The Night Country

16

The breaking of “Hansa the Traveler” was an end, and it was a beginning. It was the start of Finch’s new career: he was a scavenger. A thief. As the tales kept breaking and people started panicking and the roads and trees and even the tavern were crawling with recent ex-Stories, confused and enraged and stinking of burnt sugar and exploded flashbulbs, Finch was moving through the cracked landscapes they left behind. Before the tales and everything in them could turn into black holes, he walked their disintegrating halls.

From a fading farmhouse he took a blown glass rose and a child’s leather boot. From the bottom of an abandoned coracle he took a bone fishing hook, a little tarnished mirror, and a handful of iridescent fish scales, big as his palm and diamond hard. In an overgrown pear grove he found a dancing slipper, worn through. It looked like one of the beat-up Capezios his junior high girlfriend used to wear with her jeans. Deep in the trees, from a murder cabin straight out of The Evil Dead, he took what looked like a ginger root, colored a deep, burnished maroon. But the thing felt so vile, even through the old leather of his bag, he ended up throwing it out his window in the middle of the night.

When I wake up there’s gonna be an evil beanstalk out there, he thought, lying back in bed. It’s like I’ve never read a fairy tale.

The beanstalk didn’t show, but he still had things to worry about.

He was living with Janet and Ingrid in their cottage, which smelled like rosemary and soil and a tinge of the goat pen Ingrid was bad about wiping off her boots. It drove Janet nuts. They’d given him a home, helped make the Hinterland feel like a home, and now they were talking about leaving.

Everyone was, those days. The Stories were shaking loose and the sinkholes were getting worse and Lev was only the first death—the first disappearance. It was possible, Alain liked to say hopefully, that he was still alive. Maybe he’d slipped right back through to Earth. Maybe that was what everyone should do: show a little faith that the sinkholes worked like doors. It was a popular theory nobody ever tested on purpose.

No, their continued survival depended on the Spinner. They were waiting for her to step in, to rebuild her world, tale by tale. Surely the wound Finch had made in it wasn’t mortal. Surely she’d show herself at last, and open a door. The ex-Stories had their own ways out of the Hinterland, but none of them seemed inclined to talk. The refugees were trapped together like rats on a splintering ship.

Everyone had a theory about the Spinner: that she was an ex-Story herself. That she was just another human, or had been, once upon a time. Someone swore she was the Empress Josephine. There was an old straight-edge dude who hung around the tavern sipping water, who claimed the Spinner used to send him to Earth for cases of gin, satin pajamas, paperbacks and chocolate bars and black tea. Finch believed it.

“She’s not human, not Story, and not to be trifled with or depended upon,” Janet said briskly. “We need a contingency plan.”

But that was just talk. Even Janet couldn’t muscle up an escape route where none existed.

People were starting to lose faith. There were town hall meetings almost daily, and patrols were set up around some of the bigger sinkholes. Janet did her best to impose a curfew. Still, people were lost. The Hinterland’s refugees were wanderers by nature; Finch wasn’t the only one pressing his luck, poking around the changing land.

Then came the night when they were packed into the tavern, sardine-tight and hiding out from a rare rainstorm. The weather had gone off since the Stories started to break. Alain was in the back checking on a batch of home brew when he gave a holler, and Finch knew.

It was a rounded little hobbit door set in a place that had been solid wall, the top of it coming to Finch’s thigh. Janet looked at it with her hands on her hips.

“Let’s not be hasty,” she said.

“Hasty?” A man pushed to the front of the crowd, blond eyebrows scaling his bald head. Finch had known his type back in New York: he was the guy who composted and canvassed and spent his weekends gathering signatures for a petition to save an endangered beetle, then called the cops on kids being too loud on the sidewalk. “We’re dying out here, and you’re talking about don’t be hasty?”

Janet sized him up. “Thank you, Leon. We can always count on you for the dissenting opinion. If you’re volunteering to go first, please, be my guest.”

Leon’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

“I’d like it tremendously. I think most of us would.”

Even Janet was getting ruffled these days.

But it was Alain who got to his knees and opened the door. Half the room gasped, and Leon ducked and covered.

All you could see through it was gray fog, like it opened straight into a cloud. Then a wind came through, a bracing, whistling thing that lapped the room and left them in silence.

“Perfume,” Alain breathed. “Isobel’s perfume.”

Leon’s face was red; he looked like he was hardly breathing. “Baby powder,” he choked out. “And grilled cheese. Did you smell that?”

Everyone was murmuring now, their faces lit up or shut down, naming the promises that had blown through the door. Finch looked to Janet; she said nothing, but her face was stricken.

They were all wrong anyway. The wind had smelled like his mother’s coconut oil, and the gingery spice mix she’d kept on the kitchen counter. It smelled like the lace of overdone waffles, the very last meal he’d eaten on Earth.

Within a few hours, people started leaving through the door. Whatever was on the other side of it, they’d decided it was better than what lay through the sinkholes. Finch figured they were probably right.

But he remembered something he’d read once, about the door to the kingdom of Heaven being so low you had to enter it kneeling. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like the Spinner being petty, making them crawl their asses out through a doggy door. The sheer cuteness of it felt sinister as fuck.

He was still waiting for her to show up and show him what she thought of idiot Earthlings who messed with the works. But if she blamed him for her falling-apart world, she hadn’t said so. Some days he thought that was deliberate, that she knew it was worse for him this way: forever bracing for the hammer to come down. And some days he thought the worst thing she could do was to just let him leave. Maybe the door in the tavern wall would drop him in New York. He’d move back in with his dad and stepmom. Get his GED, let his dad pay his way into a good college. Ring a buzzer somewhere, wait for Alice to open the door.

Part of him wanted to go home, but none of him wanted it to be like this: raw, scarred, pared down. If he went back, he wanted to be like a king in exile returned. Someone who had seen things, and wasn’t shit at processing them.

But as the days passed and the population dropped, he started to think it wouldn’t happen that way. On a humid morning, with nowhere at all to be, Finch sat at a table in the tavern. It had lost its heart when Alain left the morning after the door first appeared, and had practically become a bus station since then. People walked through with their packs tied tight, alone or in pairs, said tearful goodbyes by the bar or slipped through without a word.

And always the place smelled like memories. Every time the door was opened, that antic wind sprang free, teeming with lost things. The sugar cloud of baked ice cream cone at the sundae shop a few blocks from his apartment on the Upper East Side. The rubber-and-sweat scent of indoor basketball practice. His dad’s clovey cologne. He marinated in the scents of home, watching people disappear forever into the back of the bar. While he did it, he toyed with the little metal fox he’d taken from Hansa’s cottage.

There was a trick to it. He was sure there was. It had big eyes and three twitching tails, like those creepy vintage cat clocks, and it made a chittering sound in its throat. The points of its ears and tails were tipped in gold, but the rest of it was red metal. If you put your ear up to its belly, you could hear the faintest hum.

It took time for him to notice the girl watching him from another table. Early twenties, hair bleached out and tied back into Heidi braids, wearing three different shades of faded black. She had an unflappable vibe that reminded him of Janet. When Finch finally looked at her, she smiled brightly and stood, like being noticed was as good as an invitation.

“Hey,” she said, sitting down across from him. “Come here often?”

Finch nodded at the weak joke and said nothing.

The girl pulled out a red glass bottle and set it between them. “I think we missed last call, so I brought my own. You want?”

He put down the fox. “Look, do I know you?”

“I doubt it. I just got into town.”

Reluctantly, he was interested. “From where?”

“I’ve been on walkabout. Well, sailabout, I guess. I wanted to check out the islands, see what came after the edge of the sea.”

Finch’s heart twanged. He’d always planned to do that. “How far did you get? What did you find?”

Her voice fell into the easy cadence of a storyteller’s. “I found a tale that played out on an island the size of this bar. I saw mermaids singing down storms and stirring them into the water. There’s a square of sea that’s always stormy, with a ship tossing inside it. There’s a place where you can take a staircase down to the bottom of the sea and walk in a garden there, with the water just over your head.” Her voice stalled out. “It was beautiful. But it wasn’t home.”

The way she said the word caught at him. Like home meant just one place to her, and she knew exactly where to find it. “Where’s home?”

“It’ll take more than one drink to get me to tell you that.” She smiled, but he didn’t think she was joking. “I came over here to ask you about that thing you’re messing with. That—” She squinted. “What is it, a fox? Mind if I take a look?”

Finch took his hands off it, like, be my guest.

“Tale-made, right?”

He nodded grudgingly. It was the first time he’d heard the term.

“I thought so.” She picked it up, inspected it. With a jerk, she yanked its central tail.

The fox gave a whirring shudder as she placed it in the center of the table. They watched it rearrange itself, the tails elongating, becoming two arms and a pair of molded-together legs, the eyes transforming, disconcertingly, into breasts, and a head sprouting from the body of the thing as it went from apple to hourglass.

It had become a metal woman, with a sly, foxy face.

Finch picked it up, held it to his ear to see if he could still hear the hum. “How did you know it could do that?”

“Better question is, what else can it do?” She flicked the thing onto its side. “Do you have any more like it?”

Finch thought of the glass rose, the fish scales, the rest of the cache he kept under his bed. “I might. Who’s asking?”

The girl put out a hand. “Iolanthe. Happy to meet you.”

He shook it, taking in her ice-haired prettiness, the shallow bowls of her clavicles and the unearthly planes of her face. He was starting to think she might come from someplace farther than New York.

“Ellery,” he said. “Finch.”

“Well, Ellery, the truth is I don’t want to die here. And I think you and I might be able to help each other, if”—she pointed at the metal figure—“you’ve got more tale-made treasures like that.”

“Nobody wants to die here,” he said. “Everyone’s trying to escape. What does the fox have to do with it?”

“Think. What do you need to escape?”

“A door.”

“Money and a door. I know a place where we can make some coin off that fox and anything else you might’ve picked up. How’s this: I get forty percent for taking you there and making the introduction. And for giving you the idea in the first place.”

“Is your buyer in the Hinterland?”

She smiled, relaxed but with a hint of the shark beneath it. “My buyer is not.”

“Meaning you can get us out of here? You know a safe way out, a guaranteed way?”

“I do.”

“You get thirty percent.” Finch took the red bottle and drank. The liquid inside tasted like rum made out of electrocuted sugarcane. “And I get to bring two people out with me.”

Iolanthe pulled out a pocket watch on a long chain and consulted its face. From where Finch sat, it looked completely blank. “Forty percent, and I can personally guarantee the safe passage out of your two people. But they can’t come with us.”

Her hand, when Finch shook it, felt rough and solid, the hand of a woman who’d navigated alien waters in search of tales to tell.

She held his fast. “Meet me here tomorrow at sunrise. Bring your two friends and anything you’ve got to sell. And say your goodbyes. It’ll be the last you’ll see of this place.”