Geek Fantasy Novel

by E. Archer

  “Come here,” Annabelle said. Before she had even drawn Beatrice to her bosom, they both had begun to sob.

  Annabel rolled her eyes and turned flirtatiously to Ralph. “They’re going to be wallowing for a while. Do you want me to give you a tour? There’s some really fun stuff around here.”

  “No thanks,” Ralph said. “I’d rather stick around Beatrice, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Annabel said.

  Ralph positioned himself at one end of the stone galleon, as far as he could get from any of the invisible servants. He watched Beatrice murmur to her mother, her mother rock her in return. Annabel hovered nearby, biting her nails and pretending not to watch.

  Beatrice had chosen to come to the Underworld; Ralph knew it wasn’t really his place to talk her into finding a way to leave. And even if he did try, how could he undo her death? At the same time, he was certain no good could come of Beatrice fixating on the loss of her mother and sister. She could spend an eternity down here, first crying over her Annabel and Annabelle, later coming to mourn Cecil and Daphne and everything she had lost in her old life.

  “How did you wind up here?” Ralph asked Annabel.

  “Me? Oh, it’s silly, really. Misadministered tetanus shot.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, it’s true!”

  “And your mom?”

  “She was in a coma. And she got in that coma the same way Beatrice got here. She chose to.”

  “Oh,” Ralph said. He rested his head in his hands.

  Then something occurred to him. He darted to his feet and pulled out his cell phone.

  “Oh my God,” Annabel said. “Phones have gotten so cool. Can I see?”

  He flipped it open and checked the time. 11:30 — only half an hour until Beatrice permanently slipped over to the undead.

  He jostled Beatrice, who was murmuring lost words into her mother’s ear. “Beatrice,” he said. “You only have half an hour left.”

  She peered at him blearily. “So? This is where I want to be.”

  “I’m sorry,” Annabelle said to Ralph, “but this really doesn’t involve you. My daughter is staying here, with me.”

  Ralph felt a tug on his arm and saw Annabel beside him, fluttering her long lashes. “You could join us,” she said. “It’s simple enough to do.”

  Yikes.

  “How do you know there’s only half an hour left?” Annabelle asked.

  “It’s nearly midnight,” Beatrice said dreamily to her mother.

  “Nearly midnight!” exclaimed Annabelle. “The boundary race is at midnight!”

  “So?” Beatrice asked.

  “I am the queen, so I am the undead rider,” said the ghostly Annabelle.

  “I’ll come with you,” Beatrice said.

  “As you wish, my love. You” — she pointed to Ralph — “have no choice but to follow. Unless you want to stay here with the phantoms.”

  Annabel sealed the door to the stone galleon. “To the surface!” she cried. Ralph watched the candles rearrange themselves as the invisible servants took their positions around the ship. The vessel began to ascend through the solid rock.

  CHAPTER LVIII

  It is difficult to gauge one’s progress in a ship that has neither deck nor portals. Ralph presumed they were heading upward only because the ship pitched back, strongly enough to knock him to the floor. The rock walls of the vessel moved and slid, accelerating until they became a flowing mass of stone streaming around the open space. A slight breeze sifted the close air of the hold, and as the ship jerked and tossed through various densities of rock, its four occupants made good use of the cushion pile in its center.

  Eventually the stone began to lighten in color. Ralph was able to see, in the wall’s cross-section, roots and small creatures that had made their homes in the soil. At one point a disoriented undead mole dropped into the hold and was promptly hurled back out by one of the invisible servants. As the gravel turned to silt, and the silt to sandy soil, the ship came to the surface outside the Soon-to-be-Dead city. As it had only been a void in the rock, once it arrived in the open air there was nothing left of the stone galleon but a pile of cushions in the middle of the ashen grass.

  Annabelle rose to her feet and snapped imperiously. Suddenly she was clad in a jet-black gown, a crown nestled in her large hair, a regal version of her previous self. “Horse!” she commanded.

  An undead engineer emerged from within the walls of the Soon-to-be-Dead city, coaxing a horse skeleton clad in battle armor. “The metal plates will slow it down,” Annabelle said. “Remove them.”

  The engineer — a tall and awkwardly-composed skeleton who wore a monocle over one eye socket — pressed his finger bones to his skull in dismay. The armor had taken weeks to prepare: It was filigreed and etched with meticulously rendered scenes culled from undead cultural history. But at Annabelle’s command the invisible servants set to work removing the metal-work masterpieces from the horse. It whinnied, a hollow wheeze.

  Annabelle threw herself over its back.

  “Mother,” Beatrice said. “Could you call me a horse, too, so I can ride behind you?”

  Annabelle nodded. She snapped her fingers and the engineer called forward another ornamented undead horse. Beatrice mounted it and looked at Ralph. “Coming?”

  Ralph got on behind her.

  “Annabel?” Beatrice asked.

  Annabel shook her head, bit her lip, and gave a perky wave good-bye.

  “The time!” Annabelle demanded. “The boundary race must commence at precisely twelve!”

  Ralph pulled out his phone and checked. “11:59, no … midnight!”

  Annabelle cried out, and the horses sped off toward the land of the Recently-Living.

  Training undead horses is immensely difficult. When irritated they tend to maul their grooms, for one thing. But that’s not even the worst of it.

  The cornerstone of breaking in a living horse is food — sugar cubes, carrots, the like — and undead horses simply can’t eat. It’s comical when they try, as the food promptly slips between their ribs and lands on the ground. So the task of the Soon-to-be-Dead trainers — engineering a horse faster than any the Recently-Living could produce — was tricky. For one thing, skeletal horses tend to shed chunks of flesh when they gallop. Even cantering results in a catastrophic loss of cartilage. At about thirty miles per hour, skeletal horses’ skulls lob off, ending the whole process right there. More zombielike horses don’t fare much better. Despite its many striking qualities, rotting flesh is not aerodynamic. And as for their gait — a shuffling gallop is pleasing to neither rider nor spectator.

  For these reasons and more, the undead engineers developed an almost-cyborg horse, an alloy of titanium and bone that galloped but lacked such horsely amenities as a tail and personality. The Soon-to-be-Dead creation was also, Ralph quickly noticed, severely lacking in comforts. The slap of his butt on its alloy rump was more rodeo than derby.

  Annabelle’s horse shot off as befitted a titanium-bone bullet, but Ralph and Beatrice’s horse, weighed down in battle armor and carrying two passengers, struck off at half-pace. They easily tracked the scrambled evidence of Annabelle’s passing — torn branches, ripped thickets — as they cantered through the underworld. Shadows ceased their bustling to watch them as they proceeded to the middle territory.

  As they traveled, Ralph watched Beatrice closely, to see if anything changed when she became fully undead. But, so far at least, she seemed the same.

  When they reached the clearing, they found no one there. “Look,” Beatrice said, pointing at the far side. Ralph followed her finger and saw more sundered evidence of Annabelle’s passage.

  “Wow,” he said, “she’s rocking it. Shout-out to the undead.”

  They trotted by the rotten table and followed Annabelle’s course. Even the most muddled tracker could follow the ice crystals the undead horse drooled in a steaming path through the underbrush. Once they had returned to t
he more colorful grays, it wasn’t long before they reached the fortifications of the Recently-Living city.

  Annabelle had dismounted from her horse and was standing breathless next to the slate wall, both hands touching the surface, as if it were home base in a high-stakes game of tag.

  “What happened? Where’s the other rider?” Ralph asked her, shuddering. Annabelle was far more ghostly now, a luminous horror in the true midnight of the Recently-Living land.

  “He did not ride in time!” Annabelle cried out. Or, more accurately, wailed out, as proper ghosts do. “Lord Gid has failed! Let this be my final revenge.” She raised her voice even higher. “Let it be known that all open land is now in the hands of the Soon-to-be-Dead! Stay in your pathetic city, Recently-Living; you will never again roam freely.”

  Somewhere from within the city: “What was that?”

  From farther: “Dunno. Some ghost, I think.”

  “What’s she ruckusing about?”

  “… think they’ve conquered all the land, or somesuch.”

  “Whatever.”

  Annabelle let out a bloodcurdling banshee scream.

  To which, from a long distance, came a responding shout that was unmistakably Gideon’s.

  Annabelle, who had been too occupied with her own screeching to hear properly, whirled around. “What was that?”

  “It was Father,” Beatrice said softly.

  “Giddy? What did he say?”

  “I don’t know. He yelled. He didn’t say anything.”

  “It was a shout. A victory shout, from the sounds of it,” Ralph offered cautiously. “What is your dad doing here?”

  Beatrice shrugged.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Annabelle said. “I won. What in the world would he have to be bloody victorious about?”

  “Might there be more than one way to get to the Soon-to-be-Dead city?” Ralph suggested.

  And it was true. After leaving the city of the Recently-Living, Gideon had passed along a forest lane, then a rocky mountain path, then a gravel perimeter to a skating lake, then a crystal canyon bridge, then under the rope bridge in a wood canopy, then through an underground tunnel. They had missed each other entirely.

  “This is simply ridiculous. I’ve won,” said Annabelle.

  “But you can see that maybe Father could make the argument that he’s won,” Beatrice said politely.

  Annabelle snarled at Beatrice and made as if to zap her, which was an extraordinarily alarming sight for a serious-minded girl who may or may not be fully undead and who was just reintroduced to her dead mother. She burst out in tears.

  “Oh, I wasn’t really going to strike you,” Annabelle said crossly. “This is so frustrating, that’s all. I’m beside myself.” She seemed to calm down, then suddenly turned extraordinarily bright and screeched at such decibels that she knocked over Ralph, the crying Beatrice, and a nest of dead magpies, who rose squawking into the air. “Where are you, Gideon?” Annabelle called.

  Gideon yelled something back from far away but, since he didn’t share Annabelle’s supernatural screeching abilities, whatever he said was unintelligible. Annabelle, Beatrice, and Ralph stared at each other, waiting for one of them to translate. When none of them did, Ralph spoke: “Do you think your dad still has his phone?”

  Beatrice shrugged. Ralph pulled out his own phone and waited while it dialed — he was low on battery, and hadn’t brought his charger. Even in Purgatory, Gideon must have screened his call, because he went to voicemail. Ralph left a message.

  Gideon soon called back. “Ralph? What a surprise!”

  Ralph put a hand over his free ear and smiled awkwardly into the phone. “Yes, well, I’m here with your first wife, and your daughter … well, their dead incarnations, anyway, and we were supposed to meet up with you and determine the boundaries between the Recently-Living and the Soon-to-be-Dead cities. But I guess we missed you.”

  “What was that last bit? You cut out.”

  “We missed you!”

  “Oh, that’s sweet. Well, I guess we’ll have to swap places and try it all over again.”

  “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “I’m sorry? I don’t follow.”

  Ralph sighed, then spent a minute clarifying the proper route with Gideon and finished by hurriedly saying, “I got a beep for low battery. Listen, why don’t we do the run from opposite sides, instead of switching back? We’ll sort everything out when we meet up.”

  “Okay, that sounds fine … but a little addled, actually. Wouldn’t I be racing for the wrong city?”

  Ralph’s voice went nasal as he determined the best solution to the problem. “We’ll swap it. Whatever you gain for the undead will actually be mirror-imaged.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I’ll be the judge. I’m not even dead, I don’t think, so I’m impartial.”

  “Alrighty. Here I go!”

  “No! Wait! Give me a head start, so I can get to the clearing first. What time do you have?”

  “Wow, it’s late! One fifty-four.”

  “Okay, we’re synchronized. Take off at two.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m going now.”

  “Could I talk to Annabelle with whatever battery’s left?”

  “Sure, you’ve got a minute or two,” Ralph said, then offered the phone to Annabelle.

  Eyes wide, she reached for it — and it dropped right through her ghostly fingers. “Hold on, Gideon,” Ralph called as he propped the phone on an outcropping of the building stones. “Here you go.”

  Annabelle floated over and began to whisper into it.

  “Let’s leave them some privacy,” Ralph said to Beatrice. She stared longingly at her ghost-mother, then nodded and joined Ralph on the back of the second horse. They sped back to the neutral clearing, arranged themselves on the rotten table, and waited in silence.

  “How does all this feel?” Ralph finally asked. “Meeting your ghost-mother and sister and everything?” He glanced at his watch. “And being undead for almost two hours?” He scrutinized her. “You don’t look that different.”

  Beatrice stared sullenly at the ground.

  “Anything you want to talk about? All your body parts staying together?” Ralph tried.

  Beatrice shook her head. Ralph put his hand around her shoulder. “We don’t have to say anything, then,” he said.

  They heard a pair of shouts as Annabelle and Gideon took off.

  “I’ve decided that I don’t want to be down here anymore,” Beatrice said. “I don’t want to lose chunks of flesh or become a ghost.”

  “We’ll find a way out,” Ralph promised.

  Which is something he shouldn’t have done. Did he have the first clue as to the powerful forces binding the dead to Main Isle Purgatory? Did he have any idea how to quit a land that has no exit? Did he have the right to end a wish, instead of ceding to the far superior capabilities of a presiding member of the Royal Narratological Guild? No, of course not. He was just a kid who thought his own stitches were tighter than the fabric of the rest of the world, that he could stretch and tear where he liked and knit his own reality. Well, sorry, Ralph, it’s not going to work this time. There are forces more impressive than you. You think you can be the one to save lovely, pained Beatrice, that this makes you the luckiest man in the world … and though it does, it’s not as though she would pay you attention in any other situation. She’s a rare, complex creature, no flash but all substance, someone too special for you. And you think, Ralph, you think you can make a promise and win her over — well, I’m not going to let you do that to her.

  The ground shifted so that Ralph fell off the rotten table and landed hard on his immature face.

  “What’s happening?” Beatrice asked, worriedly pressing her hand to her chest.

  At which point, to quiet her anxiety, the ground beneath them ceased shaking.

  “I have no idea,” Ralph said, staring stupidly about.

  The skies ru
mbled, clouds appeared, and soon great gray drops of rain began to fall. The first bead struck Beatrice on the nose and ran serenely to the tip, hanging for a moment before splashing onto the soft rise of her breast. Then more and more drops fell, until Ralph and Beatrice were soaked through. They held each other close beneath the chill rain.

  Which is when your narrator needs a moment to collect himself.

  CHAPTER LIX

  The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

  The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

  The hero has to be the mover of his own story.

  I lost control for a moment, and I humbly request forgiveness.

  Let’s see. Some exciting events were occurring, if I remember correctly. Oh yes. Our delightful teenagers were, naturally enough, agitated by the recent quaking of Purgatory (my fault, sorry) and the seeming apocalypse and all that, and exclaimed to each other about it for what would be an exhaustingly long time to read about. Let’s cut through and rejoin them as they detect the distant patter of bone-titanium alloy hooves.

  “Mum?” Beatrice exclaimed, leaping to her feet and nearly slipping in the mud. Ralph caught hold of her (yes, gallantly) and they stood holding each other as the staccato galloping got louder. “I knew Annabelle’s horse would be faster!” she said.

  But Ralph didn’t respond, because he had detected the less controlled hoofbeats of a Recently-Living horse. Branches shook at the tops of trees; undead birds flew into the air. Though he sounded farther off, Gideon was racing at breakneck speed.

  “Let’s get out of the way,” Ralph suggested as Annabelle’s horse rocketed into the clearing. Bathed in scorching white flames, her hair whipping in a froth of exhilaration, the ghost rider shrieked in victory.

  She had gone no more than a dozen feet past the rotten table, however, when Gideon’s horse roared into the clearing. His steed skidded in the mud and, in a flurry of long limbs, came to a muddy crash at Annabelle’s feet. Gideon managed to convert his fall into a shoddy dismount, and bowed politely once he had regained his footing.