5:2
“Give my friend back! Right now!” Gwen stood, legs braced, feet crushing fragrant herbs, and brandished her plunger at the unblinking windows of the House.
They’d made good time. The best time. And now the seven friends – and a mouse – stood ranged in the wild herb carpet surrounding the Mystery House and considered their options.
“I’m not sure that yelling at a house will…” Kim trailed off, then said loudly, “Yeah. Never mind. Go ahead and yell at the inanimate object.”
Patti stared at the building. Sass, peeking it’s head from the top of her fist, stared at the building. While trailing behind everyone else, approaching the House had seemed a sensible idea. Not a plan so much but they really hadn’t spent the time to formulate a plan and at least it had been an idea. But now, facing the House with it’s sealed windows and door she was starting to wonder what they expected to do next.
Gwen’s yelling probably wasn’t going to bear fruit but at least she was trying something. Considering what was in her own bag of tricks, Patti strained her ears and senses for the music that had directed her at the house where Diana was trapped. Nope. Nothing.
She hummed, leaving the Magick unstructured, thinking maybe something would latch on to it and change it to speak to her. Hum hum hum. Hum. She searched the area with her gaze and Magick. Hum. Nope. Nothing. Looking down at Sass she saw the little mouse apparently also doing something that involved twitching whiskers and waves of it’s hands. She formed an image in her mind of herself shrugging and pushed it to Sass along her hum. Sass tilted it’s head up to her and spread it’s paws in what Patti interpreted as an “I don’t know” gesture.
Ivan strode up to the door and pushed against it. It didn’t give. Ben searched the building and the surrounding area, looking for a lock or a code or whatever cost the building would enact from them to enter. Finding nothing he strode over to Ivan, balled his hands in fists at his side, and added his glower to Ivan’s like their gazes could cut through the door.
A bit back and to the left of where Gwen was threatening bodily harm to the house, which had no body, Dan and Prairie contemplated the building.
“Could you…?” Prairie lifted Siobhan’s flower wreath to Dan. “Could you hold this. I’m just going to take a peek.”
Nodding, Dan took the flower wreath and hooked it to one of the carabiners on his belt. When Prairie didn’t turn, but instead looked down and dug her toe into the ground, Dan asked, “Is there something else?”
Prairie nodded without lifting her gaze from where her toe dug. “I know you aren’t really a cuddling person. I’d ask Gwen but she’s…”
“Yelling at the House.”
Another nod. “Yelling at the House. I just… I wouldn’t mind having a connection to the Real. Just in case…” Prairie raised limpid eyes to meet Dan’s gaze and delicately traced the air with her fingers. “she’s in there. You don’t actually have to touch me. I’ll just stand close.”
When Prairie tentatively touched his back, Dan lifted his arm to draw her into his side. “That work?”
“Yes. Thank you.” So polite. “I’m just going to look for a moment.”
“If she’s in there, you tell me.”
Prairie swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”
As Prairie nestled against him, using him as a bulwark against what she found with her Magick, a sense of calm washed over Dan. At least he could do this much.
He was trying to keep a brave face on it but he’d never been a situation in his entire life where he felt so helpless. He was the guy with the knowledge and he had none to offer here.
Sure, before this he’d been focused on saving the victims of this insanity. It had felt personal. He’d been dedicated. Now he knew what personal and dedicated really felt like and he felt bad for putting those labels on the combination of pride and bravado he’d felt before. There’d been stakes before but they were a step removed – a goal to achieve, a victory to win with his skill and ‘heart’. He’d felt them but they didn’t have the visceral gut punch he was feeling right now. Whether he’d succeeded or failed in those things he’d walk away afterwards, feeling, sure, but not like this. There was going to be no walking away from this if they failed, no smoothing it over with the next job and the next. If they failed to get Siobhan back…
He couldn’t. They’d get her back. Reaching out with his Magick he sought a glimpse of the tapestry. Anything to give him a clue or a hint. The Magick had let him see it before. He understood that in his gut. Something wanted him to see the Story before. Well now he wanted it to want him to see it and he willed that so with the thrust of his Magick.
He was so intent on his thoughts he barely felt Prairie’s boneless state switch back to ‘alert’. When she pressed a hand gently to his ribs, he pulled his arm back from her shoulders. Taking a step away from Dan, she drew a deep breath and sighed.
“She is here. Sort of. Mostly.” She bit her lip and nodded more decisively. “She is definitely here.” The conviction in her tone was negated a little as she added, “Mostly.” She firmed her chin. “Her footprints lead here.”
Gwen raised her voice and hollered again. “My friend is missing! Her name is Siobhan! I want her back!” Her voice rose to impossible decibels on the last. There was a slight clicking sound and the door Ben and Ivan were glowering at swung open about an inch.
With a satisfied nod, Gwen swung her plunger up on her shoulder and stomped towards the door, leaving a fragrant trail in her wake as she crushed the herbs in her path. Starting to follow, Kim turned quickly and met the ‘eye’ of the window and cocked her head. After a second’s perusal she said, “Thank you,” then joined the others.
Ben tentatively pushed the door open. Driven though he was by concern for Siobhan he wasn’t stupid enough to spring a trap. When nothing went ping, boom, or whoosh he shoved the door open fully and strode over the threshold only to stop just shy of the doorway and say, “Well, this is weird.”
The remainder of the group crowded in behind him. Gwen bumped him to get him moving from the doorway, causing him to stumble forward a few steps before hastily righting himself. The oddness that had caused him to stop to begin with was… unnerving.
There was clearly something going on and Ben’s money was firmly on it being Magick. Not that he didn’t get that the place was Magick seeing as it changed every time they entered but it had always been… solid before this. Yep, that was the closest he could come to explaining it. Everything in the space was Not Solid. It was all there but if you stared it for even a second it rippled, like images painted on heat fumes in the desert. And the colors were… wrong. Too light in some places. Way too intense in others. Like whoever or whatever created these things, that reordered this world within a world, was still adjusting.
Stretched out beneath Ben’s feet was grass. Or… not grass? It had the texture and color of Astroturf. Only brighter and greener and crunchier. So, maybe not like Astroturf but it was the closest analogy Ben’s brain could latch on.
“Are we in Oz?” Gwen asked as she dropped to Ben’s left and goggled at the landscape. It should have been an idle question but considering what they had dealt with up to now it wasn’t on the outside of possible.
“No yellow brick road. No munchkins.” Kim shook her head as she fell in next to Gwen. “Though I wouldn’t mind one of those giant lollipops.”
The grass/not quite grass stretched a long way, opening up like a wild field to the horizon in front and far as the eye could see to either side. Patti, still standing in the door, stuck her head outside the building. The walls were there, the corner of the building where it lead off around the side, the door frame was there, the herb garden enclosed in it’s picket fence was there, familiar in their ‘normalness’, in their orientation to the standard and expected concepts of how objects are placed within a field of reference. She turned back around and her brain tried to process the scope and span of the field. The door was there and the wall was there and the corner where the wall with the door met the side wall was… wavering. Same with the other corner further away from where Patti stood. Wavering. And past that field stretching way out so basically the wall was standing in a field. Just standing. In a field. A wall. With a door. And some windows. Another look outside. Another look inside. Nope. Still weird.
She looked down at Sass. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
Sass’s gaze shifted from her face to the field, her face then the field. Then the mouse let out a very tentative peep. Patti patted Sass very gently on the head. “Yeah. Me neither.”
She started humming. At first it was just sound, meant to soothe, but then it settled into the rhythm of The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
She put a little bit of Magick into the next line.
The door slammed shut, catching the back of her heels and projecting her forward. There was Zero ‘tease’ in that.
Patti dashed along the wall, which was still there solid as a wall could be, to the closest window and looked outside to see the familiar herb garden and picket fence beyond. For a moment she considered just popping up the window and shimmying her ass out that window. In fact, she might have done just that, but the window didn’t budge at the probe of her searching fingers. Well, crap!
Glowering at the window, Patti stepped away from the wall. As soon as she lost contact with the stone the wall shimmered, faded, and then slowly disappeared like one of those old photographs with silver oxide that bled from the edges and formed dots on their surface. From one moment to the next Patti was looking at a wall and then she was looking at the ghost of one, hanging faded on the visual field of the meadow.
Weirder and weirder. At Sass’s peep, Patti popped the mouse into the little hanging house on her belt and then walked forward to join the group.
“No going back that way,” she announced to Ivan, indicating where she’d come from with a gesture of her thumb over her shoulder.
Ivan shrugged. “Never is.”
“I still have trouble understanding how you don’t freak out.”
“I do,” Ivan grinned that devil’s grin and pressed his palm to his chest. “I just keep it in my heart. My sensitive, sensitive heart.”
There was a small scoffing sound from Sass’s house. Ivan squatted down and looked at Sass. “Don’t scoff. it’s true.”
This time Sass blew a mouse raspberry. The mouse couldn’t communicate in human words but it sure was learning how to get it’s point across. Patti hid a smile behind her hand as Ivan rose to his full height and looked off to the horizon.
“Ben? You see anything?”
“Maybe.”
“Here, try these.” Dan pulled a small set of folding binoculars from his cargoes and offered them to Ben. Ben scanned the horizon, making fine adjustments to the binoculars.
“I think I see a cave entrance. Or maybe a door. it’s rectangular. I think that’s our way through.” He folded and handed the binoculars back to Dan.
“Do you see any threats?” Ivan asked, scanning the area for just such threats even as he asked.
“Nothing the eye or binocular picked up. But I always say be cautious. Want me to go first?”
Ivan screwed his mouth to the side in consideration then nodded tersely. “But take a healer and another fighter with you. And as soon as you get some idea of what we’re facing either come back and get us or if you think it’s safe wave a cloth and we’ll join you.”
Dan nodded at the wisdom of this. “Here,” he said, holding the binoculars out to Ivan. “Keep an eye on us with this.”
“You’re going?”
“I want to get a visual take on this.” He swept his hand over the particularly weird ice-cream and fade color-scheme to the world. “Maybe I can get a read.”
“A read?” Kim lifted her brows. “Badumbum.”
Dan shrugged. “Makes sense this is a Story thing. My first thought on it is that this is the beginning of a story. Like,” he rubbed his hand over his head. “A rough draft.”
“So, a little exciting?”
He was loathe to admit it but, “Yeah.”
“Since we have a total of one healer,” Gwen said, “with Siobhan…” she stumbled over the words, “With Siobhan gone I’m it. Guess I’m volunteering.”
Kim saluted them with two fingers to the forehead then gestured forward. “Have f- an interesting time.”
“And if you must,” Prairie added, “die loudly.”
“Here’s to not dying at all,” Ben retorted as he started across the field.
“Is that a thing?” he heard Patti whisper to Prairie as he moved away.
“Yes. It is sort of a team tagline.”
“A rallying cry.” Kim added.
Sass squeaked, as if it understood. This sound carried Ben, Dan, and Gwen forward across the crisp ‘grass’. The further they moved from the group who waited behind them the less green the grass got until it was the faded color of a curtain left in a window too long.
“I don’t see the cave or the door or whatever,” Gwen remarked.
“It’s over that way,” Ben gestured across the field and slightly to the left.
They walked for minutes with nothing to mark the passing of distance beyond the slowly fading color of the grass which seemed to darken and change to gray as they moved further away from where they’d entered the landscape. It was like walking in one of those flat, hot, big locations where people ate lots of cows and wore large hats, where you could see a target on the horizon but you could walk for hours, sweaty and getting more and more light-headed, and never seem to close on the destination.
The landscape was oddly quiet. No birds. No wind rustling grass. Everything seemed in a state of waiting, like life hadn’t been breathed into it yet. Argued for Dan’s ‘rough draft’ concept.
Dan was largely silent, reflecting the world they walked through, his gaze flitting from one detail to another even as he processed what he thought he knew of the situation. Anything he could figure out was bound to be helpful. Even as his mind cataloged the details of the surroundings – grass, grass, grass, none of the blades higher than the other like someone had just written “there was grass as far as the eye could see” – he released the hold he always kept on his Magick and let it flow into the surroundings.
A line from an old musical played through his mind. Something about a golden haze and a meadow.
He tracked his gaze over the grass, judging if there was a bright golden haze on the meadow. And damned if there wasn’t. Had it been there a minute before? Eyes darting he searched inside and out for the answer.
“Uh, was the light that color before?” he tentatively asked.
“Light?” Ben turned to walk backwards, there sure weren’t any obstacles to trip him up.
“The sun. Was it that yellow?”
Gwen blinked and turned her head to look at Dan. “Honestly, I wasn’t looking. Why?”
“No reason.” He frowned at Ben. “I know that there’s nothing but grass to fall over but you should turn around anyway.”
Ben made big show of doing exactly the opposite. He in fact picked up his feet and did some leaping jump steps backwards while pumping his arms. “There is nothing here but grass!”
Leap step. Leap step. Leap… Ben’s arms pinwheeled as the ground fell out from beneath his next step. The grass and ground crumbled away, revealing the edge of a pit into which Ben started tumbling backwards.
“Ben!” Gwen dove to grab Ben’s hand but her fingers closed on air as he fell screaming into the depths of the maw that had opened beneath him.
Dan lunged for the edge, arm outstretched, but he was also too late. As it was he had to throw his weight back to avoid falling along with Ben as the ground around the edge of the pit fell away to reveal a broken framework of sticks and hay. Sticks and hay that creaked dangerously beneath Dan’s weight and caused him to stumble awkwardly to his knees and then his belly with his head facing the side of the pit instead of the hole.
“Gwen,” he spoke slowly, in that way people always seemed to do when someone was falling through ice or was precariously balanced on a delicate framework of sticks over a pit, “back away very carefully. One step at a time. Test each one to make sure you aren’t breaking the sticks worse.”
Gwen sang an apropros line from Janelle Monae’s Tightrope beneath her breath as she very gingerly stepped back. Her voice sounded strained but she kept on, timing her steps to the cadence of the song,
She sang about not trying to run on the tightrope then stopped and muttered, “definitely not running. Nope.” Then she continued.
Step-by-step she cleared back about five feet before Dan, lying prone on his stomach with his arms and legs splayed to keep his weight spread out in a maneuver he’d read worked when dealing with breaking ice, stopped feeling creaking and flexing of the sticks under him.
“I think you’re clear.”
Gwen stopped moving, wrapped her arms around her waist, and gave him a nod. “Now you.”
“Yeah, so, I’m a lot bigger than you.”
“Somewhat.”
“A lot. And I’m not sure I’m getting off this thing. I think it’s not going to break. At least it doesn’t feel like it’s going to break. But if I shift it probably will.”
“I could rope you and then even if it breaks I can haul you up.”
“Do you have rope?”
She narrowed her eyes. Taking this as a ‘no’, Dan continued. “Plus, if I fall my weight would yank you over to. You need to signal to the others and get them up here.”
“Can you hear Ben?”
Dan started to nod ‘no’, then decided even that weight shift could send him falling. “No.”
Gwen’s lips tightened. Then she drew in a hard breath through her nostrils which carried in the preternatural silence of the landscape and turned on her heel to give Dan and the pit her back. Yanking off her jacket she waved it frantically over her head. When that didn’t seem enough she leaped and jumped, sending the jacket into the air like a spinning marching-band flag.
While he laid there, sprawled out for maximum surface with a shifting view of the pit beneath him as the ‘grass’ and ‘dirt’ slid through the stick and straw understructure, Dan realized what he should have been focusing on from the start. Pit. Covered in sticks and straw then camouflaged by grass. Big drop. The information had been in the story about Siobhan.
Siobhan the Giant Killer. If this, he swept his gaze hastily around the landscape, was the rough draft of that story he had the knowledge to help them. Not Ben in a pit – they needed to wait for the others for that – but moving forward he might be able to predict what other obstacles or threats they might encounter.
Enter The Woods 