“Home again. Back to the attic,” Pearl says softly and looks from the glowing ball to Emmie. “If you know how to return to her, perhaps you should go. Sometimes there’s no point running away, because you can’t run fast enough or far enough to make any difference.”
And then Emmie grabs her arm and tries to drag her forward. But Pearl shakes her head and digs her heels in. The ghouls are very close now, close enough that Emmie thinks she can smell them, a stink like spoiled meat and wet dog, like old cheese and boiled cabbage.
“No,” Pearl says, wrenching her arm free of Emmie’s grip. “I told you, they won’t hurt me. They wouldn’t dare, and maybe I can stall them here. And if you can find your way back to her…Here. Take this….” And she shoves the snow globe that isn’t a snow globe into Emmie’s hands. Emmie’s so surprised she almost drops it. It’s much heavier than she expected and so cold that she can feel it straight through her mittens and gloves, so cold it almost burns her skin.
“But you just said I couldn’t touch it,” Emmie protests, wanting to give it right back. The cold’s bad enough, the cold and the weight, but there’s something more coming from the orb, something she could almost mistake for music, the most dreadful music she’s ever heard. “You said there were rules.”
“For pity’s sake, there’s not time left to argue,” Pearl snaps and pushes her so hard that Emmie almost loses her footing. “Run, you silly little idiot. If you can find the way back, run as fast and far away from this place as you can go.”
And then something lopes out of the shadows and into view, something moving on all fours that stops a few feet from Pearl and stands up straight and tall on its long and spindly hind legs. Its matted belly fur is dirty blond in the starlight from the globe, and its thick black lips fold back to reveal teeth the color of antique ivory. Its eyes are the color of fire.
“Where’s Barnaby?” Pearl asks the thing, turning away from Emmie. “I heard him. Where is he?”
“Barnaby will be along directly,” the thing barks back at her and wrinkles its nose. “Don’t you fret about Master Barnaby. But that one there”—and the ghoul points a claw at Emmie—“that one has become a matter of significant concern. Step aside, Hester.”
And so Emmie runs, the freezing ball of light clutched tight to her chest, her head quickly filling up with its song. But she’s gone only a few feet when one of the pallet boards snaps beneath her, and she pitches forward. Behind her the ghoul has begun to howl, and before her the railroad track has dissolved into a sky full of stars, opening wide to take her back. Emmie shuts her eyes and lets it have her.
“I always knew you’d be back, someday or another,” the black-skinned woman says and smiles. “It was really only a matter of when and where.”
Emmie’s standing with the woman at the very top of an extraordinarily high sand dune, watching as Pearl’s snow globe rolls away down the steep slope, throwing up a fine spray of sand as it goes. It slipped from her mittened hands when she opened her eyes and saw the wide blanched sky and the yellow-brown expanse of the desert, the undulating dune fields broken only by a few scattered outcrops of weathered rock. This time the woman is wearing a long-sleeved, ankle-length thobe dyed a very pale blue with tiny red and silver beads embroidered about the neckline. She’s barefoot, and there’s a short sword or a long dagger tucked into a length of cloth cinched about her waist.
“Crap,” Emmie says and begins unwinding the alpaca muffler from around her throat, because the sun here is bright and hot, and she’s already sweating underneath her heavy winter clothes. “I wasn’t supposed to drop that.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t go very far,” the woman says. “No farther than it can roll. We’ll fetch it back.”
“But if it breaks—”
“It’s not going to break. Trust me.”
Emmie drops the muffler to the ground at her feet and unzips her coat. “Pearl pushed me,” she says, sliding her arms free of the sleeves. “I told her we could make it if she’d run, but she pushed me.”
“She must have been very afraid for you,” the woman says. “I expect the alchemist’s daughter knows well enough what the hounds would have done had they caught you.”
Before, in the dark with only the waxing moon for light, Emmie hadn’t realized how beautiful the woman was. By daylight, the sun glints off her ebony skin and catches in the dazzling topaz facets of her irises. She might be the most beautiful woman in the world, Emmie thinks and sits down in the sand. She might be an Ethiopian or Egyptian princess disguised as a Bedouin bandit.
“It’s a long way down,” Emmie says and points at the orb, still rolling towards the bottom of the dune, the place where this dune finally ends and the next begins. “Is that big snake still around here?” she asks and glances up at the woman.
“Oh, don’t you bother yourself about him. That was far ago and long away. A lot has changed since then.”
Emmie pulls off her gloves, the right and then the left, and she lays them neatly on top of her mittens. “You mean long ago and far away,” she says, and then she takes off her sweater, folds it, and puts it on the ground next to her coat and gloves and mittens.
“I think that I know what I mean, child,” the woman replies, and squats in the sand next to Emmie. “Anyway, the stone drakes are all but extinct. He was one of the last.”
“This is like Narnia, isn’t it?” Emmie asks and wipes her sweaty hands on her pants. “Like when Lucy and Susan and Peter and Edmund go back to Cair Paravel, and it’s only been a year for them, but in Narnia it’s been ages since they left, and everything’s changed.”
“I certainly wouldn’t say that everything’s changed,” the black-skinned woman tells her. “In fact, it’s pretty much the same around here as it has been since the sea dried up and the dunes and salt flats came to take its place. But, yes, the drakes are gone, which is really only a good thing. They were foul, intemperate beasts.”
“It wanted to eat me.”
“Well, you can’t really blame him for that. A creature, even a wicked one, cannot be faulted simply for wanting to eat, and out here, very few creatures can afford to be picky.”
Emmie stands and brushes sand and dust off the seat of her pants. She doesn’t feel like arguing with the woman about whether or not the snake had a right to try to eat her, and she points at the orb again, which has finally stopped rolling and lies partly buried at the base of the dune. “I should go get it now. I probably shouldn’t just leave it lying there like that.”
“No,” the woman says. “You probably shouldn’t.”
“You never did tell me what the favor was, what you wanted to ask me to do.” And then Emmie starts down the dune before the woman can reply. Each step she takes triggers a small avalanche of sand that spills out before her in gleaming fan-shaped flows. Narrow rivulets break free and meander rapidly towards the bottom, and Emmie thinks it’s almost a miracle, all these millions or billions of grains of sand balanced here by the wind, laid one atop the other and nothing to hold them in place but gravity.
“I thought you didn’t do favors for strangers,” the woman says, starting down the dune after her.
“I’ve decided Deacon might approve of you,” Emmie replies and stops so the black-skinned woman can catch up. “You told the snake it couldn’t eat me.”
“I see. Then I suppose that was very shrewd of me, wasn’t it? Do you still think you’re dreaming?”
Emmie stands staring at the streams of sand winding their way downhill, and she notices a small gray lizard that her footsteps have disturbed. It scurries away and burrows into the dune.
“I think maybe it doesn’t matter,” she says. “If it’s all a dream, then I’ll wake up sooner or later, unless maybe I’m in a coma or something. And if it’s not a dream, I won’t wake up. But either way, I think that I should at least try to do the right thing. Just in case.”
“Emma Jean, do you believe that you know what the right thing is?”
“I’m only a kid. I k
now what Deacon and Sadie tell me is right, but sometimes they contradict each other. I know what I’ve read in books. I know what my teachers say.”
“And, more important, you know what you feel in your heart is right,” the woman says and continues past her down the dune.
“I’m only a kid,” Emmie says again. “So I might be wrong. I might have it all turned around backwards.”
“I’m wrong all the goddamned time,” the woman laughs and looks over her left shoulder at Emmie. “Don’t you start thinking that getting older makes much difference about knowing the right from the wrong.”
Emmie watches the woman for a moment, then follows her, and when they reach the foot of the dune, Emmie picks up the orb, but immediately drops it again. Even after baking under the desert sun, the thing’s still freezing cold to the touch. “I don’t know if I can carry it,” she says and blows on her fingers. “I’ll get frostbite if I try to hold that thing for very long. I don’t know how Pearl was doing it.”
“I’m afraid you’ll need your gloves after all,” the black-skinned woman says, and Emmie looks back up the towering dune to the spot where she left the discarded pile of clothing and groans.
“Crap,” she says and sits down beside the orb. There’s sweat dripping from her face, speckling the sand, and her T-shirt’s already soaked straight through. “I’ll have a heart attack.”
“I can carry it back to the top for you,” the woman says. She kneels beside Emmie and lifts the glowing orb, blows some of the dust and sand away, and then rubs it clean against the front of her blue thobe.
“Doesn’t it burn you?” Emmie asks, and the woman shakes her head.
“Getting old might not teach you right from wrong, but it can give you thicker skin.”
“You don’t look old.”
“Which should be a lesson to you, child.” Then the woman gazes into the glass ball and licks her lips. “Amazing,” she whispers. “Such an amazing and blasphemous thing this is. Perhaps it’s best, what the hounds have done with the magician.”
“I don’t believe in god,” Emmie says.
“A thing can be blasphemous,” the black-skinned woman tells her, “whether there’s a god involved or not. This,” she says and taps a fingernail against the orb, “this thing is a perversion, a blasphemy. The mere fact of its existence is a crime against the world. It’s wrong, Emmie.”
“I thought so, too. But I don’t think Pearl agrees.”
“Pearl loves her father, and sometimes love can blind us to the truth of things.”
Emmie looks back towards the top of the dune again, squinting at the sun reflected off the sand. “I suppose we should get started,” she says, “if we have to walk all the way back to the top for my gloves. And if you’re still going to ask me for a favor, maybe you should ask me for it now, just in case I do have a heart attack or a heatstroke and die.”
The woman nods her head and blinks, looking away from the orb. “There’s a changeling woman whom the hounds call Soldier. You have to go to her, Emma Jean Silvey. And you have to carry this thing to her. She’s close to death and in great danger, and there’s not much time left.”
“Pearl said something about her. I asked who Soldier was, but she wouldn’t tell me. She said we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves.”
The woman turns towards the orb again. “Soldier’s the true daughter of Deacon Silvey,” she says. “She’s the one the hounds thought might at last build their bridge away from this world. She’s paid an unspeakable price for their beliefs, and your fates, yours and Soldier’s, are bound almost inextricably one unto the other.”
“Deacon is my father,” Emmie says, standing up.
“He loves you,” the woman says. “You mean everything to him.”
“And you have no right saying he’s not my father.”
The woman sighs, and for a moment the sun sealed inside the orb dims. “That’s the favor I ask of you, child. It’s more than anyone should ever ask of another, but these are desperate times. If you do as I’ve asked, you’ll learn the truth of things, and in the end you’ll curse me for that knowledge. Would there were any other way.”
“She’s really dying?” Emmie asks.
“Yes. She’s dying and lost in a dark place, and very soon she’ll stand before a foe almost as blasphemous as this vile thing,” and the woman nods at the glass orb. “I can show you the way down to her, the correct where and when, but it has to be your choice.”
“This isn’t really like Narnia at all, is it?”
“No,” the woman says. “It’s not.”
“Could you also show me the way home, if I were to say no? Could you show me the way back to Providence?”
“There’s no need. You already know the way home.”
“Crap,” Emmie says again, and then she begins climbing the dune, but the sand shifts and slides out from under the soles of her boots, and three steps only carries her right back to the bottom.
“I know a shortcut,” the black-skinned woman says.
“Do you have a name?” Emmie asks her.
“Oh, I’ve had many names, but I’ve found it’s usually best I keep them to myself,” and then the woman takes Emmie’s hand in hers, and the desert dissolves, collapsing into stars and empty space the same way that the railroad tunnel dropped away after Pearl pushed her. The scorching desert day is replaced by night, a twinkling indigo sea of constellations, and Emmie thinks about all the questions she wishes she’d asked the black-skinned woman with topaz eyes and waits for the long fall to end.
EIGHT
Intersections
A nd from the starry place, all things are possible, and, perhaps, all things are also probable. Possibility is infinite here, and possibility collides, in spiraling space-time fusillades, with probability at every turn. The unlikely and the never-was become, for fleeting instants, the actual and the inevitable and the black facts of a trillion competing histories, each entirely ignorant of all the others, each confident that it’s the only true history. Emmie is wearing her gloves and down coat again, her alpaca muffler and her mittens, and she clutches the glass orb as she slips between everything that was and is and never quite shall be. Sometimes she shuts her eyes, because there are things she cannot comprehend and would rather not see, and sometimes she opens them wide and wishes that she could see more clearly and more fully understand what she’s seeing.
The stars, and the almost empty spaces between the stars.
Light and darkness and things that are not exactly either one or the other.
Countless detours on the road the black woman has told her to follow…
~ A girl in an attic, a girl who isn’t Pearl, holds a wooden animal out over a wide hole that has no bottom—and she almost drops it in, then decides the wooden animal isn’t hers to drop. Instead she sets it down on the dusty floor and steps back from the edge of the abyss.
~ Sadie is reading Emmie The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs, but this Sadie has only one hand, and she turns the pages with two shiny steel hooks strapped somehow to the stump of her left wrist. This Sadie has red hair, like her red door, like the red of pomegranates.
~ “What about a carriage ride?” Hunter Fontana asks, and Sadie says no, she’s heard terrible things about the way the horses are treated, and the three of them go back inside the museum to see the blue whale instead.
~ A careless elbow, and a paperweight that isn’t a paperweight at all rolls off the edge of an alchemist’s workbench. There’s a breathless moment when the air smells like gardenias and millipedes, and then a blinding flash of light, and the world vanishes, and Emmie is never born and Deacon is never born and the solar system is only an ember.
~ The woman from the train, the woman with the Seal of Solomon tattooed on her hand, presses the barrel of a gun to a priest’s head. Her finger tightens on the trigger, and she curses him. The priest is begging for his life, begging her to understand that he had no choice, that he never had a c
hoice. Then he wets himself and sinks to his knees, his tears and urine dripping to the floor of a darkened room. She spits on him, and a few moments later, she places the gun to the soft spot beneath her jaw. The priest screams when she pulls the trigger.
~ Saturday afternoon in the Kingston Station, and Emmie tells Deacon that she’s sick to her stomach, that she thinks she’s going to vomit, and wants to go home. On the way back to Angell Street, he talks about blackbirds.
~ Another gun, this one in the hands of a tall, pale man in a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he shoots an old lady first, then the woman behind the cash register, then…
Concentrate, the woman in the desert tells her. You get lost out there, and you’ll never get found again.
But there are so many diverging paths.
There are so many choices.
Emmie tries to look away, fights to keep her eyes on the invisible, intangible current pulling her along towards wherever it is she’s meant to be. But faces flicker and moments flash all around her.
~ An albino girl in sunglasses, hitchhiking beneath a scalding Southern sun. At first, Emmie thinks the girl is alone, but then she sees the thing following her. The albino girl thinks it’s an angel.
~ Deacon, but he’s a young man, and he stands at a rusted iron gate leading into a tunnel, into the limestone heart of a mountain. It’s raining, and he lifts a pair of bolt cutters and clamps them shut on the hasp of a lock. The padlock falls away and splashes in the mud at his feet. Someone giggles, and the gate creaks open.
~ A snowy night at the edge of the sea, and a house burns, a very old and haunted house, evil beyond reckoning, and inside a girl named Narcissa Snow dies with her grandfather.
~ On the train to New York, a woman watches Emmie from across the aisle. Emmie wishes that she’d stop, because there’s something about the woman that makes her nervous, something that frightens her. The woman smiles at her and starts to stand up, but then someone takes the empty seat next to Emmie, and the woman sits down again. She gets off at Old Saybrook.
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