Indexing

by Seanan McGuire

  We were trapped.

  Episode 9

  Whiteout

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 280 (“Pied Piper”)

  Status: IN PROGRESS

  The four of us stood frozen in the frame of the broken window as Demi’s army of wildlife filled the yard. Their bodies packed the sidewalk and the street beyond as well, turning everything into a teeming mass of animal flesh and eyes that glittered in the starlight. The sound of Demi’s flute echoed over it all, shaping and directing the scene. The part of me that was still capable of analytical thought noted that she did have limitations: she couldn’t play to compel both us and the animals at the same time. Another, even smaller part of my mind reminded me that I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe Demi was leaving us alone because she wanted whatever was going to happen next to hurt as much as possible.

  “Sloane?” I murmured. “You’re the closest thing we have to a brute squad. Think you can take on the entire cast of Bambi and get us to the van alive?”

  “Alive, except for the ticks, fleas, and probably rabies?” Sloane hesitated as her gaze flicked back and forth across the crowd, assessing the odds. I started to hope we might have a chance. But then Sloane shook her head, expression briefly flickering into honest regret. “No. Best I can come up with is maybe Andy could throw one of us onto the roof of the van if the rest of us were willing to die to get him out onto the lawn to make the throw. Too many teeth, too many claws. We’re fucked.”

  “In more ways than one,” said Jeff, sounding horrified. I spared a glance in his direction. He wasn’t looking at the yard anymore. His attention was reserved for the grandfather clock on the other side of the room, which he was regarding with open horror. The hands were set at five minutes to midnight. “Henry, we need to get out of here.”

  “Well, if you have any ideas about how we can accomplish that, I’m all ears,” I said.

  “You don’t understand. We have to get out of here.” He turned to me, pointing at the grandfather clock with one trembling hand. “That thing just started ticking.”

  “Clocks do that,” said Sloane.

  “So do bombs,” said Jeff.

  That stopped the rest of us for a few precious seconds, and I nearly barked the order for Andy to go and check it out. Swallowing the words that would probably have seen us all blown straight to ever after, I asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Jeff said. “It’s not ticking at one beat per second. It’s a countdown that doesn’t tie exactly to the clock. Birdie set a trap for us.”

  My chest tightened, and it felt suddenly difficult to breathe. I turned slowly back to the broken window and the animals clogging the yard, suddenly seeing them in a new light: they weren’t the sword. They were the shield. They were supposed to keep us inside long enough for the bomb in the clock to take care of everything. All we had to do was keep arguing, keep analyzing—keep doing all the things a field team was supposed to do when the story wasn’t actually swinging for their heads.

  There was a way out of this. I could see it, if I stopped and allowed myself to be honest about my circumstances and what I was willing to pay to get us out of here alive. “In the kitchen,” I said, as much to myself as to the group, and then, louder: “Sloane.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Were there apples in the kitchen?” I had never eaten an apple. Not once in my life. It was too dangerous. No matter who gave me the forbidden fruit, there was always the chance that it would be somehow poisoned, and that this would be the thing that triggered my story.

  Sloane paused, looking at me in surprise. Her amazement faded quickly into understanding, and she nodded. “I’ll be right back.” She turned and bolted for the hall, running as fast as her legs could carry her.

  “Henry?” said Jeff. “What are you going to do?”

  “Something I should probably have done a long time ago. I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen?” I turned my gaze back to the crowded lawn. Demi was still playing, but her music had lost the manic air it had initially possessed: she was just keeping the animals where they were, not ordering them to do anything else. All she needed to do was wait until the bomb inside the grandfather clock went off and did the wet work for her.

  Andy stepped closer. I saw his frown out of the corner of my eye. “Are you planning to tell the rest of us exactly what you’re doing?”

  “Not unless it works,” I said.

  Footsteps behind me marked Sloane’s return, and her hand fell on my shoulder with the finality of a headsman’s axe. “Henry,” she said, and thrust her stolen apple under my nose. “Here.”

  It was perfect. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I knew the varietal instantly: Lady Alice, whose pale pink flesh and rosy skin were prized among apple aficionados. “Know thy enemy,” that had always been my motto, and there wasn’t an apple in the world that I hadn’t tasted in my dreams.

  I took it from her hand. “Did you poison this?” I asked, surprised to find that I felt only academic interest. Whether she had poisoned it or not, my next steps were finally clear. I wasn’t going to hold back.

  “Maybe,” said Sloane. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “Isn’t that always the way,” I said, raising the apple to my mouth.

  I think Jeff realized then what I was about to do. I heard him shout something. I heard Sloane snapping a response. Their words were too far away and too blurred by the sudden sound of crows crying against a winter sky for me to make them out. All that mattered was the rosy skin of the apple in my hand, and the crisp snapping sound my teeth made when they broke through it to the flesh beyond. My mouth filled with the taste of sweetness, and the world broke open around me, exposing the face of once upon a time.

  #

  The first bite of apple tasted like autumn incarnate, perfect and indescribable and somehow more nourishing than anything else I had tasted in my life. It was the first frost and the hint of snow, and it was what I had been waiting for my whole life, revealing every other meal I had ever eaten as dust and ashes. I closed my eyes as I chewed, swallowed, and took another bite, the possibility that Sloane had poisoned our salvation dismissed in the ecstasy of eating the apple.

  The second bite tasted like blood on snow, like rose thorns and needles pricking the finger of a queen-to-be (and that was the answer to why Sleeping Beauties were so often the mothers of Snow Whites; it was so clear, it had always been so clear, I just needed to sink a little deeper into the story if I wanted to see it properly; both our stories began in needles and ended in slumber), like black crow wings spread wide to catch the winter winds. I chewed again, swallowed again, bringing the story a little closer to the heart of me.

  I had no stepmother. I had no palace to flee from. That didn’t matter, that had never mattered, because this was the truth at the heart of the story: the girl, and the apple, and the broken glass around her.

  Jeff was still shouting. I held up my free hand, signaling for him to be quiet, and miraculously, he obeyed. Maybe it was the fact that I reacted at all. Maybe it was relief at the fact that I was still enough myself to give orders. Maybe he was just confused. I raised the apple one last time. A final bite to buy myself the final act.

  The third bite tasted like exotic poisons, like a glass coffin sitting lonely in the snow, and like a prince who never came. I choked a little as I forced it down, but in the end, down it went, and I opened my eyes on a world that was no longer quite the world that it had been only a few moments before.

  The lawn was still choked with the bodies of the local wildlife, but they didn’t look like vermin to me now. Every one of them was a distinct individual, and I knew instantly that I would be able to recognize them all on sight for the rest of my life. Every squirrel, every songbird—they were all their own beasts. And if they were their own beasts, that meant that they didn’t have to belong to Demi.

  They could belong to me instead.

  I stepped up onto the windowsill, causing t
he nearest row of animals to fidget and snarl nervously. The remains of the apple slipped from my hand, forgotten, as I stepped down and onto the grass. I raised my head enough to catch a glimpse of Demi, still playing her flute at the rear of the crowd. She looked nervous. That was good. She should be looking nervous. Turning my attention back to the animals, I smiled as beneficently as I knew how, and I began to sing.

  The song didn’t have words, exactly; it was more the equivalent of Demi’s piping, all sound and feeling, going on forever if that was what it had to do. I’ve never been able to carry a tune in a bucket, and that didn’t seem to matter. Maybe animals hear music differently than humans do. The ones nearest to me stopped fidgeting. Then they began inching closer, eyes going wide and glossy with what could only be described as adoration. Still singing, I motioned for the other agents to follow me.

  “What the hell is going on?” demanded Andy.

  “She’s gone active,” said Jeff. He sounded utterly broken, and I wished I could stop singing long enough to explain my choice to him, to make him understand that this didn’t have to be the end of anything, not even my career with the Bureau. Field team leaders weren’t supposed to be actives, but it had happened before. Deputy Director Brewer would understand, provided I could bring the rest of my team home alive and relatively unharmed.

  “Why the hell did she do that?” Now Andy just sounded confused.

  “To save us,” said Sloane. She pushed past me, walking forward until the animals began getting restless again. Then she stopped, looking back, and offered me her hand. “Come on, Henry. Don’t fight it, but don’t let it take you either. You’re stronger than this. You’ve been putting up with my shit for years. That’s more backbone than most Snows will ever show.”

  I glared at her as I kept singing, moving forward one cautious step at a time. The taste of apple was strong in my mouth, and half of me wanted to run away from the girl with the red and black hair, recognizing her as an enemy. The rest of me recognized that impulse as belonging to the sort of Snow White I’d always feared becoming, and shoved it fiercely to the back of my brain. My story might have started with a spoiled little princess who was scared of her own shadow, but it wasn’t going to end that way.

  A hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see Jeff standing there, expression grave.

  “We need to go faster,” he said. “The clock is about to strike midnight.”

  I nodded my understanding and picked up my pace. As I did, I started to sing a new song, asking my animal friends to do me a great service, one that would never be forgotten—one for which they would be mourned and memorialized always.

  Demi was still playing, and maybe that was good enough for the animals who were close to her and her flute, but I was newly activated and in my element, here in front of a little house on the edge of the forest. Birdie had planned for a great many contingencies when she put this trap together. She clearly hadn’t figured on my breaking the one rule I’d held sacred since I was a little girl: never activate your story. Never let the narrative take you.

  But it was the narrative that had changed things. If it was going to target us actively, I was going to fight back. And if you’re supposed to fight fire with fire, then it made sense to fight narrative with narrative.

  The animals began pouring past us, leaping and hopping and crawling through the broken window, moving slowly at first, and then with increasing urgency as I pushed onward toward the street. Sloane walked in front of me, the animals flowing past her and joining their fellows in the house. They were packing their bodies in so tight that some of them had already probably been crushed, and still they kept on doing as I asked, forcing their way inside.

  We were almost to the sidewalk when the bomb went off, filling the air with a concussive bang. If not for the animals muffling it, the blast would have killed us. As it was, it came with a burst of hot air that flung us all forward onto the grass. Almost all—Sloane somehow turned the push she got from the blast into momentum, running straight toward the stunned-looking Demi. I pressed my face down into the lawn as the second blast hit from inside the house—Didn’t spot the second bomb, Jeff, you silly boy—and so I didn’t see Sloane make impact. I just heard Demi scream. Then everything was raining fire, and I found that I had more pressing concerns to worry about, like losing consciousness.

  #

  Everything was white, and cold, and frozen.

  I was standing in the middle of a vast forest, the bare black limbs of the twisted trees that surrounded me reaching up toward the frigid winter sky. I turned, one hand going to my gun, and was relieved beyond measure when I found it strapped in its accustomed place; I was still armed. More, I was still dressed like myself, in a plain black suit and sensible shoes, not magically stuffed into some ornate ball gown that would never have survived a minute in any natural forest.

  “Hello?” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, but the wind caught and amplified it, hurtling it into the trees until it echoed back at me from all directions, like the ringing of a cloister bell. “Is anyone there?”

  “We’re always here,” said a voice from behind me.

  I swallowed a frustrated groan. “Is this one of those idiotic clichés where I turn around and see myself in the mirror of my own story, and the narrative tries to tell me that this was my destiny all along? Because I have shit to do, and if I’m not dead, I’d really like to skip the DVD extras and get back to my team before Sloane strangles Demi or something.”

  “It’s not all about you, Henrietta Marchen, and it’s not all about the narrative, either,” said another voice. While I’d been able to mistake the first voice for my own, this one was deeper and sweeter, with a Nova Scotia accent that I couldn’t have mimicked on my best day. “Now turn around, and don’t make us come over there.”

  I was standing in a frozen forest, lost in the grip of what must have been a fever dream invoked by my own awakening story. I didn’t really have that many options.

  I turned around, and gasped.

  The trees had seemed unusually widely spaced when I first looked at them, and now I saw the reason why: the spaces between the matte black trunks could be interpreted as doorways, each of them opening into a forest that was almost, but not exactly, like the one where I was stranded. And now that I was looking properly, those doors were full—each and every one of them—occupied by girls with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as (black as coal, as tar, as obsidian, as the bottom of a well, as black, as black as a raven’s wing) the space between the stars that glittered overhead.

  They should have seemed identical, those white-red-black girls, but they weren’t anything alike, not now that I was really looking at them. They came from every ethnicity on the planet, skin bleached into alien pallor by the story that had shaped them, but features remaining as unique and individual as fingerprints. Some wore their glossy black hair at shoulder length; others wore it long, or in cascades of curls, or buzzed so close to their skulls that it seemed more like gray ash than anything else. They had blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes—even red eyes, in the few cases where the narrative had used the genes for a kind of albinism to reach its desired effect.

  “Hello, Snow,” said the nearest of the whiteout women, the one with the Nova Scotia accent. She was taller than I was, and curvier, with a round jaw and a swelling bosom that strained against the buttons of her red flannel shirt. “We wondered if you were ever going to join us.”

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Inside the story,” said another woman, this one of Japanese descent, wearing jeans and a silver foil T-shirt covered in kanji that I didn’t know how to read. “Inside the story, which is inside you, just like a heart inside a duck’s egg.”

  “Don’t mess with her,” scolded a teenage girl with six piercings in each ear and a flat Midwestern accent. Pure dairy princess from the farmlands, if you ignored her coloring. “She’s new and she’s confused. We were all new and confused once. It
comes with the territory.”

  A tall, thin woman with ash gray freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose moved her hands in a series of sharp but fluid gestures, her brown eyes burning into me. I recognized ASL, even if I didn’t speak it. The woman from Nova Scotia translated, saying, “‘We were all new and confused, but we got over that long before we came here.’ You have the advantage over us, Snow-my-girl: you’re still Henrietta, because you’re still alive.”

  I looked at her, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. The taste of apples was hot and sour in my mouth, and I knew where I was: in a forest full of ghosts, surrounded by the specters of all the Snow Whites who had come before me.

  “Nice way to drop the ‘everyone around you is dead’ concept into the conversation,” said the farm girl, almost apologetically.

  “It had to come up eventually, and we don’t have that much time,” said the Japanese woman. “She’s new and she’s old all at once. That isn’t usual.”

  “Regardless,” said the Nova Scotia woman. “Henrietta, look at me.”

  I looked. I couldn’t resist: not when she spoke to me like that, not when her voice carried all the weight of our mother—our mutual mother who had never existed, the queen with the pricked finger who sat in the windowsill and first dreamed all of us into being.

  The whiteout woman smiled sympathetically when I turned back to face her. “This is hard, I know, but you need to listen. Yes: we are dead. We are the ones whose glass coffins broke before we could be rescued, or who never found our way to the coffin at all. We died in motel beds and in alleyways, in hospitals and in hovels.”

  “I died on a parade float,” said the farm girl. “It was Homecoming. My dress was white as snow, and my lip gloss tasted like apples and cyanide.”

  “I died on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean,” said the Japanese girl. “It glimmered like a mirror in the sun. There wasn’t a doctor on the flight.”