“So maybe we need to look at this from the opposite direction,” I said. “What if Dr. Reynard had nothing to do with either manifestation?”
“What are you—” began Sloane.
She was cut off by Jeff’s return, with Andy close behind him. “Demi had four more files ready for us, and I’ve scanned everything in,” said Jeff, sitting down at his desk and beginning to type rapidly. The flat-screen monitor we were supposed to use to project relevant case files came to glowing life. A moment later, names started appearing: some highlighted in red, others highlighted in green. “The red names are patients of Dr. Reynard’s who can be connected directly to recent memetic incursions. We’ve got our Sleeping Beauty and our Goldilocks; we also have a Snow White from the next district over, two of the Three Little Pigs, a Big Bad Wolf, a Goldtree, and a Boy Without Fear.”
“How far back did you go?”
“Six months,” said Jeff grimly. “The names highlighted in green are people who had been seeing Dr. Reynard up until six weeks ago, only to discontinue their sessions with little or no warning.”
“That’s not weird,” said Sloane. “I’ve dropped most of my headshrinkers cold.”
“Yes, but you didn’t drop off the grid immediately afterward.” Jeff shook his head. “None of these people have been seen or heard from since they left Dr. Reynard’s care.”
“So they could have all become active narrative manifestations for all that we know,” I said. “Is there any way to track them?”
“I’ve put Dispatch on it,” said Andy. “They’re better with this sort of legwork than we are.”
“And none of this gets us any closer to knowing who killed Dr. Reynard,” said Sloane. “We’re wasting our time.”
“No, we’re not,” I corrected, as gently as I could. Under the circumstances, being rude to Sloane was not only unnecessary but also potentially suicidal. “We would never have found these connected stories if he hadn’t been killed. He might have been able to help you with
your
story, but we would have learned nothing new about all these other stories.”
“So we assume that whoever killed him either didn’t want Sloane to get help or that they didn’t want her talking to him and maybe learning his secrets,” said Jeff. “Who do we have that fits that profile?”
There was a moment of silence before I said, defeated, “No one. We have no one.”
“But we have a lot of names,” said Andy. “We have a lot of resources. Whoever did this, we’ll get them.”
“Are you sure?” asked Sloane.
Andy didn’t answer.
Cleanup had done an excellent job on Dr. Reynard’s office, removing every sign that someone had been killed there. Even the bloodstains on the blotter were gone, replaced by clean white paper. I stood in the doorway as Sloane paced around the edges of the room, running her fingers over the spines of the elegantly arranged leather books and scowling at nothing. The air still smelled of apples to me, but only faintly, like the distant memory of a dream.
Dishes clattered in the kitchen as Jeff and Andy continued their methodical search of the property. We’d have to call for cleanup again when we were done—otherwise, whoever eventually “discovered” the empty property would assume that there had been a robbery and jump to the conclusion that Dr. Reynard had met with a bad end faster than we wanted them to. Every clatter was punctuated by the croak of the crows, who were still roosting all over the house. They’d come flapping inside as soon as we opened the doors, and none of us had really put much effort into shooing them away. This was their home, in a sense, and with Dr. Reynard gone, we had no authority to make them leave.
“Sloane? Are you sure there’s anything to find in here?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “He died in here. He was a Clever Fox. There’s something to find here.”
I frowned. “Not following your logic here, Sloane. Help me out before I order you to go and search the attic.”
“Foxes den. This whole house is nice—nicer than yours, that’s for damn sure—but this room is the one he set up as his den. Anything that was really important to him would have been kept in here, where he could keep an eye on it.”
I decided to ignore her dig at my living situation as I said, “We already found something important that was kept in here. His patient files.”
“He worked with people who’d been touched by the narrative. He knew his specialty, and he knew it well enough to get referrals for people like Alicia Connors, who didn’t even know that she was on the verge of turning into a story.” Sloane kept pacing. “None of the files we found said ‘Sloane is about five inches away from going full-wicked,’ or ‘Henry is destined for a cold glass grave.’ There’s another set.”
“… oh.” It made perfect sense. I was just so accustomed to no one outside the Bureau writing down anything about the Index that I hadn’t been able to see it.
“Yeah, ‘oh.’” Sloane kept walking.
I stepped away from the doorway and into the room, walking until I was standing just in front of the desk. Sloane’s circuit was taking her around the perimeter over and over again, an endless loop. I followed her once around the room with my eyes before letting my gaze drift upward to the top of the bookshelves. They were ornately carved, showing a clever fox going about his daily rounds. Here he was in a garden, gamboling among the pumpkins; here he was chasing a rabbit; here he was giving a rock to a crow in exchange for an interesting stick.
A crow. My eyes widened, and I ran to the door, calling, “Jeff! Bring me a crow!”
Jeff’s head appeared around the edge of the kitchen doorframe. “I beg your pardon?”
“We need a crow in Dr. Reynard’s office. Get me a crow.”
“You’re not serious.”
I glared at him.
“You
are
serious. Be right there.” Jeff withdrew. I did the same.
Sloane was still pacing. She glanced my way and asked, “You have an idea, or do you just want to see Jeff get his eyes pecked out? I’m good with either one, I’d just like to know.”
“I have an idea,” I said, and walked back to the desk.
“That’s probably the better option,” said Sloane.
We waited in silence for a minute—her pacing, me standing perfectly still—until Jeff appeared in the doorway with a handful of Wheat Thins, walking backward as he made his way into the office. A glossy black crow walked after him, pausing only to pick up the Wheat Thins that Jeff was dropping. It had somehow managed to stack five of the square crackers in its beak at once, and was going for a sixth when it saw me, and stopped.
“Hello,” I said.
The crow bent forward, carefully placing its precious cargo on the carpet and covering it with one claw before croaking a cautious greeting. I didn’t understand it, quite, but the meaning was clear, at least to me. Maybe that meant I was skirting up against my story again. I had known that was a risk when I came back here. Demi had been left behind for a reason. Having an ATI active again would just increase the odds of my beginning a downhill slide.
“We need your help,” I said. “Dr. Reynard hid something in this room. We have to find it. I think you know where it is. He was clever. You have wings.”
The crow studied me for a moment more, cocking its head to regard me with first one eye and then the other. Then, with a great rush of wings, it launched itself from the office floor and flew to the bookshelf with the carving of the fox and the crow. It landed there, balancing precariously on the edge of a leather-bound book, and pecked at the carven fox. There was a soft grinding noise, and the panel on the opposite side of the room—the one showing the fox safe at home in his den—slid open.
“Henry, there’s a whole set of files in there,” said Sloane, her statement followed by the sound of a chair being dragged across the carpet. I didn’t turn to face her. I was busy watching the crow.
It looked at me and cawed, just once, like a warning. Then it took off, wings flapping wildly, and flew out of the room. It didn’t even pause to collect its pile of Wheat Thins.
“What do you have, Sloane?” asked Jeff.
“It’s all the files about Dr. Reynard’s patients as they connected to the narrative,” she said. I finally turned. She was balancing on the back of the desk chair, a file folder crammed up underneath her arm and another held open in her hands. “He kept really scrupulous notes. Everything’s here.”
“Everything except who wanted him dead,” I said.
“So we still don’t know,” said Jeff.
“There’s a letter,” said Sloane, a bit smugly.
I stared at her. “You could have led with that, you know. What does it say?”
Sloane took a deep breath, holding up a piece of paper, and read, “‘Well done, my poppets. You have found what I have hidden, and for that, I applaud you’—what, like he did that good a job?”
“Just read, Sloane,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and continued, “‘These are dangerous days. Trust no one. I have erred on the side of trust, and look what it has gotten me. You must not trust the goose-girl, for she will lead you foul. The stories are changing. The danger is growing. Your own house is not safe.’” Sloane scowled. “That’s where it ends. He doesn’t say who killed him.”
“No, but he gave us more information than we had when we started, and that’s something.” I shook my head. “We have to be careful with this. Very, very careful.”
“Why?” demanded Sloane.
“Because someone knew you were coming here—he was killed right before your appointment, and we can’t ignore that—and someone knew about his patients. But
we didn’t tell people
you were seeking outside help. The only ones who knew were within the Bureau.”
Jeff looked at me, horrified. “Are you saying that someone on the inside had him killed?”
“I’m saying that we need to move very, very carefully right now,” I said. “If someone from the Bureau had him killed, then someone from the Bureau knew about how many of his patients were going active. Maybe …”
“Someone was encouraging it,” said Sloane grimly.
I nodded. “We have a mole,” I said.
The three of us stood in silence after that, just looking at each other. In that cold, cruel instant, it seemed that there was nothing else to say.
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 122E (“The Three Billy Goats Gruff”)
Status: ACTIVE
Andrew Robinson generally thought of himself as a reasonable man. Sure, he made his living chasing fairy tales through city streets and trying to keep wicked witches from taking over the world, but apart from that, he was pretty much a normal guy. He worked hard all day and then went home to his loving husband, who was surprisingly tolerant given the circumstances.
And none of this could explain why Andy was currently following a goat across a rickety wooden bridge that should have been condemned and torn down years before. None of it even came close.
The goat—a big, shaggy-haired male, or buck, or whatever the hell it was you called a boy goat—stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked back at Andy. Tail swishing tauntingly, it bleated once before trotting briskly to the other side of the creek. It felt like a dare to Andy. He’d never been one to resist a dare. Teeth grinding together, he launched himself across the bridge, hands already outstretched to grab the damn goat by the horns.
The troll that lunged up from beneath the bridge had his hands outstretched too. And he got to Andy before Andy got to the other side.
“Agent Robinson, report,” I snapped, releasing the button on my walkie-talkie as I pulled it away from my mouth. Only silence answered me. No, not quite silence—the Peter Pan that Sloane was trying to talk off the roof of the apartment building was shouting something at her, his weedy, prepubescent voice shredded into wordless tatters by the wind.
The wind found no such purchase with Sloane. “And
I’m
telling
you
that Neverland isn’t real!” she shouted. “You can’t fucking fly, kid—the laws of physics are for everybody!”
I glanced toward the narrow stretch of lawn between the building and the street. The firemen were trying to position themselves, looking like some kind of silent movie cliché as they moved their portable trampoline from place to place. They all looked terrified, and I couldn’t blame them, even if they didn’t see this as anything more complicated than a potential jumper. Pans are tricky things. He couldn’t fly—probably—but he might prove surprisingly maneuverable once he was in the air, and that could make the difference between hitting a soft, pliable surface and slamming face-first into the pavement.
Not that it would make all that much difference. If he actually jumped, he’d go fully active, sinking deep into the embrace of his own personal story. Some actives could be recruited to the Bureau, like Demi and Jeff had been. Others …
No Pan has ever survived past puberty. When their bodies start changing, they start looking for the rope and the razor blades. There are some betrayals of the flesh that they simply aren’t designed to endure.
Sloane wasn’t my first choice for a hostage negotiation with a high-strung preteen who wanted to throw himself off a roof to prove a point. For the moment, though, she was the best I had.
I raised my walkie-talkie again. “Goddammit, Andy, you’re killing me out here. Where
are
you? I need a status report, and I need it five minutes ago!”
Our would-be Pan shouted something else at Sloane.
“Oh
yeah
?! Never grow up
this
!” she shouted back, and something black fluttered down from the rooftop. For a horrified second, I thought the boy had jumped. Then the black thing landed on one of the firemen, and I realized that the answer was slightly more mundane, if no less horrifying: Sloane had thrown her shirt off the roof. Her bra landed on the grass next to a fireman’s feet a moment later.
My own story is in a tenuous sort of abeyance, frozen in time and space until I either find a way to avert it completely or unlock the door of my personal hell and let it flood inside. I can’t always feel the narrative moving around me like Sloane does. And, that being said, I would have had to be blind, deaf, and locked in a lead-lined container not to feel the memetic incursion that had been feeding our Peter Pan shatter around me. I raised my walkie-talkie for the third time.
“Pan is neutralized,” I said. “I repeat, Pan is neutralized. Sloane showed the kid her tits. I don’t know how we’re going to write this up for the official report. Is there anybody
there
?”
Only silence answered me.
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327A (“Hansel and Gretel”)
Status: ACTIVE
According to the maps of the area, the small patch of forest that had been left behind when the new housing development went in was no more than an acre in diameter, bounded on all sides by civilization. A road ran to the east, houses loomed to the south and north, and a small park had been constructed to the west, as a way of tempting families with young children to move into one of the shiny new houses in need of occupants. Demi knew all that. She’d seen the maps with her own two eyes before she’d agreed to go on this little scouting trip by herself, and she
knew
how small the woods really were. There was no way she could be lost. There was just no way.
All that assurance didn’t help her figure out where she was, or how she’d been able to walk so far without seeing any lights or hearing any sounds of traffic. But the thought helped a little, as long as she kept it firmly at the front of her mind and refused to let anything come even close to budging it.
Her grip on her flute was almost as firm as her grip on the thought that she was safe, she wasn’t lost, she was just … turned around somehow, on this domesticated little patch of wilderness. She’d take another step and everything would open up, and she’d be found again.
She took another step. A branch cracked under her foot, and a child laughed somewhere in the darkness up ahead. Demi’s head snapped up, her fingers clenching even tighter on the flute.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. “Hannah? Gregory? Is that you? My name is Demi Santos. I’m with the police, and I’m here to take you home.”
The laughter came again, somehow managing to sound closer and farther away at the same time. Maybe it was a trick of the local acoustics, part of the same twisting terrain that made this forest feel so much bigger than it could possibly be. Or maybe it was a trick of the narrative.
Feeling increasingly like she was in miles over her head, Demi took another step forward, toward the source of the laughter. “Your parents are very worried about you,” she called.
Not worried enough to look at the names “Hannah” and “Gregory” and think about a fairy tale about twins dumb enough to get themselves eaten by a witch,
she thought, and promptly reddened with shame. Why should any happy new parents have harbored thoughts like that for even a second? Everyone knew that fairy tales weren’t real.
Everyone except for the people who had to fight those fairy tales every day in order to keep the rest of the world happily ignorant, that is.
“I hate my job,” Demi muttered, and ran into the dark, chasing the distant and receding sound of laughter.
The forest was smaller than it seemed. She’d come out the other side soon enough.
She had to.
Sloane retrieved her shirt from the red-faced fireman, pulling it over her head without bothering to put her bra back on. “Pretty quick thinking, huh, Snowy?” she said, walking toward me and pushing her arms through the sleeves at the same time. Apparently mistaking my expression for awe, she said, “I know, I can walk, talk,
and
dress myself without tripping over my own feet. I went through a barfly phase a few decades ago. Disco was fun, but wow did I have to search a lot of parking lots for my pants.”
“First, don’t call me ‘Snowy,’” I said, briefly closing my eyes. It didn’t help. I opened them again. “Second, I never want to hear about you looking for your pants again. Third, what in the world possessed you to
flash
a Peter Pan? You could have given the kid a heart attack! Or made him jump right off the damn roof!”
“But I didn’t, and I didn’t, and if he’d jumped, the firemen were all ready and waiting to catch him.” She folded her arms and scowled at me. “I thought you’d be pleased. I found a nonviolent solution. Not very wicked of me.”
“You showed your breasts to an eleven-year-old boy.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t let him touch them, so it was just PG-13. His parents can sue us later.” Sloane gave a one-shouldered shrug and frowned. “This shouldn’t be upsetting you this much. What the fuck crawled up your ass and died?”
“I can’t raise Andy on the walkie,” I said, gesturing with the offending piece of technology. “Demi’s not responding either.”
Sloane shrugged again. “So they’re busy. I wouldn’t have picked up if you’d called me two minutes ago. Priorities, remember?”
I glared at her. She grinned.
“You’re the one who told me to fight my story by being more upbeat,” she said. “It seems to come with the awesome bonus of pissing you off. I’m going to be upbeat forever.”
“It’s not your story I’m worried about,” I muttered, and glanced toward the lawn, where our erstwhile Pan—now wrapped in a blanket, his eyes tracking Sloane’s every movement—was being enfolded in his mother’s loving arms.
We normally mop up at most one memetic incursion per month per field team. The rest of the time, we’re doing paperwork, visiting the range, and recovering from the stress of those few hours spent in the field. The Aarne-Thompson Index is nothing to mess around with, and an agent who isn’t at the top of his or her game is an agent looking to become a statistic. With the number of incursions climbing in recent months—shattering all previous records—it was starting to feel like we were on the edge of an epidemic.
And then the clock literally struck midnight one last time, and “on the edge” became smack-dab in the middle.
According to my watch, it was a little after eight o’clock at night, twenty hours since the first report from Dispatch had scrambled the field teams out of the office and onto the hunt. In that time, we’d received reports of no less than seventeen memetic incursions taking place within the same metropolitan area. They ranged from the common outbreak events, like Sleeping Beauties and Beautiful Vassilisas, all the way to the rare—a Donkeyskin at the Westfield Mall. There were even a few that were modern enough to barely belong to our agency, like Sloane’s averted Peter Pan. All the field teams had been forced to split up in order to deal with the sheer scope of the problem. Sloane and I were only still together because agents with activated tale types officially categorized as “evil” weren’t allowed out in the field alone.
As if there was any such thing as a “good” fairy tale. Even the best and brightest of stories leaves too many victims in its wake to be anything but evil in my book.
The walkie-talkie crackled before Jeff spoke, asking, “Henry? Sloane? Is anyone there?” Our normally calm archivist sounded like he was on the verge of a complete meltdown. I wanted to join him more than anything.
But there would be time for that later. “This is Agent Marchen,” I said, as I brought the walkie-talkie to my lips. “Official channels, Agent Davis. Agent Winters is with me.”
“Sorry—I forgot.” He didn’t sound sorry. “Dispatch just called me. They said that the Peter Pan incursion has been officially averted, and that they’ll be sending a cleanup team as soon as one comes free.”
“What do you mean, ‘as soon as one comes free’?” I asked. “We have twice as many cleanup teams as we do field teams. Why can’t they send one
now
?”
“Because they’ve all been dispatched already.” Jeff still didn’t sound sorry, but he did sound tired—more tired than I had ever heard him. “The good news continues, I’m afraid.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Lay it on me.”
“Dispatch has just reported a four-ten three blocks from your current location. You need to respond, and stop the subject before he or she can find something sharp to prick a finger on.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said grimly. “Hurry.”
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 503 (“The Shoemaker and the Elves”)
Status: ACTIVE
Jeffrey Davis, agent, archivist, and very, very frightened man, lowered his walkie-talkie and tried to keep focusing his eyes on the screen of the laptop computer that kept him in contact with headquarters. He was the team’s only channel to Dispatch, and on a night like tonight—a night that should have been impossible, based on all previous behaviors of the narrative—they needed him more than ever. And he was going to keep on telling himself that until he believed it, just like he was going to keep telling himself that he’d drawn the short straw through pure chance, and not because the narrative wanted to keep him exactly where he was.
Jeff had never been a very good liar, and now, when his sanity might well depend on his ability to spin a decent falsehood, he found the skill deserting him completely.
The sound of tiny nails being hammered into good, solid wood echoed from the van behind him, tickling his nerves and making his hands itch to start doing something
real
, something that mattered more than typing strings of meaningless words into a computer. You couldn’t wear words; you couldn’t slip them onto your feet and walk a mile in them, knowing that no sharp rocks or unexpected brambles would pierce your tender flesh. There was no
craftsmanship
in words.
“That is not true,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I am an archivist. I am a librarian. I collect words because words are the truest and longest-lasting craft in the world. My books will last longer than any pair of shoes.”
Even shoes made of lead?
The whisper used his own voice, which made it all the harder to ignore. He’d been hearing it since he was a teenager. It hadn’t been this loud in years.
Or iron? Seven pairs of iron shoes, that’s what a princess needs if she wants to find her husband, the hedgehog, and who will make them for her? No cobbler could make such needful things of such base materials; they need help. They need
your
help …