There Will Be Lies (34 page)

Embroidery, framed, on the walls – pictures of landscapes; alphabets. There are windows that, somehow, improbably, look out over dappled forest. I see a deer walk past, outside, nuzzling at the ground. A rabbit hops by, fur gleaming in the sun that shouldn’t be there, because it’s always night in the Dreaming.

It’s a cottage.

A Crone’s cottage, inside the castle.

The rocking chair is facing away from me but I can see there’s a woman in it; I see the feet propped up on a comfortable stool, next to a purring and fast-asleep fat old cat, the woman’s hands moving as they stitch. Wizened hands, the veins showing.

This is the gingerbread house, I say.

Oh yes, says the old woman by the fire, still not turning around. And Baba Yaga’s too. I could have decked it in sweets, if you had preferred. Or mounted it on chicken legs. But this time, I thought, a castle. I don’t know why. A Crone’s whim.

Right, I say.

I am thinking: What am I supposed to do – put out my hands and strangle her?

But my thoughts are interrupted when, surprisingly sprightly, catlike, she takes her feet from the stool, stands and turns.

I’m forgetting my manners, she says. Welcome.

I don’t say anything. I just stare at the Crone, whose voice is so terrible, but whose face is the face of my mother – the woman who brought me up, anyway, my fake mom, my captor.

Shaylene Cooper.

I stand very still and stare. There is a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, covering her chest, and she is white-haired and wrinkled, but it
is
Shaylene Cooper, the woman who took me from a hospital in Alaska. Her eyes are black, glassy, like a plush toy’s.

Surprise! she says.

The thing she is stitching is hanging in her hand, and I see the scene on it – Coyote, falling down from the bridge, into nothingness. Bleeding from a thousand wounds, wolves watching him fall, sneering. Mark.

What do you want? I ask.

A better question would be, what do you want? she says. You were sent here to kill me, no? Told that it was your destiny. So, do it.

Do …?

Kill me. Kill the Crone.

I swallow.

Ha! she says. Not so easy, is it? But then, you were supposed to free the Child too, and you failed at that, didn’t you?

Screw you, I say.

Very mature, she says. Controlling your temper is another thing you fail at, I see.

What’s wrong with you? I say. Why are you so … so … horrible?

Horrible? Whatever are you talking about?

You stopped the rain, I say. The animals are starving. You put the Child in a prison of ice. You
killed Mark
.

Mark? Who is Mark? she says.

Coyote, I reply.

She makes a dismissive gesture. I have killed him before, she says. He has an annoying way of coming back. The rain? Rain is bad for the soul. It gets into the bones. And I am barren; I cannot have children of my own.

So you took the Child? I say.

No, she says. I took the Child to stop the rain. To give myself power over Coyote.

You’re crazy, I say.

And you are weaponless. Did you truly come here without a means of defence? Did Coyote not give you a blade?

Yes, but I lost it. In the woods. In … in my world.

Careless, says the Crone. Without it, how will you possibly ever leave? She cackles, truly and purely, as if the verb, to cackle, originated with her.

My heart loses its rhythm for a second. She thinks I can only cross the air back into my world if I’m holding the knife, I realise. This could give me an advantage. Possibly.

The Crone-mother smiles, and this makes her look 6,578 times more scary than she already did. You are thinking that you could cross back over without the knife, yes? she says.

I flinch – it’s like she’s read my mind.

Not so, she continues. My castle is a castle, a redoubt. And it is
such in every plane, in every dimension. Not just the visible. You cannot cross from here. Try it.

I sit still for a moment, but then I do – of course I do. I want to get out of there. I want it very badly. I close my eyes and try to step –

Pain like a camera flash in my mind. Colossal; unimaginable.

Ha! says the Crone when I look at her again, my breathing unsteady from the agony of it. I asked only about the blade, because I thought you might have stabbed me with it. If you had it. Which you don’t.

It looks like I’m a prisoner, then, I say.

Yes, she says.

A pause.

But wait, she adds. There is a twist.

A twist?

You came here to kill me, yes?

Uh … yes.

Yet you have no weapon. And I am a Crone – I could turn you into a toad with a blink of my eye. You are powerless.

I nod, slowly, not knowing where this is going.

And still, she says, there is a turn of events, a scenario, that would allow you to kill me. That would allow you to accomplish your quest. Do you know what it is?

No, I say.

Pity, says the Crone. I thought I had taught you better. I thought you were
smart
. It’s not a riddle. It’s just logic.

I look around the cottage, as if the answer might be embroidered into one of the garish pictures lining the walls. I look back at her, at her ghastly smile.

And then, like lightning striking, I get it.

I could kill you if you let me, I say.

She claps, softly. Precisely, she says.

But why would you do that?

The Crone smiles enigmatically. There is no reason to what the Crone does, she says. But here is just one reason: I love you. I love you all the way to Cape Cod and back.

Bitch, I say in sign. Words come more easily to my hands than to my lips.

She looks wounded, or mock-wounded, I’m not sure. She rubs her hands against each other, briskly, like she’s washing them without water. Now come, she says, you must be hungry.

She moves her hands in the air; a complicated sequence of gestures, like a conductor commanding the orchestra. I find myself walking into the room, turning, pulling out the single chair at the table.

I sit down, the silver dome in front of me. There is a feeling of dread expanding in my stomach, but I don’t know for what. I know, in stories, you’re not supposed to eat. You’re not supposed to let anything pass your lips, or it could keep you there forever. Is that it? Is that her trick?

The Crone comes up beside me, standing too close, making the hairs on my arm stand up. With a flourish, she removes the dome, leaving the plate underneath.

I gasp – on the plate, which is cracked and old, porcelain, so delicate you can almost see the grain of the table through it, there is a human heart.

It is still beating, and it is fat and squat, glistening redly with blood, valves and tubes projecting from it and quivering.

What the – I start.

The Crone twitches off her shawl; it falls to the ground like a
cloud of bats, in miniature. Under it, her blouse is unbuttoned, and there is a hole in her chest. Not a smooth hole – a wound, still fresh, and suddenly I know where the blood came from on the sign outside. It’s a
big
hole, left and centre, a gaping cavity where a heart should be.

She smiles her ghastly smile again, and points to the dish, to the still-beating heart.

It’s easy, she says. You eat that, and I die.

My eyes go from the hole in the Crone-mother’s chest to the heart on the plate, and back again. I think I’m in shock – my mind feels like one of those desk toys made using magnets, where something spins in the air, weightless. Gravity, in my head, is suspended.

Eat it, says the Crone. I could make you, you know. I made you sit down.

As I watch, the silver knife and fork stand up, magic-trick smooth, and kind of walk the short distance over the pockmarked wood to my hands. They settle there, like cold living things.

When the heart beats, blood oozes from one of the tubes, then trickles slug-like down the side of the organ. I gag.

It will kill me, she says. And you will have won.

No, I say.

Of course! She claps her hands. I have not given you anything with which to wash it down. She clicks her fingers and a teapot appears on the table, covered with a tea cozy in the form of a sleeping cat. A teacup and saucer swoop down from an old dresser set against the wall, bone china too, decorated with blue flowers. The saucer lands near the teapot, and the cup jumps on to it with a rattle. Then the teapot tips into the air, all of its own accord, and pours tea into the cup.

The cup, in its saucer, jiggles across the table to me.

Drink, then eat, she says. This is not a trick I am playing on you. I will be dead forever. You will truly have won.

I look at the heart again. If it would destroy her, get back at her for what she has done; for the elks, for Coyote …

(for stealing you, says a voice very far back in my mind)

… then perhaps I should do it?

What would Mark tell me to do?

If you don’t, of course, she says, then you must remain with her, with me. You have no knife, as you admitted yourself.

I look at the knife in my hand, the silver one, but even as I do so my hand moves, and the knife darts and pricks my other hand; blood wells up wormlike.

That knife serves me, says the Crone. It is of my house. As I was saying, you have no knife. You have no choice.

I eat that, and you’re dead? I say.

As a coffin nail.

I am trying to work out the angle, the trick – because of course there is a trick, no matter what she says.

Coffin nail.

Coffin.

I look up at her, fast. That’s it, I think.

What? she says. What is it?

I eat this, and you die, that’s what you said.

Yes and I am not lying to –

I know you’re not lying, I say. But what do I become? What does that make me?

A look almost of nervousness comes to her face, like grey clouds come to an open sky. I don’t – she begins.

It makes me your coffin, I say. It makes me your tomb. You die, but I carry you around with me always. You
own
me always. You never let me forget you, or forgive you.

That’s not true, she says, but that gleaming seam of cruelty is back in her voice.

Yes, it is. You would be dead, that’s true. That’s one hundred per cent true. But I would not have won.
You
would have won, because if you get your heart inside me, if you get your flesh inside me, then you have stolen me forever, you have marked me forever, and made me yours.

A wide smile, now, from the Crone, and for the first time her teeth show, and I see how they have been sharpened to points.

Well, she says. You are smart. But tell me, clever girl, how are you going to leave? How are you going to defeat me? I am Crone. I am the lurker in the forest. I am death to all unwary children. I can make you eat my heart.

And my hands move, against my will, and the fork skewers the heart, and the knife in my right hand begins to cut me a slice.

I feel tears begin to form, as I sit there, powerless. But they don’t come. I don’t cry easily.

I feel sick, though. The Crone is going to turn me into her tomb, and I’ll never be free of her. The knife has almost finished cutting me a thin slice of heart, and it glistens sickly.

She told me she was the bane of unwary children, and I believe her.

No – wait.

Two of those words snag on briars in my mind, get caught there while the rest of the thought goes on like a disappearing deer, ghosting into nothingness.

Children.

Believe.

My hand is going back and forth, cutting into the heart while my other hand holds it still with the fork, but my mind is churning.

I remember Mark saying, Remember you’re an adult. At the time I didn’t understand. I still don’t, not totally, but …

I remember him touching that iron, by mistake, not even being aware of it, and nothing happening, no scorching sizzle, no burning, magical or otherwise.

The people of the Dreaming can’t touch iron because they believe they can’t, I think. I bet if Mark had reached out and touched it, knowingly, it would have hurt him, because of the strength of his belief.

Belief, I think.

Children.

Belief and children …

What are you doing, child? says the Crone, and I look down, and see that the knife and fork are not moving; they are perfectly still in my hands. There is strain and tension in her face; veins show in her forehead.

I stare at her.

And then it all clicks into place, all bolts together. She said it herself, even, didn’t she? That Crones are the bane of unwary children.

Children.

Child.

She called me child.

But that’s just it, I say, out loud.

That’s just what? she replies.

I’m not a child, I say. I’m an adult. As I say this, I know it’s true. Sure, in my world, there’s like a month to go before I’m legally not a child, before I can live on my own. But here? I’m fully grown. I have gone through puberty. The Dreaming is older than the stars; in the Dreaming, the laws of the United States of America are less than nothing, and in the Dreaming, I am not a child, not any more.

Fear distorts the Crone’s features, as if her whole face is clenching around something bitter.

And your magic only works on children, doesn’t it? I say.

No, not just –

On children who believe, I add. It only works on children who believe.

Storm clouds burst behind her eyes, darkness falling there, cold, shot through with lightning. But she doesn’t scare me any more.

I remember my (mother), sounding so impotent in the hospital, saying she
told
me to stay at home, that I knew what could happen to me out there in the world if I strayed. But that only works on kids, doesn’t it? The spell of telling children what to do is this: they believe that if they don’t do it, they will be hurt, they will fall prey to the monsters under the bed, they will be lost.

They believe.

Like I believed that without my (mother) to protect me, I would be nothing but another weak victim, a morsel for the men who roamed outside the circle of firelight that my (mother) created for us.