Quite Contrary (3 page)

his industrial yard was huge. The only light was the moon in the sky, sullen and slightly red. The air was cool and breezy, but not unpleasantly cold. A perfect Halloween night, at least to look at. In the dim distance, I could barely make out high walls surrounding the yard. They were a long way away, and Rat was leading me to a greenhouse instead.

It almost fit in with the other buildings. The glass started a floor up and was broken and filthy, while the lower walls were made of cinderblocks stained with ancient, illegible graffiti. Dead trees poked branches out through the holes in the glass. When I walked around the corner to the front doors, I only caught ‘27’ before the metal sign over them fell off and crashed onto the gravel in front of me, lying face down.

Now I grinned, despite it all. That had been perfect.

Rat-In-Boots tried to get the door for me, jumping up to wrestle with a handle. I showed him my way. I kicked the double doors squarely in the middle, and they both jumped off their hinges and fell inwards. Ha!

“Where are we, Rat?” I asked finally. If he belonged to me, I guessed I was allowed to ask questions.

“Abandoned factory district. For the moment. Look there,” he answered, pointing down the row of dead trees inside the greenhouse.

Instead, I looked back over my shoulder at the decrepit buildings and their smokestacks and pipes and gigantic holding tanks. “No, I mean where is this place?” I insisted.

“No one knows,” he squeaked impatiently, “It’s lost. You’re lost, this place is lost—adventures don’t happen if you know where you are. Hansel and Gretel didn’t meet the witch until their breadcrumbs were eaten. Circe’s Island might be a place, but Odysseus couldn’t draw you a map to it. If he did, all you’d find there would be pigs, not transformed sailors.”

Great. I’d gotten the smart-ass rat. I guess we get the rat we deserve.

I begrudgingly turned back and looked the way he’d originally wanted, and wasn’t entirely surprised that the greenhouse was bigger on the inside than the outside. Or longer, at least. The trees on either side of the stone aisle went on and on and on.

“And where are we going?” I asked.

“I’m getting us more lost. We can stay here in the modern stories if you like, Miss Mary, but they don’t have many Happily Ever Afters,” he answered. He was trying to sound encouraging and respectful. He really would stay if I wanted.

“I’d like to get cleaned up. Period.”

“We’ll have better odds of finding water in a forest, Miss,” he pointed out. It made me look back over my shoulder at the industrial yard, but it wasn’t like there were any fountains or rivers to contradict him with.

Broken glass tinkled under my sneakers as I stepped over the fallen doors. The trees got bigger, crowding the glass ceiling, and they got less dead. The leaves might be brown and red, but they were still on the branches and it didn’t take long until I couldn’t see the roof. I
could
still see the cement block walls on either side, right up until they ran up against another wall made of piled up stones. A wrought iron gate stood right in the middle of the path, but before it could block me, Rat-In-Boots ran up and knocked on it with his tiny knuckles. It swung open.

On the other side were more trees, and a complete lack of greenhouse. The canopy crowded the top of the stone wall, and I itched to climb up and peek over, but something else caught my attention.

On a branch a few trees ahead of me hung clothes. Clean clothes. Garish scarlet and white with skirts, but clean.

I darted down the path to them, wrestling with my blouse. I hadn’t even noticed the path, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with forests. By the time I reached the dress, the bare dirt track in the middle of the dry undergrowth was obvious.

“What are you doing?!” squealed the—my, I supposed—rat in horror.

“The mess is all on my clothing,” I explained irritably as I threw my blouse down on the path. It splatted.

“But don’t you know what you’re putting on?” he insisted. Wow, I’d stunned him. It made reaching up to run the thick, soft, clean cotton through my fingers all the more heavenly.

“It’s a Red Riding Hood costume,” I acknowledged. “Tacky, but it’s Halloween, and it’s clean. Not like—ugh!” I shimmied out of my skirt and threw it on top of the blouse. The noise was even wetter and more nauseating. My shoes I could just tuck off, but I had to peel the stockings off with great care to keep gunk off my fingers. The real blessing was that my hair had stayed dry!

“Mistress, you can’t put that on! You have to know the story of Red Riding Hood. It’s a thousand years old, and still alive and growing! You know what happens!” The little guy was panicking. I felt kind of sorry for him. Not sorry enough to let him tell me what to do.

“Yeah, a woodsman comes along and chops the wolf open and Red and her granny fill its belly with stones and it dies and they make a coat out of it. The End,” I filled in smugly as I pulled several layers of petticoats over my head. Oh, it felt good. It felt really, really good.

“Only in one version in a thousand years,” my rat squeaked, pulling on his ears in what I had to admit was the most adorable gesture possible. “In all the others Red dies. All of them. Or, well, it depends on what you think is a fate worse than death.”

Ha! I restrained the urge to laugh out loud. The little guy didn’t deserve that. He was just so embarrassed, and it was obvious why. This costume was intended for a girl who’d hit puberty, and hit it running. Okay, A short girl who’d hit puberty. I’d been able to pull a bunch of laces tight and it mostly fit me, but it was trying to show off things I didn’t have. It was one of those slutty costumes that give Halloween a bad name, or would have been if I had more to show off than a pair of shoulders. Which the cape and hood covered quite nicely. I didn’t feel all that immodest at all, especially since I’d left the panties on the branch and stuck with mine, which had four times as much fabric and twenty times as much dignity.

“You could put this outfit on a ruler and it’d be sexier than me, Rat,” I assured him dryly.

“Technically correct,” purred the Wolf, slinking out of the bushes, “But presentation and attitude are everything, and I find you devastatingly attractive, Red. Just not in a way that would offend prudish minds.”

The conflict was jarring. That voice wrapped you in honey and velvet, deep and rich and passionate like an old time blues singer’s. The body was a wolf’s, dirty gray and big. Too big to be a real animal. Dark blue eyes watched me with confident intelligence. They didn’t just watch, they roamed over me, taking me in. Suddenly, despite his assurance, the dress felt a lot less modest.

A weight pulled on the back of my skirt. It crawled up my dress at high speed, until a furry head popped over my shoulder and Rat-In-Boots squeaked, “Don’t talk to him! Don’t say anything at all! The story’s started, but it can’t end until he charms you!” He was trying to whisper, to keep his voice down. That was ridiculous. The Wolf could hear him.

“Have you picked up another animal guide already, Red?” the Wolf asked, easing out onto the path. He didn’t look like one, but he moved like a cat. “Normally I’d hate to move in on another man’s territory, but there’s nothing he can offer you that I can’t, and so much more.” That voice was heaven. It sounded like lies were better than the truth. Which was a position I wouldn’t always argue with.

On the other hand, I wasn’t stupid and if I didn’t believe in cooties, I had classmates who did. I was supposed to want to hear this voice on the pillow next to me. Mainly I wanted to hear it announcing the next album on the radio. “If you’re trying to charm me, dog face, insulting my rat is a bad way to start,” I growled at him, “He’s a hell of a lot more trustworthy than you are.”

“Yes, he is. He has your best interests at heart, and my desires are entirely selfish. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He’s a goody goody. He thinks there’s a right way and a wrong way and life’s as simple as that. You’re like me. You think that right hides behind wrong and wrong hides behind right and you’ll make up your own mind, even if you’re wrong. I can hear it in your voice. That excites me. The rat is right, there’ve been a thousand years of Red Riding Hoods, but not like you.” He circled me as he talked, his tail swaying close enough to brush across my hip. It was shark-like, predatory. He wasn’t bothering to hide what he was. It was honest, and he’d seen through me like glass.

“I would give my life for yours, mistress,” the rat whimpered, cowering on my shoulder. The honesty in the Wolf’s voice had intimidated him. I believed both of them.

The Wolf wound around in front of me again. He gave his heavy head a roll, gesturing down the path. “You think you know how this goes, and so does the rat,” a voice like chocolate ice cream explained to me, “But you’re not going to your grandmother’s house, and I don’t want to get there ahead of you. I just want you to make a choice, about whether you’ll be who the rat wants you to be, or you’ll be who you want to be. You have to make it on your own. I want you to make it on your own, so that it’s entirely your decision. Do you see where the path curves ahead of us?”

I saw what he meant. “It’s not a path, it’s a fork. One path is just hard to see.”

He chuckled. He loved that I’d noticed. “That’s right. Most people only see one path. There are flowers there. Sunshine. It’s a path most Red Riding Hoods would love to take. The other leads you through the shadows, but where the sunny path leads to fun, the shadow path leads to satisfaction. You know exactly what I mean.”

I didn’t say anything, but I did.

He turned away from me now, and trotted down towards the fork. “I’m going to take the shadow path, Red. I hope I see you there. I’d like to finally walk that path with Red Riding Hood by my side, rather than waiting for me like a lamb at the end and only good for food.”

I let him disappear into the darker branch of the fork, staring with my mouth open and my heart hammering in my chest. The rat whimpered on my shoulder. Then when I turned and walked right off the path into the bushes, he squeaked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m not taking either path. Every word he said might be true, but he was still lying to me,” I spat in disgust. “I’m getting out of this story. He can’t make me be Red Riding Hood.”

“It’s too late. You made yourself into Red Riding Hood. I could have given you any story you wanted, and you picked this one,” squealed Rat in anguish, “Why couldn’t you listen to me? Puss-In-Boots gets Jack, and I get you?”

Fury boiled up in me. I grabbed Rat in one hand and threw him at the ground, hard. Then I kept walking. “Then go find Jack, whoever the hell he is! I don’t need you!” I yelled.

Scurrying in dead leaves followed me. A weight grabbed the back of my skirt. I was about to kick him off when he said, “Jack’s an idiot. He can’t think for himself. He can’t do anything for himself. Mary got herself into trouble, then got herself out. I’ll take Mary as my owner, because she won’t wait for me to save her. But I hope she’ll let me help.”

I grunted. It had been a pretty good apology. It hadn’t been an apology at all, but I wouldn’t have believed an actual apology. People usually meant what they said, both the insults and the praise.