The Night Country

21

After my first night’s sleep in Hell, I woke up too early with a stranger’s voice in my ear.

A girl’s. Stucco-rough but somehow sweet. I could still hear what she’d said, I could almost remember it …

Then I woke the rest of the way, and it was gone. I thought about swimming up yesterday from my blackout nap, the feeling I’d had that someone was talking to me then. And I wondered.

But not too hard, because I had bigger things to wonder about. First, I reread Finch’s last letter. I read it twice. Then I pushed it aside because I could lose a whole day to that mystery, and there just wasn’t time. I had to figure out who among the Hinterland had ice in their hands and a taste for dismemberment.

I could hear Sophia’s voice in my head. Look at you, Nancy Drew. She’d never say that; she’d never even heard of Nancy Drew. I guessed the voice I heard was really my own. I guessed I should call Sophia to talk about last night, and Ella to beg her forgiveness. I did neither.

I decided what I did have to do was learn what had happened with Hansa. She was the only one of the four I felt like I knew, at least a little, and if I was looking for a pattern here her death seemed the most likely to break it.

But the idea of sniffing around her grieving parents, once I tracked them down, made me feel sick. Even worse was the idea that they might think I’d been the one to kill her. Though Sophia had promised to unsmear my name, I didn’t know how long that would take. Who would and wouldn’t believe her. And whether she was still up for helping me after last night.

When all my thoughts started going into soft focus I put on a clean shirt and headed out for coffee and food. I walked till I found an open pizza place, then ate a big foldable slice of rubbery margherita while searching out caffeine. It was half past seven by then, commuters bleeding from every subway entrance. A thousand different faces to get caught on, but the one that hooked me was a little girl’s. She wore sunglasses and a hoodie and was sitting on the edge of a gutter punk’s blanket, just out of reach of his dog. I couldn’t tell whether they were together, but she was paying him no mind.

Something about her was so familiar. I stared a minute, trying to place whether and where I’d seen her. Then I had it: she’d been waiting at the bus stop across from the diner last night. And the night before that, she’d been in Central Park. Watching me from beside the path.

“Hey,” I said, almost to myself. I started toward her, but didn’t make it too far. As soon as I got moving, she vaulted herself off the blanket and flew down the street.

“Hey! Wait!” I took a few running steps, then stopped. She was already a block away, moving fast as a whippet through the crowd.

My heart pounded and my thoughts went sharp. She could run, but I knew who she must be. And I knew where to find her.

Not many kids came through from the Hinterland. Hansa had been one of them. Creepy Jenny was another, with her baby-doll face and those keen little in-turned eyeteeth. And then there was the Trio.

In the Hinterland they’d had other names: the Acolytes of the Silver Dagger. The Red, the White, and the Black. But here, everyone just called them the Trio. They weren’t little girls, exactly, that was just the form they took. It was odd to see one of them alone, but these were odd times.

I only knew about them what Sophia had told me: that in the Hinterland they’d answered to their own kind of deity. Here, they’d found their way to the Christian God, though I doubted it was a mutual thing. They hung out at a church in Midtown, and tended to show up when they had a message for you—the garbled, prophetic kind. The kind you’d damn well better heed. I waited a little longer, but the girl didn’t come back. When nothing worse showed, either, I headed to where I knew I could find her.

Times Square in the morning looked oddly clean. Massive video billboards cycled silently overhead, and tourists clustered on the corner of Forty-Fourth and Broadway. The place I was looking for was weathered stone with a big rose window, its imposing face half lost behind construction scaffolding. A church, lovely and unlikely, tucked among the anonymous hotels and overpriced diners above the square. The schedule by the entrance said I’d missed matins, but when I tried the doors they opened.

Ella never took me to church, and there’d been a time when I was fascinated by them. I couldn’t believe they were free, that anyone was allowed to walk inside a place that looked so much like a museum or a castle.

This one’s entrance was cool and hazy with incense. Beyond it was the great glittering mouth of the church itself, yawning wide to reveal its treasures: rows of polished pews and the Virgin in her nook, mosaicked arches and filigreed screens and wooden carvings of figures who must’ve been holy men, but could just as easily have been depictions of the Green Man, the Erlking, the King of May. Saints glared out through solemn eyes, and stained-glass windows cast dim jewels over the ground, and I was starting to see how an ex-Story could find solace here, in a building so replete with ancient tales.

There were a few tourists here and there, lighting candles or taking sneaky photos, dwarfed by the gold-and-marble altarpiece. Nobody who could be the Trio, I thought. Slowly I walked to the front of the room, a faint tock tock tock taking up slow residence in my head.

It was the sound, I realized, of heels on wood. Looking over the pews I saw that they weren’t quite empty: three heads just peeked over the top of a bench on the left side. The heads were hooded, from left to right, in red, white, and black. One of them must’ve been kicking her feet against the pew like … well, like a bored kid in church. I was a few rows away when the kicking stopped and the heads clicked on their necks like something out of Camazotz, turning in unison to look at me.

“Hello,” said the child in red.

“Alice-Three-Times,” said the child in black.

The child in white said nothing, but you could tell she was thinking plenty. She showed her milk teeth in a smile that made me colder than consecrated stone.

I scanned them, trying to figure out which had been following me. The one in red, I thought. She’d changed her hoodie.

“Hi,” I said, a little breathless. “I think you have a message for me.”

Red and Black leaned forward to look at each other. White kept staring.

“Well? What is it?”

“You can ask us anything you’d like.” Red.

“Perhaps we’ll answer. Perhaps not.” Black.

White said nothing, but the other two tilted their heads into her silence, and laughed.

“Is that the message?” I slid into the pew in front of theirs and turned around, facing them over its back. They had eerie little oatmeal box faces, like an illustrator’s idea of how a wholesome child might look. If the illustrator were terrified of wholesome children.

Red studied my face. “You’re afraid of something.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

She smiled, a little meanly. “You have more to be afraid of than they do.”

“Okay. Does it have something to do with the murders?”

“With the deaths, you mean,” said Red.

Black bowed her head. “We honor their sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?” I said. “I’m talking about murder. The four Hinterlanders who were killed.”

“Great change requires great sacrifice.”

“And tales change their shape, depending on who’s doing the telling.”

I tasted metal. “Don’t talk about this in riddles, all right?”

All three held up their left palm, oath-giving style, as Red and Black talked between them.

“No riddles. You say it’s murder.”

“But we say they chose to die, and knew what they were dying for.”

“They go on to a great reward, in a better world.”

I seized on Red’s words. “A better world? What world is that?”

“The world of the kingdom of Heaven,” she said primly.

Black spoke next. “If they can make it. We do pray for all of you, not just our self.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “So you’ve thrown the Spinner over for God?”

“The Spinner never spoke to us. God does.”

“Oh, yeah? What does God tell you?”

Black shrugged. “He moves beneath the green and the gold. The blue and the brown. The red, the white, and the black.”

“He sacrificed a piece of his very self, just like Genevieve. Just like Hansa.”

I didn’t like to hear the dead’s names in their mouths. “Murder isn’t sacrifice—they didn’t want to die. Saying it was a sacrifice implies there’s something they died for.”

Red turned to Black. “Assumes she knows everything, this girl.”

“And knows less than most.”

Red looked back at me. “Don’t you know the story of Saint Alixia? He cut off pieces of himself to feed the gateway between Heaven and Earth, to keep it always open for his kin. He cut off pieces till he fell down dead, and his blood became a river. His wife paddled down it to her divine reward.”

“That’s not a real story,” I said, though I supposed it could be. You never knew with saints.

“We’ve nothing more to say to you, child.”

“Child?”

“We’ve nothing more to say,” Red repeated. “You asked your questions and we answered them. If you won’t listen, bother us no more.”

“Let’s take her out of our prayers,” Black whispered.

There was more I wanted to say to that, but a harassed-looking man was hurrying over, hem trailing behind. He clapped his hands gently, looking past me.

“You three cannot be in here. I’ve already told you, no unattended children in the church.”

The thing in white piped up then. Her voice was bell-sweet and lightly turned. She looked not at the man but up, like she was practicing her Joan of Arc. “‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” Her voice flattened, and her eyes met his. “Never, not ever. Never ever.”

Whether it was the scripture or her spooky little face, the man fell back, uncertain. “Well, that’s…” Without finishing his thought, he swept off toward the altar.

“Our advice to you,” said Red, turning back toward me.

“Is to listen when your betters speak,” said Black.

White looked at me, and I held my breath.

“And to remember every story is a ghost story,” she said. She reached out and pressed one cold little hand to my chest. Its nails were painted ballerina pink. “If you’re looking for answers, seek out your ghosts.”

The painted eyes of the saints watched me walk away. The lit candles guttered as I passed; I wondered what would happen if I trailed my fingers through the pool of holy water.

I looked back, just before opening the door, at the three dark beads of their heads over the pew back.

Four. For a moment, I thought I saw a fourth head. Then the door behind me opened and the sun sliced in, and I blinked the vision away.