The Night Country

11

She wouldn’t let me touch her. Her hand or her cheek or the ends of her black hair. My mother pressed herself small against the counter so I couldn’t reach her. Finally I left the kitchen, stumbling down the hall to my room.

I was parched and starving. I had to pee, and pain sawed at me all over. But after twenty-four hours without it, sleep took me down.

I woke up shaking.

I was hot, then cold, then both at once. The midday light through the blinds was heavy, pouring over me in scalding stripes. I was too weak to roll away.

“Mom,” I said. But the apartment was empty. I could feel it.

Infection. My attacker’s nails that had sliced over me, there must’ve been something on them. It took three tries to pull up my shirt. My ribs looked like shit, the Band-Aids puffed with blood, but the skin around them seemed okay.

My shoulder itched. I scratched through my T-shirt, then under the fabric, finally dragging it over my head. A Hinterland flower was tattooed up my arm, and it itched. The tattoo was years old, it didn’t make sense. The itching deepened to a burn.

I lay down for just a minute, closed my eyes. When I opened them, the light had changed. Time had come unstuck, hours passing without my seeing them go.

Something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just my injuries, I was sick. I thought of ice water gliding down my throat, soaked into a compress laid across my head. I pictured my phone where I’d left it, with my keys by the door. Tears slid over my temples.

It got worse every hour. By early evening I was twisting under the sheets, watching leaf shadows play on the walls. I had to close my eyes and turn away when they became little faces, winking at me.

When my mother finally walked in, I thought she was a hallucination, too. Her face was stricken, her hand on my forehead cool.

“What is this?” she said. “You’re burning up. You.”

I’d never been sick. Never, not once. I’d sprained an ankle, gotten a concussion, been hungover, had headaches, broken a rib once, vomited from bad shrimp tacos, and gouged the absolute shit out of my chin on a coffee table, but I’d never even had a cold. Ella crouched beside me.

“Do we need to go to the emergency room?”

She sounded so young. She had no script for this. Everything she’d dealt with, raising me alone, almost losing me, she’d never had to figure out a sick kid. “No, I’m—” I pushed up a few inches, tasting something in the back of my throat. Something bilious and thin. “I need water. And something to throw up in.”

She brought what I’d asked for, plus a sleeve of crackers and a skimpy sampling from our medicine cabinet. Her steady hands propped me up with pillows, fed me water and crackers and aspirin, and touched a hydrogen peroxide–soaked cotton ball to my chin. I thought of Daphne patching up my ribs, then giving them a slap. The image broke as Ella climbed into bed with me and took my hand.

“Christ. Your head’s on fire, but your hands are freezing.”

I had a sudden terror that my eyes would go black. But I was too tired to do anything about it, too weak even to walk to the bathroom; when I thought I might actually wet the bed, my mom had to help me down the hall.

Back in bed, the cold warring in me finally won out over the heat. Ella wrapped me in a robe and buried me in blankets dug out of summer storage. Her voice was drawn up tight.

“If you’re not better soon we’re going to the hospital.”

It can’t get worse than this, I kept thinking. This is as bad as it’ll get. But I was always wrong.

I drifted off eventually, me under the covers and Ella on top, holding the lump that was my hand below. The long white road between waking and sleep stretched like taffy. My bed and my mother and the walls of my room melted into trees and castle walls and a courtyard spinning with snow.

It was the Hinterland, trying to break through. I wavered there, on the precipice of dreaming, and I fought it. But I was weak, and I staggered, and I fell.

When I stood up, I stood on a curve of sand, lapped at by dark water. Behind me huddled a line of shivering trees. The sky was so low I could touch it, like there was no air here that wasn’t sky.

I was in the Hinterland. Not a dream of it, but the thing itself. It was altered: the land felt wilder. Unlatched. There was a looseness to it and a saturation too, the trees too close to the sea too close to the sky, like someone had grabbed up a fistful of the Spinner’s dark country and squeezed. The trees were bedded in a roiling black mist and stars crowded overhead, so beautiful and bright I forgot to be afraid. I was alone, watching the stars watching me.

Then one of them trembled.

It stepped out of its constellation. In the big, soft, humming silence, the star pitched itself into the sea. It was a fizzing ball of sodium white that became a girl as it drew nearer, with streaming hair and the noble, blunt-cut face of a figurehead. It slipped silently into the water, shining briefly below the surface before its light went out.

Others followed. One by one, then whole constellations, drawing courage from one another’s plunge. The air thickened with plummeting stars like sparks thrown off a downed power line, till my sight sang purple and white.

After the last star fell, the moon hung like a lonely searchlight. I wondered if she knew that her granddaughter, Hansa, was dead. I wondered if she mourned her. I watched as she lowered herself through the dark.

She was an old woman in her perch in the sky, a maiden crossing the horizon line, and a child when she touched the surface of the sea. She glowed beneath the water for a long time, lighting it the dreamy mermaid green of a motel pool.

I stood on the beach and watched her wane, feeling the shift of sand under my feet and smelling the sulfur of the fallen stars.

When the moon went out, there was nothing left but sand and water and empty sky. The trees whipped up wilder and the sea slid higher, moonless and misguided, till its cold fingers locked around my ankles, my knees, my hips. I heard a sound like splintering and a faraway singing, so high it made my scalp prickle, so low it made my knees bow, then the endless rushing of water falling over the edge of the world.

I could hear someone crying, someone moaning, someone writhing in their sleep. I knew it was me, that Earthbound version of me, but I couldn’t reach her. The water was to my chest now, to my throat, and I was lifted.

Something was being taken from me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was precious. I was back on the precipice: here, in a Hinterland running together like finger paints, and there, in Brooklyn, the press of my mother’s arms holding me together.

For a moment both worlds held me in their grip, one of them dying but both of them strong, and I was wrung like a rag between them. At every joint and join I came apart and I thought that was the end of me, but I reconnected with an electric pop, and when I screamed, I screamed in both worlds. And though I couldn’t hear it, I knew every Hinterlander on Earth screamed with me.

Then that world let go, dropping me back on my bed, in the city, with my mother’s face over mine, terrified and smeared with tears.

“Alice, hold on. Alice, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”

She said it like she was speaking every promise over a rosary bead, till she understood that I was looking back, that I was awake again, returned from wherever I’d been taken. My eyes burned with falling stars and my skin puckered with the chill of a dying land beneath an emptied sky.

“It’s dead.” I gripped her hands so tightly she winced. “The Hinterland is dead.”