Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “Allie!” calls my mother. I walk over to the doorway of the room and look out into the hallway. She’s standing right there. I thought I didn’t remember what she looks like, but I was wrong. I remember her exactly. This is her. Her dark curly hair, her dark brown eyes, her pale skin stretched tightly across her bones.

  “Plastic surgery is for people who don’t have our bone structure,” she used to say.

  “Allie, darling.” She holds my face in her hands, and I hear the Kalaturru’s hand crack as I squeeze it tighter. “Where have you been? It’s almost suppertime. We’re eating with the Standishes tonight. That child of theirs is running amuck, do you know anything about that?”

  Stan. She’s talking about Stan. I shake my head. She presses a kiss to my forehead, and my heart twists in my chest. She’s offering me everything—she’s offering me family, and friends, no blood and no death.

  But that’s not the most important thing to me anymore, is it? Because it’s all going to be kind of boring without my diner. Without Ryan.

  And she never called me Allie. She always used my full name.

  I look around. Everything looks wrong.

  She’s calling me Allie because she doesn’t know my real name. She’s calling me Allie because this is one of the Hells, and the Doors don’t know my real name. No one’s called me by my real name since my mother left, how could the Doors know it?

  They couldn’t.

  I’m still in Hell.

  “I’ll be down in a minute, Mom,” I say, and she smiles at me. Perfect teeth. Mine have always been a bit crooked, even with the application of painful braces.

  “Okay, don’t take too long. And, please, darling, change into something presentable.”

  A totally inappropriate laugh bursts out of me. I’m wearing a leather vest and leather pants and a leather duster. And I’m holding a mummy hand. Yes, if we’re having supper with Stan and his parents, I should definitely change into something more presentable. Preferably—I mean, I know my mother. Preferably something Chanel.

  She turns and walks down the stairs, the front stairs that curve around. They get wider at the bottom, like something out of a crazy movie. This was my mother’s dream house. She designed it and my father had it built for her.

  She always thought we were a class above everyone else, even the Standishes, even Amanda’s family. We had the nicest house, the nicest pool, the nicest pool house.

  I flop down onto the bed and stare at the canopy. It’s purple with black ruffles, and, if I remember correctly, it’s made out of raw Nepalese silk, or something else decadent and unnecessary.

  It all seems unnecessary now. It all seems ridiculous.

  I close my eyes and search for Doors, but can’t find any. I’m stuck here, I guess.

  Are you there? I call. I need you.

  But there’s no answer.

  I feel the bed dip a little, and surge up, and when I open my eyes, the lioness is sitting at the foot of the bed, staring at me with wide unblinking eyes. Except she doesn’t look quite like Ryan’s lioness. Which makes sense, I suppose. This one’s the real goddess, whereas the other’s just one of Ryan’s nightmares.

  “This is your Hell, huh?” I ask. “You the ghost of what might have been?”

  She looks reproachful.

  “I’ve totally figured it out. This is what my future would have been like if my mother hadn’t left. What do I have to do to get out of here?” I look down at the hand in my hand. It just looks like a desiccated old grey hand. The flesh of it is crinkly, like the casing of a sausage.

  The lioness doesn’t say anything, just sits there. Outside the huge picture window, the sun is setting. As it sets, the room gets darker and darker, until I’m lying in pitch blackness, the blackness of the dimension with the crevasse.

  And I talk to the lioness. I’ve been doing a lot of talking lately, except this time, instead of talking to Stan about all the things in the past, I talk to the lioness about now.

  Like: I love Ryan. I think I’ve been skirting around it, but—she’s a lion, I think I can tell her of all people. I love him, and I don’t even know what he thinks of me.

  I figure I’ve told her one home truth, so I follow it up with telling her that I don’t miss my parents. And then how badly I feel about what happened to Stan, and how worried I am about Amanda. Saying it all out loud makes it all feel a bit more real. Like I am creating reality out of my words, except I know I’m not, because that’s all real, and this, this room, this dimension, this is what’s a lie.

  The bed underneath me gets harder and harder, and I cry while I talk about Stan. I can’t see the lioness anymore, but I can feel her at my feet, the warmth of her. It’s freezing in the room, and my body is chilled. My hand is cramped where it’s wrapped around the hand of the Kalaturru, but I refuse to let it go. If I put it down, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pick it up again.

  I don’t know when I closed my eyes, but when I open them again, I’m in a dark place, and there are stars. Roxie said there were no stars in the underworld, but what does she know?

  The lioness rubs her face against my shoulder, and then lies down in front of me.

  I’m sorry that you could not fix Stan, the lioness finally offers.

  “Yeah, well, life’s a bitch,” I tell her.

  If it is any consolation, she starts, and I cut her off.

  “It’s not. Nothing is a consolation. I killed one of my best friends.”

  He was not your friend anymore. He was dead the moment the werewolf bit him. You know that. She puts her head on her front paws and stares at me. I stare back.

  “You know that doesn’t make it any better.” I stare back at her, and she changes the subject.

  You found what you came for. Well done.

  “The hand? Thanks. Will that stop the end of the world?” Oh Hell. I am apparently taking lessons in tactful questioning from Ryan.

  She laughs. Few can see my Hell for what it is, and I appreciate those who can know themselves. I came to give you a gift: I will answer three questions for you, and do so with as much truth as I can. To answer your first question: The hand can pause the earth and air, but it can’t stop it.

  “Wow, and thank you for springing that on me after I’d asked a question. Not very helpful,” I snap at her. “Fine. Second question: What will stop the end of the world?”

  Salt and silver, girl, the lioness says, sounding almost annoyed. You know this.

  I feel like I’m failing some kind of test here, with answers I couldn’t possibly know. That is what is called passive-aggressive argument, lioness, and I do not appreciate it.

  “Let’s skip the bullshit,” I say. “What answer should I be trying to cleverly wrangle from you?”

  Ah, says the lioness. If lions could grin, I think she would. The Door-hounds are not aspects of the Doors themselves, nor are they strictly demons, she says, and I swear for a second she sounds like Narnia. They are merely creatures that occupy the interstitials. They kill those who cross their space not out of hate, but because the Doors ask it of them. They are lonely creatures, and Doors are the only company they’ve found. The lioness stands, and stretches. I can feel the stretch in my body as she cracks her spine in three places. The warmth of the stretching flows through me.

  You’ve met a Door-hound, she says. In the darkness, a purple creature, tentacles with light dustings of fur at the end, swims around her. It’s a tiny version of the monster from the hospital. It’s a monster like this that killed Jackson.

  For a moment, I hate them.

  Oh yes, I imagine you do, the lioness says. But you have experience with loving those who do wrong without realizing it. You might want to remember that later.

  And she turns and walks into the darkness.

  A Door pops up where she disappears, and the tentacle monster—the Door-hound—swims into it, growing larger as it goes. The Door turns purple-green for a second, like a bruise, and then—Hello, Allie, the Door says.
<
br />   Yo, I say to it. I’ve been missing you. And it’s actually true.

  We missed you too, it says. What can we do for you?

  Wishes. I make too many wishes. But I figure it can’t really get much worse at this point. So I ask: Take me back to Ryan and Roxie. We’ve got shit to do.

  It would be silly if we helped you destroy us.

  I don’t really care about destroying you. I’m kind of surprised to realize that I mean it. Today is a day of re-evaluated self-image. I just want to fix the balance. You know it’s all screwed up.

  We understand, but—

  Oh, just shut up and do what I tell you. I sound about as exasperated with the Doors as Ryan always sounds when he’s talking to me. Ha ha.

  I step through the Door.

  Time slows as I go through the Door, and for a moment I hear the lioness say interstitials—that means the space between places. In the interstitial of the lioness’s Hell—the Hell of truth, I guess, and isn’t that Hell for enough people?—and a place that smells an awful lot like home, I can feel Ryan and Roxie, paused midstep in the Kalaturru/Kurgarru’s Door. And there’s something else, too. The thing that lives in the interstitials. The Door-hound.

  It smells purple. And lonely.

  And then the moment ends, and Ryan is Ryan, Roxie is Roxie, and I’m me.

  Except, maybe for first time ever, I am all of me.

  19

  When I turn around, the first thing I see is that someone’s pulled down Roxie’s BUTTER FLAVORING box wall. The theater’s dark, and on the screen is something animated, with a lot of animals wearing colored hats. Roxie and Ryan are right behind me. There are people actually sitting near us, but they’re not, you know, jumping up and screaming about these people who mysteriously appeared out of nowhere covered in blood and goo and carrying a mummy’s hand.

  “This is weird,” I whisper.

  “This is the part you think is weird?” teases Roxie. She resettles her Stetson on her head. Ryan does the same thing. I pull my sunglasses down from my hair onto my nose.

  “It looks like we’re home,” says Ryan unnecessarily.

  “What if this is another Hell dimension?” Roxie challenges.

  “Hell dimensions don’t have Disney,” I say. “Smells too human.”

  Ryan looks around. “So, what now?”

  “Got to get the van, cher,” Roxie says.

  “Sounds good to me,” I say. We head out of the theater and into the lobby, where teenagers look at us suspiciously. I see a bank of pay phones on the wall. “Hey, guys, give me a second?”

  Ryan looks like he wants to argue, or even ask why I need to make a phone call right now, but instead he gestures to the hand that I’m still holding. “You might want to put that away first,” he says mildly.

  Hmm. “Good point.” I tuck it into the pocket of my duster, and wow, that is an awkward lump. I hope it is a lot more solid than it looks, because it will be very embarrassing if we have to go all the way back into Hell to get the mummy’s other hand.

  I lope over to the block of pay phones and punch in my credit card number. It’s going to cost about a million dollars, even though it’s a local call, but I don’t care. Especially after those special moments in my old bedroom, I want to know about my life here, and now. Irrational? Probably. But it feels necessary. It smells necessary.

  Dawn picks up on the third ring. “Sally’s Diner,” she says, and when I say “It’s Allie,” she squeals.

  “Oh my god, Allie! You’ve been gone for almost a week! Where did you go? Were you with Ryan?”

  It can’t hurt to let her think the best of the situation. “Yeah, Ryan took me away for a while.” I let the force of Ashmedai’s Hell dimension come out in my voice, so that I sound kind of seductive. I also, I am sure, sound exhausted. And I’m starving. I wonder if I can convince Roxie and Ryan that before we do anything else, we need to get some pizza.

  “You have no idea,” Dawn is saying. “The shit that is going down in the city, Allie. The shit that’s going down! It is fucked up, I swear to you. It is like gang fights or something, I don’t know. I’ve been having everybody stay at the diner, just so we can keep tabs, you know? The radio’s saying the mayor’s going to call a state of emergency and declare martial law, and all sorts of wild things have been reported roaming the streets, like wild dogs and, I am not even kidding, walking trees. And—”

  I cut her off. “Any word from Amanda?”

  “Nothing. But—well, the phone is ringing off the fucking hook, but whenever I pick up, it’s just someone crying. Could that be—?” She sounds really distressed.

  “Dawn, I’ll be back soon. In fact, I think we might be there very soon to pick up some stuff. Okay? But right now I’ve got to go.”

  She cheers up enough to ask if Ryan is kissing my neck, and I giggle.

  “Not yet,” I say, and hang up the phone.

  Then I lean against it. Damn it, Amanda, where are you?

  I don’t bother to call her. For a second, I forget I’m not in Hell anymore, and I just reach for her. And—Jesus, it works. There she is, a pinpoint of sick light, and I’m following—

  Into a solid fucking brick wall. Ow.

  I open my eyes. I’m gasping. The theater lobby wavers in front of me for a second. I lever myself away from the phone bank and stumble back to Ryan and Roxie.

  “Anything?” Ryan asks, touching my elbow, holding me up.

  I shake my head. He doesn’t need to know I tried to use my Hell powers in the real world. I’ll stick with what Dawn told me.

  “It’s bad,” I say. “We’ll have to drive carefully.”

  We actually blend in pretty easily with the denizens of Sheepshead Bay—they’re all wearing bizarre outfits, and taking advantage of the warm spring afternoon to sit outside and sip cappuccinos while they wait for their movies to start, like my only living best friend isn’t somewhere I can’t find and my only dead best friend is off being mourned in Hell by the very monsters he was becoming.

  These people have no sense of perspective.

  When we reach the parking lot of the movie theater, sitting on the hood of Roxie’s van is Narnia. She looks super-pissed, and I am ready to fight her. Just let me at her. I took down one of those giant pill bugs, and I took down the fucking Hell dimension of truth—I can take on one annoying psychic witch.

  “You’re late,” she says, and holds out a bag. Ryan takes it, and pulls out bagels. Maybe she can live to see another day. Maybe.

  “I’ll let you live if one of those has cream cheese and tomatoes and onion,” I tell her.

  She sniffs at me. She’s wearing Balenciaga today, a neat brown suit with a subtle blue and cream plaid pattern, and brown knee-high leather boots. I wonder if it’s lamia leather, or if she just wears cow leather like everyone else.

  “It’s even on an everything bagel,” she says, and Ryan tosses me a bagel wrapped in butcher’s paper. I rip into the paper. Nothing compares to New York bagels, nothing, not even the best organic chocolate can compare to a bagel from New York. And with cream cheese, tomatoes, and onion? It’s like Heaven.

  Which is appropriate.

  Roxie’s got what looks like cream cheese and lox on hers, and Ryan’s cream cheese is a funny color. I lean over his arm and sniff it.

  “Walnut raisin cream cheese?” I ask, eyebrows up. That’s so . . . girly.

  “With maple syrup,” he says and takes a big bite.

  My heart sinks a little. I’ve known Ryan for six years, and in all that time, I never knew that he likes girly cream cheese. I always just buy regular.

  Narnia smirks at me like she knows what I’m thinking.

  “I just got back from Hell,” I say to her. “Don’t fuck with me, bitch.”

  “I’m here to help,” she snaps. “Don’t be an idiot.” She waves a hand at me and her eyes flash with the sparks.

  “Don’t you wave at me!” The effect is slightly diminished because my mouth is full of bagel.

/>   “Give me the hand,” she orders. Ryan snickers.

  “No.”

  “Give me the hand.”

  “What’s the magic word?” I sneer.

  “Right. Now.” Narnia’s voice is like ice, and I swear the temperature drops ten degrees.

  “You don’t have to be a bitch about it,” I grumble, juggling the bagel to get the hand out of my pocket again. “How’d you know we came back with a hand, anyway?”

  “Need I remind you that I am a psychic witch?” She smirks at me again, and gently caresses the hand. Okay, that’s more than a little creepy. “I knew the moment you entered the realm of the Kalaturru.” She looks up at me, and her eyes flare a little, but the sparks stay inside. “How did you escape the Hell of lies?”

  Because the point wasn’t the lie. The point was the truths I had to tell. How do I even explain that? Answer: Probably by not trying. “Well, it was clearly a bunch of lies, so I just . . .” I wave the hand holding the bagel, and part of a piece of tomato falls out with a squelch. Oops. “It was just a bunch of lies,” I finish lamely.

  “Hmm.”

  “Allie’s a lot stronger than we gave her credit for,” says Roxie loyally. And it’s true. I am a lot stronger than they gave me credit for. So there.

  “And my avatar is an elemental spirit.” It’s my turn to smirk at Narnia’s stupid face.

  “I knew that,” she says absently, still stroking the hand. “It’s clear just by looking at you. Air, right? It comes off you in waves. That’s why you’re so . . .” She trails off and snorts a little. “Arrogant.”

  “I’m arrogant? Me?” I feel more than a little affronted. “Seriously?” I turn to Ryan. “Me?”

  “Okay, Allie, settle down—”

  “Everyone shut up,” says Narnia. She sounds a little grim. I wish wistfully for some coffee or a bottle of water, and also to not have to look at her perfectly coiffed head or listen to her perfectly modulated voice.