Nightmares of Weirdwood--A William Shivering Tale, page 18
But for all of Arthur’s descriptions of the quaint little cottages and the rustling forest and all its creature comforts … on the other side of the mirror was nothing but a blank void.
The DappleWood had been erased again.
19
THE TRACKDRAGON
Wally watched pocket-worlds pass the Trackdragon window.
And Breeth watched him watching.
“Wallyyyyyyy,” she said, dangling from the compartment above his seat. “This is booooooring. We don’t have time for this! You’re supposed to be saving the world, and I need to be out there ghosting all good like I do!”
“We have plenty of time, Breeth,” Wally said, not taking his eyes from the window. “It will take another few weeks for us to catch up to where Arthur and the others are in the story. You just have to be patient.”
“Ug g g g g g g g.” Breeth oozed over the edge of the compartment into the seat across from him. “Let’s see you be patient after being locked in a Manor for several years and then in fake heaven for months!”
“This is important, Breeth.”
“But why y y y?”
Wally’s eyes remained fixed on the window. “I don’t know yet.” He drew a contented breath. “Isn’t it nice not to do something for a while? No fighting. No arguing. Just … watching.”
“Nope!” Breeth said. “You just described my worst nightmare. Blech. Yuck. Sick.”
They had boarded the Trackdragon shortly after Lady Weirdwood grew a Shadowrail platform in the Manor. Wally had entered an open cabin near the back, had plopped himself down by the window, and had been watching cities and pocket-worlds flicker past ever since. To Breeth, it might as well have been paint drying.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! She tried kicking Wally’s armrest, but her feet kept bouncing off. “Rrg!”
Wally didn’t even blink. The Trackdragon had stopped in another pocket-world, as gray as every other that had come before it. They were in a vast desert lit by stars. Torn into the steep slope of a dune was a Rift that looked onto a snowy village. Camel-like creatures with thorn-skinned riders approached the Rift to greet humans dressed in thick furs as they stepped out of a blizzard onto dry sand.
The people in furs gave water to the desert travelers while the camel riders showed the children of the snowy village a wicker cage that seemed to hold pet fireworks. The kids warmed their hands by the fireworks’ light, which sparkled gray in their eyes, as the camel riders gulped the water as if it was the first drink they’d had in weeks.
“So, what are we doing about this?” Breeth said. “You want me to beat up those camels?”
“No one needs to get beaten up, Breeth,” Wally said with a smile. “Look. The Rift is letting both sides share things the other didn’t have before. The people and the Fae-born are figuring it out all by themselves.”
Breeth smooshed her nose against the glass. “Well, can we at least go out there and pretend to ride the camels? They won’t even know we’re there.”
“Sorry,” Wally said. “We have to do as much research as we can before we catch up with the story.”
Breeth dragged her fingers down her face. “Do you hear yourself? If I’d wanted to do research, I would’ve stayed in Lady Weirdwood’s huge, boring library!”
With a screech and a whistle, the Trackdragon started rolling again. It chugged out of the desert, passing through the seam that separated the Real from the Fae, and into the boring infinite depths of stupid, starry space.
“Fine. You wanna stare?” Breeth stuck her entire face between Wally’s nose and the window. “Let’s stare. I can stare much longer than you can. I named spores, Wally. That’s how bored I got. You ever name spores before?”
Wally sighed. “I can see through your face, y’know. It’s like glass.”
“Oh yeah? Can you see through this?” She made every face she could think of: happy, miserable, scared, pig, tongue wiggle, and zombie.
Wally’s eyes went wide. “Breeth.”
Grudgingly, she spun in the air and faced the window. The Trackdragon had arrived at another Rift. This one was smaller. Newer. And much more horrifying than the last.
They were in the Real this time. A bank. Hippo-like humanoids in suits were storming the vaults, devouring the bills like salads and washing them down with barrels of coins. If a human banker got in the way, the hippos ate them too. Outside the bank, men with weapons were lining up, ready to hunt the hippos.
“Yeeshk,” Breeth said.
Finally, Wally looked away from the carnage. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? The Fae and the Real can help each other if they can get along. But some Fae-born are too wild, and some humans are too selfish. Tearing the Veil might bring about a better world, but so many will get hurt … It wouldn’t be worth it.”
Breeth wasn’t really listening. She was daydreaming. “If I could possess those hippos and humans, I’d make them all sit down to a tea party and talk about their feelings. But nooooo. Everything has to be gray and boring, and I have to obey the laws of time, or whatever.”
“Interesting,” Wally whispered to himself as the Trackdragon started to move again.
“Uh, yeah,” Breeth said. “It would be interesting. The only interesting thing that’s happened in—”
The compartment began to tremble violently as the window flashed an impossible white. Outside was neither Real nor Fae nor starry between. There was nothing at all. Breeth and Wally had been on the Trackdragon long enough now for the Eraser to begin its mass destruction. The only thing that passed the window now were leftover scraps of the erased Fae. And at the very edges, a rainbow shimmer.
Wally mumbled to himself, “Lady Weirdwood’s bubble sheen didn’t keep the Eraser from reentering the Manor. She kept it from entering the Real.”
Breeth didn’t know what he was talking about, but she had to admit that she had a morbid fascination with these erased landscapes. The Eraser was the only force she had come across in her ghosthood that could snuff out her spirit. Staring into this blankness was like staring into true death. She wondered sometimes if the Eraser was just a ghost like she was, searching for a way home. It just didn’t know how not to be a jerk about it.
She also wondered about all those ghosts she now knew were locked away in the organic materials of the Real and Fae. And she wondered how many the Eraser had already erased.
Later that day, the Trackdragon huffed to its final stop on the line. Out the window, a bright sunset illuminated an endless ocean and many floating islands. The islands were surrounded by dozens of Rifts.
“Whirling City!” the conductor called. “Exit here for the Whirling City!”
Wally got up. “We’re getting off.”
Breeth blinked. “Wait, whoa, really?”
“Really,” he said. “We’ve got a bird to find.”
“Then we get to rejoin the adventure, right?”
“No,” Wally said, stepping out of the compartment. “Then we’re going to look for more Rifts.”
“Waaaallyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
20
AUDREY
The DappleWood was gone. The cottages and the lanes. The shops and their wares. Pleasant Pond and the Dozen-Acre Meadow. All that remained was a vast three-dimensional canvas spattered with bare remnants, like spills of paint: some cobblestones, a wall or two, and clumps of trees in the adjoining wood. It seemed even the wind had been erased.
Audrey blinked at the nothingness. She had finally made it home, only to find it gone again. “I … I just smelled it yesterday.”
“I don’t like it here,” KW whispered, squeezing Audrey’s paw.
Audrey’s throat was too tight to answer.
“It was her home,” Arthur said, picking up the child. “Audrey … I’m so sorry this happened. When Wally’s brother led the Eraser away from the Manor, he must have brought it straight…”
Audrey took off across the blank landscape, bounding from cobblestone to patch of grass, passing half a streetlamp here, a crooked chunk of house there, as she sniffed for survivors. “Mrs. Chicken? Mr. Frog? Anybody!”
She heard a creak ahead. A piece of the blankness, a perfect square, lifted from the ground before flopping back down, leaving a dark hole behind.
A feathery head poked out. “Audrey? Is that you?”
Audrey scampered across the last few cobblestones and threw her arms around Mrs. Chicken’s neck. The chicken embraced her in her large, fluffy wings.
“Audrey, it is lovely to see you alive and safe, but what on earth is between us?”
“Oh,” Audrey said, stepping back and collecting herself. “It’s a snake. Don’t worry. It doesn’t bite. Or it hasn’t yet, anyway.”
Mrs. Chicken eyed the snake warily as Audrey peered down into the pub owner’s underground egg storage and found dozens of eyes peering back at her.
“Hello, Audrey!”
“Why, if it isn’t Ms. Abbott!”
“Our seamstress has returned!”
“Can you fix my zipper?”
“Forget your zipper! My entire wardrobe was erased!”
Audrey’s paw leapt to her mouth. “Are they all down there?”
“Every last one,” Mrs. Chicken said. She laid a wing on Audrey’s shoulder. “All we were missing was you.”
Tears of relief spilled down Audrey’s whiskers. The town may have been erased, but the heart of the DappleWood lived on in its citizens.
“I do have some regrettable news,” Mrs. Chicken said, folding together her wingtips like fingers.
Audrey’s throat clenched up again.
“That little girl…,” Mrs. Chicken said. “The Badgers with Badges did as Amelia asked and locked her in the greenhouse. Shortly after, the child fell into a deep sleep, from which she would not wake. When that walking nothingness showed up, we couldn’t lift her in time. We barely made it underground ourselves.”
Audrey’s heart took a tumble. She knew only one young girl who could not be woken. “Breeth was erased?”
“Her body was,” a beautiful woman with dark skin and ink-stained fingers said from the underground storage. “We believe Breeth’s spirit was elsewhere.”
Audrey breathed a little easier, but she still felt a sharp pang of guilt. She’d been the one to help Breeth let go of her anger and leave that body behind. Now that poor, sweet child would be a little ghost girl forever.
“Fear not, everyone!” Arthur’s loud voice cut through the blank landscape as he stepped forward with KW, who made mighty hops along the leftover cobblestones. “I’ll remake this town before sunset!” He glanced at the blank, white sky. “Er, sunrise. Whatever comes next.” He got KW situated on a cobblestone, then rubbed his hands together. “All I need’s a pen and paper and a dash of DappleWood inspiration.”
“Arthur…,” Mrs. Chicken said, not looking him in the eye. “We think it’s best if you don’t help us anymore.”
Arthur went pale. “Wh-what? Why?”
Audrey was also shocked. She had never heard Mrs. Chicken speak an ill word against anyone.
A man Audrey didn’t recognize crawled through the trapdoor. He wore drumsticks on his belt, and he held Audrey’s diary.
“After I transformed back into myself,” the man said, “I found this in the forest.” He flipped to the end of the diary. “It seems someone tried to resurrect a certain Gentleman Thief—a fictional character who was retired by a dragon-bone Quill and therefore, according to magical law, could not be resurrected. This action tore a Rift into the Fae’s world of the dead and released nightmares into this town. Arthur”—the man opened the diary face out—“is this your handwriting?”
Arthur opened his mouth as if to argue, then simply said, “Yes.”
Several townscritters gasped below. A squirrel scout whimpered.
Arthur’s head hung heavy. “I thought I could banish the Eraser by resurrecting Garnett Lacroix with my writing. I was trying to prevent this very thing from happening.”
“You could have killed everyone here,” Cadence said.
“You promised us we’d be safe!” a mouse cried from below.
“You turned our town into a nightmare!” Mr. Mole shouted.
“You said you’d beat the Nothing Man,” a squirrel scout said sadly. “We thought you were our hero.”
Arthur stared into the underground, eyes traveling around the many disappointed fuzzy, feathered, and scaled faces of the DappleWood. “I…” His expression broke, and he turned to leave.
“Arthur?”
Arthur stopped as the beautiful woman and an injured man who seemed to be her husband crawled through the trapdoor. He did not look back at them, as if he was ashamed.
“Sekhmet…,” the man said, leaning to compensate for his bandaged back. He hesitated, as if he couldn’t bring himself to ask the question. “Did she make it out?”
Still, Arthur kept his eyes ahead. “I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save anyone.” He continued toward the blankness.
Audrey was tempted to go after him. To tell the others not to be too rough on the boy. (And that was all he was. A boy.) But it seemed Arthur had hidden his misdeeds from her neighbors so they would see him as some sort of savior. At the same time, he had neglected to give them information about the Eraser they could have used to keep themselves safe. Arthur still needed to learn to let others be the hero sometimes.
Audrey took KW’s little hand, and they watched as he vanished into the patchwork forest. Soon after, the other humans, the chef and the drummer, the injured man and his wife, also left the decimated village, following a strange sort of moving map, hoping to find their daughter alive somewhere in all that blankness.
* * *
Audrey joined the effort to cobble together the DappleWood’s leftover pieces. Even KW hopped along the patches of crabgrass, gathering sticks.
Throughout the search, Audrey kept the snake draped over her shoulders so the child could reach out and be tickled by its unnervingly forked tongue. Every time the thing slid its scales along Audrey’s fur, she shivered straight to the tip of her tail. But she felt strangely grateful for the horrific serpent. Her discomfort kept her distracted from the devastation her town had experienced, spread it out so she didn’t feel it as sharply.
By the time the white of day fell to black of night, the town had set up a pleasant little encampment of odds and ends—half beds, leftover straw, a chair or two—with a bonfire crackling in the center. It was quiet around the camp. A sadness hung in the starless sky. The only thing that could be heard was the crackle of the flames against the aching absence of a windless night.
Something large came rolling toward the encampment. Every head jerked toward the darkness, eyes wide, whiskers perked, worried that whatever it was had come to finish them off. A large object, brown as a boulder, rolled into the firelight, pushed by Arthur. The townscritters’ worried expressions did not soften.
Audrey stood from the fire and met Arthur in the half darkness. “What’s this?” she asked of the boulder-like object.
“I think it’s Ludwig,” Arthur said softly. “The Manor’s woodworker.” He rotated the object to show a giant hand sticking out of the side like a sprout breaking through the shell of a seed. “I found this—er, him, in what’s left of the forest. It was buried beneath the soil, so it wasn’t erased.” Arthur nodded toward the DappleWood citizens. “I figured if they don’t want me to help them rebuild their town, maybe they would welcome the aid of the friendly giant who fixed my sloppy first drafts.” He knocked on the seed. “They just have to figure out how to crack it open.”
“That’s kind of you, Arthur,” Audrey said, resting a paw on the seed. “They’ll appreciate it.”
Arthur gazed back into the darkness. “I also found the Rift the Eraser left behind. I’m going to take the snake and follow it through the pocket-worlds. And I’m going to bring the Eraser down. Tonight.”
Audrey felt a flutter of worry. “Now don’t go getting yourself killed just because my neighbors ruffled you some.”
“It’s the only idea we have left, Audrey,” Arthur said, desperation in his eyes. “I have to try.”
Audrey couldn’t keep her whiskers from worrying. “Well, at least take some food and supplies with you.”
She returned to the bonfire and told her neighbors what Arthur had found for them.
“We don’t want no part of it!” Mr. Mole grumbled.
Mrs. Chicken clucked in agreement. “We discussed it as a town, and we’ve all agreed that it’s best if we never allow anyone from outside the DappleWood in again.”
“But…,” Audrey said. “It will take months to chop the lumber from the forest and rebuild. Years maybe! And that’s if there’s even enough wood left. Arthur and this woodworker could do it in a day with zero building materials.”
Mrs. Chicken folded her wings across her breast. “Whatever we build on top of this blankness will be ours and ours alone. No more outsiders. They cause too much trouble.” She glanced at KW, then looked away with sadness. “That includes the small ones. We’re clearly unable to protect a human child.”
Audrey stepped behind KW and pulled her close. “You can’t send Arthur and a kid out there alone! Where’s that Dapplewood hospitality?”
Mrs. Chicken lowered her beak. “Our hospitality expired the day that thing erased our home for the second time. We must keep our critters safe.”
Audrey looked to her other neighbors for support, but none would meet her eye. With a huff, she took KW’s hand and turned on her paw.
“Audrey,” Mrs. Chicken said, stopping her. “If you go with them…”
Audrey squeezed her eyes shut, hesitating just a moment. Then, without looking back, she led KW to Arthur.
“What did they say?” he asked, looking concerned. “Why is KW with you?”
Audrey looked down at the child, who had reached up to secretly pet her snake.
“I’m a simple ferret,” she finally said. “All I want is a quiet life with a happy ending. Not some huge battle between the worlds and an Erasery whozeewhatzit.” She stared into the nothingness of night, which frightened her more deeply than her darkest dreams. “Like my ma used to tell me and my siblings when we were just little slinks of fur: When you see trouble comin’, it’s best to keep out of the way and let the Great Seamstress sort it out.”
