Jane Doe and the Cradle of All Worlds

by Jeremy Lachlan

  ‘So … so what’s wrong with it?’ I ask, nodding at the gateway. ‘Why’s it all … holey?’

  ‘Dying.’

  ‘The gateway’s dying?’

  Hickory shakes his head. ‘The Manor.’

  ‘The Manor can’t die,’ I say, as if I have a bloody clue on the subject.

  ‘Can die. Is dying.’ Hickory looks around at the walls and the ceiling and the gateway like he wants to kiss them and stab them at the same time. ‘The snow. This grass. Not meant to be in here. Any of it. Gateways are failing, see? Otherworlds creeping inside.’

  ‘Why are the gateways failing?’

  Hickory’s face darkens. ‘Roth.’

  I swear the torches flicker when he says it, as if the flames themselves are frightened. ‘What’s a Roth?’ I ask.

  ‘Not a what. A who. The boss. The bad guy. Sneaked inside the Manor somehow. Marched his army in, too. Tin-skins. Leatherheads. Trucks, tanks and guns. They built the fortress. Started tearing everything apart. The Manor’s strong, but that much evil?’ Hickory shakes his head. ‘It can’t handle it. Not forever. Roth’s been here a long time. Too long.’

  ‘As long as you?’

  ‘Nobody’s been here as long as me,’ Hickory says, but he isn’t bragging. Far from it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I mean it, too. ‘But … why did Roth bring an army in here?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  And it hits me. ‘He wants to take over an Otherworld. He’s spoiled for choice in here. He could conquer any world he wants.’

  ‘Yes. And no. He got into the Manor. But the Manor’s not letting him out again. Gates don’t just open for anyone, see? The Manor chooses. Always. Who goes, who stays.’

  ‘So he’s stuck here, like you.’

  ‘Like us.’ Hickory nods at the gateway. ‘Try it.’

  ‘I don’t think I should,’ I say, and then, because Hickory’s eye twitches, ‘Okay, sure.’

  I step up to the gateway and touch the honeycombed stone. Nothing happens. There’s no grinding stone. No burst of sunlight or breath of fresh, Otherwordly air. There’s just the soft flutter of the moths, the crackle of the torches, the heavy silence of the Manor beyond.

  It’s a dead end.

  ‘Way I see it,’ Hickory says, ‘the Manor’s out of balance. Crying out for help. Letting people in to stop Roth, not letting ’em out again because it can’t risk him tagging along.’

  ‘So there are other people in here?’ I step back from the gateway, scratching absent-mindedly at an itch in my injured palm. ‘People from different worlds?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ Hickory says. ‘Lost people. Scared people. Can’t-get-home-again people. Roth captures anyone he can.’

  ‘He tries to get them to open their gateways,’ I say. ‘The ones they came through.’

  ‘Takes ’em out, one by one. But the gateways never open.’ Hickory kicks at a mound in the grass, then bends down and starts tearing it up, unearthing something grey-brown and mouldy from the tangle of roots. He picks it up. Spins it, tosses and catches it. ‘Tin-skins get a feed.’

  It’s a mangled human skull.

  ‘Bloody hell, Hickory.’ I kick the skull from his hand. A reflex motion. Not super respectful, I guess, but neither’s being tossed around like a juggling ball. Two corpses and a skull in one day. Some kinda record. ‘And, um, if a gateway finally does open?’

  ‘Roth enslaves an entire world.’

  The evil wasps buzz in my gut again. ‘Listen, that all sounds horrible, but this,’ I wave a hand at the golden grass and the moths and the manky skull, ‘this isn’t my problem. I came to get my dad, and that’s all I’m gonna do.’

  I half-expect Hickory to look at me like I’ve kicked a baby, but he just smiles and heads back down the hallway. ‘My place. Very close. We rest. Get supplies.’

  ‘Supplies for what?’

  ‘Long walk. Very far to Roth’s fortress.’

  ‘Wait a second.’ I hurry to catch up. ‘You want us to go towards the bad guys?’

  ‘You said your dad’s sick,’ Hickory says casually, as if he’s commenting on the weather. ‘If he’s sick, he’s slow. If he’s slow, he’s already been captured.’

  And that’s how he does it. That’s how Captain Bad News shakes my already upside-down world to the core. There’s no easing me into it. He shoots the words at me, rat-a-tat.

  ‘How do you know that? Hey!’

  I punch Hickory’s arm. He spins around like he wants to pin me to the wall again, but I raise a finger this time, cock my knee, ready to fire. Uh-uh. Hickory thinks twice, backs up.

  ‘Manor’s infested. Leatherheads everywhere. Everyone’s caught at some point.’

  ‘You haven’t been caught.’ My voice is shaky, but the words still slap Hickory in the face, and that’s when it dawns on me. He knows the way to the fortress because he’s been there before. ‘Wait a second, you were caught? When? How did you get away?’

  ‘With great difficulty,’ Hickory says, and it pretty much seals the deal. I have to trust him, even if he is a thousand-year-old shoe thief who collects buckets of poo.

  I have no choice.

  ‘How long does he have?’ I can’t help glancing back at the skull.

  ‘Depends how many other prisoners there are. Where he is in line. But I’ll take you to him, find your gateway home. It probably won’t let you out, of course, but that ain’t my problem.’ He sets off down the corridor again. ‘Soon as we get there, the key is mine.’

  HICKORY’S HIDEOUT

  I think we get to wherever it is we’re going pretty quickly, but I can’t be sure. We could’ve been walking for hours. Images of Dad being beaten and tortured by this Roth guy keep swirling through my mind. Worst-case scenarios’ll be the death of me one day, I swear.

  ‘So this is it?’ We’re standing in front of a dark hallway. ‘This is your hideout?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Hickory says.

  ‘What happened to the candles?’

  ‘Got rid of ’em. Good cover. No talking.’

  Into the darkness we go, and it’s the sound of Hickory’s footsteps I’m following, the counting under his breath. When he hits thirty he turns right. When he hits seventy he veers left. When he hits eighty-two he stops walking altogether and I run into his back.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asks.

  A cry for help – no, a howl – far down the corridor, back the way we came.

  ‘Tin-skins,’ Hickory says. ‘Pack of ’em. Picked up our scent. Move.’

  The counting comes faster now. Ninety-three. One-twelve. One-thirty. The howling gets louder behind us and there are other noises too. Rattling chains and barking.

  ‘How much further?’ I ask.

  Then I trip over. Scrape my knees and hands, feel my palm tear open again. I picture the base of the Sacred Stairs, my bloodied handprint on the stone, but there’s no quake this time, no furious tide. Just Hickory feeling for my arm, pulling me back to my feet.

  The squeak of an opening door. He pulls me inside.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he says, slamming the door shut behind us. ‘Not one step.’

  Rummaging down to my left. A clunk and scrape. A wooden plank sliding into place.

  He’s reinforcing the door.

  ‘Will it hold?’ I ask, wincing at the throbbing pain in my hand.

  ‘Won’t need to.’ The pop and rattle of an open jar. That familiar, eye-watering stench. A slopping, slapping sound. ‘Smell scares ’em. Blocks our scent. They’ll run right past.’

  ‘What is that stuff anyway?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Hickory says.

  The Tin-skin pack storms past the door, rattling the handle. I want to turn and run but I stand my ground. And just when I think it’s over, when the main pack rumbles out of earshot, I hear something else. Sniffing, slobbering, the clack of clawed paws on stone. A squeak of metal-on-metal. A lone Tin-skin has stayed behind. It’s pacing just outside the door.


  ‘Hickory?’ I whisper.

  ‘Wait,’ he whispers back. ‘Don’t. Move.’

  Something warm trickles down the fingers of my left hand and I remember I’m bleeding. I adjust the bandage, ball up my fist, and hope to hell the scent of the rotten goo is as much of a repellent as Hickory says. There’s another bark, another howl, and then nothing. The lone Tin-skin grunts and trots away, leaving me and Hickory alone in the dark.

  ‘Okay,’ Hickory says. ‘Hands on my shoulders.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put your hands on my shoulders. There’s only one way across.’

  ‘Across what?’

  Hickory curses, fumbles for my arm. Hands me the empty goo-jar. ‘Hold it out to your side. Drop it.’ I ask what’s going to happen when I do and he says, ‘Just do it,’ so I do it.

  I stretch out my arm, drop the jar and wait. And wait. I never hear it land.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Told you. My place. Big maze. Many paths.’

  I slide a careful foot left and then right, feel the rough edges of a thin stone bridge with my toes. ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘No idea. Too far down to see. Found this place a long time ago.’ Hickory grabs my hand and slaps it on his shoulder. ‘Step where I step –’

  ‘Stop when you stop. Got it.’

  The path goes on forever, zigzagging left and right. Hickory knows it all by memory. He counts out his footsteps in whispers, starting from zero whenever we make a turn. I don’t even try to keep track. I’m as good as lost, being led over nothing, into nothing.

  ‘Hold tight,’ Hickory says after a while. ‘Nearly there.’

  Turns out Hickory hasn’t taken all the candles. I can see a bunch of them now, floating in the darkness ahead like a tiny cluster of stars. Shapes emerge from the gloom the closer we get. Enormous, empty chandeliers above our heads, row upon row of them. Other bridges, supported by immense stone columns stretching down, down, down into the darkness. And there, directly under the candlelight ahead, a crooked shack slapped together on an island of stone.

  The centre of the maze. Hickory has built a home in here.

  I let his shoulders go, trusting my own eyes once again. I’ve left a trail of blood all down his back. I consider apologising, but it’s not like his shirt was pristine to begin with.

  ‘Hey,’ I say instead. ‘Nice place.’

  The shack looks sturdy enough. Seems to be constructed from torn-off Manor doors and salvaged scraps of wood. Broken crates and barrels. He’s even decorated the place. An old shield hangs beside the door. A line of stones on strings dangles from a tiny window. Bottles, flasks and piles of golden coins are scattered all over the place. More jars of black goo. Weapons, gas masks, machetes. A strange compass lies discarded at my feet.

  ‘Used to collect stuff. Things people left as they passed between worlds.’

  ‘You never saw anyone?’ I ask. ‘Tried to follow them out? People from the world I just came from used to walk through the Manor all the time – a lot of this stuff’s probably theirs.’ I nudge the compass with my foot. The needle won’t stop spinning. ‘But you’re lucky you didn’t follow them. Bluehaven isn’t a nice place. Better than here, I guess. No offence.’

  Hickory stares at his shack with a sick kind of look on his face. ‘Used to hear people. Track them. Always too late. The Manor never let me near them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Doors lock. Rooms shift.’

  ‘The rooms shift?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes?’ I can’t believe I’m hearing this. ‘How can the rooms shift? How can you find your way back to Roth’s fortress? How can you find anything?’

  ‘Carved my symbols on the walls,’ Hickory says. ‘And rooms can’t shift if doors are left open.’ He jabs a thumb back the way we came. ‘Always chock it open when I leave. Don’t worry, they always shift back.’ He shrugs. ‘Eventually.’

  A DIFFERENT WINDOW

  I remember the bluebird. It came one afternoon. Dad was lying in the tub I’d dragged to the centre of the room, soapy water up to his chin. He watched the bird as it hopped along the windowsill and pecked at a spider. I sat and watched beside him. The bluebird bobbed around for a minute, chirping and singing, filling the basement with music. When it flew away, Dad made a sound, an almost-laugh. It was the first time I’d ever heard him do that.

  I made up a song about it afterwards called ‘Bluebird in the Basement’. Sang it for days. Still give it a run every now and then. I’m pretty sure it’s Dad’s favourite.

  Now I’m looking out a different window, nursing my crook hand, curled up in a corner of Hickory’s hideout with a bundle of rags for a pillow. It’s a tiny shack but he cleared me some space when we stopped inside. Packed and stacked things, threw things out the door. I just stood beneath the open hatch in the ceiling, soaking up the light from the chandelier above.

  ‘Sleep,’ Hickory said when he’d finished. ‘We leave in the morning.’ I asked how we’d know when it was morning. He said, ‘When we wake up.’

  I told him we should keep moving, get what we need and go. He closed the hatch in the ceiling, took off his shirt and lay down on his own bed of rags in the corner opposite mine. ‘Rest,’ he said, turning over to face the wall. ‘Need strength. Only way to survive.’

  He hasn’t moved since then, but I can tell he’s awake. Sleep in a shared room long enough and you can always tell when someone’s awake. It’s all in the breathing.

  There’s just enough candlelight coming through the window to see the scars and burns on Hickory’s back. Whip lashes and hot pokers, I reckon. Roth and his goons really went to town on him. Once again, I think of a wild animal. Tired, wounded, resting in a cave.

  I want to ask him about the things they did to him, about everything he’s been through, but how do you start a conversation like that? Before I stumbled into his life he sat here in this shack with no-one to talk to, surrounded by junk left behind by people with better lives. People with memories to savour, tales to tell, places to be. I think about him following sounds and voices, running for his life, the Manor screwing him over at every turn. Always the questions in his head. Where did I come from? Why is this happening? Why me?

  It dawns on me then. We have a lot more in common than I thought. Replace the shack with a basement, the Manor hallways with Bluehaven streets, collecting junk with scavenging rubbish, and it’s as close a match as you’re ever gonna get.

  The Manor has ruined both our lives.

  I had sunlight, though. Not much of it, but enough. I could walk under the sky, breathe fresh air, talk to Violet. I had Dad. Even though I’ve always felt alone, I guess I never was. Not as alone as Hickory. Hell, I’ve finally met someone worse off than me.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘You awake?’ And when Hickory doesn’t answer, ‘Helllooooo.’

  He tells me to go to sleep again. I tell him I can’t because my dad’s been captured by an evil army. Also, I slept a bunch when a certain someone black-bagged my head.

  ‘I just wanted to say I know what it’s like.’ I sit up. ‘Being alone. Not knowing about your past and all. I don’t know where I was born. Which world I came from. I don’t know what’s wrong with my dad. He’s been sick all my life. And I’ve never met my mum. Don’t have a clue where she is. Don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. I know it’s hard, though, the not-knowing. Really hard.’ Hickory says nothing. ‘Well, that’s it. So, um, goodnight.’

  I lie down again, wish I could start over, but then Hickory says, ‘Bluehaven. What’s it like?’ I get the feeling he’s wanted to ask for a while. Rare details of an outside world.

  I’m not sure where to start. ‘It’s an island. With houses, farms and people. Idiots, mostly.’ I wonder how much I should say, but before I can even think of a lie – anything to make my life there seem slightly normal – the truth slips out. ‘They hate me.’

  I have to wait about ten years for Hickory�
��s response.

  ‘Why?’

  Here we go, I think. ‘They call me the Cursed One. And it turns out I am. In a way. I mean, I’m not cursed cursed – not possessed or anything, I just – it’s hard to explain.’

  So I explain it. Everything. From the townsfolk’s obsession with the Manor to the Night of All Catastrophes. From my life with the Hollows to Atlas slicing open my hand. I tell him about the quake I caused. About the Manor waking up. About Dad running up the Sacred Stairs. I tell him everything Winifred told me in her study, unload a lifetime of baggage, and it feels great. Unbelievable. Goddamn therapy is what it is.

  ‘Winifred pushed me down the hole,’ I say, sitting up again. ‘Can you believe that? Dropped a bomb down after me, too. Anyway, I made it to the gateway and – well – here I am.’ I huff out a deep breath. ‘Boy, that felt good. So what do you reckon?’

  I wait and I wait. Hickory doesn’t tell me what he reckons.

  ‘Stay here,’ he says instead, and when he leaves the shack, I catch something shining on his cheeks in the dull glow from the candles outside. The trace of a tear.

  I wasn’t expecting this. Am I supposed to say something? Keep my trap shut? I don’t even know why he’s crying. Do I ask him? What if it makes things worse? Then I get an idea.

  ‘Hickory?’ He stops just outside the door, the scars on his back frowning at me. ‘You can keep my boots. You were probably gonna keep them anyway, but I won’t ask for them again. They’re yours. For helping me.’

  There’s a long silence, but then he speaks. Softly. Quietly. Two words he probably hasn’t said in a very long time.

  ‘Thank you.’

  HUNTED

  The cold water. The shape-shifting waves. The little island, closer than last time, but still well out of reach. I try to swim towards it, but another wave whips me up and throws me through the black bubbles to the deep, deep down. There’s the eerie, underwater groaning again. The crackles of lightning in the depths that sear white shapes into my eyes. The glowing monsters are waiting, watching, unfurling their tentacles, ready to strike.