by E. Archer
“They’re right not to trust you.”
Chessie sighed. “If you’re going to be so tiresome, I’m heading off to bed.”
“Surely you can call this off somehow.”
Chessie dusted her hands. “That’s it. I’m through trying. I expected more of a sense of adventure, after all you’ve been through.”
“Will you come with me to help?” Ralph asked resignedly.
Chessie shook her head. “I’m pooped. It’s fully under control, I’m sure. The narrator has gotten the hang of things.”
Ralph glanced up at the trapdoor.
“I’m tired of telling you not to interfere, so I won’t,” Chessie said. “But I do ask that, if you get yourself killed, do it in the wish, rather than jumping off the wrong side of the castle. There are legal precedents for dying within a wish — it gets so much more complex if you perish on your way there.”
Ralph shook his head in confusion.
Chessie sighed and pointed to another spot on the ceiling. “You’re going the wrong way. Take the other trapdoor.”
“Ah,” Ralph said. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER LXV
What kind of narrator is this, you might wonder, who can’t prevent a lame-o geek — a kid who once read 1001 Ways to be Funny in order to make more friends, who was once rejected from an Oz convention, who once attended a Lord of the Rings marathon dressed as a hobbit — from worming his way into the last wish?
Truth be told, I probably could have. But I didn’t see much of a need. Sure, I would have loved it if Cecil’s and Daphne’s wishes had been pure quest stories of the old variety. But that wasn’t how it worked out, and so be it. I figure, what will it matter if Ralph wanders through one more wish? I’ll be able to handle whatever he pulls.
BOOK IV:
BEATRICE’S WISH
THE UNDERWORLD
CHAPTER XLVI
Beatrice died back in Chessie’s castle, when a ton of fairy-propelled stone shards fell on her.
Done.
BOOK V:
THE PRIVATE LIVES
OF NARRATORS
CHAPTER XLVII
You might be surprised to learn that I was born on a partly cloudy day in March. There must have been a twinkle in the sun’s light, though, to mirror the twinkle in my mother’s eye as she held me, swaddled as I was —
Are you listening?
Fine. As you wish. Back we go.
BOOK IV:
BEATRICE’S WISH
THE UNDERWORLD
CHAPTER XLVIII
Forgive me if I skip some of the early events in Beatrice’s wish. Trust me, I’m not going to tell you what happened in the first months for the same reason I haven’t informed you of every snack and every poo. It’s simply not crucial.
The vital facts:
When Ralph hopped off the roof, he found himself back where he had finished Daphne’s quest, in the Melted North. His trek out took a long time. He passed by the cottage where Regina had once imprisoned Cecil, and there he fell into a wonderful story full of wolves and witches and animated glass monkeys.
Until he ran across a wily demon and died.
CHAPTER XLIX
Why does it matter that the demon was wily? Did Ralph put up a fight? What are demons’ preferred methods of killing, and did the demon have a criminal history or a social worker who should have been working to prevent such an act? All good questions. For now, though, we’ve left Beatrice alone for far too long, and as she is my favorite character in this book, I’m keen to rejoin her.
Ralph ran across a wily demon and died.
CHAPTER L
Okay, fine, a brief sketch of the wily demon, since you may not care enough about my delightfully sullen Beatrice until we’ve settled exactly what happened to our “hero.” Here we go.
Note that I never wrote that he was killed by a wily demon, I wrote that he “ran across a wily demon and died.” This particular demon wasn’t suited to slaying, as he was only a couple of inches tall. He crawled into the back of Ralph’s shirt and proceeded to insult him, observing (rather aptly) that he was a classless, good-for-nothing brat. When the demon finally leaped out of his shirt, Ralph chased after him. The hunt for the imp took weeks, led him through a desert and around the inner rim of a volcano, finally culminating in a sojourn through the canopy of the speckled nimbus cloud forest.
At which point the demon mistakenly set off a trap laid centuries earlier by a now-extinct tribe, releasing a forty-ton walnut that brought down a dozen trees and squashed flat a nearby orphanage. Ralph was lucky enough (if we can attach the word “luck” to any part of this sorry episode) to have been knocked to one side and land in a giant spider’s web, where he was advanced on by the only web-spinning tarantula demigod ever believed to exist.
Don’t worry: Ralph will die in eight pages, but not yet. Considering the imp had just fallen over the tripwire that released the second walnut, which would have pulverized Ralph and the web-spinning tarantula demigod as well, the “disaster” that occurred next was actually an auspicious turn of events.
I don’t know if you have ever come across a melting frozen tower. Even if you have, you certainly haven’t witnessed an entire frozen continent melting. Once its tectonic core heats up, a massive tidal wave of water is released that washes out everything it comes across. Now, the melt of the continent happened a few months earlier and was initially contained in the Carp-Carpathian Mountain Bowl, but eventually it swept away the mountain range that contained the bowl, resulting in a tidal wave that spoiled the map, much like a toddler running amok with her daddy’s blue highlighter.
This tidal wave roared through the cloud forest precisely as the spider was advancing and the second walnut was rolling. The imp drowned, and though the spider survived (n.b.: arachnid demigods are highly buoyant), it was swept far away. Ralph would have soon been killed had he not been caught in the web, which the water’s force wrapped about him. His cocoon contained a nice-sized air pocket and floated, so Ralph bobbed through the world-flooding waters like a bath toy.
As reclining in a spider’s web was comfortable (particularly without the spider attached), he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to leave. Not being able to rid himself of the gruesome image of the walnut-flattened orphanage, he was convinced, perhaps accurately, that the world was cruel and not worth facing.
But eventually Ralph had mourned unknown children long enough and remembered that he still hadn’t found (and saved) the dead Beatrice. He struggled to pick open a hole in his web shell, strand by strand (spider silk becomes much less cohesive when waterlogged), sat on top of his makeshift canoe, and looked around.
There wasn’t much of anything to see, as there was no dry land anywhere on the horizon (nor, though he couldn’t know it, anywhere at all). The sea was choppy and unending, its color gone gray for all the various rocks and swords that had been swept into it. Ralph munched the legs of a drowned beetle that had been trapped in the web (sure, eating a soggy insect is gross, but this was a survival situation) and wondered what to do.
At first, he tried paddling with his hand, but each time he leaned over the cocoon’s side it rolled, threatening to dump him into the iron sea. Not sure what fearsome creatures might be lurking beneath the surface, Ralph decided that dehydration was at least a more distant death than being eaten.
He spent a day reclining in his spiderweb canoe, gazing at the sun and wondering when someone would come along to rescue him, or at least set him on a course of some sort. He started thinking of how little he knew of what might happen, and how he wished the narrator in the catwalks would fill him in.
Filling him in would be a gross breach of storytelling rules.
What did happen was that a robed skeleton approached on a boat.
Its dirty gray bones were covered in a silk robe, which it held tightly closed in its elegant metacarpals. The boat was a flimsy thing that would have rolled in the waves had it not been passing magically through and between them, cuttin
g a straight line through the chop. Ralph watched the skeleton’s approach with as much fear as his brain could muster, that emotion being recently much taxed.
The skeleton spoke. Skeletal voices are gender-nonspecific, and since Ralph couldn’t get a good look at its hip bones, he hadn’t a clue as to its sex. Not that skeletons mate with any regularity, so gender is fairly moot even to them.
“You are Ralph?” it intoned. Ralph nodded.
“Are you aware that you are the last being alive in all the land?”
Ralph shook his head.
“You are. Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”
Ralph shook his head.
“Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”
Ralph shook his head.
“Are you willing to perform the duties required of you as said last being alive?”
Ralph nodded.
“Brilliant,” said the skeleton as it sat down on the edge of its boat, momentarily flailing its arm bones to maintain its balance. “It makes all of our lives so much easier when everyone’s assigned to a purgatory. Having someone not yet dead wandering around makes all the paperwork so much more difficult, all sorts of exemptions to file and such.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Ralph observed.
“Quite right,” the skeleton said, slowing its speech to make sure this obvious numbskull understood. “But that’s not to say you won’t be dead shortly.”
“Will being dead mean I can go back home?” Ralph asked.
“How many dead people go back home?” the skeleton asked.
Ralph wondered how to answer.
“No,” the skeleton said dryly. “You won’t go back home. Because you’ll be dead.”
“I think I’ll stay alive, then.”
The skeleton looked hard at the featureless sea, then politely returned its eye sockets to Ralph. “Forgive me, but I don’t really see how you’ll manage that.”
“Look, I know this must have something to do with Beatrice. Let me meet her and get on with it.”
Yes!
The skeleton looked confused. “Beatrice?”
“Yes. This is bound to be her wish.”
“And you expect me to immediately recognize that name among the millions of dead?”
“I guess not.”
“There are probably a thousand dead Beatrices in the various purgatories.”
“I’m very sorry.”
The skeleton sighed. “Let’s give it a shot. This Beatrice is a male or a female?”
“Female.”
“Known by you?”
“Yes.”
“Likely cause of death?”
Ralph shrugged.
“Is she of a sunny or rainy disposition?”
“Rainy. Definitely rainy.”
“Young or old?”
“Young. Ish. A teenager.”
The skeleton nodded. “Gloomy teenage females are automatically assigned to Purgatory Main Isle. Very crowded these days.”
“Is it hard to get to?”
“If you’re alive, impossible. Flatly impossible. Even when you’re dead, it’s difficult. Before the Flood, PMI served as the exclusive entry terminal for the dead, but now we’ve had to farm our client load out to dozens of auxiliary purgatories. PMI’s almost at capacity, so even if you died right now, you’d still be too late to have much chance of being assigned there.”
“And it would be impossible to see her if I was in a different purgatory?”
The skeleton laughed, which caused its ribs to grate harshly against one another. “They’re different purgatories. Yes. It would be strictly impossible.”
“What’s to be done, then?”
The skeleton shrugged, another unpleasant sight when no flesh covers the bones. “There are zoning exceptions, of course. If you die within a mile of any given purgatory, you can get a local waiver. But that’s simply not going to happen for Purgatory Main Isle.”
“Why?”
“PMI was formerly in the middle of the Acrid Plains, which were hard to reach, though not impossibly so. But after the Snow Queen’s Flood, the Acrid Plains are …” The skeleton trailed off and gestured at the fathoms of dark water. “To make sure you were within a mile of PMI, you’d have to die two miles below the surface of this ocean.”
“Maybe I could swim two miles down and then die,” Ralph suggested.
“Swim two miles down? Good luck. On top of the physical feat, which you seem to be of too geeky a stature to accomplish, you’d also have to guess where Main Isle is. The currents could carry you far away in the Iron Sea before you died.”
“Do you know where Purgatory Main Isle is?”
“Not precisely. I do know that we’ve received hundreds of PMI local waivers for whales and kraken, so PMI must be near their battlezone.”
“Can you introduce me to them?”
“They live under the water, Ralph.” The skeleton tapped its finger against the void where its lips would have been. “Though the whales must come up to breathe, I suppose. That’s what whales do, no?”
Ralph nodded.
“I’ll see what I can do. Give me two days. That’s about when you’ll be dead from lack of water, anyway. Just sit tight.”
“Come back soon,” Ralph said encouragingly. But the skeleton was already gone.
CHAPTER LI
The sun was setting and Ralph, doing his best to beat back dueling pangs of thirst and hunger, huddled in his web cocoon to wait for the skeleton’s return. Once the night arrived, it was cool and pleasant, but he knew that, come morning, daylight would again beat into his skin. What would it feel like, he wondered, to die of sunburn?
But he only had to wonder for one night, since with dawn came the sound of something large slapping the water outside his vessel.
It was a whale breaching, smacking the surface in a tremendous spray. It threw itself into the air and came crashing back into the sea a few times before gliding over to Ralph’s perilously tilting craft. Its head emerged from the water; even that head was already twice the size of his cocoon, and fitted with a sleek steel helmet that had been hammered on with scab-crusted tacks.
“Hello,” Ralph said.
He expected a manly baritone, but the whale’s voice was so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible. “You’re Ralph?” it asked.
“Yes,” Ralph said.
“I’m to take you four hundred fathoms below. As a favor to the narrator, to get you moving along. Are you ready?”
“Who’s the narrator?”
“Come on, get on.”
“I, what, hold on to your flipper?”
“Dorsal fin, please. Otherwise I can’t steer.”
The whale curled so more of its body was exposed. Ralph gingerly stepped from the cocoon to its back. He gripped the fin at the center and admired the whale’s fine helmet, and the massive steel plates bolted to its flukes. “Are you a soldier?” Ralph asked.
The whale nodded, a spectacular shimmy that almost pitched Ralph into the sea. “Just got called up. Shipping back out to duty. You’re ready?”
Ralph said yes, and the whale dove. Not unforeseeably, Ralph was thrown and left bobbing at the surface of the iron sea. The whale re-surfaced minutes later. “What happened?” it asked.
“I couldn’t hold on. No chance.”
“Oh,” the whale said. “I should have thought of that.” Its flippers sagged in discouragement.
“You’ve never had anyone ride you before?”
“Calves, sure. But no humans.”
“Could you go slower?”
“Not if we want to get you four hundred fathoms deep. I’d never get up enough momentum. I have an idea, though. Get off for a second, would you?”
Ralph heaved himself back into his rocking cocoon and watched as the whale performed an elaborate dance, its armored head and tail glinting below the surface as it twirled and sang.
When it retu
rned to the surface, it had two water sprites in tow. (To those who are unacquainted with water sprites: They are lovely and almost shapeless, like the mist from a hose spigot on a sunny day.)
They carried between them a length of shimmering cord, which the whale had them bind around Ralph’s wrists and ankles. They giggled and slapped him as they did, their vaporous touches making Ralph shiver pleasantly. Then the whale opened its mouth, exposing long strips of baleen. Words were exchanged in some sea-language, then the sprites lifted Ralph out of the cocoon and positioned him against the baleen, right where the front teeth would have been. The whale’s mouth was covered with grimy plankton, and smelled like a wharf on a hot day.
The whale asked if Ralph was ready and he nodded, though he wondered what it was, precisely, that he had declared himself ready for.
The whale dove. Ordinary flukes are powered by the strongest muscles in the animal kingdom — and magical flukes, well! Ralph found himself instantly pressed upon by thousands of gallons of water. It rolled his eyelids, shoved its way down his throat and filled his stomach and lungs. He was blasted by plankton, the more resourceful of which clutched his clothing as their peers were sucked into the whale’s gullet.
They dove farther and farther, until all was black and cold. The rapid increase in pressure caused Ralph’s eardrums to burst, which would have hurt terribly if he hadn’t been distracted by the more pressing sensation of zooming to the bottom of the ocean.
By the time he was fifty leagues beneath the surface, Ralph had passed out. Which was good, since by two hundred leagues he was dead, and the one hundred fifty leagues in between would have been extremely disagreeable.
HOW PURGATORY GOES
CHAPTER LII
Ralph first noticed that there was no color. But Purgatory wasn’t black-and-white, either — it was full of luminous grays, grays like tweed, grays that hinted at thousands of colors latent somewhere within, grays flecked in colors like goldenrod and periwinkle, grays with dried flowers inside.