chocolate. After, she thinks she should have thought of that sooner.
The night is young. No one sleeps. The world suffers universal night tremors that incapacitate nations and industry. Lovers quarrel. Trains stop running. There’s a suicide.
That catches her attention, as it was never part of her plan. To tell the truth, she never had a plan, never meant to swallow the first Mare, but they were like candy. Like drugs. Like ice cream. She couldn’t stop.
Days pass. No one sleeps. Circles under sunken eyes become prevalent, then unavoidable. She, and she alone – perhaps her cat – can sleep through the day. Things stalk the shadows, things she never imagined, the distorted nightmares of seven billion sleepless zombies.
For her, it’s a living nightmare, and she knows it’s nothing next to what others suffer, but she has no control. It broadcasts from her and through her, nightmares made real, ultra-real, and supra-real. She takes to screaming and pulling out her hair in clumps.
Everyone else knows it’s her. They watch her, stare at her, follow her, and stalk her. They gape from the windows and doorways and alleys, moaning, pleading, crying, begging. She runs, but they’re everywhere. They point at her with blood-stained fingers. They scream. They cackle. They gather outside her apartment door, on the fire escapes, on the rooftops across the street. She can’t get away from them. They don’t let her sleep.
She breaks and screams and bolts upright in bed, spitting out the first Mare.
The others escape, racing across her sheets, off the bed, evading the cat and vanishing uncaught. But one, wet with her spit, straightens himself and looks at her and grins.
“That,” she says, panting and sweating, her heart racing, “was uncalled for.”
He bows and says, “And now that I’ve seen your heart, oh would-be Queen of Nightmares, I can only promise worse.”
She swats at him, meaning to crush him like a bug, but by the time her hand crashes on the bed he’s stepped sideways and disappeared.
For the rest of that night, until dawn breaks, the cat tries to comfort her. It does no good. She drinks a glass of water and wonders how long she can keep awake before going insane.
11 January
The city was old and gray. It’s never quiet, it’s never dull, it’s full of color in all the secret corners and hide-aways and personal spaces.
Outside, there were bridges stretching to other shores, and cars that would take you far away, but the streets almost all ended within the confines of the city and the subways wouldn’t take you out of it. They went around and around underground, stopping at the same platforms every time – every time, that was, except this once.
This one time, the subway stopped at a desolate, abandoned platform, which it often passed, and one boy, Bobby, stuck his head out the doors, looked up and down, and stepped off the train.
The concrete here was old. It crumbled in places. Faded paint peeled off the walls. There were advertisements, jeans and perfume and opera, but they were older than Bobby.
The train doors closed and left him alone.
The lights at the station shone dim, but glowed nonetheless, which had to mean something. Someone paid to keep the lights on.
Bobby admitted his worldview was skewed. Trains did exist that took you north of the city or west, or even south, should you feel a need for self-inflicted punishment. But no trains stopped here. The tiles on the wall called it Rue de L’illusion, which was the wrong language but easy to translate.
“Hello!” he called out. His voice ran down long halls, turning here and there, eventually returning with no real answer. Bobby left the platform in the most logical direction, passing deep shadows and closed-up newsstands, until he reached a set of stairs rising to daylight.
He climbed.
Bobby thought he knew his home city. He had been to all the edges. He had visited museums and bookshops and candy stores. He had seen the very rich with their fancy cars and well-dressed doormen, and he had seen the very poor with their tattered dreams and scraps of hope. He had seen crime and passion and business and beggars. He had seen bankers and bakers and lawyers – and even the mayor. He had, in his fourteen years, explored every road, street, avenue, lane, and alley. He had seen rooftop gardens and dirt lots no more than ten feet wide. But these particular streets were new to him, never before seen, occupied by buildings that weren’t near as gray as the rest of his city. And the streets were quiet, empty and abandoned. He walked in the middle of the street, arms outstretched, a thing that would get him killed in any other part of the city.
He walked for a while, and everything was new but dirty, promising but silent.
Eventually, he discovered he was not alone. A girl stood in the street. She wore a faded dress and had blonde hair. She stared at him.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Bobby. What’s your name?”
“I don’t have a name yet.”
“How can you not have a name yet? What does that mean? When do you get a name?”
“When you name me.”
“That’s silly,” Bobby said. He was often honest and free-spoken. “You just don’t want to tell me. Fine. I don’t care.”
She frowned.
He said, “Name yourself.”
“I always like Jenny.”
“There you go,” Bobby said. “You have a name after all.”
She smiled.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
“There isn’t anyone.”
“This is a city,” he said. “There’s always someone.” He glanced toward the highest buildings, but recognized nothing in the skyline. He looked all around in every direction.
“You haven’t given the city anyone yet,” Jenny said.
He laughed. “You’re weird. I like you.”
“I like you too.”
They stood there, in the middle of the street, between unfamiliar towers of concrete and steel, staring awkwardly at each other.
Finally, Bobby asked, “How do I get home?”
“Go back the way you came.”
“I’m in a fairy world, aren’t I?” Bobby asked. He’d always had something of an imagination.
“Not exactly.”
The sun was dipping in the sky. He really should go home. It felt unnatural, this vacant section of city.
“I’ll be here again tomorrow,” she told him.
Bobby went back the way he came. The station remained empty. The turnstiles accepted his token. He reached the empty platform, and soon a subway stopped and its doors opened for him.
After climbing aboard, after the doors slid shut, he looked out at the platform and saw Jenny standing there looking sad. She turned her head to watch him leave but did not wave.
The next day, the subway did not stop at the abandoned platform. They passed it so quickly, you couldn’t even read its name in the tiled wall.
Bobby asked about the abandoned station, but no one knew anything – not the conductor, not the cop, not the guy selling the dailies and bottled water. He went to the library but found nothing. The librarian even went so far as to tell him there were no abandoned subway stations; although old maps might show some, she said they were traps in the maps, not real, meant to deter map thieves.
Bobby didn’t know if he believed in map thieves until he become one himself, slipping an old subway schedule into his back pocket before leaving the library.
The librarian gave him a funny look but didn’t stop him.
A year passed, but Bobby was never able to convince the subway to stop at a station no one believed existed. He stopped trying. He took to books instead, and sketching the girl’s face with pencils. He started writing poetry for her, and stories about all the hidden, magical corners of cities. He wrote about tiger trainers and actors and old men making chocolate. He sketched the faces of the hidden city’s policemen, mobsters, bankers, and politicians. He wrote a great many stories, few of them any good. And one day, after another year had passed,
sixteen year old Bobby was surprised when the subway stopped at Rue de L’illusion.
This time, the platform was not empty, though no one got on the subway and only Bobby got off.
Jenny was there. She wore a yellow sundress now. She smiled and took Bobby by the hand and led him to the streets.
“You should give us taxi drivers,” she told him. “And janitors. And I’d like to eat something other than chocolate, you know.”
“I can’t do that,” he told her. But he carried his journals and sketchpads in a backpack.
“No one else can,” she told him.
So she sent him home, this time with a kiss on the cheek. She said, “I’ll be here again tomorrow.”
On the train, before it had even left the station, Bobby started writing a story about Jenny. For next time.
12 January
There’s nothing in the attic.
She moved in three weeks ago. She sleeps fine. There are no strange noises, but there is one door she never considered. In the ceiling.
It haunts her now. When she walks through the short hall, to bedroom or bathroom or living room, she doesn’t always glance up but she feels the weight of it. The not knowing. The uncertainty. The possibilities.
There might be an antique she could pawn, some rare Russian thimble or a Civil War era rifle or an ivory-handled mirror. There might be evidence of a crime, the secret books with details of shady deals, a murder weapon, a body in a plastic bag stuffed into a trunk.
She has friends over one night for beer and wine and food and music. Sometime near midnight, she tells them about the unopened attic like it’s a ghost story. What if simply opening the attic door
InkStains January Page 6
