A Rag Doll's Guide to Here and There

by Richard Roberts

  She answered in an equally calm, distant voice. So, a level of unhappiness greater than what she was willing to casually admit, but not so great that she couldn’t control it. “It’s not that. I wish I missed him more. I wish that wasn’t so obviously the right thing to do for him. He belongs here, as a dragon, not with me. I’m not good with this heroine thing of having temporary companions.” Shifting her arms up, she wrapped them around my waist instead of my legs, squeezing me against her neck with her cheek pressed to the back of my head. “I want more friendships like you and I have, where we belong together.”

  “Oh, my,” were the only words I could get out.

  Sandy’s head twitched to one side. Then I heard it too. Faint music.

  She smirked, definitely amused and not surprised. “Someone is impatient.”

  “Or pleased with you,” I suggested.

  Her eyes unfocused. “Very possible. Witches love to test people. It’s one witchy thing that I’ve never gotten into.”

  Hmmm. One quick memory search (alas, there was so little to search) later, I agreed, “I can’t recall you doing so. Of course, you’ve been a bit busy. Testing people sounds like something you do when you have leisure and control over the situation. You’ve been in adaptation and conflict resolution modes since you arrived.”

  Sandy laughed, gave me another firm, squeezy hug, and slid me up onto her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go find our hostess.”

  She headed back, the opposite direction from Pincushion. Let’s see. Turn right, then right, then left, then left again…

  Yes, the maze had changed.

  The changes got more obvious. The maze dipped, stairs leading down the slope. Then we passed a hallway without mirrors, just wooden paneling like in a real building. The mirrors came back for a while, until we hit a short break with stone walls and an actual roof. One of the stone bricks had fallen out, revealing that it was just a thin surfacing, with the same thorn vines behind it.

  We couldn’t directly follow the music, but it got louder as we spiraled around, chasing the source. The tune this time was ponderous, more solemn.

  Another new feature. The walls turned to tile, not smooth like the floor but in ugly lumpy squares. A pair of double doors blocked the way, weird metal doors with small windows and metal push bars.

  Sandy pushed through, and into a room. A real room inside a building, with a ceiling. When the doors slammed shut behind us, she didn’t jump, but I did!

  Clamping tightly hold of her shoulder to make sure I didn’t fall off left me looking behind us. The doors had disappeared, replaced by a wall of grainy stuff. Painted cement? The light of the maze abandoned us in here, replaced by gloomy shadows that were nowhere near actual darkness. I couldn’t make out the color of the paint. Maybe red, maybe brown. It was full of stained, smeared posters, bookshelves with ripped up books, and cork boards holding pictures that were just black crayon shapes like badly scribbled humans.

  I twisted around. The rest of the room was no less weird. Chairs fused with desks were arranged in rows, all forming a neat cube except for one spot where a desk had fallen over, scattering those around it. A huge, nasty, splattered smear of black defaced the tiles in that area.

  At the far end of the room, near another metal door with a window, sat a much bigger desk. Something wooden, halfway between a marionette and a china doll, lay slumped over its surface. It wore a suit of clothing like a human, but was even bigger. The whole room was huge, built to a human scale. Sandy could have fit easily in any of those chairs, although “comfortably” was not a word that matched them.

  The big desk wasn’t the only one occupied. Cardboard cutouts with skeletons painted on them filled several. A white sheet with eye holes cut in it sat upright in a chair near the toppled one, except it didn’t sit, it hung from a thin, hard-to-see wire from the ceiling.

  And oh my, was this place a mess! Dirt everywhere, stains, and someone had invited an entire of family of spiders to have a party. They’d knitted cobwebs in everything resembling a corner. The room smelled terrible. Just nasty and filthy and musty.

  Music swelled. The ringing, feminine voice came back.

  All the maze was a test

  Now you’re home, you can rest

  In the shadows where you belong

  Your heart skips a beat

  For it’s only dying meat

  In the shadows where you belong

  Sandy walked up the row, perfectly relaxed. Stopping by one of the cardboard cutouts, she gave it a finger poke and asked, “Hello? Are you alive?”

  I crawled farther up her shoulder, and adjusted my glasses as I peered at its badly painted front. More a shape depicted in white and black streaks than anything else, really. “I doubt it, Miss Sandy. Even if it talks, I suspect it would only be a spell.”

  She lifted the cutout with one finger, then let it slip free so it rattled back into its place. “What’s the difference? Everything is alive Somewhere.”

  I shook my head urgently. “Oh, no, Miss Sandy, not at all. It’s easy for you, but only humans can readily make life. Everyone else who does it, does it according to a system humans laid down. For example, take Girl Running. If I were to paint someone like her, it would just be a picture. Only Kaleidoscope Eyes could do it, because the human Dangerous Daniella made her for that purpose. I believe all clothlings are sewn by bundlish somewhere, but they can’t just make us any time and place they feel like it.”

  She wandered up to the bigger desk, and rubbed a finger against the head of the thing lying face down over it. If it had ever been a real marionette, which I doubted, it was dead now. The wood had rotted so badly, her finger dug a deep groove with every stroke, and came up covered in sawdust.

  The music had never stopped, and neither had the singer.

  And the days drag along as the ages pass by

  In the halls of long forgotten lore

  Now you’re back in the shadows where you belong

  And you’ll stay with us forevermore

  Sandy ignored it, so I did, too. Instead she pointed out, “But Pincushion made those wooden servants.”

  I beamed. This was a fun intellectual puzzle. “Yes, but they only did exactly what she told them to. Most likely a witch could make any of these things speak, but they would be following her script, saying only what she told them to say without actually hearing or seeing you.”

  “People do that to me all the time back home,” said Sandy, her lips pursed in unpleasant recollection. After a couple of seconds of that, she added more thoughtfully, “I suppose both Here and There, even if someone doesn’t obey me, whatever a human says is the most important thing they could possibly hear. I’m enjoying that. I feel special Here. And There.”

  I stared up into her tightly smiling face, and said with solemn, even cold sincerity, “If you are not special Elsewhere, I literally cannot imagine what that world is like.”

  That produced a giggle and got me another hug. Setting the food box on the desk, Sandy waved a hand around. “Well, for starters, it looks a lot like this. Belle Tower must know I’m having problems at school. Do you think she can read minds?”

  Another puzzle! I rubbed the earpiece of my glasses. “I don’t know what a witch can and can’t do, exactly. How much does this look like your school?”

  She shook her head, then gave the room one more look around. “Not much. The rooms are wider and shorter than this.” Stepping to the door, she pushed it open, showing me the outside. “We don’t have all these lockers, either. Belle Tower has heard of schools, maybe even seen one, but she didn’t get this from my head.”

  There certainly were lockers, ugly metal cabinets lining a hall that bent right next to us and went on and on in both directions. Every once in a while, they paused for another door. The walls themselves were mottled, cobwebbed, and peeling. Here and there goop dripped from the soaring high ceilings.

  Sandy stepped around those puddles as she walked down the hall, with such confidence an
d direction I had to assume she knew where she was going. Perhaps schools were uniform in layout. That freed me up for important questions. “Is this what a human school is like? Presumably the real things are clean and not haunted. All I know from the word is that learning must go on in them.”

  One of the lockers slammed open in front of us. A cardboard cutout of a skeleton sprung out, extended on a stick. Sandy laughed, rolling her head back. She stepped around it with barely a pause in either step or conversation. “So much learning. Seven hour-long classes. Each of these rooms is dedicated to learning one thing, and you have a schedule to go into that room once a day for four months, until you’re full and they give you a new set of classes.”

  My eyes twitched and felt tight, trying to do the thing Sandy does where her eyes get wider. “That… sounds… amazing. I wish I could go to human school.” The foreboding music paused dramatically, and my awed whisper echoed in the momentarily quiet hall.

  That got another, quieter laugh. Sandy kept grinning as she said, “I like that part most of the time. Sometimes you get a boring teacher. The problem is the other students. There are a lot of mean kids in my school. Bullies. They’re good at hiding it from the teachers, too.”

  I frowned, tapping the centerpiece of my glasses, but… “I’m sorry, Miss Sandy. I don’t know where to begin thinking about what can be done to stop human bullies.”

  Her smile faded, replaced by a tight-lipped solemnity. She leaned her head to the side so it touched mine for a few seconds. “I’m not sure anything can be done in my case. Maybe I need to look for indirect solutions. At least I could free you from Pincushion. What a mean little monster you used to live with.”

  “She’s trying, Miss Sandy. She’s just limited.” Limited by Charity, in my opinion. The duties and the pain of being stuck full of pins were pushing Pincushion into bringing out her worst side.

  Something bumped against a door we were passing. Welcoming the distraction, we peered through the door’s window. A stuffed burlap mannequin like the biggest, worst-made clothling Anywhere stared back. Its scowling face had been drawn on a circle of paper and thumb-tacked to the head, it wore a pair of saggy overalls, and on the overalls were embroidered (badly) “CARSON DEATHBULB EVIL JANITOR.” It didn’t so much hold a mop with a pointy tip as the mop handle leaned against the dummy. Sure enough, after a couple of seconds the mop slipped and fell over, then the dummy fell on top of it.

  Shaking her head, Sandy kept going, until we reached a set of three double doors all packed next to each other, each one individually nearly twice Sandy’s height. Written in black goo on the floor in front of them was the word “DEATH.” Sandy stepped around the goo itself, but walked right through the word to push open a door and step outside.

  And you stare at your skin

  As it sags, withering

  In the shadows where you belong

  As your eyes go blind

  Are you lost, or just your mind?

  In the shad—

  The music stopped abruptly as the doors closed behind us. The silence had an almost physical weight.

  We weren’t back in the maze. A huge yard surrounded the school, ringed with a spiky metal fence barely visible in the choking mass of thorn vines. A badly broken stone path ran straight to a gate overgrown with more vines, enough that it would not be safe to touch. Clouds obscured most of the stars above us, although a crescent moon peeked through one gap.

  The yard had the usual There surfacing of grey dirt and dead grey grass. A smaller, pointed-roofed building sat to one side, or maybe just vines grown straight up and then bent in a way that they looked like they covered a building. A warped tree grew right up the front wall like a spire, an impression made further by the brass bell hung in a carved-out notch.

  Other than that, the yard contained wooden statues of human children. They certainly weren’t marionettes. Each one actually grew out of the ground, like a tree without conventional branches or leaves. Most of them had extended arms, frozen in the act of running toward the gate.

  We looked behind us. The school was still there, but planks nailed and chained in place covered the doors.

  Sandy walked slowly, cautiously up the path toward the nearest statue. A gust of wind moved the brass bell in the spire enough to produce a faint clonk, but it was the only sound louder than Sandy’s footsteps and her breathing.

  We got close enough for Sandy to touch the statue, but she didn’t even try. It hadn’t been carved to look like a human. The wood grain grew naturally, but in perfectly exact human contours. I could make out the billows of the statue’s skirt, look up the short sleeves of its shirt to where the wood-molded fabric met the wood-molded arm, and trace every tangle of its complicated human hair. The statue’s hair was wild, entwined as it was with a thorn vine that grew up out of the ground behind it. A loop wrapped around one angle, and the wooden human statue leaned forward as if tripped in mid-step, but also bent in a bow shape because the upper vine coiled three times around its neck, and ended tangled in wooden hair.

  The statue’s mouth, complete with neatly shaped teeth, hung permanently open in panic. One arm stretched to the limit, fingers spread, toward the front gate.

  I looked around. The next closest statue was posed falling forward, because three vines plunged through its back and out the middle of its chest. The dim light concealed details of the others, but most of them were visibly held by vines somehow. Two had reached the front gate, and were so mummified by vines I hadn’t spotted them as statues at all.

  Stone snapped. Several yards down the path, a vine shoved its way through the broken rubble, grabbed a rock, and looped around it into a tangled knot before going still.

  If Sandy were standing there, or the next one came up underneath her…

  Think this through. The previous displays had a completely different tone. The earlier ones could have been insincere and this one true? That wouldn’t make sense. This clearly was a build-up, but not a threat build-up. It was far too disjointed and sudden for that.

  “This is just a show,” said Sandy out loud.

  She swiveled in place, and walked off the path straight for the overgrown side building. Standing in front of the tree, she leaned in to address it with a warm smile. “It’s a very good show. You must be Belle Tower?”

  The bell in the tree gonged loudly as its trunk shifted forward. I’d heard that bell ringing in celebration when Sandy solved the illusion room, and the voice of the singer answered her. “By root and twig, childe, it took you long enough. What do you want?” Admittedly, in a much grumpier tone than the songs.

  Vegetation creaked. Vines retreated from the fence and gate, revealing the brightly lit mirror maze beyond. One by one, the human statues dissolved into sawdust.

  Sandy folded her arms across her chest, staring the grouchy tree in the eyes. “You know what I want. Training in witchcraft.”

  “Oh? Like what? Rootweaving? Maze design? Bah. I can’t teach you witching, and you can’t be tree ’cause you’re at least twelve already!” Belle Tower laughed like the wind in dead branches. Her body creaked as she turned her face away, and waved an arm. Standing up very straight, she’d looked a lot like a tree. Relaxed, her lower half hunched forward, arms like dead branches bent when not being used, pulled in close near her body. Her face bulged out of the rising trunk, a mass of knots and one pointy twig of a nose with a pair of dead leaves on the end. She shuffled toward the school entrance, although the building had already started folding up, revealing how thin the fake walls had been.

  Sandy’s arms tightened, and she squinted one eye while raising the other eyebrow. Her own voice remained light and amused. “Is this also a performance?”

  The witch’s bell rang loudly as she spun around, her dozens of root legs rippling like a skirt. She threw her arms wide, voice suddenly booming, melodic but not quite a song. “Leaf and log! Everything is a performance, childe! Small magics like your stabby little friend and I can do is nothing but bell
s and whistles.”

  Sure enough, smaller bells chimed, and a whistle cried out, its note descending and then swooping back up before it stopped.

  This had all been Sandy’s area of expertise, but now I raised a hand. “I’d like to know, please, what is the difference between small magic and big magic?”

  Music swelled around us, bouncy and energetic. Belle tower extended her arms, and a top hat poofed into existence in one, a wand in the other. The remaining human statues stopped dissolving, and bobbed up and down, dancing in their limited way. Rainbow smoke filled with sparkles trailed behind Belle Tower as she twirled along a line in front of us with remarkable agility, and began to sing.

  Magic’s my specialty

  Tricks what I do

  Flashing and fiery

  Awes the fools but won’t awe you

  I’m There’s dark witch kee—

  As loudly as I could, I interrupted, “Excuse me, yes, we’re clear on that part, but what is big magic? It’s something only humans can do, right?”

  The music ended in a mess of discordant notes. Actual thumps and crashes heralded the remains of the school collapsing in a heap. Several statues fell over. One made the whistling noise, then spat a tube-shaped instrument from its immobile mouth.

  The hat and wand disappeared into smoke. Glaring at me now, Belle Tower held up a finger. “Great magics are Human—intrinsic to each human individually. Your Sandy is a witch, no, the Witch, and will be a witch no matter what, or which. Yes, Pincushion took her hat. She and I can make lights and cause objects to move or speak as long as we feed them lines. It’s cheap trumpery, parlor tricks without the parlor. No one can take powerful magic, true magic, away from Sandy. Just as Princess Charity will be a princess even without the crown that makes her good at giving orders.”

  “I’ve given orders,” Sandy argued, then paused. Her face pinched up on one side again, and her tone grew thoughtful, maybe a touch anxious. “Or maybe what I actually did is… raise the dead, curse the librarians with exile—to help them, but still exile, and I transformed a dargon into a dragon, and cast two giant love spells. Love spells so big—”