The Fall of Never (48 page)

“I climbed.”

“That whole tree?”

“Just up to the branch.” He pointed. “See?”

“That’s pretty high up.”

“It’s not so high,” he told her, now exuding confidence. His birdlike chest seemed to puff out before her eyes and she fought back a grin. “I can climb higher.”

“Higher than that? Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall again?”

He shook his head, but his eyes had crept up and to the right in contemplation. “I can climb to the top,” he stated.

“Wow. You’ve climbed to the top before?”

“Well, no, not yet. But I’ve been practicing. I climb up a little at a time, and each time I go up some more and up some more and pretty soon I’ll make it to the top. Just not yet.”

“You should be careful,” she told him. “You could fall and hurt yourself again.”

“You too.”

“Me too what? What do you mean?”

He pointed at her forehead and said, “You’re bleeding too. What happened?”

She brought a hand up to her forehead and gently touched the tender area. When she brought her fingers away, she saw they were slick with blood. Staring at it made her feel dizzy and she thought she might pass out. For a second or two, while talking with this boy, she’d forgotten all about Simple Simon and the Land of Never.

In my head,
she told herself.
All of it.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The boy shrugged. “Oh,” he said. Then he nodded toward the brook. “Clean it with the water. It’s clean water. Cold. It’ll make it feel better.”

“Will it sting?”

“No.” Then: “Maybe a little. But not much. You’ll be okay.”

Smiling, she hunkered down beside him along the edge of the brook. With both hands, she reached into the brook and cupped some water, brought it up to her face, hesitated.

“It feels good,” he promised her.

“Yeah,” she said, and patted her hands against her forehead. It stung, but felt good, too.

“I’m Gabriel,” said the boy.

“Kelly,” she responded, a blushing heat flooding her face. Then said, “Do you want to come see a baby?”

Gabriel smiled. “I’ve never seen a real one before,” he said.

Kelly spent the following few weeks getting to know and befriend Gabriel Farmer. He lived with his parents in a small cottage on the other side of the wooded valley and was an only child. He seemed fascinated by the idea that Kelly had a younger sister, and although he never questioned her about it much, Kelly knew he wanted to ask her what it was like…if it was like anything at all…

He taught her to draw. On warm days, they’d sit by the brook and scrawl with crayons in Gabriel’s notebooks endlessly, laughing and telling jokes, and sometimes shooting spit-rockets into the brook water.

“You ever see anything strange down here?” she asked him once.

Not looking up from his artwork, Gabriel said, “Nope. Like what? Bears?”

“Not bears.”

“What?”

She shrugged, her eyes trailing off into the forest depths. “I don’t know. Just stuff. Nothing, I guess.”

Gabriel laughed. “Look at this.” He held up a picture of Kelly in a pink princess gown and pointed hat. She held a star-crowned wand trailing glitter in one hand.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a green lump at Princess Kelly’s feet.

“That’s me,” said Gabriel. “A frog.”

“A
frog?”
Kelly laughed. “Why a frog?”

Blushing, Gabriel turned back to his drawing pad and rubbed at his eyes from beneath his glasses. “Because that’s what the prince looks like before the princess kisses him.”

She laughed harder and stuck out her tongue. “Oh, gross!” she said.

“Yeah, I know—”

Giggling, she leaned over and kissed Gabriel Farmer on the cheek, shocking him into silence. As she pulled away, the boy clamped a hand over the targeted spot, too embarrassed to look her in the face. She could see tiny droplets of sweat breaking out along his face and neck.

“Nope,” she said, “still a frog.”

He laughed. “Shut up! Shut up!”

“Give me that.” She grabbed the picture from him, examined it at arm’s length. “Kellerella,” she muttered, her face completely sober now.

“What’s that?”

She looked at him. “What?”

“What you said,” he said. “Like Cinderella.”

The palms of her hands began to sweat. “Yeah,” she said, “like a fairy tale.”

Hours later, as she headed back through the forest toward home, she heard the clatter of something up ahead and froze. Movement caught her eye and she turned in time to see several white objects drop from a tree branch and rattle to the ground. They were forks, she saw. Plastic forks with all but one prong busted off.

“Simon,” she whispered.

One of the boy’s pale, thin legs swung down from the tree branch, dangled several feet in front of her. Its sudden appearance startled her and she jumped back, uttered a small cry. Craning her neck, she could barely make out Simon’s poorly-defined form crouched among the leaves and branches of the tree.

“What are you doing up there?”

He tossed another fork down at her and spat on the ground. “Found a new friend?” he said.

“His name’s Gabriel,” she said.

“Do you like him? Is he your boyfriend?”

“No,” she stammered.

“Oh.” He shifted positions in the tree, sending a wave of leaves fluttering to the ground. His swinging foot moved out of the way and Kelly noticed that something had been carved into the bark of the tree, just above her reach. They were initials, she saw: K.K. + S.S.

“Did you tell him about me?” Simon said, and she looked up at him.

“No.”

“Why not?”

She sidestepped the tree. “I have to go home,” she said.

“I don’t like being by myself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” he told her. “You ignore me, just like your parents ignore you. You’re just as evil.”

His words hurt her. “That’s not true!”

“Let’s go to the house,” he said, “the gingerbread house.”

“I can’t,” she told him. “I have to get home.” The truth was, she’d been having a difficult time seeing the gingerbread house lately. It no longer existed for her.

“You’re supposed to be the Princess of Never,” he muttered, hiding his face behind a pall of leaves. “I’m supposed to be the Prince.”

“Some other time,” she said. “I have to go.”

Not looking back, her head down, she pushed on through the forest toward home. And although she didn’t want to think about Simon, Prince of Never, she could hear him yammering in her head:
You’re just as evil as your parents, Kellerella. You left me. You left me.

Go away!
she thought, and ran the rest of the way home.

Gabriel’s birthday was in the fall, and two days prior to it, Kelly slipped down into the forest to hang a newly made swing from the tallest tree she could find. She’d wanted to do something special for him and, having never had a close friend, she didn’t want to disappoint him and scare him off. Not that she thought Gabriel was like that.
Would it be possible to ever scare him off?
she wondered.

After much searching, she finally decided on a large oak that sat crookedly on the sloping valley floor. It would be difficult to climb it and tie it up there, she knew, but there were plenty of branches to grab and handhold, plenty of places for her to step around—

She heard someone behind her. Turning, she nearly tumbled down the hillside, but managed to grab onto a tree branch at the last second. Simultaneously, she felt a rumbling in her groin, felt the hot urgency of urine rush through her. Uttering a sharp cry, she dropped to the earth, knocking her head back against the tree.

Half-masked by foliage, Simon stood in the valley below, staring up at her. His eyes had mutated, were now a startling blue. He stood huddled like a hunchback, his slender form contorted and misshapen. For the first time, it occurred to her that her ignoring him had begun to twist his physical presence. The less she thought about him, the more deformed he became.

“Simon,” she heard herself whisper.

“You came back,” he called up to her, only his own voice did not rise above a whisper. Mostly, she was hearing him inside her head.

“You scared me. I didn’t hear you coming.”

“I’m quiet.” He moved along the valley floor, remaining concealed by the shrubs. “Never’s been quiet without you, too.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I’ve been busy.”

“Growing up,” he said.

She nodded slowly. “What’s the matter? What happened to you? You look funny.”

“Funny,” he snickered. He coughed and spat onto the ground. “I’ve been busy too.”

“Have you?”

“Want to see?” She could make out a grin. “I’ve been busy for you.”

“What is it?”

“Something I found. I’ll show you. Like old times, right?”

She swallowed a hard lump of spit. Absently, she found that her sudden urge to relieve herself had vanished as quick as it had come. It was Simon’s power over her, she knew.
He
possessed what
she
possessed. He had powers of his own.

“Come,” he said, and turned his back to her. He began ambling through the thicket, his gait hindered by a slight limp.

Setting the tree swing down at the foot of the giant oak, Kelly crab-walked her way down the hillside and jumped down into the valley. Upon hitting the ground, the world seemed to shift all around her, to take on the bright, plastic colors of the fairy tale world she herself had created. And for a moment she was no longer Kelly Kellow, but Kellerella, Princess of Never.

No,
she thought, and shook the notion from head.
That’s not me thinking that. It’s Simon, taking control of my mind. He wants me to think it.

Her legs pushed her forward through the forest. Ahead of her, Simon snaked along, his form flickering in and out of the foliage as if he were deliberately trying to elude her. After several minutes, she emptied out onto the cleared path and got a better glimpse of Simon. His skin had soured to a dull gray, the comb of his spine a series of crooked protrusions weaving down his back. Cobwebby strands of silver hair fanned out from choice places along his back, neck, scalp, arms, and legs; they undulated with each step he took.

He’s no longer perfect,
she thought.
Without me to regulate him, without me thinking about him, he can be and look like whatever he wants.

They reached the embankment to the gingerbread house and Simon turned to face her. His face looked small and flecked with minute scales. His lips were dry and cracked, laced with fine threads of blood vessels. A stench clung to him—foul and corrupt, radiating from him in moist waves. She recoiled at his sudden proximity, which made him crack a ghoulish grin.

“What is this?” she said.

“Don’t you trust me?” His grin widened. There was suddenly something reptilian about him. “We used to be such good friends, you and I.”

“What?” More forceful this time. She thought of Gabriel, of how he’d looked the day she’d kissed him on the cheek, and of the picture he’d drawn of her in the pink princess gown.

Kellerella…

“Come,” Simon muttered and crept up and over the embankment.

Kelly had it in her mind to turn and run at that moment—but her feet suddenly refused to comply. Instead, she found herself scaling the embankment and dropping down to the other side, caught in surprise by a gust of freezing air.

At her foot lay a dead raccoon, its belly torn down the middle, its innards spread like butter across its fur and the pile of dead leaves on which it lay. Fat, yellow maggots squirmed in the gore; flies had taken up residence in its half-open mouth. A sharp, jagged piece of slate rested nearby in the leaves, slick and sticky with gore. Sticking out of the animal’s shredded belly were the remains of a several white plastic forks.

Groaning, she shuffled backward and nearly fell, unable to take her eyes off the carnage before her. A scuttle of large, black beetles dispersed from beneath the small corpse and scattered for the cover of the underbrush.

“God…”

“For you,” Simon said. There was a hint of joviality in his voice. He tiptoed around the carcass, his bare feet kicking up flecks of sod, and hopped behind a fence of berry bushes. “Like the story of the children lost in the woods,” he said. “To find your way back again.”

Again she wanted to turn and leave, but couldn’t. She wasn’t fully in control of her body, she knew; that somehow Simon had latched on to a hidden handle inside her brain, and was now dragging her through his insane funhouse. She followed him, managing to keep a distance at least, and only paused once upon seeing a second gutted raccoon strewn on the ground. This one’s arms and legs had been spread and speared to the earth with plastic forks, its face smashed and torn down the middle. She felt something lurch inside her, bent, and vomited a stringy paste onto the ground. Her whole world began spinning again. She heard Simon’s voice, but couldn’t tell if he was actually speaking or if she was hearing it solely inside her head:
You’re not alone now, Kellerella. Now we’re both freaks on the hill. Ugly, ugly freaks on the hill.