“Then we have a problem,” Soldier tells her. “Because me and Mr. Lothrop here are already standing in shit up to our fucking eyeballs, and if you can’t—or won’t—help me, Pearl, then I might as well let him put a bullet in your face and be done with it.”
The brown girl stops smirking and sits back down on her milking stool. “You’re even more unpleasant as a grown woman than you were as a child,” she says to Soldier.
“Now, I’ll buy that,” Odd Willie snickers, and then he puts his gun away.
“How old am I?” Soldier asks the girl. “In Woonsocket, you said it wasn’t time for that question, that it would come later. And here we are, later. So tell me, how old am I?” But the alchemist’s daughter only shrugs and makes a show of twiddling her thumbs.
“That’s not a simple question,” she says.
“Answer it anyway. We’ve got the time.”
“There’s more than one answer.”
“But I think you know the one I’m after,” Soldier says, gazing into the shadows behind and above the brown girl, the immense attic of the yellow house stretching out before her like a half-remembered nightmare. “The last time I was here, you led me somewhere. I want you to take me there again. On the way, we can talk about what you were doing in Woonsocket.”
The brown girl watches her for a moment, then smiles again, and something about that smile makes Soldier want to hit her, something precious and cold and calculated.
“Soldier, haven’t you ever learned that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?” the girl asks. “Didn’t the Bailiff teach you that? You should try using ‘please’ sometime.”
“Fine,” Soldier says. “Please, Pearl, will you take me wherever the hell you took me before?”
“Him, too?” And the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles points at Odd Willie.
“Yes, please, him fucking too.”
“I don’t like guns, Soldier. And I don’t like being threatened with them, particularly not by men whose lives I’ve helped to save. I really don’t like being around men like that.”
Soldier turns and punches Odd Willie in the stomach as hard as she can. He yelps and doubles over, then sinks to his knees.
“There,” she says. “He’s very sorry that he pointed a gun at you. He’s learned his lesson and promises he’ll never do it again.”
“You should know, I wasn’t trying to help you,” the brown girl says. “I was trying to help Emma Jean, and—”
“I don’t need an explanation. I just need you to stop fucking around and do what I’ve asked you to do.”
“I thought I should be clear, that’s all,” and then the alchemist’s daughter gets up from her stool again and walks away into the darkness.
“Don’t be such a goddamn pussy,” Soldier tells Odd Willie, and he gags and calls her a cunt and tells her to fuck off. But she helps him to his feet anyway, and they follow the girl deeper into the attic.
Open your eyes, Esmeribetheda says, and it takes Emmie a moment or two to remember exactly how one does that, opens her eyes, because she’s had them closed for so long. Ages, it seems, long ages as she fell through the wrinkled time and space and vacuum cold and starfire that lies between the black-skinned woman’s desert and the attic of the yellow house. And it takes her a moment more to realize that Esmeribetheda hasn’t traveled with her, that she’s come alone into this musty, disorienting place of half-light and shadows. She sits down on the floor, sits down before she falls, her legs weak and trembling, and tries to figure out where she is and what she’s supposed to do next.
“Can you still hear me?” she asks Esmeribetheda, but no one answers, only her own echo bouncing back from the darkness. Emmie blinks, realizing that the dim shapes towering around her are pieces of furniture and high rows of shelving. She calls out again, louder than before.
“Can you still hear me?”
This time her echo is more distinct and clearly repeats at least seven times.
“You can’t, can you?” Emmie sighs, gazing up at the shelves. There are faintly glinting objects on them that she thinks at first must be fishbowls, row upon row of goldfish bowls of different sizes, until she remembers Pearl’s snow globe. A sun inside a crystal sphere, the thing that Soldier used as a weapon to drive away or destroy a demon or maybe something even worse than a demon. And here, here there are a hundred spheres—no, a thousand. At least a thousand.
That’s one of my father’s later experiments, and he’s extremely proud of it. He was careful to take a star none of the astronomers had ever seen….
Staring up at the shelves and all those glinting spheres, Emmie wonders just how many of them contain stars that Pearl’s father decided no one would ever miss and what other things he might have trapped.
My father moved places and moments….
There’s a dry, fluttering sound then, somewhere overhead to her left, and Emmie squints into the dark, hoping there aren’t bats in this place, but fairly certain there are probably lots of them. She gets to her feet again, her legs feeling a little stronger now, and she spots the nub of a candlestick on a nearby table, a long table that’s really more like a workbench, crowded with odd mechanical contraptions and glass containers, books and hardened pools of candle wax. She goes to the table and finds a big box of kitchen matches sitting on top of a very ancient-looking book bound in brittle leather; Emmie shakes the box and is relieved to hear wooden matches rattling about inside. The candle stub makes only a small pool of warm yellow light, but it’s a welcome thing in this place. She sets the matchbox down a safe distance from the candle’s flame, and now she can see the title of the book, Astronomicum Caesarium, stamped into the cover in dingy gold. Emmie begins to open it, disturbing several large silverfish, but then she hears voices and footsteps and looks up to see Pearl and Soldier and Odd Willie appear from behind one of the tall shelves.
Pearl furrows her eyebrows and points an accusing finger at Emmie. “How did you get up here? What are you doing with my father’s things?”
“I was just looking at a book,” Emmie replies, closing it quickly and stepping quickly away from the table. “That’s all. I didn’t touch anything.”
“Liar. You lit that candle there,” Pearl says, “so you touched that, and that means you must have touched the matches, as well.”
“Her bark’s worse than her bite,” Odd Willie says and rubs at his stomach like someone with a bellyache. “Problem is, she never fucking stops barking.”
“Shit,” Soldier says, stepping past Pearl and walking towards one of the shelves. “This is it. This is the place you brought me before, isn’t it? I was here.”
“Don’t you touch anything,” Pearl warns her, instead of answering the question.
Odd Willie plops down on a moldering, threadbare settee, raising a thick cloud of dust, and something inside it cracks loudly.
“What was that?” Pearl says and turns away from Soldier to find Odd Willie coughing and fanning the dust away. “Be careful,” she groans. “That belonged to my mother.”
“Are we in the attic now?” Emmie asks and watches Soldier examining the crystal spheres on the shelf. “We are, aren’t we?”
“We had to take the goddamn stairs,” Odd Willie wheezes. “You must have found a shortcut.”
“There are no shortcuts,” the brown girl says emphatically.
“Oh, hell, there are always shortcuts,” Odd Willie croaks and then starts coughing again.
Emmie starts to tell them about Esmeribetheda and the desert, about the burning trees and the crows who were really women (or women who were really crows), but then she decides maybe it’s best if she doesn’t. Just because she needed to know the secret doesn’t mean that everyone else needs to know it, too.
“Miss Josephine showed me the way,” she says, and Pearl glares at her suspiciously.
“Where is my father’s experiment?” she demands. “You had it when the ghouls came and I lost you in the tunnel. You have to give it back,
right this minute.”
“She doesn’t have it anymore,” Soldier says, bending close to a particularly large sphere, one almost as big around as a soccer ball. “She gave it to me. And I can’t give it back, because I don’t have it anymore, either.”
“Why not? Where is it?”
“Hell, maybe. Or Niflheim or Sheol,” Soldier tells her. “If you believe in such places.” Then she brushes her fingers across the dusty surface of the large sphere, and it begins to glow very softly.
“I told you not to touch anything!” Pearl shouts at her. “The three of you have done enough damage as it is.”
“You came looking for me,” Emmie says and walks over to stand beside Soldier. “You started this, Pearl. I certainly never wanted to run off in a snowstorm and hide in a tunnel and get kidnapped and chased by monsters.”
“There’s an entire island in this one,” Soldier says.
“It’s not an island,” Pearl protests. “It’s a small continent. My father hardly bothered with islands. That’s a place called Lemuria. It’s very important, and you’re not to touch it again.”
“Why did we come here?” Emmie asks Soldier. “Why did you want to come to this attic instead of going to see the Bailiff?”
“Because I think maybe I left something here once,” Soldier tells her.
“Do you know what it was, the thing you left?”
“I’m starting to figure it out,” Soldier says, and then she turns away from the sphere containing a small, stolen continent, and faces the brown girl.
“Why did you help her?” Soldier asks and nods at Emmie. “And why’d you help me so that I’d wind up helping her, too?”
Pearl frowns and mutters something to herself and picks at a loose thread on her black dress. Maybe she doesn’t know, Emmie thinks. Maybe this is just another one of her father’s experiments. Maybe we’re all stuck inside one of those snow globes. Maybe we’re sitting on a shelf somewhere, and her father is watching everything we do.
“You’ll have to speak a little louder than that, Hester,” Odd Willie says. “Me and Soldier here, we’re a little hard of hearing. That’s what happens when you play with guns. Next thing you know, you’re deaf as a stone.”
“I said that I have my reasons.”
“The first time I saw you,” Emmie says, “you told me you needed me to build a bridge for you. That’s why you were helping me, isn’t it? Because if they killed me, I couldn’t build your bridge.”
“You make it sound much more selfish than it is,” Pearl tells her, and she picks up something that looks like a clarinet grafted onto a ship’s sextant. “I probably would have helped you anyway.”
“And what you took from me,” Soldier says, “where is it? Where did you put it? Is it here, on one of these shelves?”
Pearl shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything.
Emmie feels dizzy and shuts her eyes. This is where it finally ends, Deacon. This is where the story finishes, in the attic of this awful old house.
“You can’t do what they thought you could do,” Pearl says to Soldier. “I knew it all along, of course, but I had to acquiesce. I had to do whatever the Bailiff and the hounds told me to do. I didn’t have a choice. They have my father.”
“Soldier’s not the bridge builder,” Emmie says and opens her eyes, but the dizziness doesn’t pass. “I am. I’m the one the hounds need to go back home, but they thought it was Soldier, didn’t they?”
“The quadroon daughter of Saben White,” Pearl says and smiles and fiddles with a tarnished brass knob on the sextant-clarinet thing. “They made a mistake, a serious miscalculation. If my father had been here, if they hadn’t sent him away to Weir and exile, he could have shown them the error of their reckoning. He could have shown them it was you, Emma Jean Silvey, and you’d not have been shuffled off to be raised by that drunkard who is not your father, and none of this would ever have happened.”
“Where is it?” Soldier asks her again, and then she takes a step towards the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles.
“Really, what difference does it make?” Pearl asks her. “Surely you don’t think you can ever have it back? The Bailiff would never permit me to do any such thing. And the hounds—”
“How about you let me worry about the Bailiff and the hounds. Show me where you’ve put it, Pearl. Show me now. I’m tired of asking.”
Emmie looks back at the crystal spheres lined up neatly on the shelf, the dust and cobwebs, all those imprisoned places and times and lives. And then she looks up at Soldier again, and she knows that the changeling woman isn’t bluffing, that she’ll kill Pearl, just like she would have killed all those people at the Cumberland Farms, just like she killed Emmie’s mother and the creatures below Woonsocket.
“You won’t hurt me,” Pearl tells Soldier, her dark eyes bright with smug confidence. “You know the rules. You were raised by them, and you won’t cross the hounds. You wouldn’t ever dare cross the Bailiff.”
“I already have,” Soldier says very softly, calmly, and draws her pistol from the waistband of her jeans. “So, I hope you appreciate how little I have left to lose.”
“Pearl, she’s not kidding,” Emmie says and steps in between Soldier and the alchemist’s daughter. “Just do what she wants, and we’ll leave.”
“No. It’s out of the question. I most certainly will not. My father—”
“Pearl,” Emmie snarls, the same way she snarled at the fat kid who said her mother was a cat, snarling like the half-breed sire she’s never met. “You want to go to your father. You want to be with him. That’s why you saved me, because you believe that I can make the bridge you need to reach him.”
Pearl stares back at Emmie and chews her lower lip, her smile faded and her eyes not so bright now. She slowly lays the sextant-clarinet contraption back down on the long table.
“Give her what she wants,” Emmie says, “and I’ll build a bridge for you so you can be with him again.”
“Soldier, I can’t let you do this,” Odd Willie laughs, a flat laugh that Emmie can tell isn’t really a laugh at all. He’s still sitting on the old settee, but now his pistol’s pointed at Soldier. “Whatever all this shit’s about, I’m pretty goddamn sure you’re right, and it’s not about me, and I have to go on living with the ghouls and the Bailiff when it’s over.”
“Willie, you don’t know—” Soldier begins, but Odd Willie cuts her off.
“Damn straight. And I don’t fucking much care, either. I’ve stood by you this far, because I figured maybe I owed you something after Ballou and Saben and all that crazy shit. You probably saved my life. But, Jesus, this is the wizard’s daughter, and I have a pretty goddamn good idea what’ll happen to me if I just sit here and let you shoot her.”
“You don’t know,” Soldier says again, not looking at him, her eyes still locked on Pearl, her finger on the trigger. “When I was five, that son of a bitch used to call me up from the tunnels and feed me sweets and ask me about my dreams. And I guess he didn’t like what I told him, because one night he sent me up here and this…this self-important little shit, she took my childhood, stole it, just like her father used to steal bits and pieces of the universe and lock them up in all these things,” and she motions towards one of the shelves with the hand that isn’t holding the gun.
“Well, boo-fucking-hoo.” Odd Willie snorts, and then he giggles nervously and wipes his nose again. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? Soldier, I’m sorry as a motherfucker, but I’m still not going to let you kill her. So put the goddamn gun away, ’cause it ain’t gonna happen.”
“Fuck you,” she says, almost whispering now, and shoots Odd Willie in the throat. The attic is filled with thunder that swells and booms beneath the faraway ceiling, and Pearl screams. There’s a spurt of blood from the soft spot below his larynx, and he looks surprised as the pistol slips from his hand and clatters to the floor.
“You’re not that fast,” Soldier says, and Odd Willie Lothrop slumps back against the settee.
Pearl is crouched on the floor, both hands clasped over her ears, and Emmie’s head is ringing from the gunshot, the gunshot and the dizziness that’s getting worse instead of better. She turns around, and Soldier’s pointing the gun at Pearl again.
“If you kill her, you’ll never find it,” Emmie says, and the ringing’s so bad that she can hardly hear herself. “You’ll never get it back, not if she’s dead.”
“Maybe not. But you never know. You never know anything for sure. I might get lucky.”
Emmie shakes her head, but the ringing won’t go away, and she wonders if it ever will. She glances over her shoulder at Odd Willie sprawled on the settee. “Soldier, he was your friend. You were dying, and he carried you out of that place and took care of you.”
“She’s a changeling,” Pearl sobs from the floor, her hands still covering her ears. “She’s a liar and a murderer, a Child of the Cuckoo, and people like her don’t have friends. She’s a monster, Emma Jean, just like you.”
“Pearl,” Emmie says, and the room swings and tilts and she has to lean against the table to keep from falling. “Give her what she wants. Don’t make her kill you.”
Pearl crawls the rest of the way beneath the table, as though it might protect her, leaving little teardrop spatters of salt water and snot on the dusty floorboards.
“I’m only a little girl, Emma Jean. They’ve had me locked away up here forever and ever, locked up here alone without time or sunlight or anyone to talk to, but I’m still only a child, not an old woman, and I’m afraid of them! I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me!”
“You really should listen to her, Hester,” Soldier says and squats down so the gun’s still aimed at Pearl. “I think maybe she’s trying to save your miserable hide.”
Pearl’s crying so hard that Emmie can’t make out whatever she says next, but apparently Soldier can, because she laughs and cocks the pistol again.
Maybe I’m dying, Emmie thinks, wishing that the room would stop rolling drunkenly about like the deck of a boat. Maybe when Esmeribetheda sent me back, she did something wrong. Maybe she messed something up inside my head, and I’m dying. And the thought doesn’t frighten her like she’s always imagined it should, because maybe when she’s dead there will be no one and nothing at all, and she won’t even have to bother trying to forget all the horrible, impossible things she’s seen in the last six days.
Daughter of Hounds Page 40
