Quite Contrary

by Richard Roberts

  “Hey, Rat—” I started to inquire, but his little head was already twisting every which way. A pink hand extended, pointing down the path right in front of me.

  “That way, Miss Mary. I can smell it now. Just barely, but it’s a hard smell to forget.”

  “Great. Thanks.” I owed Mordecai one too. “Thanks, Mister Mordecai. You got us just far enough.”

  “Thank you for the new hunting dog, Miss. Rover here just needs to be trained. Good luck with this city of iron place.” He hoisted the trussed-up wolf higher and went back down the path we’d come in by.

  “Bye!” I called back, and followed my own path. It definitely wasn’t a track now. I might have to call it a road. It didn’t bend much, and the trees had been cleared off it. Rat clawed his way up to my shoulder, sniffing the air occasionally to make sure we were headed in the right direction.

  “Hey, is that a building?” I asked when I saw a blocky shape ahead and off to the side.

  “Better than that, Miss Mary. It’s a train station!” Rat announced. He sounded pretty eager, but then I got it. A city of iron would be all about trains. He’d mentioned them in the story, hadn’t he?

  “Are the trains really going to be running?” I asked doubtfully.

  “No, but we can follow the tracks. We don’t need to know where we are if we know for sure which way we’re going.”

  That meant a lot of walking, but it was a step up.

  The trains couldn’t be running. The tracks were covered in rust, and the road dead-ended by the station. Most of it was made of cement blocks, which was fortunate. Everything wood had rotted so badly a railing crumbled when I touched it.

  I looked up. “Getting dark. “The trees thinned out around the station, and I could make out a sky shading towards indigo.

  “Roof over your head and food in the bag, Miss Mary,” Rat pointed out, “And the water fountains might work.”

  They did, after I let them run long enough for the rust to pass through. I ate a sausage and a bun, then laid the bag down to use as a pillow as I stretched myself out on an old metal bench.

  “I really hope a train comes after all,” I muttered as Rat curled up in my hood.

  Of course, it didn’t. But I had food and water when I woke up, and I didn’t even need Rat to tell me which way to walk. An old notice board still had an arrow and a picture of a bunch of buildings with smokestacks. So, I walked along the gravel beside the tracks for a long time, kept faintly amused by Rat’s attempts to comb my hair and his occasional disgusted declarations that he could smell we were going in the right direction. I couldn’t smell anything but autumn trees and rusty metal railroad tracks.

  The first real change was a hill looming ahead of us. The train tracks ran right through it by a tunnel. I wasn’t delighted by that. I’d been trying to stay off the tracks themselves, because I had no desire to be a victim of irony if a train still followed this path after all. But I stumped my way through the dark tunnel anyway, uncomfortably close to the tracks with nowhere to run, until the far end opened up ahead of us.

  We’d run out of forest. The train tracks ran over bleak red dirt up to a giant metal wall wrapped in a circle around an entire city. I couldn’t see the sky, just clouds that looked ugly and bruised over everything. A yellow haze gleamed like oil as it hung around a few of the taller buildings.

  One city of iron and yellow smoke, check. Poor Elizabeth. It did not look like a place she would want to be. I thought it looked pretty cool.

  stood on the railroad tracks and stared up at the walls of the city. I tried to tell myself that there was more iron used in an aircraft carrier, but seeing a city wall made out of the stuff felt weird and intimidating. Most of the metal had gone black, except it had gone past black to red and lumpy with rust. Holes had bitten through the metal to show dark interior hallways. They gaped yards above my head. It was just as well they were out of reach. Every jagged, rusty edge begged me to come get an extra serving of tetanus with my breaking and entry.

  Yeah, I liked the view. The walls loomed and stretched off into the distance on either side, and got extra points for being utterly useless. Right in front of us, a gap split the wall wide enough to contain a whole railroad yard.

  I strolled down the railroad tracks between those towering iron barriers, but following the tracks became complicated, fast. They split, and split again. Tracks wound around like a spider’s nest around long metal shipping containers, long wooden shipping containers, old train cars fallen onto their sides, and giant bins of coal and tilting water towers.

  I climbed up a pyramid of iron girders tied together. They didn’t need to be tied—they’d fused together from rust long ago. I wouldn’t have dared to stand on them if I didn’t figure my shoes could stop an axe. At the top, I shaded my eyes with one hand and peered around the yard. With the sun muffled by rust-colored clouds, shading my eyes was purely for my own amusement. On top of the checkered bag hanging by my shoulder, Rat shaded his own eyes and craned his head around in the other direction. A photo of this moment would have made up for a lot.

  I reminded myself that Elizabeth needed help. I didn’t have the guts to ask how long she’d already been trapped. Sight see later, practical issues now. Those huge doors were most likely a warehouse. Those wooden buildings were for engineers or signal switchers or whatever railroad staff used to work here. A tall fence separated the yard from the city, and despite the rust everywhere, it hadn’t fallen down yet. There, those were gates. I hopped down the iron girders and circled around a pile of metal crates the size of buildings.

  “Actually, Miss Mary, the city entrance is not far away,” said Rat when he saw the gates.

  Of course, they were big enough to cover a whole road, and they’d been chained shut. ‘Chained’ seemed like a strong word for those ropes of grainy corrosion. Ignoring Rat’s suggestion, I walked up and gave them a kick. A lot of banging and shaking, but nothing else.

  Hmmm. “I bet I can break this.

  “It’s not that,” Rat argued, “I left—”

  Crunching gravel. I bolted, interrupting Rat’s complaint as I dived into the cover of a tilted-up shipping container. Had my Wolf caught up so fast? I couldn’t save Elizabeth if I was dodging a hairy, murderous Casanova the whole time!

  No, the sharp impacts couldn’t possibly be wolf paws. I urged my heart to slow down. This was probably harmless. Just in case, I crept as quietly as I could around the corner and took a stealthy peek.

  A skinny girl around my age hopped on one leg down the gravel path lining a railroad track. No, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t a girl; she was more like a mannequin made of wood. Aside from the rounded, slotting joints, her shape was very convincing, but with no clothes, the dark wood couldn’t possibly be mistaken for skin.

  “I told you to wait at the city gate!” Rat squeaked loudly from my shoulder.

  “I did!” the wooden girl chirped back. She had a very high voice, but it sounded human enough. One foot still lifted, she wobbled as she turned her head around far enough that my neck ached in sympathy. “Then, out of nowhere I remembered this game. You do a lot of skipping, and you write something on the ground. That’s all I can remember, but I figured if I skipped enough maybe I’d pick up the rest.”

  “It’s called hopscotch,” I said, bemused despite myself.

  There was no point in hiding from this girl, so I stepped out from cover and started walking over to her, but what she said next jarred me to a halt. “Hello! Why do you look like me?”

  Why? Well, she did have carved hair, and the detail on the springy curls was amazing. Her body had only suggestions of human detail, but she wasn’t much thinner than me, and was nearly my height. She had the right awkward lump of a nose and little carved dents for freckles. Mind you, I didn’t have a fist-sized pocket watch with no face, ticking and spinning gears in the middle of my chest.

  “It might not be an accident,” I answered cautiously. “Did Elizabeth make you?”

&nb
sp; “That’s my mother!” the wooden girl crowed.

  Rat flinched. “Don’t call her that, please.”

  I had to grin a little. “What’s your name? Mine is Mary.”

  The wooden face had only the one curiously blank expression, but a head tilt was all it took to make her look puzzled. “I don’t have a name. Why would I? I’m not alive.”

  “Of course you’re alive,” I corrected her.

  “She’s not, Miss Mary. Not really,” Rat corrected me in turn. I looked down at him sitting on my shoulder, and maybe I glared. He shrank in on himself and clasped his hands together awkwardly. “Truly, Miss Mary. She’s just a very well made puppet. I stuck a clockwork engine in her chest to make her move on her own.”

  “I’m not. It’s true!” She sounded disturbingly cheerful about it.

  “But you just got a wild idea to play hopscotch. Were you having fun?” I asked.

  “Quite a bit!” she said.

  “Then you’re alive, and you deserve a name like everybody else who’s alive,” I lectured her, although I really was talking to Rat. Honestly, how blind could he be?

  She didn’t hesitate. “If it makes me any more alive, I’ll be happy to have one! I’d quite a lot like to be a real girl.”

  Of course. Well, there was only one obvious name for a little wooden puppet who wanted to be a real girl, so I said, “Great. Your name is Scarecrow,” instead

  “Scarecrow?” Rat asked. He sounded so baffled.

  “I like it!” Scarecrow announced. She sounded so enthusiastic.

  “Any other reason we can’t go in this way?” I asked Rat.

  “Only that it’s locked,” he answered.

  I turned around and stomped back up to the gate, and gave the mass of rusty chains another kick. And another. Rust flew everywhere—chunks of rust, not powder. A third kick, and the chains snapped. Grimy red coils fell to the ground. Then, very slowly, one of the gates fell down too, clattering loudly when it hit the pavement.

  I grinned, Scarecrow giggled, and while Rat’s expression might be hard to read, the way he rubbed those little paws of his together looked more than satisfied.

  “The whole city is broken. Its soul is rusty. That’s why it needs a princess,” Rat said as we tromped down the streets.

  I didn’t need a tour guide to see that. This place was in bad shape. Buildings crowded together and could be made out of wood, brick, or that white stuff with the cross-beams. Some of them had second floors that overhung the street. The ones with huge glazed windows were obviously shops, and some had no windows but display counters that made them into permanent market stalls. If it were left like that, I’d have felt like I was walking through any city from a painting of a fairy tale.

  Obviously, it wasn’t left like that. Pipes stuck out of buildings, running into other buildings or burying themselves in the street. Walls, roofs, doors, anything might be made out of metal. Sullen orange light drew my attention to an open stone building on my left filled with furnaces, one of which still glowed. Streetlamps stood on every corner, and the one ahead of us flickered with a bright white light in the middle of the day. Everything metal was at least dotted with rust. After the still lit lamp, the next streetlamp was nothing but a twisted mass of red grime. If it wasn’t metal, it was just covered in greasy yellow stains.

  Squeaking caught my ear, and I looked down the side street. A street car with no driver rolled through the next intersection, rumbling along and squealing like abused metal. On the opposite side of me, one of those mysterious pipes sticking out of a building hummed and rattled for about three seconds, and stopped.

  “Broken, but alive. Barely,” I remarked. I let the seconds pass, before adding, “Do you think it’s really alive? That it has a soul?”

  Rat looked back over his shoulder at me, but didn’t stop scurrying ahead on the neatly paved street. He was hesitating, but he went ahead and said it anyway. “Less than you, more than Scarecrow.”

  I’d gotten the rat who said what he thought, come what may. That greatly soothed my desire to kick him for not noticing how Scarecrow gawked with just as much interest as I did. We passed an open booth, and in the back stood a machine with a dozen nozzles. Faded red and white striped the roof over half-melted metal seats. I figured it for the remains of an old-fashioned Soda Jerk. I’d had a chocolate malted once, and it had been heaven in a glass. “I wish I could have seen this place when everything worked.” I sighed.

  “I like it now,” Scarecrow contradicted me in a carelessly cheerful tone. She wasn’t worried about me yelling at her.

  My cheek tightened in a smirk. “Yeah. You really do take me to the nicest places, Rat.”

  “Except for the smell,” Scarecrow added.

  The whole city smelled like rust, but I sniffed the air anyway. So did Rat, raising his nose. There was a certain extra chemical tang, wasn’t there? “The fog is coming,” Rat told us, and he didn’t sound cheerful at all.

  “We should go around. You don’t want to walk through it,” Scarecrow said.

  “Does it really smell that bad?” I asked. Down the street, I saw it. Yellow smoke was the right description. Thin mist already blanketed the city, but oily yellow oozed and rolled over the pavement, hiding everything it passed. I kept walking until the first wisp of the stink breezed over me.

  I had to admit it. “Wow. It really does smell that bad.” It wasn’t just the smell, which was so foul it was hard to ignore. Chemical, but like smoke, so strong it choked off my breathing. When I did breathe, my eyes and nose stung.

  “I don’t think I smell very well, but it hurts to walk through, like it’s biting you,” Scarecrow said behind me.

  Okay, Mary. Stubborn is stubborn, but stupid is stupid. “Rat, find us another way,” I barked over my shoulder. Wheezed, really. Man, the cloud stank. Glistening yellow spilled towards me like goo. I started backing up, then started backing up really fast.

  We ducked down the side street, but the smell didn’t go away. “Another way, Rat,” I repeated. I didn’t want to push, but his nose kept swiveling every which way, and I knew this was worse than it looked.

  “Up, Miss Mary. The smoke is heavy.” His squeaky little voice had gone raspy, and he sneezed twice at the end. This smelled worse to him than it did to me, and I wanted to get away from this stink badly. Running forward a couple of steps, I bent down and yanked Rat up off the street. Even, smooth building fronts were the exact opposite of this city’s look. I could climb up on that counter, or—

  I bolted forward, took one step up on a box, another on a bent pipe, and lunged around the corner to grab a hanging fire escape ladder in a tiny alley. Rat clung to my sleeve with all four legs, and I pulled hard until I hooked a knee into the lowest rung, then reached down to grab Scarecrow’s upraised hand. Oh crap, she was heavy. That was a lot of wood. I had my knee under me, and I shoved my whole body up until her fingers closed on the lower rung. My knee now stung furiously, but I got my feet onto the rungs and climbed. Scarecrow lifted herself up enough to grab the next rung, and the next.

  Seconds after that, we were all on the roof of a two-story building. The air still smelled like burning tires and mustard, but there wasn’t any yellow smoke up here. Leaning anxiously over the edge of the building, I saw the smoke turn the corner we’d come from. I also saw it flowing down the street ahead of us. We’d have been trapped down there, and I didn’t like the way walls gleamed when the smoke pulled away from them even for a moment. That rainbow shine reminded me of gasoline.

  Yuck.

  Oh, and crap. I had to say it again. “Thanks, guys.”

  “We did it together, mistress,” Rat wheezed. He lay on his back theatrically, four little legs poking in the air as he let out the occasional cough. If he didn’t look at me so directly, I might have been worried.

  Worrying about Scarecrow would be pointless. She crawled up to the edge beside me and stared down. “Pretty. It’s like an island in a sea of poison,” she piped.

&nbs
p; Her cheer infected me. Maybe I just liked the description. Rooftops poked out of the surface, but that yellow fog hid the streets completely, like a sea of poison. That had me looking around, and while the chimneys and pipes and tanks and weirdly shaped buildings gave me a lot to see, I had to pay attention to one thing first. “Is that what I think it is, and does it go where I think it goes?” I asked Rat.

  Held aloft by girders sticking out of the roof, a corroded metal tube as big as an adult crossed above this building, and the next building, and all the buildings I could see, down to the huge twisted metal building in the middle of town. From up here I could see it better, although dirty air blurred the lines until I couldn’t tell what were smokestacks and what were castle towers. The tube ran right to it. There were other tubes in the distance, angling in to the castle from the walls of the city, but this one ran right over our heads.

  “Yes and yes, Miss Mary,” Rat coughed. Flipping over onto his feet, he jumped up and grabbed my skirt, climbing. “It has ladders, so there must be a way in.”

  So it did. Amidst the struts and beams holding the tube off the roof were the rungs of a metal ladder. When I circled around and grabbed a rung in both hands Scarecrow reluctantly pulled herself away from the view and trailed after me. The ladder was thin, and I was already too high up for comfort, but height only gave me a momentary prick of anxiety. I climbed, and at the top, a loose grate already stood open.

  The tube wasn’t solid. That is, it was only half a tube, the lower half, making this more a chute than a pipe. Rails ran down the center, which explained how it used to work. Nothing moved in either direction now. Nothing except us. Scarecrow and I followed the faint slope towards the castle, which looked less like a castle and more like a factory every minute. One of those freaky industrial messes with all of the tanks and pipes that you’d think they’d keep inside.

  Whatever it was didn’t matter much. We were going there. I looked over the side, watching fog ooze around the buildings. It crawled after us as we passed beyond it, then slid away, a glob of yellow smoke creeping hungrily through the city. “It was chasing us. How did you get Elizabeth to the castle through that?”