There Will Be Lies (33 page)

Cigarette break, maybe? Good for me, anyway.

I pass by, and find the deepest, darkest corner of the store; it’s where there’s snow gear and hats, and it’s summer now so I figure no one’s going to come near. I put on a climbing harness, which I just took from a rotating display unit, and tie the rope to one carabiner using what I think is the right knot, then clip the carabiner to the harness.

I put down my backpack.

I close my eyes and try very hard to believe that I can just step around the world and into another place.

203 seconds pass.

I open my eyes again.

I calm my breathing. The store is still empty.

I close my eyes, and I hold my equipment very tightly and –

My left arm is still hooked around the tree stump, and the climbing stuff is in my right hand.

A warm wind, like breath, runs through my hair from below, tickles the back of my neck. It carries the crying of the Child to my ears.

I look down, like a moron, and my insides turn to slush.

Breathe.

I focus on the rock wall, scanning it. There – just above and to the left, there’s a vertical seam, maybe two inches wide. I loop the loose end of the rope around my neck. I have wound the belt with the cams on it around my wrist, and I select one of the medium ones. My hand is trembling. I pass it to my left hand, while I clip the carabiner to it, and loop the rope through.

My hand slips, and the cam falls – but it’s on the rope, and the rope spools out a bit from my neck but then stops. I haul the device back up, like a fish on a line.

Holding the trigger that keeps the half-moons together, I push the thing into the crack: then, when it’s as deep as it’ll go, I pull hard on the rope.

It holds, like a bolt in hardened cement.

The rope is already attached to my harness at the other end, so now I’m tied to the rock, and it would take like ten thousand newtons of force to dislodge me.

I look up. The lip of the canyon is not far above me – maybe like ten feet. My rope is twenty feet. So: I fall, worst-case scenario, I fall for thirty feet and then the rope stops me.

It would hurt. But I could climb up once more, to here, and then try again. Now, when I climb, even though I’m going to be tied to something below me, I’m going to have some insurance. Some latitude. Longitude, I guess, technically.

No. I do not have a boyfriend.

I get a grip on myself, and start to climb. I use the same crack as the camming device is lodged in, for my first handhold, and the tree branch as my first foothold. I go very slowly – I’m not a climber, and I am very soon totally out of breath. I’m scared too, which does
not
help. I have to stop almost right away.

I press myself into the rock, keeping my eyes on it, not looking up, not looking down. My sweat is cold on my face – vertigo.

It’s not sheer, though, or smooth, the surface – it’s all angles and fissures and bits of vegetation growing out. There’s always something to hold on to, and there’s a security blanket over my twitching mind, which is that if I fall I don’t fall forever.

Just when I’m thinking this, I fall – a root I grabbed snaps on me, and my hands are pawing at nothing. I plummet –

But my foot catches on an outcropping of rock before I can play out my rope, and my hand swings of its own accord and my fingers hook on to a cranny; it jars me, sends shivers of pain down my hand, but I hold on.

I take a deep breath and try again. I focus on the Child, on the
unending sound of its distress. You have to get up there, I say to myself. Listen to it. Listen to
her
.

She needs you.

Maybe an hour later, I pull myself up on to the other side. My arms are quivering like fever. I flop on the dry ground, exhausted. There’s a voice deep inside me that wants me to crawl further from the drop but I don’t, I just lie there. The feeling of relief is a physical thing; abruptly I remember an afternoon in August, temperature in the hundreds, the heat like an assailing malevolent presence, out to suck all the lifeforce from all living things. Shaylene went to the store and came back with a big bag of ice, and cream, and we made tea, then blended it with the ice and cream and drank it on the couch till the fronts of our brains rang like bells from the cold of it.

This feeling is a bit like that.

Some indefinite amount of time passes. The icy stars are bright above me.

Eventually, I unclip the carabiner from the harness and get up. I take off the harness and step away from the gorge.

The glass structure is just in front of me. It’s maybe five feet tall, wide as a car. Towers and spires at the top, buttresses at the sides. The glass looks thin – almost like ice, like an ice sculpture. The Child has scooted over to the side closest to me, and is sitting there, wailing, arms outstretched.

The Child from my dreams. Right here in the Dreaming.

Of course.

Behind it is the Crone’s castle – full-size, dark, looming. An enormous and terrifying thing, squat and brooding. I don’t want to look at it, not yet, it’s blocking out so much of the starlight, so much of the night sky. It’s like a black hole, sucking brightness out of this world.

I look away from it, shivering.

I step forward, examining the little glass castle instead. There is no door. No windows. Nothing that opens or might open. I walk all around it, the Child turning as I do, following me with her eyes, crying and crying. I realise that this is the real girl, and the one that was in the iron cage was some kind of projection.

This is the Child I need to save.

But I can’t find any way in.

I come back around to the side by the chasm and reach out to touch the glass.

Ow.

It isn’t glass after all, it’s ice, it really is an ice sculpture, and now my hand is burning and cold at the same time. I clutch my hand to my chest, swearing, wrapping my sweatshirt around it, trying to warm it. Then I kick the ice prison, lash out my foot in anger –

The pain is colossal, like I have just kicked the most unyielding substance ever made; my toes might be broken, I think.

I hop on one leg, hand and foot blazing. The Child can see that I’m hurt and is crying even harder now, and between the agony and the sobbing all my nerves are taut and electric. I almost wish I couldn’t hear, here in the Dreaming, could go back to being deaf and not have to listen to the Child.

Almost.

I take a step back and look at the Child in its ice cell again. Open sesame, I say, not really expecting anything. Which is good because absolutely nothing happens. I go around it again, looking for a seam, a gap, but there’s none. Just ice – smooth, solid ice.

Inside, I see the tears running down the Child’s face. When they fall from her cheeks they make drops of ice that tinkle on the ground.

Fricking hell.

It’s just like my dream. She’s right there, but the ice is between us, and I can’t break it. I don’t want to touch it again.

To my surprise, I start crying too – I feel the moisture on my cheeks, and I think it’s rain at first, that by some miracle Coyote has already fulfilled the quest, but then I realise it’s tears.

I sit down on the grass, unable to do anything more. I close my eyes so that I don’t see the Child, holding out its hands to me.

I’m sorry, I think. I can’t help you. I’m not strong enough. I’m not the one. I can’t save you.

But then I hear something. A distant voice, quiet, it takes me a while to notice it – I mean I’m not used to hearing at all. But then I do. It’s little more than a whisper, it could be the breeze, but I know it isn’t.

It’s a woman, laughing. Cruel laughter, triumphant, evil laughter, from a fairy tale. I open my eyes. It’s coming from the dark castle, beyond the ice.

OK, I think.

OK, screw you.

I get up and walk past the Child, who reaches out for me as I pass, but despite all my instincts screaming at me I ignore her, I keep my eyes on the castle.

I’m close but still a way away – maybe, like, the width of a football field from the door, which is big and wooden and has rivets in it, big metal studs at regular intervals.

Between me and the door, there’s just dead grass – open space, apart from one thing, an object I can’t quite make out. Something sticking up from the grass, closer to the door. Something square.

Behind the castle, just like in a picture book, the deep forest begins again, yawning around the castle too, like a cave, like an open
mouth, draping it and festooning it with thorny vines. The air is unmoving but suspended; a sense of something about to drop, about to move; like bated breath.

I move forward, caught in a cross stream, waves of hateful mirth reaching me from in front, a tide of tears behind, from the Child.

Closer.

And.

Here’s the one thing in the grass: a sign, like a for-sale sign, a wooden board on a square pole that has been planted in the earth. I step forward and read it.

WELCOME

it says, and there’s a smiley after:

This is not a bad sentiment, per se, you are perhaps thinking. It’s friendly!

Ah, but.

Ah, but wait!

The sign seems very, very much like it has been written in blood.

Fresh blood.

I need a weapon, I think.

I look at the sign, tied to a thick wooden post that is set deep in the ground. I visualise a baseball bat, striking a ball. Yeah, that could work.

Seizing the post, I try to pull it out of the ground, but it doesn’t budge. I kick it, and then kick it again, and again. Eventually it begins to wobble, and then rock freely. I yank it out.

I use the ground to lever off the sign, breaking it into pieces.

Then I heft the post in my hands. It’s heavy, solid. A staff. A weapon. It gives me an idea, though I know already that it’s not going to work. I turn and walk back the way I came, towards the ice walls and the Child.

I walk forward, treading carefully. My breathing is very fast and shallow; I feel dizzy and nauseous. But I keep going.

When I reach the icy prison I try not to look at the Child, who has scooted over and is still, always, reaching out to me, crying its endless tears. Instead I raise the heavy piece of wood and swing it, as hard as I can, as if aiming for a fast ball.

Bang.

The post jumps out of my hands, shivering, and my fingers ring
like tuning forks. I curse, shaking my arms, trying to rid myself of the needles in my flesh.

There is not a mark on the ice.

I pull my arms back, put all the twist into it that I can, and swing the staff again, hard.

The impact this time shatters the wooden post, splinters flying everywhere, one of them narrowly missing my eye. I am left holding a sheared-off, thin piece, no more use as a weapon than my own bare hands.

Some sort of spell on the ice, I figure, when my shock has eased enough for clear thoughts to form.

Well.

I didn’t think it was going to work. I cast aside the broken shard.

Sighing, I turn my back yet again on the Child, and start back towards the castle. It seems not to get larger in the usual sense of things you approach, objects appearing to grow as you get closer, due to the effect of perspective, but in the
actual
sense of getting bigger, rearing up into the sky, a beast about to eat me.

Focus.

But my heart is a piston in my chest and my hands are sweating, trembling. The castle seems to sense my fear, and expands even larger, filling the sky. Blackening everything.

That cruel laughter gets louder.

I take a deep breath and step up to the massive oak door. It is twice as tall as I am. I try the handle and find that it’s locked. I stand there for a second, like an idiot.

What do I do now?

Then I think: No. You’re the Maiden. The first Coyote, older
than the world, died to protect you. You don’t get stopped by a locked door.

So I lift up my foot and kick out, flat; I’m only part thinking this might do something, but the door shatters inwards off its hinges, like when the SWAT guys raided the cabin, and because I didn’t totally expect it I’m off balance. I almost fall, and catch myself on the hewn-stone archway.

The corridor beyond is dark and gloomy, flagstone floored, with torches set into sconces in the walls. There are suits of armour standing to attention – not just knights, though, but samurai too, and Native American headdresses, and bows and arrows and guns and swords. As I step tentatively forward, I think it’s like a museum of killing.

At the end of the corridor, there’s another door, set with locks and rivets. And a voice behind it, or rather everywhere and in my head, says,

It’s open. You can kick it down if you like, but carpenters are hard to come by these days and I would very much rather you didn’t.

It’s the voice of an old, old woman, shot through with cruelty, glittering like seams of metal in rock.

I shrug, then kick the door down.

Inside, there’s a homely little room. I blink for a second, seeing it here, in this massive castle – like finding a nest of baby birds in a cannon. The ceilings are low, blackened with soot, and there’s a rug on the floor, a rocking chair by an open fire, over which hangs a copper kettle. An oak kitchen table, scarred by years of knife marks, and in the centre of it a silver dome like in restaurants, keeping something beneath it warm, and a plate beside it with a silver knife and fork.