Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  But I couldn’t do anything about that.

  “Two days,” Eap said. “And that great Hoary keep was solid enough to withstand the . . .” He sighed. “You are talents. This is good. But talent must rest.”

  “How did you find us?” Lil demanded. She’d been frowning there as we talked, sorting through thoughts. Finally coming up with the one she wanted to lead with. “Who told you?”

  “The shadows whisper. They can’t help themselves. And, of course, a vine full of ugly, ragged Oxford ivy can lead one into dark places where one wouldn’t normally find oneself.”

  “A vine lead you to us?” I thought of those vines that had climbed up the keep and shivered.

  “I was wandering in the mists. I had to restock.” He tapped the decanter resting on the couch next to him. “Any telling I do now is far away from Grimwoods. In the mists, where things are not yet distinct, not easily . . . found.” He opened his eyes again and glared at me. “The two of you extended the firmament. Made quite a racket with your outrageous telling. Saxons indeed.” He snorted.

  “Grimwoods,” I said, catching the word, tasting it. “The woods, the ones that grew up around the keep?”

  “The bent, ugly, derivatively dark groves that have overtaken the entire world down here now,” Eap replied. “You’ve seen them, surely?”

  “They covered everything we made,” Lil said. “They took my treehouse, and tried to take over Logan’s keep. How can they be so strong? Isn’t it hard to un-tell someone’s telling? It untold everything we made.”

  “For some,” Eap said.

  “Not for the Rook,” I tried. “Or the Wolf.”

  “The Grimms,” Eap corrected. “Call them by their real names, or else they become the thing you fear. No, someone lead me to you, but I don’t think it was them. There was ivy. And roses.”

  I knew who. At least, I thought I did. Flowers, not woods, had brought Eap right where he needed to be to save us.

  Jenny. She said she’d get help. That meant . . . well, it meant Eap was okay. Didn’t it?

  Assuming Jenny was okay.

  She had saved us. Didn’t that mean she was?

  I glanced at Lil. At the suspicion glimmering in her blue eyes. Why hadn’t I said anything to her about my encounters with Jenny? “Flowers,” Lil said slowly, “and ivy.”

  “Not your Grey Man,” Eap said. “Hans is a hare in a burrow. He flees the fire.”

  Because I hadn’t decided that Lil was real, either. Not until the night in the top floor of my keep, when she spiraled. And since then, things had happened so quickly, and so darkly. We’d run. You don’t talk when you run.

  Eap sighed, opened his eyes, and sat up. “Sleep is apparently a fruitless task right now, with you two. Some food?” A very tarnished looking tray flashed off a little table next to the couch and appeared in his hands. There were two bowls on it. They had something in them—white, gluey with swirls of something dark.

  “I’m not hungry,” Lil and I said in unison, and Eap shrugged and set the tray down. “We’ve got meager offerings here. Even outside the borders of the firmament, only simple tales should be told if you want to keep out of the shadows. Simple porridge and molasses. But it’s sweet on the tongue.” He sat, sighing, so close to me our thighs brushed, and I got a good whiff of his breath.

  Not good.

  He took the serving bowl, set it in his lap, and spooned the gloop rapidly into his mouth, decorating his moustache. He reached into the pocket of his voluminous coat, drew out a bottle—gleaming green glass. “You’re lucky I ran out of spirits,” he said as poured a steady stream of dark red liquid into his goblet, “or I’d not’ve been in the neighborhood. Have to go far out of bounds if I want to tell something so fancy as a bottle of port without being noticed. And then, of course, our trail of flowers.” He gave me a grin—that horrible, tooth-baring contrast to his hollow eyes. “Any ideas on who left that for me, Logan?” He put the cup to his lips, holding it there until he’d gulped it all down, then poured another full.

  I shuddered. “No,” I lied. Because I still felt it. I had an odd sense, like it would be best not to say anything about her. Jenny. It was a tug in my mind, a sort of foreboding, that it would be bad for me. Bad for her. Bad for someone, if I talked out loud about her.

  Ears, listening. Eyes, seeing. That’s what Aspen-not-Aspen had said. And here, I felt almost safe. But Lil, beside me, was tense as a wet cat.

  He ate, drank noisily, and finally, sighing, set the tray aside. He was rosier. Not so yellow. His dark eyes gleamed, and his lips turned up under his moustache, like he was amused. The cat had leapt up to his shoulder, and they both stared at me—slanted yellow eyes and hollow boiled-egg eyes with intense, dark pupils fixed on me, then Lil.

  “You are a mother’s bloody heartache,” he said finally. “The two of you. How long’ve you been missing from the crust? Four days, you said. Four days.” He rubbed his nose with his thumb, stood, and reached for something on a shelf, near the top of one of those leaning stacks of books. He took it and the whole thing leaned. He didn’t bother about it, just let it topple to the ground—another mound of books—and a fluttering, pale cloud erupted into the air. Lil gave a surprised grunt as a few tiny moths whirled around her head and tried to settle on her braids. She put her finger up and let one crawl along the tip. I shuddered and batted them away. I hate moths. In my opinion, they’re zombie butterflies.

  Eap came to sit next to me again. He had moths clinging to his sideburns, his lapels, and one crawling up his yellow neck. He didn’t seem to care; all his burning focus was on the book he settled on his knees. He opened it. I took a deep breath and brushed at my own hair. My scalp was crawling.

  The book was large, as big as one of those coffee table tomes my aunt Sue likes to keep around to brag about her missionary travels. He opened it, and I saw that the pages were full of scrawl—steep, narrow, graceful handwriting. He flipped through it quickly, and I couldn’t read anything except a word here and there. Finally, he stopped near the middle where two pages had been filled with a sort of picture and, here and there, words in a flowing, crowded script.

  A map. A landmass shaped sort of like a sickle, or fingernail-moon, with a fat middle and two tapering points.

  Lil leaned forward over it, taking it in with frantic, greedy eyes. “Wow,” she muttered. “How come you didn’t talk to me up in . . . up on the crust? The Grey Man never— “

  “Quiet,” Eap said shortly. “Hans. Call him Hans. And don’t mention him any more in my presence, if you please. Logan,” he continued, “you can now ask me anything you wish. I will try to explain. You deserve to know what hell you’ve wandered into.”

  Lil stared at him, fire shooting from her eyes. Slowly, she turned and sat on the couch again.

  “I . . .” my mind whirred, going from image to image: the burning crack, the mist, the treehouse, my keep. “The wolves,” I said. “The Vines. The Grimwoods. What are they? Why can they take over our tellings?”

  “They are imprints,” Eap replied. “A story told and retold until it becomes solid and very hard to untell, even by the creator.” He stroked the cat, which had settled on the couch arm. “Monty here is my imprint. Most everyone here has at least one, or has had, before their essence dissolved into the blyk.”

  “I’ve heard that word before. Imprints of what? Who? And what is the blyk?”

  “Imprints of the two,” Eap replied. “The Grimms. Two men, one man. It’s complicated.”

  “Who are they?”

  “You’ve read all the stories as a child. These are the two who make the forest. The two who have hold over the blyks. They came here not so very long ago, but the stories they tell are potent and entangling, and they take souls, Logan. Blyks are stolen souls. They cannot quite pass away because here, death has to be chosen, and anyone cowardly enough to escape death by moving down into the caldera does not have the strength to choose it. But with the Grimms taking their starved essence, and makin
g them into whatever they like to tell, they cannot quite live. When something here becomes weak, the Grimms stalk them and take them. Blykhood is the way those here in the Caldera come to an end.”

  “Caldera,” I said. “Why’s it called that?”

  “This is the space of fire, of change, of telling. We call it the Caldera.”

  “So . . . nobody can die. This is a kind of . . .”

  “Hell.” He nodded. “There are two options here—stubbornly remain yourself, remain solid and live forever, or be taken by the two and become what is essentially a roil of spirit matter, trapped in the air like a dank, eternally moldering atmosphere. Here, there is nothing so merciful as death.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. I turned to Lil. She was feigning not to pay attention, twiddling her fingers together. “Is this true?” I said. “Or am I dreaming?”

  “No,” Eap replied. “Unfortunately, no. You are really here, Logan, body, mind, and spirit.”

  “Then how come . . . how come I can do impossible things? How come what I think . . . happens? I can’t believe this is real. It has to be some giant hallucination. I mean, I know Lil’s here, and I can believe . . .” I looked at Eap, and his lips curled up in a small, closemouthed smile. “Dude, I . . . I have problems. Even before, I saw things.”

  Eap gave me a long, intense stare. “On the crust? You saw things there, too? You told and things came true?”

  “I . . .” I shrugged, helpless. “My father had the same problem. He saw things, and almost . . . . He hurt me, and my mom. They had to put him in a— “

  “Madness,” Eap said. “On the crust they call it madness, when you see what others can’t. When you make things come true. This is why tellers flee into the Caldera. Selfishness. Foolishness. A hope for sanity leads tellers, susceptible and vulnerable, straight into a trap worse than the thing they’re running from. You are not the first to do so,” Eap said. “And live forever to regret it. Lil.” He turned on her suddenly. She flinched, but met his dark gaze with a bored yawn.

  “Oh,” she said. “I get to talk now?”

  “Your Grey Man—Hans. He brought you here. And you brought Logan. Was that fair of you?”

  They glared at each other. “I can see why you and Hans get along well,” Eap finally said. “Megalomaniacs. Clinging to your comfort. Both of you.”

  “No,” Lil snapped. “I didn’t come here to escape, you liquored-up . . .” she couldn’t up with a word vile enough.

  His brows arched. “Then why, Lil?”

  She gave him a smug look. “You said not to talk about him in your presence.”

  Eap rolled his eyes, a sight I knew would be in my nightmares later. He gestured impatiently.

  “Hans was in trouble. I thought maybe if Logan and I came down, and were with Hans, that we could . . . fight.”

  “Fight,” Eap repeated, his voice rising. “Utter arrogance. Fight what? The creeping forest, the hungry wolf? The starving shadow? There is no fighting. Just surviving. Down here, there is only miserable, threadbare survival.”

  “Then help us get out!” Lil shouted. “Help us get back! I made a mistake, okay? I didn’t know. The Grey Man, he said—”

  “Hans,” Eap murmured. He rubbed at his nose. “He is a good place to lay blame. And we shall, I suppose, have to track him down. If only to show him his continuing folly. But perhaps . . .” His gaze flicked over her, then settled on me again. “Look again, Logan, at this map. I am quite proud of it.”

  I leaned over it and studied the knobby sickle of land drawn there on the page.

  He touched a spot near the lower point. There was a precisely inked asterisk and the label, “Grandeur.”

  “This is us. The town of the tellers. Funny name for it now, eh? But at one time, it was quite appropriate.” Eap sighed. The sour scent of wine on his breath made me feel a little dizzy. “We had such aspirations. All of us. They—the two—let us build ourselves up, make our dreams, live the high life. Just like those sly wolves and sharp-eyed birds of theirs, they waited for us to let down our guard, to stumble. They took all of us.” He set the book aside and gazed at Lil. “And they shall take you. You must assume the worst, young miss. There is no chance of getting away with your flesh intact otherwise. You are in dire straits, the two of you. No old man, not even two old men, are likely able to save you now. You’ve attracted their attention.”

  Lil swallowed. “Hans was supposed to—”

  “Hans does not learn. Not even from Rose. I would’ve thought that, at least . . .” He stood suddenly, upsetting the book so the pages splayed out on the floor, and walked to the window.

  I grabbed it, turning pages quickly until I found the spot—the map.

  The moon-point with the asterisk labeled Grandeur was surrounded by a carefully lined-out area with vague shapes of buildings and roads like the ones we’d just passed. A thin line indicated the river, a crosshatch, the bridge.

  Grandeur was only a small spot on the crescent. Around it, Eap had drawn a double line, labeled in one spot, “Blyk Barrier.” And beyond and surrounding the barrier was forest, a mess of trees, each carefully and artistically rendered in flowing fountain-pen ink. There were rivers marked here and there, a range of mountains through the northern part, surrounded by masses of hills. Near the top end of the crescent was an abrupt line of cliffs around a small bare spot on the crescent’s other tip. There, he’d drawn a bird—black, with a curved, sharp beak and staring eyes, and the tiny figure of a wolf with its muzzle stretched toward the sky, eyes left as blank white spots.

  I was a little sick staring at that figure. It seemed almost to move—to twitch a little as if it might turn and stare back at me.

  The ledger was snatched so quickly out of my lap that I almost tumbled off the couch.

  “Don’t,” Eap breathed, “let your imagination run away from you here, Master Logan. It’ll likely run toward you, not away.” He turned back to Lil, whom he’d continued to talk to while I was caught up in the map. “We have little recourse, then. You are being hunted already. We do need to find Hans.” He stood, looked down at the pages the book was open to, and ripped them from the book. He folded them and offered them to me. “In case,” he said.

  My body prickled all over. “In case what?”

  The dark eyes bored into me. “It’s not likely the two of you will leave here. Not whole. But I’ve never been one to leave spring fledglings abandoned naked on the ground, even if the cat would be the most merciful end. Come.” He walked to the door, his own cat following, and opened it wide. The dim grey light was too bright for my dark-adjusted eyes. Details in the room stood out suddenly—the portrait on the wall directly over the door. A girl. She had black hair, heavy black brows, a delicate nose and lips, and her face was half-shadowed. She was looking over her shoulder.

  I knew that picture.

  I stared at it, feeling like my skin might crawl right off my frame. I looked at him, holding the door for us. Impossible, I thought. He can’t be him.

  But everything here was impossible.

  Eap met my gaze, his brow furrowed. “Quick now.”

  Lil gave me a sharp shove and moved past me. “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have time to be stupid. He’s trying to scare us. He’s wrong. We’ll get back.” She ran out. Her shirt snagged one of the prickly hedge-branches and tore, and she didn’t even notice.

  I followed more slowly. The shadows in the hedges seemed to be shifting. I saw shapes in them—rabbits, darting into the deeper underbrush. A movement through the leaves, deeper in—flowing, like a river. As I walked it moved closer. I didn’t remember a river by the hedge when we came up. I walked a little faster.

  The hedge was moving.

  No. It wasn’t. I told myself it wasn’t. But yes, it was, all around me, now—rustling, shifting, like a big wind was stirring it up. Out of the hedges, ahead of me, a figure stepped into the path.

  Aspen. Willowy figure, black hair, pale face, winged eyebrows. Her eye
s blinked closed, then opened, flashing a warning.

  The blyks? But there was a barrier, wasn’t there?

  Was it because I was afraid of it, worried about it, that it had come? Had I made it happen? Could I un-make it?

  I ran, closing my eyes. She’s not real, I told myself. I can undo her if I don’t see her. She’s not—

  And I full-body slammed into something; something that snarled and tumbled to the ground right in my path, tripping me so I fell, too.

  I opened my eyes, heart pounding in my head and chest, and scrambled around to face her. It.

  Not aspen. A much thinner, greyer face. Large glaring eyes, the whites yellowed. Thin mouth curled, baring crooked yellow teeth.

  It was the other her. Jenny.

  Only she looked horrible, much thinner, like she’d starved for a week since I’d last seen her. And she was naked. I stared, but not with any kind of titillation; it was pure horror. She was thin as a skeleton, the bones of her ribs and pelvis straining the skin with each breath she took. Her knees were wide knobs on spindly sticks of leg. Her hair was massive—trailing clear down to her feet, clumped, matted, filthy. It swung over her like a curtain, hiding her as she crouched and stood. “Come with me,” she hissed.

  I opened my mouth. For a second, no air, no sound at all came out. “Where?”

  “Don’t . . . come!” The words seemed like they were ripped from her throat, and her eyes rolled. “Don’t come! Run!”

  “What? I . . .”

  “Come,” she growled, leaning forward on her heels like she might spring at me, bringing her hands in front—tiny, delicate hands, with horrible, ragged curls of nail coming off them. “It will be better for you if you come. If they do not take you. Come with me. I’m your . . . friend. Friend,” she wailed, flinging her head back. “Go, friend! Go!”

  I was stuck. Watching, horrified, as her face rippled with conflicting expressions. In a moment the skin of her face might rip apart and spill blood there. And the woods.

  There were woods, Grimwoods, like back at the keep, creeping in behind her. Dark tree trunks and branches—bare, gnarled, winding in on the path even as I watched. The leaves seeped in to fill the spaces of dim light. “Crust-walker,” she crooned suddenly, taking a step toward me, swinging her hair away, exposing her breasts: rotten, withered apples with pieces of black stem. “Come to your fate. It’s quiet in the dark. Restful. Stop running. Let it claim you.”