by Hiromi Goto
They slowly descended from the mountaintop along switchback paths hewn into solid rock and sometimes stairs. The mountain terrain was dry, but sheltered pockets of rock held enough moisture and soil to support scrubby bushes and tiny colorless flowers. They were so very high that they could not see what vista lay below them. The light gray skies grew darker beneath them. Sometimes Melanie wondered if the mountain was also an island, surrounded by a slate-gray sea. Other times she was almost certain that a blanket layer of clouds was spread horizontally across the entire sky. There were no markers to gauge distance. And as they continued down, down, exhausted and wretched, she stopped caring.
It was if they were spiraling down the tallest mountain of all time.
As they slowly descended, the small pockets of plant life began to change. Sparse, twiggy ground cover grew into leafier shrubs, the flowers larger, a sweet scent in the air—but colors remained nonexistent, and Melanie had never known she valued them so much until they were gone.
And it was getting hotter. The hours of mountain switchbacks had them sweating and panting. Melanie thought bitterly about a school classmate, Lali Vukov. Field hockey captain and leader of the cross-country running team, Lali Vukov would have probably jogged down the mountain, Melanie thought. Probably whistling as she went.
Her mother’s overcoat was ridiculous in the rising temperature, but she didn’t want to have to carry it. She might need it later. Who knew how cold it became at night?
“Sweating like a pig!” Melanie muttered beneath her breath. She was hobbling down the stairs now, her knees wobbly, her thighs aching. “Bloody feet!” she cursed, limping, and stubbed her toenail on an outcrop of stone.
“I didn’t ask you to bite off your pinkie!” Melanie shouted up the stairs. “Okay? I didn’t ask you to do it!”
She sank down on a step, dropped her face into her grubby hands, and started bawling.
She had had enough. She didn’t know how she would find her stupid and pathetic mother. Weak her entire life, only ever half there, and now stupid enough to be caught by a raving lunatic. Nightmare things happening. Ms. Wei probably sent to jail. And only an unreliable rat as a companion. How could she possibly save her mum? How could her mother have left her to cope with everything by herself? Her tears stung her burnt cheeks as she sobbed and sobbed.
When she was finally finished she wearily raised her head and dragged her coat sleeve over her face, sniffing loudly. Her eyelids were swollen and her skin felt tight.
She felt lighter.
The most oppressive weight of doubt and fear had somehow waned.
She turned her head slowly and saw Jade Rat sitting quietly beside her, her tail wrapped around her paws. The rat was staring straight ahead, whiskers bobbing in the cool mountain wind. Her usually bright and beadlike eyes were dull and dry.
She looked smaller. Less robust.
Melanie’s heart shifted.
“Drink some water,” Jade Rat said in a quiet voice.
Melanie nodded. She took off her pack and retrieved a water bottle. When she finished she poured some into her palm and held it out for her companion. The rat licked the water with her tiny soft tongue. It tickled.
“I would have thought your tongue would be rough. Like a cat’s,” Melanie said.
“The universe preserve us!” The rat sneezed with outrage.
Melanie smiled for a few seconds. She stared at her ragged sneakers.
She wanted to apologize for the terrible things she had said. The things she had said out of terror and exhaustion . . . but Jade Rat had left her to fall to her death. There was no logical reason Jade Rat should have stayed. Melanie knew that with her mind. But her heart could not forgive so easily.
Melanie said nothing.
The rodent set her tiny paw on Melanie’s leg. “Perhaps it is time to try the raccoon’s gift.”
It took several seconds for Melanie to understand what she meant. Who knows, Melanie thought wearily. She could ask if she’d find her mum. The odds were in her favor to receive a “yes, definitely,” and it would make her feel slightly better. . . . She returned the half-empty water bottle and retrieved the child’s toy.
The black surface of the Magic 8 Ball felt slightly rough, as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper. Melanie frowned. As she moved it from one hand to the other she could feel the sloshing weight of the fluid inside.
Jade Rat sat neatly on her hindquarters, her small front paws clasped in front of her chest.
Melanie raised the 8 Ball to her ear and gave it a gentle shake. “Will we make it home all right?” she whispered. She turned the orb around, flat side up, to reveal the window. The slosh, slosh of liquid stilled, and a small triangle slowly bobbed upward.
An icy breeze skittered down the collar of Melanie’s jacket, and the hairs on her arms stood erect. She almost dropped the ball. Of all the answers she had seen in the toy, this triangle had never come up before. And her classmate’s 8 Ball had only the set number of statements. Never a question. Melanie nervously cleared her throat. She wanted to leave the unsettling toy behind, there, on the stair.
“What did it say?” Jade Rat inquired.
Melanie reluctantly replaced the toy in the backpack. She did not respond for several seconds. “It must be broken. Or someone’s kidding around.” She forced herself to laugh.
The rat remained silent.
“The stupid ball said something about whether I can do what I need to do even if I don’t know! Okay? And it’s right! I don’t know what I’m doing!” Melanie was standing, hands squeezed into tight fists, breathing hard and fast. It would be the easiest thing to do, to kick the rat off the mountain step, sending it flying out like a football before dropping for a long, long time. . . .
Jade Rat dropped onto all fours, drawing her red string tail around her feet. She looked very small. “I grow weary,” she whispered hoarsely. “I will aid you as I am able.” She seemed to shimmer. An audible click, and she was a pendant once more.
Melanie gazed upon the jade amulet. The Magic 8 Ball had asked her if she could do the job without knowing what the job was. How was she to know when the action she took was the deciding one? The one choice that would decide everything? She couldn’t know, and every time she had to make a decision it would drive her mad!
Melanie grabbed two fistfuls of hair and squeezed hard. The pain was momentarily distracting. She unclenched her fingers and let her hands drop.
No—no, she did not want to become one of the kids who had to yank out hair, cut themselves in order to feel okay.
Think, Melanie told herself. But don’t think too much, she admonished. Helplessly, she began to laugh. She took a long, shuddering breath, then let it all go. The most obvious thing she had to do was go down.
One step at a time.
She reached for the jade amulet. Ms. Wei had given it to her. For all that she was uncertain about Jade Rat’s intentions, she trusted the old woman, and she would be disrespectful and wrong to leave the gift behind.
Melanie tucked the jade pendant into her mother’s deep pocket, reshouldered her pack, and started descending the stairs once more.
She did not know how many hours she had been walking before she reached a layer of clouds. Suddenly she was knee-high in the gray damp of it. Dense, flat, it did not puff and roil like clouds in the skies at home. It was like a vast quilt spreading to the horizon.
Melanie could not see through the completely opaque layer. For all that she knew demons and winged monkeys crouched by her feet, chuckling, waiting for the best moment to trip her. Bite her. Gnaw her to the bone.
Yelping, Melanie scuttled up several steps so her entire body was above the unsettling divide.
What was below?
The image of one of her mother’s Bosch paintings rose unbidden to her mind. It was a copy from one of the panels from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hell . . .
With creatures and naked people being tortured, pigs wearing nuns’ habits. Sawed-off ears
and women skewered with harp strings. Why had her mum hung it up on the wall?
Melanie shook her head.
It must be so dark, beneath the layer of clouds. . . .
How much could a person endure?
Melanie took a shuddering breath and held it. She stepped down. Down, one step after the other, she descended through the obscuring grayness. For several seconds she could see nothing, and panic trembled inside her throat, threatened to burst out from her lungs. She did not want to breathe in the sickly clouds.
But she could not see.
She ran down several steps, then broke completely through.
For a moment she almost fell over backward because the stairs were wrong, she was going down, but when she looked at her feet the steps appeared to be going upward. She sat down, hard, her heartbeat pounding inside her eardrums, and desperately closed her eyes. It’s only vertigo, she told herself. That’s all. Because stairs that go down can’t go up. It’s impossible.
Except . . . except the Escher calendar prints beside the Bosch ones on the wall in their living room they had stairs going up and down, around and about, all in different directions.
“Oh, Mum,” Melanie whispered.
Melanie kept her eyes closed, but she began scooting downward on her bottom. Like a little child she lowered her feet, then her bum, one step after the other. She continued this for a long time until the rough stone step was no longer. It felt smooth, flat, like tile instead of something hewn from a cliff.
Melanie opened her eyes.
The vista that lay before her was like something from a stranger’s dream. A place of dark shadows, jumbled silhouettes of cities and jungles, forests and villages. The light that managed to penetrate the overwhelming layer of clouds created a shadowy world, absent of colors and vibrancy. It looked like early evening on a completely overcast day.
The city portions of the vista looked odd. Castle turrets beside skyscrapers, pagodas and apartment blocks, tents and stone ruins, warehouse stores and freeways. The glint of light reflected off water, a nonsensical system of canals leading nowhere. Were those horse-drawn wagons? She thought they were horses . . . with scooters zipping past them, or motorbikes, tanks rolling with the grind of metal, the crumping of mortar.
It looked like every city and period in time were mashed together. Zeppelins drifted in the distant sky, and what looked like a flock of flamingos stretched toward a body of water.
Streetlights, gas lamps, candles began to bob in windows. Neon signs flickered, a searchlight spiraled the flat surface of the clouds and a siren began to wail. Bomb warning? Melanie wondered. She realized the flickering pale lights farther off must be fires. Things were burning. The air was smoky with it.
An unseen animal began to howl.
This was Half World.
Melanie’s lower lip began to wobble. She slipped her shaking hand into the deep pocket of her mother’s overcoat and fished for the amulet. When her fingers fell upon the smooth stone she clutched it tightly inside her fist.
“Jade Rat,” her voice quavered. “I’m scared. . . . ”
The stone remained stone.
Melanie’s lips twisted. “Sorry,” she whispered. She unclenched her fingers and raised both hands to push her stringy hair behind her ears.
As she navigated the stairs Melanie no longer had to scoot on her bottom. There was even a handrail, though she couldn’t say when it had begun. She continued with her descent, anchoring herself with the railing, as she continued to gaze upon the frightening dreamscape.
As she neared the ground she could make out people; strangely shaped creatures dressed in human clothing; dogs endlessly chasing their own tails; a woman jumping into the canal, only to reappear on the worn paving stones to jump again anew.
A man sat on an ox-driven cart, a tangled heap of scrap metal filling the back. What looked like children chased after the metal collector. The children lobbed things at him, jeering and shrieking. The man didn’t care. He was missing his head.
The roar of a jet sounded in the distance. Followed by a terrific explosion. The cloud cover throbbed momentarily with light.
The children on the street began to clap and cheer.
The spiral sound of a siren was overcome by the wild clanging of church bells, the distant heartbeat of an enormous drum, a deep melodic gong rippling across the night sky.
A flock of pigeons burst off a distant rooftop.
From somewhere a burst of machine-gun spray clattered metallic.
The stink of fried chicken, oily and rancid. Putrid garbage, raw sewage thrown onto the streets. Rotting offal.
A train on a raised railway roared past in a stutter of yellow rectangular lights, and was gone.
Melanie stopped.
She was no longer descending a mountain.
She stood upon the rooftop of a tall building.
The mountain stairway was no longer there. She anxiously searched for the place she had come from, crisscrossing the expanse of the enormous featureless rooftop, but the access to the mountain high above Half World had disappeared.
Maybe, Melanie’s thoughts babbled, maybe it will come back again. After a time. Like the woman drowning on repeat. Maybe things skipped. And the stairs could come back in time.
Because it was the only way home that she knew.
When she turned around she could not stop herself from gasping.
Before her was a rooftop entrance, with walls and a door, where there had been none before.
Melanie stood there, heart pounding, until she was able to breathe again.
She curled her fingers around the jade amulet inside her pocket. “Lucka, lucka, lucka,” she crooned as she opened the door.
She entered.
EIGHT
SHE SAT, PANTING, upon the third-from-last step from the ground floor. As she had spiraled down, down the fire escape, she had considered at each landing exiting through the door into a hallway to take the damned elevator, but each time fear stopped her. She ran into no one, but sometimes there were noises she could not identify. So she had continued, soaked through with sweat, legs so exhausted they had become numb.
Now what?
Nowwhat?
She let her forehead fall into her dirty palms.
If only she were more clever. Like the smartest girl in her school, Eleanor Cortes-Quan. They were both in the same grade, but Eleanor had already skipped two years in a row, and she had placed first in the provincial math competition. If Melanie were smarter she could figure out what she should do; she could use her head and make intelligent decisions.
Or if she couldn’t be smart, if only she were stronger. Like jogging-in-shorts-outside-even-in-the-middle-of-January Lali Vukov. Captain of the field hockey team and the cross-country running team, she could out-bench-press all the boys and half the P.E. teachers.
What could she do? Melonball Tamaki, pudgy and stupid . . . She groped for the jade amulet, hoping to touch the coarse fur of the rat, but all she could feel was stone. It felt colder than before. Letting the amulet fall from her shaking fingers, she turned to her last bit of hope.
The Magic 8 Ball felt a little different—the slosh of liquid that held the answers, the questions felt slower. More viscous. As if it were motor oil instead of water. Melanie clutched the orb in her lap. Don’t let me down, she prayed. Please. I really need help.
She raised the ball to her ear and shook it gently. “What now?” she asked aloud.
Her voice sounded very small in the concrete stairwell.
She turned the 8 Ball over so she could peer into the window.
The triangle took ever so long to float to the surface.
Melanie hissed with frustration. The urge to throw the ball down the last three steps so it broke into pieces was a wall of red flames behind her eyes. Stupid, stupid raccoon! Why had it given her this useless thing? Maybe it was a trick. Meant to get her into trouble instead of help her! How was she to—
Melanie caught her breat
h.
The edges of the triangle were crumbly, as if they had been worn away . . . like the ball was beginning to decay. Melanie clutched the 8 Ball to her belly. Now that it was on the verge of disintegrating, it suddenly seemed precious. She had so few things left. Don’t let this be lost, too.
No matter what, Melanie thought as she swallowed hard, the thing she had to do was clear. She had to find her mother. She had to bring her home. She replaced the plastic orb, reshouldered her pack, and stepped down to the landing. She turned the knob of the door, drawing against the heaviness to reveal a tiny crack, and held it open.
The noise assailed her first, the myriad scents rolling in immediately after.
It was a lobby of a hotel, but not like any hotel lobby she’d ever seen on television or in films. Across the enormous foyer, above the front desk, was a large banner: THE MIRAGES HOTEL. The sign looked as if it had been painted by students for a school dance.
The entire room was filled with the squawk of voices, loud, volatile, punctuated by raucous laughter. The shrieks of birds of prey, the hooting of lemurs, the jangle of coins and tooting horns. The rich aroma of cooking meat filled the air, and the enormous room was smoky with singed flesh and dripping fat. The acrid edge of burnt sugar, beer drying in the carpet, animal dung and cigarettes. Melanie felt simultaneously famished and nauseated.
The lobby was like a bazaar: a combination of a trade show and a market square. Businessmen with crocodile eyes slid payments of frogs and lizards into each other’s pockets as if they were passing envelopes of money. A few finely dressed ladies had bird beaks instead of lips or reptilian tails trailing out behind their gowns. In little tents and booths merchants displayed their wares and shouted at potential customers, cajoling, begging, screaming for their patronage.
Sunglasses and thongs, flip-flops and wedges, silk scarves, razor blades, glass eyeballs, and skin grafts. Selections of breast implants were displayed on gleaming platters like rows of dead jellyfish on fun house mirrors. Dietary supplements were sold with promotional deep fryers and cotton candy machines. Rhino horns, tiger penises, knives, hourglasses, cuckoo clocks, helium-filled balloons, skewers of meat, candied ice, mini donuts, metronomes, rolls of lace, caged birds, snapping turtles, perfume or poison in small glass vials, and bottled water. Melanie stared, agog, with one eye through the crack in the doorway.
