A Mischief in the Woodwork

by Harper Alexander

  Somewhere, the tide of debris steadied, but I bounced on down the descent. When I reached the bottom of the bluff and the beginning of the milder slope, the dizzy craze slowed, but, disoriented, I could do nothing to stop my progress entirely.

  A shadowed drop loomed in all directions as I spun; the ravine, unable to be pinpointed amidst my revolutions. No sooner had I glimpsed its gaping form ahead of me than my attempts to hold it at bay did the opposite and spurred me on, for I had turned. The ravine was left, right, up and down – always looming, dodging my efforts to distinguish it.

  It grew alarmingly from a crack to a maw, and in a field of panic, I skidded right up to the edge to shake its hand at last, and flailed over that edge through a ripped web of clutching, raked spider-silk fingers.

  It had a killer handshake.

  Streams of dirt rained down around me, gouged from the sides by my hands. I shredded that wall. And then I hit level ground. My body glanced across the surface, and I was hustled across the ground like a leaf tumbled by the wind, a tangle of skirts.

  I came to rest in the middle of the ravine, stunned. Walls rose up around me. It was blessedly cool. Chillingly cool. The sky was a taunting ribbon above me, farther away than it should be.

  Shaken, I propped myself up. My fingers stirred through a residue much different than the powder I was used to. I regarded the layer of sullied, decayed leaves that saturated the regular dirt. It was like foreign land, right there beneath me. I had not seen trees in Dar'on for quite some time; but the rustle against my fingertips told me... this concoction had come in on the current that had carved the ravine. A deposit passing through on the season's Northbound Express. The river was a train for this sort of thing, a pollinating device, exchanging one spell of territory for another.

  It was just another way that the Great Butterfly was in motion.

  On top, the leaves were dry, crushed and light as ashes, spilling through my fingers like feathers. Airy and silent. Deeper down, they were compressed and moist, a cake of decay. I sifted, then dug through it, my fingers absently tasting the memory of the river as I scanned the rest of the ravine. The walls were not overbearingly high, but high enough that a simple hoist would get me nowhere. They were also craggy, but only in a way that would graze; nothing to provide foot- and handholds.

  The ravine narrowed a ways down, like the neck of a bottle. Not something that tempted one to try to slip past. It was well wide enough, I could argue, but it gave off a strangling air. For even at its widest, the ravine was trapping.

  I drew myself to my feet, leaf remnants falling away and clinging to my skirt. The shadows tasted me, branding my sun-beaten shoulders with cold and seeping up my legs. The dust on my face cowered in my pores.

  I scanned the walls for a section that might humor a climb, molding my eyes to each jut and crevice. I felt strangely compelled to keep my distance from the narrowing of the passage, and so turned to weigh my options in the other direction.

  Contrary to the bottled-up tendency now at my back, this new perspective yawned into a more respectable canyon. There was even a bridge, or half a bridge, that arched over it before breaking off mid-air. Its rubble lay beneath it.

  A bridge will do you no good up there, I thought to myself as I cast about for other options. I shuffled slowly out of place, changing feet, feeling for perspective.

  My heel bumped something concealed in the leaves. Curious, I sought it out, nudging away its cover with my toe. A rusty chain took form first, which led quickly to the discovery of the shackle at its end. The shackle was empty, but what I found on the other end was a bit more disturbing. I weeded the chain out of the leaves, following its length until an anchor halted my progress. Brushing away the leaves, I beheld a most interesting substitute for the ball-and-chain method: a piece of rubble from the city.

  There in my fingers, the chain sparked.

  I dropped it.

  And watched the spark thread its way quickly along the pattern of my silken fingerprints. It left them singed, looking faintly tattooed.

  Alarmed, as if I had grown fond of the cursed digits, I flexed my fingers, feeling for the slightly prickly strain of web.

  It was still there, but raw.

  I eyed the chain on the ground with distrust, and moved slowly away from it.

  There was a vision in my head now – very faint, for it had been brief – but I could see it, flickering weakly. A man who had worn that shackle.

  The purpose of the piece of rubble was clear enough, though I didn't welcome the realization: it was an anchor, which performed the duty all anchors were meant to perform.

  It kept something down.

  Or in this case, someone.

  Why anyone would be anchored to the bottom of this gulley was beyond me. I didn't let myself think too hard over it, if only for the sake of my own composure. I simply moved on, intent on finding a way out.

  There was an area up ahead that boasted good texture in the ravine wall. I grew optimistic seeing it, thinking this was not an irrevocable death trap after all. It was just a ravine, and I could climb out. There would be plenty of places that I could. After all, no one would need to be chained down unless climbing was an option.

  Still, I picked my way carefully toward the place of interest, keeping to the edges. And I could not help it, there next to the wall; I trailed my singed fingers over the face of earth at my flank.

  At first, the visions were dead. They were black. I tasted ash, as the caress only grazed my fingers. But I swallowed the acrid sensation and gentled my touch, and the veil of scored nerves lifted. It rippled over the visions, still, but I could see outlines.

  People. The people that wandered this ravine. Whiteskins, starved until they were surely as pale as they could ever desire. Bloodied ankles, dragging the pieces of debris that anchored them to this chasm.

  “You want to be beautiful?” I heard a voice question them, an overbearing murmur crowded into their ears. “Pure? Then you will welcome the vampires, and they will make you as white as you have ever dreamed.”

  I heard moaning. Distant wailing. Sounds of hysteria.

  Human phantoms wandering the ravine, united in the rhythm of dragging one mutilated foot behind them.

  Then a flicker much more radiant, right there before me. A darkskin woman, dressed in gold, lounging beneath the bridge.

  There was a utensil in her hand, a shaft like a long, thick needle. She drew it to her mouth, breathed in, and let out a breath swarming with termites.

  They billowed out, and then shifted like a flock of birds and screeched into the air like bats, and I jerked my hand away from the gulley wall in surprise as they rushed me, breaking the vision.

  The area beneath the bridge was vacant.

  It was suddenly very important to me that I leave this place to its business. But it was going to prove decidedly tricky, for I no longer wanted to touch the walls to climb out.

  I was rooted in this place by my own chains, my own demons.

  And this place had enough of its own.

  The prisoners.

  The voice.

  The golden smoker.

  And, in hindsight, I saw as I brushed together a vision in the ashes on my fingers – the one who had starved until his ankle was free.

  The one who had gotten away.

  S e v e n t e e n –

  The Ambassador

  Overwhelmed by the visions, and the thought of being surrounded by this disturbing cast, I clenched my hand against further interpretations and my eyes against further imagination. I would be dreaming up visions myself soon, spooked.

  I had not realized it, but as my fingers closed I had caught a piece of leaf. It was quaint as a paint chip.

  In the end, that's why I opened my eyes.

  Not because I was ready to go.

  Not because I had regained my composure.

  I opened them because there was a whisper still lodged in my grasp, a delicate shard of this puzzle still painting thin
gs into my mind.

  What it painted this time was something closer than the other snippets. I could feel the heat of it.

  The gaze of it.

  I saw it, as I opened my eyes.

  Even as it stood behind me.

  I revolved slowly, until its true form pricked the corner of my eye, and then snapped a full turn.

  She was there.

  And she was not a vision.

  She was in the distance, and I was illiterate to her features. But she was unmistakable.

  That was the word that described her.

  Unmistakable.

  She was hugged by gold, and her frame was one that boasted its tall authority even from a distance. This time, in her hand, she did not clutch her smoking utensil. She clutched a shackle.

  It dangled from her grasp, the chain lagging on the ground behind her. When she moved forward, dragging it toward me, she did not seem much hindered by the weight of the rubble.

  I did not take well to this woman dragging an anchored shackle in my direction. As she moved forward, I backed away. But each of her steps seemed to double mine. She came forward in flashes.

  Oh, gods, what have I fallen into?

  I felt her voice in my hand, a tremor in the leaf: “You have fallen off the face of the earth, my dear. You've fallen into the cracks.”

  My hand released the leaf with the suddenness of a clamp pried open. Her voice flitted to the ground, where I couldn't hear it. I trampled it as I treaded backward.

  I did not turn to flee, though perhaps I would have very much liked to. I was trained in survival, and survival did not always mean running. My hand went to my head, sliding into the niche where my knife was threaded. It was colder than usual, and my fingers were slick with sweat.

  There was no use denying that I was out of my element, that I had never encountered a place of this nature, even in all my encounters as an Albino, but there was no time to despair over that nature, nor the desire to analyze it. I just wanted out. I had trespassed, and I just wanted to leave. I had fallen into something that was none of my business.

  “It was just a mistake,” I tried, projecting it down the passage while my advancing companion was still a safe distance away. “I just fell in.”

  “Most of them do,” came her reply without concern. I had deterred nothing.

  My glance took in the chain at her fingertips. “Leave it,” I willed more desperately.

  She slunk closer. The dead leaves crawled away from her feet. “This is mine to do with as I shall.”

  I bared my blade then, seeking a more deterring stance. “I am not.”

  She said nothing, but carried tauntingly onward.

  Sweat ran into my eyes. I blinked furiously at it, and when my vision cleared, she was before me.

  Right before me.

  I lunged away with a hammering heart, but now her strides were long and purposeful. I threw my knife at her.

  She caught it by the blade.

  She was close enough now that I was stricken by her beauty. I had never seen such beauty. Her skin was rich as the soil of paradise, and her eyes like vast planes of night. Her cheekbones were like weapons, sharp enough to kill, poised above half-mast on her tall, angled face. The mane atop her head was slicked back, smooth, in a way that made her forehead taut as a canvas and seemed to pull on her eyes. It made her severe, and exquisite, and stunning at once.

  “Neither are you yours, my dear,” she drawled, her accent crisp as apples and hollow as wind.

  The anchor of rubble baubled along behind her, as significant as a neglected kite on a string. It was child's play in her wake.

  “The shadows will eat the sun from your skin. The vampires will drain the wretched glow of blood from it. By your standards, you will be beautiful. Fair as any queen. Have you no thanks?”

  Horror and bafflement clenched my brow. I could no sooner decipher her estranged riddles than put a tower back together from the rubble. She was a lunatic – but she was one with a distracting sense of power. I could not deny my own eyes. Something bigger was afoot here.

  “You will taste your own folly, here, ripe where its sunken into the earth,” the golden woman went on. “When the water comes through, you will taste the bitterness of your own sorry reflection, what the mirror has always seen in you – the spit it would like to throw in your face every time it's forced to look at you. You will taste the terrible sweet tang of all you could have tasted your entire life, when it was attainable. You will taste the sweetness of the things you denied, and then they will turn sour on your tongue. You will taste–” And here, she grabbed for me, an iron fist around my forearm that was a shackle by itself, and her words melted faster than snowflakes on a stove.

  Her eyes went to her hold, as if she felt something she had not expected in my bony, strong appendage.

  And the coinciding thought that was floating like a wayward survivor on the doused tide of my mind at that moment: I have tasted it...

  I did not know where the thought had washed in from, nor where the correlating ache of sadness hailed from, but as her attack of words stopped so did my resulting sentiments, and she and I were both left in a strange stalemate of uncertainty. Both had felt something.

  It just seemed mine had been more fleeting, and hers more on the convicting side – for where I had let the feeling go as it saw fit, she was evidently still puzzling over hers.

  She had taken it decidedly more personally.

  Was she looking at the same thing I had felt?

  I didn't care. My thoughts had reverted to my current state of affairs. I did not strain against her hold, for she was a beast in human form when it came to her bony clasp. She could crush me like the leaves at our feet, into a handful of crumblies. Instead, I scowled at her face, defiant against whatever it was about me that intrigued her.

  But she was not interested in my defiance. Her face, halfway between fascinated and indifferent as ice, maintained its direction a moment longer before turning thoughtfully to something behind me.

  The bridge. As if it were relevant in our exchange. Almost as if it was speaking to her.

  I could only be thankful the shackle remained idle at her side. I could not guess what she was thinking.

  “You have...” she started in bemusement, but didn't finish. But perhaps that was all that she meant.

  A moment later, she released me, and sat upon a slab of rubble I had not noticed before. An epiphany seemed lodged in her mind, playing tricks around her head. It was suddenly like I wasn't there at all. Something about the bridge had overruled my importance.

  I have... It echoed in my head, a humble trickle of agreement. But I rubbed my arm where she had clutched me, insecure.

  “Tell me,” she prompted suddenly, looking at me. “Am I beautiful?”

  It seemed such an unorthodox question given the circumstances, but then again the circumstances themselves were a puzzle to be reckoned with.

  I swallowed, for my throat was dusty and sweaty at once. “Most assuredly.”

  “They all say that.” She seemed un-impressed.

  What did she want, for me to go into raving detail? To flatter her until she declared she'd had enough?

  “Devastatingly so?” she pressed. “Enough to kill a man?”

  I struggled, uncertain as to what she was searching for, wanting to say the right thing. “If he were so ready to die, perhaps.”

  She considered this, still lacking in approval.

  “Most of them weep,” she announced.

  I did not know what to say to that. “I do not find myself...so devastated,” I hazarded – for honesty had not gotten me killed so far.

  It was suddenly her smoking utensil in her hand in place of the shackle, and she drew it to her lips a moment and then exhaled a puff of small minions.

  It seemed the termites had been no metaphor of an over-imaginative vision. I watched them disperse with morbid fascination.

  The woman watched me with considerable less amuseme
nt. Intensity, yes, but there was something entirely more dour on her face.

  “Why not, Faller?” she asked coolly.

  A truth came to me: “If I wept in the face of beauty, I would cry every day.” I did not know if it was profound, but it surprised me a little, composing such things under the circumstances.

  Her face, dry as ice. “Interesting.”

  A single termite escaped her stick, squeezing out and flitting off into the air.

  The woman stood as abruptly as she had sat, and walked at me. I shuffled back, but only encountered the ravine wall; an unfriendly array of sandpaper fists pummeled against my back. The woman's gaze pressed me hard against them, and I squirmed as she came to tower over me.

  In her catlike, nighttime eyes, I could see the deep-patterned torrents of constellations. This woman had stars buried deep within the windows to her soul.

  By the gods. Who was this woman? What power did she possess? Meeting her gaze was like looking into space.

  She seized my throat in one delicately-bony, crushing clawlike hand. In reaction, my grasp went to hers, as if I could hope to pry it away.

  My fingers locked on the veins of her wrist, and a tide of visions I was never supposed to be privy to coursed up my arm and shockwaved my body. I saw the edge of the earth, a place where souls were kicked off or taught to fly. I saw the confidential documents of the heavens, the contracts of the angels. I looked Death in the face, shook Death's hand.

  A deal.

  I was a great black steed that herded people. My hooves pounded shackles on an anvil. I condemned people. Great seas of people. I drove them like a sheepdog, crowds as big as the ocean. They tripped and scattered and fell like the waves, but I galloped along my designated shores, keeping them in check. I struck the earth open with a hoof. I drove them into the great chasm that resulted, pushing them off the edge.

  The sun rose and I turned golden, and as my mane swept across my face I was transformed. A woman now. I smoked a stick of parasites. Termites coursed in my lungs.

  I was beautiful on the outside, but inside... Turmoil... Decay under my nails. The result of those humans that had struggled in my grasp.