Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  I turned. And ran.

  I could feel it swilling after me—the dark. There was a smell: must. And there was a chill: warmth removed, light removed. Something solid, stopping it.

  “Run!” She cackled and then groaned horribly like something had hit her hard, taking her breath.

  Jenny. What was happening to her? I wanted to know . . . and I hurt, knowing. But I didn’t look back. I ran, keeping myself fixed on the two figures in front of me. Golden hair, black-beetle coat.

  “Lil!” I screamed.

  They turned, and Eap whirled around, took two stumbling steps away. “Back!” He roared.

  His great, loose coat disappeared into a hundred shapes—black birds, cawing, flying straight at the shadows. “Back, Grimwoods! You do not belong here! Children, do not touch the shadows! Do not allow them to touch you!”

  There was a wail. No, a distant howl. It was answered with a dozen, full-throated howls. I heard them. I could see them in my mind: the dark, ragged, white-eyed faces. The muzzles, curved with teeth.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Jenny was limping after me. She groaned and hunched over, putting all fours on the ground. There were sickening cracks, like a series of badly-popped knuckles, and her body changed—lengthened. Back legs bent, neck stretched, face thinned out into a muzzle. She lifted her head and screamed. The pain in it was like needles on my skin—it changed midway to a howl.

  “Boy! Boy!” Eap’s voice seemed to come through a fog. “The ravens will only hold them for a moment. I’m a tired old man. They know my every move, my every thought. You must make us a way to escape! Now, boy! We need something to reinforce! Something fresh and unexpected! Tell, and I shall tell with you.”

  “Logan!” Lil called at the same time. “The Whippoorwill! The Whippoorwill! I’ll make it with you!”

  I was still running. The air choking my lungs. But the image came to my mind even as I ran: the over-tricked steampunk airship I’d been writing stories about all year. The Whippoorwill, I called it—both the story and the airship.

  Lil made fun of it, calling it “derivative” and “overdone,” but I had every detail memorized, and in spite of herself, she’d loved some of the descriptions I’d made. She’d drawn sketches of it, floorplans of it.

  And there it formed above us, a dark blotch in the sky smoothing to its elegant anvil-shape, the huge leather-patch balloon blimp gaping over it, the giant whirring fans at the stern powering it.

  A spindly ladder swung down, fluttering in the wind, and piled slack on the ground.

  “Don’t wait! Don’t stop!” Eap called. “Run!” A hundred flapping shapes formed around him, and his coat solidified, spread, like the membranes of a bat or a horribly misshapen flying-squirrel. And he took off suddenly. His cat leapt onto his head, clutching the crown of his hat with its furry arms, bristling tail waving behind like a plume. Lil ran after him. I closed my eyes and ran as fast as I could, ran my legs off toward my wonderful, sturdy, sharp-prowed, cannon-loaded, coal-driven, terribly fast airship with the gun capacity of the Black Pearl and the speed of a peregrine falcon. That tagline—Lil had mocked it, too. But I’d kept it. I liked it. Lil might care about tropes and originality, but stories, for me, were pure joy. I felt a little of it now, the joy. Felt it, clung to it, hung on to it. I fed on it, letting it give my legs more speed.

  Lil and I grabbed onto the ladder and scrambled up. The shadows had advanced. They were only a few yards away. We’d never get up that ladder in time. “Up!” I screamed. “Up!”

  The ladder twitched and rose up into the air, slowly, with jerks at first, and then more quickly as I imagined my hundred-man crew flying from their various tasks to come help. We soared up into the air. I held onto the rungs. Under us, the darkness spread under the blimp. Spread, and began to rise.

  Chapter 12

  My outstretched hands grasped wood. I opened my eyes and looked up. The enormous billow of patched-leather balloon blocked the sky completely.

  I looked down and my stomach swooped. The landscape, so far below, was quickly turning black. Like a tide moving in, the grey town, with all its ruined buildings, was being overtaken completely by the trees. Dark bristles of trees cresting the hill, then sweeping down toward the river.

  “Don’t look down,” Eap said. “We are above it now, Logan. Move us quickly away.” He pointed.

  I looked up at my balloon. I tried to think of it moving fast, streaming in the direction Eap had indicated.

  But that’s not how the Whippoorwill works. There’s a crew. There’s people running turbines, feeding coal into a giant burner.

  I turned toward the long wooden expanse of the deck, bordered by graceful curves of carved wooden balustrades. “Coal boys,” I said.

  Nothing happened. Empty. No people.

  I walked to the center of the long deck and rapped on a trap door there.

  It opened and a handful of grinning, smoke-streaked faces greeted me. “Hello, Captain!” one of them said cheerfully.

  My coal boys. It was completely disorienting, seeing my own people. Jake and Egar and Thom and Suzy Slasher. Judy and Mellik. I’d written scenes of their rowdy adventures on the Whippoorwill. And there they were, crowded into the deck below me.

  Judy grasped my wrist, nearly twisting it, and the muscles shifted under her black skin as she helped me up over the side and into the curve of the prow.

  “Close call, Cap’n,” Jake said, touching the tuft of dark curls hanging over his eyes. “Outran those blokes good, y’did.”

  I heard Lil snort. She was kneeling there, next to me, arms folded, and a permanent sneer on her face.

  I sneered back at her and got to my feet. “Full burn,” I told them. “Turbines at maximum speed. Going . . .” I hesitated. Did anybody know which direction was which? “That way,” I pointed.

  Obediently, they scrambled off—Suzy toward the pilot’s cabin, Jake toward the stern where the great rotating blades of the turbines were managed. The rest popped back below, slamming the door closed behind them.

  We got going faster. I felt the strength of the displaced wind and the landscape scrolled under us.

  And then I saw it . . . the edge.

  A bare, stark difference. Black, then streaks and runnels of black, curling into misty white, then nothing. Just whiteness. No heaven. No earth. Just a mist like a thick fog.

  It made my heart pound. I wanted land. I wanted ground under me. What would happen when the Whippoorwill moved into the great cloud of nothing? Would it disappear, too?

  “Well.” Eap stood at the very tip of the prow, hands white-knuckled and grasping the rail. He was looking down. “Well, there’s the end of Grandeur.”

  I ran to the edge and looked down, too, watching as everything solid turned to darkness below us. The town was falling. There was a rumble as buildings broke up and fell in showers of brick, stone, wood, mud. A swarm of roots took over the road.

  “Crap,” Lil muttered. “Crap, crap, crap.”

  “It was bound to happen sometime,” Eap replied. “I admit, hiding in that hovel, it was misery. I may have you two to thank.” He turned and gazed at Lil. “And I’ll thank you properly once I’m a blyk.”

  “Shut up,” Lil said, grabbing her braids. “What do we do now?”

  “D’ye need something miss?” one of the burly engine men bent over her and offered a hand.

  She batted it away.

  “Get rid of them,” Eap muttered to me. “We don’t want to talk in front of them.”

  “I don’t— “I looked around at the sea of attentive faces crowded around us on deck. They had come out to see what all the noise was about, the crumbling town. My curious Whippoorwill crew. There were boys who must have been off-shift; sleepy, dusky with coal-dust. There were girls from the kitchen, a couple men who traded out running the turbines. And there was Corinne, the head cook, her dishwater-red face wearing a look of skeptical concern. “Cap’n,” she growled. She tossed her head in Eap’s direction. “What�
��s all this?”

  “You never know . . . who might be planted,” Eap murmured, finishing his thought.

  “I know them all. I’ve . . . made them all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Fear spiked through me. I remembered my Saxons, what had happened . . . a double-full table, and how it had been when they suddenly turned on me.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, thank you,” I said to the boys, the enginemen, the half-dozen domestic girls, the crowd of dozens that had come out of the cabins and engine rooms to see what was going on. “You shall have an extra measure of wine tonight with dinner. We’re going full steam.”

  “Full steam where?” Jerol, my second engine-man called, hesitating before he descended into the hatch that lead below.

  “Ahead,” I answered after a moment.

  “North,” Eap put in.

  I gave him a look. He shrugged.

  “North.” I pointed in the direction Eap had said to go. Into the mists. “Thank you.”

  Jerol looked from me to Eap, then back to me again. He gave me an abrupt nod and climbed down into the engine room. The coal boys followed. The kitchen girls flounced after Corinne, who swatted one upside the head when she turned to give me a flutter-eyed glance.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, striving to keep my face from going red.

  Eap gazed over the side. His expression was calm, but his knuckles were white as he gripped the rail. His body shuddered, and he fell to his knees.

  Lil and I glanced at each other. Guilt. Her. And me.

  We’d brought the blyks to Grandeur. Eap had said it existed, his hovel the last holdout, and now. It was all gone. Because of us. Because he’d risked himself to help us.

  “I’m sorry,” Lil said. It came out sounding cranky, petulant, rather than sincere. “We brought them there. Lo and me. Now your place is gone.”

  Eap stayed still for another long moment. Finally, he shook his head. “You two were just the last tap to the pendulum. And I had nothing real left there. A few books. That is all.” He tapped his breast pocket. “And a picture. Carried in my heart, head, and pocket, thankfully.”

  He leaned back, looking up at the sky. It was Hawaii-ocean blue, with cheerful fluffs of cloud. The round sun reminded me of a butterscotch candy. The air was sweet, tropical. I smelled coconuts.

  “What the hell,” I muttered.

  “They make the skies,” Eap said quietly.

  “Then they’re playing with us.”

  “Possibly. Don’t assume the worst. It’s a dangerous practice here.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Lil asked. “If the sky follows us . . . I mean, where are we going, anyway?”

  “Somewhere safe, until we can think how to collect Hans,” Eap said blandly.

  “You hate him.”

  “Hate is an awfully dirty word. You can’t always choose your allies. For a great long time, we’ve all avoided it—all of us here in the Caldera, worried about matching our wits to theirs. Silly of us, great tellers that we are. But we’ve all been grounded in their stories of wolves, rooks, and ravens.” He glanced up reflexively and sighed. He took off his hat. His broad forehead was creased where the brim had hugged it, and his black curls were damp with sweat, clinging to his cheekbones and neck. “We’ve been fools. When there were dozens of us, it would have been no contest. It’s sure we would have lost a few from our side, but . . .” he shrugged and laughed—a wild sound, cracking in the middle like a crow’s caw, “but when it comes to us, are there really sides, other than our own? That has always been their strangeness. Two, sharing a mind. Two, sharing a body. Two, forming a telling as if from one mind. But with the capacity of two great, dirty minds.”

  I waited a few moments. “The Grimms, you mean. And . . . before. You were saying . . . Do you mean the fairytale Grimms? As in the Grimm brothers?”

  “The gingerbread-witch, fatal-red-shoes, cat-who-ate-the-fat, Rapunzel-with-her-hundred-foot-tower Grimms,” Eap said. “Purveyors of romance and horror and harsh fables so that children don’t leave their mothers, and woods take over everything.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I burst out. “I . . . can’t.”

  He turned that baleful, hound-dog gaze on me. He watched me, brow furrowed, as if he were sizing me up. “Don’t tell me they haven’t crossed into your little town. The crust must be thin, indeed, where you and Lil reside, if Hans could speak to you so clearly. Surely, you’ve seen them— “

  “We have.” Lil looked at me, then away, then back, chewing her lip. It was an odd expression to see on her face—worry. Uneasiness. Not Lil at all.

  “They were tormenting him. Following him in the streets. Taking over peoples’ faces. They were making him seem crazy to everybody. They were doing it on purpose, Logan. They wanted you to . . . they . . . your Dad, and all that, Logan . . .”

  “And thus you brought him here,” Eap said, clipping his consonants so that each word resonated distinctly, “to save him.” His face suddenly softened. “Foolish. But perhaps not so selfish.” He went to the rail and leaned on it, his back to us.

  Lil turned to me. She was angry, I could tell. Feeling wronged. “You needed to see it was real, Logan.” Her voice shook. “You needed to know you’re not crazy. This world . . . nothing’s real, Logan, nothing except . . .”

  “Except what’s told,” Eap finished for her, his back still turned to us.

  “No,” I said. “Things are real.” My mind was whirring again. I sat heavily in the curve of the sky boat’s prow. “They are. There are things that can really hurt, or be hurt. You can’t say it’s not real when someone . . . when someone . . .” I closed my eyes tight, willing the memory from surfacing in my mind. My father, taking me by the throat. Pushing me under the bathwater. The ripples, the expression that distorted his face as I looked up at him through the water, bubbles frothing from my nose and mouth, clouding the surface until things dimmed, until the awful scream and my mother tore in, fought him off, and grabbed me by the collar. The terrifying, sucking feeling of my breaths. The water, tinged with pink, pouring from my mouth and puddling on the floor.

  “People are real.” Lil’s voice seeped into my thoughts. “Tellers are real. And what they tell, Logan, what we all see, what we all tell each other to see, over and over, and see again where we expect to see it, how we expect to see it—those things become firm. They don’t change because when we all look, we all expect to see it. Reinforced a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times. Over millions of years. The land, the air . . . buildings, people. Elements. The earth itself, Logan. The earth itself is a teller. It tells what’s under it, what’s over it. We tell, too.”

  “Down here,” I said slowly, trying to reform my thoughts. “Down here, down here in the . . . the Caldera, what you tell is real.”

  “Not just down here, son.” Eap turned. “Not just down here. Things are firmer above, but only because they’ve been told so many times. By so many people. And assumed, presumed, to be solid and unchangeable. But you have changed things, even above, have you not? And you have seen things change.”

  I stared at him. At Lil. Both of them, those serious expressions on their faces.

  “No,” I said. “No. You’re not going to talk me into being crazy, Lil.” I turned away from her and leaned against the curved, wooden side of the hull.

  The air was nice. I could make it nicer—scented like jasmine, perhaps.

  I could make it warmer, too, warm like a tropical island, with the sound of large waves crashing up against stone.

  I opened my eyes and turned, and Lil’s face filled my vision. She was frowning. The v-shaped gathers between her brows told me she was annoyed, frustrated. “Come on,” she snapped. “Don’t be a dumb-butt. Stand up. We’re not safe right now.”

  “We are in the mists,” Eap said. “We can make food at our leisure. The Grimwoods have not yet found a way to extend this far into the sky. We could take advantage of some rest, and drink, perhaps.�
�

  “No drink,” Lil growled.

  “Logan.” Eap jerked his head in the direction of the expanse of cabins—gleaming maple wood, with delicate-arched roofs. “Why don’t you give me a tour of this odd and lovely contraption you and Lil have made? And then we’ll consider supper. Lil, collect yourself, please, and join us when you’re ready.”

  Collect yourself, please. Just like that? He didn’t know Lil.

  “The cabins?” Eap prompted, taking a firm grip on my elbow.

  Right. The cabins.

  Inside each one, there would be a canopied bed, gold-foil wallpaper; a plush velvet cushion to sit on and look out of the bay windows that displayed a view of endless sky and the rolling dark landscape under us.

  Adjacent to the cabins would be a grand saloon with banks of windows coming to a point in front, providing an uninterrupted, hundred-eighty-degree view of sky and landscape. And through the saloon, if you continued down the ship, we would find ourselves in the kitchen—enormous, stocked with old wines and new meat and every supply one would need to live for months, and a dozen women scattering at the beck and call of my head cook.

  Corinne. She’d been one of the ones to come out to greet me, of course. Large, in charge, frizzy-haired, red-faced, and good at keeping her little dimpled kitchen girls in line. She’d probably make us eat kidney pie and a pile of greens dripping with butter and garlic and not let us leave until we’d consumed half our weight in blancmange for afters.

  We’d continue through the kitchen’s back door and we should find ourselves in the helm room with Marco, the quiet, stubborn pilot. He’d give us a full tour, take us below to see the boilers, the pistons, and all those engineers and coal-boys who spent ten hour shifts sweating in the dark to keep her going. He’d probably even take us to the very stern of the ship, so we could watch the pistons and blades of steam-turned paddles jutting out of the back, each blade the size of a semi-truck, turning so fast they were all a blur.