by L. J. Smith
Rune of sacrifice, of death. Of yielding up the spirit.
It happened immediately, startling her. The figure in the cabinet, the mechanical thing dressed in black velveteen and gold sequins, spasmed as if a jolt of electricity had gone through it. Both arms jerked up, the head rolled wildly. Cracks ran along the caked paint on its face, flaking off in pieces. Every part of the figure that could move thrashed frantically.
And then the clenched fist with the wand fell. The entire figure sagged, its head falling back. It was as if some mainspring had been sprung, or the wires to a marionette cut. The carmine lips were slightly open.
Jenny, scarcely breathing, stared at the face.
It—had changed. It was still plastic—cracked and peeling plastic. It was clearly a broken doll.
But—the pain was gone. The look that had wrenched Jenny’s heart in the beginning, the look of ineffable sadness, wasn’t there anymore. The carmine lips seemed to be smiling slightly, and the glass eyes, though open, seemed at peace.
There was an odd dignity that went with the peace. The face was patient and almost noble, for all that it was a doll’s face. Whatever her grandfather had done, whatever secrets he’d meddled in, he’d paid the price—and this doll seemed to know it. Its expression was that of somebody who’d waited a long time to get to the end of a journey, and was home at last.
“You can rest now,” Jenny said, and then she had to wipe her eyes on her denim sleeve.
A click made her look down. A fortune-telling card was in the slot.
Jenny took it, turned it over. There were only two words in the middle.
THANK YOU.
Then she really did cry, looking around as if her grandfather’s soul might be floating somewhere in the room where she could see it. Wherever it had gone, it was free.
“What about them ?” Dee said. Jenny looked at the others and saw that they were sniffling, too—and Dee was looking at the black cabinet.
Jenny wiped her eyes again, and her nose, and then she made herself look. Slug and P.C. were more hideous than ever because they were awake.
Their eyes followed her with the desperate longing of dogs that wanted to go out on a walk. Neither of them had been particularly handsome when they were alive, and in death they were grotesque. Jenny swallowed.
“Can you hear me?”
The two grisly objects bobbed.
“Did you see what I did?”
Bob. Bob.
“Do you—do you want me to do it for you?”
Bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob . . .
Jenny burst into tears and went on crying as she lifted the knife. She needed to cry. She had never liked either of these guys; they’d stalked her on an empty street, they’d meant to do her harm, they’d broken into her house and stolen from her. And now they looked like those little dogs with nodding heads that people put in the back of their cars, and Jenny was going to kill them.
She went on sobbing as she carved the two Xs, one over each head, and stabbed her middle finger. She was still crying as she began to stain the first X red.
So she didn’t notice the attack until Dee started shouting.
Jenny looked up and froze. It was another body like the one that had grabbed Dee at the Fish Pond, and it had the same ghastly emptiness above its shoulders. The only difference was that it wasn’t white and bloated, and it was wearing a black T-shirt and leather vest. It was P.C.
In the cabinet the head with the black bandanna was shaking violently—as if to disassociate itself with the lumbering body that Dee was fighting. Its eyes were terrified, straining sideways to try and watch.
“I think the Shadow Men must control the bodies!” Michael shouted, pulling Summer out of the way. Audrey had stumbled back, too, and Dee was fighting the thing alone, swinging Audrey’s pick. Cabinets on both sides were smashing.
Jenny, caught completely unprepared, was still frozen.
“Come on, hurry!” Michael shouted. He grabbed the knife from her hand and stabbed his own finger. The next thing she knew he was staining the other rune, making sharp, slashing motions on the cabinet.
“Come on, Jenny!”
Trancelike, Jenny raised her finger, smearing pale red across the second stroke of the X. The headless body had gotten hold of Dee’s pick and was jerking it away from her, pulling her within range.
Jenny whirled back to the cabinet, energized. The blue-lit heads gazed at her, looking imploring and stupid and more pathetic than anything she’d ever seen.
“Gebo!” she shouted.
Michael shouted it, too, maybe because his blood was in the runes. Then several things happened in quick succession.
Both the heads in the box jerked. Their jaws fell open, impossibly far open, revealing blue-stained teeth. Their eyes rolled up. And there was a noise—an inhuman howling that seemed to come from all around Jenny rather than from the open jaws. Down the corridor there was a terrible crashing.
P.C.’s body was flailing with the pick, breaking glass and splintering wood. As Jenny watched he flailed more and more jerkily, then stopped. His body flopped backward, collapsing like a pricked balloon.
Meanwhile, from every side, there was clicking and whirring and plinking music. The entire arcade had come to life at once. The foot vitalizer was vibrating. In a shattered cabinet a mechanical ballerina was twirling. The figures in the Ole Barn Dance were clacking their wooden jaws.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Dee shouted over the music of a nickelodeon.
Jenny cast one last glance at the black cabinet. The heads were still now, and she supposed their blank and empty expressions were peaceful. Certainly nobody was in there anymore.
Then she was moving, stepping over glass shards and P.C.’s motionless body, while the arcade gibbered and screeched around her. A minute later she was in the open air.
It was an unspeakable relief to get away from the noise. The outside seemed clean somehow, even if it was in the Shadow World.
She looked at Dee. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Dee was gripping her thigh with both hands, pulling bits of glass out of her jeans. “I got some shrapnel here, but I’m all right.”
Jenny looked at Summer, who was huddling and hugging her own elbows. “Are you all right?”
Summer managed an extremely watery smile.
“I got splinters,” Michael offered, holding up his finger.
“That was brave of you,” Jenny said. She was remembering the way he’d looked in her grandfather’s house when she had first explained that they needed to stain the runes with blood.
Michael just looked at her. “Huh?”
“Never mind. Summer, give Dee back her jacket. Audrey, are you okay to walk? Because I have the feeling we’d better keep moving. I think they’re mad.”
She squeezed her shirt pocket and felt the reassuring heaviness there. She felt the need to hurry, as if a storm were gathering behind her. The Shadow Men weren’t happy with what she’d done to their prisoners.
“Wait, but how do we find the bridge?” Michael said.
“We’ll just walk around the lake until we see it.”
They saw it as soon as they cleared the trees by the Penny Arcade. It started somewhere in between the March Hare roller coaster and the Log Ride, rising in a beautiful arch like a rainbow that ended on the island.
“I don’t think that was there before,” Audrey said.
“Maybe it just wasn’t lit,” Dee said.
Michael said, “It’s going to be like climbing the St. Louis Arch.”
Everybody looked at Jenny.
“We’ll do it,” she said stoutly. “We have to. We have to get to Tom and Zach—and quick, because they may try to stop us or something. We’ve got to actually get to them to win the Game.”
“I don’t see how the coins fit in,” Dee muttered.
But when they reached the nearer base of the arch, Jenny saw. There was a neat little tollbooth in front of it, and a fence with ba
rbed wire that kept you from climbing up the sides. After the first ten feet it was so high in the air that you couldn’t have reached the side if you had wanted to.
“What holds it up?” Summer whispered, and Jenny said, “Don’t ask.”
Attached to the white tollbooth was a coin receiver with a flat tray—like the kind you see in airports for getting luggage carts. Instead of four spaces for quarters there were three spaces for irregularly shaped coins in the tray. With a little twisting and exchanging, Jenny got all three gold pieces to fit neatly. They lay there and gleamed at her.
She looked at the others.
It was a momentous moment, a serious, profound moment. They’d finished the treasure hunt and they were about to go collect the prize. She felt as if somebody ought to make a significant gesture.
“Dee? You want to push it? Or Audrey?”
“You earned it, Sunshine. Go on and make it happen,” Dee said.
Jenny was happy.
She pushed the tray in and felt it lock in place. The white-and-yellow striped turnstile lifted.
“After you,” she said and gestured the others through.
CHAPTER 13
Dee took the lead, with Summer following her lightly and Michael and Audrey after that.
Jenny wanted the others to go ahead of her partly because she was afraid, and partly because she didn’t want any of them trying to save her if she fell off.
Heights. She had always hated heights. But she was damned if she was going to let this bridge stop her from getting to Tom.
It wasn’t all that bad at the beginning. Steep, yes, and narrow, yes. And there were no handrails. If the whole structure had been six inches off the ground, Jenny could have walked it easily, without a chance of slipping. The problem was doing it twenty feet off the ground.
But if she looked straight down and concentrated on her own feet, she couldn’t see how they were climbing.
Just then, though, something drifted past her feet—a wisp of mist. Alarmed, she looked to one side.
No, they weren’t cloud-height. They really were only twenty feet off the ground. But mist was rising around them.
“Oh, spiffy,” Michael said from somewhere ahead, and Summer’s voice said, “I can’t see.”
Dee’s voice floated back from even farther ahead. “Reach back and hold hands with each other. I can feel my way along.”
Jenny reached forward and took a handful of Audrey’s nylon jacket—Audrey only had one good arm to use. She shuffled forward, gritting her teeth. Everything around her was white. She could barely see her own hiking boots.
In a few minutes, though, her head broke through the mist. She went on shuffling upward, inching out of it. Her legs were aching, and she hoped they were getting near the top.
It was only when Audrey stopped short in front of her, and gasped, that she looked around.
The mist was gone. What she saw beneath the bridge now was—unearthly.
It was dark, and arching through the darkness were other bridges, delicate and airy, some fiery, some that looked like ice. They led to clumps of land that looked like islands floating in space.
“Like Neverland,” Jenny whispered. “A bunch of Neverlands. What are they? And where are we ?”
“Oh, I don’t believe this,” Audrey said just as softly.
“I do,” Dee said from the very top of the arch. Her head was thrown back on the slim dark column of her neck. Faint light from the bridges shifted on the planes of her cheekbones, and her eyes glowed. “I do.”
Some of the islands were brighter and more substantial-looking than any landscape Jenny had seen on Earth—sharper in detail, more exquisite in clarity. Others were dim and vague—as if they had been partly formed and then abandoned.
Between the clumps of land Jenny could see stars—but not normal stars. These stars rippled and waved as if she were looking at them through a clear stream, or as if they were studded on a flowing length of black silk. There was something incredibly lost and lonely about them.
“But what are those things? Those other islands?” she said again.
Audrey gave herself a little shake and seemed to focus. “I think—those are the nine worlds. From Norse mythology—Norse, like the runes. I told you about them once.”
“You mean—we’re above the Shadow World somehow?”
“I guess. Now that—that’s probably Asgard, the one way up there. It’s got to be.”
Jenny tilted her head back. Far above them—the farthest away of any of the clumps—was an island world that seemed all silver and gold. She could just glimpse something like a shining mountain rising into a golden cloud on it. The bridge to it was very narrow and seemed to be on fire.
“That’s where the gods live.”
“The gods?” Jenny spoke to Audrey without looking down from the shining island.
“So the myths say. Hmm, and I’ll bet that’s Vanaheim. World of primal water and plenty, where some of the less important gods live.” Audrey pointed to an island painted in jewel-like colors, dark blue and dark green.
“Vanaheim—any relation to Anaheim?” Michael murmured. Audrey pinched her mouth on a smile, but ignored him.
“And that’s Alfheim, world of light and air,” she said, nodding at an island that was much closer to them, shimmering in the colors of sunrise: yellow, pale blue, light green. “Home of light elves—like good spirits. I’m remembering all this, isn’t that amazing? I must have been about eight when I learned it.”
“What about those?” Dee said, pointing straight outward. Two island worlds were floating at about the same level as the bridge they stood on: one rocky and lashed by what looked like tornadoes, and the other so bright with orange fire that Jenny couldn’t make out any details.
“The rocky one’s Jotunheim—the world of primal storms. And the other one has to be Muspelheim, the world of primal fire. Nothing lives there but killer giants.”
“What’s that ?” Michael said, staring downward and to the left.
Audrey looked. “Hel,” she said simply.
“I always thought hell would be hot,” Summer said, her eyes widening like cornflowers blooming.
“Hel, with one l. It’s the underworld, where everything sinks in the end. Ruled by Hella, queen of the dead.”
It looked like a frozen lake, colder and blacker than the empty space between the worlds. Jenny had never seen such a lightless, joyless place.
The bridge to it was like a slide, broad and frosty.
“We definitely wouldn’t want to go there. Or to that one—the one that looks like a cavern. That’s Svartalfheim, the subterranean world.”
“No more caves, thank you,” Michael said.
There was only one island left. It was the one directly below them, and both ends of the bridge they stood on seemed connected to it. From here, the surface was obscured by dark mist and shadows.
Audrey said, “Niflheim, land of ice and shadows. The Shadow World.” She shook her head. “I still don’t believe this.”
“Why not? It’s no weirder than anything else we’ve seen today,” Dee said. “But I only count eight worlds. Where’s Earth?”
Audrey looked around, then shrugged. “Maybe we don’t get to see that bridge until we finish the Game.”
“Who cares? Look, we wanted to walk between the worlds, right?” Dee said, her eyes shining. “And now we’re doing it. So—shall we?”
Jenny nodded. She felt very tiny and insignificant standing here, and her throat was tight. And she had the feeling that it was going to be harder going down than going up—because now the fall was so much longer.
They started moving. It was hard to walk in the place between the worlds—physically hard. After two or three steps Jenny began to feel muscle-burn in her calves and thigh muscles. She could hear Audrey panting in front of her.
And the barest glimpse of the fall on either side made Jenny’s internal organs feel as if they were plunging out of her body.
He
r legs wanted to freeze. She wanted to get down on her rump and scoot the rest of the way—no, get down on her stomach and slither. But that wasn’t the worst.
She was afraid she would faint.
If I faint up here, I’ll fall. Of course I’ll fall. Nobody faints neatly forward. I’ll slide off the side.
The moment the thought of fainting occurred to her, it blocked everything else out. She was going to faint. Just thinking about it made her dizzy. She was so scared of fainting, she felt like jumping.
Hysteria began to bubble up inside her. She shouldn’t have thought about jumping. Now she was afraid she would jump, just because the idea had occurred to her. She had to try not to think about it.
Think of anything else. Think of Tom, think of getting to Tom. But the idea of jumping was now stuck in her mind. She started to picture it. She could get it all over with, turn to the side and just let go. God, no—she didn’t want to, but she was afraid she’d go crazy and do it. . . .
The voice came from her own brain, but it was so harsh it seemed alien. You keep on moving, girl!
Jenny realized she was stopped, frozen. Staring down at her own feet in their brown leather hiking boots, and the white ribbon of bridge, and the formless darkness on either side.
Just put one foot in front of the other. The right foot. Put out your right foot.
I can’t, she thought.
Yes, you can!
But if I faint—or jump—
You expect everybody else to face their fears, and you can’t face yours? You’re not your only master if you can’t even control your own feet! You’re just a coward!
The right boot jerked a little and stepped forward.
That’s right. Now the other one.
The other boot came forward. Jenny was walking again.
She could do it—command her own feet. Just put one foot in front of the other. And one more step. And one more.
Don’t look to the side. One more step. And one more.
There were only a few body-lengths of bridge in front of her. She could see where it ended. Ten feet. Five feet.
On legs that had suddenly gone weak as angel-hair pasta, Jenny stumbled and fell onto safe ground.
Dee bent over her. “You okay?”