by Rebecca Daff
Chris realized he was talking about the mirrored hills.
“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “But how can I get down?”
“You’re small. Maybe you could crawl down the bark like an ant.”
She looked down and everything started to spin. “It’s really far,” she said, steadying herself.
“That’s true,” said the vulture. “And there are toads down there that might eat you.”
“Yeah. Been there, done that,” she said.
He leaned closer as if he were about to tell her a secret. “You know, maybe you should wait here for a while. Just until one of your companions comes to help.”
“They couldn’t see me all the way—” She stopped herself. “How do you know about them?”
“Oh, you can see so much from up here.”
Looking around, all Chris saw was more and more leaves. “I can’t see anything.”
The vulture’s beak stretched into a grin. “You can if you want to. I have a way you can see far away while still in the safety of this tree. You can see anywhere, and anyone, you want. If you stay a while I can show you.”
Micah was probably awake by then. The Fly would be trying to tell him where she was. “I appreciate the offer, but I really need to find a way down.” She cautiously started to make her way down the length of the branch, crawling past the hooks of his talons.
“You should have just agreed,” he said.
When Chris opened her mouth to ask him what he meant, he opened his beak and spit a blue mist into her mouth. Her lungs seized. Coughing uncontrollably, she lost her grip on the bark, and the vulture scooped her up onto his talon and placed her back on a leaf. She sat there, struggling to catch her breath. Every time she tried to breathe in she started coughing all over again.
“Quit fighting it,” he said. “Accept the magic.” He retreated back into the shadows, joining his vulture brethren.
Chris doubled over, her stomach sore from the nonstop spasming. The brown leaf caught her spittle, the foamy droplets like dew on its decaying surface. The leaf turned darker, its brown shifting to black. Holes appeared in its surface until bits of it began to slough off, putrefying and dropping to the ground in great globs. Chris scuttled backward until she was on the branch again. Another round of coughing racked her body. She squeezed her eyes tight, willing it to be over. And then it was.
“Are you feeling any better?” her dad asked. He took the thermometer out of her mouth, held it up to the lamp on her nightstand, and frowned. Setting it on the table, he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
“Do your glasses get on your nerves?” she asked. Her voice was rough and weak.
“What, these?” He took them off and looked them over like he had never given it much thought. “Nah. Well, sometimes, maybe. Like when they get smudges and I have to clean them.”
Sweat plastered Chris’s bangs to her forehead. It dripped down her temple and landed in her ear. She was too tired to do anything about it. “Will I have to get glasses someday?”
“Maybe,” he said, putting them back on.
“I don’t want glasses.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be Four Eyes.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to be a Four Eyes,” he said. “See?” He picked up her ballpoint pen, the blue one she kept on the table with a pad of paper so she could jot down her dreams, took off his glasses, and jammed it into his left eye. Blood streamed out of the wound as if he were crying. His other eye remained wide open when he smiled at her.
She wanted to move. She wanted to run, but her muscles felt like she had been lifting weights for hours. She just stared, horrified. Then she yelled, “What are you doing?!” As if it wasn’t obvious that he was stabbing himself in the eyeball.
“Showing you that it’s no big deal, honey. Now, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, but here’s the next part!” He removed the pen, and his eyeball popped out of its socket with it. Annoyed, he shook the pen until his eyeball was dislodged and then he proceeded to jab his remaining eye.
“Stop!” Chris yelled, even though it was too late. Blood gushed down both his cheeks.
“If you don’t like it don’t look,” he said, in all seriousness.
She laid there watching her father sitting at her bedside, one of his eyeballs gone, the other with a pen protruding from it. It was enough to make her vomit or pass out, but she didn’t. And instead of reaching out to help him or at least finding a phone and calling 9-1-1, she watched the way the veins in his empty socket throbbed in time with the beating of his heart.
“What is it, pumpkin? You look worried,” he said.
“You can see me?”
“Of course! You don’t need your eyes to see.”
Chris thrashed on the tree branch, the bark scratching her skin until she was bloody. “That’s not my dad!” she screamed.
“God, why don’t you just shut up?” Claire said, exasperated.
Chris was in a stable. It looked to be around midday, and hot. The sweet smell of hay mixed with the earthy smell of horses. Flies buzzed around her and Claire. The two of them sat in an empty stall. Claire held a pocketknife over the body of a dead squirrel.
“Don’t,” Chris said. She didn’t want to see its insides. It was already bloated from the heat of the day and smelled like hot garbage.
“Hey!” Claire said, holding the knife toward Chris. “You’re the one who begged Mom to make me play with you. This is what you get.”
The small blade was dirt-caked from the holes Claire had dug while waiting for Chris to bring her a glass of water. Six thimble-sized holes in the ground in a circle around the squirrel’s body were filled with water. “Offerings to the gods,” Claire had said.
She lowered the knife, and when she saw Chris wasn’t going anywhere, she pressed it to the squirrel’s chest. She looked up and whispered something under her breath that ended with “baked in a pie.” As she pressed down and pierced the animal’s fur it released a noxious odor and deflated. Chris was going to puke.
Without looking up, Claire said, “You better not.”
Chris swallowed hard and tried to keep her gag reflex in check, her stomach sour and hot.
“Hold this,” Claire said, handing her the knife. Chris pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, letting it dangle point down. Meanwhile, Claire took what was left of the water Chris had brought her and poured it over the body. “Should get rid of the smell,” she said.
But it didn’t. In fact, the smell got worse, and before long Chris was thinking that there was no way something that small could stink so bad.
Claire held out her hand. “Scalpel,” she said.
When her breath hit Chris, all bets were off. It wasn’t the squirrel that smelled so bad after all. It was Claire. Her breath smelled like she was rotting from the inside out.
“Scalpel,” she said again.
The stable went cold. A horse huffed in the stall across from them and a cloud appeared in front of its nose. Chris’s fingers ached and started to shake.
“Ugh, Chrissy!” Claire said. She grabbed the knife from Chris’s hand. “How do you play piano shaking like that?” Claire placed the blade’s point against the hollow of her own throat. “Slow and steady. Like this.” She pressed the knife to her skin, pulling it down her torso, creating a perfect red line all the way down her abdomen.
“Claire.” Chris was crying, lost as to what to do.
“Watch,” she said. Reaching down, she used her hands to pry the line open. Her beating heart pulsed blood out of the open cavity. She was thrumming with life, but was more dead than the carcass lying between them.
Chris reached out and tried to staunch the flow, but it only got worse when she placed her hands over it. Her arms and clothes were slick with blood, but the more it gushed the harder she pushed until Claire finally said, “Stop.” Chris ignored her, grabbing the towel the squirrel had been wrapped in from where it lay, hay-covered, a
nd pressed it against the wound.
“Stop!” Claire yelled, looking at Chris earnestly. “You can see what you’re doing, can’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Chris could hardly see anything. Her vision was blurred from crying. But she followed Claire’s gaze down to her stomach. The towel remained pressed to her abdomen with Chris’s left hand, but in her right, she was holding the knife. Chris was busily making a horizontal incision in Claire’s stomach so she could be viewed more easily, just like when Chris had dissected a frog in biology class.
“Oh my gosh,” Chris said. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop being sorry. Just let it go.”
Chris tried. She really did. But she kept making incisions like her body was on autopilot. “I can’t.”
Claire sighed. “You know, Dad’s getting sick of this crap, too.”
“I really am, honey,” he said, walking up behind them, still without eyeballs. He must have noticed the change in temperature because he was wearing his favorite sweater. Chris shivered when he crouched down next to them. The scene from her bedroom replayed in her mind, and she was shocked to find that her father hadn’t been the one jamming a pen into his eyes. She was.
Chris would have covered her open mouth, but her hands were still hard at work.
“So now you know,” he said.
“Know what? That I killed my dad and my sister? I already knew that.” Her entire body was shaking with the exception of her hands which remained busy at their task.
“No, no, no!” he shouted. “You know better than that. Everyone knows better than that. You’ve been trying to convince yourself this whole time that it was your fault. But unless you were out on the road forcing us off of it, you had nothing to do with what happened that night.”
“But Claire and Spence broke up—”
“That breakup,” Claire said, blood oozing from the corners of her mouth, “was not your fault.”
“But Spence—”
“Spence is a jerk,” she said. “There was something off about him from the beginning, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be with him. When I found those pictures on his phone that night and I knew he had a thing for you, I really wasn’t that surprised. I should have broken up with him sooner, but I didn’t want the fantasy to end, you know?
“But you, Miss Chrissy, you didn’t do anything wrong. You need to know that.”
Chris’s right arm pushed the knife a little deeper. “I’m sorry!” she said.
“It’s okay, honey,” her dad told her. “But you really do have to stop at some point. It’s not just us that you’re hurting.” He pointed to her shirt which was now soaked in red. She could feel the pressure of the knife on her own stomach even though it was pressed into Claire’s.
Her dad gave her a little smile. “I miss your playing. Your mother does, too. It’s a shame you’re wasting your gift, Christina. It heals. Use it for healing.”
Chris’s right hand grew cold as the rest of her body began to tremble. The lines she was cutting became unsteady and shallow until her fingers no longer had the will to hold the knife and it dropped to the ground.
“How about that?” her father said, smiling at Claire. “It worked.”
Chris continued to press the blood-soaked towel to Claire’s stomach, but then she realized—finally realized—that it was doing more harm than good. Chris was infecting her in her attempts to keep her alive. As soon as she had the thought the towel dropped to the ground as well.
“By George, I think she’s got it,” Claire said. She smiled and Chris saw what was beneath it: good-bye.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, wiping tears with bloody hands.
“Would you rather we stay and keep doing this?” her dad asked. “It’s been going on far too long already, don’t you think?”
She couldn’t say anything. If she tried to speak she was going to break down completely, and if it really was good-bye then she didn’t want it to end like that. She nodded.
Chris’s father laid his hand on hers. His eyes had grown back. Claire’s wounds had healed. Chris felt her father’s hand on her own for the first time in years, its warmth, the long fingers that were made to play piano. Claire put her hand on her little sister’s shoulder, a light, familiar pressure.
“So,” her dad said, “you done with this nonsense? Ready to get going? I promise we’re never far.”
Chris took a good look at them. Their hands were still on her, still reassuring her. They would always be close.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m ready.”
* * *
Chris was treading water, a normal human size again. Above her loomed the trees of the dead and the vulture roost on Toad Island. She swam in the other direction toward the mirrored hills. Pulling herself onto the glass, she saw her haggard reflection. She was drenched, wearing nothing but her shirt and pants, her dress forgotten somewhere outside the cave, but at least she was clean. Despite what she’d been through, the horrors she had endured in the long night, she was wide awake. And when she looked at the sky, the sun just peering above the horizon with the promise of a new day, she smiled.
CHAPTER 26
Chris, Micah, and The Fly were in a bog, having left the glass hills behind them hours ago. The swamps in all their soggy, stagnant glory had begun. The Fly had deftly guided them around Toad Island, far from what Chris guessed was the first in a probable series of Swamper defenses. When she had gotten back to camp and told Micah about her adventures, The Fly’s mouth hung open nearly the entire time. When she’d finished her story, he just slowly shook his head. He couldn’t believe she had survived. She hardly believed it herself. But she had survived, and she was ready to face Leroy.
There was a low mist along the ground. Muddy waters bubbled and gurgled like a hot pot of stew. They didn’t smell like one, though. It was more like pit sweat. Chris found the best way to combat the odor wafting from the water wasn’t to breathe through her mouth or try to pretend it wasn’t there but to embrace it for the stench it was. Once she accepted that it was just part of the world like anything else, it made it so much easier to tolerate.
Chris tried not to let her mind linger on the encounter with her father and sister. There would be time to process that later. Right now, she and Micah needed to be more vigilant than ever. Their plans had changed. Namely, now that Chris had lost her dagger she was going to have to use Micah’s sword to kill Leroy. Micah had given her a lesson on the basics before they left camp, but she couldn’t help but feel woefully unprepared.
Keeping the ground beneath their feet was also proving to be tricky. Chris had felt more sure-footed when she was walking on the fire legs. Here, the ground gave way without warning, sliding out beneath her shoes, sending her foot plunging into the bog water, so every step was a risk. Regardless, she and Micah kept slogging and squishing their way ever westward, heedless of the mud that tried its best to pull them down.
Soon they were making their way through a particularly messy section of the swamp, an area that was pockmarked with deep holes. Heads down, they were ever mindful of their steps. When The Fly tapped on Chris’s shoulder, she waved him off irritably. Did he want her to fall or something? But when he tapped her again, this time harder, she stopped and looked up. Across from them, on a far piece of solid land, a group of five creatures in brown cloaks were riding east. There was no mistaking what they were, and Chris’s heart thudded so hard she was afraid it was going to give out. Mercenaries.
There was no place to hide. There were no trees or tall grasses. No bushes or buildings to duck behind either.
The lead rider’s horse stopped short and tilted its head in Chris and Micah’s direction. Everything seemed to slow down. The mercenary’s head began its slow turn. The Fly buzzed in front of Chris. Micah turned to her, looked at the ground, grabbed her arm, and they fell into one of the holes.
Time returned to normal as The Fly dove in after them. It had to have been at least a thirty-foot dro
p to the bottom of the pit, but something squishy, and moving, cushioned the impact.
They could hear the strange, guttural language the mercenaries spoke to each other coming from above them. It went on and on while they lingered overhead. Chris was pretty sure they were arguing. Their voices were getting louder. Then she realized that they weren’t getting louder, she and Micah were getting closer to the top of the pit. They were so much closer, in fact, that they could now see what they had landed on: frogs. Thousands and thousands of frogs that started croaking as if they could sense that they had finally been noticed.
Chris heard the mercenaries riding away, fast. Why were they suddenly in such a hurry?
The Fly pointed to the sky.
“What?” Chris yelled over the croaking.
He jabbed at the sky again.
“Yeah, we’re getting closer,” she said.
He shook his head in exasperation and tried Micah this time.
“We’re almost there,” Micah said.
The Fly gave up trying to get them to understand and followed the pit’s walls to the top. Chris took the hint and tried to get a handhold in the wall, but it gave way and all she had to show for it was a handful of goopy mud. It looked like she and Micah would have to wait. Fortunately, the frogs were pushing them up. Topside, The Fly just kept waving Chris and Micah toward him. He seemed panicked, which wasn’t like him at all.
“Um, Micah,” Chris said, “I think we should get out of here as fast as we can once we get close enough to climb out.”
The middle of the frog pit had begun to bulge. They were near the top now. It was just out of reach, but then there was a sudden surge. The Fly frantically waved his legs and they used the rising pile of frogs to boost themselves out.
The croaking stopped. A mud bubble popped somewhere nearby, and then every pit around Chris and Micah erupted at once. Frogs by the millions burst far into the air like an amphibian version of Old Faithful. They waved their legs as they started falling. Chris and Micah covered their heads, doing what they could to guard against the aerial assault. Frogs thumped against Chris’s back and shoulders, her neck, their feet tangled in her hair. She didn’t dare move because the ground was a thick carpet of them now.