“Demi,
get your flute up,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Jeff’s
back entrance let us into a hall that didn’t seem to be used for much of
anything; it was spotlessly clean, but had that dead-aired quality that only
comes from isolation and abandonment. The lights were dim, and I took point as
we made our way toward the main building. The hall was straight, and the
bullpen and interview rooms were all in front of us. That was convenient. I’m
not sure I could have handled a labyrinth under these conditions.
This
little unsealed door revealed a massive flaw in our security system—I was going
to have Maintenance’s ass for this. Once lockdown began, once a narrative was
loose and live in the building, the agency was supposed to become impregnable.
Well, we hadn’t worked all that hard, and we were inside.
Worrying
about security was a matter for another time. Right now, we had bears to deal
with.
We
were almost to the interior door when sounds began filtering through the thick,
blast-reinforced steel. Alarms: someone had triggered the internal lockdown
system, and it was making sure everyone knew about it. And
screams. They were softer than the amplified alarms, but they were
somewhat harder to ignore.
Jeff
tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, and he offered me a pair of earmuffs.
“Demi’s
almost certainly going to need to play,” he said. “There’s nothing we’ll need
to hear in there that we won’t be able to pick up through visual cues.”
“I’m
not so sure about that,” I said, but took the earmuffs, making sure that they
were firmly in place before I looked back to my teammates, nodding once, and
hauling the door open.
We
stepped through into chaos. Red light bathed everything, and screams came
intermittently from behind closed doors, loud enough to be audible even through
my earmuffs. No one moved in the wreckage of the bullpen. I motioned Jeff and
Demi forward, and we picked our way into the open, heading for the hall that
would lead us to the interview rooms. That was the most likely place for Sloane
and Andy to have taken our unwitting Goldilocks, which would make it the
epicenter of the bear attacks.
We
were halfway there when a bear lunged out of the space between two filing
cabinets, teeth bared and claws reaching for my throat. I had time for one
dizzied moment of introspection—
How the
hell did a bear even fit in there?
—before the business of keeping myself
and my teammates alive took priority. I fired three bullets into the bear’s
face. It dissipated like smoke, wisping away into nothing but a burning smell
and the memory of terror.
“Ghost
bears,” I snarled. “Oh, that’s just perfect.”
I
turned. Demi was staring with wide, frightened eyes at the place where the
phantom bear had been. Her flute was in her shaking hands.
“Play
something!” I shouted.
She
shook her head and mouthed something that looked like “But Jeff didn’t—”
“Just
play!”
Demi
nodded, raised her flute, and began to play.
More
bears emerged from the shadows and the thin spaces between the walls and the
furnishings. They came in every size and type imaginable—even koalas and
pandas, which aren’t actually bears. They lumbered and they raced and they were
coming right for us.
Jeff
and I took up positions to either side of Demi, shooting at the phantom bears
as they came toward us. Only one bullet seemed to be required to dissipate the
smaller ones; the big ones, the grizzlies and the Kodiaks, took two or three. I
paused twice to reload. Jeff fired more slowly, and he covered for me whenever I
was unable to shoot. The whole time, we continued down the hall, making our way
step after step toward the interview room.
We
were almost there when the door slammed open and Sloane crashed out into the
hall, a fireplace poker in her hand. The incongruous nature of her weapon
aside, it was effective; she slashed it through the three nearest bears,
opening a path for the three of us. “Come on!” she snarled, lips moving in an
exaggerated fashion as she tried to make herself understood despite our
earmuffs.
She
didn’t have to tell us twice. We rushed past her into the interview room, Demi
piping all the while. Sloane slammed the door behind us. Andy and Jennifer were
there: Andy with his gun drawn and his eyes on the door; Jennifer facedown on
the table and apparently unconscious.
“Report,”
I said, pulling my earmuffs down and letting them dangle around my neck. “What
the hell happened?”
“She
said she needed a nap, and as soon as she closed her eyes, bears,” said Sloane.
She shot a glare at Jennifer. “We’ve been trying to wake her up. Bitch sleeps
like the dead. And stop that!” She transferred her glare to Demi. “We don’t
need more bears, okay? We have plenty of fucking bears. There is
no
room at the inn.”
Demi
lowered her pipe, looking guilty.
“Okay,”
I said. “So she’s finishing her story at this point. She’s gotten so far along
that she’s going to complete. Jeff?”
“Most
variations, the bears wake Goldilocks up and she runs away, never to trouble
them again,” he said. I started to relax. He continued: “In others, the bears
rip her to pieces as a warning to anyone else who might try breaking into their
home.”
“Fuck,”
I muttered. “Andy? Sloane? Did the bears actually hurt
anyone when they showed up?”
“At
least three people dead, possibly more by now,” said Andy. “We locked ourselves
in here, since this is the epicenter.”
“And
we didn’t shoot her because ghost bears don’t necessarily fuck off when you
kill their Goldilocks,” added Sloane. “We could just wind up haunted.”
“Ghosts
are real?” demanded Demi.
There
was a moment of silence, save for the distant sirens, as we all turned and
looked at Demi. Finally, Jeff said, “Magic is real. Ghosts come with the
package. It’s just that the narrative is usually more subtle than this. It
doesn’t want to be seen, because it doesn’t want to be stopped. Ghost bears
aren’t something you can overlook under normal circumstances.”
“What
do we do?” asked Andy. “We could throw her out of the building, but that won’t
stop the bears. It’ll just move them into an unprepared populace.”
There
are rarely easy answers when there are fairy tales involved. Still … “The
bears came into her yard, but they never entered her home,” I said. “They’re
sticking to the story, at least to a certain degree. How is it supposed to
end?”
“They
wake her up, they scare the pants off of her, and she promises never to break
into a stranger’s house again,” said Jeff. “Or, as I mentioned before, she gets
eaten.”
“Okay,”
I said. “This is what we’re going to do …”
Demi,
Sloane, and I had nearly been tagged as Jennifer’s bears, before we shunted the
narrative and caused a ghost bear invasion. So now it was the three of us who
stood in front of her, separated only by the table. “Now, Sloane,” I said.
“Who’s
that sleeping in my bed?” Sloane boomed, and emptied the pitcher of water in
her hand over Jennifer’s head. Jennifer sat up with a gasp, eyes wide, wet hair
slicked back and sticking to her neck and cheeks.
“Wh-what—”
“We’ll
ask the questions here,” Sloane snarled. “Who told you to make that prank call
to 911? Don’t you understand that this is no laughing matter?”
“Couldn’t
it at least have been funnier?” asked Demi stiffly, like she was having trouble
remembering her lines.
“Bears,”
I scoffed. “As if.”
Jennifer
looked at each of us in turn, starting to shake. “I didn’t … I mean, I was
…”
“We’ve
searched your neighborhood, Miss Lockwood,” Demi said. “There are no bears
there. Did you call us because you had a bad dream? There are laws against this
sort of thing.”
“We
should lock her up,” said Sloane. “Make an example.”
“We
should let her go,” I said. “Show mercy.”
“What’s
going to stop her from doing the exact same thing the next time she has a
nightmare?” Demi demanded. “No, punishment is the only answer.”
Somehow,
Demi’s tone made the words sound just right. “I won’t do it again, I swear!”
Jennifer leaned across the table, grabbing for my hands. “Please, believe me. I
didn’t mean to do anything wrong. Please!”
The
three of us looked at her solemnly, but inside, I think that we were all
smiling.
Andy
drove Jennifer home. The bears were gone; they had disappeared as soon as
Jennifer apologized. Maintenance was already working on the back door, and EMTs
were swarming in the halls, helping those who had been wounded by the ghost
bears and collecting the bodies of the fallen. I, and
the rest of my team, wound up sitting in the interview room, waiting to be
debriefed.
“You
realize that poor woman will have psychological issues and a fear of authority
after this,” said Jeff.
“Narrative
never plays nicely with any of us,” I said.
“Still
…”
“We
did what we had to do. What we’ll always do. We stopped the story before it
could get to ever after.” I shook my head. “Better a few ruined lives than an
entire ruined world.”
Silence
fell between us. For once, none of us had anything left to say.
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNRESOLVED/AVERTED
Everything was too loud and everything hurt.
Sloane Winters peeled her eyelids open through a combination of Herculean effort and pure spite. Something had to be making that horrible clanging, roaring noise that was ripping through her head and setting her teeth on edge. She was going to find it, and she was going to kill it. Once it was good and dead, she might even bury it in the backyard, just so that she could have the privilege of dancing on its grave. Then, and only then, would she be able to go blissfully back to sleep, no longer harassed by uninvited shrieks from beyond.
The noise stopped as soon as her eyes were open.
“What the …” Sloane caught herself before the curse could pass her lips. Instead, she sat up and ran her fingers through her tangled, bleach-fried hair. She hit a knot and winced as new pain was added to the existing pain left behind by the infernal clanging. When she had been sitting long enough to be sure that her head wasn’t going to fall off and roll around the room, she straightened, looking around with narrowed eyes.
Everything seemed to be normal. The birdcage in the corner was still covered, which eliminated one possible source of the din. Lovecraft was not a quiet bird, but like all parrots, he truly believed that it was nighttime when he couldn’t see the light—or at least he pretended to believe that, and Sloane, who was anxious to coexist with
something
she didn’t want to kill, allowed him to think that he was fooling her.
The walls were covered in a thick layer of posters, flyers, and bumper stickers. It looked more like a sixteen-year-old’s bedroom than the domicile of a grown woman, but what did that matter? Not even Sloane herself was quite sure how old she was. Too many years had been lost in the struggle to evade her story. Those years were never coming back, and if she felt safer in her nest of teenage rebellion and outdated angst, then no one was going to convince her that she should do anything differently.
She was cautiously stretching one leg toward the floor, preparing to slide out of the bed, when the shrieking roar began again. Sloane clapped her hands over her ears and screamed, the sound swallowed by the greater scream of whatever was invading her privacy. She thought she heard Lovecraft squawking under the noise, but couldn’t be sure; she couldn’t move under the weight of that painful din.
As the unseen sirens clamored on, Sloane Winters collapsed back onto her bed, clamping her hands down until her nails scratched her scalp hard enough to draw blood, and waited for the noise to stop.
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
“Where’s Sloane?”
I stopped in the process of putting my bag down on my desk chair, frowning at Andy. “What do you mean, ‘where’s Sloane?’ Is this a trick question? And have we cancelled ‘good morning’ for the foreseeable future? I was never overly fond of it to begin with, but it’s a ritual thing, and I do appreciate a good ritual.”
Andy crossed his arms and glared at me. Being more than a foot taller than I was, with shoulders like a linebacker and the sort of craggy, determined face that was designed for either male modeling or law enforcement, he did so excellently. Andy was such a champion glarer that Jeff had been known to spend entire afternoons trying to goad him into a good glare. Most of the time, it worked. Andy was a friendly man who believed in doing his job, and doing it well. But that didn’t grant him infinite patience—and thank Grimm for that. If he’d been smart, athletic, good-looking,
and
a saint, I would probably have been forced to shove him into the path of an oncoming story just on general principle.
“I mean, where is Agent Sloane Winters, who was supposed to be here an hour ago?” he said. “Her computer hasn’t been turned on. She isn’t in the office.”
My frown deepened. I finished putting my bag down, removed my sunglasses, and asked, “Did she have today off? Maybe this is one of her weird Sloane-specific holidays, like Australia Day, or National Cotton Candy Day.”
Sloane’s part in the narrative had been averted sometime before I’d joined the Bureau, and she had been living a normal, if angry and maladjusted, life ever since then. Part of her conception of “normal” included a flat refusal to live by any social convention that even smacked of story. Sloane worked on Christmas and stayed home on April Fools’ Day, which she celebrated—last I checked—by carving faces into cantaloupes and inviting the local kids to smash them with hammers.
The door opened. Andy and I both turned, only to pause and frown again when we saw that the figure slipping into the bullpen was Demi Santos, and not Sloane. Demi blinked at us as she approached her desk. “Why are you both staring at me?” she asked, her trepidation visible in her face. “Did I forget about a meeting?” She blanched, her complexion taking on a distinct waxy undertone. “Is there an incursion?”
“Dispatch hasn’t alerted us to anything, and no, there wasn’t a meeting,” I said, shaking my head. “We just hoped that you’d be Sloane, that’s all.”
“You hoped I’d be … Sloane.” Demi raised an eyebrow. “Under what circumstances, ever, in this universe, would you hope that
anyone
was Sloane?”
“Our lovely young Miss Winters is probably relieved to wake up every morning and find that she remains Sloane, rather than becoming the nameless antagonist in some larger narrative,” said Jeff, stepping out from behind a filing cabinet. I managed not to jump. It was a near thing. Not even years of dealing with our resident archivist’s tendency to appear out of nowhere had rendered me completely immune to the surprise of it.
Demi laughed. “I guess that’s true,” she admitted. “I’m pretty happy to wake up in the morning and still be me.”
“There you are. A good morning to you, Agent Santos, and to you, Agent Robinson, and to you, Agent Marchen.” Jeff accompanied each greeting with a nod to the appropriate person. When he got to me, I smiled. He smiled back. Jeff was one of the few people I knew who wasn’t disturbed by the contrast of too-red lips with too-white skin. A true Snow White looks more like a horror movie than a fairy tale come true, but Jeff always treated me like I was myself, nothing more or less than that. It was nice. In my own way, I was just as happy to wake up as Henry every morning as Sloane and Demi were to wake up as themselves, our respective stories aside.
“Morning, Jeff,” I said. “We were just wondering if Sloane had the day off. We were a little surprised not to find her here waiting when we all got to the office.”
“She left at her usual hour last night, and she hasn’t been in yet today,” said Jeff, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as he pursed his lips in concentration. “The duty roster posted in the break room has her on active for the entire week. I’m sure I would have noticed if she had a day off in the middle.”
“I believe you,” I said. As a five-oh-three, Jeff was a born archivist whose attention to detail bordered on the obsessive—if he said that something was so, then it was so, no argument needed. I wasn’t certain, but I was reasonably sure he lived in the office, sleeping in one of the supply closets that were supposedly not in use. He left sometimes, but he always came back, and he was always in when we needed him.
It didn’t bother me. Whatever it takes to get through the day and survive your story, that’s what you’ve got to do.
“Should we call her at home?” asked Demi. “Could something have happened to her?”
“Things don’t happen to Sloane,” said Andy. “Sloane happens to things.”
“Please don’t start making Chuck Norris jokes,” I said, turning to face Andy. “Still, we should check. I’ll go up to Dispatch, see if Birdie can raise her. Sloane won’t be happy about it, but she’s less likely to get violent if the call comes from someone whose job is knowing where we all are.”
Andy looked relieved. “Would you, Henry? I don’t like to admit it, but I’m worried about her.”
“I don’t like to admit it either, but thanks to you guys, now I’m worried too. I’m on my way.” I paused long enough to unclip my badge from my purse strap and clip it to my lapel—Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau—and offered the rest of my team members a little wave as I turned and started back toward the stairs.
Even when I’m not out in the field, it sometimes seems like a field commander’s work is never done.
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNRESOLVED/UNDETERMINED
The noise had stopped long enough for Sloane to empty the top drawer of her dresser out onto the floor, pawing through the tangle of torn fishnets, worn-out bras, and mismatched socks until she found the pair of earmuffs she’d been issued when they had that Snow Queen incident to clean up in Ann Arbor. She clamped them down over her ears, letting out a sigh of relief when even the small ambient noises of the room stopped. They might not hold against a full-on aural assault, but they would at least let her keep her wits long enough to get dressed and get out.
“Someone’s going to die,” she announced to the room, as she staggered back to her feet. Her knees were still shaking, and her head spun with every motion. Hands out to help her hold her balance, she made her way to Lovecraft’s cage and pulled off the sheet that covered it.
Lovecraft, looking as affronted as it was possible for a Black Palm Cockatoo to look—which was remarkably affronted, thanks to the years they’d spent together—opened his beak, emitting what was doubtless a deafening screech.
“Sorry, dude, but you don’t want to be in here right now,” said Sloane, opening the cage door and sticking out her arm. “Come on. I’m moving you to the aviary cage.”
Lovecraft screeched again before resentfully stepping onto her arm. Sloane smiled.
“For once, you fail in your ‘make me go deaf’ campaign,” she said. “I’m wearing earmuffs. Neener-neener.”
Lovecraft responded by sidling up her arm to her shoulder, where he began nibbling on her hair in a grooming motion that was as soothing as it was familiar. Sloane moved away from the cage, grabbing the clothes she’d laid out the night before—thank God for Internet housekeeping advice sites, or she’d be pawing through her closet while she waited for the sirens to resume.
“Momma’s going to commit a murder today,” she said conversationally, tucking her bundled clothing up under her arm as she started for the door. “That’s right. I’m going to find whoever woke me up, and I’m going to rip out their heart and show it to them before they have a chance to finish dropping dead. Won’t that be nice, sweetie? Won’t that be nice and bloody?”
Unheard, Lovecraft screeched.
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
Most of the building that housed the ATI Management Bureau was old wood and older design, like a stage set transported from the 1970s—which was, not coincidentally, when the building had been originally constructed. The Dispatch Unit was a science fiction dream, all chrome, glass, and unnecessarily streamlined plastic fittings. I always felt like I was leaving a hard-boiled crime drama and stepping into something with starships and empires when I had to visit the dispatchers in their home territory. Still, “we may have misplaced our Wicked Stepsister, do you think you could give her a ring for us” wasn’t the sort of question I felt comfortable asking over the phone.
Three of the dispatch desks were occupied when I arrived. Two of the dispatchers were hard at work, coordinating their own field teams as they investigated possible incursions by the narrative responsible for fairy tales and folklore the world over. Human belief focused the narrative, and in our modern age of mass-produced DVDs and endless television reruns, incursions were becoming more and more common.
The third dispatcher, a small, round-faced woman with fluffy blonde hair and thick-lensed glasses, was leaning back in her chair and staring thoughtfully up at the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. I walked over to her desk, crossed my arms, and waited.
People wind up in Dispatch after they’ve been touched somehow by the Aarne-Thompson spectrum, but have failed to show the reflexes and capabilities for fieldwork. Most people expected Jeff to go into Dispatch, given both his nature and his narrative. He surprised them all when he wound up in the field. Birdie Hubbard, our primary dispatcher, surprised no one when she chose a nice, safe desk job.
After standing patiently and waiting to be noticed for more than a minute, I cleared my throat. Birdie jumped in her chair, knocking over a coffee cup full of pencils and nearly sending herself on a quick trip to the floor. I started to step forward to help her, and paused as she grabbed the edge of the desk.
“Not going to fall?” I asked carefully.
“A-Agent Marchen!” she said, half gasping for air. “You startled me!”
“I got that when you tried to teach yourself how to fly,” I said, taking a careful step back, into my original position. “Are you okay now?”
“I am, yes. How long have you been standing there?”
“Not long.” I shook my head. “Have you heard anything from Sloane this morning? She hasn’t checked in for work, and we’re concerned about her.”
Birdie blinked guileless blue eyes behind the magnifying lenses of her glasses, and asked, “Did you try calling her at home?”
“This is Sloane we’re talking about. We decided that Dispatch would be less likely to invoke her undying wrath.”
That earned me a chirpy giggle. “I guess that’s true,” Birdie admitted. “How is she doing with her story? I know she’s been in abeyance for a long, long time now.”
The fact was, none of us knew exactly when Sloane’s exposure to the narrative had occurred. She predated every other member of the team, and given the spectrum’s ability to influence people’s genetic makeup—witness my coloring—there was no reason not to believe that it could keep someone frozen at a particular age if it really wanted to. “She’s Sloane,” I said, with a shrug. “She does her Sloane things, and we try not to encourage her to kill us. She’s mostly stopped threatening to jam Demi’s flute down her throat, so I guess she’s been having a good couple of weeks. Can you call her house now?”