Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  For a second, I made my usual mistake and tried to imagine it all gone before I remembered: replace it.

  I closed my eyes and replaced all the food with things that sounded good. Pancakes, I thought. With real maple syrup. And strawberry jam. And strawberries. And cream—the real kind, whipped so it’s all fluff and vanilla and sugar. And mint truffle hot chocolate, foaming in huge, quart-sized jugs.

  “Eh.” Aelfur stared with bulging eyes at his suddenly prissy, fruit-filled, pastry-stacked table. “What sort’o blashery’s this?” He picked up a pancake, flopped it around in the air, and scarfed it down in a second. His brows shot up. “Blargh,” he growled. “Too sweet for my tongue.”

  I made my way over to his side and sat in the empty chair there—empty except for a flea-bitten dog with a white body, a black muzzle and tail-tip, and observant, lazy eyes. “Get off, Bud,” I said, feeling a little guilty because it had been years since Bud died, and really, I should have been hugging him and glad to spend any extra minute with my childhood pet.

  I selected two pancakes, poured golden syrup from the pitcher at my elbow onto the stack between me and Aelfur, and on the ones in front of me. “Not sweet enough,” I contradicted, and downed them in ten oozing, sticky bites. Hiccupping, I grabbed the mug and drank for a whole minute.

  I sighed, set it aside.

  They’d been watching me, puzzled frowns on their faces. A muscled thane with a horn sticking straight out of the front part of his helmet picked up his fork.

  They were trying to imitate me, gulping down syrup-saturated pancakes, knives and forks clutched in their hammy fists.

  Aelfur grunted. “Fool things.” He flung the fork across the table, grabbing his stack of pancakes and shoving them in his mouth. Then they were all in it fisting each other, fighting for platters full of spongy cakes, spooning up syrup with their fingers. They were putting mugs of syrup to their lips, toasting enthusiastically, pouring it on each other. They smeared jam and cream all over the table, gobbled up strawberries, and roared at each other over the last few.

  A big mess. A big, hairy, sticky mess. The table. The floor. The chairs.

  Chunks of strawberries caught in matted beards. Syrup clotting in wild manes.

  They all sat back in their chairs and groaned, rubbing their bellies.

  “Too sweet,” Aelfur murmured, laying his rosy cheek on his hand and going to sleep on the table.

  A mess.

  That’s what Lil and I were in.

  Reluctantly, I looked around at them, my lairds.

  Half of them were asleep. And half of them . . .

  Were watching me.

  Unfamiliar faces, all of them.

  I don’t know why a certain word came to my mind—imposters—but it had just the right cold, slightly nasty feel.

  “You see,” one of them hissed.

  They rose all at the same time, all in the exact same movement, and fell apart—colors blending, then darkening.

  “Aelfur.” I touched his shoulder, then shook him. With a snort he woke, eyeing me blearily.

  “Yeah, Lad?”

  “Who are these . . . when did these new people come?”

  They didn’t look much like people anymore. More like a dark wave of shadow. I could see faces in it. They distorted and grimaced. Angry. Frightened.

  Aelfur stood. “Sit, lairds. You’ve no’ad’near’nough. More chickens. More potatoes. This friffery won’t fill the bellies of men.” He dismissed the mess on the table with a wave of his hand. “Wenches! Bring meat!”

  “No.” I backed toward the stairs. “Aelfur, where did they come from?”

  “Came in last night,” Aelfur grunted. He tilted his head toward me, frowning from under his dark-furred brow. “Said they were looking for you and the wench. Said you’d brought them here. I gave them my hospitality.”

  “No. I didn’t—”

  “Logan,” Aspen’s voice interrupted me.

  Her voice again. The tone was sweet—too sweet. Aspen Winters has never been nice to me in my life.

  I turned to face her. She was only a few paces away. Her long dress was black now, flowing right into the shadow she cast along the floor. She smiled and took a step toward me. “Don’t run,” she murmured. “Please.”

  I was cold-sweating, heart-beating-out-of-my-chest afraid. The shadows behind me, the shadow in front of me . . . .

  Jenny. The strange girl. She’d said not to let them touch me.

  But again, was Jenny someone I could trust?

  “What’s wrong, Logan?”

  “I—I don’t . . . Where did you come from?”

  “Me?” She gave me a puzzled look. “You know me, Logan. We have . . . composition together. Fifth hour.”

  The way she said it, the way she hesitated, I knew.

  She was imaginary, but not totally. Someone was making her. Something with a will. Something who didn’t say things like people in my world said them. Composition, instead of English. Fifth hour instead of fifth period. This something knew me. Knew I had class with Aspen Winters.

  Last night Lil had been afraid, and she was never afraid. She’d said “they’d” found us. They. The Rook. And the Wolf.

  Birds. Dogs. Complete. Randomness. I grabbed at my hair, clenched my teeth. Could something make sense, please? Just for a minute?

  “Aspen,” I finally said, “Don’t come any closer.”

  She slid to a standstill, giving me a quizzical look. Her brows curved high on that pale skin like ink on paper. I’d memorized the perfect shape of them.

  I had no idea what to do, but I had a feeling that I needed to stall, that I needed to act confused, act like I didn’t know what was wrong. Whatever it was Lil was afraid of, I had to play it like I didn’t know I should be afraid.

  “How did you get here?” I asked her.

  She smiled mysteriously, and winked.

  Run, my heart said.

  Run, my mind screamed.

  “A nice bir’o’ Lass,” Aelfur chortled. “Come’n off th’fen, haevye?”

  “Sorry Aspen,” I said. “I don’t know how you got here, but make yourself comfortable. I’ll just go get Lil and . . . be back down.” Heart rattling my chest, I forced myself to walk toward Aspen. I had to get by her to reach the stairs. I had to . . . get by her . . . .

  Her eyes narrowed and her lips spread, showing her teeth. “You cannot fool us.” They grew—fangs, yellow, out of her mouth, spreading down over her perfect lower lip. “We’ve got eyes.” Her voice was rough, hollow. Almost a growl. “We have ears. We see your fear, and we claim it. Come to us, Logan.” Her voice echoed oddly on the last syllable of my name: gan . . . gan . . . damn . . . .

  The room shimmered and the mass of darkness shifted. Shapes, running into each other. “You see us,” they whispered. “You can’t fool us. We are here to claim you.”

  The room was twisting, darkening. Dark lines snaked over the walls like cracks. Like little black rivers—

  No, vines.

  They swelled, furring out with five-pointed leaves. A wall split, shifting a jagged section of the massive blocks, sending down a shower of stone dust. Vines went crazy, filling up the space. The room, my Saxons were fuzzing out, growing dark. Dust fell on my head and sifted down the neck of my shirt. And Aspen took a step toward me. The slim figure had stretched, thinned into a dark wisp like a shadow, and yet it pulled at me.

  My feet slipped on the stone surface of the keep, on the dark thing I stood on, which was nothing. I tried to grab something, but there was nothing.

  Nothing. Only not the white, diffuse, fog kind of nothing I’d first encountered, coming out of the tunnel—a sticky, smothering kind of nothing. Like tar. It filled my lungs, filled me entirely, taking over every piece of me to draw me where it wanted to. A dark, sucking current, toward that thing I knew I couldn’t touch. “You’re here now,” the voice repeated in a harsh whisper, booming off my skull like saws rasping. A hundred saws. “And here you’ll staaaay, brea
th and bones and flesh, here you’ll staaaay, hair and bile and offaaaaal, here you’ll staaaay . . . .”

  As the phrases blew through me, there was a tingle and roil that took over my body. My breath became a living thing crawling through my throat, ripped from me. My bones ached and shook in their sockets. My skin was going to tear off.

  I yelled, loud. Or at least a yell started up in my chest. Whether it actually sounded or not . . .

  “Logan!”

  Lil’s scream tore through me, and with it came a lightning bolt—a blinding flash, cutting through the dark.

  “Logan!”

  “Two!” The Not-Aspen hissed.

  Something flew at me, making an awful noise like wrenching metal.

  A bird—black, with a black beak and a pair of malevolent, red-rimmed eyes—circled the tower and flew straight up toward the roof, then angled toward the wall.

  Tower. Roof. They were back, and the muffling darkness lost its grip on me. It was in the thing, the bird, wheeling toward the top of my tower.

  “Keep it strong.” Lil was leaping down the last few stairs, her braids a wooly mess. There was a gleam of malicious triumph in her eyes like I’d only seen before when she knew she’d checkmated me. “Keep the walls and roof strong, Logan. We’ve got— “

  Another terrible caw, and sunlight ripped through the wall thirty feet above us.

  “Close it.” Lil leapt off the step and ran toward me. “I can’t do it, it’s yours. Think of it solid, Logan. Now. Before it gets—”

  The bird rocketed through the broken wall and was gone.

  Lil threw herself at me. “How could you?” she screeched. “You let it go, Logan. You let him go! We had him and you let him—” And then she was punching, kicking.

  For a few moments I just stood there, dazed, and took it. Then I grabbed her hands, twisted her wrists, and brought her down on the floor on her knees. She swore, spit, and knelt there, panting.

  “What,” I said, when she’d got herself back under control, “what the hell was that? What is this, Lil? Where are we?” I threw her hands forcefully away from me, so she rocked back on her heels and sprawled on the floor. “Stop doing this to me. Stop it right now. Get rid of all this. I grabbed the back of one of the chairs and slung it with all my strength. It was made of heavy oak, strong enough for a two-hundred-fifty-pound Saxon warlord with a busty damsel or two on his lap, so it didn’t even topple. I looked around for something more satisfying to throw. I grabbed the end of one of the banners off the wall. It tore with a satisfying scream of ripping fabric. “Get us out of this,” I shouted, balling it up and throwing it at her. “I’m done, Lil. Done with this stuff. I need Mom. I need meds. Who knows where the hell we’re at? Probably freezing in a snowbank somewhere. Get us out of this. Bring us back, Lil. Bring us back. Now!”

  She stared up me. She looked calmer now, frowning up at me like I’d just given the wrong answer to an obvious question. “Back where, Logan? What are you talking about?”

  “Back into the real world! Gah, I—” I grabbed at my head, closed my eyes tightly. “Lil, I can’t do this. We can’t.”

  “We don’t have a choice.” Lil’s words came slowly, and she was looking away—some spot behind my shoulder. “Now they know we’re here, they’re not going to let us go. If we want to get back to St. Anthony, Logan, we need his help.”

  “Who’re you talking about? Your Grey Man?” My eyes darted to the gecko at her feet, tail curled around itself, gazing up at me through slitted eyes, looking like he might want to take a bite out of me. “Just make him, then.”

  “Don’t be dumb. I can’t make him.” She flung her arms out in a helpless gesture. “You can’t make people.”

  “You made him all the time in the studio.”

  “Yeah, but those were just . . . containers. He came into them. He made them alive.”

  “I made Aelfur.”

  “Aelfur’s not a person. He’s . . . a thing. A story. I mean, I could make a copy of the Grey Man, and make him act like him, like from a story, like your Aelfur, but we don’t need a made up Grey Man. We need the real Grey Man. And . . . he’s hiding from me.” Lil licked her lips, studying Satie. “You’ve given me an idea, though. Satie?”

  The gecko licked his eyes and unfurled his tail.

  “Go find him,” she said. She bent down and touched the flat place on the top of its head, and a yellow-pink tongue flashed out and curled around her finger for a second. “Go find the Grey Man. Bring him back to us. Blend in wherever you go. Don’t stay yellow. Become . . . become the stuff around you. And come back safe, Satie. All right?”

  Satie scampered toward the wall. She was up it in a flash, then out the window slit. Just before she left, she went all grey and mottled green and brown, like the stone of the keep.

  “What if we never find him, Lil?”

  I was thinking of the girl—Jenny. Where had she gone? She was going to get help, she’d said. Could it be she was going to get him? The Grey Man? I opened my mouth to mention it, to say what had happened. To tell her about Jenny. For some reason, the words wouldn’t form on my tongue.

  I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was having an ally, something Lil didn’t have in her pocket.

  No. I’d keep Jenny to myself. I had no idea what she was. I didn’t feel like borrowing trouble. It was comforting to hope there was someone on our side. My side.

  “We’ll think of something,” Lil said, interrupting my thoughts. “The Rook and the Wolf’ll underestimate us at first. They weren’t expecting you, Logan. And they have no idea what they’re dealing with, both of us together.”

  She glanced around at the mess—smears of whipped cream, jam, strawberries. Pancake crumbles. “You know, I didn’t think I would, but I miss them. Bring your weird Saxons back, Logan. They’re loud and . . . distracting.”

  I sat at the table and tried to mentally chew over everything. All she’d said. All that had happened.

  People couldn’t be made. Aelfur was a person, but not as much a person as her Grey Man, apparently? What did that mean?

  Who were the Rook and the Wolf? Who was Jenny? And the Grey Man?” These Grimms?

  Why was I even trying to make sense of this? It wasn’t supposed to make sense.

  Delusions don’t make sense, Logan. I wasn’t getting out of here quickly, and I didn’t have anything but Lil’s and Jenny’s words to go by.

  Chapter 9

  I brought back my banners, filled the table with game. I closed my eyes and brought my Saxons back.

  They stormed in through the massive door, grunting and muttering. They were droopy, I noticed, and stumbling. “Long hunt. Ho,” Aelfur roared. “Yu’ve poot yusel i’ charge o’m’table noo?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered as he began to skin a huge, eight-prong buck right there on the table, blood rivuleting over the edge and pooling on the floor.

  Lil laughed. It echoed through the room, and came back sounding more like a caw, like an animal. It startled me and seemed to startle her, too; she went pale, and stared up at the ceiling.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. Don’t make it real.”

  A howl sounded.

  I knew that noise. Not quite wolf, not quite a human cry. I’d heard it before, though I didn’t know where. I knew, though, it meant bad things. Ice gathered in my veins as another call went up, then another, until it became a chorus. Shrieks, screams, wavering yips with a sort of musical quality to them.

  “The wolf?” I asked.

  Lil’s eyes darted around. “Keep the walls strong and solid.”

  “What’s that moither?” Aelfur belted, standing, his hands dripping blood.

  “Quiet, you brute,” Lil snapped, standing as well. “Stay quiet and we might be safe.”

  “Pert’ll wench,” Aelfur roared. He leapt onto the table, sliding a little, “Don’t tell me wharran do!”

  The howl rose in volume, so loud and so s
hrill it felt like something sharp in my head.

  “That did it. Logan,” Lil grabbed at my arm. “Fix them. They can’t be tired. We might need them.” She gazed around the hall. “There are, what, maybe fifteen men? Can you double that? Send them out to stand around the keep.”

  “I . . .” I looked at my bleary-eyed Saxons surrounding us at the table. “I guess.”

  “Give them good armor, too. Not these bear skins. They need something that won’t be pricked.” The way Lil was talking—fast, frantically—scared me more, almost, than the thrill of howls outside. They were getting closer. “Now, Logan,” she shouted. “Now, before they get here!”

  The ground was shaking a little. I don’t know if I was making it shake, or if something else was shaking it. My knees were trembling. Those howls stole energy from my body.

  I closed my eyes tight and made Aelfur wake up, sent hot blood through his veins, made him rosy and roaring. I needed his band to be fifty, now. Fifty men with matted hair, flea bites, and frostbitten cheeks. And they wore . . . they wore . . .

  They were covered from head to toe in thick steel, curved and joined with flexible steel-linked mail.

  Armor, I thought. Too derivative. The words in my head came in Lil’s voice.

  So . . . I thought. So, armor. With slits for the eyes and muzzles for the mouth and nose to fit into. Muzzles that concentrated their breath and voice into roars louder than the howls could match. Roaring helmets.

  And in their hands . . . weapons. Not swords or maces or axes—balls of pure energy. Sparkling collections of light that were cold until they are thrown. And then when they made contact, they blasted enough fire to make moon-craters.

  They had hollow tubes with wicks at the end that turn breath to flame, like a dragon’s blown fire.

  They had springs in their boots that could send a man ten yards forward with each step.

  I opened my eyes and there they were, all around me: gleaming, terrifying in their muzzled metal masks with demonic eye-slits, each clutching their fire-tubes, each with a quiver of crater-balls.

  I turned to Aelfur, still there at the head of the table, and recognizable as tallest.