Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

As her hand closed on the doorway, she again felt a flash of heat and saw her hand grown long and elegant. Reflexively, she glanced toward Roland to make sure he was all right… And saw a tall, slim grownup in a tailored suit. He smiled down at her, fondly and with just a touch of sadness.

She blinked in astonishment and, where the stranger had been, she saw only Roland, staring worriedly at her.

“Stop woolgathering,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

They ran down the corridor, through its not-smells and unfelt pains. Faster and faster they went, until it seemed to Sasha that she was racing full-tilt down a long and steepening slope. Her hair flew out behind her, like Alice’s in the Caucus-race, and still Roland sped up, tugging her after him down the corridor, which kept bending away from them until suddenly Sasha realized that she wasn’t running any longer but falling.

“Roland!” she cried. “What’ll we do?”

“Keep calm,” Roland said in a surprisingly mature voice. “It’s rather fun, don’t you think? Perhaps there will be cotton candy for us when we finish.”

Sasha had to admit that if she thought of it as a game or an amusement ride, it was indeed rather fun. But it wasn’t an amusement ride! It was real, and Lord Snow was undoubtedly behind it.

Roland twisted around as he tumbled down. “Use your imagination, Sister Sasha! Perhaps there’s a big pile of cushions below us. Or a haystack! I would love to land in a haystack. Maybe we’ll fall into an enormous pile of soft, fluffy snow” — Sasha shivered — “only warm, you see. Warm snow! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“How can you think those things?” she cried. “It makes no sense!” She wondered if the time he spent in the cage had unhinged his mind. Since she had had no recollections of him, she had no way of knowing whether he had always been such a cheery fellow. Mr. Chesterton, although he took a very positive attitude, had generally leavened it with a reassuring grumpiness.

“Not everything makes sense,” Roland said. “I thought about this in the cage. For one thing, playing with trains — what’s the sense in that? Tiny little people made of metal, with tiny metal coats and hats.” He waved his hands, which made him tumble faster, and shouted back at her, “Toy trains don’t go any where. Coats and hats and people are not metal !”

Then he stretched out his jacket to slow himself down, almost like a parachute, and took a deep breath. “But a real train that goes straight up the Winter Tree is not necessarily an improvement. It ought to be, but somehow it’s just not! So what I think is this: There are things in life that make no sense at all, but that’s no reason not to enjoy them.”

Sasha was trying to make sense of her brother’s words when suddenly — just as he had predicted — they fell ( whoomp! ) onto an enormous pile of soft, fluffy cushions.

“There you are. I must say it took you long enough to get here.” Out of the darkness loomed a strangely familiar figure. “Let me just light a candelabra, so we can see what we shall see.” A match skritched. Shadows danced. Sasha saw the speaker.

It was Aunt Adelaide.

“I suppose you’re full of questions,” Aunt Adelaide said. “I know I would be, were I in your place. Very well, then, I’ll answer them all, and then it’s back to your cages with the both of you.” She fell silent. Then, arching an eyebrow, “Well?”

“I — ” Sasha began.

“Stop!” Roland cried. He stepped between her and Aunt Adelaide, as if the old woman were a physical danger that Sasha had to be protected from. “No. We have no questions whatsoever. We don’t want to know and we’re not going to ask.”

“Really?” The old woman’s grin was wide and froglike, her teeth pointy, her lips and tongue bright red. Her face grew ghostly white. And snap! — just like that! — it was obvious that she was in no way human. Under her gaze Roland fanned out like a hand of cards into dozens of Rolands, swelling up on one side from small boys to tall men and dwindling down on the other side, older and older, to a hairless, wizened old figure that was not identifiably male or female. Aunt Adelaide reached out with impossibly long arms and shuffled the Rolands vigorously. Then she dealt out three, one on top of the other.

First a toddler. “Shall I tell you whether you’ll always be safe and loved?”

Then a grown man. “Or whether your darling Victoria will always be faithful to you or not?”

Finally, Roland as he was now. “Or whether you will ever find the real Aunt Adelaide?” Then, in a deceptively gentle voice, “Or your mother and father?”

All the Rolands collapsed into one angry little boy. “No! We don’t want to hear anything that you have to tell us.”

Sasha pushed Roland out of her way. “It’s easy for you to say that,” she said heatedly. “You don’t remember any of them. But I do.” She turned on the false Aunt Adelaide. “So — yes! I want to know what you did with Mother and Father and Grandmother and Aunt Adelaide. I want to know what I have to do to get them back. Tell me!”

The inhuman red-tongued grin broadened, but the voice was as kindly and solicitous as ever. “Why, child,” she said, shaking her head. “My dear, dear child, we killed them. We came out of the mirrors and we killed them all. Now they’re dead and they’re never coming back. It’s possible you’ll still manage to rescue yourselves, though I wouldn’t bet money on it. You might even manage to save Mr. Chesterton, quixotic though that would be. But you’ll never, ever see your parents again. Even Lord Snow himself couldn’t arrange that. I’m quite sure that you’ll never even find their corpses.”

The shock of her words hit Sasha with all the force of a slap. Her flesh turned as stinging cold as Arctic ice. All the world grew small and distant and still. It felt as though she were turning to stone.

“That’s right, dear, hold it all in,” the creature cooed. She was softening and sagging, so that she no longer looked like Aunt Adelaide; her hair had turned to white foam and her dress to whipped cream. But needle-sharp teeth still gleamed from the dark cavern of her mouth. “Wrap it up tight and hard. Taste the pain. Savor it. Let it encompass you and sink down through your flesh and bones to the very core of your being. Let it become you and you become it. Give it all your love and — ”

“ Demon !” Roland screamed, pushing between her and Sasha. He plunged his hand into his chest and pulled out his beating, glowing soul. He held it up before him. “Stay away from her!”

But the mound-of-foam-woman was not put off for an instant. Chuckling, she reached out a grasping cloud-wisp of a hand. “Is that for me? Oh, what a good little boy you are! Give Auntie some sugar.”

Seeing his mistake, Roland pulled back his soul, stumbling and almost falling. But streams of spume and wind-drift flowed from his opponent’s skirts, twining around and behind him, sprouting more and more long, tentacular arms. “Roland!” Sasha cried, jolted out of her paralysis. “Hide it, put it back inside yourself!”

Wispy tentacles wrapped themselves around Roland’s legs and torso and tightened about his chest, blocking him from simply replacing the soul in its original receptacle. So, desperately, he stuffed the heart into his mouth and swallowed it whole. His skin turned grey and he clutched at his throat, choking.

He doubled over in pain.

Sasha ran through the scattering foam to her brother.

Then he straightened. Roland was no longer himself but an adult, tall and handsome, self-possessed and imperially lean. He shook his head, marveling. “Oh, Sister Sasha, were you ever that young? You always seemed so much older in my eyes. Older, and wiser too. How strange to meet you like this.”