So it’s not Del. It’s me.
You’re supposed to forgive yourself for thinking you were to blame for what he did to you, Honey told me. For thinking you deserved it.
Except I honestly don’t believe it’s that. I’m not stupid. I know I wasn’t to blame. I was just a little kid being hurt by someone who was supposed to be protecting me. I didn’t deserve it—no one does—and I don’t think that. So what’s to forgive?
But Honey seems to think it’s still sitting here inside me, and she’s not alone. All those healers Joe consulted, back when I first had the accident, they all said the same thing. That I have something inside me that needs to be fixed before they can help me with my physical problems.
I guess that something is this place, with Del ruling the roost. Del in control again, only amp that up a hundredfold because the old Del, the brother I grew up with, didn’t go around wielding magical powers. He was just a redneck pedophile—bad enough for any kid to deal with, of course, but nothing like what he is here.
Which brings me back to, what am I supposed to do?
If this is all in my subconscious, then I need to find some way to tell my subconscious that it’s over. Del’s not god. He’s not even the devil. He’s just a loser that I’ve managed to raise to these huge supernatural proportions, here, in this world that sits inside my head.
I actually have to smile then, because that gets me thinking: If this world’s inside my head, then what’s inside my head when I’m here, physically in the world inside my head? It’s a confusing piece of Escher logic—or illogic, depending on how you view that kind of thing. Me, I appreciate the odd riddling mystery it provides. It’s like holding a mirror up to a mirror where the reflections get smaller and smaller as they go on into infinity.
It’s a once upon a time, and if you can have that, then you can still have hope, because however a fairy tale turns out in the end, the once upon a time beginning at least sets you up with the hope of a happily ever after. In a world of angst and irony, that’s actually a precious thing. At least it is to my way of thinking.
How would my story go?
Something like:
Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in an old house in the middle of the woods . . .
I realize I’ve come to a full stop at the fence between this field and the one that runs up to the back of the house. I study the windows, trying to see if there’s any movement in them. Looking for Del’s face to be staring back out at me through the dirty panes.
I don’t see anything, but that does nothing to lighten my sense of disquiet. I don’t know that there’s a single solitary thing in this place that could, but just as I’m thinking that, I’ve turned away from the house to look around myself and I see it. The tree. My old friend and confidante.
Here, it’s not a burnt down stump. Here, it’s still tall and majestic with a full canopy.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in an old house in the middle of the woods and her only friend was a big old tree . . .
So, even though I’ve left everybody behind, I’m not alone in this place. Just as I wasn’t when I was a kid. Because she was always there for me, the White Deer Woman, her tree my haven from the darkness.
Now it’s the two of us again, and I don’t have to worry about what Del might do to her. Those old spirits exist on a whole other level from the rest of us. Del going after her would be like a flea or gnat going after us. Annoying, sure, but nothing you can’t just swat and be done with.
I’d like to go over and press my face into the bark like I did before. It would be cooler under her heavy boughs. Safe.
But the sight of her’s enough to bolster my courage. I clamber over the fence and start across the last field. The house rises taller and taller in front of me, the clapboard walls stained with mold and covered, on one side, by dead kudzu pretending to be decorative vines before it all died off. I guess that says something about the evil in this place that not even a parasite like kudzu can survive in its presence.
I can’t really see inside the windows—they’re too dirty and dark, the sun’s too bright out here—but I don’t get the sense that anybody’s watching me. I look at the back porch. The door to the summer kitchen hangs ajar so it’d be easy to go in, but I circle around to the front instead.
I want to know right away if the body’s still lying there at the bottom of the stairs. I want to just push the front door open, look inside, and know. I don’t want to have to go creeping in from the back of the house to find out.
Except when I get to the front of the house I now have this urge to go back to the rear again—just to put off the moment. But I know I’m just being stupid, like I’ve turned into Anxiety Girl, and that’s so not my style. I’m a doer, not a worrier.
So holding my breath, I step up on the porch. I wince when a board creaks underfoot, but cross to the door and push it open.
It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light, and then I let out that breath I’ve been holding.
The body’s still there. Del lying in a pool of blood. Flies buzzing around him.
I give a nervous look into the open door of the parlour, down the hall to the kitchen, up the stairs to the second floor. Nothing. It’s just me and the body.
So I step inside.
I approach the body and study it. The open eyes, staring at nothing. The awkward angle of the neck. The torn flesh between his chin and chest where Honey ripped out his throat. The blood, coagulated and thick with the flies.
I’m repulsed and fascinated at the same time. And truth to tell, half-expecting the corpse to sit up.
Because this isn’t the real world. Nothing here plays by the laws of physics the way I know them. Here a man can be turned into a changeling of twigs and leaves. Women can be turned into children. Their mouths can be erased. Here anything can happen.
So I am half-expecting it to sit up, but when it does, I still give a shriek and jump backwards.
It doesn’t lumber to its feet like a George Romero zombie. Instead, it’s like watching a movie playing backwards. The blood runs back into the body, then the body goes bouncing back up the stairs, banging back and forth between the banisters and the wall, sucking the smears of blood into himself, until there he is, at the top of the stairs once more.
Del.
Unhurt.
Holding that shotgun, just like he had been before I pushed him.
Looking down at me with a grin.
“Gotcha!” he says.
He starts down the stairs and I back away from him. I thought I was backing out the front door, but I got my trajectory wrong and find myself backing into the parlour instead. He follows me in, the shotgun dangling from one hand.
“Man, you should have seen your face,” he says. “I thought you’d piss your panties.” His grin broadens. “Now tell me the truth, did you? You can tell your brother something like that.”
“You can’t hurt me,” I tell him.
“Can’t I? I’m thinking different. But we both know for sure you can’t hurt me, though I got to say, I’m disappointed that you’d try.”
“You’re a monster.”
“Nothing you didn’t make.”
“Bullshit! I didn’t make you. A child doesn’t make an adult want to fuck her—especially not her own brother.”
Del shrugs. “Mama thought different.”
“Mama was as sick as you.”
“Father Cleary told me you confessed to him.”
“Yeah, and then he did me.”
“Can you blame him?” Del asks. “Hot little thing like you, who’s already proved she’ll put out?”
“Goddamn you!”
A funny thing happens then. I step towards him, swinging a little girl’s fist, but by the time I reach him, I’m my normal size and instead of hitting him in the chest, my fist connects with his cheekbone. He staggers back, then does that wavy thing with his free hand, and I fly back and hit the wall behind me.
It knocks the breath out of me, but I get up as quick as I can. My back hurts from where I banged up against the wall and I nurse my hand. The skin’s all broken across the knuckles.
Then I realize that I’m still full-grown.
“Now this is interesting,” Del says. “Turns out you’ve got a smidgeon of backbone still left in you.”
“You—”
“Oh, shut up,” he says.
He waves his hand at me again, and again I bang up against the wall. This time I’m a little girl again.
“There,” he says. “You see? What did that get you? Two seconds of freedom from my will?”
“I don’t—”
“I can do any damn thing I want to you,” he says. “But you know what? If you want things to be like they really are, then why don’t we just do that.”
Another wave of the hand and I’m full-grown again, but not the twenty-something I see myself as in the otherworld. Instead he’s returned me into the Broken Girl: frail and brittle, tottering on weak legs, half my body numb. It’s all I can do to keep standing.
“Now there’s my little sister that the world knows and loves, though what in goddamn hell anyone sees in you looking like that doesn’t make the first bit of sense to me.”
“You know what?” I tell him. “I don’t care.”
He lifts the shotgun. “I could shoot you.”
“Go ahead. Knowing my luck, I’ll just come back to life the way you did.”
“Oh, yeah? What makes you so brave all of a sudden?”
“It’s not all of a sudden. But right now, it’s just you and me. There’s no one else for you to hurt in my place and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
“Oh, come on,” he says. “You must have some big rescue in mind. Some trick to play.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why the hell would you come back? You didn’t really think I was dead, did you?”
I have to lean against the wall. That helps some, but it doesn’t stop the trembling in my bad leg.
“I had hopes,” I tell him.
I think back on that moment when I hit him. When I changed back into who I wanted to be. Was it just being as angry as I was? God knows, that shouldn’t make a difference because I was angry before.
What did Honey say?
Something about focusing. About believing.
That was what was different, I realize. For that one moment before I hit him, I wasn’t uncertain anymore. I was completely focused on hitting him. I believed I could hurt him, and he couldn’t stop that. He didn’t get back control until after, when the uncertainty hit me again.
“Well, you hoped wrong,” he says. “Get this straight, little sister. No matter what happens, I’m never going away. You’re always going to have this piece of me inside you. So you might as well get down on your hands and knees and pray to me, because in this place, I’m God.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Goddamned right, I’m right. So let’s see a little respect from you. We can start with a little begging.”
“No,” I say. “I meant you’re right about me always being stuck with a part of you inside me. Memories don’t go away. We can lock them up and shut them away so that we think they’re gone forever, but even when we can’t see them, they’re always there.”
“What the hell are you on about?”
“You. Me. This curse you’ve put on me because, even though I got away from you, I’m always going to be carrying a piece of you around with me.”
“Damn straight,” he says.
I can tell he’s just mouthing the words. That he doesn’t really understand what I’m talking about. I’m only just getting it myself.
Bleeding hearts would think I need to forgive him.
Honey thinks I need to forgive myself for ever thinking I was to blame, that I deserved what happened to me.
But that’s not what it’s about.
It’s about acceptance.
It’s about me accepting that I had no control over it, that it happened, and that all I can do is not allow myself to fall back into a situation where it might happen again.
And you know what? I don’t need to do the rest of it by myself. Maybe I need to find the conviction and belief in myself on my own, but dealing with Del? Nope.
“You ever think of Raylene?” I ask him.
Raylene went through everything I did. She ran away, too. But before she did, she stood up to Del. She cut him with a knife, and that’s why the fat drunk in the trailer park still walks with a limp.
“Why do you want to talk about her?” he says.
He’s still all cocky and full of bluster, but I caught the momentary flicker of uncertainty in his eyes when I mentioned her name.
“You know what?” I tell him. “I think we need to have ourselves a little family meeting.”
Lizzie
“Okay, somebody explain this to me,” Lizzie said.
She’d been sitting on her haunches, staring at the spot from which Jilly had disappeared. Now she lifted her head to look at her companions. Honey was the closest. She lay on a nearby stretch of flat red rock, mouth open, her tongue lolling as though she was simply an ordinary dog. Timony perched on the petroglyph rocks, legs dangling, while Geordie studied the distant mountains. Geordie turned at the sound of her voice.
“Explain what?” he asked.
“How does it work? This world where Jilly’s gone—it’s inside her head, right? So, if she’s gone there—you know, inside herself—shouldn’t her body still be here with us? How can she physically go inside her own mind?”
“Who knows?” Timony said. “How do the Walking Hills of Tremaynse travel without legs?”
Lizzie just looked at him. “You know that doesn’t make any sense either?”
I think that’s his point, Honey said. Many things are possible, here in the otherworlds. In some parts you can find anything. You only need to go deep enough.
“Everybody keeps saying that, but it just seems too weird.”
“Weird?” Geordie said. “Sure. But too weird? I don’t know. These are also called the dreamlands—the place we go when we dream. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had some weird dreams in my time.”
“So if I dreamed I went to a place where fish breathed air and had arms and legs and lived in skyscrapers . . . that place would actually exist somewhere in here?”
The otherworld is infinite, Honey said.
Timony nodded. “It has to be, to fit everything in.”
“I guess.”
Honey stood up and stretched.
It’s time I returned to my family, she said. You will be safe here until Jilly returns.
Like that was a given, Lizzie thought. None of them wanted to talk about it, but they’d all been there. They’d all seen the power Del could wield. What were the chances that Jilly was even still alive at this moment? The world she was in had immediately closed behind her so that neither Honey nor Timony could get a reading on how she was doing.
But if Geordie and Honey weren’t going to talk about it—and they were way closer to Jilly than she was—Lizzie certainly had no intention of bringing it up. It didn’t seem right for her to dash their hopes.
“Yeah, we should be fine,” Lizzie said.
“Thanks for everything,” Geordie added. “You totally saved the day.”
I only did what Jilly would have done for any of us.
The trace of a smile touched Geordie’s lips. “She is a going concern, isn’t she? It doesn’t matter what’s going on in her life, she’s always ready to drop everything to lend a helping hand.”
The dog nodded. She thinks the light she carries was a gift from one of the old spirits, but all it does is illuminate the largeness of heart that was already there.
They were using the present tense, Lizzie thought, but the things they were saying still felt like eulogies.
If you should need me, Honey said, you have only to call for me.
br /> She turned and started down the trail.
“Honey!” Lizzie called after her.
The dog turned.
“I was wondering . . . how come you don’t just, you know, teleport to where you’re going?”
Tele . . . oh, I see. I understand how you got that idea, but what we have been doing is walking between worlds. It’s not quite the same thing. There are still distances that must be travelled by foot.
“Bummer. Teleporting would be cool.”
I suppose. Though I like to take the time to feel the dirt under my feet when I travel.
“Time,” Timony said, “runs differently in different parts of the other-world. Some places it passes more quickly—where a day for you would be a year for those you left behind.”
“Like Rip Van Winkle,” Geordie said. “Or True Thomas.”
The doonie nodded. “In others, your year is another’s day. It’s why the otherworld is so dangerous—for anyone unfamiliar with its reaches, but especially for mortals. But it’s even dangerous for fairy and the First People—what you call cousins.”
“Except you know your way around, right?” Lizzie asked.
“Somewhat. But I’m no expert.”
Joe is, Honey said.
She’d been sitting through the conversation, but she stood up on all fours once more.
Until later, she added. And Timony—you might consider fetching your companions some water.
Turning, she padded down the trail and was quickly lost from sight.
“Water would be good,” Lizzie said.
The doonie smiled. He gathered a pile of dirt and bits of stone onto a stretch of flat red rock and sat down in front of it. Bunching it together, he began to speak over the tidy mound. His voice was low-pitched, but Lizzie already knew it was in some fairy language so she wouldn’t understand it anyway.
Geordie came over to stand with her.
“What’s he doing?” he asked.
“Asking the dirt if it wants to be water, I guess.”
Except it turned out that Timony wasn’t summoning water. As he continued to speak over the mound he’d gathered on the rock in front of himself, the dirt began to take on the shape of a pot. A moment later, and he had a wide-mouthed clay bowl. He grinned at them when Lizzie clapped, then cupped his hands above the vessel. This time his voice woke water that rose up to the tops of his fingers and overflowed into the bowl under his hands.