Probably it was nothing like that. I wasn’t bipolar. What the hell did I know about it?
One of the streets we passed down widened into a kind of courtyard with a carved stone in the center. It occurred to me, looking at it, that I had not seen anything like the carved stones since we entered the city. The one here was on a raised brick dais, as if it were a piece of sculpture.
The effigies slowed as we entered this courtyard, filing around the stone in a circle. Anna put out a hand and we stood to one side, waiting.
Tok… tok… tok…
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Click… click…
They were making noises at the stone, turning their… heads, I guess, those that had heads… moving bits of themselves back and forth.
“Are they worshipping it?” I said. I sounded very calm. I was asking the question from very far away.
Anna shrugged.
The very old holler person, Uriah, looked over at me with filmed eyes and said, “They do courtesy to their makers.”
“What does that mean?” asked Foxy.
Uriah blinked at her. His eyelids moved a little too slowly, like a lizard’s. “It is… what we were…” He fell silent for a long moment, then added, “It was long ago.”
“Why here and not up on the hill?” I asked.
Uriah blinked a few more times. “This one is here.”
I wasn’t sure if he understood me or thought he’d answered me or what.
The effigies were moving. If they were human, I’d say they would be swaying, but they weren’t doing it like humans would. Parts of them would move and others would stay still. One of the effigies, the greyhound one, began to turn back on itself, crawling up and over its own hindquarters in an impossible corkscrew.
And I twisted myself around like the twisted ones.…
They’re better at it than I was, I thought, and had the urge to laugh hysterically and then perhaps begin screaming.
The stone was one of the ones that I thought of as the dead ones. I stared at it. The lines didn’t squirm like they had on the hill, but they still had a motion to them. It looked like a corpse wrapped in a shroud. After seeing the carved burial on the walls, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t just making that up in my head. But as I kept staring, some of the carved lines seemed to resolve into a hand working its way loose from the wrappings. A shroud, or a binding?
A cocoon?
I reached my free hand up and gripped the line of hickory beads.
There was no strikingly obvious change, but the hand came into focus immediately. It looked like a human hand. I didn’t know if that was good, bad, or just the way things were.
The effigies, with no signal that I could see, unwound from the circle and began to walk forward again.
I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me. I felt numb. The litany of the twisted ones kept chasing around in my head, tangled up with the corpse stone and the carving of all the little figures bent over with their hands over their faces.
“Oh hell,” said Foxy, and I finally looked up.
One of the immense bird’s nest constructions loomed at the end of the street. It was the largest one I’d seen. It had engulfed at least one building and was leaning over the nearby ones.
The entryway was lopsided and large enough to drive a car through.
Effigies stood in a straggling crowd around it, but they had left a long corridor clear.
“Come,” said Anna, in her remote voice. “We are summoned into the Building.”
21
I had to pick Bongo up and carry him. He would not walk into that doorway.
I wanted to walk into it even less, but no one was giving me a choice.
Be ready, Anna had said. Our escape lay on the other side of… whatever happened next.
Assuming she wasn’t betraying us. Assuming that there was any way to betray us, since we couldn’t get much more captive than we were. Assuming that she hadn’t been lying, for some strange purpose of her own.
Assumption after assumption. But all I could do was go forward, not back.
I could not explain any of this to Bongo, so I picked him up in my arms. He whined miserably against my shoulder.
I felt as if I was betraying him. I also felt as if my back was going to give out, but surely I only needed to get him inside. After that he’d probably be eager to leave under his own power.
I walked forward through the crowd of effigies. Twenty, at least. Maybe more. They blurred together at the edges. It felt like I was walking a gauntlet. Living junk turned its head and watched me, and everywhere I heard the soft, thoughtful clicking.
Please, I prayed, to any god that might be able to hear me in this place. Please let my dog live.
Anna had said we’d make a break for it after we came out of the Building. That implied we’d come out again, didn’t it?
It’s just a building. It’s probably like a temple or something. We just need to go in and then we’ll come out again.
Bongo can get away. He can outrun them, I bet. Foxy and I… Well, Foxy’s got that gun. Surely she can take care of herself.
Which left me as the deadweight, but I expected that.
The doorway to the Building loomed in front of me. It wasn’t a pitch-black opening. It was gray and layered, and I could see a little way inside. When I stepped over the threshold, my feet crackled on the surface below. It looked like… I didn’t know, like something oddly familiar. Handmade paper, the kind you get with bits of leaf pressed into it or papier-mâché. Something like that.
The Building wasn’t silent. At first I thought it was Bongo’s trembling against my chest that made it seem to move, and then I realized that there was a thrumming sound, like distant machinery.
Machines? Here?
It didn’t make any sense, but what did in this place?
Foxy stepped in behind me. “Better keep moving, hon,” she said quietly. “There’s a big one behind us, and I think it means business.”
I didn’t look over my shoulder. It wouldn’t do me any good to look at it. Orpheus and Lot’s wife might have been unable to resist looking back, but I was done.
Bongo’s heartbeat raced against my chest.
“It’s okay,” I lied to him. “It’s okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
The corridor was square at first. It seemed like the material had been layered over the interior of one of the stone buildings. Then it opened out into a room, rectangular but with the corners softened with drifts of the paper material.
The ceiling was full of twigs, like a mass of bird nests all woven together. It was hard to tell if the gigantic wicker structure on top had been built or had simply grown there. There were no leaves on the twigs, but maybe that didn’t mean anything. There were no leaves on the trees around the voorish dome, either.
There was a second opening on the far side of the room. It was an irregular circle, and I had my doubts that it was part of the original stone building. The twigs ran down to meet it and the odd pulpy gray layers were built up around it.
I shifted Bongo against my hip, trying to see over him so that I didn’t catch my footing, and suddenly I realized what the material reminded me of.
“Foxy?” I said softly.
“Yeah?”
“This is a paper wasp nest, isn’t it?”
“Think so, hon. If the wasps were the size of horses.”
This was not a comforting thought, but I had pretty much given up on comforting thoughts by this point.
Anna stood framed in the circular opening. She had halted. As I watched, she took a deep breath, lifted her head, and stepped forward.
We followed. Bongo had gone completely limp. I heaved him up so that his paws were on my shoulder and I could take more of his weight on my hip. If his heart hadn’t been hammering against my collarbone, I would have worried that he was dead.
The circular tunnel sloped upward and was ribbed like a throat. That was another thought I wished I hadn�
��t had. I wanted to slow down, but Foxy was right behind me, one hand on my backpack, and I knew something had to be right behind her.
It went around and around, like a spiral staircase. It wasn’t as dark as it should have been. The paper let light through, maybe, or reflected it differently. The air was full of diffuse gray light, like the horizon just before dawn.
There were carvings on the walls here too.
I say carvings. Bas-relief made of paper? Sculpture? Something like that. Easier to carve than stone, I suppose. The same as inside the corridors, the tall figures, the small ones at their feet. Not all the small figures were human. Some of them looked like dogs or goats or maybe horses, some kind of four-legged animal, but scaled down. All of them walking up alongside us, in a great spiral, the large ones getting fewer and fewer, the small ones continuing on.
Ahead of us, the tunnel opened up.
Anna paused in the tunnel mouth. There was a light source in front of her, turning her into a black paper cutout. I didn’t want to touch her but I was being pushed ahead, so I cleared my throat.
She stepped to one side and I came out, carrying my dog, into the heart of the Building.
* * *
You think really stupid things when you’re horrified beyond belief. In this case, I thought: Of course. Building. You think it’s a noun, but it’s also a verb.
That’s what was happening here.
Building.
The nest rose up on all sides, over a vast open space. We stood on the roof of the stone building and looked over the edge. The effigies had sheared down through what had once been a street, and the Building continued for an unknown distance below.
It didn’t fall away into darkness, though. Darkness would have been an improvement.
The pit was filled with material, a mound of junk, of twigs and bone and discarded wire, skulls and pebbles, feathers and dead leaves. And it was alive.
The surface rippled like a pregnant animal’s sides, heaving with contractions. Effigies picked their way across the mound like water bugs skating on the surface of a pond, tugging bits loose, binding them together. I watched two creatures like praying mantises with cow skulls for heads, working on a pile of clay that moved and squirmed under their claws, as they wrenched it into a shape I couldn’t begin to fathom, then jabbed sticks into it, sticks and stones and broken bones, while it writhed in what looked like pain.
We’d wondered who made them, and suddenly it was obvious.
They were making themselves.
I thought of the white people in the Green Book, the holler people, making poppets to serve them. The holler people, having children with ordinary humans and the white stone, growing fewer and fewer as their blood grew thinner and thinner.
The human figures, surrounded by smaller ones. Not children, but their servants. Made things and the ones who made them.
And one day the holler people were gone, but their servants remained, and the servants began to replace themselves, over and over, the poppets building poppets of their own, growing farther and farther removed from any human hand, the small figures walking up the spiral, no longer human or animal, continuing on and on and on alone.
“Look up,” said Foxy softly. “Or maybe don’t.”
I looked up.
Hundreds of effigies hung from the top of the nest, the way the deer-skull effigy had hung from the tree. They dangled on the ends of ropes like silent wind chimes.
Anna walked to the very edge of the roof. The two humped, headless ones flanked her like an honor guard. She said, “I have brought the interlopers.”
I didn’t know what to expect next. For the mound to start talking? For it to open monstrous eyes and roll over and be an effigy made from the bones of giants? For the ground to open up and swallow us whole?
None of those things happened. If they had, I would probably have broken right there.
Instead the effigies behind us fanned out around us. More and more streamed through the doorway, the entire crowd that had been around the Building, a hall of wire and bone horrors. The ones working began to slow. The praying mantises paused in their assembly, holding the twitching, headless body of their child between them.
The ones hanging from the ceiling began to sway.
Clicking echoed from all around us. The praying mantises tapped their long twig fingers on their hollow skulls. Hagstones rattled in the rib cages of the hanging ones. The mud-dauber effigy stood closest to me and shuddered its body so that the mud tunnels chattered together like teeth.
I didn’t ask what they were doing, because this, too, was blindingly obvious. They were talking.
Sticks and stones, sticks and stones, sticks and stones and talking bones…
A rattled discussion went on all around us, click, click, click, like the voices of monstrous insects, giant cicadas humming in the heat. Anna folded her arms in front of her and listened.
“What are they saying?” I croaked.
“The poppets are deciding whether to keep you,” she said.
“They can’t do that.” My voice sounded very calm and conversational, as if I could convince Anna, and the effigies, that holding us prisoner was some kind of social faux pas.
“The alternative is to take you apart for materials.”
Foxy swore.
The clicking grew louder and more agitated. The ones swaying from the ceiling began to clatter together, introducing discordant notes. A heated discussion? Did they have emotions? Did they get angry, happy, sad, frightened?
Did it matter?
“The newer ones say that you can perhaps be bred to make more masters,” said Anna. “The old ones say that they must wait for better stock. Masters bred from your flesh will be weak, even with the white stone, as mine have become weak. The newer ones say that even those can be used for materials.”
If I had not had Bongo in my arms, I might have panicked. Things were going a bit gray around the edges. They were talking about using me as a broodmare for… for however long someone lived under the voorish dome.
But I had Bongo. And I couldn’t panic, because I had to take care of him, even if the flesh under discussion was trying to crawl off my body in sheer disgust.
“The dog and the old one will be made into bones,” she continued. Her voice was flat and emotionless. “They will be given the task to guard you. It is”—her voice acquired some faint sheen of emotion, one I couldn’t place—“an honor.”
I looked at the two headless effigies beside her. It occurred to me that they walked beside her nearly every time I saw her, and I finally thought to wonder what had gone into their construction.
Or who.
I clutched Bongo against me. His eyes were closed and he was panting in the last extremes of distress.
“We will await your decision,” said Anna to the crawling, clicking Building. She turned and stalked back the way we had come, no longer stately but angry, her face flushed, eyes glinting.
Is she mad that they’re going to kill us?
I’d have liked to think that. I really would have. But she didn’t look worried. She looked… thwarted.
Was she hoping for something else? Hoping they’d let us go?
Hoping they’d let her go?
Oh.
I don’t know why it took me so long to realize what she intended. My only defense is that the Building had been so shocking that I wasn’t thinking clearly. But finally, finally, everything clicked together in my head.
Kilroy was here.
Then she left, that bitch.
You aren’t one of us, are you?
Anna hadn’t really called for help. She’d called for someone to take her place. And I had blundered in, thinking that somebody needed rescue and stupid enough to think that I might be the person to do the rescuing.
Me, lacking any blood of the holler people in my veins. Because Cotgrave was my stepgrandfather, and that was an inelegant phrase and we’d all stopped using it and gone to other words, and maybe he�
�d been too confused at the end anyway to explain.
And now we were trapped in here with her.
She’d talked about running, but she’d been talking to Foxy. Foxy, whom she’d tried to keep out completely. Had she expected to trade me and be free? Had she assessed the situation and figured that it would be easier to get out with Foxy helping, that maybe the effigies wouldn’t try to get her back if they had me instead?
I stared at her shoulders. If she could feel my eyes boring holes between her shoulder blades, she gave no sign.
She led the way down the spiral staircase, and I wanted to turn and run in the other direction, but that way lay the effigies and the Building and the creatures copying themselves in wood and bone, waiting for their masters to return.
So Foxy and I walked behind her. Uriah followed us, looking oddly lost without his escort.
The two headless ones were with us. The rest of the effigies were gathered around the edge of the roof, engaging in their wordless conversation, as they argued over whether to take us all apart into bones.
Anna had said that fewer of them would come with us after we went to the Building. This was certainly the least number I’d seen since we entered the voorish dome.
How long would it take for them to decide? Minutes? Hours? Years?
I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
If we were going to escape, it had to be as soon as we left the Building. We might never get another chance.
I hoped Foxy was ready, too.
Don’t be ridiculous. Foxy’s probably way ahead of you. You’re not the one who packed sandwiches and a handgun on this little jaunt.
The CIA had really missed out when they hadn’t hired her. We’d probably be toppling governments on Mars by now.
We reached the square room. I set Bongo down because my back was going to give out. He was shaking badly, but he lunged for the end of the leash, pulling to get out of the Building.
The Twisted Ones Page 26