Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

I pulled on the trousers, a loose white shirt. I crammed Anna’s hummingbird bandeau in my pocket and started rummaging in the back of the wardrobe when Justice yanked me away.

“ Now. “He pulled me after him to the door. He cracked it and peered out, then tossed the spent lumiere behind us. For a moment he regarded me as I swayed beside him, trying to steady myself. Then he clicked the door shut and motioned me down the hall.

Sudden freedom made me giddy. Paneled walls ballooned in shadow. Beneath me the florid carpet snaked blue and gold in the rain-washed light. Justice took my hand and led me like a child, the two of us racing silently down the dim hallway. Abruptly he stopped and dragged me into an alcove. He drew something from his pocket. I smelled his fear and shut my eyes until the piercing desire to tap him faded.

“I’ll kill you now.” He spread his palm to show a cobalt capsule. “Or will you come with me?”

I nodded. He stared at me, after another moment replaced the capsule and turned to the door. When its old-fashioned latch gave, the door creaked inward onto a long dark stairway winding down: Andrew’s secret passage. I glanced down, half-hoping that I might see him crouched on the stairs with his cigarette lighter, luring spiders.

But no. I had seen no one for weeks, no one except for Dr. Leslie and Tast’annin and the janissary medics who slipped into my room when I was sedated. Later they would attach the siphons to my head as I slept. I began to shake and stumbled against Justice. He took my hand and squeezed it.

It was so dark that I could not even glimpse the step I stood upon. A sharp crack; I started and saw a fresh lumiere glowing in Justice’s other hand. He steadied himself against the wall and glanced at me.

“They were going to kill you,” he said. “They’ve already killed most of the others. Do you think you can walk?”

I nodded and stroked his face, his skin warm beneath its sheath of sweat. He shrank against the damp wall. I brought my hand to my lips and licked it. In his sweat I tasted blunt desire, and shivered with the sudden thrill of understanding that it was an empty he wanted, as there had been those I treated who longed to sleep with the dead. I stared at him until he looked away and shifted the lumiere to shadow his face. We descended the stairs.

As we fled downward the air grew cooler. The walls roughened from wood to rough granite and moldering brick. I smelled refrigeration; rotting orchids; the drowsy chypre of the sleeplabs. The lumiere’s faint light dwindled.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, slowing his pace to answer me. “But I thought we might gain a little time before they track us here.” He glanced at me doubtfully. “But this is only a way out of the building. We can’t stay on the grounds—the dogs will find us for sure.”

“Where does it come out?”

“The Glass Fountain.”

“And then?”

He shrugged, shaking the lumiere in a vain effort to get a stronger light. “It’s only the old fence there—I don’t think there’s a surveillance system. They never worried about keeping you in; it was more to keep the world out. Behind the fence there’s the cemetery and the forest. They might be afraid to follow us there.” The stairway curved so sharply that for an instant I lost sight of him and heard his voice echo, “Anyway, we have no choice.”

“But where can we go?” I coughed, trying to keep up with him. “The forest—they’ll find us there—”

He waved the lumiere as though to drive off hidden enemies. “I know. But I read the applications disc for you, Wendy … ”

Below us I glimpsed a break in the darkness.

“This is it,” Justice whispered. He halted and took my hand, fumbled in his pocket for a moment. “If they catch us, I have these.” His fist opened to display five cobalt ampules threaded with jet.

I shook my head. “I don’t want them.”

He stared at me, fingering his hood.

“I’m not afraid,” I said. “They can kill me.”

“It’s not that.” He shoved the ampules back into his pocket. “It’s how—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s in my head now. I can’t get rid of Him, Justice. She gave Him to me, Justice. Dr. Harrow.”

I could not finish. He turned to face another door that opened easily. Lantern light splintered about us as we stepped onto a patio. Justice pulled his hood tighter around his face, then tossed away the spent lumiere.

We hurried down steps that glimmered pink and yellow in the glow of sulfur lanterns. Far above us in the jutting gables and turrets of HEL , lights flickered and died. I heard the mewling whine of night monitors on their circuit through the upper gardens.

“Are you sure this is right?” Justice whispered. I ignored him, finding my way by scent as much as sight: tracing through the boxwood maze a thread of citrus that led us into a tiny circle of dwarf kumquats, and from there seeking out the firs that bordered the very edge of the estate.

“You said the Glass Fountain.” I pointed to where it danced and sang in the soft rain, its canopy embracing a circle of rainbow light.

“Can you see behind it? To a fence?”

I squinted through the rain, then shook my head. “We’ll have to get past the fountain.”

We slid down a small knoll and waited beneath its shadow. A sound rose behind us—the yelping of guard hounds. A moment later the wailing shriek that signaled the release of the mastiffs from their pit beneath the greenhouse. Justice grabbed my hand.

“There!” he gasped. I stumbled with him over a low stone wall. To either side stretched the high impenetrable hedge of lindens and thorntrees that bounded HEL . In front of us leaned a barbed-wire fence, overgrown with thorns and strangling ivy except for a few yards of rusted metal snagged with feathers and a loop of some small animal’s vertebrae. Beyond the wire stretched woods and the tilted gray humps of tombstones.

From the hill behind us a mastiff squalled. I whirled to Justice. “You said there was a way out—”

He still gazed behind us like one entranced. I shook his arm and he pointed to the ground where a strand of wire had nearly rusted away. “Under there …”

We scrabbled through a few inches of dirt until we scraped broken concrete and gravel. Justice leaned back on his heels, swearing.

I shook my head, took a deep breath, and flattened myself against the ground. A barb tore through my clothes, raking my back almost to my waist. I pushed myself forward, hands and elbows grinding against crushed cement and glass.

I was on the other side. Justice hesitated before he bellied against the slick ground, yelping as the wire tore his cheek. In a few seconds he stumbled to his feet beside me. We kicked rocks and leaves to cover the shallow opening, then stood staring back at the rainbow Fountain, the glittering emerald lawns sloping above us beneath their diadem of watchlights. As the baying of the dogs shook the hedges we fled into the black and dripping woods.

During the last centuries the trees had grown unchecked. Decaying leaves muffled our footsteps. I stumbled on toadstools the size of dinner plates that expelled acrid clouds of brown spores. After a few minutes Justice whistled for me to stop.

“Wait.”

The forest fell back around a clearing studded with the domes of mausoleums and kudzu-covered pillars. A stand of young gingkos littered the ground with their leaves, already bright yellow. Tombstones lay everywhere like discarded dominos poking through the undergrowth. I tipped my chin westward toward Linden Glory.

“So why—” I began.

“No—listen.” He wiped the rain from a tombstone before leaning against its mossy flank. “Can you hear?”