The Night Market (12 page)

“Do you see it? I thought at first maybe I was
hallucinating.” Jenny’s voice was soft and awed, anxiety and jealousy
intertwined. “It’s like something from a horror movie, or Japanese pornography.
Can you see it there in the middle of everything?”

To Yael’s misfortune, her perspective on the sky was
perfect. Because when she looked into the heart of dizzying cluster of stars,
something looked right back at her.

Yael wanted to scream, but she was either too smart or
too frightened. Instead, she shoved her fist in her mouth, and bit down on her
fingers until she could taste blood.

“At first I thought that it was moving, because every
time I see it the stars are different. One night, though, I finally realized
what was happening. That thing isn’t moving – the stars around it are changing.
They are disappearing – and I’m pretty sure that thing is eating them.”

Yael wasn’t sure about that, but even with her eyes
closed and the sleeping bag pulled over her head, she couldn’t escape the
feeling that it was watching her. When Jenny retreated back from the tent
entrance, Yael found that she didn’t mind their proximity in the tent nearly as
much as before. Eventually, she fell asleep with her back pressed against
Jenny’s.

***

“Induced.”

It is summer, and she is walking back
from temple with her family, except for her father, who is at work. Her brother
is unsteady in the daylight, his muscles atrophied from hours spent asleep, his
beard wild and his hair unruly. He holds on to her hand tightly, both for
balance and for comfort. Yael looks up at his face fondly, but there is nothing
there.

“Too much with it too soon. A secret
even to herself.”

At school, Ravi and Saul are playing
chess in the library. Yael is only there because she has to stay until the end
of class. She reaches for a book on the stacked shelves, and is surprised at
how heavy it is. She barely manages to drag it to a table, and then she drops
it, because it is so cold that her hands sting. The book is bound in worn
leather and the title is written in gilt letters across the face of it, ‘The
King in Yellow’
.
Yael is disappointed, certain she has read this book before, though all she can
remember is that she didn’t like the first act.

The house is cold, and Yael cannot
find any of her cats. She is worried, because one of them is pregnant, and she
has not seen it in weeks.

The tunnel is too small for Elian,
even though he has narrow shoulders for a boy. He says that he will wait for
her there, crouched in a passage so small that he cannot even sit, but she
doesn’t believe him. She crawls forward, certain that when she turns around,
Elian will have retreated to the service tunnel entrance, assuming shame kept
him from fleeing altogether. Even with the mask, it smells bad, or maybe that
is just her imagination.

Jenny has a bag, and Yael knows the
bag was full of kittens. She can do nothing to stop her as she throws them into
the river.

Smoke from one of the distant peaks.
In Vermont, the hills weren’t really hills at all – they were more like
mountains, wild and lonely because the Visitors preferred this country. The
road winds through fields well-along the process of being reclaimed by the
creeping wild. The trees on the upper slopes are impossibly old, and the houses
in such poor maintenance that they appear to be sinking back into the earth.

“There are always alternatives.”

At the chalkboard, tracing the shape
of the Silver Key, the Sign of the Yellow King which allows sleepers to remember
their dreams on waking.

The map, smoldering at the edges as
if it had been rescued from a fire.

“The train.”

Yael waits at the station, but she doesn’t
have a ticket, and she is nervous following her brother on board. She has seen
the authoritarian uniforms of the fare checkers who roamed the cars, demanding
to see a ticket, and she fears them.

Ancestral memory, an entire
generation lost to the wilderness. A lifetime spent wandering. The sign by
which dreams are remembered, inviting revelation, madness.

“This is the way out.”

***

“Where are we going?”

“I already told you that. This road ends in Hastur,
beside the dry lakebed. That’s where we can find the train station.”

“I don’t know about this. How do you know where to
go?”

“I saw it in a dream last night.”

“That’s crazy talk. Also, you snore.”

“I do not!”

“Suit yourself. You always do what your dreams tell
you?”

Yael nodded, better able to deal with Jenny with the
gas mask on.

“Of course.”

“And you don’t think that’s kinda, you know, batshit?”

“Miss Frost!”

“Oops,” Jenny exclaimed with a wink. “But how
often...”

Yael interrupted, not certain why she felt so
defensive. Maybe it was because the conversation was so similar to any number
of unpleasant discussions between Yael and her stepmother.

“I always follow the instructions I receive in dreams,
Miss Frost,” Yael said icily. “And they are
always
right. How do you
think I made it this far? My dreams hold the map we follow. If you don’t like
it, then you can go back to walking in circles in the Waste.”

Jenny kicked a stone in Fenrir’s general direction,
earning what looked remarkably like a contemptuous glare from the dog.

“He’s so skinny,” Yael criticized. “Do you ever feed
him?”

Jenny seemed legitimately surprised by the question,
as if Yael had suggested something utterly novel.

“Why the hell would I do something like that?”

“So he won’t starve, naturally! How can you be so
cruel?”

“You think I’m cruel? You should see what he eats. Actually,
that’s how we met.”

“What? I don’t follow you.”

“Fenrir. That’s how I ended up working with him.”

“He wanted to eat you?”

“Sure,” Jenny said, grinning. “That too.”

“I don’t think I want to understand.”

“Let me give you a piece of advice, Princess,” Jenny
continued cheerfully, disregarding Yael’s response. “Life really isn’t that
complicated...”

“How old are you, again?”

“Twenty-four, which is older than you. And shut up. Nothing
is really that complicated, and the least complicated thing of all is men.”

“I thought we were talking about a dog, or whatever
Fenrir is?”

“That is exactly my point,” Jenny said, seizing Yael
by the shoulders as if she had said something clever. “It doesn’t make any
difference. They can’t see anything but what they want.”

“Please stop shaking me.”

“Men can’t hide it when they want something,” Jenny
said enthusiastically, leaning her forehead against the top of Yael’s gas mask.
“Let’s be honest – despite your flat chest...”

“Hey! It’s not...”

“...and your skinny legs, guys are gonna like you. If
you ever take that stupid mask off. Actually, some of them might like you
better with it.”

“Gross!”

“Figure out what someone wants, Yael, and you own
them. As long as you make sure they never get it. Understand?”

Yael extracted herself from Jenny’s grasp.

“I understand that is the worst life advice I have
ever received.”

“Talk to me again in ten years.”

“Eight.”

“Why are you so pissy?”

“Because you are obscene and annoying.”

“You asked.”

Yael stopped in sheer disbelief.

“All I asked was whether or not you fed your stupid
dog! And now I don’t care.”

“Oh, well, you know,” Jenny grinned, poking Yael in
the side. “Fenrir is my associate, not my dog. He eats people, but he prefers
little girls. Unless you want to volunteer...”

“Would you please stop talking?”

***

“There is no safe haven.”

Yael sits on the rocks and watches
the Atlantic Ocean, dead and grey from winter and the Visitors’ ships, waves
lashing the shore with half-hearted intensity. She experiences a moment of
profound déjà-vu when she looks to her right and sees her own gas mask staring
back at her. Then she notices that it is missing the stickers she plastered all
over it and remembers that her brother, whose name she can almost remember, is
still behind it.

Eating stolen bread in the kitchen,
white bread, the kind that comes in identical spongy pieces. Her mouth is so
full of it that she can barely swallow, and Yael is seized with a terrible fear
of choking.

In the dusty attic of an abandoned
building she lets her first boyfriend touch her but feels only a vague sense of
disappointment. Eventually, he gives up in the face of her indifference and leaves,
too embarrassed to speak.

There is a blown-glass vase in her stepmother’s
room, curved and delicate, and she has broken it. When Yael tries to reassemble
it, half-blind with tears, the broken pieces cut her fingers.

“Nothing is real.”

Her brother always moved one of his
center pawns two spaces on his first turn, no matter how many times Yael beat
him.

“Everything is permitted.”

***

The Waste was depressing in its enormity and the miles they walked were
unsatisfying by comparison.

Yael stopped counting the days on morning when she ran
out of clean underwear. She wasn’t sure how many evenings she sat on an
uncomfortable rock while Jenny coaxed dead grass and scrap wood into a small
fire. Then she finally saw it while staring off in the distance, sparkling at
the edge of a vast depression in the wounded land stretched out before her, at
the edge of the hills disappearing into advancing dusk.

“Look,” Yael commanded, pointing at the single light
twinkling against the darkening sky. “Look, Miss Frost.”

“What?” Jenny glanced up from the embers, clearly
annoyed.

“Just look.”

Jenny sighed and walked over to stand beside Yael,
staring in the direction she indicated.

“Finally,” Jenny said with obvious relief. “I was
starting to wonder if you were full of shit.”

“Miss Frost!”

“What? You could have been lying. How would I know?”

“Not that... oh, never mind.”

Jenny squinted at the point of light.

“How far?”

Yael consulted her memory of the map.

“Two days,” she guessed. “Maybe three.”

Jenny grunted and returned to feeding twigs into the
tiny fire.

“You know what this means, right?”

Yael turned away from the light to look at Jenny
curiously.

“No. What?”

“Some bastard down there has a bathtub,” Jenny said
cheerfully. “And I am going to use it. Even if I have to kill them.”

Yael smiled despite herself.

“A bath sounds amazing,” Yael said with longing,
suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the way she itched beneath her clothes.
“But you can’t kill anybody for something like that.”

“I have before,” Jenny said indifferently, sitting
back as the fire gradually bloomed. “I’m sure I will again. If a bath isn’t
worth killing for, then what is?”

Yael shook her head, warming her hands beside the
small fire.

“I hope that you are joking,” Yael said sternly.

“I can see why you would think that. I mean, I make a
lot of jokes, don’t I, Princess?”

Yael hung her head.

“I can’t tell when you are kidding and when you are
serious.”