Geek Fantasy Novel (27 page)

“I can see in your eyes that you understand it,” young Annabel whispered, her face suddenly at his elbow. “Severe trauma in the realm of the dead leads to
life!

Ralph thought about Annabel’s words. The first chill hands of the ghouls had locked onto his thighs, and he could feel his flesh beginning to pull beneath their nails: it was definitely worth a shot.

“I have the power to un-kill?” he asked.

“Yes!” screeched Annabel. “Yes, you do!”

Ralph looked at Beatrice, who was locking with a rotting harpy, pushing against her beating wings. He couldn’t bring himself to try it out on her. “Annabel,” he said. “I’m sorry for this. Maybe.”

He grabbed a cutlass from a skeletal buccaneer and ran her through.

She turned a more ghostly gray and fell back, clutching her belly and staring at Ralph in shock.

Now, Ralph’s reasoning wasn’t all that loopy. Or, let’s be honest; it absolutely was. But admit it: You thought it was going to work. You’re used to rewards coming to those who act spur-of-the-moment on an irrational conclusion based on patchy evidence in a high-stakes climax. That this suggestion was supplied by a ghostly young woman who had already revealed herself to be an enemy of Beatrice should have factored into Ralph’s thinking, yes, but that’s just another in a long list of demerits for our sorry hero.

After he stabbed her, Ralph thought he was watching Annabel disappear. In truth, the pretty young ghostess was only astonished. Ghosts turn ghostlier grays when shocked, seeming to vanish before quickly returning to their normal color, like a cigar struck by a gust of wind. Therefore, to Ralph’s delight, his theory appeared to have worked. The older Annabelle, astonished to see her daughter so coldly run through, grayed as well. But did Ralph notice that, and realize the disheartening implication? Nope.

“Beatrice!” he cried. “I can undo all of this! I can send you back home.”

Beatrice seemed about to shake her head, until an undead chorus teacher yanked her hair back, exposing her long, pale neck. The nurse’s horrid mouth opened wide, her slack lips revealing row upon row of eggshell teeth.

“Yes, please do,” Beatrice croaked.

Ralph raised the cutlass above her throat. She gazed at him pleadingly. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

The nurse’s yellow teeth puckered her fair skin. “Hurry!” Beatrice pleaded.

Ralph brought the blade down and traced a deep red line along Beatrice’s neck. The undead screeched in rage when, after a few shattering seconds, Beatrice’s lifeblood had bled itself out onto the ground. Ralph held the cutlass blade out to Annabelle, who was screeching in fury over the assault of her daughters. She was more than happy to do her part.

Soon Ralph was dead next to Beatrice. The ravenous undead, with Beatrice’s enraged mother at their head, consumed their united flesh.

Except for the toes. The undead don’t like the taste of toes.

BOOK V:
THE PRIVATE LIVES
OF NARRATORS

It seems a fitting end for our presumptuous hero.

Can I muck about in other people’s stories because I happened to have been present while a royal spell was being cast? Can I worship computers and binary code above all other things, yet lumber into a tale made of wonder? Can I dupe the loveliest poetess ever to exist? Can I disrupt an otherwise structurally perfect triad of parallel negotiating-parental-boundaries tales?

We know Ralph’s answer to all of these questions, and we spit on him for it. That middling domestic shorthair of a boy.

And, to make it all worse, a tinny voice protests from somewhere that “I demand a new narrator!”

Where from, you might ask? Cease such wonderings. Reader, unite with me, and take no more interest in Ralph.

“New narrator, please!”

Reader, you’re not doing your work.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

Let’s sing a song, shall we? I’ll try to take care of this in the meantime.

“Ouch, hey!”

Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

“How about a light in here? Please!”

Blast.

While you were turning these pages, I took a moment to clear my head, as I hope you did as well. Before we continue, let it be noted for the record: When I tried to stop Ralph’s tale, it was for his own good.

In summary: When we last saw them, Ralph and Beatrice were dead. You’ll remember that Ralph had been slain by Annabelle, who was grieving over her daughter, who wasn’t dead-dead at all, and popped up shortly after, hungry for pork chops.

Now, Annabel’s theory that you can un-kill was false, a jealous ploy to do away with her sister. But she and Ralph both were unaware of an equally persistent theory, one that actually turns out to be true. Narrative discontinuity is the most powerful tool at a rebellious character’s disposal — in sheer point of fact, it’s the only tool at a rebellious character’s disposal. And since Ralph killed Beatrice, which was unforeseeable by anyone (including me), he’s right in the middle of it.

From the
Seminar in Advanced Topics in Storytelling
syllabus:

So, yes, Ralph’s unwitting deployment of Advanced Narrative Discontinuity Theory generated difficulties for your already beleaguered narrator. Nothing too grave, mind you, but a story’s rails must be set before the train takes off, so to speak, and Ralph’s unexpected killing of Beatrice was a significant derailment. I’ll need another moment to sort things through and make all of this tie back into a coherent story, that’s all. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll think things through out loud until I can come up with a plan.

Our petulant young hero — an immature little boy, really — came awake at the very moment the Underworld fragmented. Even in the night sky there are stray filaments of starlight; even behind your closed eyelids penetrate a few hardy rays, but when Ralph opened his eyes, he found true nothingness. The loss of the Underworld was, like all true calamities, soon begun and finished, living much longer in memory. In the replay, Ralph felt the ground fall away, not down but away, so the emptiness was sudden and narrow, closing on his chest like lips on a finger.

What was on his mind? Was he terrified to have ripped the fabric of the universe? Was he overawed to have burst the careful majesty of Beatrice’s story, a rupture produced by the slash of a cutlass?

Of course not. He stood suspended in the emptiness and waited for something to happen. So very book-character of him. He was disoriented, naturally, but he scanned about as if there were rays of light to fill his eyes, called out as if there were anyone to hear him.

In the meantime, I’m sitting at my desk in the catwalks, scribbling as I flip pages beneath my reading light, and trying to figure out how to salvage my story, now that Beatrice’s wish has unexpectedly terminated, and I’ve no more spare employees or a single pence left in the discretionary budget.

Ralph’s first clue that he hadn’t perished entirely was that he was
standing
in the absolute nothingness. For surely one cannot stand without something to stand on?

As a light clicked on far above — a reading lamp bulb — he could make out more and more of his surroundings.

He found that he was in a storytelling attic of sorts. The floor was made of clear, hard nothing. There were also clear hard nothing tables, barrels, and benches, all of them cluttered with sets and figurines. Many of his favorite characters from childhood were there, along with others that he didn’t recognize. Swordsmen, pregnant doctors, ancient infants, monks and bards and bookshop clerks. And then there were settings — magnificent dioramas of mountain slopes, laboratories, spaceships, living rooms (God, how very many living rooms). When he peered at them, he saw that the attention to detail was astounding; except for their small size, there was no telling the sets from reality. Within them were miniature pianos that emitted sweeping scores of their own accord, tennis rackets that volleyed fluorescent pinheads, miniature
suns hot to the touch, and able to be shrouded in any number of different clouds — some rainy and dark, some puffy and white — that were kept hanging on a nearby rack when not in use.

Ralph picked up a figurine — an elderly woman carrying a cigarette holder and a shiny black pocketbook — and dropped it into what appeared to be a South American cantina. She sprang to life as soon as she entered, finding a tenable reason to be there (she clumsily commented aloud that her twelve-stop flight to surprise her philandering businessman husband in New Zealand had a layover in Bogotá). He watched as she sat at the bar to order a drink and made breezy comments to the blinking bartender. When Ralph put his head close to the miniature set, the little diorama looked like all the universe. At full swing, this area could have thousands of quests going on at one time.

“Hello?” Ralph called to the elderly woman. But because
she
was a
well-behaved
character, she wouldn’t allow herself to hear anything outside of her own story.

So he moved on.

After wandering for an hour, it became clear that this cold hard nothing space was infinite, or at least extraordinarily large. He found any number of sullen young women, but none of them was quite the sullen young woman he was looking for.

His plan, once he located Beatrice, was to find a way out, to return to his own home and his own parents and his own boring life. But there was no diorama for his real world, no figurines of his own parents.

Ralph figured there had to be some clever way to get out of the attic. But, he was coming to realize, that was the hardest thing about being in a story; he didn’t really have any choices.

“Hello?” he called up to me. “Could you throw me a line, buddy?”

Of course I didn’t answer.

What happened next? I guess Ralph really had to go, because he peed behind a chemist’s laboratory set piece. He hadn’t found a bathroom anywhere in the Underworld, so he must have been holding it for quite a while.

What else? He rummaged around for food, with no luck — it was all too small, crunchy, and inorganic; he once brought a miniature horse to his lips, but got afraid he’d choke on a hoof. So instead he sat and got depressed for a while.

It had been a long time since he’d eaten anything; he couldn’t remember the last time, actually, though he was too anxious to actually feel hungry. He sat in the dim light of the empty stage and waited.

For what?

Anything, he supposed.

Ralph heard a slight creaking in the attic, looked over, and thought he spied a ghostly figure hovering far away.

“Beatrice?” Ralph called.

He heard her rush toward him, then a crash and a curse as she slammed into Oz on her way over.

“Hold on. I’ll come to you,” said Ralph, whose eyes had better adjusted to the near-darkness. He took Beatrice’s hand, and she crushed herself against him.

“Ralph, Ralph, Ralph,” she said.

“What is it?” he said, suddenly convinced he was about to be eaten.

“I was sure you were gone forever. Like Chessie’s son.” Her face wet the crook of his arm.

“It’s okay, I’m here. Shh.”

“Thank God.” A pause. “Um, where
is
here?”

“Hmm,” Ralph said, wondering how to answer. He sounded, for the first time in his life, a bit like his father. “How did you get here? Maybe that will tell us.”

“Well, I think your killing me —”

“Oh my God, that’s right. Yipes. Are you okay?”

“Yes, fine. I think your killing me finished my quest, in a weird way. I passed out and woke up in my everyday world, the way it’s supposed to go. Only, traditionally, you’re supposed to wake up with everything totally back to normal, so much so that you’re not even sure your wish actually happened. But I was still gray. And I could walk through things. And the castle was still in the clouds. Gert is super-cranky about that, by the way.”

“She’s going to kill me.”

“Maybe. Who cares? Anyway, since I’m still a ghost, I was the only one of the family able to get down to the ground. Cecil wanted to climb but Mother and Father wouldn’t let him. They wouldn’t let me, either, for that matter, but I ignored them, threw myself out the basement, and glided down. It was amazing — the vale was crawling with Royal Narratological Guild people in their pajamas yapping on cell phones, trying to figure out what to do. All I had to do, though, was catch the right gusts of wind, and I totally avoided them.

“I headed for London instead, because I wanted to chase down Chessie. I found her holed up in bed in her Kensington flat, with the door triple-barred and a couple of armed men standing guard. She was probably freaked out that the Royal Narratological Guild was going to come after her for botching another wish. Which they probably were, come to think of it. In any case, I floated right in. She ran farther upstairs and slammed the door closed. I passed through that door, too, of course, and finally cornered her in her bathroom. She was hysterical.

“At first I’d wanted to … well, to thank her, actually. For giving me the opportunity to see my mother again. And to complain that I didn’t have more time to chat properly with her. I wasn’t sure if I was going to bring up my ghostliness, because even now I’m still kind of digging it, and don’t want anyone to take it away. When I opened my mouth all that came out were questions about you. She’d been the one to grant the wishes, and I figured it was her responsibility to find a way to get you back.