Hugo & Rose (34 page)

The head was leaning against a pile of dusty furniture. An old easy chair, once a red that had faded to a mottled pink. A chipped highboy dresser. A few cane chairs, the woven seats of which were in various states of unravel.

It was as if someone had emptied an antiques shop or attic into the saw grass.

The rattling blades behind her quieted. Hugo had stopped moving.

“I can see you.” His voice was playful, but still distant. Rose's eyes scanned the green stalks, looking for him.

The furniture began to
fuse.

Rose watched in horror as the highboy and the chairs began to join together … their edges leaning toward one another and melting into an unnatural six-limbed
thing.
The mottled velvet of the chair spread a sick skin over the wooden struts and faces as they morphed and popped like muscles.

Rose pushed herself back from it, flailing against the stalks.

What had once been the back of the easy chair bent forward, reaching toward the Buck's head on the ground. It locked on.

The whole thing shook, a big cat getting out of the water, and then it lifted its head.

The Buck's head snarled and snorted.

And then it saw Rose. Glass eyes animate with life and hate.

It stamped the ground and
charged
.

Rose twisted and threw herself into a run. Headlong into the saw grass.

She could hear it behind her as she crashed into the green. The edges of the stalks caught her flailing arms and face, splitting cuts into her skin. Her heart was pounding.

He had sent this thing after her. Hugo had sent her this monster.

She would never get away.

Rose felt the despair push its way up into her mind.

A vicious, meaty snort sounded right behind her. Rose turned to look—

Suddenly she was
falling
.

Rose gasped, trying to make sense of the shift. The world was upside down and she was tumbling over the end of it.

The Spider Chasm.

Somehow she had tumbled off the edge of it. The cliff face was flying past her.

She screamed, reaching toward the rock wall.

Her fingers caught a slight crevice in the rock and her body swung downward, hitting the stone with a queasy thud.

Rose could feel that her fingernails had snapped somewhere inside the darkness of the crevice. Her body was in pain. Shoulder screaming, nearly wrenched out of its socket. Lungs bruised, the air torn out of them. Chin scraped against stone.

She willed her other hand to move. To find somewhere to take hold.

Her fingers scrabbled over the rock.
There has to be something here. Please. Please.

Her breath reflected back off the stone, hot, panicked wind.

Her searching hand found a small outcropping in the cliff face. A tiny hold, barely there.

But it was something.

Rose glanced down, through the small window of space between her shoulder and the cliff wall.

The canyon floor was distant. Miles away, it seemed.

A small sound of despair bubbled its way out of her lips.

A smatter of pebbles bounced down the wall in front of her face. She looked up.

She had not fallen far. Maybe twenty feet from the cliff top. Her eyes strained against their sockets for a view; she didn't dare shift her weight to angle her neck for a better look. But even so, she knew.

The
thing
was there.

The outer prongs of its horns whipped over the edge of the Chasm for a moment. Rose could hear its sniffing. Smelling out her location.

She suppressed a whimper.

Above, the sniffing stopped.

Rose held her breath.

Then she felt it … the enclosure around her hand, the one that had stopped her from falling …

It was closing.

The rock was sealing itself, growing over Rose's hand and wrist.

Rose cried out and pulled her hand free, the sides of her fingers scraping against the narrowing gash of stone. Her body swung down, held only by the little outcropping. Her fingers were cramping, protesting against the weight of her.

She sensed movement above. A small face peering over the edge of the cliff.

“Hugo?”

Beneath her hand, the outcropping began to shrink back into the rock wall.

“Hugo, please!” she cried.

Her nails broke against the rock, losing their purchase.

And then she was tumbling backward toward the floor of the ravine, the air screaming in her ears, hair blowing a soft cradle around her face. In the growing distance she could see little Hugo's face watching her placidly from the cliff's edge, a ready witness to her destruction.

Rose braced herself for the pain that would come with the ground.

Maybe I'll wake up. Isn't that what they say? If you fall in a dream that you wake up before you hit the ground?

Her body slapped a surface …

And kept going.

Rose was enveloped in a cool green world.

Water.

Bubbles flew upward, ascribing a trail to her plummeting body. Rose took in her surroundings, confused.

Somehow she had fallen into water, instead of hitting the rock floor of the Chasm.

Rose's descent stopped and she righted herself. A white shape danced in the gloom. She swam toward it.

It was a woman's body, her eyes closed and peaceful. She looked young, maybe thirty, and
pregnant
. Over her belly was an apron decorated with a familiar brown and yellow marigold print.

Rose recoiled, turning away from the corpse—

Right into another body floating in the dim. This one male. Rose could just make out the mustache on his still and silent face.

A scream of bubbles escaped her lips. Rose pushed away from them. This dead couple. Ghosts in the water. Sediment swirled up from the lake floor, and they disappeared into the cloudy murk.

Rose couldn't see anything. Her lungs were burning. She needed air.

Something cold and hard brushed against the back of her hand.

A chain.

Rose clasped it and pulled. Hand over hand. Above her she could make out that the gloom was getting lighter … she was nearing the surface.

She broke it with a gasp.

The Green Lagoon.

Rose beached herself onto one of the enormous roots that bordered the edge of the pool. Her body spasmed, coughing up the insurgent water that had invaded her lungs.

“See! I could have let you hit the bottom of the ravine—but I didn't, Rose. I could have hurt you, but I didn't.”

Little Hugo was standing on the other side of the pool. He looked proud of himself.

Just in front of him floated the Plank Orb.…

Or rather, the
remains
of the Plank Orb. An ax rested in the small part of the vessel that remained seaworthy. It had clearly been used to create an enormous gash in its upper hemisphere.

Orphaned bits of wood bobbled on the surface of the Lagoon.

Rose coughed again, her cheek pressing against the rough bark of the root. “Who are the people in the water, Hugo?” Her voice was strained, torn. She barely sounded like herself.

“Nobody. Come on, Rose. I want to go back to the beach. I think the sun is going to come out. We can jump on the rainbow trail. You always like that.”

“I want to wake up, Hugo.”

“We're never going to wake up, Rosie. You're going to stay with me here forever.”

 

twenty-four

“What did you do to us, Hugo?”

Little Hugo was making his way toward her. Hopping from tree root to tree root. He looked pleased with himself. Like Isaac when he came home with a good score on a math test.
Look, Mom!

“Let's go back to the beach.”

“What did you do to us?”

“God, Rosie. Nothing bad.”

“Why aren't we going to wake up?”

“Because I don't want us to.”

His face was infuriating. Smiling Eddie Haskell shit-sated grin. Rose felt the desire to slap him grow in her palms. An itchy want.

“But what did you do?”

He rolled his eyes.

God, I hate it when they do that.

“He did it. But it was my idea. To take them. To give them to you.”

Rose suddenly became aware of a faint, familiar bitterness spread across the width of her tongue.
The pills.

Grown Hugo turned to sand, crumbling away into nothing.

“How many?” she asked, but she knew.

“All of them.”

All of them. All of the pills. Divided in half. Swallowed whole by Hugo. Crushed and poured down Rosie's unconscious gullet.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Suddenly she was running
toward
him. Driven forward by fury, propelled by hatred of this selfish child who had taken her from everything she loved. Her arms raised. She did not care anymore that he looked like a little boy. She did not care that he looked so much like Hugo … whatever part of Hugo she had once loved was crumbling into sand.… And this
thing
wearing his skin needed to be destroyed. Ripped apart.

Her hands reached his shoulders, palms poised to curl around flesh—

And then she was stumbling onto the dry earth of the meadow. She tumbled to her knees, bent grasses caught in her fists instead of the insipid little boy she had been looking to throttle.

“Goddamn it!” she screamed. Why was she being tossed from place to place like this? Battered and buffeted around the island like some grocery sack in the wind?

Because Hugo is dying.

Rose felt the rightness of the thought. Maybe he had just tried to put them to sleep. To knock them into comas like the one she had been in when they met. A permanent dreamworld.

But he had overshot.

“Oh God.”

He had trapped her here. Trapped her here in his dying, collapsing mind. Lured her away and poisoned her so that she couldn't escape his nightmares, the nightmare of himself.

Rose looked up. Castle City loomed a short walk away, its green walls crumbling a hundred yards distant. Rose could see that portico that had thrilled her weeks ago, the gate to the city, the long-sought-for way in.

Through it, she could see the streets of the metropolis.

A dead place.

She stood. All around her the meadow was littered with discarded dusty furniture and storage boxes. The contents of a thousand emptied basements and attics, church rummages and garage sales.

She took a step.

“Rose, I told you. I went to the city. You don't belong there.”

He was behind her. The darkest part of Hugo. The part he'd left her with.

Rose didn't turn to look at him. “What's in there?”

“Things you shouldn't see.”

In her periphery, Rose sensed the rummage sale debris begin to shift … accreting into clumps on the field. She didn't need to look to know what was happening, what was forming. Hulks of tired cardboard and wood. Monsters of metal and old picture frames.

“What shouldn't I see, Hugo?”

Small showers of earth burst up from the ground all around her. Spiders making their way to the surface from below. In the distance she could hear Blindhead's distinctive slither.

She heard him right behind her. Was he still wearing the little Hugo skin, or had he made himself look like something else?

“Bad things. Dark things. Nightmares.”

All around her the piles of furniture were waking up. Shaking life into their wood-and-fabric muscles. The hard-packed earth was giving beneath the giant carapaces of the island's Spiders, bits of clay tumbling from their bodies as they pulled themselves out of the ground.

“Hugo, everything is a nightmare now.”

If he didn't want her in the city, that was where she needed to go.

Rose ran.

And the beasts came after her.

Came after her on their stilted improvised legs, limping, hulking beasts. Half-things. Rose's toes bit into the dry earth, pushing her toward the dying city. She felt the wind press drily against her eyes. The creatures were sluggish, partly formed. The Spiders not yet free of the ground.

The portico grew closer.

She could make it.

Rose gasped, one huge long pull of air into her dormant lungs.
Had she been breathing before that?
She thought of her body—not the one here running from these makeshift monsters, but her
real body,
her sad overweight
poisoned
body on the floor of Hugo's house.

Rose regretted every ugly thought she'd ever had about her living
breathing
working body.

She willed another breath into her lungs.

She could not die on the floor of Hugo's house.

She could not die.

She would not.

Rose crested the threshold of the city, pushing her way past the portico gate. She turned, ready to fend off the beasts.

The meadow behind her was empty of monsters. Wild poppies and brush grass waved in their stead. Rose bent over, hands on knees, recovering from the exertion. Another breath. Another breath. Another breath.

He's still there. Even if you can't see him. Still there.

Something soft and light pressed itself against Rose's leg. A faint fluttering.

Rose looked down to find a piece of paper, pushed by the breeze against her calf. She peeled it away from her skin.

One of Hugo's drawings. A self-portrait. The artist as an almost man.

A few more drawings flew by. Tumbleweeding. End over end past the reaches of her toes. There was a pattering. Like a summer rain.

Rose pulled her eyes away from the pencil sketch of Hugo's dreamy, sad-boy face and toward the source of the sound.

A library's worth of paper tears cried from the towers of Castle City.

Rose saw snatches of each page's contents as they weaved and wended their way down. A watercolor foot. A pastel lock of hair. A limb in charcoal.