“No,” I said. “No lights, no sirens. We do this quiet.”
“Because we’re so subtle,” said Sloane.
I rolled my eyes and focused on the road. The local police would let us go without so much as a warning if we got pulled over, but that wouldn’t give us back the time we’d lose flashing our badges and explaining that the lights were off because we were trying to run quietly through the dangerous hours of the night. I didn’t know exactly why I was so against turning on the notifications of our official presence, but something about the idea felt wrong to me. Call it a hunch; I have them rarely enough that I try to listen to them when they show up, if only for the novelty. We needed to do this without attracting attention.
“Henry.” Jeff’s voice was soft enough that I would have missed it had the siren been running. As it was, it was almost drowned out by the sound of the wind rushing through the broken driver’s side window. I glanced to him. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the file in his lap, and the small block of text illuminated by his handheld flashlight. “I think we may have a problem.”
“I think we have about thirty, so cutting it down to one would be a real treat,” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“All of the stories that went live tonight were under observation at some point, although several of them had been marked as too minor to ever be at risk of activation,” said Jeff, moving his flashlight’s beam down the page slightly. “We knew about all of them, at one point or another. It looks like less than half were ever routed to a field team for examination. The rest were just filed and forgotten.”
“Okay,” I said. “That sucks, but it happens.”
“In every case, the Dispatch officer who decided that the story would never activate—meaning it could be dismissed without further action, and didn’t have to be investigated by a field team—was Birdie Hubbard,” said Jeff. “She signed off on every one of these.”
“Our dispatcher is evil?” Sloane stuck her head up between the seats. “Okay, well, that’s new. Does that mean I can smash her skull in with Andy’s crowbar as punishment for making me flash a preteen?”
“No,” said Jeff.
“You did what?” asked Andy.
“We don’t know that Birdie was involved,” I said. “Dr. Reynard was killed for his files. Maybe Birdie is in trouble because the same person wanted to have access to her files.” The excuse sounded weak and mealy-mouthed even as I was making it. Dispatchers all put their files in the same repository. That was how we’d been able to access them. What would have been the point of attacking Birdie?
Unless she was taking work home with her, that was. If she had files that hadn’t been stored at headquarters, that might have been sufficient to put her at risk. For one sickening moment, I found myself hoping for exactly that. Better an endangered dispatcher than one who was doing the endangering.
“How much farther?” asked Jeff in a tight tone. I glanced in his direction. From the look on his face, his thoughts had been mirroring mine.
“Not far,” I said.
“I am reluctant to give you driving advice, but Henry …” He paused for a moment before shaking his head, the light seeping in from outside the car casting glints off his glasses. “Floor it.”
I did exactly that.
#
Birdie Hubbard lived in exactly the sort of house that you would expect a woman named “Birdie Hubbard” to live in, especially if that woman existed in a world where fairy tales were real and had teeth. It was small, burdened with an excessive amount of decorative gingerbread carving, and painted a lovely shade of eggshell white accented with a variety of pastel colors. There was a white picket fence around her perfectly manicured lawn, and beds of wildflowers nestled close to the house like baby birds cuddling up against their mother.
The four of us stood on the sidewalk outside the fence, briefly frozen by the sheer storybook perfection of the scene in front of us. As usual, it was Sloane who recovered her wits enough to speak first.
“She has garden gnomes,” she said, tone somewhere midway between horrified and impressed. “Those are contraband. She could be seriously disciplined for allowing a representation of the Fair Folk this close to her home.”
“I think we have a bigger problem,” said Jeff. I turned. He was pointing to her mailbox where, I saw, someone had painted a line of cursive script on the side. “This says the house belongs to ‘M. Hubbard.’”
“Is Birdie married?” I asked.
Jeff shook his head. “No; she’s single, no family, no close friends outside the Bureau. All dispatchers are like that. You can’t work in Dispatch if there are people in the outside world who might wonder where you go all day.”
“Hell, you can barely work in the field,” said Andy.
I decided not to comment on that particular sore spot. “We can’t stand out here forever,” I said. “Birdie may need our help. What are you getting at, Jeff?”
“I think that ‘M.’ refers to Birdie—that it’s her first initial, or at least the one she uses with the world,” said Jeff. “But I don’t think it’s a name. I think it may be short for ‘Mother.’ Does that ring any bells?”
“‘Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone,’” said Andy. “It’s a nursery rhyme.”
“A woman who calls herself ‘Birdie’ and uses a nursery rhyme as a mask between her and the world.” Jeff shook his head, expression grim. “We need to be careful here, Henry.”
“We will be,” I said, and opened the gate. “Sloane, you’re on point. I want to know if you pick up anything strange. Andy, take the rear.”
“I have no fucking clue what you people are talking about,” said Sloane, slinking nimbly around me and beginning to stroll down Birdie’s front walk. She made it look utterly casual, like there was no potential for bloody mayhem in our immediate future. “Is Birdie a bad guy or not?”
“There are a lot of characters in nursery rhymes named ‘Mother,’” I said, following Sloane but directing my words at Jeff, who was staying close behind me. “She could have just chosen the name to be ironic. Or that could be the narrative she’s tied to. Maybe she has trouble keeping food on the table.”
“Or maybe she was hiding in plain sight,” said Jeff. “All anyone ever had to do was stop and go ‘Hubbard, isn’t that from the rhyme about …’ and the rest of it would fall into place.”
“Still no clue what you’re talking about, getting sort of pissed off about it,” said Sloane, in a singsong drawl. She stopped as she reached the door, twisting around to look back at me. “Now what?”
“Knock. If she doesn’t answer in thirty seconds, you can break it down.” I didn’t like sanctioning property damage, but Birdie could bill the Bureau if she was just taking a nap.
Sloane grinned. “That’s the sort of instruction I like to hear.” Turning back to the door, she hammered her hand against it, pounding loud enough to wake the neighbors—if Birdie had had any. I reached out and grabbed Sloane’s wrist before I could think better of it, stopping her arm in mid-hammer.
Andy made a small, dismayed sound. Jeff went still. And slowly, deliberately, Sloane turned around to stare at me. I didn’t need light to know how dangerous her expression was. Malice was practically rolling off her in waves.
“Now I know you’re not stupid enough to touch me without a damn good reason, so how about you tell me what that reason is, and I’ll decide whether I’m getting written up for breaking your nose or your neck.” Sloane’s tone was perfectly reasonable, like she was asking me how I took my coffee.
“Does Birdie have neighbors?” I asked.
Sloane blinked. “Snow bitch says what?”
“Does Birdie have neighbors?” I repeated. “When we drove up, when we came up the street, were there any other houses? Don’t look.” My hiss caught her in the process of turning her head to the right. She stilled, attention flicking back to me. “Just answer the question. Are there any other houses he
re?”
“No, it’s just forest,” said Sloane. Then she froze, her eyes widening. “But that’s impossible. You can’t have a suburb with just one house. We would have noticed. Someone would have said something about Birdie living too far from civilization, you need to keep people around you as a stabilizing influence …”
“Turn now,” I said, letting go of her wrist.
Sloane turned. So did the rest of us, and as a group we stared into the tangled wood that encroached on Birdie’s perfectly manicured property, slinking up on all sides until it was stopped by the delicate barrier of the white picket fence.
“It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” said Andy in a choked voice. “The little house in the middle of the forest, with the flowers and the … and the garden gnomes. This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”
“Knock again, Sloane,” I said tightly.
She looked at me thoughtfully before swiveling and resuming her pounding on the door. There was no motion from within. “Guess we’re breaking it down,” she said, and started to raise one foot to kick the wood.
“Try the knob,” said Jeff suddenly.
“What?” Sloane shot him a dirty look. “You spoil all my fun.” But she reached for the doorknob, only hesitating for a moment before she closed her hand around it and twisted.
The sound of the latch opening seemed very loud in the stillness of the nighttime air.
“Huh,” said Sloane, and pushed the door open, releasing it rather than stepping over the threshold. It bumped to a stop against the wall of a small, spotlessly clean hallway, with woven rag rugs on the floor and knickknacks lining the walls. The smell of baby powder, chocolate chip cookies, and apples drifted out to greet us.
“Does anyone else smell apples?” I asked faintly, swallowing the sudden urge to be sick.
“No,” said Sloane, her posture shifting into something predatory. She looked more like a fox or a wolf in human form than an actual human as she stepped over the threshold into the hall. She froze there, chin up, nostrils flexing as she scented the air. “I get baby powder, cookies, and arsenic. Don’t ask me how I know what arsenic smells like.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Jeff. “For reference, I can smell the powder and the cookies, but apart from that I smell leather. Fresh-tanned and supple.”
“All I smell’s cookies,” said Andy.
“That fits,” said Jeff. “The narrative may want you, but you aren’t naturally one of its possessions. It can’t control you the way that it can the rest of its toys.”
“Fuck that; I want to be a dentist,” said Sloane, and stalked down the hall, leaving the rest of us to follow. Which we did, without hesitation: Sloane might be unpleasant and bad-tempered, but in the years that she had been working with my team, she had never once put any of us intentionally in danger. The fact that she had entered the house meant that it was safe, and I clung to that thought as hard as I could as I moved to cover her.
Andy was the last one inside. The door slammed shut behind him. We all stopped and turned to watch as he tried the knob, first calmly, and then with increasing urgency.
“The damn thing’s stuck,” he finally reported.
“Somehow, that isn’t a surprise,” I said. I turned back to Sloane. “Find Birdie, and then find us a way out of here. I don’t feel like becoming a statistic tonight.”
“Didn’t you get the memo? You already are.” She started walking again, moving more cautiously now that she didn’t have an escape route waiting for her. At the end of the hall she paused, sniffing the air, and finally pushed open a swinging door, sticking her head inside. She leaned back to inform the rest of us, “Kitchen,” before stepping forward and vanishing.
“Dammit, Sloane,” I said, and followed her.
Sloane already had the light on by the time the rest of us joined her. Birdie’s kitchen was as homey and pleasant as the rest of the house. Given the circumstances, I would have felt more comfortable with stained Formica, or maybe something in an Addams Family “cobwebs and cleavers” motif. Instead, we got cookie jars shaped like strawberries and decorative salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like they spanned a period of about eighty years. There was a large freestanding butcher’s block in the center of the room. I paused, frowning, as I tried to remember where I’d seen that layout before.
Jeff got there first. “This is like a mirror image of Dr. Reynard’s kitchen,” he said. “Move the cupboards, change the décor a bit, and you’d be standing in the same room.”
“Yeah, except his kitchen had a back door,” said Sloane, prowling in a circle around the butcher’s block. “This one has a solid wall. Nowhere near as useful, unless one of you has been holding out on the fact that you’re actually a ghost.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” said Jeff, moving to examine the wall in question. “They’re just echoes of the narrative. They have no free will, and they certainly can’t be employed by the Bureau, much less ‘hold out’ on the living.”
“You’re like a walking Index sometimes,” said Sloane, and didn’t mean it as a compliment. She shot me a look. “See what you’re signing up for?”
“Shut it, Sloane,” I snapped. “If there’s no back door, how are we getting out of here? And where’s Birdie?”
“The smells were strongest in here,” said Sloane. “If she was anywhere in the house, it should have been this room.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Andy. “Split up and search?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Splitting up is how you die in situations like this one. But we should move on—Jeff? Did you find something?” He had started picking at the wallpaper, and was peeling it away from the wall in a long strip.
“Property damage always make me feel better, too,” said Sloane amiably.
“Henry, maybe you’d better come and have a look at this,” said Jeff, continuing to pull the wallpaper away. We all moved to cluster around him. The smell of apples grew stronger, and I saw the writing on the wall.
HELLO, MY PETS;
YOU CERTAINLY TOOK YOUR SWEET TIME GETTING HERE, DIDN’T YOU? YOU SHOULD HAVE MOVED FASTER. YOU SHOULD HAVE GUESSED MY NAME LONG AGO, AND HANDCUFFED ME TO A ROWAN TREE TO KEEP ME FROM TROUBLING YOU. BUT YOU DIDN’T, AND YOU DIDN’T, AND YOU BROUGHT ME SUCH A WONDERFUL TOY THAT I SIMPLY COULD NOT RESIST ANY LONGER. THANK YOU FOR THAT. I PROMISE TO USE HER WELL IN THE STORY THAT’S TO COME.
AS YOUR REWARD, YOUR DEATHS WILL BE AS QUICK AND PAINLESS AS I CAN MAKE THEM.
I LOVED YOU BEST OF ALL,
MOTHER GOOSE
“Our dispatcher thinks she’s Mother Goose?” said Sloane, sounding baffled.
“Our dispatcher is Mother Goose,” corrected Jeff. Sloane turned to stare at him. He took a step back. “I am an elf, and you are a cruel sister, and Henry is Snow White. Why shouldn’t Birdie be Mother Goose?”
“Uh, because even I know that Mother Goose isn’t in the Index,” said Andy. “She can’t be something that doesn’t exist.”
“The Index was written by humans,” I said. “There can be holes.”
“Okay, normally, I love the ‘we work everything through by talking about it and then we all go out for lattes’ chick-flick vibe that you guys have going, but does anybody else feel like they’re standing in a trap arguing about whether or not the crazy bitch who put us here is delusional?” Sloane shook her head. “I, for one, vote for getting the fuck out of here and arguing about this shit later.”
“I agree,” I said. “Sloane, find us a way out.”
She grinned disturbingly and picked up the strawberry-shaped cookie jar. “I was waiting for permission.”
#
Whatever the narrative had allowed Birdie to do to the house might have locked the front door and removed the back door, but it couldn’t Sloane-proof the windows, especially not when Sloane was armed with a stolen cookie jar and a lot of free-floating aggression. She slammed the cookie jar against the picture window in the front room three times. On the th
ird slam, the cookie jar shattered, and so did the window, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Sloane, and boosted herself onto the windowsill. The wind drifting in through the broken window smelled of green grass, and carried the distant sound of piping.
I barely grabbed the tail of Sloane’s shirt before she could jump down to the lawn.
Sloane froze. She didn’t turn to face me as she said, in a dangerous tone, “This ‘grabbing me’ bullshit is becoming a habit, Henry. It’s a bad one.”
“Don’t you hear that?”
Sloane stepped back down from the windowsill. I let go of her shirt. “No,” she said. “But I’m willing to listen.”
I pressed a finger to my lips, motioning for everyone to be silent, and indicated the broken window. We all went still, listening.
We didn’t have to listen for long. The sound of Demi’s pipes grew rapidly, until it seemed to fill the entire world with its sound. Sloane made an incoherent snarling noise, leaping for the windowsill again. This time, it was Andy who grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her chest and bodily restraining her as she snarled at the empty lawn.
“Jeff, what’s the song?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Then Demi herself appeared. Her uniform was gone, replaced by a pied harlequin’s outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Renaissance Faire. She was too far away for me to see her face, but she was turned toward us, and I was suddenly, horribly sure that she had known we were there all along.
“Let me go,” snarled Sloane.
“Demi!” I stepped closer to the window. “Put down the flute and come home, honey. We’re not mad at you. We’re here to rescue you.”
“I don’t think she wants rescuing,” said Andy, sounding horrified. Sloane stopped her struggles and just gaped. Jeff reached for my hand, and I let him take it, standing frozen as I watched an army of vermin pour out of the forest, taking up a position between us and the van. Raccoons, opossums, coyotes, owls and pigeons and songbirds and endless, endless rats seethed on the lawn, blocking it from view.
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