Nightfall in the Kingdom of Winter

Nightfall in the Kingdom of Winter

  by Andy Young

  Copyright 2013 Andy Young

  ***

  Natalie had been twelve for seven days when the dream happened the first time.

  “You’re Nightfall,” said the boy.

  “Nightfall?” she asked.

  “Your name,” he said. “You’re Nightfall.”

  “But I’m Natalie,” said Natalie. The boy looked odd: shortish, and thinnish, with a green pointy cap on his head.

  “Who are you?” asked Natalie, but he just shrugged.

  Natalie looked...different, here in the dream. She was wearing a dress, for one thing, which she almost never did, and it was no ordinary dress. It was fancy and old fashioned. It had poofy long sleeves with frilly edges. The top surrounded her neck, and the bottom went all the way down to her ankles. She wasn’t wearing shoes, which was fine, except in the dream she was surrounded by snow, so she should be freezing.

  But she wasn’t.

  And her skin...well, it was not easy to describe. It wasn’t any color a person’s skin should be, not brown or peach, rust or olive. Instead it was indigo blue, deep as night; she looked at her hand, and it didn’t resemble a real hand at all. It was a hand-shaped hole in the sky. And there were stars, but they were strangely unreal. They had five points, like stars a child would draw, and were sparkly and gold.

  She was covered with them.

  “This isn’t really me,” she said to the boy, who shrugged.

  “It sure looks like you,” he replied. “We should go.”

  “Go?” asked Natalie.

  “Follow me,” said the boy. “You have a job to do.”

  The boy started walking. Natalie followed, down a snowy path between thousands of trees. It was the oddest sort of forest; each tree seemed a different species from its neighbor. Some were evergreens, with needles large or needles small, bits of snow clinging to their boughs, but the great majority were leafless, fractal silhouettes against the sky. Even without leaves she could see how each was unique: gray bark or brown, or nearly black. Thin trees and fat ones, thick ones and thin, tall ones and short ones.

  The snow crunched under her toes, which were not cold. No other part of her was cold, either, though she could see her breath. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Ha!” laughed the boy. “Where? That’s daytime thinking, you know.”

  The path turned one way, then another, but the trees were a constant, marching off into the distance as far as Natalie could see.

  “This place is weird,” she said. The boy just shrugged.

  But soon enough they came to a different place. The path through the snow ended at a kind of building. It was four stories tall, with a balcony on each level, and four doors along each balcony. There were stairs on both sides. It looked very old; maybe a long time ago it had been fancy but now nobody was taking care of it. The doors were wood, and looked heavy. Each door was a different color, but the colors were ancient and faded. The walls, steps and balconies were all made of gray stone.

  “This is the Kingdom,” said the boy.

  “What is?” asked Natalie. “This building?”

  “This is the Kingdom of Winter.”

  Natalie nodded. “You mean the whole place, right? Is there a king?”

  “You have a job to do,” said the boy. “Follow me, Nightfall.”

  “My name is Natalie.”

  The boy walked to the first flight of stairs, which was only a few feet high, leading up to the first balcony. Natalie followed him up the steps to the first door.

  That was when she noticed the...something. It was like a statue, but it wasn’t made of stone. It was of a girl, but not a normal one. Her head was oval shaped, her hair thin and wiry. She had eyes, which were closed, but no nose and no mouth. Her neck was thin. From her neck down she wore a strange sort of dress, bright pink except for a symbol like a snowflake on the front. The dress was a perfect shape, like an upside down ice-cream cone: no wrinkles or folds, no arms or legs sticking out anywhere. That’s all she was: head, neck, and dress down to the ground.

  “What’s this?” asked Natalie.

  “She is the doorkeeper,” said the boy.

  “What does she do?”

  The boy rolled his eyes. “She keeps the door.”

  “They have those in China,” said Natalie. They’d been studying countries at school. “They paint these guardians by the doors of old houses, to protect them.”

  The boy just shrugged.

  “You do that a lot,” said Natalie.

  The boy shrugged again. “You have to open the door,” he said.

  “What?” asked Natalie. “Why?”

  “You are Nightfall. You have to open the door.”

  “I’m Natalie. What if I don’t want to?”

  “You must. It is what you have to do.”

  “Whatever,” said Natalie. She walked forward, grabbed the handle, and pulled open the door. It was heavy, but moved easily enough. It didn’t go inside anywhere; the door opened to the outside, to a forest in winter, though the trees weren’t the same. They were all thick pines, their branches drooping with snow.

  “Oh!” said Natalie. “What is this place?”

  The statue opened her eyes. They were empty and blue, nothing but blue, with no pupils or iris. Natalie gasped and stepped backwards.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said the statue.

  And then she woke up.

  It was a school day, but she didn’t get out of bed. The dream had been...very real. It wasn’t like her other dreams, where she could only remember some of what happened. She could remember everything this time: the way the snow had crunched, the sound of the little boy’s voice, the creepy way the girl’s empty eyes had stared at her.

  “Weird,” she said out loud.

  Then she saw the doll, there among all her other dolls and stuffed animals, arranged carefully around the perimeter of her desk. The doll had a cone-shaped body, topped with a thin neck and open, spooky eyes. That’s what it was, she thought. The doll. I had the dream because of the doll.

  Natalie was satisfied, now that she knew where the dream came from. She liked figuring things out. One time she’d dreamed that she and her father were on a boat lost at sea, and when she woke up she remembered that they had watched a video on YouTube about a man who’d been lost in a lifeboat for weeks. Another time she’d been to a parade one afternoon, and that night she’d dreamed she was running through the streets of the town, hearing the music of a parade but not finding it.

  So now I get it, she thought. She liked getting it.

  But it had felt like a very real dream.

  She got out of bed, put on her robe, went into the kitchen for breakfast. Her mom was there, checking email on her phone and drinking coffee.

  “We have waffles,” she said.

  “Ok,” said Natalie. She opened the freezer, retrieved two waffles from the package, popped them into the toaster. She opened the fridge, got out the orange juice, poured a glass, snatched the hot waffles from the toaster and sat at the table.

  “Get a plate, honey,” said her mother.

  But Natalie didn’t. She was chewing a too-big bite of waffle and thinking: when did I get that doll? She couldn’t remember.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know that doll? The girl with the cone body? When did I get it?”

  “Which doll?” said her mother, laughing at something she saw on the phone.

  “The creepy little girl doll with the blue eyes. The pink one.”

  “Oh,
” said her mother. “Is that a new one?”

  “I was wondering when I got it.”

  “Oh. I’m sure it comes from a store or something.”

  Duh, thought Natalie, but she was under strict orders not to say ‘duh’ for any reason. “I said when, not where.”

  Her mother looked up from her phone, blinked like a lizard in the sun. “When what?”

  “Never mind,” said Natalie. She finished her waffles and headed for her room.

  “Mom!” she called a few minutes later.. “Which shirt should I wear?”

  Her dad’s head appeared around the door. “Yes?”

  “I said mom.”

  “You can ask me.”

  Natalie smiled. “Which shirt should I wear?”

  “Oh,” he said. His eyes went back and forth- the blue shirt or the green one. “Um, I like the blue.”

  “Get mom, dad.”

  “Wear the blue,” said her mother when she appeared. “It brings out your eyes.”

  “Brings out?” frowned Natalie. “What do you mean?”

  “It makes them more noticeable.”

  Natalie decided to wear the green. Why, she wondered, would I want everybody staring at my eyes?

  Outside it was cold, but clear and sunny. Natalie looked down the sidewalk towards school and frowned. Jessie, the weird girl who