by Dia Reeves
“Unlock it.”
“Why do I have to?” Not challenging him. Just curious.
“Because ladies first?”
“Chivalry?” Ophelia fitted her silver key into the keyhole beneath the handle. “Or did your balls not turn brass overnight, after all?”
“Just open it, smart ass.” Not that he minded her mouthing off to him. He preferred her feisty, instead of shy and unsure the way she’d been yesterday at Carmin’s.
Jimi followed Ophelia through only to find that the doors were no longer visible, and instead of a grand foyer and the Alfred-like butler Jimi had been anticipating, they stood in the middle of a cave constructed solely of blue-tinged ice and snow, as vast and serene as St. Teresa Cathedral. Spaghetti-thin ice formations hung down from the domed ceiling far overhead and swayed in the polar air, filling the cave with a crystalline tinkling.
The ground was frozen but so clear that Jimi felt as though he was standing on water. Fishy denizens floated past, sometimes several feet below his boots, sometimes mere inches, bodies glowing pale blue in the dark water.
Jimi put his arm around Ophelia, hoping she wouldn’t freeze to death in such a place.
“Why don’t you—”
Even though he had been using what Alexis would have referred to as his “inside voice”, his words rolled around the cave like thunder. One of the ice formations dropped from the ceiling, shattering against the frozen ground. Close enough to pepper them with icy shrapnel.
The doors that had led them to this place were nowhere to be found.
After several moments of startled silence, Ophelia whispered:
“Why don’t I what?”
“Keep woolen tights in your pockets,” Jimi said, as they continued much more carefully through the cave. “Or a pair of pants? Or shoes that cover your toes?” He moved his arm from her waist to her shoulders, draped it like a scarf.
“I’ll be all right.” But she was smiling to herself in this secret way.
Before long, they came into a different area of the cave with no crystalline shards that could fall and skewer them. Instead, the much lower ceilings were crowded with pale, bulbous growths.
The ground was frozen all the way through, the fishy creatures no longer swimming, but curled motionless in the ice, like slimy fruit inside a gelatin mold. A random assortment of picnic baskets sat here and there upon the ice, and on the other side of the room, impossible to miss, was the Mayor. Impossible to miss because she was at least twelve feet tall. More than tall enough to reach overhead and pluck the blobby snowballs off the cave ceiling and drop them into the half-empty basket at her enormous feet.
In person, she had the same golden, celestial perfection as the carvings on her front door, her hair a black shadow that blended with her long robe. A huge keyring hung at her hip, jingling.
Jimi had seen her before, at parades and festivals, and once in the square walking with a group of Mortmaine. It felt strange to be alone with her, strange that she could exist outside of crowds and the holidays.
“Speak as you will, children.” The Mayor continued with her chore, clearly busy, but not indifferent to their presence. “Don’t be shy. But no snacking.”
Jimi peeked into a nearby basket and saw, not a misshapen snowball or a blob, but several fat, wormlike bugs that had wrapped themselves in their own glittering, freezer-burned wings.
“Ice pixies,” said the Mayor, her voice booming, making him extra glad no icy spikes hung in this part of the cave. “They winter here until the spring when their prey returns to this part of the world and they can feed again. Until that happens, they’re the prey.”
“You eat them?” Jimi said, squirreling tidbits of info the way he did with everyone he met.
“They’re a treat for the revelers,” she said, not answering the question.
Ophelia pushed at Jimi a little, encouragingly. As though he was the shy one.
So he stopped—not clinging; Jimi wasn’t clingy—holding extra tight to Ophelia and stepped forward.
“Actually, that’s what we came about.”
“Ice pixies?”
“No, ma’am. The Revelry.” His best speaking voice, so childish all of a sudden. “We’d like two invitations. If that’s okay.”
“The invitations are rewards,” said the Mayor. “Rewards are earned.”
“I don’t mind earning them.”
“We don’t mind,” Ophelia said.
“We don’t mind, as long as you don’t mind that we’re earning the invitations as a favor for someone else and his girlfriend.”
For the first time, the Mayor abandoned her work and whirled on them.
“Is it for Thaddeus Barton?”
Ophelia hid behind Jimi, let him take the full brunt of the Mayor’s suddenly hostile attention. He gulped. “Who?”
“Don’t tell me who.” The ground trembled as she charged forward. The bodies below their feet jiggled like Jell-O as the Mayor bent her face to Jimi’s, a rattler about to strike.
Jimi had always heard that the Mayor’s eyes were really mirrors, and now he could confirm it. He watched his face turn red, as if fear had given him a rash.
“Did Thaddeus put you up to this? I’ll not have him anywhere near my Revelry!”
“The invitation is for my step-cousin Carmin, and his girlfriend Lecy.” He took a deep breath, watched the redness drain from his face and leave it a calm neutral brown. “We’d never do favors for anyone named Thaddeus.”
The Mayor shrank to her normal size—normal for Jimi—and calmed, visibly. “Why didn’t Carmin ask himself? I’d love to speak at length with him about his pharmaceutical endeavors.”
Not that Jimi would ever admit it to Carmin, who was insufferable enough as it was, but the Mayor wanting to socialize with Carmin enough to make allowances for him was unbelievably epic.
“He’d love to speak with you,” Jimi said, admiring his reflection now, the confident thrust of his chin. “Once we earn the invites, you can speak to him as much as you like.”
“I always prepare a drink especially for the Revelry, but I haven’t gathered the main ingredient yet. I keep putting it off; it’s such a depressing chore.”
“Mayor’s Milk,” Ophelia said reverently. “What do you need?”
“Milk from a sphinx; you’ll need these.”
A glass milk bottle appeared in Jimi’s and Ophelia’s hands. Sneaky-like. As if to convince them they’d been carrying the bottles all along. After Jimi and Ophelia exchanged a wtf look, the Mayor pointed.
“You’ll find the sphinx through there.”
A door had opened behind them. Not like the double doors on the Gray Road, but a round hole that had been cookie-cuttered into the air. Heat blasted from the hole, thawing Jimi’s numb face as he stared out onto a walled compound, with an elaborate wrought-iron sign arching over the entrance: Noble Isle Zoo.
“Bring me the milk,” the Mayor said. “Bring as much as you can, and you’ll have earned your invitations.”
Jimi didn’t ask if it would be dangerous. People who earned invitations to the Revelry didn’t ask transy-ass questions like that.
“I’ll bring the milk, Ophelia.” Jimi removed his jacket, folded it, then tucked it into an empty basket. “I know how attached you are to that coat, and it feels pretty hot over there.”
“Hardy har.” Ophelia undid her coat and revealed a white—of course—romper, smocked at the waist and backless. Coatless, she resembled a sheared sheep, a vulnerable quality that Jimi didn’t mind, especially since he knew it was an illusion.
The Mayor didn’t seem to know that and stared at Ophelia as though prey had come early to the cave. For her instead of the ice pixies. “You’ve chosen a perfect companion, Jimi. Ophelia loves doing favors for people. With or without my permission.”
Jimi added Ophelia’s folded coat to the basket next to his own. “Ophelia does what she wants, and she wants to help you. If Ophelia wanted to help me, I’d say thank you. And
then I’d get out of her way.”
The Mayor turned her gaze to him, shocked to be spoken to in that tone. Jimi was shocked to be using it, but one of the rules of civilized society was that when people were willing to go out of their way for you, you didn’t turn around and act like a dick.
Ophelia took Jimi’s milk bottle—deliberately caressing his hand—and placed them both into her roomy, interdimensional pockets where they sank out of sight. Careful not to look in the Mayor’s direction.
“Fine then, Jimi. You may consider this your thank you gift.”
A key in the palm of Jimi’s hand. Out of nowhere.
He wished the Mayor would stop doing that to him, switching him off and then on again. What if she switched him off permanently?
What if that was the point: making him worry?
“It’s a master key,” she said with a knowing look, like she’d read his mind. “You’ll need it to get to the sphinx.”
The key was heavy and brass. Ophelia smirked at him, and he knew she was thinking about his balls.
“Now off with you,” the Mayor said, turning back to her work. “Before the heat spoils the pixies.”
Chapter 22
The heat was the first thing. Of an intensity Jimi hadn’t felt since August, but after his sojourn through the ice cave, the heat felt blissful rather than oppressive. Though the sky was blue and the air breathable, a ringed planet skimmed the horizon, a planet as green as Earth was blue. Green with plants, perhaps. There sure as hell weren’t any down here.
This wasn’t Earth; that was the second thing.
No plants and no dirt. Only smooth, beige stone and buildings made of that stone—the massive zoo before him, the termitic mound of a city in the distance, and the Washington Monument-like tower to the east—all seemed to have sprouted from the ground like stony plants. The tower had a duo of giant horn speakers that sat atop it like pretty red blossoms, but the voice blasting from the speakers wasn’t pretty.
The voice was the third thing.
If someone gave a hornet a microphone and forced it to give a speech, it would sound like what was buzzing from those speakers.
“What kind of audience is listening to that?”
Jimi had no idea how spooked he was until he yelped and spun, fist cocked back and ready to fight to the death. But it was just Ophelia, rubbing her arms against the chill air blowing from the hole the Mayor had punched out for them.
“Not us,” he said, fiercely glad she had brushed off his misguided attempt at gallantry. “Come on.”
They approached the Noble Isle Zoo entrance cautiously, but there were no guards or locked doors. Nothing to prevent them from entering. So they did. Jimi took one look back toward the ice cave door. Still there. He didn’t need it; Portero tugged at him, an umbilicus he could follow home at any time, but the Mayor-created exit was a comfort. One he quickly lost sight of once they entered the zoo.
The grounds were vast, like an amusement park, and the lush green that was missing outside had found a home here. Lawns and copses and fields. They crossed a low bridge over a marsh where bushy-tailed lizards slept half-hidden in the tall grasses. Jimi and Ophelia were careful not to wake them.
Past the bridge, an aviary of giant birdcages rested higgledy-piggledy on a wide sidewalk of cream stone. A rainbow of birds perched in silent, accusing rows. A field dotted with empty nests and rotting bird eggs. The stench haunted them all the way to a huge, empty pond. Empty because all the fish that should have been in the water lay instead among the reeds—a mass suicide. One of the fish was still breathing, a thickly lashed eye tracked Jimi and Ophelia as they hurried by.
Past a cat in a cage, disturbingly human hands wrapped around the bars.
Past hairless horses in a corral taking turns running head first into a tree. Like a game, except the blood was no joke. Neither was the screaming.
They passed many creatures, each more disturbing than the last, but nothing that looked like a sphinx.
At the end of the stone path, they came to a tower, shorter than the one outside, with wooden signs attached instead of speakers. Though they could still hear the buzzing that was too animated to be anything but speech.
The cream tower had been smeared with black handprints and graffitied with a single, creepy word that summarized Jimi’s zoo experience thus far: Booji.
Three of the signs atop the tower had words that, like booji, made no sense to them. But one word did: Maze. Straight ahead to the left.
“The maze sound okay to you?”
“Sounds great.” Ophelia stroked her finger over the handprints, and the oily smudge they left on her fingertips made her grimace. “A prize is always at the center of a maze.”
They walked on until the path ended in front of a cream wall too high to see over.
Through the lone archway was a barricade of stone instead of the green hedges Jimi had expected. They had to make a choice: left or right?
“Which way?”
Instead of answering, Ophelia leaped into the air, her wings casting a shadow over him. A brief shower of feathers drifted down on him like snow, and he felt violently alone.
Until she returned, tucking her wings back into whatever pocket of the universe she used for storage. She pointed the way. “Right.”
Jimi took her hand in too tight a grip, but she didn’t object. Ophelia navigated like a pro, having memorized the route from above. Jimi rarely allowed anyone to take the wheel, but he felt safe with Ophelia, had from the very beginning.
“Why did you hide behind me?” he asked, as they turned down a long passageway. “From the Mayor. You’re the immortal one.”
“Long-lived,” she said, the larger part of her mind focused on the map in her head. They turned left again. “There’s a difference. Why shouldn’t I hide behind you?” She bumped into him, friendly-like. “Tall boys make the best shields.”
Jimi considered this, decided the heavy feeling in his chest was approval.
“Dez wasn’t like that. She had zero instinct for self-preservation. Not like you.”
Ophelia wrenched her hand from his grip and hurried on, no longer interested in being by his side.
Why did he never learn to keep his fat mouth shut about Dez?
Ophelia came to a sudden stop. To let him catch up with her? To give him a chance to apologize? No. She’d simply found the center of the maze. The prize at the center had brought her up short.
Another cream stone building with a sign embossed over the entrance: John Westwood Vivisection Laboratory. Someone had spray painted over the sign, over the entire façade in huge red letters: House of Pain.
The sign that they were on the right path. A literal sign. A sandwich board near the entrance that had been knocked over and trampled. Black handprints soiling the beautiful painting of a sphinx.
Ophelia went up the steps to the entrance. Paused.
“What’s wrong?”
“We might find a terrifically dapper man in a suit inside that building, pissing and moaning about his wife. If we do, you have my permission to punch him in the face. I’ll hold him while you do it.”
“Consider it done.” Jimi had no idea what she was talking about, but his quick agreement seemed to make her happy.
Two gates fashioned of wrought iron stood before them, but each gate had a different decorative insert. The insert on the right had been artfully twisted into the shape of an animal; Jimi couldn’t tell which, only that it had a tail and was on all fours. The insert on the left was shaped like a man.
Since the animal gate was right in front of Jimi, that’s the one he held open for Ophelia.
The building was empty, half the lights burned out. A reception area straight ahead, with no one to receive them. The art on the wall featured dogs: some playing pool, some poker. The door behind reception was actually an elevator. A clanging contraption with only one button. Jimi pushed it and he and Ophelia were carried deep underground.
The smell of dung overw
helmed them as they stepped off the elevator and into a long corridor with glassed-in exhibits to either side: centaurs on a grassy plain, mermaids in aquaria, a satyr in a forest.
The creatures in the exhibits looked healthier, but their human features revealed their sadness more viscerally than the animals in the zoo outside, so that Jimi couldn’t pretend to misunderstand.
The exhibit at the end of the corridor displayed a desert biome, the sort of place a sphinx could call home. It was empty.
Jimi and Ophelia rounded the corner and found a door in the wall behind the exhibits. A locked door.
Jimi used the master key and unlocked it.
The door to the right of the passageway led to the empty biome, so they tried the door on the left. Inside was a small dusty room with old bones on the floor and bloodstains on a table. An operating table? They tried another door on the left side of the passage and found what looked like a hospital room; a sphinx lay in the center of the filthy floor.
A woman with riotous hair, tawny skin and exposed breasts; but below her torso she was a lion. The small shabby room was suddenly smaller and shabbier with the magnificent sphinx as a contrast. Jimi bowed to her, a genuflection that came as naturally as breathing, and said:
“The Mayor sent us.” He waited, as if those were the magic words, but maybe sphinxes also knew there was no such thing as magic.
“I know of no mayor.” Her mouth was full of sharp teeth, but Jimi decided not to let that bother him.
“You speak English?” said Ophelia.
“Mr. Westwood thought it would be useful if we understood his language, understood how and in what ways he was causing us to suffer.” She spoke with an accent Jimi couldn’t begin to trace, but her English was so perfect that the sarcasm came through with crystal clarity.
“Is he here?” asked Ophelia.
“I haven’t seen him. Not for ages.”
“Was anyone here when you had your baby?”
“They had to be here for that. To steal her and then cut her apart on the table in the other room. To take the pieces to alter themselves. As if they could ever be anything but abominations.” She said these things with the heat of someone reading from a grocery list.
