by N. D. Wilson
Henry stood up and walked into the kitchen to get the glass he had left by the sink. When he had it, he walked back to the stairs and climbed slowly, thinking.
He had ninety-eight options. Remove Endor, the old throne room where the wizard Carnassus ate his grubs, and Byzanthamum, and he had ninety-five. But he only wanted to remove those places. He didn't know if they belonged to the same world as Hylfing. Grandfather's journal had said that there weren't that many completely different worlds. All three could be in the same one. But he didn't think that Byzanthamum and Endor belonged together. Darius had heard legends of Endor, but he'd been searching for a way through worlds.
Henry stopped near the top of the stairs. Pieces were falling together. They were the wrong pieces, but still. Darius must have come through into Kansas after Henry had escaped, but he'd been faster than Henry. He was the one who had opened all the cupboards. He had found his way to Endor. Or maybe not to Endor. He'd been looking for Nimiane. He had wanted her freed in the worlds. Maybe he had gone to wherever she was, to wherever Zeke and the girls had shoved her after Zeke had knocked her out. It felt like an age ago, like it had all happened somewhere in Henry's distant childhood, back when he was a baby. But it had only been a matter of weeks.
Henry reached the top of the stairs and stood on the damp landing. How would Darius be able to tell which cupboard the witch had gone into? Maybe he couldn't. But they were both probably through there somewhere. Worse, Nella and Ron had seemed pretty sure that Henry and Darius would be meeting again.
Henry walked into the dark bathroom, set his glass on the counter, and flipped the light switch without thinking. Nothing happened. There was a window in the shower, so he ripped the shower curtain down and threw it in the tub. Bright daylight flooded in through the gapped and shattered panes, and Henry turned and saw himself in the mirror.
Black spots of dried blood were stuck to his lip beneath his nostrils and to the sides of his nose and his cheekbones around his tear ducts. He leaned toward the mirror and saw black tracks leading out of both of his ears. He twisted the faucet handle to wash his face and then remembered why he had walked upstairs in the first place. The only water in the house was in the toilet tank.
Henry picked up the porcelain lid and balanced it on the seat. For a moment, he stared at the black float and the decades' worth of toilet silt that clung to the tank's walls. Then he numbed his mind, dipped his glass, and drank quickly.
It was good.
He didn't finish the glass. He pulled a hand towel off a rack and dumped the rest of the water onto it. Leaning back toward the mirror, he scrubbed at his face.
The blood from his cupboard passage came off quickly. There wasn't a lot of it.
He dropped the towel in the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. His shirt was ridiculous. Wherever he decided to go first, he needed to change his clothes.
A cobweb was stuck to his jaw, straggling off from the new skin around his old burns. He brushed it, but it didn't move. Then he looked closer. It wasn't one cobweb, it was a whole tangle of extremely fine threads. Together, they formed an irregular tube, spiraling in place where his scar had begun to pock. They were gray, and they were deathly. Smaller versions, tiny and ghostlike, crawled out of the other places where the witch's blood had spattered on his skin.
Henry ran his fingers through them, and they were undisturbed. He raised his right hand and saw his palm-flame in the mirror. The gray webs scattered, flattened on his face, spun, and writhed to avoid his dandelion fire. He put his hand down and watched them swirl back into place.
An actual spider, unaware of the consequences of its decision, lowered itself from the ceiling and came to rest on top of the mirror. Henry pinched its thread between his fingers and dangled it in the air. Then he moved it through the ghost-funnels next to his face.
When it touched the first small one, the spider jumped, grabbed at its line, and started to climb. Henry moved it through the bigger one, and the spider twitched and dangled. Its legs folded against its underbelly, and its abdomen shriveled up as all eight legs dropped off. Henry let go of its string, but it clung to his fingertip. He shook it off, scraped his fingers on the sink's edge, and then looked back in the mirror.
He didn't like that at all.
Remembering how Nella had looked when he had begun to really see her, he stared at himself. He wanted to see more than the weird things clinging to his face. But nothing appeared. Nothing but his face-webs and a flash of gold when he raised his right hand.
Henry shivered and left the bathroom quickly. He didn't want to think about what he had just seen. He needed to change. And then he would pick his poison.
Wearing normal shoes felt good. He'd been through a lot barefoot. Henry wiggled his toes. He was even wearing socks. They were a little damp, but better than nothing. Water had found its way through most of the drawers in his nightstand dresser, but his jeans weren't too terrible, and he'd found a black T-shirt that was completely dry
Henry's backpack was unzipped on his bed. He stood in the doorway, holding Grandfather's journals, looking from the diagram to the wall to the list of names and back to the wall.
He hadn't the least idea where to begin. A brassy-looking door on the left looked interesting. It had some sort of relief of a vine with colored stones as flowers. But he wasn't sure. He found himself more attracted to plain doors, to doors that didn't look as frilly or glamorous as some of the others. To doors that didn't look like they might have Darius or Nimiane behind them.
It was distracting having most of them open. Smells, good and bad, crept through along with warm air or cold. He wanted to shut them all, but he wasn't sure that would be smart. He'd already regretted shutting the most important one.
Badon Hill was the only place he really wanted to go. But it had been boarded up.
Henry stared at the twisted rectangular door. He could pick the smell of Badon Hill out of every other drifting scent. It was its own place. Its wind had its own flavor. The dangling door drifted and rocked, and Henry pulled in a deep breath. Realization bubbled up in Henry's mind. When the faeren had posted their warning, they had closed off the backside of the cupboard. He hadn't been able to smell anything. There had been no breeze.
“Wait,” Henry said out loud. He set the journals on his backpack and knelt on the end of his bed. Water soaked up out of the mattress and into his jeans. Henry pushed the door out of the way and felt around inside. Splinters of wood covered the bottom, and when his hand reached the back, his fingers crawled through earth and moss.
It was open again.
Henry didn't know why that would be, but he didn't care. That's where he was going. If he couldn't find a way off the island, then he would come back and try something else. If he found out that there was no Deiran Coast in that world—how, he didn't know—then he would come back and try something else.
Henry flipped through the other journal until he found the combination to Badon Hill. Then he set the compass locks, picked up his backpack, and hurried down the attic stairs. He didn't stop on the second-story landing. He quick-stepped down the next flight, moved through the mushroom patch, dropped his pack on the dining room table, and went into the kitchen to find a pen. He was planning on digging in the junk drawer, but there was already a pen on the counter.
He picked it up and went back to Frank's note. He wrote his own note up the side.
He looked at his note and tried to think if there was anything he should add. Should he say “Love, Henry”? No. But he did have a thought. He double-checked the journal and then copied the Badon Hill combination next to his note and circled it.
That would be enough.
It was time to load his backpack. The flashlight went in first. A couple pairs of socks, a pair of underwear, a gray hooded sweatshirt, and a long-sleeve T-shirt were wadded into the middle. The other can of tuna went in there somewhere. He didn't know where his pocketknife was, and he didn't feel like looking, so he'd pulled an old-fash
ioned, plastic-handled, round-nosed steak knife out of a drawer, wound a kitchen towel tight around the blade, and shoved it into the middle of his clothes. He rubber-banded the journals back together, put them in a sealable plastic bag, and dropped it on top of everything else. Then he zipped up.
He felt weird climbing the stairs, knowing that he might never see the house again. A lot of things had happened to him here. He had changed. But not as much as the house had.
Henry stopped in the bathroom for another drink. He didn't look in the mirror, but he couldn't help looking down at the spider and its scattered legs. He didn't like spiders, but he still felt a little bad. He set his glass on the sink and bent down to pick the dead thing up. The legs stuck to his fingers, and he brushed them off into the toilet bowl. The body was dry and crumbled in his hand. When it was floating with its limbs, he put his hand on the toilet handle but stopped. He shouldn't flush. The tank would empty. Henrietta might need that water later. He might need it later.
“That didn't help,” Henry muttered. He banged the lid shut and stood up.
He didn't allow himself to dawdle on the landing. A knot in his stomach was trying to grow and tighten, but he kept his breath even and concentrated on what he was doing, not on what might happen because of it.
Grandfather's room smelled wonderful. The wind from the smashed windows tangled with the breeze that slid out of the cupboard, and Henry stopped and simply felt it. He looked out at the police car and then around his grandfather's room, the room that had been so mysterious for so long. Crouching in front of the cupboard, the floor breeze rustled against his face and filled him with an ache. A longing. Not for anything he knew, but for something. Something that could be had. It was like being hungry without knowing food existed. Or thirsty without ever having heard of water.
Henry wished that someone could assure him that everything would be all right, that he wouldn't die until he was one hundred, and that he wouldn't notice then. Maybe that he wouldn't die at all. But that was Darius's wish. That's what Nimiane had achieved. Death was better than that.
Henry felt like he should pray. He didn't know why, and he didn't remember the last time he had. He took his backpack off and set it in the cupboard in front of him. The breeze was warm on his hands.
“God,” he said, and stopped. What else should he say? Fix everything? Kill Darius in his sleep? Make the world soft and friendly?
“God,” he said again.
And he crawled in.
Soft earth compressed beneath his palms. Moss pulled away beneath his fingers. He pushed his pack up ahead of him and grabbed handfuls of warm grass. He saw the sky and treetops swaying, grabbing at its belly. He saw the long gray stone, its surface shimmering with warmth, and he rolled out into the sun.
raggant flared its nostrils and sampled the world. He knew it well, and he hadn't been gone long. Much was the same. But the currents had changed. For a person, it would have been like finding a childhood river flowing the wrong direction. Or worse, leaving someone strong for a few days and returning to find them dying. But the raggant was not like a person, and it didn't panic like one. It sat on the thick tree limb and breathed— longer, deeper, louder—and his soul remapped the world. It didn't use any abstractions, like coordinates or dimensions. A spawning salmon didn't need to, even a migrating goose with the intelligence of a walnut wouldn't need to. And their internal compasses were as sophisticated as a bit of fluff when compared to the raggant's. The raggant's was more like a spider's web. If spiders worked in color, knew the stars by how their light tasted, and could see sound.
The raggant didn't have any extra senses. He only had one, and it interfaced everything into an amazingly complicated but entirely accurate caricature of whatever worlds were within his range.
The only thing more intricate and accurate than the raggant was a common bumblebee. And bumblebees only used their abilities to name every individual flower within their flight radius and inflate nectar value by re-classifying every vintage based on temperature, light angle and refraction, time of collection, barometric pressure, period elapsed since previous electrical storm, and mood of flower.
They had the raggant's respect. Though it couldn't comprehend why they would allow themselves to be seen flying any more than a turtle could imagine going around shell-less.
A bumblebee was distracting him now. He dropped off the tree limb where he'd been sitting, pinched off his breath, and flapped madly while his drooping hind end approached the ground. He landed hard on a bed of pine needles and picked his next perch.
Right now, everything he sensed was located in relation to four things—himself, his birthplace, the woman who had raised him, and Henry York. He knew where his self was. The ship he had been born on was just around the next continent and a couple hundred meters below the ocean surface, wedged between a loud rock and some melancholic red coral. The woman was just over the mountains. But Henry York—he had found Henry York. That had been the goal. The first goal. Then he had to find a way large enough and safe enough to lead Henry back through world seams. Now one had opened up, but Henry had gone away just before. And when he'd felt Henry shift, he'd rushed back without planning and stepped on some sort of back-fanged legless thing in the transition. His haunch still stung where he'd been bitten.
The raggant looked at the old ruined temple wall, nestled back in the brush and vines. The crumbling niche in the wall he had come through was completely hidden by leaves, but he didn't need to see it to know it was there. He could sense the flat grassland and the salt water and the flavors beyond each of the cupboards from where he stood. And he knew which one Henry was in. It had been too small for him to fit through—a world of smoke full of people that sounded like peacocks. He had to find another way. There would be one. There always was.
He slowly jog-hopped to build speed, and then jumped, flapping as wildly as he could, just dragging himself in a spiral toward the top of the ruined wall. People were coming. So he hurried and flared his dark wings against the breeze for balance when he landed.
Below him, vine leaves rustled. A white sack dropped to the ground.
Frank pushed through the leaves and fell out onto his pillowcase. He sat up, blinked in the sunlight, sneezed, and turned off the flashlight. Then he stood up, leaned the shotgun against the wall, parted the vines with his hands, and yelled. “Right! Penny first.”
A few seconds later, he pulled out another pillowcase, set it beside his own, and dragged Penny out by the wrists. She stood up beside him and looked around.
“Wow,” she said.
Another pillowcase was born. Anastasia slid out through vines and staggered on the soft, needled ground.
“This doesn't look that different,” she said.
Frank ignored them both. His daughters chattered while he pulled out Richard, and then Zeke, and then Dotty, and lastly, a limping Ken Simmons, bulging in his Christmas sweater and uniform.
Anastasia and Penelope had already stripped off their extra layers and thrown them onto the pillow stack. Richard was sitting on the ground, and Zeke was pacing a small perimeter, looking around at their new location.
“We should have brought tents,” Anastasia said. “This would be just like camping.”
Penelope looked at the tall fir trees and the sloped ground rising up around them. “It would be camping,” she said.
Dotty pushed her hair back and picked out a leaf. “Try to keep your voices down,” she said. “We really don't know where we are or what might be around.”
Frank pulled in a deep breath and licked his lips. He reached back into the leafy wall and lifted the loose vines, looking at the stone and the shape of the hole. It had been an alcove once, a niche, and he had seen it before. But only once. A lifetime ago.
Facing the ruined wall, Frank backed up. He bumped into Anastasia, but he didn't stop. The wall had changed a little. Or a lot, he couldn't tell. The place had been so vividly stamped in his memory for so long that it was hard to submit
his memory of the place to the reality. He had filled things in over the years, imagining what he thought he was remembering. The place had seemed so big then. A hidden hollow, with a crumbling temple wall once belonging to the wizards but long thrown down. The vines were thicker and had swallowed the whole ruin, but it was the place.
Shutting his eyes, Frank could still see Dotty's father striding down toward the wall. He could picture him stepping up into the gap. He remembered waiting. And following. And crawling through into a strange bedroom. And a lifetime in Kansas.
His father-in-law had lied to him. Not that he was surprised. But why would he say that the connection had been broken, that the wall had crumbled? Why had he believed him? He hadn't ever. Not really.
Frank sat down hard and looked up at the sky that had been his as a child. He looked at the sharp firs, and then he filled his hands with earth. He lifted the dirt to his face, and he smelled it. It smelled like him, like his arms, like his bed, like what he really was. He was made from this stuff.
His lips were pinched tight between his teeth. His eyes were warm. He wiped them on the backs of his hands, blinked, and looked toward the hills. Beyond them was the sea. Beyond them, he would find the graves of his fathers. And maybe of his mother and brothers. It had been long enough that beyond them, he knew he might find nothing. He sneezed again, and then sniffed.
Dotty looked at him. “Frank?” she asked. “What's wrong?”
Frank just smiled and stood up.
“Frank?”
“I know where we are,” he said.
Henrietta nodded slowly and jerked awake. The branches beneath her were moving. She couldn't sleep in a tree, but Eli wouldn't even let her lie down on the ground. He said it would make her feel worse, that the longer she slept on it, the weaker her life would be. So he'd tucked her up in the oldest, strongest tree he could find. And now he was gone.
Her feet had been killing her, but her legs had fallen asleep, so she didn't notice them. She did notice her back, resting against the tree's hard surface, and her tail-bone, which felt like it would be snapping off soon.