She was in a student’s room. Actually, if she had to guess, she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though obviously she’d never seen it, because her crush had remained in a theoretical state. What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. She began to suspect that somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was fucking with her.
“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”
Well, fuck away, she thought, and we shall see who fucks last. She half suspected that she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! Actually, that would be kind of cool.
The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She decided that she wasn’t going to fight against the dream logic of what was happening; she was going to play it out. Steer into the skid. To leave by the front door would have been to break the dream spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a little door at the back of it.
She couldn’t help but notice, by the by, that his closet was full, practically packed solid, with boxes of those pencils. Why, exactly, had they thought he was going to freak out at the loss of two pencils? There were like 5,000 of them in here. The aroma of tropical wood oil was suffocating. She opened the door and stooped through.
From here on out, her travels ran entirely on dream rails. The door in the back of Wharton’s closet took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. They were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as spatial. It was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.
She watched herself leave the courtyard. That was her in a nutshell, Plum thought: standing there and watching her own life go by. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself, or if this was more of a two-way-mirror deal. She frowned. The causality of it became tangled. This much at least was clear: if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.
The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, a curiously reduced Brakebills. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long, straight hair and bad teeth.
Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only momentarily, incuriously, as she passed. No question what they were up to.
“Another League,” she said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”
Then the next door opened on a room that she thought she knew—no, she knew she knew it, she just didn’t want to think about it. She had been here before, a long time ago. The room was empty now, but something was coming, it was on its way, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. It was the thing: the thing that she could not and would not think about. She had seen this all happen before, and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Now she knew it was coming, and it was going to happen anyway.
She had to get out, get out now, before the horror started all over again.
“No!” Plum said. “No, no, no, no, no.”
She ran. She tried to go back, the first time she’d tried that, but the door was locked behind her, so she ran ahead blindly and crashed through the next door. When she opened her eyes again she was in the little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.
Oh. Oh, thank God. She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. Or it was real, but it was over. She didn’t care, either way she was safe. This whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going to go forward either. She was safe right here. She wasn’t going to think about it. Nobody had to know.
Plum sank down on the ragged couch, boneless. It was so saggy it almost swallowed her up. She felt like she could fall asleep right here. She almost wondered if she had when she opened her eyes again and looked at the reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked earlier. Of course she wasn’t in it: magic mirror. Right. Plum was relieved not to have to look at her own face right now. Then her relief went away.
Another girl stood there in the mirror instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked, and its skin gave off an unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue. Its eyes were utterly mad.
This was horror of a different kind. New horror.
“You,” the ghost whispered to Plum.
It was her: the ghost of Brakebills. She was real. Jesus Christ, that’s who was fucking with her. She was the spider at the center of the web.
Plum stood up, but after that, she didn’t move; all moving was over with. If she moved, she wouldn’t live long. She’d spent enough time around magic to know instinctively that she was in the presence of something so raw and powerful that if she touched it, it would snuff her out in a second. That blue girl was like a downed power line. The insulation had come off the world, and pure naked magical current was arcing in front of her.
It was beyond horror: Plum felt calm, detached. She was caught in the gears of something much bigger than her, and they would grind her up if they wanted to. They were already in motion. There was nothing she could do. Part of her wanted them to. She had been waiting so long for her doom to catch up to her.
But then: bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—it sounded like something had run into it from the other side. A little plaster fell. The bump was followed by a man’s voice saying something like “Oof.” Plum looked.
The ghost in the mirror didn’t.
“I know,” it whispered. “I saw.”
The wall exploded, throwing plaster in all directions, and a man crashed through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off. White witchery sparked around both his hands like Roman candles, so bright it made purple flares in her vision.
Always keeping one hand pointed at the blue ghost, he walked toward Plum till he stood between her and the mirror.
“Careful,” he said over his shoulder, relatively calmly given the circumstances.
He reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out.
It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first reaction was: I must tell Chelsea that she doesn’t have to worry about paying for it.
Breaking the mirror didn’t dispel the ghost—it was still watching them, though it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned around to face the wall behind Plum and joined his hands together.
“Get down,” he said.
The air shimmered and rippled around them. Then she had to throw her forearm over her eyes, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity, it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. She didn’t see but she heard and felt the door behind her explode out of its frame.
“Run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Go on, I’m right behind you.”
She did. She hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shock wave as Professor Coldwater threw some final spell at the ghost. It lifted Plum off her feet and made her stagger, but she kept on running.
Going back was faster than going forward had been. She seemed to be bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till
she realized, no, it was just magic. One stride took her through the hell room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the crawl space, the library, the creepy-pear-tree courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.
They stopped just short of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. She wondered if he’d just saved her life; at any rate, she definitely felt bad about having made fun of him behind his back. He resealed the passageway behind him. She watched him work, dazed but fascinated: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily, like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.
She couldn’t help but notice that this time he caught the resonance pattern, the one she’d used to break the last seal, and corrected it.
Then they were alone in the Senior Common Room. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.
“What did she say to you?” he said.
“She?” Plum said. “Oh, the ghost. Nothing. She said ‘You,’ and then she didn’t say anything else.
“‘You,’” he repeated. He was staring over her shoulder—he’d already gone absentminded again. One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Hm. Do you still want to go to the wine closet? That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Plum laughed in spite of herself. The wine closet. She’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It seemed too pointless to go through with it. Everything was too sad and too strange now.
But somehow, she thought, it would be even sadder not to go through with it.
“Sure,” she said, aiming for jaunty and almost getting there. “Why not. So there really is a secret passage?”
“Of course. I steal bottles all the time.”
He drew the rune word on the next panel over from the one she’d used.
“You don’t count the half panel,” he said.
Aha. The door opened. It was just what she thought: a doddle, not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.
She squared her shoulders and checked her look in a pier glass. The hair was a little wild, but she supposed that would be part of the effect. She was surprised, and almost a tiny bit disappointed, to see her own face looking back at her. She wondered whose ghost the ghost was, and how she died, and why she was still here. Probably she wasn’t here for the fun of it. Probably she wasn’t a nostalgic alumna haunting Brakebills out of school spirit. Probably she needed something. Hopefully, that thing wasn’t, you know, to kill Plum.
But if it was, she would have done it—wouldn’t she?—and she hadn’t. Plum wasn’t a ghost. It was actually worth telling herself that: Having seen a real one—and she hadn’t even thought they were real, but live and learn—she knew the difference now, really knew it. I didn’t die just then, she thought, and I didn’t die in that room. It felt like I did, I wanted to die, but I didn’t, because if I had died then, I would have died. And I don’t want to be a ghost. I don’t want to haunt my own life.
She’d just closed the secret door to the wine closet behind her—it was concealed behind a trick wine rack—when Wharton came bustling through the front door with the rumble and glow of the cheese course subsiding behind him. Her timing was perfect. It was all very “League.”
Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling from the fingers of the other. Plum regarded him calmly.
“You’ve been short-pouring the Fifth Years,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You have my pencils.”
She watched him. Part of the charm of Wharton’s face was its asymmetry. He’d had a harelip corrected at some point, and the surgery had gone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at some point but just kept on trucking.
Also, he had an incredibly precious widow’s peak. Some guys had all the luck.
“It’s not the pencils I mind,” he said, “so much as the case. And the knife. They’re vintage silver, Smith and Sharp. You can’t find those anywhere anymore.”
She took the case out of her pocket.
“Why have you been short-pouring the Fifth Years?”
“Because I need the extra wine.”
“Okay, but what do you need it for?” Plum said. “I’ll give you back the pencils and all that. I just want to know.”
“What do you think I need it for?” Wharton said. “I give it to that fucking ghost. That thing scares the shit out of me.”
“You’re an idiot,” Plum said. “The ghost doesn’t care about wine.” For some reason, she now felt like an authority on the subject of what the ghost did or did not care about. “The ghost doesn’t care about you. And if it did, there’d be nothing you could do about it. Certainly not placate it by giving it wine.”
She handed him the case.
“The pencils are inside. Knife, too.”
“Thank you.”
He dropped it in the pocket of his apron and set the two empty wineglasses down on a shelf.
“Wine?” he said.
“Thank you,” Plum said. “I’d love some.”
Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Sci Fiction, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brainrose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, Crucible, Dogs, Steal Across the Sky, and the Probability Trilogy, comprised of Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen, and Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. Her most recent books are a new novel, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, and two new collections, Fountain of Age and Five Stories. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel Probability Space, and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.
Here she takes us to a ruined future America to ask the question, in a world where only basic brute survival counts, is there any room left for beauty? And would you be willing to kill for it if you found it?
SECOND ARABESQUE, VERY SLOWLY
When we came to the new place it was already night and I couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t like Mike to move us after dark. But our pack had taken longer than he’d expected, or longer than the scouts had said, to travel south. That was partly my fault. I can’t walk as fast or long as I once could. And neither could Pretty, because that day turned out to be her Beginning.
“My belly hurts, it does,” the girl moaned.
“Just a little farther,” I said, hoping that was true. Hoping, too, that I wouldn’t have to threaten her. Pretty turned ugly when she felt bad and whined when she didn’t, although never in Mike’s presence. “A little farther, and tomorrow you’ll have your ceremony.”
“With candy?”
“With candy.”
So Pretty trudged through the dark, broken, rubble-choked streets with me and the other six girls, behind a swinging lantern. The night was cold for July. The men closest to us—although I don’t call fifteen-year-olds men, even if Mike does—walked bent over with the weight of our belongings. The men on the perimeter carried weapons. The danger was partly from other packs wanting foraging territory
, although there are fewer territorial firefights than when I was young. Still, we have desirable assets: seven young women, at least two of them fertile, plus three children and me. And then there are the dogs. Cities are full of wild dogs.
I could hear them, howling in the distance. As that distance grew smaller and Mike still had us stumbling along by patchy moonlight and one lantern, I left the girls in Bonnie’s charge and walked double time to find Mike.
“What be you doing here?” he demanded, gaze and rifle both focused outward. “Get back to them girls!”
“It’s the girls I’m concerned about. How much farther?”
“Get back there, Nurse!”
“I’m asking because Pretty is in some pain. She’s at her Beginning.”
That took his attention from any dangers in the darkness. “Yeah? You sure?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t.
Mike gave his slow, rare smile. He wasn’t a bad pack leader. Huge, strong, illiterate—well, they all were, and I needed them to be—he cared about his people, and wasn’t any more brutal to us than discipline required. A big improvement on Lew, our previous leader. Sometimes Mike could even lurch into moments of grace, as he did now. “She be okay?”
“Yes.” Nothing that the start of her monthlies and a little candy wouldn’t cure.
And then, even more surprising, “You be okay, Nurse?”
“Yes.”
“How old you be now?”
“Sixty,” I said, shaving off four years. I was under no illusions what Mike would do once I could no longer keep up with the pack. Already Bonnie had learned half of what I had to teach her. Not even a Nurse would be allowed to slow down the nomadic moving that meant food.
We had kept walking as we talked. Mike said, “I be first, with Pretty.”
“She knows that.”
He grunted, not asking her thoughts about it. If Pretty were fertile, she must be mated with a fertile male, and no one knew which of the pack men that might be. Nor did we have any idea how to find out. So Pretty, like Junie and Lula before her, would be mated with all of them in turn. Already Pretty, a natural flirt when she wasn’t a natural whiner, tossed her long blond hair and flashed her shapely legs at all of them.