by Sarah Porter
“Anyway what?” Elena asks. I hadn’t really looked at her before, but I do now: her bobbed hair streaked blue and swarming like shadows, her face defined by soft curves of light from passing cars. She must really be crazy about Everett if she’s doing this, but it’s still hard for me to understand that; Elena could have almost any guy she wanted, so why him? I know Ever’s awesome, but that’s never been obvious to people outside our family. But it hits me now: she sees who Everett really is, and she must have for a long time. Maybe she’s seen him more clearly than I did until right this moment. “Anyway what, Ruby? I heard everything your ghost brother said, and I almost believed him. But I still feel like my head is ripping open, trying to understand what the hell is going on here.”
“Part of me is in the Land of the Dead,” I say. “That’s the price of letting Dashiell live inside me. So if I’m split between my life here and death, how can anything seem strange to me?”
“And that’s where we’re going,” Elena says. Her voice is flat but I can sense the fear rippling under it. “The Land of the Dead. There, and to a slumber party.”
“Yay, slumber party!” I say, and for a moment there’s a flash between us: a bleak smile that wings from her lips to mine and back again. For a moment it feels like we’re friends.
“Oh my God,” Elena raps out in a voice like clacking stones. “Cupcakes!”
She turns to ring the doorbell.
EVERETT
I’ve pretty much lost my grip on the world now, and I know that’s a problem. The darkness isn’t still anymore. It’s more like I’m caught in a pitching, spinning dizziness where all I can detect are periodic pops of emotion coming from Aloysius. Like, he gets flustered when he reaches the subway turnstiles and finds out they don’t take tokens anymore—he really hasn’t been back in New York in a while!—and I feel him experiencing that confusion totally clearly. I get the curious, watchful sensation of him observing other people going through with their MetroCards, and I know when he finds mine in my jeans.
Then there’s the scraping, jagged pain of my broken ribs: that, I feel all the time, but it’s like the pain is dislocated. Like it’s not in any specific part of my body, but whirling around with no direction. He’s probably offloading all the suffering he can onto me, but I can tell that he has to put up with at least some of it, too.
But I can’t see or hear anything. I guess I know where we’re going, but a guess is all it is, really. So I don’t have much to do but think about what Aloysius told me earlier. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind lying, but everything he said about Dash felt so true that it raked right through me. Yeah, so Dash was saving his own ass and using us to do it, but he was also looking out for me and Ruby—trying to keep us out of the exact mess I’ve gotten into now, all by myself. But I went and assumed the absolute worst of him, and I was wrong, and now I get to live with knowing that.
Though probably not for long.
Jesus, Dash. Why didn’t you just tell me? But he can’t hear me thinking anymore, not now that we’ve been cut off from each other. And I’m honestly not sure if I would have believed him, not even if he had told me the whole crazy story. He probably knew that my default assumption was that everything he ever said was a lie.
A flash of the street. Wet and moody, with thin trees scraping at the grubby, lamp-stained night. A window full of brightly lit wedding dresses, bone white and hovering over the sidewalk. Spectral skirts and dead arms. Why is he showing this to me?
Because it’s the East Village, is why. We’re three doors down from Paige’s apartment building. I’m helpless to do anything, stop anything, and the realization of what’s going to happen is like a tic deep inside me. And every little jump in my stomach squeezes the dread out, farther and farther through my body, until fear has taken the place of every cell I’ve got.
Paige maybe won’t be thrilled to see me, or what she thinks is me, but she won’t be afraid, either. She won’t run. She’ll probably come right up to me and ask me what my problem is, and what the hell do I think I’m doing, stalking her like this.
Miss Kittering didn’t respond when you rang her bell, Aloysius thinks at me. Perhaps she’s out painting the town. But she’ll be coming home in due course, won’t she?
He curls one fingertip back and forth, stroking the handle of the butcher knife he shoved into the lining of my jacket. Every time that wooden handle slides against my skin there’s a tiny propulsive blurt of feeling in me, something between disgust and hot-cold horror.
She won’t come home! I tell him. She’ll be out all night with some new boyfriend. You’ll be standing here in the drizzle like a complete fool.
But he knows I’m lying. He knows I wouldn’t be so spastic with fear if I believed for one second that what I’m saying is true.
Oh, that seems unlikely. I don’t suppose Miss Kittering is a young lady any self-respecting man would keep in his bed after she’s served her purpose. More the sort to whom one hands cab fare, and perhaps something on top. A tumble and then a fistful of gold coins, isn’t that right, young Everett? A hasty thank-you for the pleasure of her company, and show her to the door. I knew demimondaines of her type very well, back in my day.
Ugh. I don’t know if he knows somehow what happened with me and Paige, or if he’s just guessing, but I’d like to drag his entrails through the street for talking about her this way—even knowing that every loop of intestine was actually mine.
But that’s the problem. The more enraged and sickened I get, the more he enjoys it; that’s the whole point of his game. Otherwise he’d just keep me blacked out.
And when she does return? Why, I think I’ll keep you bright-eyed and alert. Intimately aware of every detail of our transaction. You might find you relish it rather more than you expect. You might even acquire the taste.
I don’t bother answering him anymore. I feel so totally obliterated, as weak as my own smashed bones. I feel so lost, and the maze is my own damned body. I don’t know where I am inside it, really, or where it stops or starts, or whether I’m fooling myself when I imagine bashing my way through Aloysius’s control again. Disrupting his grip on my hands. I wouldn’t need to do it for long. Just a few seconds.
I mean, assuming that I could find the nerve to turn my hand around and slash that knife across my own throat, then that’s all the time it would take.
RUBY SLIPPERS
There’s a hole at the bottom of my dreams.
I find the crevice where Dash said to look for it: under the bed he slept in as a teenager, before everything went so wrong. Now the sheets are dusk gray and covered completely in ruby-red script just like the writing on his bedroom walls—No one has injured you except yourself—except here the letters writhe slightly. They shine with a patchwork glow that brightens and gutters out again. In their dim light I can just make out the ragged edges of the gap between the floorboards, and I crawl through.
It’s a thin and twisted passage; Dashiell has been burrowing up through the defenses he built himself. Through slanting barricades made of every material, or none; of flotsam and shipwreck and broken-off rinds from the moon; the fireplace mantel from my mother’s London apartment, which I’ve only seen once; slats from the Coney Island boardwalk dotted with shoes I wore when I was ten. Dash has been busy, working with whatever he can find abandoned here, in this sedimentary layer between waking thought and dreams.
Once I’m almost sure I feel him. Once his warm hand brushes mine as he reaches up from below. Then it’s gone again. He has other tasks to do tonight, I know that; maybe he’s gone to loosen a way through for Elena, and that’s why he’s pulled his hand away before I could see him.
At least, I hope that hand was his. I keep twisting downward, catching at chinks in the debris to pull myself through.
“Ruby? Ruby, are you okay?”
I can barely hear Liv’s voice, echoing from somewhere. She sounds very distant. Feathers of sound wafting far above.
For a moment I hesitat
e. I think I can still turn around but soon I’ll have gone too deep. I’ll lose track of the way back to waking.
“You’re getting dressed? Ruby, it’s after three in the morning! What—did I say something wrong? Are you upset with me?”
There’s a lull, and then I dimly hear myself speaking: “My dad texted. There’s some kind of emergency? I have to get home. Don’t worry, Liv, I’ll call a cab.”
Dashiell. But he can’t imitate my voice nearly as well as he can do Everett’s. Liv will notice how wrong I sound, how chirpy and artificial. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll think it’s because I’m so upset.
There’s a bigger problem here, though: where is Dashiell taking my body? What is he planning to do with it? From what I know, our plan doesn’t involve me physically going anywhere, and I should stay curled up in my sleeping bag on Liv’s floor until morning. As far as anyone can guess by looking at me, anyway. I should be part of the jumble of girls on the rug, cupcake frosting dabbed in our hair from the food fight we had earlier.
Dash? I call. I can see my thought rising like red smoke up through the chaos of planks and lost dolls. Dash-Dot-Dot, what’s going on?
I know he won’t answer—and just like I expected, he pretends not to notice me crying out to him. If Liv is still talking I can’t tell. All I can hear now is the dull fluting of a draft seeping through the cracks around me: a draft from below. I must be almost through, about to step out into the borderlands where I first found him. If I keep going then any moment now I’ll find my feet sinking into the spongy mud of the riverbank, but I think it’s not too late to turn back.
For a long moment I stay where I am, uncertain. If I crawl out of this dream and back to the surface of my sleeping body then I can at least knock at Dashiell’s awareness—I can demand that he hear me. Have we already walked out of Liv’s house; are we standing on her stoop in the deep blue night? I can’t tell.
But if I turn around any chance that our plan will succeed will be utterly ruined. I know what that failure will mean, for Everett and for me. Because I’m bitterly aware now that Ever was right: Dash won’t tolerate the risk my twin poses, both to me and to Dashiell’s life inside me.
Dash will try this way first—he’ll sincerely try his best, I trust him to do that much—but then he’ll move on to last resorts. So following Dashiell’s instructions now, following them exactly, is my only real hope of saving Everett.
And what will I do, if we fail tonight, if we reach the point where Dashiell will say we have no choice? I don’t know. I can’t stand to think about it. I can’t let myself even imagine what might come next.
So I gather whatever I am in this place: the illusion of breath, the dreamed heart crashing in a chest that aches even though it isn’t really there at all. And I keep going down, insinuating my way among my own memories. I only pause once, right at the final edge: I have one last small task to do, before I emerge.
Everything I see belongs to me. Until I touch down on the gray soil of a country that belongs equally to all of us.
The river laps at my toes, and when I glance down I see my crimson patent-leather boots, though I’m sure I wasn’t wearing them earlier. They’re so bright in this dim place that their color is throbbing.
Ruby slippers for you, my sweet Ruby-Ru.
EVERETT
There she is: a silvery girl in silver feathers and a huge skirt striped silver and dark purplish red. Some kind of crazy necklace that sticks out six inches in all directions and big plumes waving out of her hair. I’ve been in the dark for so long that at first she’s all I see, blazing in the middle of a black fog. It’s so cold out, it has to be, but she’s walking around without a coat. Just some little furry thing wrapped around her shoulders. She’s heading away from me, maybe fifteen yards up the street; as far as I can tell she hasn’t seen me at all.
All around her the mist is shining. Scintillating. For a second I think the light is coming from her and my heart skips. Every tiny flutter passing through her costume passes through me, too, like my fear is rustling.
I’m sunk so deep in myself that the view of Paige seems like it’s being beamed down to me.
And what comes after it is the sense of Aloysius’s cold, metallic smirk clanking down here. Ah, young Everett, even after the long hours you’ve had for contemplation, you overlooked a certain essential fact. I’ve never seen the nasty little trollop we’re hunting before. That young lady looked to be the right general sort of creature, but I couldn’t have been certain of the identification—if only your boyish excitement hadn’t given her away.
Maybe he’s telling the truth, or maybe he’s just out to mess me up. Either way I won’t answer. He’s right that I’ve had plenty of time to think. I’m pretty disoriented, but we must have been pacing this block for hours. I’ve been thinking as hard as I can the whole time; like, trying to work through the problem logically. Consider all the possibilities, even if everything that occurs to me seems desperate and irrational.
That beam of vision blinks out, and when it comes back we’ve closed almost half the distance. I can see more of the world now: a blur of shop windows, their light hitting the water droplets in the air like handfuls of flung glitter. It must be really late, because there’s no one else on the street that I can see: just Paige with her silvery plumes bending in the wind, and us following her. Her spike heels clack but my sneakers are dead silent. She’s passing that shop with the wedding dresses now: almost to her own building.
Darkness again. I wait for the world to flash in on me, knowing that when it does she’ll be closer. This time she’s like a silvery comet, looming into view. So near that I can see the black fuzz on the back of her neck. And I can’t help it, my fear of what’s about to happen grows with her, bigger and brighter, until panic starts to blot out all the parts of my mind that are still trying to be reasonable, to find a solution.
The pain in my ribs bursts through me at every step.
When Aloysius attacked my dad I held him off by exploiting my own weakness, and that’s what he’ll be watching out for now. But realistically he has to have weaknesses too. I just have to find them.
I try to stay with that thought as Paige pauses, maybe just eight feet away, and unzips the miniscule sparkly handbag dangling from her shoulder. She’s poking around in it for her keys, but it seems like they’re lost.
I try to stay with it—calm now, calm, there’s a way, he’s a ghost but so am I now, a ghost in my own body, and I’m haunting him, I’ll haunt him all the way to hell—as his grip tightens on the handle of that knife. Alive or not, as long as I’m adrift in this nowhere I’m another ghost, like him.
So think: what can they do? What have I seen Dashiell do, since he’s been haunting my body?
Aloysius will be waiting for me to pull the trick with my asthma again. He’ll have a good hold on my lungs. And he’ll be braced for me to bash up against him. To try to fight my way to the surface. He’s strong, and he’s ready to swat me back down.
He takes out the knife and slowly turns it in the glow of the streetlamp. He lets a spike of reflected light play over my face, then pivots his hand—no, my hand—and sends the shine-blade dancing over the back of Paige’s dress, her fur wrap.
Trying to take back my hand was a stupid idea, I can feel it. He’s baiting me into attempting that right now so that he can smack me down for fun. He’s in complete control, smirking at the thought of me rushing him.
God—there’s something here. The clue I need is right here.
And actually I’d better rush him. I’d better give him the satisfaction of seeing me rise to the bait. If I don’t, he might start to wonder if I’ve thought of something else.
Which I have, I think. Maybe, maybe, if I’m not deluding myself—maybe it’s worth a try.
So I collect all of my shapeless scraps of self into a boiling mass. All I am, all the energy I can muster, slams up at him at once, wrenching at my fingers and striking at the weight of his mind.
/> Nothing yields, though. There’s a quick shudder in my right hand and he has to make an effort to keep from dropping the knife, but that’s it. Bubbles of his silent laughter fizz through the dark.
Paige has finally found her keys and she’s fiddling with them. The knife stops twisting around and balances at the level of her heart. I can feel Aloysius getting ready. His intentions squeeze us both, enough that I know he’s waiting for the moment her key is in the lock to drive the blade deep between her ribs.
In the course of doing what was necessary to maintain control, I knocked you down—deeper than I’d meant to. That’s what Dash told me, pissily, about how we wound up running through the Land of the Dead together. About how we went too deep.
Paige tips forward with the key in her hand. In the glass door her reflection looks like a froth of silvery light. I can feel the muscles in my arm tense for the blow.
“Miss Kittering,” Aloysius whispers, and I see her turning, her feathers like trails of glow on the mist. She hasn’t seen the knife and she’s not scared yet, just confused. Her mouth opens to say something, but I can’t stop to listen.
I will not let him hurt her. Her eyes are on my face, her expression just starting to sharpen into annoyance, and all I want is to erase every pain she’s ever felt, every humiliation. And all at once I feel stronger than I ever knew I could feel: I’m a force swirling out of nothingness, and no one is going to hurt Paige while I’m here.
I crash at Aloysius again, madly now, and he shoves me down savagely.
We’re vapors, both of us. We’re the smear and welter of tangling minds. But even so, even though he’s just the impression of mass, shoving down that hard gives him a lot of momentum. And down is the one direction I think he’s not expecting.
Instead of pushing back I collapse beneath him, then as he stumbles—if you can describe a mind as stumbling—I grasp him and plunge.
And—oh, thank God—he’s caught completely off guard.
