by A. C. Wise
Sophie drops onto the couch, leaning toward the TV. A shift, the Nag Bride moving a fraction out of focus, and now a horse walks toward the camera, steps slow and plodding. A beast of burden carrying the weight of humanity’s cruelty, the weight of the world. Sophie watches until the horse, the woman, passes out of the camera’s view. She watches a moment longer, the shadows on the long drive shifting, drawing together and pulling away. She strains, trying to see whether the footprints left behind are shaped like a woman’s bare heel, or the rounded moon of an iron horseshoe.
Sophie’s legs tremble as she stands, but she makes them carry her into the hall. Thud, thud, thud. Hooves scrape the boards again.
Sophie glances to the horseshoe hung crookedly above the door. As long as it remains in place, she’ll be safe. This house is safe. But safe for who?
She thinks of her mother, tortured to death. She thinks of Mrs. Everett Moseley, denied her own name, her husband cheerfully informing the store clerk he intended to bury her. And what about Edward Simpson’s wife? What about the women in all those stories Andrew’s grandfather wrote out? The Nag Bride killed and buried, again and again.
And she thinks of Andrew’s grandfather, his kind smile, his excitement at showing them his latest flea market find. She thinks of Andrew, her best friend, her brother, the two of them making Halloween costumes and telling stories and always having each other’s back. Andrew’s grandmother pouring Sophie coffee and drying her tears when she’d come running through the trees, making sure she felt loved. All of them, together, Sophie’s family when she couldn’t rely on her own, making this a safe place for her.
The Nag Bride with her moon-pale skin, easily bruised, with her long-fingered hands, waiting for the iron nails, is a mirror reflecting the worst and most terrible impulses humanity has to offer. But humanity has more to offer than pain. Sophie has seen for herself that this is true.
Sophie presses her forehead against the door. Hard. Harder, until it hurts. She clenches her teeth.
Behind her closed eyes, she sees the farmer standing over a woman in his barn, driving nails through her hands. She sees her father, driving nails into her mother’s skin.
Maybe the Nag Bride doesn’t need to be wed or killed. And if she isn’t either—unmarried, unburied—then maybe the cycle needn’t begin again.
Sophie draws in a ragged breath. She pulls the chair back in front of the door, grabs the hammer. Her thumb still aches, but she ignores the pain as she climbs onto the chair and gouges at the nail, prying the horseshoe free.
Sophie half jumps, half falls, kicking the chair out of the way. She wrenches open the door.
The Nag Bride blinks dark, liquid eyes.
She is the most beautiful thing Sophie has ever seen, and the most terrible.
Her face is long. Not a horse’s face, and not a human’s either. The lines of her skull are visible through her skin. She turns her head to one side, nostrils flared, and looks at Sophie from one of her wide-set eyes. A prey animal’s eyes, rolling and afraid.
Then she turns her head again and she’s fully human. A predator again. Except when she smiles, it is pained, her flat teeth never meant to fit a human jaw.
Lashes shadow the bride’s pale cheeks as she looks to the horseshoe in Sophie’s hand. When her gaze comes up again, it’s a question. Will the Nag Bride be wed?
The woman, the horse, both and neither, reaches out a hand. It’s already bleeding, rusted punctures where nails have been driven in over and over again. She turns it palm up, waiting for Sophie to place the iron shoe there. Sophie moves closer, until she is on the porch with the Bride and they are face to face.
Breath warms Sophie’s skin; it smells sweet, like hay, and it smells old, like earth and flowers—marigolds—on the edge of rot. Sophie places the horseshoe in the Bride’s hand.
“I’m not giving it to you,” she says, her voice trembling “It’s yours already.”
Fear pools in Sophie’s belly. It trickles along her spine. She is not marrying the Bride, and she will not drive nails through her skin. And she can only hope in choosing not to do so, she is setting her free.
The Nag Bride’s jaw shifts, teeth grinding, as if she would speak, but her tongue isn’t made for human sound.
“I don’t want….” Sophie closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to marry you.”
She opens her eyes.
“No one here does. This house belonged to a good man and a good woman, and it will again. I—”
A thought takes her, and Sophie releases a shuddering breath, gathering herself before she speaks again.
“This house is safe, I swear it. No one here will hurt you as long as… As long as I’m around. I promise.”
Sophie has no idea how she will keep the promise, but she means it, down to her core. She may be making the biggest mistake of her life. If the Nag Bride refuses her proposal, will she pass through the trees, will she go to hunt the family living in the house where Sophie’s own house used to stand? Will she continue on until she finds someone else, someone weaker, someone like Sophie’s father?
The Nag Bride’s hand remains extended, the iron shoe between them. There’s nothing protecting Sophie now. The Nag Bride could step over the threshold, whuffing the air. She could kick Sophie in the chest with powerful hooves, cracking Sophie’s ribs open with one blow.
The Nag Bride takes a step back. Her mane-like hair stirs, hiding the strange shape of her jaw, then blowing away again to reveal her unnatural smile. Her eyes shine, and they do not look away from Sophie as she continues to walk backward, the iron horseshoe still held out on her palm.
A promise made, and a promise accepted?
Sophie still doesn’t know. Has she only delayed the inevitable?
The Nag Bride must always have her groom.
Or will things be different this time?
She leaves the front door open, retrieves her phone from the floor. She dials Andrew’s number. He answers on the third ring, sounding out of breath, but like himself.
“Hey. I just landed, and I’m trying to find the shuttle to the hotel.” She pictures the crowded airport, Andrew dragging his suitcase behind him. “Is everything okay?”
“I want to buy the house.” The words leave her in a rush, given breath, made real.
“What? Soph—What are you—”
“I want to buy the house. Don’t sell it. I don’t know…I’ll figure something out.”
Sophie carries her phone back into the hall, out the front door and onto the porch. Ruined cornstalks sway, even though there is no breeze. Footprints trail in the driveway’s dust. Hoof-shaped, shaped like a woman’s bare heel. A promise in return. The Nag Bride is patient and if Sophie fails, she will be there, waiting.
“We can talk about it when you get home.” Sophie hears the weariness in her voice, the strain.
She knows how all of this must sound to Andrew, and she doesn’t care. She has a promise to keep.
“Hey, don’t even worry about it. Focus on the interview. I know you’re going to kill it.” Sophie feels herself smile, despite everything.
“Are you sure you’re all right? You sound—”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just….”
Sophie looks to the trees, swaying as though something just passed through them. For a moment, it isn’t the new house built where her house used to be that she sees. It’s her house, low and narrow, and her father is in there, sleeping, and her mother is gone, and there’s no one else to protect it except Sophie.
“I need to do this,” Sophie says. “I need to stay here. This is the only place that’s ever felt like home.”
The trees sway and the wind doesn’t blow and somewhere in the darkness a horse wickers. And even though Sophie can’t see it, she feels it—the Nag Bride smiles.
Tekeli-li, They Cry
They tell me the future is broken. Will be broken. Has always been broken.
I was wide awake the first time they sp
oke to me and have been every time since. They come from there, then, when the future is broken. Which is now because the break stretches in every direction. That’s what they tell me.
We’re time travelers, meeting in some middle distance where they can scream at me, speak in soft, reasonable tones, jibber, weep, and tell me what is to come and is already here.
They’re bright, like staring directly into a 100-watt bulb. One that’s already broken—jagged but still burning. There are shapes behind them, smearing and blurring and refusing to stay still. It hurts to look at them, so mostly, I just listen.
The voices overlap. Like listening to five radio stations at once. Whether they weep or plead or speak calmly (those are the worst), the one thing they agree on is south. Go all the way south to the pole. Stop the future from being broken.
Why do I believe them? Because of my beautiful baby girl. I’ve seen her out there on the ice. Even before I came to this blue place full of wind and sleepless sun, I saw her. A skip in time. A scratch on the record of my life. A time, repeating. My past, leaking into my present. Her future, reaching back for her with empty hands.
I know time is broken because I saw my little girl, even though she’s been dead for three years, seven months, and twenty-one days.
*
Our eighth day on the ice, James and Risi brought Austin back into the station screaming. He shouldn’t have been out there alone. That’s the first thing you learn here—the ice is treacherous. It’s worse with climate change. Everything is more extreme: the colds colder, the warm periods rotting the ice soft under your feet.
Everything here wants to kill you. Not like a jungle or a swamp with poisonous insects and crushing heat. The cold kills with kindness—or humiliation. It lulls you to sleep. It makes you think you’re burning up, so you strip your clothes off. History is full of people who have frozen to death naked in snowstorms.
The wind blows shimmering snow, blinding and tricking the eye. The sun—ever-awake six months and absent the other six—throws shadows all stark on the ground, so we see things that aren’t there and miss things that are. If I didn’t know the world was broken, that there are worse things coming (already here), I would think what happened to Austin was just the landscape fucking with us.
Us. I should say, that’s Austin, Ricky, Sheila, Cordon, Risi, James, and me. (And my daughter’s ghost.) You wouldn’t think I would lose count with only seven, but I do. There should be nearly 200 bodies filling the station. It’s peak season. But since the moratorium on climate research, no one cares about the South Pole. They can’t afford to. Still, this is where the voices say the future will break. So here we are, funding our own research, stubborn or stupid or frightened enough to run away to the end of the world.
Austin was gathering samples from the ice for me to study. Bacteria. Fungus. Algae. Some of the few things that can survive here. I’m looking for something microscopic in the ice, something people would never notice, being too busy looking at the horizon or the sky for the big, terrible thing, then bam. World’s end.
When they brought Austin in, he was screaming that something in the ice bit him.
The station has a trauma center. Luckily, it’s in the part that didn’t burn. Sheila is a surgeon. Was. Like all of us, she came to the end of the world with a bag full of demons. One of them was enough to get her barred from practice apparently. She saved Austin, even though there wasn’t much for her to do other than treat him for shock. He wasn’t even bleeding. His wound didn’t look like a bite; the lower half of his arm had been sheared clean off.
*
The whirring of the 3D printer woke me up even though it had already been going for hours. It’s a waste. All this expensive tech tucked away at the bottom of the world. One government funded a whole bunch of upgrades, top of the line stuff. The next one swooped in and took all the money away, made climate research damn near illegal. Now, all the fancy machines and equipment are rotting away, and private eyes and dollars are on space. Well, it’s not a complete waste, I guess. Austin gets a new arm.
(If the government hadn’t cut funding, maybe they would have found the poison in the water sooner. I shouldn’t complain. Neelie was born with all her limbs in the right place, and no extra ones. Other parents weren’t so lucky. My baby girl only had a slight delay in cognitive development. A lag. Sometimes she was miles away, her eyes on some past or future only she could see. But maybe that had nothing to do with the poison in the ground. Just like the nights she woke screaming. All kids have bad dreams, after all.)
Still, I’m surprised the government didn’t drag the tech out when they pulled the plug. They could have printed light armor, weapons, and bombs undetectable by scans. Some of the scientists tried to burn the station on their way out in protest. After that, the government could barely be bothered to get the people out. If they wouldn’t have had human rights groups from creditor nations barking up their asses, they probably would have left the scientists to rot too.
Anyway, Austin is in remarkably good spirits for someone missing half his arm. He’s sticking to his story. Something in the ice bit him. I think time broke, just where he happened to be. Half his arm ended up in some other when. It’s right where he left it, just a few seconds or years into the future or the past, so we can’t see it anymore.
One of the voices (one of the weeping ones) said a city rose, is rising, everywhere and everywhen. There are holes; things can slide through. Sometimes by accident, like arms. People can slide through, but it isn’t easy, so most stay put and shout across the distance.
(Oh, I should have said. Time is broken. It doesn’t matter what we find in the ice. Nothing we do here matters. I lied to Austin, Sheila, Cordon, James, Ricky, and Risi. The voices (some of them at least) really do think there’s something we can do to change things, but we can’t. I recognize the stages of grief. I’m surprised the other seven (eight?) don’t. The voices are bargaining right now. They’re pleading with anyone who will listen. Just please take it back. Make it the way it was. Make it okay again. Bargaining never works. That’s why it isn’t the last stage. One thing it’s made me understand that I didn’t three years, seven months, and twenty-nine days ago—it’s not that no one is listening. It’s just that sometimes, there’s nothing they can do.)
After I woke up, I went to sit by the printer. It’s hypnotizing, all that passing back and forth, building new bones. Out of nowhere, James burst in and said we should be printing weapons, not arms (ha ha). He said there’s a fight coming. He said he’s seen things under the ice, sleeping. He wouldn’t explain. I saw him standing by the window later, staring out at the ice, at the spot where I saw Neelie last time. I wanted to hit him. She’s my ghost. Mine. He can damn well find his own.
*
It’s been a couple weeks since Austin’s ’accident’ and now Ricky thinks he’s seen James’s monsters, too. Shadows under the ice. Vast, slow things. Turning, he said. I don’t know what that means.
Sheila is working with Austin on rehab, even though it isn’t her specialty. It’ll be a while before he has any kind of dexterity. No one seems to care that Austin is basically useless for field work, except James. Every time James sees Austin, he starts in about weapons again.
Ricky’s thing is CERN. He says whatever’s going on is probably their fault. He’s a good kid. He’s supposedly here to keep Risi’s notes in order, label things, make spreadsheets and pretty graphs. I think he would be smart under normal circumstances, but Risi only brought him along because she wants something to fuck.
The birds aren’t birds. That’s another thing Ricky says.
He’s been drawing them since he got here. Really detailed, textbook quality. He wanted to be an artist, but he couldn’t hack it. So he let Risi pay his way to the bottom of the world.
He’s jittery, more so by the day. I don’t think he’s sleeping. I don’t know that any of us are, not real sleep at least. Risi shows it the least.
James going on about weapo
ns got Ricky worked up about CERN again.
“It’s when they fired up the Large Hadron Collider,” he said. “They fucked everything up. Ripped a hole in space.”
Risi looked like she wanted to slap him. Actually, she looked like she wanted to tear him apart with her teeth, right down to marrow and bone. Maybe that’s her kink—violence gets her off better than sex. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “This has nothing to do with science, or if it’s science, it’s not any kind of science we understand.”
She wouldn’t explain what she meant; she stalked off and slammed the door. It’s the closest I’ve seen to anything like a crack in her armor. Maybe Risi is human after all.
*
It’s day sixteen, or twelve, or thirty-seven, or two. Cordon and Risi are drinking to cope. I wish I could join them.
I smashed a mirror yesterday. Well, crushed it, really. It was a little pocket mirror I found behind the bookshelf in my room. They’re like dorm rooms, except cleaner. Someone before me cared about their appearance, apparently. I broke it in half, squeezed it until it cracked. Seven years bad luck.
(Maybe I should say why I’m really here, now that you know I know we can’t stop the end of the world. I came looking for Neelie. Even though I saw her before I saw her out on the ice, I think she wanted me to follow her here. Her ghost is brighter in the snow.)
I think Ricky might be on to something with the birds. I wanted to put that down before I forget.
I could say something melodramatic, like I was looking at my reflection, and I couldn’t stand the monster staring back at me. But I wasn’t even looking at the reflective part, just turning the mirror over in my hand like a stone.
(It wasn’t until I picked up the broken pieces that I saw Neelie’s eye staring back at me, her mouth open to speak. I got scared. I’ll admit that. I got scared. I came here to find her; she’s my little girl, but she still terrifies me.)
