by S G Dunster
An idea sparked. As I breathed hard, as I backed away, I realized that my trope could be useful.
Medieval Europe, and a dark woman. What bigger cliché was there? “Aelfur!” I shouted. I ran behind the table, dragging Lil with me. “A witch! She’s here to take the keep!”
My Saxons were all around me, brawny, broad, hairy and smelling reassuringly like a herd of pigs and dogs and horses that had run a hundred-mile race together.
“Get’erm!” Aelfur roared, upsetting his plate, suddenly in front of him again, shoving the table that had bloomed back into being. It got several of his men in their midsections. “Urp,” one of them said, and then vomited all over the table. “Get the witch!”
The men rose to their feet and advanced on the Aspen-apparition, moving slowly, forming a solid wall between her and Lil and I. “Leave,” Lil said distinctly. “You do not belong here. This is not yours. This is not theirs. It’s OURS.”
In sync with her last word, the line of men roared, drew their clunky metal swords, and ran at her, ran at the pool of shadows, the curtain of them creeping up the wall behind her.
And Aspen blinked, walked backward into the wall, and disappeared.
The shadows retreated with her until it was just a bare stretch of stone wall.
“That’s it,” Lil said blandly. “They’ve found us.” She sat on the edge of the table, folded her arms over her chest, kicked her legs, and glared into the distance. “Where the hell is he?”
“Your Grey Man?”
She turned to me. “Maybe he doesn’t actually know we’re here. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.”
“Maybe he’s not coming.”
“No.” She shook her head like a dog shaking water out of its coat. “No way.”
The men were celebrating their victory, raising fists, linking arms and doing jigs, pouring back to the table to chug their wine.
“You two filled y’bellies enought?” Aelfur shouted at us over the noise of the crowd. His fist came down on the table, vibrating the full length. “Eat your weight o’ mutton! We’ve won t’rday!”
Lil leapt to the ground and gave him a slight bow—more an inclination of her head, which was likely all the deference anyone could ever get out of her. “No thanks,” she yelled back. “We’re tired. Give us a bed.”
Aelfur looked from her to me, furrowed his meaty brow, and shrugged. “Chicken-bone wench,” he said. “T’each man’is. There, you.” He gestured in the direction of the stairs. “Make’r way up t’attic. There is straw’nough t’keep ye warm f’r t’night. Tomorrow w’mae battle.”
“Yeah,” Lil muttered as we obediently wended our way around the table. “I think you’re right.”
Chapter 8
The attic was four stories up. And a couple hundred stairs.
The stairs were each about a foot-and-a-half high, irregular blocks, with only the wall hugging them as a banister, the other side open, except where bisected by the half-floors of the tower. Nothing would keep us from falling many, many feet onto a hard surface. I put my foot on the first step and paused.
“It’s your tower,” Lil jeered. “Should’ve thought of your issue with heights when you made it. Hey, if you fall, give yourself a pair of wings.”
I hesitated still.
She gave me a look. “Come on. We need to talk. Away from . . .” she looked around, then frowned again. “Come on,” she repeated grimly.
The spiral leaned inward as we went higher, sloping the stairs slightly downward. Lil scrambled up them nimbly, and Satie scurried after her, flicking her misshapen tail at me tauntingly. My knees shook more and more as I climbed higher. I tried clutching at the blocks in the wall for a handhold, but my hands were getting slippery with cold sweat. I made myself a handle of cast iron, imbedded in the stone, here and there.
I tried to un-think, un-feel, the cold dizzying fear that gripped me as we got past the first story—twenty feet over the head of Aelfur the Hairy, who was still tossing away wine like it was his air to breathe.
The air grew warmer as we got higher. I was wet with sweat. The walls were shaking. Just a little. Maybe my imagination.
Stop, I told myself. You are imagining it.
“Logan!” Lil called down at me, a note of exasperation in her voice. She was clinging to the wall just like me, only the expression on her face wasn’t fear; it was annoyance. “Cut it out!”
The walls were shaking. Just like me, they were trembling.
I clung to the wall, pressing my body as tight against it as I could, the sweat coming like icy knives to my face, hands, and the small of my back, and tried to think of how to stop it. It was, as Lil said, hard to un-imagine things. Especially when they brought strong feelings.
“Stop it,” Lil called down again, her voice booming against the stone walls. “Get a grip, Logan. I can’t climb if you’re making an earthquake.”
I couldn’t un-imagine the height, the stairs. They were part of my story, part of what made me remember it, think of it, re-imagine it. Could I change something about myself, make myself safer on these stairs? Make myself . . .
Sticky. Gum on my feet, the soles of my shoes covered in ooze. Green, glowing, sticking tight to whatever I step onto.
A disgusting sucking noise, and a resistance when I tried to raise my leg to take the next step, signaled me that it had worked.
I looked down. There it was, green ooze on the bottom of ridiculously cartoonish purple boots. They looked almost like eighties-era moon boots.
Sticky boots.
My sticky boots.
Feeling a little embarrassed, I gazed up at Lil, where she stood several feet above me.
Lil’s never worried much about fashion. She didn’t blink, didn’t even really give them much of a look. “Great,” she said. “Get moving.”
The walls had stilled. I climbed cautiously at first. As I got accustomed to the glop, suck, smack routine of stepping, then unsticking my boots, I chugged up those stairs, the slope feeling easier and easier until we came to the top room. It was completely floored in with a small stair entrance, ceilinged by the tower’s flat stone top.
A low room, barely tall enough that my head didn’t brush the ceiling. It was full of straw, mounds of it, almost like the miller’s daughter from Rumpelstiltskin ought to be there, spinning it into gold.
A dim outline fizzed into being, but I shoved it aside. I didn’t really want any more fairytales today.
All around the walls were slits of windows, floor to ceiling, about eight inches wide.
Lil was standing at one, peering through it, stock still.
I sat in the spokes of light they made on the floor, taking a moment to rest and be grateful I was back on easy ground, before I joined her.
“Take those off.” She turned to look at me. “They’re making fart noises on the floor.”
I looked down at my boots and thought about them going away, but of course they didn’t. I squinted down at the boots and pictured instead my comfortable, broken-in Nikes, the shoes I’d logged at least a hundred miles of running in. The friendly soles hugged my feet and the purple-dinosaur boots were gone.
“Get your butt in gear,” Lil said, pointing at the window slit. “Look.”
I stood behind her and looked out. I blinked a few times—my usual trick to get things to behave—but the strange sight didn’t go away.
Instead of our nice, clean meadow, our keep’s hill with its view of Lil’s treehouse and the lake, there was forest.
No lake. No treehouse. No soft, green grass. Just a black, menacing mass of trees; ragged, dark, tall, too thick to see into from our vantage point. It came to the very bottom of the keep, so that I could no longer view the giant wooden double-door.
And it was growing. The branches reached up toward us, talon-twigs spread like they wanted to grab us through the window.
“What happened to the Baobabs?” I asked, and dim traces of pillar-trunks formed and thickened in the air, jutting up from the dark
carpet of gnarled trees.
Lil grabbed my arm. “Don’t think about them. You’re making them.” The fear in her voice froze me. She was breathing through her mouth with a rasp like she couldn’t quite catch her breath.
“What is it?”
“They’ve taken this place from us.”
“Who?”
She gave me a look.
“The Crow and the Wolf?”
“Rook,” Lil corrected.
I scanned the landscape again: dark, spiky pines, billows of old oaks. A dim mountain in the distance, shadowed by trees. A wave of them seeped in like a tide, dark green, dark brown. My mind said those colors, but really, it was black. And the sky was changing, too, turning dim. A fog misted down, descending on us in damp, clammy waves. It brought with it a strange smell. Musky, like old meat, unwashed fur. A hint of something putrid. Dog poo, maybe.
“They’ve found us, Lo. Found me, at least. This isn’t good. But maybe,” she sat down suddenly in the straw, and began pulling agitatedly at her braids.
I fell down next to her. “Don’t pull your hair.”
She batted my hands away. “I’m fine. I’m not . . . I’m fine, Logan. I’m just worried.” She let go of her braids and gave me a long, level look. “They know I’m here, but they might not know you’re here. We might still be . . .… almost okay.” She stood again and paced, peeking out of the windows intermittently. “There’s two of us. Two of them. If we could only find him. Three to two, it’d be done. We’ll have won. If only he’d come now—” she slammed her fist suddenly into the wall. “Stupid. Grey. Coward,” she shouted. She began frantically pulling her braids.
I caught her just before she collapsed onto the floor. I held her, a writhing mass of elbows, teeth, hair. She moaned and beat at me, gave me a fierce elbow to the ribs, then went limp. It wasn’t a seizure; it was a fit. Feelings, taking over. My mom had taken her in to get her brain scanned after the first one happened, frightened of epilepsy, but there wasn’t anything really wrong with Lil’s neurons.
Lil didn’t often channel feelings. When she did, it was like fire in straw. They consumed her. And her fits were just that: her body shaking in the wake of feelings she couldn’t contain.
I’d done it before, held Lil during one of her fits to keep her safe. My mother had done it countless times, too.
The room was going dark like a light had been turned off, and it changed colors. The spokes from the windows swirled and circled the floor, moving to the center like a coiled snake.
A spiral.
It was what Lil drew, what she sculpted, what she painted, when she fell away from reality. When she got frozen, or scared. I’ve seen her go for two days straight, sitting with a pad of paper in front of her, scribbling spiral after spiral.
A spiral. Lil was making a spiral, right now, with the lights from the window. Like she always did when she needed grounding. It meant . . .
I pulled her head onto my shoulder and clutched her to me, tight.
This was Lil. For real. The thing I held didn’t come from inside me. It was her. Lil. Lil made spirals. I didn’t. This came from her. She was here, with me.
Not dead. Real. Alive.
I hadn’t hurt her.
I tasted the salt—tears. Mine. I felt the heat of their warmth on my skin. The echoes of the blows to my ribs didn’t even hurt. My heart was bursting with exultation. With gladness.
I was crazy, but I wasn’t crazy enough that I’d hurt Lil. And we still had a chance. We could come back together. We could wait it out—this delusion we were in—and when the real world came back into focus, we could go home, both of us. We could get help, together.
I wasn’t going to jail.
I hadn’t hurt Lil.
I don’t know how long we sat there, me wrapped around her, but eventually she fell asleep on my chest, and I laid her down and settled in next to her, pulling straw over both of us. It was prickly, and dusty, but warm and safe. And I was exhausted.
We must have slept. For how long, I don’t know.
The world fuzzed back into being, swimming in my vision as I woke. I had a moment of panic, feeling the roughness of straw, the itch of it on my skin, the dust of it in my mouth and nose. The darkness. There was no direct light through those windows, which meant the sun was sitting right on top of us, glaring directly down on the tower.
I waited until my heart slowed, then stood, slowly, brushing off straw. Lil lay curled in a comma-shape on the floor, and I shifted carefully so she didn’t wake up.
I walked to the window.
And nearly yelled. Because she was there, sitting on a branch just under the window, staring up at it, like she’d been waiting for me. “Gah,” I sighed, gripping the ledge. “What are you doing here?”
“Do I look so bad?” Jenny touched her face. “I know I look a sight. How is the girl?”
“Fine. Better.” I rubbed at my head, thinking. “Are you real, too, then? Lil’s real. She’s here. And I am here. But Aelfur and the others— “
“Figments,” Jenny replied, shifting her weight on the branch. She stood, balancing delicately like . . . well, a surfer, maybe. Jenny, surfing the creepy forest with her rags and spindly, emaciated body, her hair hanging down almost like surfer-dude dreads.
Her clothes shifted and became a bright tankini, exposing the awful relief of her ribs, and the branch turned into a surfboard.
“Stop it,” she hissed, batting at the clothing, kicking at the bright plastic she stood on.
“You’re not real.” I felt hollow in the gut. “You just changed.”
“I’m real as you. I just can’t . . . control. Hold control. I’ve been . . . I’m close to falling. Get this off of me. Give me back my gown.”
“Your rags?”
She glared at me, dark arches of brows meeting in the middle. I stared back at her. She could be pretty almost. Those fierce-but-delicate features. Curved cheekbones. Large eyes, hollow with shadows.
“I never let him dress me,” she said. “And I’m not letting you, either. Nobody tells me what to wear. Or what to do.”
She moved her hand across her body and she was clutching at the rags that hung down off her hips in filthy strips and swaddled her torso like mummy bandages, the bright swimsuit either gone or hidden.
“Good.” She locked eyes with me again. “Don’t let them change you. Don’t let anyone here change you. It’s the beginning of the end. I’ve seen it happen, over and over again. And most of all, don’t let the blyks touch you.”
“The blyks— “
“The shadows. The spirits. They are controlled by the Grimms. They take flesh. They will drain you and you’ll become part of the black tide. The forest’s found you now. You’d best get back to where you came from, fast.”
She was climbing down now.
“Wait,” I said, trying to bend to get something—my face, my head, a hand—through the narrow window. “Where are you going?”
“Going,” she replied, her voice dimming as she descended. “I’m going to go get you help. This wasn’t your fault.” She turned her pale face toward me again, the dim, dark spots of her eyes boring through the shadow of the trees. “She brought you here. Just like he brought me. Slaves to their selfishness, we are. We won’t fall to them. They will fall first. And we will watch their end.”
I barely caught the last of it and wasn’t sure I’d heard right. Also, I wondered if I should really be talking to her, listening to her. Who was she?
She seemed concerned. And she’d helped me.
I thought she’d helped me. Had she?
But she was gone, anyway
I watched the forest, hoping, but she really was gone. Black trunks and branches pressed against the round keep walls, grabbing at the cracks between the stones. Dark vines were had curled up the side, spouting dark, bat-like leaves. The vines shifted, because of the wind or not, I didn’t know, but they seemed to be moving up toward us.
I stepped back from the win
dow.
Down below, I could hear my Saxon lairds. The faint boom of joviality and conversation, a hint of music.
They were there still. It was a comfort. There were others here with us, me and Lil, even if they were, as Jenny had called them, figments. Maybe if I asked Aelfur, he’d know what to do. He lived here, right? He must know more than I did.
But you made him, idiot. He doesn’t know anything you don’t know.
Still, I hurriedly cobbled together a thought of those gummy boots. They ended up being more like converse shoes this time, much radder looking, and the slime at the bottom was thinner and yellow. The suction they made as I practically ran down the stairs was crisper and quicker stepping. I sort of liked them.
The room whirled around me as I descended. There was even more finery than before: gold and green banners to accent the blue and green already there; furs decorating and upholstering little couches and chairs that had been put in the niches of the empty rooms; and people. Lots of people. More than I’d made. More than I’d told.
This brought a slight pang of confusion as I digested it. I hesitated on the last few steps, looking down, frowning. Could figments make more figments? How did that work? Maybe because Aelfur was a piece of me, he liked to tell stories like me?
I stepped down slowly and walked into the room.
Dozens of men and women were lounging around: fat, flaxen-and-copper haired, dressed in bright-dyed wools and furs and pronged helmets.
They looked normal, like they belonged, talking, feasting away on animal flesh, flirting and groping, and ruffling the fir of the dogs under the table.
As I approached the mass of them chortled away, cracking bones in their teeth, globs of congealed grease decorating their formidable beards and oiling the necks and chests of the women.
“Up at last!” Aelfur boomed when I stepped out onto the floor, standing and gesturing impatiently. “Sit’ aside me, lad. Drink fr’m m’cup.”
It was making me sick, the scent of spoiling fat. I was not going to eat the food, no way. But I didn’t want to agitate Aelfur. I knew what sorts of explosive reactions might follow such an offense as refusing to sit at his table. I had to change the food.
