by Laurel Gale
“No. I don’t know. Maybe. But they’re not, so we’d better find another way up.” He stood. The wall had a series of small holes, each about an inch and a half in diameter and half a foot deep, leading up to the larger hole that hopefully provided an exit. After handing the flashlight back to Melody, he reached his fingers into one of the small holes. Then he did the same with his other hand and another hole. But when he tried to pull himself up, his fingers failed to support his weight. He couldn’t get his feet off the ground, and if he kept trying, he worried his fingers would tear off, even though they had been reinforced with stitches.
“These holes are too small. I can’t get a good grip.”
“What about that hook?” Melody shined the light at a metal hook positioned above the larger hole. “Maybe we’re supposed to use that.”
“The rope!” Crow ran over to the length of rope. “We can tie a loop at one end, throw it over the hook, and use the rope to climb up.”
He’d studied knots a while ago and had gotten very good at tying the double overhand, the alpine butterfly, and the anchor hitch, among others. A figure eight follow-through struck him as best suited for the task, so he got to work on the complicated twists.
Unfortunately, tying knots in shoelaces had been somewhat easier than tying knots in thick rope proved to be, and a few fuzzy spots in Crow’s memory necessitated some trial and error. He looped and unlooped, tied and untied, until finally he had a knot strong enough to hold the weight of two eleven-year-olds. Hopefully. Just to be sure, he’d climb up ahead of Melody.
But before either of them could start climbing, they had to get the knot around the hook. Crow tossed it up. It didn’t even make it halfway before gravity pulled it down. He tried again, this time with all his strength, and failed again.
Melody climbed onto the lower level of the fountain, then the upper level. “Give me the rope. Maybe I can get it from here.”
With her first attempt, the rope missed the hook by several feet. With the second attempt, it brushed against the hook. With the fifteenth attempt, she complained about sore arms.
“Keep trying,” Crow urged, tossing the fallen rope back to her. “You’ve almost got it.”
“Almost isn’t going to help us,” she said, but she didn’t give up. Eventually, long after Crow had lost count of the attempts, the loop at the end of the rope caught the hook perfectly.
Worried that the rope might break, or that the knot might come undone, he gave it a few good tugs. It seemed secure, so he started to climb.
He made it about six inches off the floor, which left nineteen and a half more feet. Nineteen and a half feet too many. He fell to the floor.
“Let me try,” Melody said.
She made it a little over a foot.
“Maybe I’ll get farther after a break,” she said. “I’m pretty tired.”
Crow nodded, although he doubted a break would help any. Neither of them was strong enough to climb a rope all the way to the ceiling, but until he had a better plan, he saw no reason to point this out.
They sat down and leaned against the base of the fountain. Melody selected a lollipop from her bag. “Do you want any candy? I know you said you can’t eat, but maybe a piece of gum or something would be okay.”
“No thanks. I can’t taste anything anymore.”
“Okay.” She licked her lollipop. “So if your mom has been throwing away my letters, cutting the phone line, and blocking my email, how’d you get her to let you go out tonight?”
“She didn’t exactly let me. I just kind of went. Things haven’t been great. My dad visited a few days ago, and they got in a big fight about me.”
“How long have they been divorced?”
Crow had to count the months, which all seemed to bleed together. “About a year.”
“That’s not very long. I bet they’ll fight less after a while.”
“Yeah. I guess. Did your parents get divorced?” He remembered her saying her mother had disappeared and that she blamed magic, but there had to be more to the story.
“No.” She took a deep breath. “My mom just sort of vanished. Overnight. I’m pretty sure she was abducted by aliens because I remember seeing strange lights in the sky that night. Or it could have been fairies. They take people sometimes—children, usually, but occasionally adults—and I did find that fairy circle the next day. Some people think fairies and aliens are actually the same thing, so probably both my theories are right.”
“What does your dad say happened?”
“That she couldn’t handle being a mom. That she walked out on us. But who cares what he says? Obviously he’s wrong because magic is real—otherwise we wouldn’t be here right now. And Mom wouldn’t have just left us. She couldn’t have. Fairies took her, or aliens, or something else. Her bedtime stories about monsters had been real all along. She was trying to warn me, but I didn’t get it. Not until it was too late.”
“That’s why you’re so interested in magic.” His face fell, his shoulders slumped, and he looked down at the dirt ground. “That’s why you want to be friends with me.”
“Not this again. Listen, when I first met you, I didn’t even know you were magical. And maybe I was interested in getting to know you because you were mysterious, but it’s not like that now. I think you’re nice and fun and smart. After seeing what the kids at school are like, is that really so hard to believe? I’d rather be friends with a maggot.” She stood up and marched over to the rope. “Luke doesn’t even deserve to be rescued, but I want a wish. I think I’m ready to try again.”
She made it about two feet this time. Impressive, but not nearly enough.
“That’s a lot farther than I got,” Crow said, hoping he sounded encouraging.
Tears welled in Melody’s eyes. “Yeah, but it’s nowhere near close enough. We’re stuck down here.”
“No, we’re not. This is a test, and we can pass it. My parents passed it, remember? And neither of them can fly, either.”
She sniffed. “That’s true. Maybe we need to use the sticks.”
The sticks! Of course. The Meera wouldn’t have left them in the room if they weren’t part of the test. Each stick was short, maybe eight inches, and thick enough to be strong—maybe even strong enough to hold their weight, if only they could figure out how to use them.
Melody jumped up. “The holes in the wall!”
She didn’t need to say anything else. Crow, understanding at once, grabbed a handful of the sticks and carried them to the spot beneath the exit. He and Melody shoved the sticks into the small holes that lined the wall, creating perfect climbing holds.
Perfect as far as they could reach. Which wasn’t very far.
Crow climbed back down. “Give me your trick-or-treat bag. We can put the sticks in it, and I’ll carry it up. Can you follow me with the flashlight?”
Melody experimented with different ways of holding the flashlight, finally settling on carrying it in her mouth. When Crow had gathered the rest of the sticks, he followed Melody’s lead and held on to the bag by biting a corner.
The first part was easy, but then he ran out of climbing holds. Grabbing on to the rope and keeping his feet on the sticks for support, he climbed a little higher. Then, still hanging on to the rope with one hand, he used his other hand to take a stick from the bag and put it into the next hole.
Up he climbed, inserting one stick at a time, as Melody followed below.
A loud snapping sound almost caused him to lose his grip. Melody shrieked, and everything was plunged into darkness.
“Are you okay?” Crow asked.
Silence. Silence and darkness.
“Are you okay?” he repeated, panic sharpening his voice. What if she’d fallen? He’d studied a lot of things in his years of home schooling, but first aid hadn’t been chief among them—not unless he counted sewing limbs back on.
“Y-yeah,” came Melody’s voice, faint and quivering. “Sorry. I’m fine. One of the sticks broke. I dropped the
flashlight.”
Crow looked down, hoping to see the flashlight lying on the floor. There was nothing but blackness. The flashlight must have broken in the fall.
Nothing had changed. Melody hadn’t been hurt, and Crow’s rotting body was staying in one piece. So what if it was dark? He still had a job to do. His fingers felt along the wall until they found the next hole. He reached out for the rope and grabbed hold of it. No light needed.
Twenty sticks later, and with none to spare, Crow reached the top. He pulled himself into the large hole, where he was relieved to see light at the end of a short passageway.
He moved aside to give Melody enough space. She pulled herself up and collapsed against the wall of the hole.
“How many tests are there?” she asked, looking at the light ahead.
Crow shook his head. “I never got the chance to ask.”
Burning torches lined the walls, bathing the room in an eerie flickering light. The Meera was watching them, Crow realized. It lit the torches only after their flashlight had broken. And that meant it could put the fire out, too, if it so desired.
Perhaps it was in the room with them: a fly on the wall or a spider on the ceiling, hiding in the many nooks and crannies the torchlight didn’t reach.
But thoughts like this didn’t help Crow one bit. He forced himself to continue his examination of the room. Between the torches were engravings of a dog. It looked like a Labrador retriever.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Melody asked. “Bark? Play fetch? Roll over?”
Crow frowned. “Maybe the engravings don’t mean anything after all. They could just be decoration. This might not even be a test. The exit looks pretty easy to reach.”
The room branched into three parts, with a large door at the end of the middle, well-lit part. The two side corridors were dark and, Crow decided, best avoided.
“You think we’re just supposed to walk out? That seems too easy.” But she shrugged and started walking.
An ax sliced through the air.
“Duck!” Crow yelled.
Melody dropped to the floor. She pressed herself against the ground but couldn’t make herself flat enough, and the large, heavy blade was angled to swoop down low. She screamed as the ax grazed her back.
The ax swung back up. Crow grabbed her hand and pulled her toward him, worried that the ax might swing down again, perhaps even lower this time.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She turned around so he could examine her back. There was a four-inch slash in her blue leotard and another four-inch slash in the skin beneath. It wasn’t deep, but blood welled in the cut.
“It isn’t that bad,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
She turned around, her eyes watery and her lips pressed together.
“Does it hurt?” Crow asked. Then he wanted to kick himself. “Sorry. Of course it hurts.”
“Do you feel pain anymore?” she asked.
“No.”
“You’re lucky.”
He nodded, but he didn’t feel lucky. He remembered pain—horrible, yes, but big and bright, too. It was a part of being alive, and he missed it along with everything else.
“We’ll have to be more careful,” he said. “There are bound to be more booby traps.”
With Crow in the lead, they tiptoed toward the door. When they’d made it as far as Melody had during her first attempt, they paused. No axes swung at them. They took another step forward. Nothing happened. A few more steps.
A dozen arrows flew at them.
They dropped to the floor. The arrows whizzed past, some mere inches above them.
“Maybe we should stay on the floor,” Melody suggested.
This struck Crow as an excellent idea. As an animated corpse, he didn’t need to worry about things like blood loss, but he didn’t relish the idea of walking around with arrows sticking out of him like some sort of monstrous pincushion, either.
They crawled forward on their stomachs, making themselves as flat as possible, and were therefore unharmed when twenty swords swung through the air above them.
Crow glanced behind him and smiled at Melody. “I think we’ve got this test beat.”
Then a blade fell from the ceiling all the way to the floor, much like a guillotine, and being pressed against the ground did nothing to help. The blade sliced through Crow’s arm.
“Crow!”
His left hand had been chopped off a couple of inches above the wrist. The fingers still moved, bending and stretching under his control. He shoved the hand into his pocket. “It’s fine. My mom will sew it on later.” Assuming they ever made it out. “Let’s keep going.”
Melody nodded, though she looked a little paler than usual. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember you’re really dead.”
Crow shrugged. He never had that problem.
The door was only a few yards away now.
They stayed on their bellies, pulling themselves forward an inch at a time—something made more difficult by the loss of a hand. But as long as there were no more guillotine blades, Crow thought they would make it.
Until he saw the next threat.
A ball of flame materialized in front of the door. It seemed to come from nowhere, and it shot straight at Crow, who scurried to his feet. He darted back and forth, trying to lose the flaming ball, but with no luck. The fire appeared to be chasing him, which seemed crazy at first, until he remembered where he was, and who he was, and that nothing could be crazier than that.
Another ball of flame materialized, and this one chased Melody. They fled in opposite directions: Crow down the dark corridor on the right, Melody down the one on the left.
Crow came to a halt. The ball of fire had disappeared, and the corridor was no longer dark. In fact, it was no longer a corridor. His jaw dropped as he stared.
It was his room, only better. Brilliant sunshine and fresh air streamed in through the open window, no longer nailed shut. The door, too, was open, the dead bolt removed. His computer was back on his desk.
None of this could compare to the other thing Crow saw: himself.
A living version of himself, to be more precise. He had a full head of hair and two attached hands. His skin was rosy, his eyes not sunken. He smiled and beckoned Crow—the dead Crow—to the window.
When Crow reached his living self, the two versions merged. Now there was just one Crow. He looked at his hands, both attached to his arms. He felt his heart beat within his chest. His stomach settled into comfortable stillness, no maggots squirming inside it.
“Hurry up!” came a boy’s voice.
Crow looked outside and saw three boys standing in his front yard. After a moment, he recognized them as three of his friends from before his death. They had four skateboards—one for each of them, and another for Crow.
This was everything he’d ever wanted. This was Crow’s wish. He had passed the Meera’s three tests, and now his dreams were coming true.
Melody screamed.
“Come on!” his friends yelled. “Hurry up, or we’ll leave without you.”
“Crow!” Melody screamed. “Crow!”
He peeled himself away from the window, noticing for the first time that this version of his room had two doors. One opened into the hall of his house. If he went that way, he would go downstairs, out the front door, and to his waiting friends. The other door led back to the Meera’s booby-trapped room. If he went that way, more guillotines, arrows, and balls of fire would await him.
Melody stood at the opposite end of the booby-trapped room. Her corridor had not turned into a wish-filled bedroom. Instead, it had led to a den of snakes. There were hundreds of them, from tiny specimens to monstrous beasts more than twenty feet long. They hissed, venom dripping down their fangs.
“Crow!” she screamed. “Come here!”
Crow stepped toward her, then paused. As soon as his hand went through the barrier of his bedroom, it turned gray. He put his other hand through experimentally. It disappear
ed from his arm and returned to his pocket.
With one more step, he knew he would be dead again.
“Come here, Melody!” he screamed. Maybe they could share his wish.
But she didn’t come. She needed his help. Crow passed through the door that led to her, and his heart stopped beating. He ran.
At the same moment, she ran, too. They met in the center of the room.
“I thought you were going to be killed,” she said. “Again!”
He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he was too excited to care. “Come on.” He pulled her toward his room. “It’s wonderful.”
She stayed where she was, her feet firmly planted to the ground. “No! Are you crazy? You have to come with me.” She looked at the snake den, no fear in her eyes. She even smiled.
“Why would we go there?” Crow asked. He tried again, still unsuccessfully, to pull her toward his room. “This way leads to my wish. Maybe it will lead to yours, too.”
“You wished for spiders?” she asked.
“No. I…” He didn’t understand. There were no spiders in his dream bedroom. He looked at it.
But it wasn’t there.
And now he saw them: millions of spiders, some as big as cars, crawling over the ground, the walls, and even each other. Thick cobwebs awaited any creature, large or small, unlucky enough to take a single misstep.
“Were those there the entire time?”
Melody nodded. “That’s why I was screaming. But it’s okay. The other corridor leads to my wish. There’s magic, and I can control it, and everyone believes me—”
“I’m sorry,” Crow interrupted, finally understanding. “Look again. It’s a snake den.”
“No, it’s—” She stopped. Her face blanched. Her knees wobbled. She saw what Crow saw.
“It was a test,” Crow said. “We were shown our wishes, and we had to resist.” If he’d taken the other door—the one that seemed to lead to the stairs in his house and to his friends waiting outside—he was pretty sure he would have ended up stuck in a giant web. And then eaten.