Half World (7 page)

Her sweaty fingers slipped.

Desperately she squeezed tighter. But her grip was growing numb.

She wouldn't make it. She wouldn't make it even into Half World.

Screw that! Screw the wind and the evil man and everything else standing in her way! Melanie pulled her legs with all her might, heaving with every muscle in her body.

The wind screamed fiercer as if sensing the girl's will. But Melanie redoubled her efforts, eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched hard.

She inched her feet out of the opening. Slowly. Surely. Until her sneakers found purchase on something solid. The frame. Her toes squeezed hard as she started to pull the Gate shut. The wind screeched in dismay, desperate for its prize, and it seized Melanie's midriff, yanking her, U-shaped, her back arching, protesting, cracking. . . .

“Nooo!” Melanie screamed and heaved with all her might.

The Gate slid shut, and Melanie fell to the concrete.

She breathed shallowly, quickly, as her heart's pounding grew calmer.

“Holy crow,” she muttered into the stinking cement. “Holy crow, nobody said anything about a wind.” She patted her chest, and felt a wave of relief when her fingers fell upon the warm amulet still hanging from her neck.

“Ohhhh,” Melanie groaned as she struggled to her hands and knees, tottered to her feet. She reached for the handle once more.

What could be next? A slavering monster? A desiccated human? Her school principal, Mrs. Nougat? Melanie almost managed to smile.

She needed to open the door to get to the other side.

Simple.

Unbearable.

Melanie wrenched the door open.

The air was silent.

She stepped through.

SHE STOOD ON
a cliff ledge, hardly ten feet wide, hewn out of the side of a gray mountain. She looked up, above the open portal in the rock face, but could not see where the mountain peaked, if it ever did. High, high above her the almost vertical plane seemed to blend into a grayish white that was either cloud or sky. . . . When she looked over the ledge, it fell away so far, so deep that Melanie couldn't see the bottom, only small white pockets of mist. A cold wind whistled in fits and starts. Her heart and head spun, dizzy, imagining the horrific plunge, a deathly plummet that also called her, beckoning, compelling. . . .

She slowly backed away from the seductive edge, her heart trembling like a sparrow.

Something brittle snapped, crunched beneath her feet.

Little dry white sticks were scattered all over the cliff ledge, and they crumped into crumbs beneath her weight. Melanie raised one foot to stare at the remains underneath. It felt so disgusting.

A grinding sound came from behind her. Melanie spun around only to see the portal closing, as if an enormous boulder were being rolled in front of the opening. The circular passage was an ever-thinning crescent, until it was completely covered. The sudden silence was overloud, and the cliff face was a solid flat surface once more.

Melanie bit her lip. She could not go back that way.

And as if someone had turned on a switch, the air was filled with noise—the rasping, hoarse calls of thousands upon thousands of crows winging their way to their mountain home. Just like the ones she used to admire when she walked home from school. Had the crows been flying to Half World all along?

From far, far below, a glinting black thread seemed to rise slowly upward to where Melanie stood. As it drew closer, the erratic black line, undulating and unstable, began flying across the abyss as well as rising upward. The harsh rasping cries of the crows grew louder and louder as they flew nearer to Melanie, even as they stretched across the expanse of open air to a single mountaintop that had appeared three hundred feet away.

A black airborne bridge . . . They were crows.

Three feet wide, and bobbing and heaving like something tossed upon a stormy sea, the bridge of crows was the only way across the sky to the other side.

The sky around the mountain ledge where Melanie stood was blue, tinted with shades of sunset pink and lavender, but midway, the brilliant colors were leached. The mountain across the abyss was not vibrantly green with growing things but a dimmer hue. The sky behind it was slate gray. Everything looked flatter.

“The bridge draws near,” a deep voice rumbled.

Melanie squeaked in surprise. She teetered on the edge, small dry branches snapping beneath her feet, and a large rough gray hand drew her back.

The hand belonged to a giant. Easily ten feet tall, her entire blocky body was of the same gray granite of the mountain. Without the sky behind her, she blended into the colors of the cliff face almost seamlessly.

Melanie's mouth fell open.

The giant stood still. She could so easily be a statue, Melanie thought. Unthinkingly, she stretched her hand to touch the giant's boulderlike knee.

It was solid, slightly cool. Stone.

Melanie jerked her hand away, blushing. How rude she had been! “Sorry,” Melanie peeped humbly, looking up at the giant's implacable face.

She was staring across the abyss, her eyes the same matter and color as the rest of her body. “I am the Keeper of the Fourth Gate,” the giant intoned, her voice a low, deep groan. “You must pay the toll in order to pass.”

Melanie blinked. “Okay,” she said in a small voice, thinking rapidly. “I have some things I can use to pay the toll. . . . ” She started patting the pockets of her mother's industrial overcoat. There's bound to be loose change, she thought. I'm sure it will be enough. Because, she thought desperately, maybe the toll was symbolic. Maybe she just needed to make a show of some payment. She rummaged through deep pockets, rustling through old receipts and Kleenex. The crows cawed, their wings rushing like a fast river.

“Payment is the smallest finger of your hand.”

Melanie blinked rapidly, confused.

“You must detach the smallest finger from your hand and offer it to me in payment,” the giant said neutrally.

Melanie's heart stopped. “Wh-wh-what? You're going to cut off my pinkie?”

The giant was implacable. “You must bite it off yourself.”

Melanie's heart thumped loudly in her ears. Small white lights speckled her vision. She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “Please,” she entreated. “Please. I can't do that. I have to get across. My mum . . . ”

“You must pay the toll or turn away from the Gate. The bridge will wane soon, regardless.” The giant crossed her arms with a creak and grind of thousands of tons of stone. She said nothing more.

Something burned in Melanie's chest. It twisted and writhed. Sobbing, Melanie stuck her pinkie into her mouth. She bit down at the base, hard, and she whimpered with the pain. But she could not bite through. She pulled her finger out and stared at the imprint of her teeth. She shoved her pinkie in her mouth again and bit harder, the sound of bone grinding. She wailed with pain. But she could not do it.

She could not do it.

“Stop,” a small voice whispered sharply.

Jade Rat. Melanie hadn't even noticed the creature reanimated and perched upon her shoulder. Melanie clasped the animal to her chest and bawled.

“Stop that!” the green rat said fiercely.

Melanie flinched as if she had been slapped.

“You'll lose the bridge!” Jade Rat hissed. The small creature turned to the giantess. “I offer my finger as toll,” the rat said clearly. The giant said nothing.

Before Melanie could do anything, the green rat clasped one paw in the other and bit off her smallest digit with her hard, sharp teeth. Jade Rat spat the tiny pinkie at the giant's feet among the bleached, dry twigs.

“Jade Rat,” Melanie whispered. Something cracked and snapped beneath her runners. She stared at the ground. And finally saw . . .

She wasn't standing upon dry branches but upon the brittle finger bones of the people, the creatures who had sought entry into Half World before her. . . .

“Do you accept this toll?” the green rat said hoarsely, panting.

The giant nodded. Once. Then gestured to the crows. Their raucous cries filled the skies and the flapping of their wings was thunderous. “Cross on the backs of the crows. They are a temporary living bridge between your Realm and Half World. Haste is necessary,” she said evenly.

Melanie gasped at the open space that yawned beneath them. And the crows. Only a few moments ago they had been so numerous that they had made a solid black path, but now the path was starting to lose its density.

“Run!” Jade Rat hissed. Her claws clenched into Melanie's coat, her tail clinging around the girl's neck.

Melanie didn't think. She ran.

She leapt onto the path, her foot landing on the back of a flying crow. The smooth softness of sleek feathers. The oily slipperiness beneath her shoes. The flying bird sagged beneath her weight and just as it began to veer away Melanie leapt off, stepping down as the next crow flew in to take its place in the path. On and on, Melanie leapt. She could not run faster than the birds' flight. The bridge existed only beneath her and behind her. The crows flew in from behind to offer her feet a moment of surface. As soon as she set down her foot the trod bird was compelled to break its forward motion. It was a bridge that was perpetually falling away in front of her. If she stopped she'd tumble out of the sky. Melanie ran at full pelt, sobbing, gasping, as if each step were her last.

“Don't look back!” Jade Rat screeched. “Run faster!”

Melanie, told not to, couldn't help herself.

She looked back.

Only fifteen feet more of flying crow remained to act as a bridge and the mountain was still fifty feet away.

She would never make it.

“Move it!” Jade Rat screamed.

Melanie ran with everything she had. Five feet. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. She kept pace with the flying crows, leaping onto their backs as if she were jumping from stone to stone in a rushing river. . . . The crows began to separate; the bridge was starting to break. And Melanie could see the empty space between their flapping wings. I'm running across the sky! She was capable only of thinking, I'm running across the sky!

Only fifteen feet away. An outcropping of rock. Flat, like a landing pad, a dock. It was covered with coarse mountain grass and dark flowers. No colors. Only black and white. Shades of gray. She staggered toward it desperately. Her heart pounding close to bursting. Lungs tearing for oxygen.

Her right foot.

Empty air.

Eyes wide with terror. Mouth open in a silent scream.

Jade Rat.

She scrambled down Melanie's arm and leapt. Sailed through the air. She landed on a crow's back and sprang off, leaping quickly, lightly, from crow to crow, toward the mountain.

The rat did not look back.

After all, Melanie thought as she started a slow-motion plummet, she was a sinking ship.

Melanie closed her eyes as the wind began to roar.

Felt something beneath her foot.

The crows. The ones who had reached the mountain and had landed on their roosts, they had watched the girl's crossing. And for the first time in millennia, they flew back to aid someone who was meant to fall.

They streaked out in a dense column, splitting into two separate streams, looping around to serve as a living path beneath Melanie's steps. They were so many that the air was solid. And Melanie ran across the remaining distance with unspeakable gratitude.

She threw herself onto the mountain ledge and clung to the ground cover with her fingers and toes, her heart pounding wildly, heaving for breath, eyes tightly closed. Her head spun with delayed reaction. She lay there for a long time.

The scent of a sharp mountain herb penetrated her brain. She blinked blearily, and her eyes focused on a pair of scaly black claws.

The claws, sensing her gaze, clenched nervously then were still. Melanie raised her head. A large crow, head tilted to the side, peered at her with one bright black eye.

Melanie swallowed. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely. “Thank you for coming back.”

The crow stared into Melanie's face. It seemed to bob its head, then hopped to the edge of the outcropping and dropped away, wings outspread.

Melanie rolled onto her back.

The sky. It was not dusk, here. No sunset hues marked the skies. It was washed out, a glare of light that Melanie could not differentiate between clear or overcast.

She was in Half World. . . .

She sat up and gazed across the vista, toward the Gate she should have come from. But nothing was there, not even the other mountain. The wind keened with a cold voice in the empty expanse of sky.

How would she get back?

Maybe, she thought, maybe at dawn. When the crows went the other way . . .

She sighed. Plucked a strange two-petaled flower and raised it to her nose. She thought it might be blue . . . her hand. Though it was dirty and pale with cold, her skin stood out against the black-and-white hues of Half World, almost glowing with Life. Her jeans had taken on a dark cast and her mother's overcoat was dark gray.

“We must climb down the mountain,” a small voice said.

Melanie looked down. Jade Rat sat on her haunches, her paws clasped together. Her imperial green hues looked closer to black in the light of Half World. She looked so dark her eyes were barely discernible.

Melanie blinked slowly. “You left me,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.

Jade Rat did not look away. “You were going to fall. There was nothing I could have done that would have helped you.”

Intense feelings writhed inside Melanie's stomach. Jade Rat had bitten off her own finger when she couldn't do it herself. The rat had helped her twice already, even risking her life. But the rat's abandonment on the bridge of crows tasted bitter, bitter on her tongue. Melanie narrowed her eyes and clung fiercely to the wrong that had been done to her. “You deserted me,” she repeated.