Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  “I very much doubt you’d know,” Athelas said. “You don’t even know why you’re connected to the house.”

  “’S’pose it’s the same thing that keeps Morgana and Ralph connected to their houses,” I retorted, averting my eyes from the leaves above with a bit of a shiver. Athelas’ worm chewed that up and dug for more, nibbling away at the roots of my mind. “The murderer killed their parents too, so there’s no reason to think it’ll be different for me.”

  “You,” said Athelas, “are very different from the other two.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice fading into the soft shadows of the room and the whispering advance of the greenery above. “My parents died for me.”

  Athelas’ voice was amused. “You’re very trusting of the words of a nightmare.”

  “It never talked before,” I told him. “And I’d already half-guessed, anyway. Oi. What would happen if we just…went through one of these thin patches?”

  “We’d be deep Between and very nearly Behind,” he said. “Why? Do you wish to choose one?”

  “Dunno. Reckon Zero’d be annoyed, but he’s probably going to be annoyed anyway.”

  “That’s an interesting direction,” said Athelas. “Why not go that way?”

  The suggestion was directly at odds with his earlier warning, but despite that, I followed the potential path of the thin patch with my eyes. It trailed off into the darkness of a corner that shouldn’t have been as dark or deep as it currently appeared to be. It definitely shouldn’t have smelled of old, grey, wet rock.

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good way to go,” I said, but I rose anyway. I felt the uncomfortable muddle of movement in my pocket as I did so, and absently patted that pocket. Three tubes of something that felt plasticky lurked beneath the denim, and when I pulled one out, it was a needle. “Flamin’ heck,” I said. “This is the lot I got from that goblin way back when!”

  What were they doing in my pocket? I kept them upstairs with the necklace-that-had-been-a-snake, hiding behind my marbles. That’s probably a metaphor, but the important thing was that they were now in my pocket, and I didn’t remember putting them there.

  The worm nibbled furiously now, chasing something slippery and dark.

  “Isn’t it odd,” said Athelas’ voice, “how things seem to move around the house? Always in just the right place to be useful.”

  I tore my eyes away from the dark, grey space in the corner and said, “Yeah. Handy, I s’pose. Was that bit of…stuff…always in the house?”

  “I believe we mentioned being surprised the house hadn’t sunk into Between or been the site of more strange occurrences.”

  “That’s a nice, creepy yes,” I muttered. The worm wriggled and chewed, and that was uncomfortable, but I wanted to know what it was chasing so furiously. The closer I got to the shadows, the more furiously it moved. To Athelas, I said, “C’mmon. Looks like this is it, after all.”

  I didn’t have to see his face to know that he had a brow raised as he followed me; the amusement in his voice as he said, “Oh, after you, of course, Pet!” was enough. He followed me, though, and that was the important thing.

  We passed through the plaster and into cool, damp rock, far too tight around us for comfort. Athelas had to move slowly, and I wasn’t much more comfortable: him behind and the rock pressing in from the sides made me feel as though I couldn’t quite breathe. Maybe it would have been easier without the worm constricting my mind as well, but by then it was something of a relief to have that to focus on. I caught a brief flutter of memory, and let the worm eat it as I stood still to capture it too: it was a memory of myself, shambling sleepily through the house to get to the kitchen and wandering instead through a mossy glade. Soft beneath my feet, the grass made me giggle drowsily to myself. I could still see the kitchen light ahead of me, and I wasn’t afraid until something big and shadowy cobwebbed itself into the divide between wherever this was and the safety of the kitchen.

  It reached for me, and I screamed, high and sharp. Something big and fast that smelt like dad swept past me, and an urgent hand tore me away, spinning me to face the other way too quickly for me to be truly frightened at what I saw.

  Mum’s face; Mum’s eyes, so bright and grey. She knelt before me, cupping my face in her hands, and although my younger self didn’t think anything of it the me that remembered it now realised for the first time that she had also covered my ears against the muffle of sound behind me. We stayed like that for a few minutes, and I remembered how my heartbeat had slowed down with my face in her hands and my toes scrunched into the moss.

  When she let me go, my toes were scrunched into the carpet instead. She looked down at it, then shot a quick glance behind me before she got up.

  “You’re sleepwalking again,” she said, and I knew that it had to be true. I felt the brief warmth of her hand around mine, as if she actually had reached through the memory and grasped my hand here and now. More insistently, she added, “You just had a bit of a nightmare. Forget about it. Come back to bed, Pet.”

  She didn’t say Pet, of course.

  She said my name, but the sound of it was blurred within my mind. I heard, or felt Athelas’ amusement somewhere behind me.

  “I am somewhat comforted,” he said. “It seems that you don’t trust me as much as I’d thought you did. Your mother was a surprisingly gifted magic-user, it would seem.”

  “For a human,” I said, adding the qualification he hadn’t.

  “I’ll thank you not to put words in my mouth. It seems as though you were inclined to wander where you shouldn’t wander as a child, too.”

  “That’s pets for ya. Always getting into stuff.” I wondered, suddenly and coldly, exactly how many of my memories of the old mad bloke had been altered. I had used to wander around after him a lot after we moved here, and something fun and exciting always happened when I went out to chase after him.

  I found that my memory of those episodes wasn’t quite whole: it was there, but I had carefully forgotten the way the world changed around me as I followed him, and the strange people we met on the way through that changing landscape.

  How often had I followed the old mad bloke into Between without knowing about it? And did he remember it all, or had he been made to forget it too?

  “You should stay away from that one,” said Athelas, and the worm grew sharp and insistent as it ferreted out memories of those adventurous days to chew on.

  I let it do its work, shaken by the familiar yet not quite familiar memories that wriggled to the surface of my own mind: memories that I remembered, and now viewed through a slightly different lens—or perhaps simply a different point of view. I felt as though I had become something not myself.

  I tried to move forward in the tunnel to give my body something to do while my mind churned in discomfort, but it ended abruptly, closing me into the dark, stuffy recess of my own mind.

  “Now this is interesting,” murmured Athelas, his voice cold and amused and speculative. “Do stop trying to run away, Pet.”

  For the first time in a very long time, I felt actually frightened to be alone with him. As much as the stone pressed in around me, did Athelas and the worm press in on my mind.

  I said unsteadily, “Maybe we should go back.”

  “There is no going back,” said Athelas. “I am very much afraid that you are at my mercy. I did warn you before we began that I would not be kind to you.”

  I tried very hard to steady my breathing, but it felt as though the very rocks themselves were pressing against me, suffocating me. “You brought me down here on purpose?”

  “As you yourself mentioned, my lord is somewhat of a deterrent to this sort of endeavour,” he said, soft and thoughtful. “He is unlikely to find it easy to reach you, even if you call for him; I shouldn’t rely upon that tracker spell working, if I were you.”

  “Yeah? How annoyed d’you reckon he’s gunna be if I yell out for him and he has to come rescue me from you?”

 
; “Try it,” he said, the last vestiges of light glancing off the curve of his lips and catching in the depths of his moonlit eyes. “I won’t wait for you to do so, but I won’t stop you.”

  I reared back against the stone behind, then surged forward to try to push through Athelas, but both alike were immoveable.

  “There’s no way forward and no way back,” he said. “Now. Let us see exactly what memories can be squeezed out of you.”

  I very much didn’t like the way he said squeezed, or the way that the rocks seemed to constrict as he said it. I couldn’t help the small, panting breath that escaped me as I pushed fruitlessly against the rock in burgeoning panic.

  The worm bit me this time, deep and hard and searingly painful, and I choked on a cry of pain, battering at the stone around me until I seemed to feel the blood run down my arms. No matter how hard I pushed, against the stone or Athelas, nothing moved. It grew tighter instead, and the worm tore strips off my mind, careless of importance and pain alike.

  For a brief instant, I was caught in a floating, clear whiteness, teetering on the edge of descending into the madness of panic and pain; and in that moment, I had time to think just one thought.

  Hang on.

  Hang on.

  Zero was able to find me when even I didn’t know where I was—when he didn’t have a tracker on me, too. There seemed to be a connection that brought him to me when I called for him. Where on earth had Athelas tricked me into going that Zero wouldn’t be able to get in? There was nowhere Between or Behind that Zero couldn’t find me, especially if I called for him.

  And as I thought that, I understood.

  I stood up straight, and this time I could do it: stone and pressure alike vanished.

  “You flamin’ liar!” I said in shock. “We’re not in the house! We’re not even Between or Behind—we’re in my head!”

  The scene changed in a moment from claustrophobic tunnel squeezing the breath out of me, back to our living room once again: Athelas in his armchair with one leg crossed over the other and me on my couch where I always sat.

  Only this time, I knew it wasn’t the real thing, so the feeling of not quite being in synch with my surroundings didn’t put me off like it had before. The relief of not having the worm tearing strips off my mind left me awake and sharp and highly focused, too.

  And now, I was stroppy.

  “I do wonder why you expect me to tell the truth all the time,” Athelas said pleasantly. “It really is no use glaring at me.”

  “Because you always do,” I said. “You tell it in a way that makes people not believe it, but you tell the truth.”

  “How exactly is that different from lying?” he enquired.

  “You never lied before,” I said. I couldn’t help still feeling shocked at that. Athelas had always told the truth before—albeit in such a way that made it a weapon of deception instead of uprightness. “Not really.”

  “Perhaps you have not been paying enough attention, after all,” said Athelas. “Don’t attempt to struggle, Pet; you’re here in my power, and I don’t think I’ll let you out so easily, after all.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Zero’s gunna be pretty cranky at you,” I said again. We were still inside my mind, and now that I knew it, I also knew that Athelas didn’t really need the worm. Here, he was the worm.

  “Perhaps so, but Zero isn’t here to help you,” he said pleasantly. As he said it, a wealth of vines grew up and around the couch, coiling around me with shocking strength. “And I don’t recall setting any kind of limits. I believe you have already mentioned that you have no trust in me not hurting you, after all. We will begin.”

  I pulled with all my strength against the vines, straining my neck and arms, and felt something make a distinct pop between neck and shoulder. I didn’t miss the slight lift of one of Athelas’ brows; he might as well have called me an idiot, and that was very useful.

  Insulting, yeah. But flamin’ useful.

  I laughed to myself as I realised the ridiculousness of straining physically against bonds that were real only in my mind, and this time I focused all the anger and pain that I had felt in the last fifteen minutes into finding the source of my power here in my mind.

  There was no visible power, but I saw the world around me shift until it was a morass of particles of thought instead of a coherent whole, and that was a terrifyingly unsettling thought. I tried to grip the particles of that world, and as I did, another memory wriggled to the surface. I sat upstairs in the second living room, playing with dust motes that swam in the morning sunshine, and there was a warm contentedness to me that curled like a blanket around me. The walls moved and sighed with greenery, sending a fresh, sweeping breeze of heavily oxygenated air through the room, and something shuffled through the leaves nearer the floor as I smiled my content around the room. I breathed in wonder as I remembered how it had felt, and felt a tickle of delight in my chest. I had once been so familiar with the world Between that it had seemed friendly to me. I wondered if I would have felt so safe if I remembered all the things my mother had obviously made me forget.

  The shuffling across the room grew and resolved itself into a canine sort of form that slinked out of the leaves and surveyed the room. It caught sight of me, and I heard it sniff the air, deep and snuffly.

  It looked like a dog, and it was pretending to be a dog, but I could already smell something very wrong about it. I felt my brow furrow.

  I said to it, “Good dog?”

  It snarled and leaped for my throat, its jaw elongating and splitting to display a double row of teeth, top and bottom. I didn’t scream this time: I used the free-floating edges of Between to sweep it up mid-leap, then tumbled it over and out the window. It shattered the window, howling, and disappeared from sight, and I heard it hit the ground outside.

  Footsteps pounded against the stairs and my parents tumbled into the room, panting.

  “It wasn’t a dog!” I said, my breath coming too fast. “I didn’t ask it to come in!”

  My father crossed to the window, picking through the glass, and I heard his breath hiss inward. “There’s another one out there.”

  “This is…not working,” my mother said heavily. She knelt beside me, methodically checking all my limbs for wounds, then settled back in relief. “We’re going to have to teach you to forget, Pet.”

  The name was still blurred around the edges, but there was a purposeful sort of rounding of the sound that gave me a thrill of fear that Athelas might just be able to make it out if he listened hard enough or thought well enough.

  There was a very heavy silence before my father said, “Isn’t it safer if we teach her how to fight them?”

  “She already knows how to fight them,” said my mother, her voice tight with worry. “That’s the problem. Every time she interacts with that land, she’s in danger; they can sense her. Once she gets stronger, they’ll come for her. They always come for them. Unless she learns to forget, she’ll keep drawing danger to herself.”

  Dad’s lips pinched in, but he nodded. “You look after it,” he said. “I’ll go find those…things…and put them down.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, Mum,” I said, as he left. “It just came through.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why you’re going to have to learn how to forget.”

  I let the memory go, and the worm appeared again to eat it up. Eating, it grew, and turned back for more. There were more memories there for it to eat, and now that they had begun to surface, they pushed from beneath, wanting to be free. I could access these memories without the worm, and I wanted it gone. I wanted it gone, but it wouldn’t stop eating, and I knew Athelas wouldn’t stop it.

  I pulled in a breath that probably wasn’t real, though it stuttered as though it was. There was no Between in here—at least, not in the way that there was outside my mind. But it was my mind, and that was enough. Just like my mother had bound me to forget things—just like she had obviously bound me to make
myself forget things—Athelas had a binding around my mind. Only instead of keeping memories in, it was keeping me in. It was magic, but I already knew about magic. More importantly, now I knew that I had once known how to use it.

  Despite the lingering sadness at Athelas’ duplicity, that thought, and all the implications of it, warmed me. It was time to take away the bindings. I had once been a child, and now I was grown: it was time for me to break free and fight instead of hiding and forgetting.

  I drew up the corners of my mind as if they had been the corners of a sheet, gathered all the knowledge and strength from every thread of it, and shoved it all at Athelas, or the worm, or maybe both of them, because they were one and the same.

  The vines curled away and vanished as if they had been seared and burned to ash in a moment, but we were still in my mind. Heck. I’d figured that would work. How on earth was I supposed to get him out when I didn’t even know how to get myself out?

  “No, I think not,” murmured Athelas, wincing only slightly. “You will not throw me out so easily as you did last time, Pet; nor, I think, will you be able to do so to Zero’s father a second time. As…special as you are, it would be foolish to think that you’re equal to either of us when we’re aware of your methods.”

  “Yeah,” I said, climbing unsteadily to my feet as the world turned lazily around me. The memory of my mother had been useful in more than one way, because it had reminded me of something that I had learned only recently. “But I’ve got the element of surprise, remember?”

  He looked faintly amused at that, but it didn’t weaken him in any way: the binding he still had around my mind was tight and sticky, digging roots into places I didn’t want brought to light and pulling upward.

  I crossed the room that was my mind, and sat on the arm of his chair, pulling my legs up until my feet rested on the seat of it, snuggled between the arm and his legs. I slipped my arm behind his neck and curled it there, then leaned my head into his shoulder and linked my other arm with the one around his neck. I’d sat like this with Dad more times than I could remember—and those memories remained, whole and unbroken, in my mind.