“Does anyone else smell apples?” I asked faintly, swallowing the sudden urge to be sick.
“No,” said Sloane, her posture shifting into something predatory. She looked more like a fox or a wolf in human form than an actual human as she stepped over the threshold into the hall. She froze there, chin up, nostrils flexing as she scented the air. “I get baby powder, cookies, and arsenic. Don’t ask me how I know what arsenic smells like.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Jeff. “For reference, I can smell the powder and the cookies, but apart from that I smell leather. Fresh-tanned and supple.”
“All I smell’s cookies,” said Andy.
“That fits,” said Jeff. “The narrative may want you, but you aren’t naturally one of its possessions. It can’t control you the way that it can the rest of its toys.”
“Fuck that; I want to be a dentist,” said Sloane, and stalked down the hall, leaving the rest of us to follow. Which we did, without hesitation: Sloane might be unpleasant and bad-tempered, but in the years that she had been working with my team, she had never once put any of us intentionally in danger. The fact that she had entered the house meant that it was safe, and I clung to that thought as hard as I could as I moved to cover her.
Andy was the last one inside. The door slammed shut behind him. We all stopped and turned to watch as he tried the knob, first calmly, and then with increasing urgency.
“The damn thing’s stuck,” he finally reported.
“Somehow, that isn’t a surprise,” I said. I turned back to Sloane. “Find Birdie, and then find us a way out of here. I don’t feel like becoming a statistic tonight.”
“Didn’t you get the memo? You already are.” She started walking again, moving more cautiously now that she didn’t have an escape route waiting for her. At the end of the hall she paused, sniffing the air, and finally pushed open a swinging door, sticking her head inside. She leaned back to inform the rest of us, “Kitchen,” before stepping forward and vanishing.
“Dammit, Sloane,” I said, and followed her.
Sloane already had the light on by the time the rest of us joined her. Birdie’s kitchen was as homey and pleasant as the rest of the house. Given the circumstances, I would have felt more comfortable with stained Formica, or maybe something in an Addams Family “cobwebs and cleavers” motif. Instead, we got cookie jars shaped like strawberries and decorative salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like they spanned a period of about eighty years. There was a large freestanding butcher’s block in the center of the room. I paused, frowning, as I tried to remember where I’d seen that layout before.
Jeff got there first. “This is like a mirror image of Dr. Reynard’s kitchen,” he said. “Move the cupboards, change the décor a bit, and you’d be standing in the same room.”
“Yeah, except his kitchen had a back door,” said Sloane, prowling in a circle around the butcher’s block. “This one has a solid wall. Nowhere near as useful, unless one of you has been holding out on the fact that you’re actually a ghost.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” said Jeff, moving to examine the wall in question. “They’re just echoes of the narrative. They have no free will, and they certainly can’t be employed by the Bureau, much less ‘hold out’ on the living.”
“You’re like a walking Index sometimes,” said Sloane, and didn’t mean it as a compliment. She shot me a look. “See what you’re signing up for?”
“Shut it, Sloane,” I snapped. “If there’s no back door, how are we getting out of here? And where’s Birdie?”
“The smells were strongest in here,” said Sloane. “If she was anywhere in the house, it should have been this room.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Andy. “Split up and search?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Splitting up is how you die in situations like this one. But we should move on—Jeff? Did you find something?” He had started picking at the wallpaper, and was peeling it away from the wall in a long strip.
“Property damage always make me feel better, too,” said Sloane amiably.
“Henry, maybe you’d better come and have a look at this,” said Jeff, continuing to pull the wallpaper away. We all moved to cluster around him. The smell of apples grew stronger, and I saw the writing on the wall.
H
ELLO, MY PETS;
Y
OU CERTAINLY TOOK YOUR SWEET TIME GETTING HERE, DIDN’T YOU?
Y
OU SHOULD HAVE MOVED FASTER.
Y
OU SHOULD HAVE GUESSED MY NAME LONG AGO, AND HANDCUFFED ME TO A ROWAN TREE TO KEEP ME FROM TROUBLING YOU.
B
UT YOU DIDN’T, AND YOU DIDN’T, AND YOU BROUGHT ME SUCH A WONDERFUL TOY THAT I SIMPLY COULD NOT RESIST ANY LONGER.
T
HANK YOU FOR THAT.
I
PROMISE TO USE HER WELL IN THE STORY THAT’S TO COME.
AS YOUR REWARD, YOUR DEATHS WILL BE AS QUICK AND PAINLESS AS
I
CAN MAKE THEM.
I
LOVED YOU BEST OF ALL,
M
OTHER
G
OOSE
“Our dispatcher thinks she’s Mother Goose?” said Sloane, sounding baffled.
“Our dispatcher
is
Mother Goose,” corrected Jeff. Sloane turned to stare at him. He took a step back. “I am an elf, and you are a cruel sister, and Henry is Snow White. Why shouldn’t Birdie be Mother Goose?”
“Uh, because even I know that Mother Goose isn’t in the Index,” said Andy. “She can’t be something that doesn’t exist.”
“The Index was written by humans,” I said. “There can be holes.”
“Okay, normally, I love the ‘we work everything through by talking about it and then we all go out for lattes’ chick-flick vibe that you guys have going, but does anybody else feel like they’re standing in a trap arguing about whether or not the crazy bitch who put us here is delusional?” Sloane shook her head. “I, for one, vote for getting the fuck out of here and arguing about this shit later.”
“I agree,” I said. “Sloane, find us a way out.”
She grinned disturbingly and picked up the strawberry-shaped cookie jar. “I was waiting for permission.”
Whatever the narrative had allowed Birdie to do to the house might have locked the front door and removed the back door, but it couldn’t Sloane-proof the windows, especially not when Sloane was armed with a stolen cookie jar and a lot of free-floating aggression. She slammed the cookie jar against the picture window in the front room three times. On the third slam, the cookie jar shattered, and so did the window, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Sloane, and boosted herself onto the windowsill. The wind drifting in through the broken window smelled of green grass, and carried the distant sound of piping.
I barely grabbed the tail of Sloane’s shirt before she could jump down to the lawn.
Sloane froze. She didn’t turn to face me as she said, in a dangerous tone, “This ‘grabbing me’ bullshit is becoming a habit, Henry. It’s a bad one.”
“Don’t you hear that?”
Sloane stepped back down from the windowsill. I let go of her shirt. “No,” she said. “But I’m willing to listen.”
I pressed a finger to my lips, motioning for everyone to be silent, and indicated the broken window. We all went still, listening.
We didn’t have to listen for long. The sound of Demi’s pipes grew rapidly, until it seemed to fill the entire world with its sound. Sloane made an incoherent snarling noise, leaping for the windowsill again. This time, it was Andy who grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her chest and bodily restraining her as she snarled at the empty lawn.
“Jeff, what’s the song?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Then Demi herself appeared. Her uniform was gone, replaced by a pied harlequin’s outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Renaissance Faire. She was too far away for me to see her face, but she was turned toward us, and I was suddenly, horribly sure that she had known we were there all along.
“Let me
go
,” snarled Sloane.
“Demi!” I stepped closer to the window. “Put down the flute and come home, honey. We’re not mad at you. We’re here to rescue you.”
“I don’t think she wants rescuing,” said Andy, sounding horrified. Sloane stopped her struggles and just gaped. Jeff reached for my hand, and I let him take it, standing frozen as I watched an army of vermin pour out of the forest, taking up a position between us and the van. Raccoons, opossums, coyotes, owls and pigeons and songbirds and endless, endless rats seethed on the lawn, blocking it from view.
We were trapped.
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 280 (“Pied Piper”)
Status: IN PROGRESS
The four of us stood frozen in the frame of the broken window as Demi’s army of wildlife filled the yard. Their bodies packed the sidewalk and the street beyond as well, turning everything into a teeming mass of animal flesh and eyes that glittered in the starlight. The sound of Demi’s flute echoed over it all, shaping and directing the scene. The part of me that was still capable of analytical thought noted that she
did
have limitations: she couldn’t play to compel both us and the animals at the same time. Another, even smaller part of my mind reminded me that I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe Demi was leaving us alone because she wanted whatever was going to happen next to hurt as much as possible.
“Sloane?” I murmured. “You’re the closest thing we have to a brute squad. Think you can take on the entire cast of
Bambi
and get us to the van alive?”
“Alive, except for the ticks, fleas, and probably rabies?” Sloane hesitated as her gaze flicked back and forth across the crowd, assessing the odds. I started to hope we might have a chance. But then Sloane shook her head, expression briefly flickering into honest regret. “No. Best I can come up with is maybe Andy could throw one of us onto the roof of the van if the rest of us were willing to die to get him out onto the lawn to make the throw. Too many teeth, too many claws. We’re fucked.”
“In more ways than one,” said Jeff, sounding horrified. I spared a glance in his direction. He wasn’t looking at the yard anymore. His attention was reserved for the grandfather clock on the other side of the room, which he was regarding with open horror. The hands were set at five minutes to midnight. “Henry, we need to get out of here.”
“Well, if you have any ideas about how we can accomplish that, I’m all ears,” I said.
“You don’t understand. We
have
to get out of here.” He turned to me, pointing at the grandfather clock with one trembling hand. “That thing just started ticking.”
“Clocks do that,” said Sloane.
“So do bombs,” said Jeff.
That stopped the rest of us for a few precious seconds, and I nearly barked the order for Andy to go and check it out. Swallowing the words that would probably have seen us all blown straight to ever after, I asked, “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” Jeff said. “It’s not ticking at one beat per second. It’s a countdown that doesn’t tie exactly to the clock. Birdie set a trap for us.”
My chest tightened, and it felt suddenly difficult to breathe. I turned slowly back to the broken window and the animals clogging the yard, suddenly seeing them in a new light: they weren’t the sword. They were the shield. They were supposed to keep us inside long enough for the bomb in the clock to take care of everything. All we had to do was keep arguing, keep analyzing—keep doing all the things a field team was supposed to do when the story wasn’t actually swinging for their heads.
There was a way out of this. I could see it, if I stopped and allowed myself to be honest about my circumstances and what I was willing to pay to get us out of here alive. “In the kitchen,” I said, as much to myself as to the group, and then, louder: “Sloane.”
“Yeah?”
“Were there apples in the kitchen?” I had never eaten an apple. Not once in my life. It was too dangerous. No matter who gave me the forbidden fruit, there was always the chance that it would be somehow poisoned, and that this would be the thing that triggered my story.
Sloane paused, looking at me in surprise. Her amazement faded quickly into understanding, and she nodded. “I’ll be right back.” She turned and bolted for the hall, running as fast as her legs could carry her.
“Henry?” said Jeff. “What are you going to do?”
“Something I should probably have done a long time ago. I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen?” I turned my gaze back to the crowded lawn. Demi was still playing, but her music had lost the manic air it had initially possessed: she was just keeping the animals where they were, not ordering them to do anything else. All she needed to do was wait until the bomb inside the grandfather clock went off and did the wet work for her.
Andy stepped closer. I saw his frown out of the corner of my eye. “Are you planning to tell the rest of us exactly what you’re doing?”
“Not unless it works,” I said.
Footsteps behind me marked Sloane’s return, and her hand fell on my shoulder with the finality of a headsman’s axe. “Henry,” she said, and thrust her stolen apple under my nose. “Here.”
It was perfect. It couldn’t have been more perfect. I knew the varietal instantly: Lady Alice, whose pale pink flesh and rosy skin were prized among apple aficionados. “Know thy enemy,” that had always been my motto, and there wasn’t an apple in the world that I hadn’t tasted in my dreams.
I took it from her hand. “Did you poison this?” I asked, surprised to find that I felt only academic interest. Whether she had poisoned it or not, my next steps were finally clear. I wasn’t going to hold back.
“Maybe,” said Sloane. “There’s only one way to find out.”
“Isn’t that always the way,” I said, raising the apple to my mouth.
I think Jeff realized then what I was about to do. I heard him shout something. I heard Sloane snapping a response. Their words were too far away and too blurred by the sudden sound of crows crying against a winter sky for me to make them out. All that mattered was the rosy skin of the apple in my hand, and the crisp snapping sound my teeth made when they broke through it to the flesh beyond. My mouth filled with the taste of sweetness, and the world broke open around me, exposing the face of once upon a time.
The first bite of apple tasted like autumn incarnate, perfect and indescribable and somehow more nourishing than anything else I had tasted in my life. It was the first frost and the hint of snow, and it was what I had been waiting for my whole life, revealing every other meal I had ever eaten as dust and ashes. I closed my eyes as I chewed, swallowed, and took another bite, the possibility that Sloane had poisoned our salvation dismissed in the ecstasy of eating the apple.
The second bite tasted like blood on snow, like rose thorns and needles pricking the finger of a queen-to-be (and
that
was the answer to why Sleeping Beauties were so often the mothers of Snow Whites; it was so clear, it had always been so clear, I just needed to sink a little deeper into the story if I wanted to see it properly; both our stories began in needles and ended in slumber), like black crow wings spread wide to catch the winter winds. I chewed again, swallowed again, bringing the story a little closer to the heart of me.
I had no stepmother. I had no palace to flee from. That didn’t matter, that had never mattered, because this was the truth at the heart of the story: the girl, and the apple, and the broken glass around her.
Jeff was still shouting. I held up my free hand, signaling for him to be quiet, and miraculously, he obeyed. Maybe it was the fact that I reacted at all. Maybe it was relief at the fact that I was still enough myself to give orders. Maybe he was just confused. I raised the apple one last time. A final bite to buy myself the final act.
The third bite tasted like exotic poisons, like a glass coffin sitting lonely in the snow, and like a prince who never came. I choked a little as I forced it down, but in the end, down it went, and I opened my eyes on a world that was no longer quite the world that it had been only a few moments before.
The lawn was still choked with the bodies of the local wildlife, but they didn’t look like vermin to me now. Every one of them was a distinct individual, and I knew instantly that I would be able to recognize them all on sight for the rest of my life. Every squirrel, every songbird—they were all their own beasts. And if they were their own beasts, that meant that they didn’t have to belong to Demi.
They could belong to me instead.
I stepped up onto the windowsill, causing the nearest row of animals to fidget and snarl nervously. The remains of the apple slipped from my hand, forgotten, as I stepped down and onto the grass. I raised my head enough to catch a glimpse of Demi, still playing her flute at the rear of the crowd. She looked nervous. That was good. She
should
be looking nervous. Turning my attention back to the animals, I smiled as beneficently as I knew how, and I began to sing.
The song didn’t have words, exactly; it was more the equivalent of Demi’s piping, all sound and feeling, going on forever if that was what it had to do. I’ve never been able to carry a tune in a bucket, and that didn’t seem to matter. Maybe animals hear music differently than humans do. The ones nearest to me stopped fidgeting. Then they began inching closer, eyes going wide and glossy with what could only be described as adoration. Still singing, I motioned for the other agents to follow me.
“What the hell is going on?” demanded Andy.
“She’s gone active,” said Jeff. He sounded utterly broken, and I wished I could stop singing long enough to explain my choice to him, to make him understand that this didn’t have to be the end of anything, not even my career with the Bureau. Field team leaders weren’t supposed to be actives, but it had happened before. Deputy Director Brewer would understand, provided I could bring the rest of my team home alive and relatively unharmed.
“Why the hell did she do that?” Now Andy just sounded confused.
“To save us,” said Sloane. She pushed past me, walking forward until the animals began getting restless again. Then she stopped, looking back, and offered me her hand. “Come on, Henry. Don’t fight it, but don’t let it take you either. You’re stronger than this. You’ve been putting up with my shit for years. That’s more backbone than most Snows will ever show.”
I glared at her as I kept singing, moving forward one cautious step at a time. The taste of apple was strong in my mouth, and half of me wanted to run away from the girl with the red and black hair, recognizing her as an enemy. The rest of me recognized that impulse as belonging to the sort of Snow White I’d always feared becoming, and shoved it fiercely to the back of my brain. My story might have started with a spoiled little princess who was scared of her own shadow, but it wasn’t going to end that way.
A hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see Jeff standing there, expression grave.
“We need to go faster,” he said. “The clock is about to strike midnight.”
I nodded my understanding and picked up my pace. As I did, I started to sing a new song, asking my animal friends to do me a great service, one that would never be forgotten—one for which they would be mourned and memorialized always.
Demi was still playing, and maybe that was good enough for the animals who were close to her and her flute, but I was newly activated and in my element, here in front of a little house on the edge of the forest. Birdie had planned for a great many contingencies when she put this trap together. She clearly hadn’t figured on my breaking the one rule I’d held sacred since I was a little girl: never activate your story. Never let the narrative take you.
But it was the narrative that had changed things. If it was going to target us actively, I was going to fight back. And if you’re supposed to fight fire with fire, then it made sense to fight narrative with narrative.
The animals began pouring past us, leaping and hopping and crawling through the broken window, moving slowly at first, and then with increasing urgency as I pushed onward toward the street. Sloane walked in front of me, the animals flowing past her and joining their fellows in the house. They were packing their bodies in so tight that some of them had already probably been crushed, and still they kept on doing as I asked, forcing their way inside.
We were almost to the sidewalk when the bomb went off, filling the air with a concussive bang. If not for the animals muffling it, the blast would have killed us. As it was, it came with a burst of hot air that flung us all forward onto the grass. Almost all—Sloane somehow turned the push she got from the blast into momentum, running straight toward the stunned-looking Demi. I pressed my face down into the lawn as the second blast hit from inside the house—
Didn’t spot the second bomb, Jeff, you silly boy—
and so I didn’t see Sloane make impact. I just heard Demi scream. Then everything was raining fire, and I found that I had more pressing concerns to worry about, like losing consciousness.
Everything was white, and cold, and frozen.
I was standing in the middle of a vast forest, the bare black limbs of the twisted trees that surrounded me reaching up toward the frigid winter sky. I turned, one hand going to my gun, and was relieved beyond measure when I found it strapped in its accustomed place; I was still armed. More, I was still dressed like myself, in a plain black suit and sensible shoes, not magically stuffed into some ornate ball gown that would never have survived a minute in any natural forest.
“Hello?” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, but the wind caught and amplified it, hurtling it into the trees until it echoed back at me from all directions, like the ringing of a cloister bell. “Is anyone there?”
“We’re always here,” said a voice from behind me.
I swallowed a frustrated groan. “Is this one of those idiotic clichés where I turn around and see myself in the mirror of my own story, and the narrative tries to tell me that this was my destiny all along? Because I have shit to do, and if I’m not dead, I’d really like to skip the DVD extras and get back to my team before Sloane strangles Demi or something.”
“It’s not all about you, Henrietta Marchen, and it’s not all about the narrative, either,” said another voice. While I’d been able to mistake the first voice for my own, this one was deeper and sweeter, with a Nova Scotia accent that I couldn’t have mimicked on my best day. “Now turn around, and don’t make us come over there.”
I was standing in a frozen forest, lost in the grip of what must have been a fever dream invoked by my own awakening story. I didn’t really have that many options.