The Night Country

38

My own chest exploded with pain. My head fell back, and my vision went white. Into the whiteness came something glittering. Ice: the distant ceiling of an ice cave. Then it changed, to the moving roof of a grove of trees. I blinked and it changed again: I saw the face of a crying child, in a misty wood. My tongue tasted like honey, like salt. I saw the four of us from far overhead: Finch crouching over me, and the Spinner over little Alice, hoodie peeled back, the front of her black with blood. When Finch screamed my name, I didn’t know which one of us he was calling for.

Then I was back in my body, in my head, looking up at him.

“Jesus, are you okay?”

I tried to nod, but he was holding my face too tightly.

“She was a kid. She was a kid.” His eyes were shiny with shock. “How could she kill a kid?”

I tried to push up onto my elbows. My mouth tasted like blood and my chest felt like a crushed can but I talked as fast as I could. “She’ll kill everyone. The Night Country is a vampire. Whatever you’ve been told, it kills the world it’s made in. Do you understand me? If she takes Alice’s heart, if she makes the Night Country, this world will fall apart. Like the Hinterland did.”

“No,” he said, his voice stunned and new. Like he’d just remembered something. “It won’t be like that. It’ll go gray. The sky, the earth, all of it. It’ll be like Pompeii, like something out of a nightmare. This is your revenge, then?” He looked to where the Spinner must be. “A world for a world?”

I heard her voice from behind me. “Poetic, isn’t it?”

Finch helped me sit up. I couldn’t look at the boneless crumple of my younger self. The black-eyed shell of me, what I would’ve been if Ella hadn’t stolen me away, hadn’t loved me. Instead I looked at the Spinner, holding a freshly harvested heart in upraised palms, looking like a sorceress, like Circe, so packed full of malevolent magic the air around her seemed to ripple.

I leaned over and snatched up the closest piece: Hansa’s foot, scraps of purple polish still clinging to its toes. I pulled my arm back, but before I could chuck it—to stall her, at least—the Spinner was running at me with the knife.

She ran it down the sunburnt line of my arm. The blade was a brute, dulled on the chamber of little Alice’s chest. The Spinner dropped the heart in place with her other hand, then braceleted it around my arm and slid it over the slice, squeezing. I screamed at the rusty pain of it. Finch lunged at her, but she’d already let me go.

“And blood to bless it,” she said, half shrieking it, and shook out her hands.

Drops of blood, my blood, flung themselves over the pieces. The foot I’d let fall when she cut me, the sci-fi meat of the heart. Sophia’s golden eyes. Finch was talking in my ear, he was tending to my bleeding arm, but all I could hear was silence.

The silence of a turned corner. The wait between the drop and the crash. Maybe it won’t work, I thought desperately. Maybe she forgot one thing, did one thing wrong.

Then the singing began. Pure tone, high and sweet and cold as a spring. It came from Vega’s tongue.

I would never be able to explain it, how the air shuddered against the song. How it unpeeled itself, allowing something to crawl free of nothing. The tongue sang itself two rows of bright teeth. It sang itself a skull and the stacked ivory checkers of a spinal cord, the cage and cradle of ribs and pelvis. The long bones of the limbs swarmed toward severed hands and feet, one leg blooming odd and overextended to reach Hansa’s foot where I’d dropped it. The busy bloody tumult of muscle and organ and tendon, so ripe I couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe, then the relief of skin sliding over it like a paper window shade.

The singing stopped, but the notes still scraped against the air, arcs of hot sharp sound. I didn’t think my ears would ever be empty of it. I was pressed against Finch, both of us so sweaty I couldn’t tell what was him and what was me. When the body stood up we gasped in a breath together.

It was a girl. Bald-headed, its skin a calico patchwork, its eyes my dead friend’s. Its heart drummed so loud we could hear it through its new-sprung skin.

It stood like a child. Back swayed, belly out, Sophia’s eyes in its head a new kind of blank, washed clean of history. Finch was saying things under his breath as we stared, a stream of whispered disbelief, but I couldn’t speak at all. This wasn’t magic like I’d seen—the snarled labyrinth of the Hazel Wood, the unlatched cages of the Hinterland. It was older. Cruder. This magic was a blunt and wily animal, fed on horrors.

The creature began to move. First in a dizzy circle, like it was getting its bearings, bobbing on its one odd leg. Getting used to being alive, if that’s what it was. Then—it began to dance.

None of us could look away: me, Finch, the Spinner. There were things so strange even she had to pay them witness. The creature’s limbs swung on joints loose as baby teeth. Spectral red shoes swirled around its feet, kicking off sparks. It picked up speed, it began to whirl. Every other second it broke from its spin, making darts at the air like a hopped-up cat.

And then I got it: the creature was looking for a weakness. The air here was thinning. Lightening. Lessening: it was looking for the place where it might break through.

We felt the moment when it found it, when those searching fingers made a tear in the world’s skin. The room’s atmosphere swelled and popped with a tinny huff. The Spinner laughed, high and wild.

A black keyhole hung on the air. Floating, detached, I’d say impossible if that word hadn’t been used up. The blackness spread, till it formed an archway high as a church door. The creature turned away from it, opening its mouth wide, like the boy in the fable getting ready to swallow the sea.

It took in a breath. I felt that breath beneath my ribs. All the colors I could see went flabby, watered like a cheap drink. Then it turned and exhaled all the life it had taken into that flat black doorway.

The dark woke up. A wind blew out. It smelled crackling and undone, and filled my hair with static. The patchwork girl moved more clumsily now, her purpose complete. She’d made the dark hungry; now it would feast on its own. She spun as she unraveled, gums receding, molars dropping like dice, jawbone falling after them. Ribs and intestines and tissue nibbled away by the air, till all that was left were the parts she’d been made of, falling to the floor in a harmless patter.

It was done. In the end, I hadn’t stopped it. In the end, I’d barely known how to try. I could feel Finch beside me, his hand clamping a ripped-off strip of his T-shirt around the slice in my arm. I felt Ella distant from me, somewhere else in this city. I imagined her head lifting from her pillow, or from a book, if the eerie turning of the world had left her sleepless.

And I remembered another piece of the story she’d told me.

The Spinner had made the Night Country that became the Hinterland. But it hadn’t become hers till she stepped inside it, imprinting herself on its land. I held that idea in my mind like a key. Like a blade. My mother had always worked so hard to arm me against the dark.

The Spinner moved toward the doorway, her face as soft as I’d ever seen it.

“Hello,” she crooned to it. “Hello, again.”

Her voice had changed. I think it was her true one. I think she might’ve forgotten about us entirely if we’d let her—she had her parasite, her cannibal, she’d fatten it up on New York and everything that lay beyond it, and we’d go out with a whimper. She’d gathered us here to watch her gloat, then to die with this world. That was her revenge.

Finch touched my uninjured arm.

“Don’t,” he said. Like there was anything left to wait for.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “We cannot let her go in there first.”

The Spinner heard me and smiled. “Go ahead, then. Go on.” My confusion made her smile thicken. “You’re a Story, sweetheart. Potential, given form. Through that door is pure potential. You go in there first, it’ll dissolve you like a sugar cube.”

Before she was done speaking, Finch was on his feet. He was running toward the door. He trusted me that much, after everything.

She met him there, knife in hand. I saw him hold back for a crucial second, then duck away as she swiped. I followed, trying to put myself between them, pulling out my pocketknife.

Potential, given form. Fuck that. I held the knife like a killer in a slasher flick and, screaming, brought it down into her shoulder. It went in half an inch and stuck. She bared her teeth but made no sound. Finch had both hands around her wrist, holding back her hunting knife, as she drove a knee into his gut.

We grappled there on the edge of the infant world. But the dark had a mind of its own. It knew who it really wanted, among us three.

It reached for him. I know it did. With bare black arms the Night Country drew Finch into itself, and the Spinner screamed. I saw his feet touch down on the formless ground. I saw it when the place seized hold of him, the way he breathed in like a wave had just slapped him, his eyes going round as shooter marbles. Then the Night Country folded over his head.

The Spinner screamed again. She threw the hunting knife in after him, the knife in her shoulder, ripped out two fistfuls of her hair and threw that, too. She stamped her foot like Rumpelstiltskin. Then, breathing hard, she dove in after him.

Looking into the dark was like looking into black water. As unknowable. As frightening. I braced myself against the iron-laced air, and jumped.