Slice of Cherry

by Dia Reeves

  She backtracked until the dot reappeared and then scouted about but found no alternate trails, as she had the other times the dot had vanished. There was just the sunny path and the dark woods pressing malevolently on either side of her. She sidled to the right, and the dot disappeared, so she sidled left . . . and the dot stayed. She had to keep going left. Off the path. Into darkness. Where that slugboy thing was waiting for her.

  Fancy stared horrified into the woods. She had to do it. For Kit she would do it. If she quit now, she’d never have the guts to come in again, not after what she’d seen. She took a deep breath and plunged into the trees at such a high speed she was sure her feet didn’t touch the ground for at least five yards. As soon as they did, she stumbled and crashed head over heels right out of the trees and down an embankment. After a swift, stomach-churning free fall she landed on her butt in a green, piss-warm stream.

  After several moments spent shaking and assuring herself that nothing was broken, Fancy stood and consulted the map that she’d still managed to hang on to through all her long fall. The pink dot was there and—thank God—closer than ever to the X. She tested possible directions and determined that she had to go upstream in the flowing water toward a bridge. She moved quickly; the sunlight was strong on the stream and made her feel safe, but the sooner this quest was over, the happier she’d be.

  Before too long Fancy found herself standing beneath the bridge. As soon as she unfolded the map, the pink dot, which had moved directly over the X, floated off the page. Fancy gasped and flinched as it drifted up past her face to the bridge’s underside, which someone—a crazy someone, obviously—had decorated with junk.

  The pink dot rolled along the shiny pieces of randomness overhead—cracked CDs, wine bottles, a toy submarine, stained glass, tinfoil—and then came to a stop over a long brass . . . something.

  Fancy jumped up and grabbed the thing by its wooden handle and struggled to pull it free. It was difficult, and the more she pulled on the handle, the more she saw what was holding all the junk to the bridge—slime. When she yanked the brass object free, a big drop of slime, pink slime, fell on her map. The line and X that had sustained her along the sunny trail had disappeared, replaced by one word in pink script: RUN.

  Fancy looked up. Several amphibious creatures hung above her, hiding the shiny junk from sight, leering down at her. The slime attached to her map had dripped from the mouth of the creature directly above her. When the map jerked from her hand and into the creature’s wide, wet mouth, Fancy realized it hadn’t been slime, but a tongue.

  Fancy took the map’s advice and ran.

  She raced along the stream and then up the embankment, going back the way she’d come. But the frogmen were quicker than she was, leaping over her head and catching hold of the trees, waiting for her to pass by, like it was some game. They were greenish-brown, blending so well with the trees that she didn’t see them until they whipped their tongues at her, at her skin, stripping bits of it off. Snacking on her.

  She made it back to the path, but she was no longer safe, assuming she had ever been safe. The frogmen were right behind her. Unlike the slugboy they had no fear of sunlight. A tongue on her leg tripped her up. She hit the ground on her back and watched the frogman greedily swallow a good bit of her shin. Fancy screamed and ran on mindlessly.

  Straight into a green wall.

  She bounced off a Mortmaine woman dressed all in green. With her were two companions: a Mortmaine boy, also in head-to-toe green, and a girl in purple—a Porterene, judging from the silver key dangling from her purple bracelet, though Fancy had never heard of a Porterene who wore color outside of church. And she had never heard of a Mortmaine wearing anything but green.

  Fancy decided she was hallucinating, that her mind was trying to distract her from the fact that she was being eaten alive by frogmen.

  “Look out!”

  As the frogman’s tongue came whipping at Fancy, the girl in purple snatched it in one gloved hand and used it to yank the creature forward. The frogman landed at her feet in a sprawl, and she stomped on it, grinding it beneath the heel of her purple boot like it was no more than a cockroach.

  The other frogmen hesitated in the treetops, glancing at one another as if they knew the Mortmaine were nothing to tangle with. They leaped back the way they had come.

  The first Mortmaine flipped her long black hair and said to the purple girl, “Don’t go thinking you’re a badass ninja. Toadies don’t weigh much is all. That’s why they’re so easy to yank around.”

  The other Mortmaine whispered into the purple girl’s ear, “You’re my badass ninja.”

  She giggled and whispered back, “No, you’re my badass ninja.”

  “Neither one of you is a badass ninja!” the first Mortmaine shrieked.

  “That’s not true, Shoko,” said the purple girl, with some strange accent. “Poppa says I’m very definitely a ninja.”

  Shoko and the boy looked uneasily around the woods, like the purple girl’s dad was going to jump down on them from the treetops. Shoko shoved Fancy toward the boy. “Wyatt, take her outta here so I can have at least a small break from you and Hanna playing kissy-face all day.”

  “Don’t be such a hardass, Shoko,” Wyatt said. “You’re not fooling anybody.” He walked Fancy out of the dark park, holding her hand the whole way because Fancy refused to let it go.

  They left the dark park behind, and Fancy saw the sun shining, saw cars speeding by, felt a breeze on her skin, and started to believe that maybe she wasn’t being eaten. That maybe she had survived.

  “You okay, kid?” Wyatt asked her.

  Fancy shook her head.

  “Good. Maybe now you won’t think you can go in and out of the dark park like it’s the frigging mall. And if you do go in there again, for Christ’s sake, don’t run. You run, you might as well tattoo ‘prey’ on your forehead. Humans are predators, not prey. Always remember that.”

  Back at the parking lot of St. Mike’s the Mortmaine sprayed her with something that he said would heal her stripped skin and then gave her a long hug until she stopped shaking enough to actually operate her bike. He nodded to the brass object still clutched in her fist.

  “Was that worth it?”

  Normally she wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Kit, but it seemed rude when he had just come to her rescue in such a huge way.

  Fancy said, “If it’s not, I’m gone come back here and burn down this whole forest!”

  He smiled. “Now you’re thinking like a predator. A psychotic predator, but still an improvement.”

  * * *

  Fancy rolled her bike into the garage and limped to the back of the house, her muscles sore from her romp through the dark park, her skin itching from the stuff the Mortmaine had sprayed on her arms and leg to heal them. Her hand hurt from her death grip on the brass object, which was the only bright spot. Despite her cowardly behavior, she had gotten what she’d gone into the dark park for. Now all she had to do was figure out what she was supposed to do with it.

  She went into her room and saw Franken sitting at her tea table. In her chair. Drinking her tea. With her sister.

  “There you are!” Kit jumped up to greet her. “I got your note about a quest. What happened? You look like two miles of rough road.”

  Fancy pulled away from Kit, feeling like she was hallucinating again. “What is he doing in here?”

  “I just brought him up for some fresh air.” Kit lowered her voice. “You were right about being greedy. It’s like Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz—you have to look for your heart’s desire in your own backyard.” She pointed to the brass object in Fancy’s hand. “What’s that?”

  Fancy shoved Kit out of the way and stalked toward Franken, who hurriedly offered her a cup of tea as though that would keep her off him. “I can go back to my room. I don’t mind.”

  Fancy slapped the cup out of his hand. “Our cellar is not your room!” The cup hadn’t made a satisfying enough crash, so she
grabbed him and yanked him outdoors and down into the cellar, screaming the whole time. “You are not our guest! You are not our heart’s desire! All you are is a corpse waiting to happen!”

  She pushed him onto the cot, and Kit hurried to his side.

  “This is my fault,” Kit told him. “I should have talked to her first. Fancy doesn’t handle change well. Or at all, really.”

  But Fancy wasn’t paying attention to Kit. In the kinetoscope she’d caught a glimpse of Cherry standing in the happy place.

  A flash of anger swept over her as she remembered the dark park ordeal she’d been forced to suffer through, but then Cherry dipped out of sight of the screen and returned holding a parrot-sized Franken in a canary cage.

  When Cherry opened the door, shook Franken out, and let him scamper at her feet, Fancy wondered if Cherry knew she was mad and was doing funny tricks to make her laugh. But there was nothing clownlike about Cherry, who seemed a bit impatient, the way people got when they were trying to explain something to a person who just wasn’t getting it.

  Cherry pointed to something offscreen, and Fancy followed her finger and came to rest on the brass object in her own hand. Now that she saw it so close to the kinetoscope, she understood what it was.

  “Holy smokes.” Fancy brought it close to her face. “That’s what this is?”

  Cherry smiled, and the screen went black.

  “What’re you talking about?” Kit asked, snuggling with the life-size version of Franken on the cot.

  “This is the missing crank to the kinetoscope.” Fancy showed her. “The key Cherry wanted me to find. The key to the happy place. It’s the kinetoscope!”

  Fancy finally shared the story of what had happened to her at Cherry Glade, and how Cherry had helped her find the key to getting away with murder in the dark park.

  “We use the scope to send people to the happy place,” Fancy explained. “No body, no evidence.”

  “Send them how?” asked Kit, eyeing the crank dubiously, joining her sister so she could get a closer look at the crank.

  “Like this.”

  Fancy ran her hand over the kinetoscope, and her fingers dipped into a hole on the side that was full of dust. Kit stood by uncertainly as Fancy affixed the crank into the hole where it fastened with a satisfying click.

  “Here we go.” The crank clicked as Fancy turned it, like a jack-in-the-box, only instead of hearing music, they saw the image of the happy place on the screen projected onto the four walls, and then the ceiling and the floor. The cellar was no longer around them.

  “Fancy, what the hell?”

  “Not hell,” said Fancy, fitting into her happy place as surely as the crank had fit the kinetoscope. “Home.”

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  I CALLED 911 TO REPORT KIT MISSING, BUT THE DISPATCHER SAID THAT KIT WASN’T MISSING. SHE PUT KIT ON THE PHONE, AND I LISTENED TO HER CRY FOR A LONG TIME. WHEN I ASKED KIT WHY SHE WOULDN’T COME HOME, SHE SAID I HAD TO FIRST PROMISE NOT TO KILL HER IF SHE TOLD THE TRUTH. SHE KEPT ASKING, BUT I NEVER GAVE HER MY WORD.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The sisters stood on the platform in the center of the garden, which was ringed by eight gigantic faceless golden statues in varying poses facing the garden. Between each statue sat a large elevated plot of earth that was bricked in stone in the shape of a circle. The sun glinted off the statues so brightly, it made Fancy’s eyes water. She was so used to seeing this place through the lens of the kinetoscope that all the color had her head spinning. When Kit grabbed her and twirled her in a circle, that didn’t help.

  The platform was the centerpiece, surrounded by a green-scape dotted with fountains and flocks of pink flamingos that stared at the sisters as if to ask how they had gotten there. Animal topiaries lined the path that led from the platform and through the giant hedges that enclosed the garden.

  Fancy pulled away from her gawping sister and looked for the kinetoscope, but it hadn’t come over with them. Nothing in the cellar had. Except Franken.

  He stared wide-eyed at the sky, lying on his back at the center of the platform as if he were still tied up on the cot, and Fancy felt a flash of irritation that she was sharing this moment with him and not just with Kit.

  Kit danced over to him and dropped to her knees beside him. “You came over too!”

  “Of course he came over,” said Fancy. “I asked Cherry specifically for a way to get rid of Franken.”

  “Get rid of him?” Kit drew her finger across her throat.

  Fancy tried not to roll her eyes, but it was hard. “Not like that. I mean get him out of our hair. Out of our cellar. And especially out of our sleeping porch.”

  “I can’t believe you went into the frigging dark park. Alone. You must really not like Franken.”

  He lay still as death, his eyes closed, shirtless, his stitches like skinny zippers all over a tacky suit from the eighties. Tears were rolling down his face, which was also tacky. How dare he ruin her fun with his tears?

  Kit put her hand on his shoulder. “Franken, it’s okay.”

  “He doesn’t realize he’s free yet; that’s all. It’ll sink in.” Fancy kicked Franken’s feet out of her way and circled one of the statues so she could see it from the front. She had to tilt her head way back and squint her eyes to see all of it, it was that tall and bright.

  “Maybe we should take him back.”

  “So you can cut on him some more?”

  “At least then he’ll show some life. This just seems cruel.”

  “He needs to learn to live without us. Without you. He’s way too attached. Like hostages who get Helsinki syndrome or whatever and fall in love with their kidnappers. It’s unhealthy.”

  Kit lit up. “You think he’s in love with me?”

  “Everybody flies the coop sometime,” said Fancy, ignoring the question.

  But Franken refused to fly away. He just lay there sniveling like a two-year-old.

  Kit said, “Franken, don’t be like that. This is good news. You’re free now.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, I mean it this time.” She smoothed Franken’s mite-free hair.

  “You’re really letting me go?” His face was full of some odd emotion.

  “Yep.” Kit smiled, trying to be happy for him.

  “I can go home?” Nervousness—that’s what it was. Reluctance.

  “Forget about home,” Kit said. “That’s over. This is your home now. It’s really great here. Fancy and me used to sit in front of the kinetoscope for hours watching the happy-place people running around and having fun all the time like we used to before Daddy got arrested. You’ll have fun here too, and if anybody gives you any lip, tell ’em Fancy sent you. It’s her place.”

  “Our place,” Fancy corrected her.

  Franken leaned heavily against Kit as she helped him sit up. He stared all around and then winced as if the happy place had punched him in the face.

  He whispered, “You killed me, didn’t you? That’s why I’m seeing all this—because I’m dead.”

  “If I had killed you,” Kit whispered back, “you would know it. Believe me.” She pulled him to his feet and held him up, their arms around each other. “And you sure don’t feel like a corpse.”

  He was taller and, even ragged as he was, still bigger than Kit. He could have knocked her over the head if he’d wanted, but he didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want to be free. He wanted Kit.

  Fancy wanted to puke. She left the statues and pulled Kit away from Franken. “I wanna see what’s beyond the garden,” she said. But when they hopped off the platform and onto the grass, frightening the flamingos into an awkward run, Franken tried to tag along.

  “Not you.” Fancy shoved him back toward the platform. “We don’t want you.”

  The sisters left him sitting forlornly among the headless statues and ran beyond the gap in the hedges, exiting onto a hill overlooking a rustic village nestled in a green valley by the sea.

  People milled about, sail
ing on the ocean in big white ships, frolicking on the beach, talking and laughing together on the streets of their village.

  “It’s just like in the scope,” Kit breathed. “How weird is this?”

  “Not just like,” Fancy said, frowning. “There should be a hill.”

  “You mean this one we’re standing on?”

  “Another one. Just beyond the village.”

  A lush, green hill materialized in the distance, just small enough that a person could run up it without getting winded. Several children did just that, dragging their kites behind them like unruly dogs.

  “There,” Fancy said. “That’s better. What?” she asked when Kit kept staring at her.

  “How did you do that, witch?”

  “Do what?”

  “That hill just appeared out of nowhere, that’s what. Out of nothing.”

  “Yeah?”

  Fancy didn’t understand Kit’s astonishment. Being inside the kinetoscope was no different from being outside it, and she had been arranging and rearranging things inside the happy place for years.

  Kit stood behind Fancy and wrapped her arms around Fancy’s shoulders. “Do you have any idea how amazing you are? I wish I could do even half of what you can do.”

  “If it’s in me, it has to be in you.” She leaned back into Kit’s embrace. “We’re practically the same person.”

  “No, we’re not. I feel it now, the difference between us. I never felt that before.”

  Fancy felt as if all the air had been squeezed from her lungs. “We’re not different! Don’t say that. You just have to concentrate.”

  Kit tried. She let go of Fancy and furrowed her brow at the village below.

  “What’re you thinking about?”

  Kit unfurrowed and sighed. “Franken. He should be here, seeing all this, since he’s gone live here now.”

  “We’re in paradise, where we can make anything happen, and all you can think about is Franken?” She said his name so loudly, the happy-place people stopped everything and looked their way, attentive as meerkats.

  “You brought him here,” Kit reminded her quietly, as if she were trying to make a point about how loud Fancy was being.