5:7
“Seriously, I find the lack of actual giants in this version of Jack the Giant Killer a little disappointing.”
Gwen’s comment came as she, Kim, and Patti stood staring up at the two giants that had acted as their anchors when exiting the dungeon scenario. Kim stood cocklegged, one hand planted on her hip, and eyed the giants who were even less ‘giant’ or ‘figure’ than the giant they’d found in the cave. These two were roughly humanoid in shape with dangling noodle-like appendages that were probably arms and mostly spherical-like things protruding from their neck regions that were *probably* heads but it was kind of hard to be absolutely certain as they had no facial features. None. Like golems formed by the hand of a four-year old that lost interest halfway through the project, they had lumps for heads and lumps for hands and she wasn’t going to contemplate what else on them was unformed lumps as well. Just leave it as they were lumpy and barely humanoid and it was taking a bit of imagination to say they were giants and not say large planters or trees or sacks of manure with chickens balanced on top.
She watched as Prairie dropped lightly down from the chicken on a manure pile she’d alighted on after sliding down the rope tied to what was roughly it’s neck region, then looked to the second giant-lump to see Dan doing the same. That was the last of them coming the ‘normal way’. Now to see which, if any, of Dan’s theories about what would happen when Ivan pushed against the wall from inside the dungeon.
Kool-Aid man? Erased from the picture book?
“He’ll be fine.” Ben walked up to stand beside Kim.
“If he busts through the wall and shouts ‘Oh Yeah!’ I’m going to laugh so hard.”
“Me too,” Prairie said, coming up on Kim’s other side to stand in equal silence. You could practically taste the anticipation or feel it on your skin or whatever other reference made sense to you to describe that every single member of their group, mouse included, was waiting with gazes locked on the stone wall behind the giants.
“Any day now, fucker,” Ben muttered under his breath.
As if summoned, like a genie from a lamp, like Kool-Aid Man seeking that empty glass, Ivan burst out of the wall a floor-and-change up from the ground where the others stood. His expression took on a decidedly Wile E Coyote cant as he realized he was basically hovering on the air then gravity, or what passed for it in this messed up landscape, snatched him and drew him down with pinwheeling arms and an open oh of a mouth.
Patti and Gwen took a step back to avoid his body, Ben took a step forward to try to catch it. Patti and Gwen had the right idea. Ivan’s considerably larger body hit Ben’s like a boulder. Or a large body dropping from a height onto a smaller body that wasn’t really made to catch such a thing.
Ben, flattened under Ivan’s weight, lay cursing. Loudly. Fluently. Like it was his second language. Ivan, meanwhile lay on the cursing, writhing cushion of Ben and stared at the sky or what passed for one as he chewed over the fact he hadn’t gone poof. It was like there were ghosts, or ghosts of a sky, or something ghostly. He really didn’t have the poetical bent to adequately describe what he was seeing as he stared at what should have been the sky.
Prairie, who’d crouched down to check on he and Ben, turned her face up to look at the sky. “It’s like clouds if clouds were made from a dying man’s last breath. So thin and drawn out and full of pain that it hurts to sense it.”
“Huh?”
Ben had pulled back on the cursing and was now inefficiently pushing at Ivan to get him to move. But Ivan was having none of it, staring transfixed by Prairie’s face and her words.
“Seriously, fucker!” Ben raised a knee and hit Ivan in the kidney. That Ivan responded to, with a grunt and then a quick move to avoid another hit. With the help of his arms he rolled to his feet then rose, allowing Ben to do the same. Slower. With more cursing.
Gwen came over and poked and prodded Ben, focusing her healing on him, then turned and did the same to Ivan. A frown flitted across her features.
“What?” Ivan asked, his heart sinking.
“It’s nothing.”
“If it’s nothing you wouldn’t have made that face.”
“This is my face. My parents made it.”
“Ha. Ha! Why the face?”
“My Magick is responding weird.”
Dan turned at this. “How so?”
Gwen shrugged. “Can’t say. Just it feels like there’s less of it?”
“Like maybe you are pulling on your reserves and not accessing the well?”
Ivan stiffened at the implication. “Did you feel that before I busted through the wall?”
“No.” Gwen’s words were slow. “But I wasn’t actually trying. When I fixed Ben up in the pit it felt normal. Maybe I’m just at my limit.”
“Have you had a limit before?”
Gwen’s answer was clear in the cloud that shadowed her expression.
Dan turned, looking at each member of the group in turn. “Anyone else feeling tapped?”
Ben shook his head ‘no.’ Kim did too, then clicked her fingers to summon a small flame in evidence. Patti sang several notes. As they hung on the air she frowned slightly.
“Prairie?”
“No.” She looked down and curved her slight shoulders inward. “I’m a little tired but I haven’t been sleeping that well.”
“Ivan?”
Ivan shook his head at Dan’s question. No. He’d almost say he felt energized. Shit.
“Did I do something?”
Dan shook his head. “I don’t know. Could be. My Magick feels like it’s… I’d say aligned wrong. That’s the closest I can say. Like it was taken and twisted about a degree to the left.” Another head shake. A shrug that telegraphed ‘What you gonna do?’. “It’s done now.”
“Is it me or is this place getting weirder and weirder?” Ben’s question broke the tension, giving everyone the excuse to look at the landscape and not at each other or within their selves.
It was getting weirder. Where before there had been defined features to the environment, now it was like whatever was creating this had stopped trying. They stood on what was probably meant to be a cobblestone surface – maybe a courtyard, maybe a porch, maybe just a stony field though the last seemed unlikely since something vaguely resembling a wall rose a short distance from them. The wall, or something like it, shimmered like a mirage, the image of it wavering on the air so fine that it took no effort to see through it to what resembled a room with vague lumps for furniture beyond. Very vague lumps.
Above the group and this wall the sky (or again something like a sky) hovered close enough that if Ivan stood on his toes and reached his arms high he could probably brush it. The clouds Prairie had called a dying man’s breath, an apt description most of the group would agree, had very fine filaments coming from them. At first they appeared to be rain, but really more like drool because it fell in a single line that rippled as if on a breeze from the mass above.
Some of these lines fell on the top of the partially realized wall. As the strands hovered the wall seemed to get taller while the lines moved in a rhythmic fashion so fast as to be vibrations. Like the wall was being printed by the lines falling from the mass in the air.
“Crap.” Without any more explanation Dan rushed forward over the flagstones until he was inches from the wall.
Kim and Prairie came to stand next to him.
“Prairie?” Dan asked. “What do you see?”
“A grid. And words. Aligning on the grid.”
Kim made a scoffing noise. “Going to ask me?”
Dan turned slightly, his expression questioning. “I see words too.”
“Tell me what you see.”
Kim nodded and turned back to stare at the surface. She squinted a little, then tilted her head to the side. “I mean they are kind of spread out and misaligned a little but it seems like these ones go together. ‘The wall stood strong, firm, it’s stone ageless as the mountains from which it had been hewn…’.”
Hearing this everyone spread out and started staring at the elements of the environment.
Patti crouched to stare at the flagstones. “’The stones, could they talk, would have drawn images of countless steps upon them. The shoes of wealthy men, the slippers of the poor. All had traversed this…’” She gasped jumping back to land on her butt. Her eyes were wide. “It just changed. See!” she pointed a shaking finger at the stone in front of her. “It doesn’t say ‘all had traversed’ any more. See! It says ‘Stories sunk deep in their pores.” Scrambling to her feet she jumped back like the ground would bite her. “Dan! What is this?”
“This,” Dan said, his words slow as he connected theory to what could laughably called reality, “is a story that is being told.”
“How? What?”
“Ever written a song, then crossed out a line because you thought of a better lyric?” Dan bent his elbow, swung his pointed finger around through the air indicating everything around them. “That’s what’s happening here.”
“Again, how?”
All he could do was shrug. He had the evidence but nothing, not one damned thing, to explain what his eyes and his Magick were telling him. “I got nothing.”
Ivan, who’d been staring with horror at pretty much everything as he kept his arms close to his ribs and his feet planted firmly on the stones which were nothing but writhing worms to his senses, cleared his throat. “Is there any reason for us to stay here?”
Dan shook his head. “No. If I spent hours or even days studying this I might, maybe, come up with an idea but as it stands I got nothing. Except an overwhelming sense of the ticking clock. I don’t think this landscape is going to be solid for a long while. It feels, like I said, as if we are in a rough draft. I’m not sure what the House is trying to get us to see.”
“You think the House is trying to talk to us?”
At Prairie’s quiet question Dan jerked. “What? Did I say that?”
Gwen nodded emphatically and Kim confirmed it. “Yep. That’s what kind of what I heard.”
Dan’s only response was a drawn out, “hmmm.”
Insightful.
“Yeah,” Ivan turned and focused on the roiling shadow that he suspected was meant to be a wall. “I say we move on then.”
“Good by me!” Ben’s enthusiasm seemed a bit strained. More ‘get me the fuck out of here’ than ‘Wow, adventure awaits around the next bend!’. He approached the ‘door’ (dark hole that was vaguely door-shaped) in the ‘wall’ (yeah, you got the idea) and stepped over the threshold. He didn’t stop to probe Dan for details of any potential threats. He didn’t give a jaunty salute. He just went. The others were left to follow or get left behind as Ben definitely had a solid grasp on ‘get up and get the fuck out’ (a variation on ‘get up and go’ for those who really wanted to *go*).
Kim, Patti, Prairie, and Gwen hurried to follow. Dan paused in the threshold to look up at the door frame, confirming with a nod that it too was made up of words, widely spaced as Kim had described. He couldn’t see the frame that Prairie referenced but the words stood out stark and black, floating on the air as they aligned to form sentences and ideas, lines and paragraphs aligning on top of each other to form some semblance of solid construction. Gave a whole new meaning to the term “sentence structure” for sure.
How many times were these ideas written out before they formed a cohesive and coherent whole? The Magick of it was staggering, challenging his concept of what it was to be a Bibliomancer. He’d never look at a written page again and not remember what it was to see the Magick raw, unfocused, manipulated by a master hand.
Ivan followed Dan, the last to approach the entry or exit or whatever it was. “Just in case,” he muttered to Dan, motioning for the other man to lead the way. Trepidation clenched his upper arms as he stooped to avoid the low door jam and stepped through what to him was a gaping hole in reality. Whisper-fine tendrils swayed down from the frame as he walked through, behind him where he couldn’t see.
Ivan didn’t flinch as the door, as the others had for each space they entered, closed behind him with a soft click. Perhaps if he had flinched, or turned to acknowledge the closing, he would have seen the tendril that reached from the door frame and latched onto his hair. He didn’t make it a foot into the room beyond, a swirl of squiggles and wavering lines like seaweed in a tide to his senses, when the Magick flowed over him, freezing him in place between one step and the next.
Dan looked up at the mass of words in the sky. There was no dancing around it. That was what that mass was. Words. As were the walls of the room. And the floor. And, well, that was about all he could see. The space was undefined.
That sounded poetic and maybe it was. For him a space, larger than Leo’s pub, larger than the town hall, and yet somehow close and intimate, empty except for the loose words that floated on the air like dust motes, was a visual poem. It was wild Magick and wonder and possibility and it opened something inside of him like doors of school gaping open on the last day of school. Actually that was an apt description as the words flew and danced and fell, like papers grabbed from lockers by excited children’s hands to be flung into the air in an enthusiastic celebration of the whispering promise of adventure and friendship and love and mysteries explored in the season of youth that was summer vacation.
Dan reached his hand up to snatch a word from the air. It curled around his fingers before settling into the palm of his hand, like a small black kitten whose mewl cried ‘take me home’. The word was Hope. A smile came unbidden to his face.
“Hey, Dan!” Kim’s voice, coming from his right, sounded strained. “Why are these things trying to grab us?”
Dan turned to see Kim with a ball of fire in her hand, swinging it back and forth in front of her like a lantern that could hold the dark at bay. Gwen and Patti stood behind her, Patti with her mouse crouched in her palm while it gave out a pitiful peep.
A frown chased the smile from Dan’s face. He shifted his gaze to see Ben and Prairie standing similarly, with Ben clutching a ball of shadow in his palm and holding it like a fastball at the ready.
“The shadows are hungry,” Ben said, strain in his voice. “I can feel them pulling at my Magick.”
“Shadows?”
“Can’t you see them?” Ben snapped.
Prairie flinched and pushed against Ben’s side. Without lowering his ball of shadow, Ben lifted his arm and drew her against him where she cringed as if to ward away the air.
“Where’s Ivan?” Gwen turned and gasped. As she took a step back towards where they’d entered several words drifted from the side and traced across her skin, grey-leached text painting her cheek in shadow like light filtering through stained-glass, and she froze in the middle of her step with her front leg firm and her back one extended with flexed foot pushing off from the ground.
At Patti’s cry Kim pivoted, flame a trail behind her. “The fuck! Gwen!”
Dan dove for Kim, grabbing her arm with the hand that didn’t have a Word nestled in it. “No!”
“Dan!” Kim turned, gaze as wild as the fire dancing in her hands. The flame, which had been a small ball grew until it seethed, a living halo, around her fist.
As if in defiance of the light she wielded, the words in the room swirled, causing the light to drop until the space was lit with that waiting darkness that came before a storm. Dan could almost smell ozone. No. That was… ink. Or something very like. Like ink and ozone and the tingle on your tongue that came before a storm that was almost but not quite a taste like copper or maybe blood.
Patti, Dan, and Kim stood in a circle of light cast by Kim’s fire. Just beyond it the light danced over Gwen’s frozen form. The effect was like when you stood around a bonfire on a dark night in a circle of light and camaraderie, with embers dancing on ash floating in the sky. The encroaching darkness of the words, pouring from the unknown, hovered outside this circle, repelled by the promise of immolation.
Dan skewed his gaze to where Ben and Prairie stood. Where Kim’s light appeared to repel the words Ben’s shadow drew them. Like a funnel they arrowed to the globe of shadow in his fist, pulled as if by suction into it. The ball grew bigger with each word it consumed, spreading out from Ben’s fist to bloom a dark balloon that flowed first to encompass his shoulder and the side of his face and then to rapidly expand until he and Prairie stood within an orb of darkness. Words continued to pour into it, swirling on the surface before being absorbed.
“What the fuck is going on!” Ben screamed from within the protecting shadow.
“I don’t know!” Dan yelled back from within the circle of light that surrounded and equally protected he, Kim, and Patti.
Quietly, Patti began to sing Toby Lightman’s Better. Her mouse, Sass, closed its eyes and began to hum. There was no other word for it, though Dan didn’t know that mice *could* hum. The hum blended with Patti’s voice.
Patti put a hand on Kim’s shoulder and continued. In Dan’s hand Hope shivered against his skin. Surreptitiously Dan laid his other hand over it, shielding it from the light.
As the mouse and Patti sang the edge of the light circle around Dan, Kim, and she shimmered and seemed to form a light film. And then the circle expanded. The words that had been hovering 0n the periphery of the light bounced off the expanding edge. Some of these rebounded and were absorbed by Ben’s sphere of shadow as he and Prairie slowly edged towards where Dan, Kim, and Patti stood.
“Dan!” Ben yelled. “Explain!”
“I can’t!” Dan yelled back.
“This is your shit!”
“I got nothing!”
“Get something.” Kim’s voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t know what we are doing and I don’t know how long we can keep it up and I need you to Get Something.” The last words held the snap of her emotions.
Patti continued to sing. Sass’s hum almost sounded like an echo.
All the sounds coalesced into a cacophony, into white noise, until Dan couldn’t determine any single thread that made up the whole. Then from the clamor a sound rang pure and clear. A Word. “Hope.”
Dan looked down at his hand. The Word which had been laying quiescent slowly turned, sinuous as the cat he’d compared it to earlier. It spun once, end to end. Then faster. And faster. Until he couldn’t see where it started or where it ended. And then it dissipated. But instead of going into the air Hope flowed into his palm. He watched as the black of it seeped from his palm to his fingers, oozing between them, their edge receding from his palm as the word flowed to the front of his hand.
He flipped his hand and watched each letter settle on a finger just above the knuckle. What was left was the letter H on his index finger, O on the middle, P on the ring, and E on the littlest finger. At first the letters were stark, block, like letters written by a child’s hand, but then they flowed into a vintage typeface like that from a printing press of old. Filigree formed around the letters, creating an aesthetically pleasing design.
Dan curled his hand into a fist, tight, and watched the skin move over his knuckles then stretched his fingers. The letters did not move. On the surface. But inside of him he felt his Magick stretch, testing then twining around the word.
Again he heard the word “Hope” and then a deep resonance thrummed through his blood. And he understood. Perhaps only a little. But he understood enough that he could give his friends an answer.
“We need to move. There is something beyond this that we need to find.” He spoke with confidence, his deep voice with a trace of Magick. “Kim and Ben. Move slowly forward. The Magick can’t get to you through the barriers you’ve formed.”
Kim gave him an assessing look. “Sure?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “Ben keep Prairie close. Patti keep touching Kim. I think your song may be feeding her Magick.”
“Sure?” Patti echoed Kim’s question.
“No. That I’m not sure of. It isn’t my Magick. What I am sure of is that there is something here that I need to find. The rest is guesswork.”
“What about Ivan and Gwen?”
At Ben’s question Dan grimaced. “Can you move your bubble?”
“Haven’t tried.”
“Try.”
Ben and Prairie shuffled to the side and the bubble moved with them. Just as Dan had hoped.
“Okay.” He turned to Kim. “I’m guessing you can move.”
“Uh huh.”
“Step back and see if the light encloses Gwen or repels her.”
Kim took a step back. And another. Dan and Patti moved with her, keeping themselves within the circle of light. It only took four steps before the light was brushing up against Gwen’s frozen form. Another step and the light bled over her, bisecting her so she was half in shadow and half in light.
“Wait a sec,” Dan said, halting Kim mid-step. He swept his gaze over Gwen, looking for any sign the light would be repelled or would cause her harm. When it didn’t, he gestured to Kim who took another step back so Gwen was fully in the light.
“Patti. Can you put your arm around Gwen? Don’t let go of your grip on Kim either.”
“I’ll need to put Sass in the carrier. One sec.” Patti pet the mouse gently with a single finger then set the mouse in its house. Then she looped her arm around Gwen.
Dan eyed Gwen’s stance. “Do you think you can lift her?”
Patti gave him a disbelieving stare. “That would be a solid no.”
“Okay. We’ll address that later. For now at least we have her close.” Dan turned towards Ben and Prairie behind their barrier of shadow.”
“Ben. You’re going to need to try to get to Ivan.”
“That’s a long way back.”
“I know. But I think we need to keep everyone close.”
“Okay.” Ben looked down at Prairie. “Don’t let go. We’ll move on two.”
Prairie nodded.
“One. Two!” They took a step back and the bubble moved. “Again!”
In this way, at first with tentative steps that established a rhythm that allowed them to move in unison and then with wider ones, they started through the darkness back to the entrance where Ivan was frozen.
At one point Prairie giggled. “It’s like a giant hamster ball!”
Ben shook his head and kept moving and Prairie had to focus to match her steps to his. “It’s true. We are two giant hamsters in a hamster ball.”
“A hungry hamster ball.” Ben muttered. “Don’t touch the edges of it.”
“Okay. I wasn’t planning on it.”
The ball rolled until its forward edge brushed into Ivan’s frozen form. Another two steps by Ben and Prairie brought it fully in contact with him. At first the surface bent slightly, depressing against Ivan’s bulk. Ben clenched his jaw and tightened the fist held at his shoulder height.
“So hungry.” He gritted his teeth and willed the shadow to pull Ivan in without consuming him. An internal battle, his will against his Magick’s, ensued. Inside of him a void opened. From it was the sound of a chill wind, biting at his resolve. He clenched his abdominals and his teeth and grunted, forcing the aperture of the void to close. There was a popping sound and the surface of the bubble and the surface tension of the bubble released, flowing around Ivan then closing behind him.
Prairie patted Ben’s tummy. “You did good.” She whispered.
“Thanks.” His voice was the croak of a person woken from a long sleep, throat dry and in need of a drink.
“We have him!” Prairie raised her voice to call out in the direction of Kim’s circle.
“Can you move him?” Dan called back.
“I doubt it. He is very big.” Prairie hugged her arm harder around Ben and poked Ivan’s rigid form with her free hand. “And very frozen.”
A moment of silence then Dan asked, “Ben? Do you have a rope?”
A little bit of Ben’s usual humor seeped into his tired voice. “Do I ever not?”
“Okay. Can you tied it around Ivan and drag him with it?”
Prairie eyed Ivan. His large frame loomed over she and Ben. “Probably not. I think he’ll topple if we try.”
“But do you think you two can drag him?”
It was Ben’s turn to do a visual assessment of Ivan. As he did so he reached into his jacket’s inner pocket and pulled out a bundled rope. “Maybe. If we tied him like we do the boxes at the shipping yard that need to be hoisted. Prairie, I have to hold the shadows rigid, so I only have one hand. I need you to use your free hand to get this rope around Ivan. I can help with the tying, but you need to do the harness. I’ll explain how it can work.”
Between the two of them, mostly Prairie, they looped the rope around Ivan’s midsection, crossed it over his back with the intersection below his shoulder blades then looped the ends back over his shoulders to the front where they situated them under the rope at his belly. With some effort they tied it off using Prairie’s right hand and Ben’s left. A length was left as a leash. They tied this around themselves, binding their torsos closer together.
Ben eyed Ivan’s bound form then looked at Prairie. “I think we need to move as quickly as we can forward so, hopefully, we jerk him off his feet. Then we need to step back to give the rope slack, so he falls. I don’t think this will work with him standing.”
“Won’t he land on his face?”
“Yes. Probably. He’s a big boy. He can take it.”
Prairie bit her lip. After doing a visual inventory of Ivan’s features she nodded against Ben’s side. “Okay.”
“On two again.” Ben counted, “One!”
On two they lurched forward, their upper bodies canted at an angle to give the rope maximum tug and their feet moving like someone trying to win a three-legged race. The rope went taut, nearly jerking them off their feet as Ivan’s weight pulled against it. They were jerked off their feet, falling backwards to land on top of Ivan with their backs on his. Thankfully the rope around their combined waist kept them together because Prairie’s grip slipped as they fell. Even more thankfully Ben managed to keep the bubble of shadow steady around them.
Ben and Prairie lay for a moment, splayed on their backs, staring at the dark bubble arcing above them. Then Ben turned his head to look at Prairie. “We need to get on our feet.”
“Okay. How?”
“Tighten your arm around me and rock forward.”
It took a few tries and Prairie worried for the damage they were probably doing to Ivan whose face had to be grinding into what passed for ground, but eventually they managed to awkwardly rock to a sit and then from there they fumbled to stand. Turning they assessed Ivan’s condition. He lay face down. His feet protruded from the protection of shadow but didn’t seem to be taking any ill-effect from the darkness beyond the bubble. Guess he was already paralyzed. Couldn’t be paralyzed twice.
As for what the barrier was doing to him, Ben bit his tongue and reeled back on the shadows, denying them their meal with a concerted concentration of his will. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to keep up the defense. Eventually he knew he would lose the battle. His Magick was vast and it was hungry and his will, while formidable if he did say so himself, was bound to give out. But not now. Not happening.
“All right! Yep!” Ben tightened his arm around Prairie. “We’ve got this.”
Slowly, inexorably they moved forward, straining to pull Ivan along behind them. It felt like centuries, but it was probably closer to ten minutes before they were able to draw up vaguely next to the circle of Kim’s firelight.
“What now?” Ben’s voice was thin, reflecting his internal fight against his Magick as well as the strain of dragging Ivan’s larger frame.
“Now we get out of here and get Siobhan.” The confidence in Dan’s words was reassuring and yet…
“How do we do that exactly?”
“I think we keep going.”
“Keep going where?”
Ben’s question poked holes in Dan’s bravado. He was working to maintain confidence. To appear to know what he was talking about because if he didn’t who would? But he was feeling his way in the dark here, literally, and he had to work hard to not let that seep into his tone. “Into the story. I have the sense that the only way for us to find Siobhan is to get through this story. It isn’t written yet and it needs to be.”
As he said this he knew it was true. He wasn’t sure if the words had come from intuition or his Magick but as soon as he said them, he knew. “The story needs to be written.”
“And how do we do that?”
At Kim’s question Dan looked out into the darkness beyond the circle of light she was projecting and, potentially, Patti was holding. “We push forward.”
“Towards where?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.” With no more explanation than that Dan let go of Kim’s arm and stepped quickly out of the circle of light.
“Dan!” The darkness of words swirled around Dan, muffling the sound of Kim’s cry. His eyes fought to adjust the sudden transition from blazing light to encompassing shadows.
Since Kim had erected the circle the darkness had deepened. Where before it had been the false twilight before a storm now it was the dark that came on a night with no moon. Dan couldn’t see a thing. Not the ground or what passed for the sky. Not the hand before his face.
The hand before his face… Dan lifted the hand with its new Hope tattoo and spread his fingers, palm out, so the Word faced him. Nothing. He turned slightly to the right and did it again. Nothing. It was when he turned to the left, not once but twice pivoting until he was facing about forty-five degrees in that direction that his Magick responded. From in front of him the fog of words and letters parted as if in front of a car’s headlights, forming a path that beckoned him forward.
Behind him Patti continued to sing, helping him to pinpoint she and Kim’s location without having to turn from the path. “So when he comes to you and he’s so confused because he wants to give his heart to another. You’ll tell him everything’s gonna be just fine. ‘Cause I will be your light.”
Dan’s words pulsed over Patti’s song. “We need to go this way. Follow the sound of my voice and I’ll get you through.” When Patti’s voice tapered off he called, “Patti, don’t stop. I’ll make sure you can hear me.”
In that way, with Patti’s singing and Sass’s humming playing a subtle soundtrack to their movements the group traveled the darkness of unspoken words. Moving without visual markers made the journey seem long, but perhaps it was long. Who knew how long they walked through the darkness with Dan’s Magick and Patti’s song directing them.
The first song Patti sang ended and she flowed seamlessly into Amos Lee’s No More Darkness, No More Light.
Allowing his Magick to direct him through the Hope that was written on his skin, Dan hummed along with Patti’s words. Just when Dan thought that they had to have walked ten miles, though probably it was nowhere near that, the fog of words that pushed at the path he followed faded, breaking down to gray and subtle shadow. Ahead of him there was a blank white wall, clearly defined. And on it there were words, laid out in measured lines.
Dan lowered the hand that had guided him from the darkness and stepped up to the wall.
“Dan, are we safe?” Prairie’s delicate voice carried out of the darkness at his back.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“So, I’m hearing keep the fire burning?” This came from Kim.
“If you can.”
“Not sure I can. I may want to tamp to reserve my energy. But I need you to make the call.”
Dan turned from the wall and assessed the boundaries of the light that he stood within. Where he stood there was light, but the word-miasma swirled close, the line between dark and light ebbing and flowing like a tide across a sandy shore. There was enough space for him to stand and potentially stretch his arms out, but not much more than that.
“Ben?” Dan projected his voice back to where he thought Ben and Prairie might be, based upon the direction Prairie’s voice had come. “How are you holding up?”
There was a moment’s pause. “A little too well.” Ben’s voice held a note of hesitance. “The shadow has fed well. And that, well, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”
“Okay.” Dan wasn’t used to be the shot-caller of the group. More like the eccentric professor uncle who provided valuable information the leader-types used to make those calls. But seemed like this situation was demanding they each stretch their personal definitions in new directions. “So I’m hearing you don’t feel drained.”
“The opposite.”
“Can you expand your shadow to make room for Patti and Kim?”
Silence, then Ben said, “Feels like.”
Dan nodded. “Kim, move towards Ben.”
There was a shuffling in the dark then, “My circle is hitting his and rebounding. I can’t let it go or the shadow-stuff will get us.”
Dan rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Ben, is it just a matter of stepping into the shadow?”
“Maybe? We were able to get Ivan in so, probably?”
“Patti?” Dan called out, “Let go of Kim and try to step into Ben’s shadow.”
Patti’s song stopped. There was an odd suctioning sound and then she cried out.
Dan searched the darkness with his eyes, trying to make out anything that would tell him what had happened. Then Patti called out. “I’m in.” The chatter of her teeth made the words sound clipped. “That was really weird. Cold.”
“Here,” Prairie’s voice weaved through the dark. “Better?”
“Yes.”
Dan assumed Prairie had pulled Patti close but he couldn’t tell because he couldn’t see. “Okay?”
“Yes!” Ben and Prairie called out.
Dan nodded and shifted his gaze to where Kim stood in her circle of light. Unlike Ben, who he couldn’t see obscured in shadow within shadow, Kim and her fire stood out clearly against the dark. Enough that when Dan shifted his gaze slightly he saw an afterimage floating on the cloud of words.
“Kim, can you hold?”
“No,” she made an odd-noise and the circle of light wavered. “I don’t think I…”
Dan dived into the darkness, turning his back as a bulwark to the shadow as he caught Kim’s collapsing form. He threw himself forward, a silent apology to her, as he thrust them into the small half-circle of light in front of the wall of words. Her breath chuffed from her as he landed on top of her. Then she shifted under him and Dan let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
“Wasn’t sure that would work,” he mumbled.
Kim drew a hard breath. “Thanks. Uh, could I get up? Kind of squished here.”
Though her voice was quieter than usual, with an edge of breathlessness, it held her usual sarcasm, causing Dan to smile as he rolled back on his feet and then stood.
Kim rolled to her back and stared at the roiling shadows that formed a dome over them about seven feet up, the same distance the apron of light spread across the ground. Something, Magick likely whether that of the House or Dan or who-knew, had formed a protective dome around the space near the wall, similar to the bubbles of darkness and light Kim and Ben had formed. But where theirs had formed full spheres the one around them now was bisected by the floor and the wall, leaving them standing in more of a quarter-sphere of safety.
Good enough.
“I think I’ll just lie here a while. My legs don’t seem to want to work so well.” At Dan’s frown she added. “I just feel a little drained. I’m sure I’ll be fine in a few.” She stiffened and turned her head to Dan. “What about Gwen?”
Crap! He’d sort of… forgotten? Dan stepped out of the light and into the swirl of words with his hand extended and his Magick projecting forward to where he’d grabbed Kim. Gwen remained standing, frozen, in the middle of a step. Well, at least nothing additional had happened to her!
Dan tried to lift her into his arms. Stiff and unmoving. He tried a fireman’s carry. Even worse. Eventually he settled on wrapping his arms around her. Shuffling backwards, he dragged her from the darkness and into the light. He set her close to the wall and then went back to his perusal of the words placed there.
Still on her back, Kim tilted her head to look at the wall and the words . “What’s this?”
Dan narrowed his eyes on it. “I think it’s a paste-up board.”
“Speak up for those of us in the balcony?” Ben’s voice came out of the shadow.
“A paste-up board.” Dan lifted his voice to carry.
“Which is what?”
“It’s how newspapers were laid out before the advent of computers and layout programs. Some Bibliomancers use the technique when they get a work that has fallen apart because of age or the quality of the paper it was printed on. Like, they might have the pages but they are out of order. And they need to piece them together in different ways to figure out what the order is but the paper is too delicate to manipulate. Rather than risk the paper they put the lines of text from the book on photographic paper then they run it through a machine that applies wax to the surface. From there they cut the paper and paste-it up using the wax to adhere it to a board.”
Kim rolled to her side. “Interesting. Then?”
“Well, with Bibliomancers nothing. Once they have the text in the right order, they copy it. But newspapers would take a photograph of the layout and then use it to make a printing plate.”
“So,” Kim propped her head on her hand. “What we’re looking at is something meant to be transferred to a printing plate and then printed?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s it say.”
“Good question.” Dan turned to read the words on the wall. It didn’t take long to see it was the next part of Jack the Giant-Killer, in which Jack overheard an unnamed two-headed giant planning to bash his head in with a club and then tricked the giant with a simulacrum of himself under the covers where he was supposed to be sleeping. He explained as much to Kim.
“And this helps us get Siobhan how?”
From somewhere unbidden came the answer. “I rewrite it.”
“Huh?”
Dan rubbed his hands together and tracked his gaze over the letters on the wall. “I rewrite it so the scene is us finding Siobhan.”
“Uh,” Patti’s voice called from the dark. “Will that work?”
Dan shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Will it blow up in our faces?” this from Ben.
“Don’t know.”
“Well, all right then. Glad I asked.”
“Shh,” Prairie’s voice was soothing and calm. “Let Dan work.”
Some grumbling followed but no more questions emitted from the dark. That settled Dan went back to looking at the words on the wall. Now, how was this going to work?
Out of the paragraphs certain words seemed to vibrate slightly, drawing his eye. Tentative and slow and thinking, boy this could really backfire on me, Dan reached the hand on which Hope lived to the board. Very carefully he put his finger on the last word there and slowly started to slide it to the side. There was a moment’s resistance and he felt his Magick surge, down his arm and through his fingers, filtering over and through the Hope. Then the word moved. In this way he carefully cleared the entirety of the two paragraphs on the wall until all the words were a jumble along what would have been the margins.
He picked out the phrases and words that had vibrated, sliding them into a small grouping along the left margins while keeping the rest to the right.
Fast as he could to
but lost his road
a light shone through the dark
Found a large house
knock at the gate
corner of the room
the light cast in shadow
the other night
to a room
called out
I am so glad you came to my gate, friend!
show of friendship
here
this night
friends
gave hearty thanks
the giant led Jack to breakfast
they were seated at a table
it’s bulk
and went out
he released those held captive by the giant and guided them
found himself again on the road
Then he slowly started sliding the words, one by one, into place on the board. Some of the phrases he broke up, using a few of the words while discarding the others to the right.
He reviewed the words several times, prodding at them with his Magick. Yes, that felt right. Very gently he picked each of the words from the right side of the board and flicked them one-by-one into the words that clustered beyond the protective bubble around the wall.
Once the board was clear except for the words he had selected, he slanted a glance to where Kim still lay.
“Here goes nothing,” he said and then started to read with Intent and Magick. “In the night Jack found a large gate in the corner of the room. Cast in it’s light those held captive by the giant were released. Fast as he could he called out to his other friends and led them to a room where he found his lost friend. Jack gave hearty thanks at the show of friendship.”
A rustling, scything sound, like a corn harvest, came from the edge of the wall obscured by the fog of words. A gate, a light behind it beckoning, formed in the wall about thirty-feet outside of the bubble of light against the wall.
“Hot shit!” Ben called out. “That worked!”
Inside Dan echoed the sentiment. He closed his eyes and worded a Thanks, just as he had built into the story.
Dan carefully wrapped his arms around Gwen’s stiff form and dragged her to where the light filtered through the gate. Just as he’d rewritten as soon the light hit her, Gwen drew in a deep breath and looked around wildly. Dan gave her a upward head jerk, projecting ‘it’s all good’. Her wild expression suggested otherwise but that’s she’d accept it. For Now. But there would be questions. Oh, would there be questions.
Dan offered Gwen a hand. She took it, squeezed his arm, then threw her arms around him and pressed a smacking kiss to his cheek. As Dan pulled back slightly, she brushed the cheek with her thumb. “I knew you could do it.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Just take the compliment!”
Kim pushed up from the floor and eyed the darkness separating she, Gwen, and Dan from the gate.
“Fireball?”
“Can you?”
She shrugged. “Probably.”
“That fills me with confidence.”
“Eh.”
Casting his fate at her feet, Dan fell in behind Kim as she pulled up a small, sputtering, but still-a-fireball in her hand and then stepped out of the bubble of light and into the gate.
He paused, turned, called towards Ben’s bubble of shadow. “You guys coming?”
“Why does my face hurt?”
“My money is on straight up fugliness. Because I know that’s why your face hurts me. Every. Single. Day.”
At the sound of Ivan’s voice, followed by Ben’s, followed by the sound of a hand smacking the back of a neck, Dan closed his eyes for a moment, offering another Thanks that his gambit had paid off. Then he stepped close to Kim and followed her into the dark.
Enter The Woods 