Defy the Dark

Dia Reeves The Dark Side of the Moon

When Cado snuck up on Patricia in her backyard, her first reaction was not to scream but to thwack him over the head with a silver watering can.

And that was what he loved about her.

“Oh my God, Cado!” She dropped the watering can and tried to break his fall as he wilted into the petunias. “I’m so sorry!”

“Not as sorry as me,” said Cado, blinking away stars similar to the red, white, and blue ones he’d seen strung in the redbud trees along the block as he’d driven up.

Charter was less than an hour from Portero, both towns hidden within the East Texas piney woods, but while Charter consisted of unlovely acres of livestock and hay farms, Portero could have been carved out of gingerbread. By pixies. Stars in the trees, cobblestones in the streets, flowers in all the gardens. A place that charmed and disarmed with its tweeness . . . and then thwacked you over the head.

After she’d checked to her satisfaction that she hadn’t cracked his skull into a million pieces, Patricia threw herself into Cado’s arms and rolled him around in the flowers like she thought she was a milkmaid. “You’re not even supposed to be here until tomorrow!”

“I know, but I wanted to sleep over, and I figured your folks wouldn’t’ve agreed if I had asked first.”

“That’s amazingly diabolical.” Patricia’s kiss was like a stamp of approval. “My influence is finally rubbing off on you.”

But she didn’t ask why he’d come early, probably assuming he wanted to catch her in the shower or something predictable like that. Patricia knew a lot, like what all the initials in the Wall Street Journal stood for and how to apply lipstick so that it never smeared no matter how hard Cado kissed her. But she didn’t know him. Not as well as she thought she did.

He sat up and rescued the bouquet of daylilies from where he’d dropped them after getting clobbered. The petals matched the setting sun and blazed against the black of Patricia’s dress as he presented them to her. “I brought this for you.”

“Why?” Patricia asked, hip deep in flowers, yet staring at the daylilies as if they were alien babies.

“Because you like flowers. Duh.”

“Not as a symbol of love. Those are going to wither and die in a week. Is that what you think about our relationship? That it’s going to wither and die in a week?”

“No,” he said after realizing the question wasn’t rhetorical.

Patricia grabbed the bouquet that he had painstakingly selected and threw it so hard, it sailed over the wrought-iron fence and smacked a passing soccer dad in the face.

Patricia didn’t understand him, but sometimes Cado didn’t understand her, either.

After she helped him to his feet, he grabbed his duffel bag and flute case from the petunias and followed her through the back door into her home.

“Want a cool drink?”

“Maybe later,” he said, distracted by her outfit, a black dress with no back and shoes that exposed her manicured toes—definitely not a milkmaid. She smelled cold and Parisian. “You look nice.”

Patricia twirled for him, showering the floor with pink petunia petals. “My folks are at a canasta party, but after they’ve heard all the neighborhood gossip, they’ll swing by to pick me up. They’re treating me to a farewell dinner at Gitano’s before you steal me away. Wanna come?”

They hadn’t seen each other since he’d gone to Castelaine to see her perform two months ago. They almost never saw each other except at recitals and band camps, like the one they were driving to tomorrow. Although they talked and texted all the time, the whole long-distance thing was beyond suck. “I’d rather stay here with you.”

“They’ll be home any minute,” Patricia insisted, and before he could stop her, she popped the zit on his chin. She was always doing that to him. “I don’t care if it scars you,” she’d say whenever he complained. “I’d rather look at scars than pus.”

“We only have enough time to change you into something less transy,” she said, dabbing his chin with a kitchen towel.

Cado held her away and looked down at himself, his worn jeans and new, blue Fourth of July T-shirt. “Transy?”

“It’s short for transient.” She put her hand over her mouth briefly, as though she had been impolite. “It doesn’t mean anything bad; it’s just what we call people who obviously aren’t from Portero. Usually Porterenes wear black in public.”

“How can y’all stand it? Especially in the summer.” It had to be close to one hundred degrees outside.

“We’re used to it, though it helps not having anything to compare it to.” She led him upstairs and into her room. “I mean, it’s not exactly a law, but it may as well be.”

“Why?”

“Because people die all the time here,” she said solemnly, taking his duffel bag and setting it on her bed. “Death surrounds us. Did you pack a suit?”

“Um . . .” He was inclined to take Patricia seriously when she spoke of death and monsters, now more than ever after what he had seen last month, but still, her mix of weirdness and practicality always mystified him.

“I have a black shirt and pants.”

She rummaged through his poorly packed bag, but after finding the shirt and pants, the search continued. “Where’re your ties?”

“Ties? I thought we were going to dinner, not Buckingham Palace.”

“You can take the boy out of the country,” she muttered, giving him a pitying look. “I’ll get something of my dad’s.”

Cado changed clothes while she was gone, noting the real art on the walls, the violin from Austria gleaming in an open case on her desk, the blue silk covering her bed and pillows, and the fresh yellow daylilies ironically scenting the air. He tried his best not to smudge anything.

Patricia returned and gave him her dad’s jacket and tie, which he struggled into while she dumped the contents of a red purse into a metal one that reminded him of an anorexic version of his mom’s toaster.

Cado examined himself in Patricia’s full-length mirror. The jacket fit tightly on his arms; if he flexed, he would burst the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

“I look like a gorilla at the opera.”

“You do not! Don’t be so down on yourself. You’re handsome and smart”—Patricia jabbed him with the metal purse after each point—“and a soon-to-be world-famous flutist.”

“I guess. You smeared lipstick on your purse.”

“That’s not lipstick,” she said, and then applied some to her mouth, as if he had reminded her. “That’s blood. And what do you mean, ‘you guess’?”

“Are you bleeding?” He grabbed her hand and she wound up with lipstick on her chin.

“That’s not my blood, silly.” She swatted him away and fixed her face while he examined the purse. “It’s not even fresh; it just looks like it is.”

And it did, dripping across one side of the metal like an open wound but not staining his hands.

“A couple years ago, there was a plague of blood grackles,” Patricia explained through lips that matched the stain on her purse. “They looked just like regular grackles, except blood grackles liked to eat people instead of worms. Fortunately they couldn’t abide metal, so for a while, it was all the thing to wear metal accessories as protection. Mama bought me that purse for my birthday, and wouldn’t you know that very same night, I had to bash a couple of blood grackles out of the air when they dive-bombed me. On my birthday of all days!”

She finished doing her makeup and fluffed out the curly afro puff resting cloudlike atop her head, not even interested in his reaction to her story.

No one back home would have believed her, but Cado did. Patricia wasn’t the type to bullshit anyone or mince words. “Are they still around?” he asked. “Those blood grackles?”

“They got wiped out last year. All the metal was too much for them.” She nodded at the purse in his hands. “That stain is all that’s left, as far as I know.” Patricia unknotted the mess he’d made of her father’s tie and redid it. “Some of the faculty from the Shepherd School are gonna be at the retreat.”

Patricia’s ability to flit nimbly from the bizarre to the mundane floored him yet again. “The Shepherd School at Rice? Why do you care? I thought you wanted to go to Oberlin?”

“Rice is closer. And cheaper.” She smoothed her hand over his now-perfect tie. “Cheap enough even for gorillas who play the flute.”

“It’d be better for my family if I went to A&M and studied farming or—”

“The hell with your family! Just man up and make a decision, Cado, and don’t hide behind your family.”

Definitely didn’t mince words.

“That’s why I came early,” Cado told her. “To man up.”

The car horn startled them both. Patricia peeped through the window blinds; the dying sunlight clawed her face.

“It’s my folks.” She took her purse from him and tucked it under her arm. “This conversation isn’t over.”

Cado didn’t like when she got upset with him, but he didn’t mind it—Patricia was cute when she got her back up. He grabbed her hand and held it all the way down the stairs. “Do you have any other magic weapons like that purse?”

“There’s no such thing as magic. Otherwise I’d send a wise old elf to tell you to apply to Rice so that we can finally be together. Not a day here or two weeks there, but really together. For as long as we want.”

“I might not get in. It’s not a sure thing.”

“You were on From the Top, for God’s sake. You know how many classical musicians would kill to be on that show? Rice would slit its wrists to have you enroll.”

“But it’s so . . . high art. You know? Tuxedos and tea sandwiches.” His hand sweated all over hers just thinking about it. “That’s your world, not mine.”

She didn’t give Cado a pitying look this time; she looked into him, there on the bottom step, and she liked what she saw. “You’re awesome enough to make it in any world.”

And because it was Patricia who’d said it, he believed her.

Cado wanted to stick a fork in his eye, but there were four to choose from, and the Markhams would sneer if he chose wrong.

“A salad fork?” they’d say. “In the eye? Everyone knows salad forks go in the ear.”

At least Patricia’s folks were devoted. Not just proud of their daughter but pleased with her. Cado, on the other hand, they seemed to find thoroughly and mouth-twistingly unpleasant.

“So,” said Mr. Markham heavily, as Cado toyed with the overabundance of heirloom cutlery. “Why the flute? Were the ballet classes all filled that day?”

“Don’t be tiresome, Daddy.” Patricia rested her foot atop Cado’s and sipped from her wineglass. Red wine that looked like blood and tasted like Mardi Gras.

“I don’t mind,” Cado told her. “I get it worse at home. You’d be surprised at the numerous and creative ways my dad finds to impugn my manhood.”

His vocabulary impressed the Markhams against their will. Those soul-numbing SAT drills had been good for something at least.

“Have you been to Portero before?” Mrs. Markham asked, her polite tone at odds with her stony expression.

“No, ma’am.”

Mrs. Markham touched her daughter’s hand. “Be sure to show him the sights, darling: the Old Mission, Fountain Square. The historic district is always nice.” She gave Cado a tight smile. “You can look at the pretty houses.”

Cado sipped from his own wine, resisting the urge to stick his pinkie out. “That sounds like fun, ma’am.”

“Does it?” Mr. Markham said. “Would you also like to go antiquing with my grandmother this Saturday?”

“Maybe. Is your granny as cute as Patricia?”

Patricia laughed and clinked her glass against Cado’s. “Excellent riposte, sir. But no one is as cute as me.”

Cado was saved from Mr. Markham’s retort by the arrival of their waiter. While Mr. Markham ordered for everyone, Patricia and Cado began texting each other.

Patricia: You’re the cute one.

Cado: Not for much longer. Your dad hates my guts.

Patricia: Sure does.

Cado: Why? Cuz I haz white skin?

Patricia: No. Cuz you haz white penis.

“I wish the two of you would stop that,” Mrs. Markham said as the table shook with the force of their laughter. “That’s incredibly impolite.”

“It is not,” said Patricia, even as she put her phone away. “We’re multitasking.” She kissed Mrs. Markham’s cheek. “Don’t be so twentieth century, Mama.”

Cado considered taking some of the bread that had been left with them—and that had been architecturally arranged with more thought than the Sydney Opera House—but lost his nerve at the last minute.

“Which college are you going to?” Mr. Markham asked him.

“Um . . .”

Patricia said, “He’s trying to decide between Rice and A&M.”

“It just depends on how things work out,” Cado added when Mr. Markham kept staring at him.

“With the Young Artists’ Retreat or with my daughter?”

“Neither. It all depends on the night trolley.”

The Spanish guitarist seemed deafening in the intense silence that followed Cado’s statement.

“What do you know about the”—Patricia lowered her voice—“night trolley?”

“About a month ago I was on a hunting trip with my uncles. We thought we were about to flush a wild hog from the bushes, but it wasn’t a hog.

“At first I thought it was a naked man running wild in the woods, a maniac or something. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t a man. It wasn’t human. It had sick white skin and needle-sharp teeth and a head three times as big as mine.”

Patricia said, “Big as a pumpkin?”

“Yeah!” The recognition on their faces healed something in Cado he hadn’t known was damaged. His family had half convinced him he’d been seeing things. Even his uncles who had seen the same thing he had.

“A cackler?” Mrs. Markham said to her husband. “In Charter? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“They get out, but they don’t last long.” Mr. Markham turned a sour eye on Cado. “Certain people aren’t as tolerant as we are.”

“That wasn’t any sort of thing I was ready to tolerate,” Cado said. “It was already dying when we flushed it out, but it was more than ready to take us all with it. I got in behind it with my hunting knife and put it down.

“My uncles buried it and said not to tell anybody. That even though it was a crazy mutant, we could all end up in jail.”

“A mutant?” the Markhams exclaimed.

“Uncle Beau said that was the only logical explanation.”

“That a man was bitten by a radioactive pumpkin and became a mutant?” said Mr. Markham. “That kind of logic?”

Patricia said, “What does any of that have to do with the night trolley?”

“Uncle Beau said that it came from here. That Portero was full of mutants. And he told this story about a friend of his who moved here. The locals started in on him, telling him he should move back where he came from, that he didn’t have what it took to live in their town. So Uncle Beau’s friend asked what was the bravest thing anybody could do. And they all said the same thing: ride the night trolley.

“They said it was a kind of ghost on wheels that only came in the dead of night, and people who rode it were never seen again. They told him that if he could survive a ride on the night trolley, every Porterene would worship him as the most hard-core badass in all creation. So Uncle Beau’s friend agreed.

“They sat with him at the stop till three a.m., and after the trolley appeared out of thin air, they watched him climb aboard. They waited all night for him to come back, but he never did.

“You Porterenes have your cacklers and your blood grackles and no fear of anything. Except this one thing. That’s the reason I came early, to do what Uncle Beau’s friend couldn’t— ride the night trolley and live to tell the tale. If I can be brave enough to do that, to experience something that even a Porterene thinks is scary, I can be brave enough to do anything. Even become a classical musician.”

At the end of Cado’s long, heartfelt recitation, Patricia and her parents laughed. They laughed until they couldn’t breathe.

But Cado was a redneck who played the flute. People would probably still be laughing at him at his own funeral.

After dinner, Cado and Patricia escaped her parents and went to Fountain Square to watch the fireworks with her friends who were all band geeks and, like Cado, played uncool instruments: the oboe, the xylophone, the piccolo. Everyone wore black, just as Patricia had claimed, but they also managed to show their patriotism with Fourth of July buttons and hats. Several people had painted the American flag on their faces.

As they sat together in an amphitheater—with a huge fountain at its center spouting red, white, and blue water—Cado noticed that the Porterenes shared an odd resemblance; but not like relations, nothing that simple. More like they had once all been held hostage together and still bore the psychic scars.

After the fireworks show, Cado and Patricia left the square and strolled past businesses still open, past people chatting under awnings and on the cathedral steps and on benches, in no hurry to be anywhere.

The night was warm, but Patricia was cool on his arm. Cado had never seen her break a sweat. The knowledge that she’d never done a hard day’s work—unlike the women in his family, who worked on a pig farm—secretly pleased him.

“Why didn’t you want to hang out with my friends?” she asked, curious instead of upset.

“It’s getting late.”

“You wanna go home?”

“No.” They went up a short flight of steps to a part of the street that held more homes than businesses and so was correspondingly quieter. “I wanna find that trolley stop.”

“That joke stopped being funny two hours ago.”

“It’s not a joke.”

Patricia stopped walking, and so Cado left her behind. He didn’t have to search for long. The stop was just a few yards down the street, bathed in the warm glow from the windows of the skinny brick homes that stood in a row behind it.

Patricia ran after him and then blocked his way. “You are not getting on that trolley.”

“Sure I am,” said Cado, lifting her out of his path. “It’ll be good for me. The kind of experience that’ll put my whole life into perspective.”

“Or kill you!”

“Either way.” He sat on the blue bench next to the brown-and-white trolley stop sign. “Death is an answer.”

“Death is a question. The ultimate question.” Patricia tugged at him but didn’t have the muscle to move him off the bench.

The more frantic she became, the calmer Cado felt, happy even. She wasn’t laughing at or pitying him now.

Patricia gave up her attempts to haul him bodily from the trolley stop and instead sat beside him. She took his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Only one person ever came back. One person. Who gave birth to many, many babies. With many, many legs.”

“Obviously I’m not gonna give birth to anything,” said Cado, amused.

“It was a guy who came back,” Patricia said, stabbing Cado’s amusement in the back. “And his babies ate him alive; he smiled the whole time.” She didn’t see what she wanted in his face, so she released him and stared out into the street. “They killed all the babies, of course, but there’s one on display in the museum.”

“Bullshit!” Cado said before he could stop himself. Before he remembered that Patricia wasn’t a bullshitter.

“I’d show you if it wasn’t closed. The trolley—the regular trolley—is part of the museum. A rolling exhibit. They started work on it in the 1800s, but they ran out of money. So it doesn’t go anywhere. Tourists get on from the museum, and it takes them around the square and that’s it. Except not really. Sometimes people travel a lot further than they ever intended.

“This town is full of doors. Crawl spaces. Jagged little holes that you never see until you step through them. That’s why we have things like cacklers and blood grackles and the night trolley.

“The man who had the babies? He said the trolley took him to the dark side of the moon, only it wasn’t dark at all, but filled with a light so pure and holy that he couldn’t stop smiling. The things he gave birth to, though, were neither pure nor holy.”

Cado saw it then, the gulf between them—he never had before. He stared at her the way she’d stared at his daylilies: like she was an alien. That inexplicable awareness screamed from her face, as loud as language.

“When you shine a light into the dark places,” Patricia continued, “you see the world as it really is. The rats peeing on your toothbrush, the roaches laying eggs in your shoes, the bogeyman salivating as he watches you sleep. You don’t want to see those things.”

“Sure I do.”

“You do not!” Her voice scared a pigeon into flight. “You don’t even want to face the truth—that you’d rather die than be looked down on for being a candy-ass flutist!”

Cado knew that the truth hurt, but he’d never felt its jagged claws rip into him before.

He fished out his cell and pressed the number three nine times. When Patricia realized what he was doing, she tried to bat the phone out of his hands, shocked that he even knew what to dial.

“Wait!” She grabbed his wrist before he could press SEND. “This isn’t a game, Cado. Why can’t you understand that? Sometimes people prank call that number, just to see what will happen, and then they don’t show up to take the ride. So the trolley pulls up in front of their homes and gets them.”

Cado knew that Porterenes were scared of the night trolley, but seeing that fear on Patricia’s face frightened him in a way all her talk had not.

“If you call,” she said, her icy fingers digging into his flesh, “it will come for you.”

“And take me to another world? You said I could make it in any world. I believe you. Even if you don’t really believe in me.”

He pressed SEND.

Patricia’s hands flew to her mouth as if to stopper a scream.

“Night trolley.” The bored, sexless voice was decidedly unfrightening.

“This is Cado McCoy.” He took a deep breath. “I need a ride.”

“It’s a dollar, one way.”

Cado said firmly, “This’ll be round trip.”

“This stop, three a.m.,” said the voice. “Don’t be late.”

After he put his phone away, Patricia said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?” She couldn’t look at him, her hands still covering the lower half of her face.

“I’m not afraid—”

“Because you’re an idiot!”

“—of the trolley,” Cado continued calmly. “But knowing you don’t have any more faith in me than I do”—he touched Patricia’s face—“now, that’s scary.”

Cado had meant to rest before his otherworldly appointment, but it was impossible. Mr. Markham kept coming in to check that he was still in the guest room and not lolling sexily in Patricia’s bed. When the door opened for the fifth time, Cado threw his pillow at it. “Dammit, Mr. Markham, I’m—”

But it wasn’t him.

Patricia snuggled next to Cado, her gown soft, but not as soft as her body through the gown. Her feet curled around his ankles. She must tiptoe across the backs of geese and the tops of clouds to keep such velvet skin.

“If I were nicer,” she whispered, “you wouldn’t be doing this, would you?”

He brushed his thumb over the tip of her nose. “You’re the nicest girl I know.”

“I’m not nice! I wish I had a dungeon so that I could throw you into it and chain you up until this madness leaves you.”

“Would it be weird if I said that sounds like fun?”

His alarm went off, and he had to leave Patricia’s embrace to shut it off. He turned on the lamp and got dressed.

Patricia threw back the covers and held out her arms. “Come back to bed.” Her nightie wasn’t black, but sunset-colored, like the daylilies she hadn’t wanted. Her toes sparkled at him.

“I refuse to be distracted by your body right now,” Cado said, lacing his Chucks. “But feel free to distract me with it tomorrow.”

“What tomorrow?” she said bitterly, and then with an equally bitter resolve climbed out of bed. “I’m coming with you.”

“No way.”

“Why not? We’re the Bonnie and Clyde of the classical music world, and they died together in a car—we’ll die together on a trolley. I’d prefer a private jet or a yacht, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“It doesn’t count if I bring a brave kick-ass girl to hide behind. I have to do this on my own.”

“You’re taking your flute?” Patricia asked when he grabbed his case.

Cado stroked the cracked black leather. “Turns out I don’t need your magic purse after all. I got my own right here.”

“A flute case?” she said in a voice too shrill for two a.m. “You think you’re one of the Hardy Boys or Harry Potter? That if you’re clever and plucky, you can play a tune and save the day with the power of music?”

“I know what I’m doing,” he reassured her. “And it doesn’t involve pretending to be the Pied Piper.”

“What does it involve?” she asked, not in the least reassured.

“What’s going on?”

Mr. Markham’s robed appearance in the doorway barely registered, Cado and Patricia too busy staring into each other’s eyes as if for the last time.

“Nothing,” said Cado, finally looking away. “I was just leaving.”

“Where do you think you’re going at this hour?”

“To learn about fear,” he said, his mind already on the adventure ahead. “About real fear.”

But instead of walking out the door, he looked back at Patricia and immediately wished he hadn’t. She seemed bruised somehow, as if he had struck her. That’s how she would look at his funeral. Of course she wouldn’t stand over his grave and laugh at him. Cado was amazed he had ever thought such a thing.

“I wish I had kept those flowers,” she said. “Looks like they were a good symbol after all.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “At least kiss me good-bye?”

Cado kissed her between the eyes and once on each cheek.

Patricia made a tsk of impatience. “That’s not good enough!”

“That’s because it wasn’t a good-bye kiss. Just, you know, a ‘see you later’ kiss. I’ll kiss you for real when I get back.”

“What is going on around here?” Mr. Markham asked as Cado escaped downstairs.

Patricia answered but her tears distorted the words. Her father’s response, however, was as clear as arsenic:

“You should have kissed him good-bye.”

St. Teresa Avenue was within walking distance of the Markhams’ home, so it didn’t take long to reach. Cado had the town all to himself, the shops now closed and the street empty. His steps echoed like a giant’s. The purple-tinged fairy glow beneath the lampposts only illustrated the absence of light.

Cado went up the steps that beveled the sidewalk and stumbled over an indistinct lump. No. Not a lump. A person.

A bum?

A stroke victim?

“Hey, you okay?” Cado grabbed what felt like an arm and pulled the person beneath the lamppost a few feet away. The weak light illuminated a woman in black sweats with long, pale hair and no face. It had been peeled neatly off from hairline to chin like the skin from an apple.

Cado scrambled away and fetched up against the blue bench at the trolley stop. After winning the struggle to free his phone from his pocket, he sat and dialed the sheriff’s office with fingers that had gone numb and spoke with a voice he hadn’t used since he was thirteen.

“A woman without a face?” the deputy was saying, uninterested. “Another one? We’ll get someone out there as soon as we can, miss.”

Miss? Cado looked down at himself, then quickly away. If he looked too long, he might grow breasts. Or if he looked directly at the dead woman, his own face might peel off for no reason. The world felt dangerously malleable.

He called Patricia.

“Cado? Is it over already?” The hope in her voice was painful to hear. “Cado?”

“Am I awake?”

A long pause. “You were when you left,” she said, all hope gone. “You sound weird. I’d tell you to come back, but it’s in God’s hands now. God’s or whoever’s. Why aren’t you saying anything? Cado!”

“There’s a dead woman on the sidewalk,” he whispered. “Her face—”

The line went dead.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the dead woman prop herself against the lamppost, giggling facelessly.

The phone cracked in his fist; otherwise Cado didn’t react. If he ignored the dead woman, surely she would remember she was supposed to be dead and shut up.

A thick tearing split the air. Like whatever had stolen the dead woman’s face had decided to rip it in half. Only nothing so small as a face—this was vast. Mountainous. The sound of the world clawing itself open so violently, the force of it snuffed out the scant halos of light beneath the lampposts.

The cathedral bells chimed but distantly, as if they were miles away instead of down the street. On the third chime, the trolley appeared.

Cado squinted against the sudden light it brought. The single burning headlight and the interior lights all cast a feverish glow. Even the trolley itself was the yellow of something spit up from a diseased lung.

The doors accordioned open when Cado stood. For several moments his legs refused to move forward, but once he took the first step, it became easier.

Cado noticed an animal stink as soon as he boarded, like the inside of an iguana cage. The odor emanated from the motorman crammed into the driver’s seat, too tall for the space if the awkward jut of his knees was any indication. The motorman had no eyelashes, and his lids made a gummy smack when he blinked.

“One dollar.” It was the same sexless voice Cado had heard earlier, but it didn’t belong to the motorman. It came from a speaker on the control panel. A recording.

Cado put two Sacagawea coins into the cash box. “I told you,” he said, proud that he no longer sounded like a girl. “Round trip.”

He turned to take a seat, and a sharp pain stabbed through the base of his skull just before the doors banged shut.

Cado grabbed the back of his head and whipped around in time to see a stinger retreat into the motorman’s palm as he grabbed the lever and set the trolley in motion.

“What did you do to me?”

The motorman punched a button on the control panel, and the voice hissed once again from the speaker. “Sit.”

Cado realized, just as he had with the cackler, that he was in the presence of something inhuman. Not just smelly and misshapen, but inhuman. Something he might have been tempted on any other day to stomp beneath his shoe, but today he did as he was told. He went to the back of the trolley and sat on the hard wooden seat. The sting hadn’t hurt him; it simply made everything floaty and pleasant.

Above the windows but below the arched roof were old-timey ads for stuff like Dictaphones and athletic trusses and nerve food, whatever that was. The ad didn’t show what nerve food looked like, only a woman holding her head in agony, and a bunch of words he wasn’t close enough to read. He wondered if nerve food was good for what ailed him.

Cado touched the sore spot on the back of his head, and his finger came away bloody. The motorman had stabbed him in the brain or maybe the spinal cord. Both? Either way, Cado should have been dead. Or paralyzed. Or at least worried. But the only thing he felt was the trolley propelling him through town. And then out of town.

Cado no longer recognized the landscape. East Texas was thick with piney forest, but the passing trees were massive, big enough to tunnel through, which the trolley frequently did. After a few moments, it began a steep ascent, and the giant trees fell away as a city rose before him.

It was what Cado imagined New York City must be like, only with buildings so tall they were wreathed in clouds. The tracks twined about the mile-high, artfully sculpted towers like ribbon unspooling from a beautifully wrapped gift.

At the height of the track, the trolley paused and Cado’s window aligned with the top window of one of the skyscrapers. A woman sat inside at a vanity applying mascara to the third eye in her forehead. That third eye winked at Cado just before the trolley plunged into freefall. Into darkness.

The track leveled off seconds later, and after Cado’s stomach had settled back into place, he realized the trolley lights had shorted out, maybe damaged by the rapid descent. Outside, however, glowing pink corkscrews of light spiraled down in the dark like fancy New Year’s Eve confetti.

After a few moments, it began to get lighter inside the trolley, not the same feverlight as before, but bluish and intense. Cado could see again, the motorman hunched at the front, the hand straps hanging like nooses, the ads. The nerve-food woman was still holding her head, but now she was laughing. Even though her body was peppered with almost comically large bite marks.

Cado tittered nervously and turned away, but the strange light had destroyed the exterior view. He could only see his own reflection, half asleep like a boy daydreaming in class. Or nightmaring. Waiting for a rap on the knuckles to snap him out of it. But there was only the motorman who had stabbed his brain and robbed him of his fear, which was fortunate because Cado realized he could see inside his own head.

The blue light shone through him like radiation, his brain barely visible, obscured by a thick whitish soup. Like whatever the motorman had shot into his head had turned it into a giant zit. Without thinking, Cado put his hands over his ears and squeezed. Patricia would have done it if he had allowed her to come. He could no longer remember why he’d been so against it.

Fluid gushed out of the hole at the base of his skull and splatted against the back window. He could see his brain now, clean and clear. Everything was clear. And so bright. Not just in the trolley. He could see past his own reflection to a moon as big as the Himalayas crowding the horizon so closely, Cado could see its pockmarked texture. The light it cast fell on him like a weight and killed even the possibility of shadows.

The gleaming stretch of track skated over swirls of rock, valleys of ice, but his view of the terrain was eclipsed by a horde of creatures that mobbed the trolley, scuttling alongside like fans chasing a pop star’s limo. But these fans, like the motorman, weren’t human.

The creatures were small. Half Cado’s size. Children, really, from the waist up, but from the waist down they had too many legs. Too many to count. So many they were able to easily keep up with the trolley, which had begun to slow down.

They peered at Cado, their gummy eyelids smack-smack-smacking at him. Interested in him. Waiting for him.

After the trolley came to a complete stop, the motorman unfolded from his seat and faced Cado. The sick moonlight shone through him, revealing an unfamiliar grouping of organs, a swish of pale blood, and the motorman’s legs—his real ones—unfurling wetly up the walls to make room.

Cado, without realizing it, had begun whistling “Tango Etude No. 5” to give himself something nice to listen to instead of the motorman’s scabrous approach. He wished the poison in his head was back. There had been no room for fear then—now fear was the only thing he had. That and his flute case.

He reached for it, careful not to look down and see his own quivering guts, his frozen blood. He still couldn’t feel his fingers, but he saw them snatching open the latches, saw through them without meaning to, his own blood not frozen but red and frantic when he grabbed the hunting knife from the case, the one he’d killed the cackler with. It was a foot long at least, bone handled, and sharp enough to decapitate a wild hog.

Cado’s arm whipped at the motorman, at those endless legs, at the chest, at the face with its gummy eyes shocked to see prey fighting back. Cado let his seemingly demonic arm do all the work as the rest of him screamed while blood splashed over the trolley walls like water.

When the spider children began to scream with him, an almost beautiful sound, like wolves howling, Cado’s arm stopped swinging. Because the motorman was dead, just an untidy leggy heap.

Cado clambered over the motorman and settled into the driver’s seat. He put the trolley into reverse and hid from the light as best he could.

The trolley pulled up in front of the St. Teresa stop and Cado exited, his eyes so traumatized by light that several seconds passed before they adjusted enough to see Patricia sitting on the blue bench. Her sunset gown covered with a black silk robe. Her feet bare.

Her toe polish chipped.

“You came back,” she said wonderingly, staring at him like she’d never seen him before.

Cado grabbed her and lifted her off her feet. “Why are you running the streets barefoot like a country girl?”

“Never mind my feet!” She squeezed him even harder than he was squeezing her. “You sounded so weird on the phone. I just knew—”

Whatever she knew was drowned out by the cathedral bells striking four.

He’d only been gone an hour? It had felt like a million years. Yet there was the dead woman, as faceless as ever but no longer animated. The lampposts were on again. Maybe they’d never gone out—he had gone out.

Cado buried his face in her neck. “You smell good.”

“Like Paris, still?” said Patricia, amused that he thought such things when he’d never been out of Texas. “Or maybe like Amsterdam?”

“Like life.”

“You know now, don’t you?” she said. “What I meant about reality?”

He nodded, then tried to speak, but it took a while. Patricia understood. She lived in a town where everyone understood such things. But only he had survived it.

He sat with her on the bench and told her what had happened.

“How strange,” Patricia said when he was done, staring at the trolley and the spidery surprise inside. “But it’ll make a nice addition to the museum exhibit, I’m sure. Can I see the knife you killed it with?”

“You can have it,” said Cado, handing her the case. “That can be our symbol, since you hate flowers.”

“Your flute can be our symbol?” said Patricia, confused.

“My flute’s in the trunk of my car still,” Cado explained, snapping the latches open. “I lost the sheath to my hunting knife, so I’ve been carrying it around in this old case ever since.”

Patricia turned the knife, cloudy with alien blood, this way and that. “What’s the symbol?”

“That our love can destroy anything.” As soon as Cado said it, he regretted it, struck by a powerful image of Patricia and him rampaging like Godzilla, trampling whole cities into rubble.

“Cado”—Patricia clutched the knife to her chest—“that’s so sweet!”

He took her in his arms, carefully, and then kissed her. “And just for the record,” he said, “that wasn’t a good-bye kiss, either.”

Some time later, after Cado had insisted on dressing her feet in his Chucks, they began the walk back to Patricia’s house.

“Are you brave enough to make a decision now?” she asked him.

“Rice,” he said immediately. “If they’ll have me.”

Her squeal of joy echoed over the whole town.

“I feel stupid to have been so worried,” he said, the bricks of the sidewalk cool beneath his socks. “Life’s too short not to do what you want.”

“Sorry I didn’t believe in you,” Patricia said as they stepped over the dead woman in unison. “I do now. You look like one of us—brave and confident. A touch insane.”

His stomach growled.

“And hungry.”

“I can’t be hungry,” said Cado, almost offended by his stomach’s insistent rumbling. “I was nearly killed, like, ten minutes ago.”

“Life doesn’t stop just because a spider creature nearly lays eggs in you, Cado. Of course you’re hungry. There’s lobster salad left over from lunch.” She smiled. “Or we could have tea sandwiches and caviar.”

Cado sighed. “Do I have to wear a tie?”

“I’ll make an exception,” Patricia said generously, “just this once.” Arm in arm, they disappeared blithely into the dark.