Fair Peril (20 page)

“Then you should go home and
get a bath
and some sleep, shouldn't you?”

Buffy expressed her exasperation with a sigh and headed out. As she paused outside the door, trying to think what to do next, she heard the woman call to somebody else in the office, “It's getting screwier around here every day. Did you see the woman with the monster frog on a leash?”

Homeless, baloney. But phew, Buffy had to admit that Essence of Body Odor was going to linger on the air after she was gone. She headed toward a john to take a sponge bath. Make that a paper-towel bath. The plan, insofar as she had one, was to stay at the Mall Tifarious, get some sleep somehow—there had to be storage areas where they kept the naked and dismembered mannequins, the seasonal displays; Buffy pictured herself napping with the Easter Bunny—and then she would start looking for Emily again. But as she walked toward the rest rooms, her tired brain farted out a notion and she veered into one of those nature-and-ecology whoa-green-is-expensive stores. Her nightgown, aside from being overdue for a wash, was not suitable garb for public places. But she needed a starry, starry garment in order to do transfrogrifications. Maybe there would be one in here.

There wasn't. There were jigsaw puzzles depicting the constellations, but no starry T-shirts. The T-shirts had koalas and flamingos and coatimundis on them. So much for that idea. Very tired, too tired to think, Buffy stood and stared dazedly around the store.

Something on one of the display tables caught her eye; she toddled over there. Under garish wooden parrots hanging from the ceiling, amid hand-up-the-ass endangered-species puppets, amid rubber moose and plastic mongooses and metal make-a-noise cicadas, amid all the tacky envirokitsch reared a carved snake made out of some sort of white stone, alabaster or white jade or something, a museum-quality sculpture with graceful lines and a lifted head, a white snake looking back at her.

Carved stone, yet its golden eyes seemed alive.

“You were there,” Buffy whispered to it.

She was tired, so tired, exhausted, drifting. The cloth on the display table fluttered like leaves. “There! There!” a parrot squawked from overhead.

Buffy whispered. “You were there that day. Do you know where my daughter is?”

Yes, the white snake did. The white snake knew. Except that his forked black tongue flickered out, his mouth did not move, but Buffy heard as if he had spoken inside her head. Or rather, she did not hear—the snake's preverbal reptilian language was not her language—but she sensed a wordless affirmation.
Yes, certainly, I am the white snake. Of course I know.

“Tell me! Where is she?”

Barely changing position, nevertheless the snake was slowly gathering, coiling, rippling, flexing, clenching his muscle in the lazy way of a strong, confident serpent. His upraised head swayed in languid negation.
Nah. No. Don't feel like it.

Like a child who has been hauled around a shopping mall way too long, Buffy could have cried. “Tell me!” Her whisper flipped into a yell. “Why won't you tell me?”

Why should I? I am the white snake. How have you deserved my help?

She knew she had been unmannerly. She knew the tales and their number-one rule: speak politely to everyone and everything until you know for sure who or what it is. The arrogant older son, the bitchy stepmother, the haughty queen, they always forgot the rule and always got the business. But Buffy could not stop. She danced in red-hot-iron frustration, she writhed in spiked-barrel despair. She screamed. Her hands shot out to seize the white snake and wring the truth out of him.

She never touched him, of course. He bit her.

The ballista that had hurled frightened young Adamus from the battlements could not have been more spring-loaded, more sudden. Before Buffy knew what was happening, fangs pierced her hand and withdrew. She looked down on two ruby-red pearls of blood. Tiny pearls—but within her she could feel the bite slithering its way through her veins, chill, huge, an enormity.

Punissshment,
the white snake told her, turning his lithe, indifferent back and sliding away.

Buffy knew she was supposed to die. She just did not know how or how soon.

Everything changed very quickly.

Everything was moving. Wooden parrots flew up with frightened cries and disappeared—quite literally disappeared. The mall was disappearing—or transmallgrifying. Instead of glass-domed ceiling and glass storefronts, Buffy saw glass walls closing in. Fountains puddled around her feet. To get out of the water she jumped up an oversized step and stood on top of a large, dank, reddish-brown platform—brick?

Before she could think, her footing shook and there was a sound like mountains grinding together. Cowering, she looked up as the roof, or top, whatever it was, lifted off. A giant face peered down, seemingly from the sky, a face gargantuan beyond anything she had ever seen or imagined. If God had nose hair and wore a dirty baseball hat, then this was God.

A hand the size of fate came down. Buffy wanted to run yet froze like a terrified rabbit; the only parts of her that seemed able to move were her bladder and her bowels, spewing away her self-respect as the hand seized her between thumb and forefinger and lifted her right up through where the roof should have been. Close to fainting, Buffy shut her eyes and hung in that coarse-skinned grip, much too far above the ground, dripping. “Now, here's a fat little stinker,” the voice of the God-ogre said, booming and distant, so huge that she could barely catch the words between the deep echoes in the dome of the sky. “Good for bass. You put the hook in here—” A fingertip threatened to cave in her face. “—and you bring it out here.” He nudged her side; Buffy felt ribs scream. “Tie one leg to the shank but let the other one loose so she keeps wiggling.”

“Wait,” Buffy whispered. Then she managed to open her eyes and say it louder. “WAIT!” she yelled. “I'm not bait!” She looked down at herself—yes, it was her, all right, feet kicking in wet sneakers, legs sticking out pale and unlovely from under her soiled nightgown, wallet and keys, those apodictic proofs of her sanity and humanity, clutched so tightly that her hand was going white. “You're making a mistake!”

The baseball-hatted giant did not seem to hear her at all. “Uh-huh,” the other one was saying, his voice flat, uninterested in being taught how to bait a hook for bass. “I'll take her. Box her up.”

The—other—one?

That flat, quaking voice—no. It couldn't be. Panicked, Buffy looked—it was hard to make sense of the immensity of these personages as big as sky, it was like finding coherence in the clouds, but—the inside of the little white box felt awfully familiar, though Buffy had never been imprisoned in a Chinese takeout container before. Funny, how the inside of a pristinely white box could look black in the absence of light. It was him, all right.

“Prentis!” she cried.

The box swayed, throwing her from side to side, as he carried it by the wire handle. Either he didn't hear her or he wasn't hearing her.

“Prentis, please! What are you doing with me?”

No answer, only a jarring thunk as he set the box down, then vehicular vibrations. They were in his car now. Going somewhere.

It was like one of those Mafia movies.
Where are you taking me?

No. It was worse. Far worse. On her hands and knees in the corner of the box, Buffy puked up her soft pretzel, she felt so sick with fear, carsick, seasick, airsick, nauseated in zero gravity; which way was up? How/when had she become fish bait while remaining the same size? Did Prentis know the prisoner in his little white box was her? Did he have plans specifically for her, maybe to sink the hook a bit more viciously than necessary? Or did he think she was a bug or something? Everything would have been more bearable if she had just understood what was going on. Whether she was going to live or die.

No, actually, it might not have been more bearable.

She tried shouting again. “Where are you taking me?”

No answer. Trying to stand up, she was thrown to her belly as he veered into a driveway or something. The car stopped.

Buffy stayed where she was, lying down. A good move—the box swayed wildly as he carried it. She heard the snick of a doorknob turning, felt the lurch as he stepped inside. Thunk, the box shook again as he set it down.

“Did you get a nice one, honey?” asked an older woman's throaty voice.

“Sure, Mom.” Prentis sounded weary and supercilious.

Mom?
Fay?
Once more Buffy's bowels spasmed, but there was nothing left in her to let go.

Fay said, “Prentis, dear, your tone of voice. I'm only trying to help.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Better put it in the aquarium so it doesn't die before we're ready. This may take a while.”

The box swooped up, opened to let in a glare of disorienting light, careened over, and dumped Buffy with a splash into shallow, stale water. Did Prentis know it was his ex-wife he was dumping—again? Moot point. A shock worse than the chill of the water kept Buffy sitting where she was, mouth open but not functioning to speak: she was in her own aquarium, looking out at the interior of her own messy bungalow, her own kitchen, where Fay and Prentis were sitting at her plastic-covered table.

“Coffee, hon?” Fay offered. Fay was always so sweet to Prentis that it made Buffy's teeth hurt. And the more his mother courted him, the more he closed her out.

“No thanks.”

Fay rose to get herself a cup, banging cupboard doors one after another. “Can't find anything but dirt. This place is a swamp.” Splendiferously aureate as always, Fay provided enough reflective surface to light up every speck—okay, in Buffy's case, it was more like clumps—every lurking lump of filth. Finally locating a coffee mug, she eyed it suspiciously and made a sour face. “That Murphy person never did keep anything clean.”

Being called “that Murphy person” roused Buffy from her waterlogged daze. “Hey!” She struggled to stand up, her nightgown sodden and streaming. “Get your claws off my stuff!”

Neither Fay nor Prentis heard her, of course. “Can we just get on with it?” Prentis grumbled.

Fay sat down with her coffee. “You can't hurry this book.” It lay open on the table; she might have been scanning it for some time. Now she picked it up in both hands, balancing the base of its hefty spine on the table. Big book. Big green book. Buffy did not have to look closely to know:
Batracheios.

In Fay's hands the green cover seemed to turn golden, like green leaves turning golden in late-day sunlight. Standing in the glass prison, looking on, Buffy shivered with cold.

“I've been looking all morning,” Fay said in tones of mild annoyance, “and I still can't find where Emily might have gone if she ran off with a frog.”

“What's it matter,” Prentis said. “She'll come back when she wants to. She likes her car, and we've got her car. She likes her clothes, and we've got her clothes. Tell you one thing, it's a lot more peaceful now she's not in the house.”

“YOU COCK-UP!” Buffy yelled hot and loud as a volcano—but they couldn't hear. They'd never been able to hear, neither of them, what she was really trying to say. Prentis, sitting there, no health-club pose when he was around his mom, just being his lumpen, jowly self—Buffy wanted to bite him and give him rabies. She wanted to chew his nose off.

But his mother put down the book and gazed at him solicitously. “Emily made it hard for you and Tempestt?”

Prentis just gave her a look.

“It's frustrating when you're a new couple,” Fay said.

“Just shut up and find me an answer, would you, Mom?”

“Well, I need to know what kind of—”

“I just want Tempestt to get more interested in me and less in the goddamn money!”

Buffy sank down to sit on rotting wood, weak with exhaustion and astonishment. Neediness, in Prentis? Truth, in Prentis?

Silence, as Fay flipped slowly through
Batracheios.
Prentis jiggled his leg.

Fay beamed, as befitted an ormolu presence. “Here we go. This ought to do it. Okay, first you're supposed to take your frog and drive pins into it.”

Buffy started to shake.

“That's supposed to make your beloved feel pangs of love,” Fay continued with no apparent levity. “Then, when it's stuck full of pins, you're supposed to bury it alive. Then after six weeks you're supposed to come back and dig it up and it's supposed to be dead and decayed and there's a little bone like a hook. You're supposed to hook that on your beloved someplace, like on her belt or something, and that's supposed to do the trick. Okay?”

“Sure, whatever.”

“Fine. Where's Murphy keep her pins?” Fay laid the book down. “Where's her sewing basket?” On golden spike heels she clicked into the next room. Hunched in a corner of the aquarium and shaking, Buffy could hear her moving things around in there, searching. Sewing basket, what did Fay think this was, a nunnery? Buffy hadn't owned a sewing basket in years, but she knew exactly where there were some straight pins, in an orange juice can along with three slowly petrifying pencils, a few thumbtacks, and some paper clips, in plain sight on the kitchen windowsill, and she prayed Fay wouldn't think to look there.

“This place is a
cesspool!
” Fay called from the next room. “Prentis, do you know where she—”

He bawled back, “How the hell would I know! Just find something, Mom, wouldja?”

Something dark and desperate in his voice made Buffy start to scrabble and claw at the glass walls of her prison, even though she knew she could not possibly escape.

Fay moved on toward the bedroom. “I suppose we could use a brooch or something from her jewelry box, if I can figure out where
that
might be—”

“God's sake, Mom, just skip the pins and come on!”