Vassa in the Night (12 page)

Erg is made of wood.

Babs stares down at the hand's capering. It's scribbling again. “Drat you,” she mutters. “What nonsense is this?”

It hops on its wrist. Up on the register the other hand, Sinister I guess, makes a sweeping bow and points toward the window.

“Indeed,” Babs says. “I fully expected that half the bills in this register would effect their escape into the beyond. Imagine my chagrin at their faintheartedness.”

Sin hops down next to Dex and nudges its mate, then rolls itself into a tight spiral fist. Dexter hesitates, then jitters with enthusiasm and imitates its gesture, its wrist angled up. Once they've squeezed themselves into two coils they press their knuckles together, spirals forming a unified flat surface, and propel themselves along the counter at startling speed.

I'm hopelessly confused. Babs figures it out before I do. “Him? Our servant in black?” she spits. Now I understand. The hands are mimicking a
motorcycle.
“What in the world did
he
have to do with the dismaying failures of my faithful employees?”

I'd like to ask the same question, but I might already know the answer. Sinister uncoils and pantomimes a series of actions: catching something in midair, shaking it, and bringing it back to someone. He
was
the help that Erg had, then? Babs has her mouth hanging open.

“He wouldn't dare,” she rasps softly. “He wouldn't risk the consequences of defiance. Not for the sake of some half-named minx.”

The hands bop up and down in a way that distinctly communicates,
Yeah, he would!

I'm having trouble believing it, too, but the hands seem terribly emphatic and I guess they would know. I couldn't say how old the guy on the motorcycle is, but it's obvious enough that he isn't in high school. I've only seen the bottom half of his face, and that half could in no wise be classed as hot or handsome or even vaguely cute. He's downright scary-looking. He doesn't talk. He's monstrously inappropriate as a crush object. But for some reason all of these strike me as points in his favor. It's nice to have one reason that carries a hint of validity, now.
Look, the dude helped save my life! Seriously, what do you want?

Babs jumps over the counter with incredible agility. Her teeth are bared and a spit-misted hiss comes fizzling through them.

Behind her one of the hands starts walking on two fingers, and I realize with a lump of nausea in my gut that it's imitating Erg. It's trying to tell Babs what they're up against, that Erg and the motorcyclist were acting in cahoots. But she isn't paying any attention anymore.

“
Did
he?” she snarls. “Did he really engage in such ill-considered behavior? Well, this will be a matter for discussion, won't it?” She goes storming off toward the door she slipped through earlier, presumably concealing another of these luxurious bed-and-broom closets.

From where I'm hiding the door is facing directly my way, so when Babs flings it open I get a momentary glimpse of what's behind. Whatever it is, it appears to be rather bigger than a breadbox. Or a closet, or a school bus, or maybe a blue whale.

Which makes no sense since BY's is a fairly small building, turning around and around on giant chicken legs. There's no place to put a palace-sized indeterminate cavern full of foreboding shadows and twinkling lights. I'm just absorbing this conundrum as Babs darts through and slams the door behind her. Whatever I saw is gone again.

The hands fling themselves down on that low pile of ashes, looking dejected, and I skim back into my tiny room, close the door, and think, since there's nothing else to do. What kind of person can the motorcyclist be, when he chased me back into BY's, then turned on a dime and started trying to protect me? I hope he won't be in too much trouble.

“Erg?” I say. She's still in my sleeve, one tiny wooden arm poking out through the hole. “Erg, why did he help us? Do you know?” She doesn't answer, so I take my jacket off, trying to be gentle. She's fast asleep; her violet eyelids perfect crescents on her pale face. I bundle the fabric into a sloppy nest for her and lie down, tucking her in the crook of my arm. I guess she had a long night.

For a while I just lie there in the dirty-looking amber light, wondering about him. Babs called him her “servant,” and I have the distinct impression that there's something genuinely strange going on. When he vanished earlier, where did he go? For some reason I have the feeling that he isn't far away, but I can't quite picture him living in one of those lumpy apartment buildings crowding the Brooklyn streets.

At some point I must fall asleep, and when I wake up and peer through my door it looks like the end of the afternoon. And it's snowing.

 

CHAPTER 7

There are places where heavy snow in April wouldn't be totally crazy, but we're not in Siberia here. The white rush of it streams through my eyes like windborne vertigo, and I suddenly have an awful sense that it might be only nominally spring. I start to wonder if we lost our summer completely, drowned it in one of those merciless nights, and now we've emerged under a slate gray sky where autumn is failing and winter is already pressing in. I'm more frightened by this blizzard, if I'm honest, than by anything that's happened so far. Brooklyn, poor Brooklyn, you're under enchantment all right, and it's cold and dark and disquieting.

Soon it will be night. I shut the door again and feed myself and Erg as best I can. I guess there's no chance of a shower so I sponge off at the sink with a wad of soapy paper towels, air-dry for a while, and then wriggle, still damp, back into my clothes. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll find a toothbrush.

“Vassa?” Erg chirps. I sit down next to her and pet her head. She seems subdued, by her inflated standards of exuberance anyway. “Chelsea is out in the parking lot. You could go wave hi to her? Through the window?”

I've jumped up before she's finished talking. “Are you kidding? I'm going to go out there and tell her … apologize for being such an idiot, I guess.”

“I don't want you going outside,” Erg says fretfully. “Don't do it.”

“Why shouldn't I?” I usually take Erg's advice—she's right more often than makes any rational sense—but I can't miss a chance to see Chelsea. I owe her so many apologies that I don't know where to start.

“Well … Okay, how about that it's snowing?”

“I like the snow,” I say, a little petulantly, even though Erg probably knows that this snowfall is creeping me the hell out. It feels toxic and invasive; even its brittle whiteness comes across as unnatural. “It's pretty.”

“You don't have a hat. Or mittens.”

I stare at her. She's still sitting on the bed, hunched over, with her lips drawn into a duckbill of stubbornness. “You are being ridiculous. Erg, really? It's not like I'm going trekking in Antarctica.”

“And your shift is about to start. It's almost evening.”

I squirm into my jacket and offer her the sleeve. “You coming? We have to get out there before Chelsea gives up!”

Erg gives me a sullen look, but after a moment she jumps in. I pull my hood up and dash out of my room, then around the shelves toward the front of the store. Babs is slumped at the register, her face crunched and sour, the hands standing palm-forward on her shoulders like flabby twin hybrids of parrot and earthworm. I don't care what she thinks and I'm already stamping out the code on the floor. Her mouth puckers with something that might be interest or, worse, amusement. “And what would you be doing?”

“It isn't my shift yet,” I snap. “You said three nights.” I must have gotten the pattern right because the store is already kneeling.

“And how do you propose to extricate the days from between them, Miss Imp? The days might be the bones running through a darker body.”

“I'm just going out to the parking lot.” I wish I didn't sound so defensive. “I'll be right back.”

Babs smiles, her lips like crumpling paper, her white eye racing and rebounding. “Oh, enjoy your scamper. Go brisk, go far. Take wing in the snow.”

The right hand, Dexter I guess, waves an unpleasantly cheerful goodbye as I walk out the door. The bite on its thumb looks a bit inflamed, like it might be getting infected.

The snow is neon orange where it reflects BY's tangerine glow, then twilight blue farther out with blocky crisscrossing shadows layered around the lot's margins. The winking of a traffic light on the corner shifts the shadows to crimson, then to electric green, and the skewered heads look worried. I don't see Chelsea anywhere but there is an isolated trail of footprints welling with indigo darkness, and I follow it. The snow is at least six inches deep already and coming in fast, pirouetting like a ballerina blown to atoms but still doing her best to play her part.
The show must go on.

“Chelsea?” I call. The footprints run in scallops, stopping in front of each pole. God, she's been checking heads. “Chels, it's me! Where are you?” I'm starting to wonder if she's going around and around, always just ahead of me, always hidden in the huge cubic shadow BY's drops onto the snow. Then I see her standing under the last pole, the empty one. “Chelsea!”

In her thick-heeled boots she's over six feet of solid muscle, a bulky silhouette against the tent of glow spread by a streetlamp. As she turns there's a quick disruption, something like a blade passing over my vision, and suddenly I'm looking at him. What I thought was Chelsea's fantastic mound of curls turns into a huge protuberant helmet; what I thought was her brilliant smile becomes an uncanny gray-white chin. He's straddling his motorcycle as he holds up a hand in the universal gesture:
Go no farther
. I stop dead and my knees waver.

“Vassa!” Chelsea screams, and then it's her again, really her, bounding toward me. “Vassa, I don't know whether I should hug you first, or slap you senseless! If you
ever
scare me like this again, I swear…”

I race to throw my arms around her and she grabs me. I'm tall, too, but not like her, and I lean my head on her down-jacketed shoulder. “I know, I know, it was the dumbest thing anybody's ever done, Chels. Just imagine all the apologies you want, okay? Because I totally mean them.”

“You came here for
what
? Just to show Stephanie you could go five minutes without stealing?”

“More like…” It's too embarrassing to admit, but I do. “More like if she wanted me dead that bad, I thought she should live with the consequences.”

“Oh, so you were
trying
to get beheaded? Just so your death would be
in her face
? Okay, I'm not sure I can imagine any apologies I would consider adequate, but I'll try.” She holds me back and shakes me a little. “And once I'm done with that, there's the small issue of your
staying
here this long. Were you trying to trick us into thinking you'd been killed?”

“No…” I say. I'm just getting my first hint of how impossible explaining is going to be. “I wanted to call you. My phone isn't working.”

“This is so obvious I can barely stand to say it, Vassa. But then, uh, why didn't you just
come home
?”

“I…” There are certain areas of human existence that are susceptible to nice clear explanations, and then there are the shadow-zones beyond where words just won't measure up. Chelsea's still hugging me, but she's in one realm and I'm in another. “I'm working here. For a few days. I can't leave.”

She reacts to this more or less the way Tomin and company did: flabbergasted, jaw dropped, forehead wrinkled. “You know what? You're most certainly leaving now. When we get home I will wallop you with a pillow and then make you cocoa, okay? And you can tell me all about how you'll never do anything so messed up again.”

“I can't, Chelsea.” I wish I could offer her a sensible justification for this, but there isn't one: just Babs's smirk as she told me to
go far,
that queasy, chipper wave goodbye from Dexter, and one outright hallucination that seemed like it was warning me not to leave the ring of heads. That's all I've got, and every speck of it would sound fresh-minted from the mental ward. “I … promised the owner here I'd help out. For three nights. And I'm not allowed to go home between shifts.”

The expression on Chelsea's face is not improving.

The snow is falling more densely now, broad-winged avalanches of white plunging from the sky. In places it's so thick that it starts to seem like it's clotting into bodies, long-necked and ruffling.

“You know Iliana can't really cope with you,” Chelsea says. Ominously reasonable. “She has too much on her plate. And for all intents and purposes you don't have parents.”

“Sure,” I say.