– 2 –
Sid is dead by then.
It goes like this.
There’s a cat curled up on old Mrs. McGinty’s porch. There’s an audience gathered around to listen to the words of the evil prophet.
There’re some crows, croaking raucously, on a nearby power line.
Sid walks up from the south. He doesn’t look around. He stares straight square on into the evil prophet’s face.
“Hey,” he says.
Lucy studies him for a bit.
“You,” she says. She brightens. “Where’s Max?”
There’s a long silence. Sid looks away.
“Oh,” says Lucy flatly.
She looks away.
Then she wonders, softly, “It wasn’t me, was it? I didn’t want to kill him until last. But I am not being very discriminate of late.”
“No,” says Sid.
His head bobs side to side.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t you.”
“You’re here to fight me?” says Lucy.
“Yeah,” he says.
“That’s ridiculous,” says Lucy. “Why wouldn’t you just try to get on my good side, instead, or wait for that Jeremiah Clean savior guy to come?”
Sid is blushing.
After a moment, so is she.
“How did he die?” she says.
Sid shrugs.
“OK,” she says. She looks at him. She makes a face. “Rock-paper-scissors, or summoning?”
“Summoning,” says Sid.
“I’m ever so much better at rock-paper-scissors,” says Lucy. “Or at shooting people with an umbrella-gun. Or at evil prophesy. Heck, I’m better at the Konami Thunder Dance. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather fight me in a way that’s less exploitative and embarrassing?”
He doesn’t know the Konami Thunder Dance. He could try it. He could press the button with his toe, and the world would warn him:
There’s no turning back now!
And there wouldn’t be. The crows would go silent as death. The cat would uncurl itself and stretch and lope away. The wind of the Thunder Dance would fall down upon him, in time with the Symbols that she danced, and it would tear him and all his dreams apart.
Realistically, he’s made the proper choice.
“Summoning,” Sid repeats.
“OK.”
The evil prophet of space waves away their audience. Their audience disassembles into its component atoms, blows away, and is gone. The crows dissolve. Mrs. McGinty’s cat uncurls itself, stretches, and turns to dust.
That poor kitty!
“Always kill people who gather around to listen to you,” says Lucy. “Otherwise, they could be a vector for avian kissing sickness to spread.”
“I don’t think,” says Sid, “that they were going to —”
“Always!” says Lucy.
Sid accepts the rebuke. He looks away. He draws a summoning circle on the ground.
“Max just wouldn’t have wanted you to be —” killing all these people, Sid says, but he doesn’t get the whole line out. Lucy Souvante waves all that away.
“I get it,” she says.
He nods. He turns. He stares at her. Angels are singing. Light is rising from the ground all around him. He scuffs the ground with his shoe. He invokes his summons.
He summons A MAGICAL JAGUAR.
There are magical jaguars in decaying orbit around the Earth, you know. They were thrown up there by Mayan sages. They are guardians of life and they are beautiful; and they have fallen so very many times around the Earth already; but eventually, even a falling jaguar must come down.
Sid looks at his watch.
“Eventually,” he explains.
He waits.
“They’ve got to get here eventually,” stresses Sid.
Lucy steps forward. Sid, panicking, free-summons HAND PUPPETS. A pair of sea serpent hand puppets appear on his hands and begin gathering energy for a puppet beam.
Lucy steps forward again.
The beam gathers. He blasts!
She weaves out of the way, left, right, around, her hand coming up flat under his chin with her scroll of evil prophecy pressed between them, the golden letters rubbing against his mostly hairless jaw.
“I’m sorry,” says Lucy Souvante. She doesn’t actually know how to summon anything. She just knows how to play rock-paper-scissors and how to brandish her evil prophecy at things, such as Sid’s head, to the effect that they are unraveled, unmade, and destroyed.
Sid free-summons —
His throat is bleeding. His head is bleeding and fluttering red fabric. It isn’t attached to anything else. It flies away.
Lucy Souvante finishes: “But you’re dead.”
She parses the echoes.
The last thing he’d said was: HEAD PUPPET.
He is behind her. He is slamming a summoning stick into her back. It leaves an imprint of a summoning circle on the flesh behind her kidney. He summons FOUR-ARMED APE inside her body, in direct violation of the tournament rules for competitive summoning. This would kill almost anybody, and disqualify him utterly if she hadn’t fouled him first, but it does not kill her. She is the evil prophet of space; she diffuses into a pall of evil black smoke instead, with bits of four-armed ape scattering inside.
(She’d killed it long ago.)
Sid, undaunted, summons:
WINDSTORM.
Lucy frays amidst a howling wind. The pall of her tries to dissipate and scatter. She recoalesces, panicking, and she elbows him in the throat. He gags and the wind ceases. He does not summon anything. She stands there for a moment, panting, and then she circles her foot, starts forward —
A jaguar falling out of the sky uses her mass to decelerate. It has come screaming down through the atmosphere.
It is, of course, on fire.
And for a moment she tastes the dirt.
For a moment everything is confusion and she thinks that somehow, even though this was never written in her prophecy, that he has beaten her. That somehow that kid, that freakish stupid Sid, has beaten her, because there is a rock against her eye and her face is in the dust and her back hurts, so very much it hurts, all scraped up and down by a jaguar’s claws, and her shirt and hat, they are on fire.
For a moment even he thinks he has beaten her; for a moment, he stands straighter. He thinks that all the suffering has been worthwhile; that all the training has been worthwhile; that here he has reached the apex of his hero’s journey, and cast down evil with his own two puppet-covered hands. Here at last is the reason he was born:
But she is Lucy Souvante.
ICESTORM, says Sid. It is killing him. He is bleeding from the eyes.
Her flesh dissolves into mist. It re-congeals. He throws out: FIRESTORM.
FIRESTORM.
INTIMATION.
INTIMATION.
ICESTORM.
WIND . . .
But it is pointless.
He was born to love some girl he never met; and to have two children that he never saw; and to one day inspire somebody with a scrap of remembered poetry so that they’d know that the world is kind — and not for this.
Or maybe he was born to fight a centipede or a tiger — and not for this.
To study summoning with Max, and one day become a team — and not for this.
To fly a plane. To hug a frightened child. To discover a new bit of cake-making one day — not for the first time in the history of the world, or anything, just, you know, for the first time in the history of his little circle of friends; and how his face lights up with it! — and not for this.
Or, if Lucy Souvante is to be believed, he wasn’t born for anything at all.
Lucy braces herself with her umbrella and levers herself up to her feet. She sways, and she looks at the jaguar, and then she looks at Sid, and she shakes out the fire from her hair, and she rolls her neck, and she swallows, hard, and she cracks an awful smile.
And it’s over; he understands in that moment that it is over; but he can’t help smiling back.
It is pure and bright and clean, that smile; and if you were to ask him why, he would not know, only, somehow he has understood in that moment that it is OK; that it is OK that he has lived and breathed and suffered and struggled and fought and that now, most probably, he will die; screaming, most likely, or, no, wait, not screaming, because Lucy Souvante has just ripped out his lungs.
It is OK.
He doesn’t understand how it can be OK, how it can possibly be all right, how such terrible and burdensome and awful things can be all right, only —
It is something he sees in the jaguar, I think. It’s the same thing Emily sees in them, that I won’t let myself see in them, because they’re her enemy and thus are mine.
He looks at it. It looks at him.
Its eyes are worlds to him. O See Them Move!
And she does, perhaps; does see, perhaps; or she does not; Lucy stares at the jaguar a long moment, in any case. It strops the ground. It squints back at her.
Then it turns its back on her, very deliberately, and the jaguar lopes away.
– 3 –
That was probably jaguar Chan, but I don’t know. Maybe it was jaguar Ixchel or even Yohl. Maybe it was a jaguar with some other name; there were some whose names I never learned.
– 4 –
I do know that somewhere under the world, if he hasn’t died yet, there’s a dwarf named Joffun and he’s holding a genuine miracle in his hand.
It’s a miracle of the old world, and not the new one, but maybe —
Maybe it’s still valid. Maybe it still matters.
Maybe it still counts.
If it does, then it’s all right, I guess. If it does, then I guess there’s still hope for us, under the surfaces of things; and maybe there’s even everything that ever was in that, in the palm of his hand, still in there — still contained there, like the jewel in a monster’s heart.
Joffun knew the end was coming, after all. He’d tried to stop it. He cut out the heart of a young boy named Edmund Gulley and he’d tried to use it to save people, but it didn’t, you see. It wasn’t the miracle that he wanted. At least, it sure wasn’t, back then.
He got arrested for assault and attempted murder, what with ripping a young boy’s heart out, instead.
– 5 –
You can extrapolate the entire universe, Navvy Jim once contended, from the game of rock-paper-scissors. The laws of ballistics, the Simon-says-playing-robot once mentioned, were a necessary part of a well-defined game of Simon says. The truth of the whole cosmos, I think, might be encoded, defined, and implicit inside a single wobbling sheet of film.
In a little bit of saran wrap, maybe, caught by the wind, blown in circles, and spread between the branches of a tree.
– 7 –
So one day Emily’s down there by the trees and she looks at that bit of cling wrap — like I’ve said, it’s one of the last things left — and it’s wobbling in the wind.
And it reminds her of how she used to look at space.
There’s something in it that makes her think of the way things used to be, back when there was something more to the world than the house, and the woods, and the chaos, and that bit of blue and seamless sky.
It wobbles in the wind, that bit of cling wrap, and it makes shapes for her, and it reminds her of the old and wild space; of a sky that was of more shades than blue.
Of stars and stones.
Of the jaguars, and the scissors, and the saints.
It’s like it’s all still there. It’s like it’s all still in there, and real, on the other side of that little bit of film; but she walks around it, once, twice, thrice, and it’s the same from either side.
So she takes off her hat, and she hangs it up —
I guess maybe that’s to mark her home.
And she walks out into the waste beyond the edges of the world.
“I’m gonna get them back,” she says. “All those errant children in the sky.”
– 8 –
“You could die, you know,” cautions a silver snake.
Its paper tongue flicks, and the lightning moves.
“They’ll fall on you,” it says, “and the Earth will shake, and you’ll probably be buried alive.”
It’s a good warning, I think. It’s an important truth. But Emily, she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t heed.
She doesn’t . . . actually . . . know . . . how to understand the words of snakes.
So she just picks it up, and she kisses it, instead, and she gets a paper cut on her upper lip; and she puts it down, and she pats its head.
And she goes off to summon down the sky.
– 9 –
I don’t know why I’m wasting time on that stuff. I mean, I told you. This story isn’t about Emily. This story is about Mr. Enemy.
I just . . .
It’s just, I would like to imagine
that somehow Emily will endure.
Lamb
“Goats are very dull creatures,” says Jane, in a worldly fashion. “I have entirely outgrown my one-time goat infatuation and now concern myself entirely with more sophisticated animals like lambs.”
She outfits a lamb in a three-piece and a monocle on a golden chain.
Then she runs away!
The lamb traipses through their maisonette like it’s skipping through the flowers. It knocks over a lamp. Then a bowl. Then Martin’s box that holds anything. Martin’s pile of white gold coins spills out.
“I can explain that,” says Martin.
The lamb eyes him snootily through the monocle.
“It’s just money,” Martin says. “Please. Jane doesn’t know. I didn’t hurt anybody.”
Pretty soon Martin is babbling confessions to crimes he didn’t even commit!
“I’m a mob boss!” Martin says. “I had sex with an omelette!”
The lamb has him sweating.
“No, wait! I’m a really sharp goat!”
The lamb traipses off on an adventure to the catacombs under Rome. It becomes involved with hard people, cold people, strange people.
It does not show up in our story again.
“I killed Jimmy Hoffa!” Martin says, in full-on desperation; but he doesn’t even know who that was.
– 1 –
Edmund wakes up. Edmund yawns. Edmund stretches. Edmund wanders off to eat Sid, because he’s hungry.
So Sid shoots him with a death ray.
Go Sid!
– 2 –
Let’s go back a little.
Sid is thinking about the bad milk. It’s expired. He shouldn’t drink it.
. . . or should he?
“Maybe,” says Sid, “I will just drink a little.”
He pours himself a little. Just a little. Then he tastes it. He makes a face. It is quite bad.
“I bet,” he says, “that if I drink it all, the world will be better.”
This won’t make the world better.
“Or at least,” he says, “it’ll fix someone’s life.”
It won’t fix anyone’s life. Unless you . . . I mean, unless you, I mean, right now, unless what you need right now, to have hope for the world, is for Sid to drink a bunch of bad milk. I don’t know why you’d need that. But maybe if you wanted to need that, I mean, so you could?
He’d drink it for you.
He’s drinking it now.
He gets half of it down. Then he’s choking. He’s spluttering. It’s come out his nose. He can’t drink any more for a while.
Then he thinks.
“Maybe,” he says, reasoning with himself, “it’ll have gotten better. It’ll have aged. Like fine wine, or a cheese.”
It hasn’t aged.
Well, that’s technically inaccurate.
“Tonight,” he says, resting his head on the table, “I really, really, really have to win.”
– 3 –
A fly has landed on Sid’s pale finger. He lifts it, gentle and calm, up to his right eye’s eyelashes.
It is going to crawl down onto his eye.
His left side is shuddering continuously but his right side has it under control. His eye has gone full clear, all quivering and awful jelly; he is wroth with the power of his (Torment’s) House.
It is perfect.
At last it is perfect.
It will crawl onto his eye. Maybe it will lay eggs there. And the world will be saved.
It will — if he can just do this.
If he can just get through this part, this last hard part, everything is sure to be fine. Everything will be OK forever. Just let it . . . just . . .
There’s a knock at his door.
He twitches; it flies away; he howls. He beats his head against the table. He freaks out. He can’t stop.
Then he stands up. He walks to the door. He opens it.
“Oh, hi, Emily,” he says. “What bad timing! I was just —”
He waves his hand vaguely.
He waits for her gold eyes to throw him into confusion. He waits to forget what he was doing. But she isn’t goldening him. She isn’t bespelling him, not this time. She isn’t keeping him from exerting the power of his House.
She’s just holding out a basket. She isn’t speaking. The basket’s got a cloth and some cookies inside.
Sid sighs.
He raises an eyebrow at her.
After a while, she reluctantly turns on her speech amplifier. It’s svart-elf technology. It lets her talk without straining. “They’re cookies,” she says.
“I see that,” says Sid.
“They’ll rot your teeth,” she says. “I mean, if you eat enough of them.”
He makes a face at her. She blushes. She looks away.
It’s kind of creepy having her there, but there’s only one of her. You can stand in a creepy point near somebody but it doesn’t give the whole effect of the Keepers’ House.
“I don’t know why you’d think I’d eat your cookies for that reason,” says Sid. “Dental hygiene is extremely important. I am a good person, Emily.”
She just shrugs, forcibly hands him the basket, and she goes away.
He closes the door. He drops the basket by the door and he starts shuddering. He doesn’t want those cookies.
Maybe later, when they’re stale, and more crumbly, and less sweet.
– 4 –
BOOM
Edmund’s form dissolves. He is howling. His form pales, rips itself away from reality, gelatinizes for a moment, crisp edge around a translucent core —
But Death is small and the wolf is large.
Death may not have Fenris’ Edmund Gulley.
Edmund’s form stabilizes and it resumes its strength. He bats the gun away, he drags Sid to the floor against the edge of Sid’s bed, he is howling; he gapes his maw, he opens it to devour the boy in a single bite, and confusion surges over him in a wave.
He stares at Sid. He cannot figure out how to fit the whole Sid in his mouth at once. Sid appears to be larger than his mouth. He cannot even figure out how to bite a little piece off.
Edmund works his mouth. He rubs puzzledly at his forehead. He tries to remember theorems of geometry.
Edmund can’t remember theorems of geometry!
This is a particular weakness of wolves.
His back crawls. For a moment he thinks it’s a spider and he almost drops Sid to flutter it frantically away, but then he realizes.
“You,” he says.
Them.
There’s the whispering of clothing behind him. Edmund puts Sid down carefully. He turns. He looks at them.
Them, in their yellow hats.
“What are you doing?” he says. “Why would you stop me? Why? Look at him!”
He’s almost crying.
“Look at him.”
Sid pulls himself up to his feet. He shoots a glance at them. At Fred. At Emily. At Paul. Emily can’t meet his eyes.
“Thanks,” says Sid. “That was a close one! I almost got eaten by that white-eyed boy.”
His voice is amazingly even.
“Come on,” says Edmund.
“You’re not supposed to be in my room,” says Sid.
Edmund hits him. The sound is horrible in the silence.
Then Sid shrugs. He goes over to the closet. He gets his outing coat. He slips past the boys and girls in their yellow hats. His feet crunching, he goes out.
“You can’t do this,” says Edmund. “Why would you save him?”
They don’t have answers.
“He is hurting,” Edmund says. “He is in such awful chains. He is hurting. Let me free him. You can’t pin me down like this. I’m Edmund Gulley. I’ll have you all expelled.”
He can almost hear them talking. Almost. It’s like watching birds through a camera and knowing that they’re twittering amongst themselves.
“I can make this stop,” Edmund pleads.
“Hell with this,” says Emily.
The others’ attention turns from him with a snap. It’s like being pressed to the ground under a giant, heavy metal plate that someone has suddenly removed, or like having a bunch of people standing in a creepy semicircle staring at you suddenly turn away and stare at one of their own instead.
Which is, in fact, what they’ve just done.
“What?” Emily says. She makes faces at them. “What? Hell with this. Hell with everything! I can’t do this any more. Better he did eat him. What are we fighting for? What are we fighting for, life bought with this?”
She is still making faces at them. They are utterly quiet.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
Edmund moves.
She squeaks as he comes at her. She focuses on him. Her eyes flash with fear, regret, remorse, and gold. But she is just a moment too late.
The others are turning on him again. But they are just a moment too late as well.
He shatters her with his eyes.
He knocks her down. He leaps past her out the door. He turns. He glares.
They try to hold, but they do not hold. Before his glare, they scatter; they dissipate; they dissolve into the hallways of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth like gusts of wind. They leave Emily there, on the floor, clawing feebly for her hat, and they do not stop Edmund as he chases after Sid.
Sid turns at the end of a hallway. He sees Edmund coming up from behind him.
He punches through a glass case on the wall beside him.
He takes out a fire axe.
Edmund is a blur.
Sid looks at the axe for a moment. He seems mildly confused. He swallows. He leans his tongue out towards the blade.
You shouldn’t do this, by the way. The first thing to do is to take the glass bits out of your hand. Then, without licking the fire axe, use it to defend yourself from the attacking Edmund-beast!
I mean, obviously, it’s possible that if you just lick the axe in circumstances like that you will get a pony; or everything will end in a beautiful, happy ending; or you will become a magical, inescapable Prince.
But this probably isn’t what would actually happen.
Sid doesn’t quite manage to lick the axe, either way. It is knocked from his hand and he is knocked back and his eyes follow it and there is an overpowering sense of loss in them; and then —
White.
It surges. It fills his field of view.
Edmund’s hunger drowns out Sid’s vision. His heart catches in his throat. His mouth and his nose go dry. He is still moving, he thinks, he may even still be fighting, but he cannot see.
He cannot hear.
He cannot taste.
He wonders if he is dead now. He wonders if Edmund has killed him; if this is what it means to be eaten by the House of Hunger, that one falls forever in the great hungry white.
He wonders if the world still exists, without him.
He wonders what it would actually mean, to be alive.
And in that nothingness he reaches for himself and he cannot find himself. He is suddenly dual, the Sid that is and the Sid that is seen. He reaches for the self that accepted the burden of Torment; the self willing to be like that, live like that, that something beautiful, something amazing could be born.
That the world could live just more day, even.
It is gone.
Edmund has ripped it out of him. He’s devoured it.
Sid remembers his name. It’s Sid Sidwell. He is crying and covered in wounds. Wounds, and ripped clothes, and two unhappy spiders.
The burden of Torment is gone.
It has left him alone.
It is as if a clear full-body cast has been stripped from him, and now his body is free to bend, to curl, to reject the world, to become small.
And he still thinks, —
It occurs to him after a while that he still thinks what he was doing was for the best. He could still do it. He could still —
He looks at the axe. He licks his lips. He could still be the sacrifice the world requires —
Only, he can’t.
He’s not strong enough. He doesn’t even —
He admits this to himself. He is ashamed of it, but he doesn’t even want to be strong enough again. He doesn’t want to go back to that.
Oh, God.
What he wants is for the pain to stop.
He can feel the world beginning to crack.
His head is pounding. He can barely breathe. So he scrawls out a pentagram in his blood on the floor. He marks the edges of it with runes. With a will that has become so much as iron that the dizziness barely touches him, he summons up half a thing to clean him and to tend his wounds and brush away the spiders, and to carry him off to the infirmary where he can rest.
As for the other half, he doesn’t know.
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