Quite Contrary (15 page)

“Just ‘no’?” I barked back, high and shrill. “No mysterious poems that can mean anything? No line of bullshit about the stars and escaping my destiny?”
Mary, lay off her! She’s trying to help, and you just don’t like hearing the truth!
I couldn’t lay off. “What kind of oracle are you?”

At least I hadn’t made her cry. She just looked sad and resigned and used to this kind of abuse. Oh, and I’d broken my promise to Rat.
You’re on such a roll, Mary.

“I’m the kind of oracle who gives the true and complete answer,” she said, with the calmness I knew so well that meant she wanted to hide how I’d hurt her. “That’s why I can only answer one question, and why the priestesses of Apollo wanted to keep me forever, but wouldn’t let me be Pythia. When you asked, I saw your destiny, your future, all of your possible futures, I knew everything about your question, Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, and you. I held onto what I could. The real answer is ‘no’, and I didn’t want to get your hopes up. Do you want to hear the rest?”

I grunted. It was that or swear at her.

“Your magic, your destiny, and your story are tied up in a knot,” she went on when I didn’t. “There’s no way to untangle that knot, because everything you do ties the knot tighter. It has to, because you are Little Red Riding Hood.”

“I am not Little Red Riding Hood!” I screamed at her, jumping to my feet.

She waited for me to stop shaking and for the shame to hit. I hated that feeling. I wouldn’t let myself yell at her more to cover it up. I refused to be that kind of person.

In fact—“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, although it hurt to say it.

Rose looked just as pained. It couldn’t be easy to tell a twelve-year-old girl you’ve just met that she’s going to be murdered. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to or not, but she continued, “You’re telling the story differently, but it still fits. Instead of being a victim or an easy seduction, you’re making the Wolf pursue you. He has to persevere and chase after a prize he wants badly, but the end is the same. However you tell the story, it ends with giving in to temptation, and death.”

“Pardon me if I don’t lie down and accept that,” I mumbled bitterly. It was the most polite thing I could think of to say.

Rose didn’t show a flicker of irritation at my sarcasm. “No, you won’t. I saw that. You’ll be who you are, and the Wolf will be who he is, and this could end a thousand ways, but all of them are a Red Riding Hood story. There’s only one way out, and you won’t take it because you don’t want to. I hardly saw any futures in which you were that desperate. You think it’s worse than death.”

Don’t argue. Don’t jump to conclusions, Mary. Just listen.
“Go ahead and tell me.”

“You can go home. You can, but you won’t,” she told me.

“It’s better than being killed. I guess it keeps me out of the Wolf’s reach. How do I get there?” I snapped.

“Not easily. You can’t just find an exit like most explorers. They’re closed to you. You would have to rip yourself free. You would have to throw away your story, throw away all the magic in your life, and crush them out of you forever. Doing that and going back home are the same thing now. It’s difficult and dangerous, but it is possible, and if you do it you’ll go home and live the life you know you’re going to with no magic and no special story of your own.” She recited it all calmly and evenly. After all, she knew how I’d react.

“Not ever, ever, ever,” I answered her just as calmly. I knew what kind of person I almost was. Being killed by a Wolf was better than that.

My options really sucked, but if I had to be a Thenardier, I’d be Eponine.

“I’m sorry, Mary. You needed to rest. You’re stretched to your last nerve, and I’ve thrown it all in your face again,” Rose whispered.

“No, I’m sorry,” I hissed. I was. I really was. “There’s nothing happening to me I haven’t done to myself, and now I’m going to leave you alone because I can’t stay here and just talk after hearing that. I can’t rest here.” Already my legs twitched with the desire to get out, to be alone and away and escape this helplessness, to do something instead of stand here and talk about how useless everything would be.

“I understand. Let me do one thing for you, at least,” Rose urged me, “Drink some water from my pool.”

The pool her statue stood in. The vines of the rosebush wound right down into it, but the surface was clear. Crystal clear.

“I’ll be fine. I have to swallow this news before I can handle anything else anyway,” I gruffed. I was straining to be polite. Rose hadn’t done anything to me. But I itched with my desire to be away, or to blame it all on her and get angry.

“Please,” she insisted.

Anger shot up from my feet to the top of my head, then passed out of me. Did I have a giant button on me that said, ‘This is how to get what you want?’

Rose wouldn’t have any more chances to push it, and she was trying to help me. I sighed extra loud and took the step forward to kneel by the pool and dip my hands in. The water was cold, of course. Almost icy cold, but not quite painful. I lifted what I could hold in cupped hands and scooped it into my mouth quickly before it all ran out between my fingers.

Cold. The water hardly tasted of anything. It was just fresh, spreading a pleasant chill through my body. My stomach unknotted. I wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or even tired. My heart ached, but even my legs were merely stiff.

I lifted my eyes to the flower and Rose explained, “This blessed water keeps me immortal.”

“It helped. Thank you. It hardly hurt to say. “I’m going to go now. It was nice meeting you. It really was. None of this is your fault.”

“Goodbye, Mary. I don’t remember if we’ll see each other again. I hope so.” She rolled up her petals, hiding her face. She hadn’t completely covered up the regret in her voice, and she didn’t want to watch me walk out on her.

I turned around and took a step. Behind me, Rose’s muffled voice added, “Right now you want to run away from fairy tales. When you change your mind, remember: Once upon a time, there was a sweet little girl. Everyone who saw her liked her, but most of all her grandmother.”

I kept walking. I didn’t care about fairy tales except the one I was stuck in, and if I’d needed any proof I wasn’t Red Riding Hood, those words were it.

I walked out through the gate, shut it behind me, turned left and kept walking. We were both alone again, and both used to it. For me, I was going to see where these steam tunnels led. Now that the pool had calmed my body, I hoped walking would calm my feelings.

It did. They didn’t get better, but they became calm. I walked through warm mist and stared at a tangle of pipes. I walked, and when I got to another T intersection I turned right, and then the corridor turned left again. The quiet hiss and tunnel scenery soothed my nerves. Eventually, I’d have gotten bored, but long before that happened I saw the first rat.

I thought it was a rat, at least. Something dark and hairy scurried along a pipe over my head and disappeared into the foggy gloom. I kept on, and about the time I saw a four way intersection ahead, another little body bolted away from me along a pipe. It ran around the corner to the right, so I followed. I hate being bored.

The memory felt wrong. The rat had moved wrong. I’d seen a bare rat tail, but I thought the animal had run upright. Around here, that wasn’t a surprise, but I wondered what I had really seen. I passed a mushroom growing on the surface of a pipe by my feet, then a pair of mushrooms sticking off a pipe over my head. The shadows in the mist ahead of me changed, and I walked through the haze into a much more chaotic stretch of tunnel.

The pipes had been diverted. Some had shiny new fixtures turning to run across the middle of the tunnel. Others had new pipes rammed through and the edges sealed with coppery gunk. Holes pockmarked the walls, some still with lengths of pipe sticking out. Jumbles of pipe that were all connectors without connections looked like makeshift buildings attached to, well, any surface. This place was a village, and the not-rats were its inhabitants.

A village and a forest. Or a farm. Moss covered large sections of the walls, floor, and ceilings. Mushrooms, a couple the size of pumpkins, sprouted from whatever they felt like. Pipes, moss, little buildings, bare concrete and brick, whatever. The variety of colors and shapes bewildered me, and some had been cultivated. When a series of pinholes in a steam pipe sprayed nonstop steam on a row of mushrooms, what else could I call it?

As for the not-rats, I couldn’t decide what they were. They were mostly black and brown-furred, some mottled or with white patches. They looked kind of ratty, but bipedal with an extra pair of arms. Not entirely bipedal. They ran on all sixes a lot.
Face it, Mary, you haven’t got a clue
. So, I just decided they were not-rats.

They ignored me, going about their business. One used a fragment of edged copper to saw through a mushroom, then others descended to dissect it meticulously into parts, such as peeling off the top layer of the cap or shaving the flutes off the stem. A small team wrestled with a pipe, screwing it into the end of another pipe sticking out of the wall. I might as well have been invisible. Why shouldn’t they ignore me? I had no place in their weird little world.

I crept through the tunnel carefully now, trying not to step on mushrooms or otherwise disturb the village. I had to duck under or step over pipes they’d diverted through the middle of the hallway, not just to be polite but so as not to burn myself. I could feel the heat radiating from some of these pipes without touching them, but the not-rats walked with bare pink feet along the metal blithely.

Some of the mushrooms had faintly glowing bulbs instead of caps. Others curled the cap up the wrong way, like a flower. Out of one of those, a shining star rose, hovering in place, then zipping up in front of me.

The light was a fairy, of course. A tiny little woman the size of my pinky, with wings that buzzed so fast I couldn’t make out anything but the golden glow. She glittered like glass, which kept me from telling how human she was. She was a gleaming thing with a female shape and blurry, shining wings. I did make out the opened mouth as she lunged for my face, but by this point, I’d learned that I just plain hate fairies. I’d been watching for it, and I swatted her right out of the air with the back of my hand. She hit a pipe, and a not-rat jumped on her, pinning her in all four arms and scurrying off as she struggled.

I didn’t feel bad about that. I hate fairies, and she’d been a nasty little bug that attacked me at first sight. If they made fairy burgers, they wouldn’t be making them out of a person, just an especially pretty wasp.

I kept walking, and ducked under another pipe to come across a field of those glowing bulbs. Not-rats tended them, rubbing the surface of some while three of the little creatures twisted a bulb off its stalk with patient precision. A thin path let me walk down the center of the passage without stepping on the fields on either side, but I had to step over not-rats in the process. I had nothing to grab onto that wouldn’t burn my hands, so I felt wobbly and uncertain as I stretched my legs out to creep over one not-rat, then a second, and then a third. When I got to the other side, I looked back down at the not-rats still working, apparently unaware I’d even passed by. Could they talk? Did they really not know I was here? Curiosity hit me. I crouched down and asked the nearest not-rat, a black and white piebald creature, “What are these—”

There wasn’t any point in saying more. When I addressed him directly, he’d dropped his little copper cup full of mud and sprinted away on all sixes into a hole in the wall. As for the others, it might as well not have happened.

I stood up, and kept walking. Another ten or twenty feet and the moss got thin. I couldn’t see any more village or mushrooms or not-rats ahead of me, and the mists settled into the even white that told me no pipes were waiting to block my path. I stopped, staring back behind me at the weird little village of weird little creatures doing weird little things. I’d liked it. It had been pretty. But I’d been an invader there, and I had to keep moving.

I walked some more. The steam tunnel went back to the old look, stark and intricately lifeless, filled with shadows and gleams. All metal and bricks. Hey, hadn’t it been stone before I’d passed through the village? A change like that shouldn’t surprise me at this point, but it did. I was passing from place to place without knowing anything about any of them.

The steam tunnel ended in a dank, circular room. It held less pipes, most of them traveling floor to ceiling along the walls. The room had three doors and a couple of grated vents near the ceiling that I couldn’t see how I could get into. The old circuit breaker box on the wall stood out too, but I had no desire to shut off the lights.

I checked the left hand door. Like the last door, this one was metal and official looking and had a push-bar, so I pushed. It creaked open reluctantly into a tall, gray cement hallway. Banners of sports teams hung high up on the walls, but I didn’t have a clue about sports teams. When people wanted to act stupid in a group, I didn’t get involved. A stairwell went up right next to my door, and a goblin carrying a pizza box was disappearing up it.

This was a sports stadium, wasn’t it? A back hall of a sports stadium. Another crusty, hairy little brown man, a long-nosed goblin in a flour-stained polo shirt and khaki shorts, walked out of a doorway down the hall carrying three more stacked pizza boxes. He waddled up towards me and, presumably, the stairway. Sure, of course, this was how food stands in stadiums were stocked. Real people had no place to cook. I felt amused, and wondered if any of this pizza really ended up in an actual stadium.

“Hey, can I have some?” I asked the goblin whimsically as he turned the corner to go up the stairs.

He screamed. He shrieked bloody murder, threw his boxes at me, and fled back the way he came waving his arms and gobbling. It was the only word I could use to describe the gibberish he wailed. They sounded more like an angry turkey than a human.

Two of the boxes slid to the ground, but I’d caught one without thinking. I opened it up and peered inside. Hot, fresh pepperoni pizza. I wasn’t all that hungry, but hey. Free pizza. I kicked the other two boxes after the rude little creature, stepped back into the circular room, and yanked the door shut as hard as I could. They didn’t want me, so I didn’t want them. I didn’t care. I’d gotten pizza out of it, and I was more annoyed that the door had one of those stiff hinges that wouldn’t let me slam it.