed from the dark cavern of her mouth. “Wrap it up tight and hard. Taste the pain. Savor it. Let it encompass you and sink down through your flesh and bones to the very core of your being. Let it become you and you become it. Give it all your love and–”

  “Demon!” Roland screamed, pushing between her and Sasha. He plunged his hand into his chest and pulled out his beating, glowing soul. He held it up before him. “Stay away from her!”

  But the mound-of-foam-woman was not put off for an instant. Chuckling, she reached out a grasping cloud-wisp of a hand. “Is that for me? Oh, what a good little boy you are! Give Auntie some sugar.”

  Seeing his mistake, Roland pulled back his soul, stumbling and almost falling. But streams of spume and wind-drift flowed from his opponent’s skirts, twining around and behind him, sprouting more and more long, tentacular arms. “Roland!” Sasha cried, jolted out of her paralysis. “Hide it, put it back inside yourself!”

  Wispy tentacles wrapped themselves around Roland’s legs and torso and tightened about his chest, blocking him from simply replacing the soul in its original receptacle. So, desperately, he stuffed the heart into his mouth and swallowed it whole. His skin turned grey and he clutched at his throat, choking.

  He doubled over in pain.

  Sasha ran through the scattering foam to her brother.

  Then he straightened. Roland was no longer himself but an adult, tall and handsome, self-possessed and imperially lean. He shook his head, marveling. “Oh, Sister Sasha, were you ever that young? You always seemed so much older in my eyes. Older, and wiser too. How strange to meet you like this.”

  Sasha was a little afraid of this man, kindly though he sounded. “Are you really my brother Roland?”

  “Well…yes and no,” the man said. “But explanations can wait. Right now we have bigger matters in the kettle.” Roland-the-Adult planted his feet solidly on the ground and began walking down the hall, holding Sasha by the hand, so that she trailed behind him like a balloon. He seemed to be in no particular hurry.

  “Shouldn’t we be running?” Sasha asked timidly.

  “That’s just what Lord Snow wants us to do–run as fast as ever we can and strive forever to outdo ourselves. No, the time for that is over. Instead, we shall linger,” her adult brother said. “Linger just as hard as we can.”

  In a leisurely and yet ultimately efficient manner, they passed through the labyrinthine passages of Tesseract House, coming at last to its front entrance and throwing the doors open upon the dark, star-dusted darkness. “Deep breath,” Roland said. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”

  Then he flung her into the void.

  Sasha’s second flight through the frigid vacuum was painful, difficult, and not much different from her first. She tumbled and tumbled, struggling to hold her breath and keep her courage for what seemed far too long a time…and then she landed with a light bounce on a familiar platform. She was back at the Terminus.

  Her brother was nowhere to be seen.

  Pressing herself against the wall, out of the way of foot traffic, Sasha watched the train workers going about their jobs. She thought about what Roland had said: They did look a bit like they were made of tin. Conductors and redcaps bustlied about. Engineers and brakemen strode past purposively. In the booths, Plasticine vendors sold magazines, cigarettes, hot dogs, coffee, and even tiny souvenir Tesseract Houses in snow globes. Over a tremendous desk marked Information there was a train schedule that read:

  Then all the letters spun around, making a clacking noise, and when they finished spinning there was a new entry at the very bottom of the list:

  She was about to go to the information desk to ask where she could find Track One when a redcap brushed past her. Though his uniform was different from that of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Workers, his face was very similar to that of Mr. Big Bill. Not pausing, he nodded meaningfully at Sasha, and in his wake there was piece of paper in her hand.

  Sasha turned her back on the crowd before looking. It was a page torn from a comic book, folded in four. Carefully, she opened it up, hoping it would be from one of the Mr. Chesterton books, simply because it wou
ld be so very good to see his face again.

  But it wasn’t. It was from the comic about Yaa Asantewaa Warrior Queen. In the first panel, she was slogging through a jungle swamp, trees hanging down ropes of moss and vines. She wore huge golden earrings and had a band of gold around her forehead. You could see by her expression that she was very tired, and in the gloom above her hung the image of the Ejisuhene, the rightful ruler of Ejisu, whom she had sworn to free from exile and return to his throne. In the next panel, a tremendous crocodile lurked. In the third, its enormous jaws opened directly in front of Yaa Asantewaa. She drew her sword and thrust downward, into its skull, with a resounding SKLUNNK! The enormous creature thrashed in its death-throes, and Yaa Asantewaa grabbed a trailing vine to pull herself up and over the dying croc. But wait! The innocent-looking vine turned out to be a mammoth python! Yaa Asantewaa struggled as the huge snake wrapped itself around her. She distracted it by biting its tail! It fought ferociously, but at last she strangled it. The swamp was quiet now, and she was alone. The final panel was a close-up drawing of her face, full of lines and sagging flesh. She was an old woman, Sasha saw with surprise, worn and wrinkled. She looked exhausted, but she also looked defiant. Ranged about her were three thought balloons.

  The first read: “I Must Go On.”

  The second: “I Can’t Go On.”

  And the third: “I’ll Go On.”

  Abruptly, Sasha felt a chill, as if a cold draft had hit the back of her neck. She looked around, half-expecting to see a python. On the far side of the station was Lord Snow! Without looking down, Sasha refolded the comic book page and, since girls’ dresses didn’t have pockets, slid it into her sleeve.

  There was a cart full of luggage nearby. Sasha slipped behind it. Then, slowly and cautiously, she peeked around the side. Lord Snow was busying himself with a large steamer trunk, snapping the latches to make sure they were fastened. The trunk had a mesh inset on its side, which meant, Sasha reasoned, that whatever was in it was alive.