River of Blue Fire, Page 52

  On a blue china plate lay a paper sack, from which spilled a child’s Halloween plunder—gumdrops like brightly colored gems, peppermint sticks, paper-wrapped toffees . . . and a pile of gleaming gold coins. Grasping John staggered forward, his face alight with greed and triumph.

  “It’s just chocolate!” Fredericks whispered. “Those fake gold coins for kids!”

  “The riches!” the pirate captain exulted. “Ah, sweet Fortune, the riches that are now mine! I will buy two ships—three! I will crew them with the worst and most dreadful mercenaries from under the sink and behind the rubbish bins, and we will plunder at will. I will be master of the entire Kitchen!” He used hook and pistol to grip and then lift one of the coins, which was proportionately as large as a manhole cover, and after threatening Orlando and Fredericks with his pistol to keep them crouching where they were, stumbled with it to the edge of the shelf where he could admire its glitter in the light of the Bulb.

  “I always knew that a golden destiny awaited me,” he crowed. He waved the coin in the air, then clutched it tight against his breast, as though it might sprout wings and try to fly away. “I knew it! Did not a soothsayer tell my mother that I would die the richest and most elevated man in all of the Kitchen?”

  As he paused in silent rapture, a single noise broke the stillness, a brief tump like a knuckle rapping on a tabletop. Grasping John looked on all sides for the source, then turned his gaze down. A feathered shaft had sprouted from the center of the golden coin. The pirate captain’s face wore an expression of mild surprise as he swiveled back to face Orlando and Fredericks. He tried to lift the coin again to examine it, but it was stuck in place. A dawning realization crept over him as he stared down at the butt of the arrow that had spiked the coin to his chest, then he swayed, took a step backward, and fell from the shelf, the gold foil glimmering for just an instant as he spun out of sight.

  As Orlando and Fredericks watched in stupefaction, two hands grabbed the edge of the shelf where the pirate captain had stood, then a dark shape pulled itself up and onto the shelf, facing them.

  “Bad man dead now,” Chief Strike Anywhere explained.

  Orlando scrambled to the edge and looked down. Far below, Grasping John Vice was a small, dark, and very still shape on the linoleum at the foot of the Ice Box. With his cape flared beneath him, he looked like a swatted fly.

  “We . . . we thought you left,” Fredericks stammered. “Is your baby all right?”

  “Papoose in boat,” the chief said, which didn’t really answer the question. “We go now.”

  Orlando turned and made his way back across the shelf. “First I want to see if there are really any Sleepers, like the tortoise said. I have a question I want to ask them.”

  The Indian shot him a dubious look, but said only: “Sleepers up there,” and gestured with his thumb to the ceiling of the Ice Box above their heads.

  “What, up on the roof?” Fredericks asked.

  “There must be a freezer compartment or something,” Orlando decided. “Can we reach it from here?”

  The chief led them to the side of the shelf where a series of small holes in the wall had apparently been designed to accommodate moving the shelf up or down. He led them in a short climb; then, when he was braced against the ceiling, he reached up over the top edge and tapped on something they couldn’t see. “Here.”

  With help from the Indian, Orlando managed to climb past him until he reached a thin ledge that ran the length of a door which seemed only slightly less massive than the front of the Ice Box. As he crouched beside it, he could feel the cold beating out in waves. He looked down at the dizzying view and began to think this might be a very bad idea after all. The pirates had needed a giant cannon to open the big door. How could he and Fredericks hope to budge this thing without at least jackhammers and blasting caps?

  With no real hope of success, he braced himself in the corner between the ledge and chilly wall, then inserted his sword into the crack running down the side of the door. The blade crunched through ice crystals, but met no other resistance. He pulled back on the handle, levering it in the crack, and was astonished to feel the door give ever so slightly.

  “What are you up to, Gardiner?” Fredericks shouted from below. “We’re hanging on the wall here, y’know, and we’re about five inches from the edge, so there are utterly more comfortable things we could be doing.”

  Orlando was saving his breath for another pull. He jammed his heels against the frosty ledge and heaved. For a moment nothing happened except that he felt himself slide toward the rim of the narrow ledge, and had a brief but overstimulating vision of plummeting down to join Grasping John as a splotch on the floor. Then the freezer door creaked open. Its massive edge almost scraped him from his crouching-place as it swung past. A cloud of vapor slowly rolled out and surrounded him.

  “I did it!” he shouted, and tried to pull himself in. The metal at the edge of the door was so cold that his skin stuck to it, the pain of tearing his hand free so distracting that he almost toppled over backward into nothingness. When he had his balance again he clung to the ledge, waiting for his heart to slow. “The door’s open!” he called down to Fredericks. “Damn! It’s cold!”

  “Well, lock me twice, Gardiner,” his friend called back. “What a surprise.”

  Orlando waved a hole in the unfurling mist. Just inside the door, the freezer floor was covered in an ankle-high layer of frost—cold on knees and hands, but nowhere near as bad as the frozen metal. It was dark inside: only the faintest light crept in from the Bulb suspended overhead. Orlando could not see the depths of the freezer—within a few steps, all was in shadow—but it seemed surprisingly large.

  “Are you coming up?”

  “All right! All right!” Fredericks’ head appeared in the open doorway. “You never stop, do you? Why don’t we just be glad we’re alive and get out of here?”

  “Because I think this Otherland place has rules, just like game worlds.” Orlando clambered back to the edge and gave his friend a hand up. “I don’t know what they are yet, but I bet it does, in its own way. And we have questions, don’t we?”

  “Lots of them,” Fredericks admitted. “But the first one, which I never see you asking, is ‘Why look for trouble?”’

  “Where’s the chief?”

  “He thinks you’re impacting majorly. He’s not coming—I don’t even know if he’ll wait for us, Gardiner. In fact, I don’t know . . .”

  “Ssshhh.” Orlando held his finger to his lips. “Not so loud—it doesn’t feel right. Anyway, we’re here—let’s look around.”

  Fredericks seemed about to argue, but caught a little of Orlando’s suddenly somber mood and fell silent. When they stopped moving, the mist rose around them, so that their legs vanished and they seemed to be standing hip-deep in a cloud bank. Fredericks’ eyes grew wide as he surveyed the white emptiness. Orlando had already felt it. The freezer was not quite like any other place they had been in the cartoon world. Behind the stillness lurked a sort of quiet attention, as though something, perhaps the very fog and ice, regarded them with dreamy interest.

  Orlando began to walk deeper into the freezer, each footstep puncturing the frosty crust, disturbingly loud compared to the previous silence. His friend shook his head, but followed. Within a few steps the light of the open door was only a sheen in the mist behind them. Fredericks looked longingly back over his shoulder, but Orlando would not be swayed. As he adjusted to the strange twilight gloom, he began to see details he had missed before. He still could not discern either wall of the freezer, and the depths were still lost in fog and shadows, but he could see the roof—a smooth white surface lightly furred with frost, about three times his own height above them—and where all had been a pale blur he could now make out actual shapes in the mist before them, low mounds rising here and there from the icy floor, snow-covered lumps like t
he cairns of ancient dead.

  As they neared one of the mounds, Fredericks slowed, his reluctance plain. Orlando could feel it too, the sensation of trespass. If the rest of the cartoon world seemed primarily designed to amuse its creators, the freezer seemed to be something else, a place that belonged to no one . . . something that had grown rather than been created.

  They paused before the icy tumulus, surrounding themselves with a cloud of their own breath. Orlando was seized again by the feeling that they were in someone else’s place, that they were aliens here. At last, he reached out and carefully wiped away a layer of rime.

  As the popsicle wrapper appeared, it seemed at first a moment of comic anticlimax. The colors burst out as the frost was scraped aside, jarringly bright against the endless white that surrounded the mound. But beneath the words “Lucky Boy Fudge Pop” was a picture of a child, and the terrible clarity of the image made it seem more than just a piece of packaging art, that instead a real body had been pressed into the wrapper. The boy was dressed in shorts and a striped shirt and an odd cap that seemed of some much earlier era. His eyes were closed and his mouth sagged, ever so slightly down. At first Orlando thought this was somebody’s dreadful joke—that they had wrapped their product with a picture of a dead child. Then the Lucky Boy moved, a slight flicker of eyelids, a minute flair of nostrils, and a thin, unhappy voice murmured in their ears.

  “Cold . . . dark . . . Where. . . ?”

  Orlando took a stumbling step backward and almost knocked Fredericks over. Without either of them noticing, they clasped hands and moved away from the tumulus.

  “This is horrible,” Fredericks whispered at last. “Let’s go.”

  Orlando shook his head, afraid that if he spoke he would lose his nerve. He pulled Fredericks in a wide path around the mound, heading deeper into the freezer, but could not shake off the memory of the sleeping child. At last he disengaged himself and returned to smooth the frost back over the Lucky Boy’s pale face, then returned to Fredericks. Silent, they walked on.

  The mounds rose higher on all sides now, some as large as the carton-houses of the lower shelves, all made impenetrable and mysterious by their covering of ice. In some places, where the frost was thin, faces showed as through thick, dirty glass; they seemed mostly children, but there were also stylized animals and some less easily identified creatures, all sealed in cold slumber. Voices hung in the air, phantom murmurs that Orlando at first thought were only his imagination—faint cries for absent mothers, protests against the dark, swirling sounds as bodiless as wind crying down a chimney.

  Surrounded by these pitiful, terrible voices, Orlando wasn’t even sure any more what he was looking for; the thought of trying to question one of these sleepers, to drag them up into something like wakefulness, was repellent. He was beginning to think Fredericks had been right again, that coming to this place had been a dreadful mistake, when he saw the glass coffin.

  It lay in the center of a circle of mounds, a translucent oblong silvered with frost but not sunk in a blanket of white like the rest of the freezer’s occupants. It stood out as though it had been waiting—as though it were something they had been meant to find. The other voices grew quiet as they approached it. All of Orlando’s hard-earned simworld instincts told him to expect a trap, and he could feel Fredericks’ wire-tight tension at his side, but the place seemed to weave a spell around him. He found himself strangely helpless, unable to take his eyes from the object as he walked forward. It was with no more relief than he had felt on seeing the popsicle wrapper emerge that he realized it was a butter dish, the old-fashioned sort with a glass lid. In raised letters along the bottom, barely legible through the frost, was the legend “Sleeping Beauty Brand—Fine Creamery Butter.”

  Fredericks, too, seemed lost in a kind of hypnotized state, and did not resist or object as Orlando leaned forward and wiped a clear spot in the glass. Something was inside, as he knew there would be—not a picture, but a shape with all three dimensions. He cleaned a larger space so they could see her whole.

  She wore a long, antique green gown trimmed with feathers and pearled with ice. Her hands had been folded on her breast, clutching the stem of a white rose whose petals had tumbled free and lay scattered on her throat and shoulders and in her cloud of dark hair. Her eyes were closed, the long eyelashes tipped in frost.

  “She . . . she looks . . . so sad,” Fredericks said in a strangled whisper.

  Orlando could not speak. His friend was right, but it seemed a wholly inadequate word, like calling the sun warm, or the ocean wet. Something about the set of her mouth, the bleak fixity of her ivory features, made her seem a monument to quiet unhappiness; even in death, she was encased in her sorrow far more completely than she was encrypted by glass and ice.

  Then her eyes opened—dark, amazingly dark, but occluded by frost, so that she peered through cloudy windows. Orlando’s heart thumped. There seemed a terrible distance between those eyes and what they should see.

  “You are . . . strangers,” a voice sighed, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. “Strangers . . .”

  Fredericks gasped and fell silent. Orlando fought to make himself speak. “We . . . we are . . .” He stopped, uncertain of what mere words could explain. “We . . .”

  “You have traveled across the Black Ocean.” Her face, like her body, remained motionless, and the dark irises remained fixed upward, starring at nothing, but Orlando thought he could feel her struggling somewhere, a bird trapped in an attic room. “But there is something in you that is different than the others.” The mist rose for a moment around the glass coffin, obscuring their view. “Why have you come? Why have you wakened me? Why have you brought me back to this terrible place?”

  “Who are you?” Orlando asked. “Are you a real person? Are you trapped here?”

  “I am only a shadow,” she sighed. “I am the wind in empty spaces.” Great weariness dragged at her words, as though she explained something that could not possibly make any difference. “I am . . . the queen of air and darkness. What do you want of me?”

  “Where . . .” Fredericks was trying hard to master his voice, which wanted to squeak. “Where are our friends? We’ve lost our friends.”

  For a long time there was only silence, and Orlando feared she had dropped back into slumber, but the mists eddied a little and he saw that her dark eyes were still open, still staring at something unseeable. “All of you have been called,” she said then. “You will find that which you seek as the sun sets on Priam’s walls. But another waits for you, too. He is close, but he is also far away. He is coming.”

  “Coming? Who’s coming?” Orlando leaned forward, as though proximity could make things clearer. “Coming when?”

  “He is coming now.” The words, spoken with a distant carelessness, sent a shiver through Orlando that had absolutely nothing to do with the frost. “He is already here. He is the One who dreams—we are his nightmares. He dreams you, too.”

  “What is she talking about?” Fredericks demanded, tugging at Orlando’s hand in growing anxiety. “Who’s coming? Here?”

  “Let me sleep again,” the voice said, the faintest tone of petulance creeping in, a child dragged from her bed for some incomprehensible, grown-up purpose. “Let me sleep. The light is so far away . . .”

  “We’ll find our friends at Priam’s what?” Orlando asked. “Priam’s walls?”

  “He comes.” Her voice was growing fainter. “Please let me go. Don’t you understand? I have . . . lost . . . my . . .” The rest of her words were too faint to hear. The lids slid back down to cover the great, dark eyes.

  As they stood in silence, the mist rose again until the coffin was completely obscured. Orlando turned, but it was even hard to see Fredericks, though his friend stood only an arm’s length away. For a long moment Orlando felt himself weighted down by a crushing sadness, a misery that for on
ce was not his own, and it left him speechless.

  “I think we should go,” he began at last, then the light changed and things were immediately, inexplicably different.

  “Orlando . . . ?” Fredericks’ voice suddenly seemed very far away. Orlando reached out but his fingers, first probing, then frantically grabbing, touched nothing. His friend was gone.

  “Fredericks? Sam?”

  The mist around him began to glow, a diffuse gleam that turned the whole world translucent, as though he were trapped in the center of a piece of quartz. The light, which at first had only been a brighter whiteness, soured into an unnameable color, a hue that on a not-quite-imaginable spectrum where red did not exist would have fallen directly between purple and orange. A horrible electric fear pinned Orlando, sweeping away all sense of up and down, pushing away the walls and the floor so that the light itself became a void, an absence, and he was the only living thing left, falling endlessly in the terrible orange-lavender nothing.

  Something wrapped itself around him—something that was the void, but was not the void. It spoke in his head. He became its words, and each word was a thing painful to shape, painful even to think, an inhumanly powerful howl of misery.

  Angry, it said inside him. The thoughts, the feelings, became the entire universe, turned him inside-out, raw against the great emptiness. Hurt things, it said, and he felt how it hurt, and how it would hurt others. Lonely, it said.

  The bit of him that still was Orlando understood suddenly, and dreadfully, that there was something more frightening than Death.

  Black mountain. The words were also a vision, a black spike that stretched so high the very stars were shoved aside in the night sky, a terrifying vertiginous thing that grew up from impossibility into sheer blasphemy. Kill everything. My children . . . my children . . . kill everything.