by Tiffany Tsao
She heard a loud knocking on the door, followed by a bark: “Police! Open up!”
With a groan, a chunk of plaster detached itself from the ceiling and plummeted to the carpet, narrowly missing the One.
“Ann, I’m leaving now,” warned the One, at the same time extending a hand towards her.
In response, Ann’s mother screamed and picked up the scissors.
But Ann wrenched the scissors away.
Don’t, she pleaded suddenly with her younger self. You don’t have to.
Yet the self-hatred and anger continued to surge within her, on the verge of exploding into a deadly flash of searing heat and light. And it was then that her body converted it—into an energy blacker and harder and icier than ever before, giving rise to almost unbearable levels of discipline and restraint. The hand with the scissors swung up and pierced her right eye. She felt nothing. And then she felt unimaginable pain. But the energy was in full swing now, driving her muscles and motions to complete the act that was the most fitting response to her rage at herself.
There was a twist and a flick, and something came away with a sickeningly mundane pop—like that of a suction cup detaching from glass. And she pressed the something into her mother’s hand. There was screaming. And wetness. Everything was wet.
“You won’t find me, Mama. You won’t.”
The door gave way. The ceiling caved in. A hand grasped hers.
And then there was nothing.
Ann knew what would happen next. This was the part where she would wake up in the One’s arms, where she was supposed to be. The physical wounds would heal. Her new life would start. Sure enough, there was the One now, calling her to consciousness: “Ann? Ann?”
She opened her eyes. Eye. But there was no One in sight.
Where was she?
CHAPTER 17
“Ann! You’re alive! You’re alive!”
Murgatroyd’s voice was coming from somewhere behind her, and even though her immediate impulse was to sit up and turn around, Ann found she couldn’t. The facts of her situation impressed themselves upon her with surprising speed. She was lying on her side. Her hands were bound together, as were her legs. And mere millimetres from the tip of her nose was a wooden wall, painted yellow and orange and blue. She scooted herself backwards a little and saw that the orange and blue splotches were rows of flowers, obviously done by hand—yolk-coloured circles fringed with fat turquoise petals, fairly uniform in size and spacing, yet irregular despite the artist’s best attempts. She heard Murgatroyd again.
“Ann! Are you okay? Say something!”
“I’m fine,” she answered, her voice coming out in a slow croak. “What happened?”
“We’ve been kidnapped!”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where are we?”
“We don’t know that either.”
A gravelly voice—female—gave this last answer. So they’ve captured Nutmeg too. Ann had just started to scoot backwards again with the goal of eventually turning herself around, when Nutmeg spoke once more.
“Stop! You’ll fall off!”
Just in time, Ann caught herself from sliding over the sudden drop. With a heave, she flipped herself onto her back, then onto her other side so she was facing outwards, away from the wall, which turned out not to be a wall at all, but the solid backrest of the bench where she had been placed.
But is it a bench? she wondered as, with effort, she swung her legs over the side, planted them on the floor, and raised herself into an upright position. It couldn’t be anything else—wooden, rectangular, with armrests on either end. Yet in some respects, it was as if it were trying to be a sofa: the floral pattern painted on it suggested upholstery fabric; the backrest was composed of three separate panels, not unlike sofa pillows; and the armrests were solid and fat.
She looked around. The whole living room had the same peculiar quality about it—as if everything in it apart from Murgatroyd, Nutmeg, and herself was endeavouring to be something it actually wasn’t. The armchairs on either side of her, where Murgatroyd and Nutmeg sat, trussed hand and foot like herself, were lumpy and misshapen, covered in a thin fabric that looked like it had been cut from a bed sheet. The rectangular rug in the centre of the room was made of the same material as well: a flimsy, faded red cotton on which a vaguely Persian-carpetish design had been penned in black and purple and royal blue, with the edges on the shorter ends cut and knotted to resemble tasselled fringes. On the rug stood a large coffee table, imperfectly sanded, unevenly stained, and slightly more parallelogram than square, and on the table’s surface were three books in a stack, each one bound in brown paper and bearing the title My Proper Life—volumes one, two, and three—in large shaky letters on its cover and spine. Next to these books were a purple teapot and four cups of the same shade, all lacking the perfectly smooth roundedness of dishware proper, all tangibly “off,” like everything else.
Suddenly Ann reeled as the trauma of reliving her terrible departure from the Known World reasserted itself, flooding her senses once more as if gushing from a rupture. She tipped herself sideways again, rested her head against the armrest, and closed her eye.
“Ann, what’s wrong?” she heard Murgatroyd exclaim in panic. “Nutmeg, what’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” replied Nutmeg. “Perhaps they gave her more of whatever they gave us.”
“Ann!” cried Murgatroyd again. “You have to wake up! You have to get us out of here!”
Ann drove her temple farther into the hard yellow edge of the bench. “I can’t,” she mumbled.
“Yes, you can,” urged Murgatroyd. “You’re Ann! You can do anything!”
Ann shut her eye even more tightly and burrowed farther into the unyielding surface. “No,” she sighed, the words escaping her like air from a balloon. “Not right now.”
Murgatroyd was bewildered. He had never seen Ann like this. What had they done to her? Then, from somewhere beyond the room, he heard footsteps and the low murmur of voices. They grew louder.
“Ann, please!” he yelped, his voice distorted by terror. “They’re coming! Do something!” He turned to Nutmeg. “She always does something,” he said, more to assure himself than her.
Nutmeg looked pityingly at Ann. Then in a tone of gentle admonishment, she said, “Murgatroyd, look at her. Leave her alone.”
Chastened, he fell silent—and remained so, even as somewhere behind him, a door handle turned, then rattled furiously, as if it were broken and someone were trying to get it to work. Then he heard the thud of a shoulder being shoved against wood, followed by a sudden creak of hinges and someone stumbling into the room. Then the rustling of multiple bodies and pairs of feet.
Ann forced herself to open her eye and sit upright, and Murgatroyd watched a group of eight people silently arrange themselves before the living room set like tourists at a zoo exhibit. Among them was Pierre, his abodemate, but the others he didn’t recognize. Then he caught a glimpse of another familiar figure standing at the very back, shoulders hunched as if to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. Could it be?
“Benn?”
Murgatroyd was speechless. Nutmeg was the one who’d uttered the name. He saw the figure duck his head and redden before shuffling forward.
“Benn, who are these people?” asked Nutmeg. “And where are we? Silence doesn’t work here. What’s going on?”
“It’s all right,” Benn said soothingly. Murgatroyd noticed he was speaking only to her. “Everything will be fine. We’ll be going home soon.”
“I don’t understand,” said Nutmeg.
“You aren’t meant to be here. They were supposed to stay in Flee Town, not come to our settlement.” By “they,” Benn evidently meant Murgatroyd and Ann. “Then you came across the body, and they found your notebook . . . but don’t worry. We’ll sort everything out.”
Murgatroyd tried to speak again, to communicate his outrage, his disappointment, his disgus
t, but again no words would come. He glanced at Ann in anticipation of the invective that would pour from her lips, but instead she stared dully ahead and said not a word. It was as if something inside her had broken.
Someone else in the group cleared his throat—a tall man in a rumpled navy-blue suit. As he stepped forward, Benn stepped hastily back. From the way the others acted as well, spines straightening, heads turning, the man was obviously in a position of authority. Yet there was something unsettling about him that made Murgatroyd squirm inwardly in discomfort. It was the same quality that afflicted all the objects in the room—an air of strenuous impersonation. The chairs, the rug, the coffee table, the tea set—all were pretending to be something they could never be. The same went for the man.
He should have been handsome. Everything about him bespoke health and vigour, from his athletic build to his regular features, from his pleasant smile to his clear blue eyes. Even his hair—effortlessly tidy and parted to the side—emanated robustness. He reminded Murgatroyd of a travel poster for Norway or an advertisement for snow gear. And yet there still lingered about him an aura of fraudulence, as if the features, for all their manly appearance, were at their base infantile, blighted with an irreversible prematurity, and there was nothing that could be done to grow them into proper adulthood.
The man turned slightly to his right and addressed Murgatroyd specifically. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last,” he intoned ponderously, as if addressing an important figure of state. Reaching for Murgatroyd’s right hand, which was tied to Murgatroyd’s left, he clasped it in a genial handshake. “I’ve heard so much about you from Pierre.”
The same childishness that afflicted his person was also present in his voice, and even the gravity of his words and the smoothness with which he uttered them couldn’t mask it entirely. He continued with the same formality, and Murgatroyd had the distinct impression of being spoken to by a small boy trying to convince his grown-up audience that he was not seven, but forty-five.
“I apologize for any discomfort or inconvenience my colleagues may have put you through, but it could hardly be helped.”
Suddenly Murgatroyd heard Ann gasp.
“Hans?” she murmured. “Hans Andersen?”
The most awful grin spread across the man’s face.
“You kn-know him?” stammered Murgatroyd.
“The first murder victim,” muttered Ann. She was obviously still not herself, but she was struggling to get out of it now, straining against whatever seemed to be incapacitating her in an effort to make sense of it all.
“Just Hans these days,” said the man, addressing Ann. “I’ve never been too fond of the full name the Other gave me.” He gestured at the three books on the coffee table. “Anyway, since I’ve taken to writing about life as it should be, having the same name as a writer of fairy tales doesn’t seem appropriate.”
“But we found your body,” said Ann. “With knife wounds. Someone cut your throat . . .”
“I did,” said Hans, the grin still plastered on his face. “I cut my throat.”
Ann frowned. “I don’t understand . . .”
“You really aren’t in your usual tip-top shape, are you?” he purred. “Then again, I should be more precise: I cut someone else’s throat, and you all thought that someone was me.” He giggled, as someone might after revealing the secret behind a good prank. “Clever, wasn’t it?”
Murgatroyd felt the blood draining from his face. “Whose throat?” he asked.
“Oh, just some settler,” said Hans with a shrug of his shoulders. “In Tunisia-Bathtub. I forget his name. But he was perfect. Just the person I’d been looking for. My height. My build. Same hair and eye colour. That nose, though. All wrong. It had to go.”
Nose sliced off. Advanced decomposition. The details Ann had read in the report came flooding back to her now.
“Lived all by himself too, with no one to miss him. And nobody did. But people missed me. Eventually.” He stroked his chin. “Two and a half months. That was how long it took after I went missing for my fellow Questians to find me . . . what was left.”
Ann recalled more of the report included in Hans’s file: Failed to show up for his appointment at the Compendium at the designated time. Three weeks later, a search party was sent out.
“‘Three weeks later, a search party was sent out,’” said Hans, echoing Ann’s thoughts. Ann looked sharply at him, and he smiled. “I read the report as well. Don’t you think that’s a rather long time for one’s friends—one’s adopted family, if one really thinks about it—to let elapse before trying to figure out what happened?”
The word elapse he stressed, as if particularly proud of being able to use it correctly in a sentence.
“What do you think, Murgatroyd?” he asked, turning away from Ann.
“Erh. Yes?” squeaked Murgatroyd, truthful as always.
“You know very well,” said Ann, “that the conditions of being on the Quest are such that people frequently absent themselves without explanation for long periods of time. If we were to go hunting for someone every time they were late in turning up for an appointment or hadn’t been seen for a few days, we’d be wasting all our time on completely unnecessary—”
“But it was necessary in my case, wasn’t it?” Hans broke in. “I was dead.”
Ann gazed at him. “No,” she observed. “Unfortunately, you weren’t.”
Hans walked over to Ann and punched her in the face.
Murgatroyd and Nutmeg screamed, and even the rest of their captors looked startled. One of them came forward—a severe but matronly woman wearing glasses and a grey cardigan.
“Shhh, shhh,” she said, rubbing Hans on the back. “There’s no use in getting angry. Remember how we control ourselves?”
Hans took a deep breath and rubbed his knuckles. “One . . . two . . . three . . . ,” he counted.
In the meantime, blood streamed from Ann’s nose and trickled down her chin.
By the time Hans reached ten, he had returned to a somewhat placid state. “See what you made me do?” he murmured in dismay, looking at the blood dripping onto the bench. Producing a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he began to wipe up the spill. “I’m already dissatisfied with this sofa as it is. You are too, I’m sure. I ran out of foam and fabric, you see. It’s difficult to recreate Known World objects with limited access to Known World materials.”
Hans leaned over her to mop up the blood on her other side.
“But on the whole, my craftsmanship is quite good, don’t you think?” He motioned at their surroundings.
There was a lengthy silence.
“Traitors,” Ann finally hissed, her nose still swollen and dripping, the word slithering off her tongue and coiling in the air.
Hans frowned. “I wouldn’t call us traitors. Enlightened, maybe. But traitors? That’s hardly fair.”
“What else should you call people who murder and capture their own colleagues?” asked Ann.
Murgatroyd gasped. “They killed Nimali?”
“And Jonathan.”
Murgatroyd gasped again. “Ann, are all of them . . .”
“Questians,” she confirmed, letting her eye drift across each and every one of them like a searchlight. “You know Pierre, of course. The others are retirees, from long before your time.”
“Retirees?” repeated Murgatroyd with some incredulity. Most of the people standing before them were in their fifties at most.
“Retired, rather,” amended Ann. “By Yusuf and the One. Deemed too mentally and emotionally unstable to continue with Quest duties.”
“And whose fault was that?” snarled a beanpole of a man with red hair and bloodhound jowls. “You try being left in a strange forest in a strange Territory all alone for a few days at the age of six and see for yourself what kind of state you’re in afterwards.”
“Martin Camberwell,” said Ann to Murgatroyd, as if Martin hadn’t spoken at all. “The Quest’s first recruit. Entrusted to the O
ther, unfortunately.”
Martin sputtered. “‘Unfortunately’!? Unfortunate doesn’t even begin to describe it! That man—”
The matronly woman glided to Martin’s side. “Shhh,” she said, rubbing his back as she had done with Hans. “There, there now. Shhh.” Martin quieted down.
“Yusuf really was right, then,” said Nutmeg mournfully. “The Quest is bad.”
“They’re not the Quest,” Ann growled.
Nutmeg looked puzzled. “But you just said they were.”
Hans intervened. “We used to be. Not anymore. We’re the Anti-Quest.”
Murgatroyd’s eyes widened. “The Anti-Quest? What’s that?”
“It’s very simple, really,” said Hans. “Tell me, Murgatroyd. How would you describe the Quest?”
The words that had been drilled into Murgatroyd from his first day as a Questian leapt immediately to his tongue. “We’re an organization dedicated to exploring the uncharted Territories of the More Known World and disseminating knowledge about them.”
“Good,” said Hans with a nod. “So, all that? Everything you just said? We’re against that. Anti-Quest. And do you know why?”
“Because you’re a bunch of assholes?” Ann volunteered.
For a moment, Hans looked as if he were going to punch Ann a second time, but instead, he counted silently to himself.
“Very good,” the matronly woman murmured from where she was standing.