There Will Be Lies (35 page)

But look what I have survived.

Like Mark believed, Coyote, with that iron cage: he believed it would cause him pain, and who knows, maybe it even would have, if he had touched it knowingly.

But it didn’t hurt him when he didn’t know he was touching it.

The spell of telling children what to do: that is what the Crone is doing to me, I realise; she is telling me to eat the heart, telling my hands, only she is doing it in some way that doesn’t involve speaking, some older way, and because I was thinking like a child, because I was believing I couldn’t stop her, it worked.

I don’t believe you any more, I say. I don’t believe anything you say. I don’t believe you can force me to do this.

The knife trembles in my hand.

Nonsense, says the Crone. I can make you do anything. I can –

No, I say. No, you can’t. And it’s true. The knife and fork remain
motionless in my hands. I am not even having to struggle to hold them like that. Mark told me, I say, he told me I was an adult, and now I know why he told me.

She snarls. Curse him, she says. I will feast on his entrails.

He’s dead, I say. You showed me, on your embroidery – him falling from the bridge.

She nods quickly. Oh, yes.

And I think: No, you idiot, you are believing again. What if he isn’t dead at all? Just like in those books, in the Flagstaff store, what if he can come back? What if I manage to kill the Crone, and rescue the Child somehow, and he
can
make it rain again?

I push my chair a little back from the table.

Stay right there, says the Crone.

No, I say. And I stand up.

The Crone’s face is twisted into a mask of anger. How dare you disobey me!

Shut up, I say.

Blood drains from her skin; she is white with shock. Nobody speaks to –

How do I free the Child? I say. How do I break the ice?

You can’t, says the Crone, sneering.

I bet I can.

She shakes her head, but I don’t believe her, so I begin to turn, to leave her behind and return to the grass outside, to the prison of ice. If I can hold firm against her spell, then who knows what magic I can work?

Maybe I can break the ice with my mind.

Oh no, says the Crone as I move. If you will not eat the heart, I must kill you. I cannot let you leave me.

Your magic doesn’t work on –

But then she draws a dagger from the folds of her clothing. It is literally like something from a fairy tale – shiny, tapering to an incredibly fine point, vicious looking. It’s like it was made for cutting out hearts. Then I see a streak of blood on it, and I know it
was
used for that. Recently.

You are still unarmed, she says. Unless you count that thing in your hand. But that’s not a knife. Not like this. I will have slit your throat before you even raise it to defend yourself.

She moves towards me, still with that surprising grace, like her body wastes no energy at all, like her every step is precisely calibrated, economical, and she is raising the blade.

Time turns to ice; invisible, solid.

I reach for the feather and pull it out.

Please, says the Crone. Eagle has no power here. But is that a shiver of fear in the smallest muscle beside her eye?

No, it’s not, because she’s still coming forward. She lifts the blade up high, and it flashes through the air as she brings it down, hard, towards me, stabbing me.

For the second time in like ten minutes I am about to die.

Shit, I think.

The Crone swings the blade, its edge flashing in the air. For a moment, the weirdest thing: she has my face, she’s me, and then she’s the Crone again, my (mother).

But then I remember something else: something about fairy tales. How the Crone always brings about her own downfall, inadvertently. Like in
Hansel and Gretel
, they trick her into looking in the oven, and she ends up pushed in there, broiled alive.

I don’t have to eat her heart. But I can still stop it. And she has given me the way to do it.

I look down at the pulsing thing on the plate, and then, very deliberately, I stab the knife in my hand down, right into the centre of it, as hard as I can.

The heart bursts – blood rains over me, hot and sticky. The Crone stops fractions of a second from taking my head with the dagger – doesn’t just stop moving, like of her own accord, but
is stopped
, like a film frozen on a single frame; her foot is up and by all logic of gravity she should fall forward on her face, but she hangs there, immobile. The knife shimmers, still, the light from the fire playing on it like waves.

I think for a moment: She’s going to explode, or something.

But she doesn’t. Nothing happens at all.

I don’t move, for a while. Then I get up and touch her. She is cold and hard, like stone. A statue defying physics.

I have killed the Crone, I think. I have zero point zero feelings about it. It’s like I might not actually have feelings again, ever. Slowly, I go to the broken door, and walk out into the corridor. I keep glancing behind me, thinking she’s going to pop up, and be like,
Ha!
, I’m a Crone, or did you forget?

But she doesn’t – she stays dead. Or frozen. Or whatever.

I go through the big main door, and out on to the dead grass. I feel invincible, like I’m walking on air. I am the Maiden, and I killed the Crone.

Then I realise something.

I can still hear crying.

I walk away from the castle, back towards the ravine, half hoping that with the Crone dead the box of ice will have melted, just like that.

It hasn’t.

It’s still sitting there, gleaming in the permanent starlight. And the Child inside it, I see as I approach, standing now, hands against the ice, crying out for me.

I walk forward. My heart is heavy in my chest. The Crone is gone but what about the Child?

What am I supposed to do about the Child?

I am at the little ice castle now, a miniature in light, in crystal, of the dark castle behind me. The Child looks up at me, banging her little fists on the wall of ice impotently. I look around me, desperately, hoping for Coyote, hoping to see him climbing up from the ravine to help me.

But he doesn’t come.

Maybe this time he is really dead, and is never coming back.

The Child’s cries are pins through my whole body. Twisting. I reach out again for the ice and hammer it with the side of my hand – instantly, pain explodes down my arm, impact and coldness rolled into one sharp bolt of agony.

OK, I think.

OK, change the plan. I remember the cottage in the castle, the idea of belief. I think to myself: Believe you can do this. Believe it. I look right into the Child’s enormous eyes and I steel my will.

I believe that this ice is going to melt, I think.

I think that this ice is not here.

It’s like when I was a kid, and I thought that if I concentrated hard enough I could make a book fall from my desk – I tense my mind, try to force the ice through sheer power of belief to break, to melt away.

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t and I can’t take it any more.

Screw this, I think.

I kick out, start to rain blows on the thing, with my hands and feet, it hurts like you can’t believe, every nerve in me taut and resonating like wire, transmitting pain like white noise, pain that fuzzes everything else – the sound of the Child, the darkness around me, the ravine – into nothingness.

I keep going, shouting, cursing, willing the thing to break under my barrage of blows.

My hands are bleeding.

My foot may be broken.

Eventually, my movements slow. I can’t go on – I’m exhausted, and wiped out by the burning cold of the ice prison. I slump against
it, still on my feet but only just, crying now too, overwhelmed. My head rests on the roof of the structure, burning my cheek, but I don’t care. I have come all this way, I have killed the Crone, and now I’m here and I can see the Child there on the other side of the thin ice wall, but I can’t get through to her.

Slowly, I reach out my hands, and put them on the ice, where the Child has hers, so that we are almost touching each other, palm to palm. I look into her eyes, her desperate eyes, her tear-filled eyes, and I cry even harder.

I’m so sorry, I think. I’m so sorry. I can’t get to you.

I’m so –

Hands.

Hands on my shoulders, shaking me, invisible hands, gripping, shaking, and the Dreaming disappears and I am –

In the climbing store, standing in the aisle. The counter guy is obviously back from his smoke break – I can smell the tobacco almost before I register anything else, and then I process his face, his eyes looking into mine with concern; he has long dirty white hair and a cute face, maybe twenty.

He is also holding my shoulders; it was him shaking me, I realise.

I blink at him and he whisks his hands away, quickly.

Can I help you?
he says.
Are you OK?

What?
I say with my mouth.

You were … I don’t know. Having a fit or something. Kicking and punching and stuff. Then you stopped
.

Oh.

So
…
you need anything? Are you … I don’t know, epileptic or something?
He glances down at my CAM Walker, he’s maybe figuring me for someone who was in an accident and has a head injury. Maybe.

I just want to run out of there, run as fast as the CAM Walker will let me, but I know that will only make him more suspicious, so I force myself to look right at him, and shake my head.

I’m OK
, I say.
Honestly. Just … letting out some frustration
.

I can see that he’s not convinced. My warped, deaf-person vowels are presumably not helping. At the same time, like most people, he’s not going to blatantly go against what I say.
You don’t want me to call anyone?
he says.

No
.

He frowns.
Let me help you to a seat, at least
.

I nod. I had better let him sit me down, go through the motions of recovering from some passing fugue type thing.

He leads me to the desk, where he lowers me into a surprisingly comfortable office-style chair.

I was watching you
, he says. He gestures to a CCTV screen below the desk, I hadn’t noticed it. Black-and-white footage, grainy. Old-school style.

I nod, like, OK.

You stood in the aisle for, like, a half-hour, he says. With like camming wedges and stuff. I thought about calling an ambulance, like you’d had a stroke or something
.

Inside I’m thinking:

WTF? I was in THE DREAMING. I wasn’t standing in the store for a half-hour. Was I?

Was I?

I realise he’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

Just
…
came in here to think
, I say slowly.
Problems with my mom
.

For the first time he smiles.
Figures
, he says.
Well, it’s a free country. I mean, you wanna stand in a climbing store looking at some stuff, that’s cool with me
.

Good
, I say.

You don’t want it, though?
he says. He has cute dimples, actually. Faint marks where I guess an eyebrow stud used to be.

I frown at him.
Sorry?

The stuff – the rope, the cams, whatever. I mean, you just stood there holding it and then you put it all back on the shelves. So you don’t want the climbing gear?

I look down at my hands. I did? I have literally no recollection of putting the stuff back on the shelves.

Oh
, I say.
No
. I pause.
I don’t climb
, I say, enunciating as clearly as I can.

He looks at me like I’m mental. That was a mistake, I think. A rookie mistake.

Sorry for being weird
, I say.
I’ll get out of here; you don’t have to worry about me
.

He is still looking at me oddly and I curse the weird way my speech sounds, to someone else it probably does sound like something has gone wrong in my brain, a stroke or concussion or something. But I hold his gaze and eventually he shrugs.
Whatever
, he says.
You got your thing, I got mine
.

I nod.

You’re sure you’re OK, though? You don’t want me to, like, call someone?

What does he figure? That it’s the head injury thing? That I’m mentally ill and had a breakdown? That I’m in recovery and need to call my sponsor? I don’t know, but at least he’s not adding me up with the whole child abduction story that I know is playing big on the news.

No
, I say.

I smile at him, a little unconvincingly, I think, and make for the door. I am conscious of the phone in my backpack, the burner my fake mom gave me, and I have an idea of what to do with it. Then I think of something. I was going to use my cell, that was why I asked Carla for it, but now it occurs to me that the FBI has probably
scanned my SIM, or whatever, they’ll pick up a trace if I use it, and that’s no good.

I turn.

Wait
, I say.
Borrow your cell?
I’m trying to use as few words as I can.

He spreads his hands. Sure. He hands me an old Motorola, a flip phone; I didn’t know people still had these things.

Now.

Now.

Now I want you to think about something, before I tell you what I do next.

This is what I want you to think about: one of those women whose husbands beat them, over and over, and every time, they end up forgiving them, they take them back, because they love them, because they think, I don’t know, that this time things are going to change. The ones who actually get angry if their friends try to help. We’ve all seen the ads on TV.

Picture her: dirty hair, a bruise on her cheek, an expression of anger, hurt, sadness, but also forgiveness, complicating her face. She is basically looking bummed but like it’s her own fault she’s bummed. She is a victim, but she loves the man who hurts her, she truly loves him.