The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  I took a quick glance behind me. Foxy was there. So was the tall, pale man.

  So were the effigies.

  The archway stood at the top of the path, as remote and unreachable as a star.

  Bongo’s tail was up, wagging vaguely as he trotted after Anna. I envied him.

  White stones gleamed like fireflies in the dark, dotting the edge of the path. They were carved in patterns that at first seemed unfamiliar. Then I realized that they were the same as the twisted ones, the designs folded and doubled back on themselves… but they weren’t doing the painful eye-burning jitter. I could look at them out of the corner of my eye and they didn’t look as if they were crawling away.

  That should have been comforting. It wasn’t.

  Either something was happening with my eyes or… or…

  Maybe that moiré pattern is what happens when an enchantment meets the real world. Like heat haze on the road. Now you’re not in the real world, so it isn’t distorting the air around it anymore.

  Thanks, self. That was real helpful. A+ coping mechanism.

  If the white stones were enchanted, then there had been one sitting at the edge of my grandmother’s garden for quite a while. Although for all I knew, that particular stone was a signpost of sorts, a warning to the other holler people that my grandmother’s presence was foul.

  I wondered how Cotgrave had figured that out in the first place. Ambrose, maybe. Or maybe he’d just stopped seeing the things after he met her. He hadn’t written it down. I wished I knew. Maybe I’d have been able to repel the damn things now.

  Anna turned to follow a bend in the path. I saw her profile. It was impassive but not serene, a set face with secrets behind it.

  What had the Green Book said about the Lady Cassap? That she was the tallest and whitest of them all? Which meant… what, exactly? That the author was weirdly racist? That Cassap was closely related to the holler people? Close enough to summon snakes and do magic with wax dolls, not close enough to get out of being burned alive?

  I could believe that the woman in front of me could summon snakes. Frankly, snakes would have been an improvement. Snakes are generally more scared of humans than humans are of them.

  It would be nice to be around something that was more scared of me than I was of it. The effigies sure weren’t.

  Anna turned again, following a set of switchbacks down the hillside.

  Something was moving among the trees. I could catch glimpses of things shifting—rags, perhaps. Grasses. Not leaves, not in this leafless forest.

  A low, throbbing sound filled the air, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Easy,” said Foxy behind. “Easy, hon. That one’s a mourning dove.”

  “Oh God,” I said faintly. I felt embarrassed, which was probably stupid because being terrified out of my wits was absolutely the most logical thing I could be at the moment. Still, who knew they had mourning doves in… what? Fairyland? Hell?

  I followed Anna. I couldn’t shake a sense that I knew her from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember from where.

  Well, I don’t really have context, do I? I mean, if you’re used to seeing someone while surrounded by monsters, you don’t recognize them when they’re just getting a scone at the coffee shop, do you?

  I was pretty sure I did not know her from the coffee shop.

  The switchbacks continued down the hill. I began to see buildings through the bare trees below us. They were made of pale stone or clay, squared off, like something you’d see at Mesa Verde or in the desert around Mesopotamia.

  There were strange growths off the side of the buildings that at first looked like more trees. We were directly above one when I finally realized that it wasn’t a tree but some kind of odd, lumpy construction of mud and branches.

  It looked wildly out of place against the square stone buildings.

  “Some kind of nests, looks like,” whispered Foxy.

  Once she said the word nest, it snapped into focus. They looked like swallow nests on the side of a building, only grown to enormous size. I wondered what would hatch inside that kind of nest and then decided immediately that I did not want to know, I would be infinitely happier not knowing. There was absolutely no good that could come of knowing a thing like that.

  People like Ambrose talk about forbidden knowledge. Nobody talks about knowledge that is just a dreadfully bad idea all around.

  The white man moved up to walk beside Anna. He passed close enough that I could see that his skin had thousands of fine lines in it. They didn’t look like wrinkles, but like cracks, the way some porcelain glazes crackle and break.

  It occurred to me suddenly that he might be an effigy himself, a very old skin over… what? Tree branches and wire? Bones? A human skeleton full of hagstones?

  Bongo twitched as my fingers jerked on his leash. He glanced up at me, as if wondering what my problem was.

  “Sorry,” I whispered to my dog.

  We reached the final switchback. The base of the path led to a square, lit with that gray, indirect light. From above, with no trees to block my view, I could look down into the heart of a cold city.

  It looked empty. The doors were black rectangles. There were no lights. There were only a few things scuttling between the buildings, and from the way they moved, I knew they were not even so human as Anna was.

  Maybe the other people are asleep. Or they don’t want to get close to us.

  Hell, for all I know, it’s like The War of the Worlds and they’re afraid of catching some disease from us.

  I wondered briefly if I should worry about catching some terrible disease from Anna, then glumly decided that I was probably not going to live long enough to worry about whether I was up on my current vaccines.

  Anna herself strode forward, never slowing. Her entourage of clicking, sighing effigies bunched up around us, until I knew that they were as close to me as Foxy was. I could have reached out and touched one, if I were so inclined.

  I would rather have gnawed my hand off at the wrist.

  Look, I ordered myself, as we entered that quiet square. Look. The horror movie gets less scary once the monster comes out of the shadows. Just look at them. See what you’re up against.

  I turned my head and saw the ones that flanked me.

  The fan-headed one I knew already. It hopped like a vulture when it walked. Some of the others, though… I forced myself to study them as if they were some of my aunt Kate’s samples, something safely under a microscope slide.

  Rag. Bone. Wire. Stone.

  Other things, too, natural and unnatural. One had bullet casings tied in among its hagstones. One had the deep rib cage and narrow hips of a greyhound, the ribs stuffed with dead birds and old mouse nests. One was scaled in what looked like black leather, until I realized that it was made of bits of blown-out tires.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones. Sticks and stones may break my bones. It ran through my head with the same maddening jump-rope rhythm as the litany of the twisted ones, until the words had no meaning and it was just a rhyme pounding in my blood.

  There was an effigy that had dozens of thin mud pipes along its back. It took me a moment to realize that they were the nests of mud-dauber wasps, the little clay chimneys that get built every summer, all tied together like organ pipes.

  Two paced beside me on my right, humped and headless, as if someone had built a body and then decided they’d gone far enough. Empty sleeves of some material—cloth or hide, it was impossible to tell—hung down where the necks should be.

  Perhaps I stared for too long, because one of those dangling sleeves moved as if there was something inside, something turning to look back at me. I jerked my eyes away and fixed them on Bongo’s back.

  “Where do you think they’re taking us?” I whispered to Foxy.

  “Shit, hon, does it matter?”

  “You will be taken to a holding place,” said Anna, not looking back at us, “until your fate has been determined.”

  “But
where are we now?” I asked, looking over the effigies at the strange, empty city. I still had not seen another human, or even one as human-shaped as the holler people. “Is this more of the hill with the rocks?”

  “No. The place of stones is a threshold place,” said Anna. “One can reach your world and this one from there. Thresholds are powerful. But it is not safe.”

  “Safe?” I sank my teeth into my lower lip.

  Anna shrugged. “The white stone. The stone attracts… attention. The voorish dome over this place keeps it unnoticed. There are things that one might speak with, perhaps even invoke, but one does not wish to live beside them day after day.”

  The irony of this statement coming from a woman standing flanked by monstrous effigies built of bone and mud and wire was so great that I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from yelling at her or shaking her or doing any one of a number of things that would undoubtedly get me horribly slaughtered in short order.

  “Your critters there based on them stones?” asked Foxy, speaking up for the first time.

  The man with the cracked skin turned his head and looked at her. His pupils dilated wrong. I’d have thought he was on drugs, except for the bit where I was in a cold city on the far side of impossible and if anybody was on drugs I would probably ask them if they’d share.

  “They are modeled on many things,” he said. “But those are shapes of power.”

  Most of me was terrified. Almost all of me, in fact. But underneath, a tiny little voice was saying, Isn’t that fascinating?

  You’re under the voorish dome. You’re somewhere that hardly anyone else has been. Even Cotgrave never got this far into the hills.

  Isn’t that interesting?

  I didn’t know whether to embrace that voice or try to smother it. It was like standing on a cliff and hearing the little voice that tells you to jump. For all I know, once you jump off, that voice says, Isn’t this fascinating? all the way down. Listen to the wind rushing by your ears. Isn’t that interesting? Look at how sharp the rocks are below you. Aren’t you intrigued?

  Foxy put her hand on my shoulder again. We all kept walking.

  * * *

  I truly don’t remember very much more about the walk through the city. I think it must have taken at least another ten or fifteen minutes, but it’s mostly a blur. I stared at Bongo’s ears. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing dark openings into buildings. I wondered if there were other holler people inside, watching us from the darkness.

  Once I looked up, because we stepped into a shadow, and I saw the branches of one of the nests stretching over the street, connecting the two houses. Something came squirming out of a gap in the branches, something with long flat limbs or half-furled wings, dragging itself claw over claw up the structure. It looked soft, like clay, and the branches left deep bloodless gouges in its flesh.

  I must have made a noise because Foxy stepped up beside me and grabbed my arm.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Fine, it ain’t, but I’m an old lady and you’re supposed to be keeping my spirits up.”

  I croaked a laugh. Anna looked back over her shoulder, which surprised me. She hadn’t looked at me when she’d answered my questions before.

  The laughter didn’t sit well in that place, and I was sorry I’d done it immediately, but at least it got me out from under the shadow of the nest.

  Nothing else made an imprint on my memory. Just the dark doorways and the tapping of the effigies and the bits of motion.

  Finally, we got where we were going. The street had curved around to reach what looked like a slanted stone wall in the hillside. Another dark opening yawned from it, but this one had double doors in it, standing open. Anna walked through them without a trace of fear and Bongo followed her, and I realized that if I didn’t hurry, an effigy was going to go next and I would be left following one’s back into the dark. My stomach lurched, and I rushed through the doors.

  Despite the width of the doors, the corridor narrowed until I could have touched both sides with my outstretched arms. It was dim inside, but not completely dark. The lighting came from what looked like oil lamps in recessed niches. I wondered vaguely what kind of oil they were burning. Did they have kerosene in hell? Fairy whales? How did it work?

  If you’re thinking that I was focusing on something inconsequential in order to not think about what was happening, you are absolutely correct.

  Someone must get the oil and refill the lamps, whispered the little voice in the abyss.

  The corridor sloped downward underfoot. There were no stairs. It just went on and on and on. Sometimes we would pass another corridor that joined with ours, or a doorway gaping like an open mouth. I lost count of how many questionable oil lamps we passed, how many times my shadow swelled on the wall opposite the niches.

  And it was a long, long, long way.…

  The only mercy was that there were no echoes. I expected echoes in a corridor like that, but my footsteps fell muffled, as if there was a softness to the stone. I heard the faint tap of Bongo’s nails and Foxy’s heels clicking behind me, and that was all.

  Compared to what I could have heard echoing, the silence of the stone was very welcome.

  When Anna suddenly turned right and went into one of the other corridors, I almost stumbled. If Bongo hadn’t been leading the way, I might have kept going, half hypnotized, until I ended up God knows where under the earth.

  But Bongo tugged on the leash and I jerked my head up, startled, and Foxy ran into my back. “Sorry,” she muttered. I think she was probably in the same state I was.

  The corridor did not slope here, but it did curve from side to side like a snake. I no longer had any idea what direction we were facing, whether we’d come all the way around in a circle and passed underneath the sloping corridor, or if we were still going mostly in a straight line.

  What I did know was that the unrelieved stone of the walls began to change. First it was only a few small hatch marks around the edges of the niches. Then the hatch marks began to expand, overlapping and twisting until they became long carved lines that connected the niches together.

  They weren’t straight lines. They would double back on themselves, break apart, then rejoin.

  We came to a doorway where the carved lines wrapped around the threshold, not quite touching it. Unlike the other openings, there was a door in this one.

  Anna opened it and gestured for Foxy and Bongo and me to go inside.

  The room was not large, smaller than Cotgrave’s bedroom. It reminded me of a sauna, not because it was hot but because there were benches along both sides. They appeared to be carved out of the same stone as the walls. A niche stood at the far end, with another of the oil lamps in it.

  I looked at Foxy. Foxy shrugged. I clicked my tongue at Bongo and walked forward.

  “We will return,” said Anna, standing in the doorway. Her voice was even more remote than it had been. It might have been a recording for all the warmth in it. “We must discuss your fate. You will wait here.”

  Foxy looked at our cell, then back at Anna. “Doesn’t look like we’ve got a lot of choice, do we?”

  Anna inclined her head. Under her elbow, I saw one of the humped, headless effigies moving back and forth.

  Foxy stepped inside. Anna nodded and closed the door.

  19

  We looked at the door. We looked at each other. We looked at the door again.

  Bongo sat down on the floor.

  “What am I gonna do if he has to pee?” I muttered.

  “There’s a grate,” said Foxy.

  There was indeed a grate, on the floor beneath the niche. It had metal bars. Foxy and I stared at it.

  “Think you could fit through?” she asked.

  I eyed it dubiously. “Not unless they leave us here long enough to lose some weight. And I don’t know if dropping into the sewer would be an improvement. Do you think they even have sewers
here?”

  “I guess even holler people gotta shit.”

  “Those bone and wire things walking around probably don’t.”

  “I dunno. What happens when they eat someone?”

  I grimaced. From her expression, Foxy wasn’t too keen on the answer to that question herself.

  We abandoned the grate and sat down, backs against the wall. Bongo laid down on the floor between us.

  “Do you think it’s the same stuff as that white stone?” I asked, poking the wall.

  Foxy gave me a look. “You got a whatsit on you?”

  “A whatsit?”

  “An X-ray spectrometer.”

  Even Bongo looked up at that.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I admitted. “Do I have one on me?”

  “Seems unlikely. That’s the thing we used over at the cement plant when I worked there, to figure out if a batch went bad. You give me one of those, I’ll tell you anything you want to know about these rocks.”

  “Well, if I trip over one, I’ll let you know. Maybe we could ask Anna if we could borrow one.”

  Foxy snorted.

  We sat in the room in silence for a minute. Finally, I said, “I’m scared shitless.”

  “Yeah,” said Foxy. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. “Me too.”

  “I sort of expected to die,” I said. This was an awkward thing to express, as if I was picking my way through the words like I’d picked my way through the hill with the twisted stones. “Or… hell, I don’t know what else I expected. But not for there to be a place on the other side of everything, with people and…” I shook my head. “There’s too much more of it. Like, if you went out after… I dunno, after the Loch Ness Monster or something, and then it turned out that it was a secret government lab breeding plesiosaurs to blow up submarines.”

  Foxy opened her eyes and tilted her head sideways, like Bongo did when I did something particularly baffling. “You’ll have to explain that one a little better.”

  I waved my hands helplessly. “It’s too big! There’s too much there! I mean, if I say, ‘There’s weird stuff in the hills,’ everybody nods and says, ‘Yup, doesn’t surprise me,’ but then I say, ‘And they’ve got a whole city back there made out of white rocks and bird nests and… and walking deer skulls and things made out of old shovels tied together!’ and then it sounds crazy.” I groaned. “Do you think this is what happens to people who get abducted by aliens?”