Ghost of Doors (City of Doors) (10 page)

"Marie?" More footsteps. "Marie, I'm coming." He felt along the wall for the light switch and pressed it as soon as he found it. It clicked and a tired light bulb suspended on a cord like the freakish child of a firefly-spider coupling glowed and flickered in the room below. Marie was not there, and the footsteps continued in the corners of the basement where the impotent light, a tattered banner cut too short, failed to reach. Leaping down the rest of the steps, Wolfgang watched the dust on the cracked concrete floor rush away from him as he landed, dust long settled and undisturbed for what could have been ages. There was no evidence that anyone had been here in a long time, if ever. Maybe the footsteps he'd heard were just echoes of his own? If that was true, then where was Marie? If she didn't go into the basement, where did she go?

Panic gripped his chest tight and would not let him breathe. Before him was a wall, ragged blocks stacked with mortar filling the cracks between, and he slid his fingers against the grooves, hoping to find an opening or another way out where Marie might have gone or been taken. The blocks here were darker as if stained or charred, and the mortar had turned brown. Finding nothing, he turned around and studied the opposite wall where the light only just grazed it and thought that he saw something glimmer there, teased out by the simple light. More dust fled before him in his haste, and he ran his fingers along the grooves of the wall where he saw the spark. He felt a prick and drew his hand away from the pain. Sure now that something was there, he pulled out his father's knife and began to dig at the mortar, scratching it away to expose whatever had glinted in the light. He hoped it was a switch to a secret door that would lead him to Marie, but anything that would help him at this point was welcome. The scratching exposed more of the metal so that he could see what it was. It was a pen, the kind that his father told him people give as gifts in the human world. After a little more work, it was free. Though marred, it still held its ballpoint tip and was preserved well enough that he could read the inscription on the side:
Rübezahl Chemie
. Shocked enough that he forgot to be scared, Wolfgang knew what that was: The company his father had worked for in the human world. This was his father's pen. He had been here, had come this way. Did this mean that the Hindernis was near?

But Marie had said this was her mother's house. Wolfgang had never seen it before, so he had no reason to doubt her. Why would her mother's house be sitting here in the No Man's Land? Was the house always here? Did it change appearance for everyone? The pen was shifting in his grip; he noticed a crack winding up the side. He fumbled with the top and bottom, twisting them against each other in an effort to tighten the pen but loosened it instead. As they fell apart and away from his hands, something fluttered down slower than the casing, a white moth, a dove, a scrap of paper rolled and folded and well preserved in its shell but yellowed slightly none-the-less. Wolfgang carefully unfolded it so as not to tear it too much. It did anyway, along the lines of strain where the paper had been bent, but he held it firmly in place and read it to himself. His heart beat excitedly as he wondered what wisdom his father would impart to him from the past.

"Don't run," it said.

That was all it said. He flipped it over to make sure. Hastily scrawled, Wolfgang wondered if that was a warning for whoever should remove the pen, or if it was something his father had meant to remind himself, should he return this way again. It was a piece to a puzzle Wolfgang wasn't sure he wanted to solve but might not get the chance to even if he wanted it--the basement began to shake. He could hear the old windows rattle in their frames in the rooms above him as if the house was a volcano about to erupt. Faces began to push their way toward him from the stone like worms burrowing through the sides of the basement floor. Skeletal and gaunt, they howled inhuman wails, though the suffering felt human and real to Wolfgang. "You are not welcome here," a face nearest him wheezed. He couldn't help but search for eyes within the soulless black eye sockets, holes so dark they revealed nothing more than a bleakness devoid of hope. He didn't know if he should talk to it, but his father's message "Don't run," came back to him in his mind, the paper actually hovering once again in his mind's eye like a beacon against the darkness, and he couldn't imagine his father ever doing something that would intentionally hurt himself. It hadn't said "Don't talk," so he reasoned that, by omission, it was an option.

"Why not?" he asked softly.

"This is not your house," a face the size of a child's piteously replied.

"But I want to help you," he said. "I want to find my friend."

"We cannot escape," the first face said. "To struggle brings only more pain."

"That's horrible," Wolfgang said.

"Be grateful it is not your house," one face said to him. "It could be. It could be anyone's. We made this house what it is."

He felt sorry for them and a little less terrified because he trusted in his father's advice not to run. "My friend is missing. Marie. Once I find her, I'll leave you." He was going to add "in peace" but he understood there was no peace to be found here.

"Oh, no," replied a face rimmed with flickering light as if struggling between light and darkness. "This is her home, too. She belongs here."

"What?" Wolfgang got a cold and angry feeling deep in his heart, like a lance of ice. It was a feeling usually reserved for MOON, since no others usually made him feel so enraged. If he were a dog, he would have started growling. His hair already stood on end.

"She left us. But she has returned."

"You cannot take her with you. She belongs with us."

His heart wrenched with every beat in a panic. Did that mean she was dead? Had this place killed her? Wolfgang remembered the salt statues in the woods--she, blinded, while he was gutted. What had she seen that she did not want to see? What did she see when she closed her eyes that she had to forget? The faces on the walls, buried in agony in this place, forever bound to it, forever alone. Was Marie also bound to it, this, her mother's house? The faces could not see past their pain, poor creatures, and Wolfgang drew only one conclusion that horrified him more than death masks on a wall ever could. Had she killed herself? "Where is she?"

"With us."

"In this house?" he asked, "or someplace...else?"

"With us."

He had to look for her. He had to find her, no matter what, no matter if she was alive or dead, no matter in what way he might find her. But his father's words, scrawled across that white paper, bone-like, bandage-like, came back to him again.
Don't run.
If he ran out now, looking for her, would he be putting her in more danger?
That's stupid,
he thought.
You're taking it too far. Your father couldn't have known about Marie. Maybe he wrote that note just for himself, anyway. She needs you, and you're talking to ghosts who don't want to help you.

It was maddening. He wanted to strike out at something, anything, just to bring an end to the nothing happening. No matter how he tried to convince himself that he should flee the basement, his thoughts returned to that pen and that note, purposefully lodged in the wall with the intention that someone find it. Then the ghostly faces, on worm-like necks, became joined with their bodies, skeletons which also slid out of the walls like so many secrets, a small family of mother, father, and child, and these three then surrounded Wolfgang, a fence of regret, a fence of loss. Wolfgang pulled out Vogelfang and got ready for a fight.

"Too fragile," the father said, "is flesh."

"Do not forget," said the child.

The mother, the most ghastly shade of all with her torn hair and tortured face, said nothing. It was then that Wolfgang saw the noose around her neck, rotten and black with age, so frayed and worn he had at first thought it a necklace. Before he could react, they turned their backs on him and rushed up the walls on unmoving legs, gliding with a supernatural smoothness of gait.

Everything in his being wanted to follow them, to see if they would lead him to Marie. He burned inside like Orpheus, unsure that Eurydice was behind him, on fire with the need to have just one look to make sure she was there. But he had faith in his father. And his father had written, "Don't run." So he didn't. He took a deep breath and let it out, and waited. He waited so long he felt his body would explode from all the energy building up within it that had to be set free, a matter of moments that felt like hours, when the house, in a way that he could only later describe as shifting around him, changed from the basement of what he presumed was a dilapidated old French country home to another basement just as old, but filled with casks of wine, kegs of beer, and crates containing foodstuffs and delicacies stamped with languages that Wolfgang had never seen before. Acutely reminded of how hungry he was, Wolfgang's stomach growled, but the thought that he had lost Marie turned his stomach back to silence.
So the shift was the reason for waiting
. Wolfgang took his leave of the basement by charging up the stairs, eager to track down his best friends and continue on his journey.

The stairs led outside. A large and crooked tree grew outside the house, his footsteps through the mulch as he came around to the front punctuated from time to time by the soft thud of something of substance hitting the ground from a height. A woman opened the front door to meet him, the age-spotted skin on her face hanging heavily, a culmination of time and trials, and the long, indigo silk scarf around her head shimmering in the firelight from the roaring hearth within. Whether the scarf was hiding hair or not was anyone's guess, but her eyebrows more than made up for any missing hair by stretching across her face from one side to the other. If she had been a pirate or a fortune teller, Wolfgang would not have been surprised, and he expected her to be carrying a crystal ball instead of a fruit with skin like a honeycomb of green pimples that repulsively matched her own pale skin. The old woman twined the scarf around a finger as if it was a lock of blue hair and gripped the fruit tightly with her other hand. She had a pendant--a large, dark eye, with flecks of deep green and dirty white flickering like stars in the sky behind wind tossed clouds. Caught up against the folds of her wide and shapeless dark dress, the pendant hung off-center, and made her overall lopsided. The gambol with which she walked toward him did nothing to help straighten her out.
This place would warp anyone,
Wolfgang found himself thinking, while she undulated with each step, bird-like, a living symbol of the waves of the ocean at night and the depths which it concealed. "You've made it!" she cried.

Wolfgang could not relax the sneering muscles he felt contorting his face. Slipping Vogelfang in its holster, he let his guard down for the moment.

"...thus far," she added, wagging a finger for emphasis. A chuckle that could have been directed at her own joke or just as easily at Wolfgang cracked the silence like a bird call.

"Is this the Hindernis?" Wolfgang asked.

The old lady looked him up and down, a look that scathed. "Ya think MY house is the Hindernis? This, whelp, is a PARADISE, an oasis in the desert." She gestured widely with her arm, taking in the forest as deep as the fog would allow. "And I am its pearl." Wolfgang decided not to comment. It was likely that she could help him...if she chose to, if he made it appealing for her to. Being nice to her was important and a little flattery might not hurt, either, but it would have to be honest or it would score him nothing. Whatever she was, she must be powerful, or she would not be making her home here. "The fresh water, the bubbling spring. That's me." The old woman turned her back on him and waddled toward the threshold. As he followed her, he noticed something grown over surging out of the forest floor, as if it struggled to be noticed in spite of the moss and mist and that sought to drown it out. Hollowed out bone met Wolfgang's wide eyes. It was a skeleton.

"Have you seen Marie?" he asked bluntly, the sight of the bones reminding him urgently of his missing friend. "My friend, Marie. She's--"

"Yes, yes. She came here looking for you."

"Where is--?"

"Inside," the old woman interrupted again. She gestured for him to follow. He did.

"Stay for dinner?" the old woman asked. Reaching her table, one of the few furnishings in the one room house, she gestured to them both, boy and girl, one after the other, with a kitchen knife she had produced from her apron. Slipping to the other side of the table, he hugged Marie so tightly they would never be able to come apart again. Tears he didn't know were there spilled from his eyes; he wiped them before anyone could notice. He wanted to talk but not here in front of Baba Yaga. "Ya two look too thin to stand. No wonder ye came as a pair. Somethin' ta lean on."

Wolfgang felt a chill. He felt reduced in his mind to a young boy, frightened but compelled all the same by what he was seeing. The fruit in the old lady's hand writhed, its surface bulging and moving as if something beneath fought to get out. "We...we really can't stay," he said.

"Ah. You two have an appointment, I wager? Tea with the Queen of England?"

"Something like that," Marie murmured.

"Or maybe ye expect to be back home any minute now, just a few steps down the road." She must have been speaking figuratively, because there had been no sign of a road since they left Doors. "Most people get to this point so hungry they'd eat their own hands if served up to them. Those who've survived the journey, that is. That's why I always keep a pot ready." Her grin gave little doubt to the reason for the skeleton in the yard and convinced Wolfgang that the pot was for him. "I aim to please."

"We seek the Hindernis," Wolfgang said. "We cannot stay."

"SEEK it?" she asked. She gave Wolfgang a closer look--her eyes peered through his and an icy thorn pricked his soul like the sharp, deep pain of a toothache. "Well, ye can't seek it, darlin'. It seeks you." And a voice buzzed in his mind, mosquito thin:
I am the door.