Nightmares of Weirdwood--A William Shivering Tale, page 13
Arthur held BW close and stood his ground.
“Ah, come now,” Rustmouth said, stepping closer. He gestured to the nothingness behind Arthur. “Ain’t no recovering from this, eh? Your precocious Manor’s in hissrepair. Your wittle architect’s replaced blueprints and blue veins with naps and nappies. Heh heh.”
“I can tell you how to get to the Mercury Mines,” Arthur said.
Rustmouth shuffled to a stop. Silver Tongue peered over his shoulder and licked her cracked, blue lips. So, Arthur was right. The silvery tunnels he’d seen were where Silver Tongue got the mercury for her flask.
“You prevaricaterin’ to us?” Rustmouth asked.
Arthur shook his head. “Cross my heart.”
He stared into Rustmouth’s sharklike eyes, and nodded toward the end of the truncated hall, where the Room of Fathers floated by. “Step into that room, and I’ll tell you exactly where to go.”
Rustmouth glanced back at Silver Tongue, who was already skipping down the hall, leaping off the broken edge into the passing room. He grunted in frustration, then joined her.
Once they had floated a ways from the hall, Arthur told them exactly where to go.
“Dam your ayes, little godling!” Rustmouth shouted. “I ever see your smugly ug again, I’ll eat your hands!”
“Shut up talking to that kid, Rusty!” Silver Tongue screeched. “Find a way to steer us to that sweet stuff!”
The Room of Fathers drifted off into the nothingness, and Arthur breathed a little easier.
“Augh!”
Something sharp poked him in the back, spinning him around.
He found Audrey, holding out Lady Weirdwood’s snake, her muzzle turned away. “Get this thing away before it eats me or vice versa.”
“Audrey,” Arthur said.
The ferret reached up and wrapped the snake around BW’s neck like a bib. “Despite our differences in opinion on how to treat a lady ferret, you and I do see eye to eye on some things.”
The snake coiled itself around the baby’s neck as she giggled and popped her lips. “Mac, Mac, Mac.”
Arthur ran his finger between the baby’s throat and the snake’s coils, making sure it wasn’t strangling her. The snake’s muscles were relaxed.
“What do we see eye to eye on?” Arthur said.
“We both want to keep the Veil right where it is, thank you very much,” Audrey said, giving the baby’s cheek a pinch. “Now that the Dapplewood’s back, thanks to you, I don’t want any more humans tromping through it.” She frowned at the snake and released a shudder. “And if you don’t realize just what a difficult decision that was for me, you don’t know how much I despise serpents.”
Arthur shook his head in wonder. “How did you get away from Wally and Breeth?”
“I told them all this jostling shook my bladder up something severe and I needed to find the little ferret’s room,” Audrey said. She shook her head and sighed. “If I’ve got any trickery in my whiskers, I probably get it from you, don’t I?”
Arthur beamed. “I’ve never been prouder.”
A bump snapped him back to the current danger. A tower with a weather vane bounced off the truncated hallway and spun off into the static. Weirdwood Manor’s roof had collapsed.
Arthur made sure the snake was secure around BW’s neck. “We need to find somewhere safe where she can grow back into her old self.”
Audrey stared into the nothingness and shivered. “Is there anywhere safe?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
They quietly hurried down the hall, away from the tearing chaos of the Eraser, but they came to dead end after dead end. Hallways ended in nothingness. Debris was piled high on staircases. The Wardens were nowhere in sight.
They reached yet another broken hall and found Lady Weirdwood’s wedding dress lying crumpled on the floor. Audrey slipped it around the child. “There now. Ain’t that a mite more comfortable than slimy scales?”
They were about to turn back when a voice called out from the nothingness. “Arthur!”
He stepped to the floor’s edge and found Amelia standing on the waxen throne, which floated through the staticky abyss.
“We got the snake!” Arthur cried. He shifted the baby in his arms, the pain in his shoulder sharp. “BW’s already getting heavier!”
“Look around you, Arthur,” Amelia responded, with more softness than he’d heard from her before. “It’s over. The Manor is destroyed.”
Arthur went numb. “But … Lady Weirdwood will be back to herself soon. She can fix this…”
Amelia closed her blue eye, as if pained. “Find an exit. Save yourselves.”
A shape appeared behind her—a horror of a human silhouette pressing out of the static.
“Amelia, watch out!”
The acrobat spun and cracked her whip at the Eraser, who floated toward her, arms spread. Before Arthur could see what happened next, Amelia and the waxen throne floated out of sight.
Arthur stood in shock until the broken hallway started to bow and splinter under its own weight. He returned to Audrey, who worried her paws.
“Did she tell us to save ourselves? How are we supposed to do that?”
Arthur gazed around, hopeless. They were islanded. Every way led to a dead end. The Eraser’s destruction had ensured they couldn’t reach the Manor’s exits or any of the opening Rifts. He wondered how the others were doing. The Wardens. Sekhmet. Wally. He couldn’t reach them if he wanted to.
He felt woozy. Weak. If he carried BW any longer, he was going to pass out from pain. He bent to set the baby down on the floor … But she landed on her own two feet. BW wavered a moment, her snake compensating to balance her, and then she stayed upright.
“Mac, Mac, Mac.”
“Looks like we got ourselves a toddler,” Audrey said.
The sight of BW standing gave Arthur a touch of hope. Maybe the old architect would still know what to do. Maybe the Manor wasn’t lost.
He stepped to the doorway of a room that was no longer there and gazed across the floating pieces of the Manor— a strange, exploded, X-ray view. Far below he could see the Abyssment, its top peeled back like the lid of a can.
“I’ll tell you how we get out of here, Audrey,” Arthur said. “Same way Wally and I escaped this Manor the first time.”
He headed toward the Manor’s center. Audrey followed, leading BW as quickly as her tiny feet could patter. He leapt over a narrow chasm at the base of a staircase, then reached back for BW before the ferret made her own leap.
“There’s a special mirror on the first floor of the Abyssment,” Arthur said as they continued down the hall. “It allows you to step inside any book you place on its pedestal. We’ll find a safe story and hide in there until the snake ages the lady back into her wise old self, and she can tell us what to do. Now all we need is a book…”
He reached another edge, peered over, and nearly collapsed to his knees. The Bookcropolis—that sprawling labyrinthine city of a library was gone. Every last page erased.
Arthur, refusing to let his hope die, squeezed his eyes shut. “There have to be more books in this Manor somewhere…”
Back in Kingsport, he never went anywhere without an adventure story in his pocket. Mostly of the Gentleman Thief variety. But ever since he and Wally had stepped into the Manor, Arthur had barely had time to sit down for a minute, let alone read a gripping tale. He’d been too busy living his own adventure …
Arthur’s eyes leapt open. “Thieves of Weirdwood.”
Audrey quirked her head. “You mean you and Wally?”
“Kind of!” Arthur said, striding past her toward the staircase they’d just passed. “It’s a copy of our first adventure that Lady Weirdwood gave me as a consolation prize for not becoming a Novitiate. I was devastated about it then and even sadder when I left the Manor and realized I’d accidentally left the book behind in my room. But now it’s going to be our salvation! So long as my room hasn’t been erased…”
He reached the base of the staircase and gazed up. The second floor was as black as pitch. Every candle snuffed out. The Eraser had been pursuing the Wardens along the main floor and hadn’t ravaged the upper ones, but the halls had fallen as still as winter branches.
“I’ll be right back,” Arthur whispered to Audrey. He looked at Toddler Weirdwood, TW, who cooed and made nonsense words, making more complicated facial expressions as the constellations in her eyes burned more brightly. “Keep her safe.”
The ferret took TW’s hand.
Arthur crept up the stairs, feeling the walls to guide himself in the whisper of light coming from the first floor. He reached his room, went straight to the nightstand, and picked up the copy of Thieves of Weirdwood. Their last salvation.
SHHCCCRRRKKKK
Outside the room came that terrible sound, like wood and carpet disintegrating. Arthur slowly turned around, and his heart turned inside out.
The Eraser stood in the doorway—a blackness that burned darker than the nothingness behind it. It had erased the hall, severing the room from the Manor. It was just Arthur and the Eraser now, drifting through the static. Its starry body pulsed as its eyes, jittering and chaotic, stared at the book in Arthur’s hands.
Of course. The Eraser was still trying to find itself. First, it had tried to acquire the dragon-bone Quill, hoping to write itself back into existence. Next, it had returned to Garnett Lacroix’s old adventures, hoping to fill the void within. Neither had worked. So now it was looking for the very last place where the Gentleman Thief existed. This copy of Thieves of Weirdwood.
But if the Eraser had erased the Merry Rogues, it would erase this book too.
The Eraser didn’t move from the doorway. It seemed to be hesitating. Arthur remembered calling the Eraser by its true name, Garnett Lacroix, making its eyes flash golden and its head swoop into the Gentleman Thief’s hat before it briefly became corporeal and fell through the clouds.
Arthur hoped the Eraser was still afraid of him.
“H-h-hello, Garnett,” Arthur said, unable to control the tremble in his voice. Shaking, he held up the book. “Looking for this?”
The Eraser blurred toward him.
13
GHOSTS
“Graham’ll be okay, right?” Breeth said. “He can just peek into the future and avoid all the bad stuff … right?”
Wally didn’t answer. He rushed through the halls, checking every door, every passage, skidding to a stop at the erased sections as he frantically searched for a way to his brother.
Breeth felt as helpless as a living person. She knew exactly where Graham was—that shivery figure hiding in the closet that she sensed in her vibrational map. But she couldn’t reach him. Too many of the Manor’s passages were broken or flat-out missing. And there was no way she was flying her spores out into the nothingness. She would never forget the feeling when the Eraser had seized her by the throat and nearly snuffed out her spirit.
Wally opened another door onto a missing room and kept moving. He was so concerned with finding Graham that he’d barely noticed when Audrey had slipped away to use the restroom. Breeth had a funny feeling that the nice ferret lady wouldn’t be coming back with the snake. But she didn’t say anything to Wally. She owed Audrey for teaching her how to die.
Wally grunted in frustration when yet another passage led nowhere. Breeth was pretty frustrated herself. What use was being a ghost if she couldn’t contort walls to save her friends? This was just like the time she had first put on her body and couldn’t help them escape Lady Weirdwood’s shifting passages …
“The Hall of Doors!” Breeth squeaked, remembering how they’d gotten around that time.
Wally pivoted and ran in that direction, and Breeth swept after him. They came to an Eraser-sized gap, but Breeth possessed a broken floorboard and slid it across, creating a bridge to the Hall of Doors. She released her spores and stuck her ghostly head through every door.
“Found it!” she said, opening a triangular green door for Wally.
She put her spores back on to follow him through, but he stood in her way. “Can you check on the others?”
“But…,” Breeth said, spores sagging. “What if you get erased?”
Wally looked away from her. “Like you said. Graham can see into the future. He’ll keep me safe.”
Breeth’s spores sagged with worry. Even Wally didn’t sound convinced.
“I’ll be okay, Breeth,” Wally said. “I promise.”
“You better be,” she said.
He closed the door in her face.
Breeth hugged her own spores. If she lost Wally, she didn’t know what she would do. But she couldn’t just float there, worrying. She checked behind every door in the hall, searching for survivors. She tried to ignore that tiny part of her—a few heart spores worth—that worried about Rose in the Abyssment. No one deserved to be erased.
Not only did Breeth not find any Wardens, she didn’t find much Manor. The Eraser had left vast streaks of emptiness behind, cutting through passages and rooms, now bowing and collapsing without structural support.
Breeth’s spore heart disintegrated at the sight. This Manor had been her bones and skin for years. Seeing it fall apart like this felt like losing her own limbs. When Lady Weirdwood had been in charge, the Manor was a safe, cozy place, full of countless mysteries and wonders.
Breeth couldn’t help but hope that the Wardens would win it back from the Order and Wally’s brother. But how could she tell her best friend that she might disagree with him? Would she even get the chance?
“Rrg!”
Breeth heard a grunt behind a large black door and opened it to find Amelia hanging from her whip, whose end was wrapped around what remained of the waxen throne. The acrobat’s eye frantically searched the surrounding area, looking for something, anything, to land on.
“Hold on, Amelia!” Breeth shouted.
Without thinking, she pushed her spores off the doorframe and drifted through the static. Halfway to Amelia, she shed the spores and possessed the wax of the throne. She stretched and contorted herself, trying to create a bridge to safety. But the more she stretched, the droopier the wax grew, so she ended up making a slide, which Amelia rode down into the feasting hall, which had a chunk taken out of its ceiling.
Breeth seeped out of the wax to join her … but she couldn’t find her spores. The moment she had left them behind, they had drifted into the chasm where they were swallowed up by the static. Worse, the wooden floorboards that led to the Abyssment had been erased. Breeth was sporeless.
She frowned into the chasm and sniffed. She was going to miss the millions of little guys.
“Breeth.”
Breeth turned and saw Amelia. Without the spores to lend her shape, the acrobat could no longer see or hear her. She was alone again.
“Look at your skin,” Amelia said.
It was only then that Breeth noticed Amelia’s eye was fixed right on hers.
Breeth held up her hand. It shone like blue glass.
“Whoooooaaaaa,” she said, wriggling her fingers. “H-how?”
“The Rifts,” Amelia said, gazing toward the distant holes that led to pocket-worlds. “Ghosts exist in a liminal space, so the tearing of the Veil reveals them.”
“Right,” Breeth said, still in awe of her new blue-glass self. “Libinal.”
She held her hand up over a Rift and found that the light shone through her, giving her nothingness texture. These were her hands. Not paws. Not tentacles. Not spores or constricting bodies. She no longer had to possess anything organic. She was just … there.
“Amelia! I have skin! Do you know how many things you can do with skin? I’m really asking. It’s been so long since I had it that I forgot.”
“I’m very happy for you, Breeth,” Amelia said, not sounding happy at all. She nodded toward the floating chunks of Manor. “If you consider having a shape worth all this destruction.”
Breeth dropped her hand from the Rift’s light, feeling a little selfish.
“I’m going to look for survivors,” Amelia said. “I suggest you do the same.”
The acrobat stepped off the edge of the feasting hall, twirling her whip toward another chunk of the Manor. The whirlwind sent a single spore wafting in from the nothingness. Breeth caught it and cradled it in her blue palms. It looked a lot like Mr. Moonlight’s Right-Hand Man.
She pushed the spore through her glowing blue chest, tucked it inside her heart, and floated off to search for survivors. A short time later, a tiny squeak caught her ear. She knew that squeak. It stirred the single spore in her chest. She descended to the Hall of Portraits, where she had first met Wally. There, near the baseboards, she spotted a rodent whose fur also shone like blue glass. It was the mouse thing.
“Hi, you!” Breeth squealed. “I never got to apologize for getting you turned into porcelain and shattered! How are you? What’s new? Are you still mad about that shattering thing? Wait, where are you going?”
The mouse thing hopped down the hall, and Breeth pursued it to a grand portrait of the dragon duchess. Breeth had passed this portrait thousands of times, but something about it was different now. The dragon painting’s scales glowed blue—just like her and the mouse thing. And—she couldn’t believe her ghost nose—it smelled of sea salt.
Breeth reached out and brushed the painting’s scales with her fingertips, then jerked away when they began to writhe. She floated back, terrified, as a serpentine ghost uncoiled itself from the painting, revealing a tail, a long, scaled body, and a massive head with a blue mane that drifted like seaweed.
“Huamei,” Breeth whispered.
Motherly memories stirred inside her. She had once possessed the dragon duchess to get her to spit out Arthur, gaining sympathy by waking memories of the duchess’s son. In the process, Breeth had felt as if she was raising the dragon boy herself.
Huamei saw Breeth and snarled, crinkling his ghostly dragon eyes. Her motherly feelings evaporated as she noticed his coral-sharp claws, his broken seashell teeth.
“Please don’t eat me,” she said. “I have zero meat on my bones, and I just got skin for the first time in years.”
