The Night Country

26

Finch wrote a love letter. At least he thought he did.

Back in the towered castle in the fossil world, in a spare gray bedroom on the second floor, he circled a few times before sitting down, gingerly, on the edge of the bed. He pulled out the silver pen, and for a long time he just thought.

About New York. About the first time he saw Alice, the spark that grew into curiosity, then fascination. That tumbled into and out of nightmare. Her skeptical eyes and cropped hair and husky, hard-won laugh that sounded twenty years older than her voice. He touched the pen to the blank inside cover of I Capture the Castle, the book that was nearest at hand when he’d packed, and the only one he’d taken from the Hinterland. Ink bled steadily into the page from its point, wicking away.

I am lost, he wrote.

I am lost and stupid and doing this all wrong. He watched the words disappear.

Then he was off, writing in a fever, the words vanishing into the page, barely remembering what he’d said from one line to the next. His head was full of giddy images of Alice. Her face tilted over the letter, the elfin bend of her ear peeking through yellow hair. Her fierce gaze eating up his words.

When he finished his eyes were so wide he could feel them drying out. Every time he closed them, a firework burst in his chest: of anticipation and anxiety and a kind of sweet panic. He recognized the feeling from the time he dropped a carefully copied-out Neruda poem into his ninth-grade crush’s locker.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, laughing at himself, then rolled over and shoved his face into the pillow. It smelled like dead people’s dandruff. He said her name into it, and felt shy.

Earlier that day—though Finch wasn’t sure how to account for days stretched across multiple worlds—Iolanthe had walked him to the six corners, then left him there as she darted back down the street. She returned carrying two bottles of a carbonated lemony drink, not sweet, and a stuffed, greasy-bottomed bag that smelled like heaven. They sat on a curb and ate right there.

“You don’t want to eat in the gray world,” she said, around a mouthful of something midway between a bao and a knish. “Death gets into everything, makes it taste like black licorice. It’s the same way in the Hinterland, in the land of the Dead.”

Finch was going hah, hah to cool his mouth after biting into a boiling-hot pastry; now he stopped short. “Wait. You went to the land of the Dead?”

“Of course. I went everywhere.”

“That’s…” Amazing, he could’ve said. Incredibly foolish. Terrifying, to be frank. “Extremely metal,” he finished finally. “How’d you get in?”

“I followed the Woodwife.” She looked at her hands, neatly sectioning her knish to let the steam out. “How about you? How did you get in?”

Finch stilled. He hadn’t told anyone he’d gone into the Hinterland’s underworld. He thought he never would. Those were dark days, best looked at sideways: his nihilistic expat period, when life was one long string of double-dog dares that could’ve killed him.

“I followed Ilsa’s golden thread,” he said quietly. “In, and out again.”

“I knew it. I could tell right away—that you’re like me, that you’ve come too close to it.” She smiled faintly and touched her neck where his was striped with a scar. “I think you’ve come too close to Death more than once.”

She had no scars he could see, but right then Finch had the oddest vision: of Iolanthe as a creature many times mended. He could almost see the cracks in her carapace, and the light that came through.

“I think you have, too,” he said, then looked away, unsettled.

They didn’t speak again till they were done eating. Iolanthe stood, pulling out the book that had brought them there.

“Brace yourself,” she said. “The doors can be rough on a full stomach.”

Back in the dead world, Iolanthe assigned them each a room on the castle’s second floor. He figured they’d be massive and opulent, like the library, but his had the constrictive, smoke-stained feeling of a chamber built in an age when everyone had ten kids and died before they were thirty. He’d had the sense, closing the door, of sealing himself away in a tomb.

He wrote his letter to Alice. Lay down, got up, lay down again. When he peered out the window, a glassless circle the size of his two hands cupped, he saw the kingdom laid out like fallen dominoes. Again came the tricksy flicker of distant movement. Finally he climbed under the bed’s moldering blanket, certain he’d never sleep.

The light hadn’t changed when he woke chilled with sweat, his body turned like the arm of a clock and his covers kicked to the floor.

In sleep he’d flown over the Hinterland, the land wrinkled beneath him like the surface of a globe. He’d watched as mermaids beached themselves, singing torch songs, and the last of the castles came down. It could’ve been just a dream. But maybe he’d seen a true vision of the world’s last gasp. Still caught in the drifting headspace between sleep and dreaming, he wrote Alice another letter. It felt like he was talking to himself; it felt like she was right beside him. He wasn’t sure which instinct to believe.

The dream and the letter left him with a heartburn hurt and the need to move. He laced up his shoes, slipping out of his room and past Iolanthe’s. He figured he’d poke around the library. But halfway down the stairs he heard a woman’s voice.

Iolanthe’s, coming from below. His stomach seized, but when he found her, she was alone. Sitting at a long table singing a wordless song, breaking between verses to drink from her red glass bottle.

Finch stood in the shadow of the stairs. Against all odds, he knew the song. Ingrid sang it sometimes, on late nights with Janet in her lap and a glass or two of cider gone to her head. Ingrid had put words to it: of hope and longing, and the distant shores of home. Iolanthe’s voice turned it into something else. Something raw-edged and utterly alone. He could taste the salt on it, imagine her singing it as she sliced through the Hinterland Sea. A flyspeck on its waters, the stars peering down. When he couldn’t take any more, he crept back up the stairs.

Her room was next to his, a similarly medieval bolt-hole of rough walls, picturesquely lumpy bed, and washstand and basin. Her bed was undisturbed, her bag propped carefully against its foot. Before he could lose his nerve, Finch crouched down and opened it.

Inside, impressively rolled, was an all-black rainbow of clothes. An offbrand Walkman and a handful of unmarked tapes. Toiletries, an array of currencies in a leather pouch, four packs of Silver Siren brand cigarettes. Canteen, hairbrush, needle and thread. And below all that, wrapped in a pair of long johns, the things he figured he was looking for. The things she thought worth hiding: a book, a photo, and a little metal rabbit.

The rabbit looked like a game piece. It was heavy, its fur filigreed and its eyes inset with minuscule pink stones. He put it gently aside and inspected the photo. It was different from photos on Earth. More intense. It looked less like paper than a dark and bright window onto a breezy day when a younger Iolanthe had grinned, squinting, into the camera, snugged up against a slender, dark-haired man who looked like Rimbaud. His face held the kind of temporal beauty generally reserved for those who die young.

He stared at the photo awhile before placing it carefully back into her bag. Then he turned to the book. It was a children’s picture book. The Night Country, it was called, with illustrations the saturated colors of candied fruit.

This is not a fairy tale, it began. This is a true story.

Finch paged through the book. It was a tale sparely told, of a mischievous little girl, the daughter of a court magician. When her kingdom is descended upon by a plague of golden locusts, the little girl and her best friend, the king’s youngest son, steal her father’s books to try to discover a way to save it. First, they accidentally enchant every mirror in the castle to say true and embarrassing things to anyone who looks into them. Then they summon a lazy demoness who tries to lead them astray. Finally, they find a spell that could save them: a spell that conjures a door into another world. That world is called the Night Country, and in its fertile air the children rebuild their kingdom as they please, simply by dreaming it up.

They create a world without vegetables or tutors or bedtime. Full of rainbow-flanked ponies and candy fountains and an underclass of hardworking gnomes who build them stained-glass cakes and clockwork wonders, like a beautiful pantomime princess to read to them and an old wizard who sends them flying around the room. In the end, they don’t let anyone else into their Night Country. They shut the door, leaving their parents and siblings and everyone else to the plague of the golden locusts.

Finch closed the book, feeling uneasy.

Then he reopened it. Just to see the illustrations one more time. There wasn’t much to the story, but it gave him a feeling he couldn’t place. He’d just reached the bit where the king finds the first golden locust inside his royal egg cup when the door swung open.

Iolanthe hung in the doorway, her posture dangerous. He crouched in place, her open bag beside him. For a long time they just looked at each other.

“Did you read it?” she asked brusquely.

Finch nodded.

“Good.” She stayed, lightly swaying, in the doorway. “It’s a true story, you know.”

Finch wasn’t sure whether he should stand or remain seated. He settled for rising up on one knee. The pieces of what he knew about Iolanthe were stirring together like alphabet soup: The missing book in the library that she came out of. The picture book in his hands, and the pocket watch in hers. Her sail across the Hinterland’s storied sea, and her journey through its underworld. The photo of the beautiful young man tucked away like a secret.

“Who are you?” he asked her. Not for the first time. He should’ve demanded a better answer before walking through a door traced in her blood.

“I’m like you,” she said. “One of the lost. A wanderer, worldless.”

“How do you know I’m worldless?”

“Same way I knew you’d seen a door into Death, and walked through it.” She knelt beside him and put a fingertip to the line over his throat, pressing closer to keep it there when he recoiled. “Same way I knew this would work, you and me.”

He spoke around the permanent gravel in his throat. “What do you mean, work?”

“You’re a searcher. We both are. Trying to get back something we lost—a home that no longer exists.”

She said it like she was a seer. But Finch was used to people telling him stories about who and what he was. It had been happening all his life.

“Actually I’m thinking about getting back to a girl,” he said. “So I guess you don’t know me too well.”

That broke the spell. Iolanthe fell back, her laughter short and surprised. “So let me get to know you.” She held his gaze, still so near he could smell the liquor on her breath. For an awkward moment he worried she was hitting on him. Then she grabbed the book.

“True story,” she said again, pointing to its cover.

“What part of it is true?”

“Maybe all of it. But the part that matters, the Night Country, that is true. I meant for you to read it. It’s what we’re waiting for. It’s what we’re seeking.”

“We? We’re not seeking anything. I don’t even understand what that means.”

“A world made to order, full of everything you’d like. That’s what a night country is. Doesn’t that sound pretty? Doesn’t that sound nice?”

It did, for a minute. Finch’s mind sparked like a flint against all the things he wanted. Then the sparks went out.

“It sounds like a nightmare,” he said. Because it did, when you thought about it. A world where you glutted yourself on your own desires till you were as awful as the little girl in the picture book. There were enough worlds that could make you into monsters out there. Why make another one?

“It’s the very last secret,” Iolanthe whispered. She poked him again, this time in the chest. “How many can say they’ve walked through a world made from pieces of their own heart? I saw your face when I talked about sailing the Hinterland Sea. You wanted to do that, too. And now you never will, oh, well. You want to read every book in the library, visit every world. How can you say no to the Night Country? You can’t,” she answered herself. “It’ll be one more thing to haunt you.”

“Don’t touch me,” he said, rubbing his sternum. “Back up, I can’t think.”

She sat on her ass, feet on the floor and eyes amused. “Sorry. I’m drunk. But I’m also certain. I’m inviting you to be my companion. Not that kind of companion, we’ll get you back to this girl. But first: let’s have an adventure.”

“Why would I go with you? I know nothing about you. What’s with the pocket watch? Why didn’t Grandma June let you look through the spyglass? Where do you even come from?”

“You need to hear my sad story to trust me?” She shrugged. “All right. I come from a world you’ve never heard of, so it’s no good my telling you its name. I lost someone I loved and it was at least a little bit my fault, and I ran away from that. I ran so far I couldn’t find my way back. I’ve been gone so long I don’t know what I’d be finding my way back to.” Her voice went a little mean. “How about you? Think that girl will still remember your name? Your face? Time gets slippery when you start walking through doors. She could be married by now. She could be dead.”

Her words were infecting him with a buzzing, low-grade panic. Alice married, Alice dead. Alice thirty years old, say, smiling at him politely. Letters? What letters?

“So why would I let any more time pass?” he asked. “If too much has gone already?”

“Because if you do this for me, with me—if you do this for yourself—I’ll make sure you get exactly where you need to go, and when.”

“That’s something you can do?”

She held up her pocket watch. “I’ve got a few tricks.”

“But why do you…”

“Because I’m scared.” She laughed a little. “I’m finally going to get what I want. And I’m scared now. Don’t make me do this alone.”

The last scavenger hunt Finch had gone on took him to a heavily fortified castle at the foot of the ice mountains. Its moat swam with annihilating mist, but its drawbridge was down.

He’d run across it. He’d moved through a torch-hung hall that felt like something out of a video game. Down a winding staircase into echoing dungeons, and below them into a crypt, each walled-in corpse marked by a bigger-than-life-size statue that peered at him with glimmering enamel eyes. He’d taken a rusted metal crown from the head of a surly-mouthed queen, and a misty orb from the hand of a mage.

Crouching next to this slippery, avid-eyed woman in her faded blacks, Finch felt the same way he had walking through that castle’s courtyard. It was addictive, that cocktail of trepidation and desire, walking on when you knew you should turn back. Saying yes when the right answer was so likely no.

“First promise me,” he said. “After the adventure—promise you’ll get me back to her.”