Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Thanks,” Molly said, not looking at him. He was very interesting to look at, but she didn’t particularly want to see him close up. The closer she looked, the more real and unreal he seemed — noticing new details made her more certain she wasn’t dreaming, but revealed him to look weirder and weirder and weirder. He was, she realized, a good candidate to escort her off into lunacy. She slowed down, pausing before every step, and he gave her a little push. “Don’t …” she said, meaning to tell him not to touch her, but even as she said it she realized it was too late. She started running anyway, thinking that if she just tried hard enough, or concentrated hard enough as she ran, the trees would part and the fog would lift, and she would find herself shortly on Jordan’s doorstep. She hurried away down a path that petered out before she’d drawn ten heavy breaths, and then she was running among trees, ducking branches and leaping over fallen logs. It was an unchanging scene — white trees and white fog and dark wet grass — and she felt as she ran as if she could do it forever and never get any farther than the next white tree. That was not so terrible. It was nice just to be running from the awful certainty of the touch of that weird man; it was one thing to see him and hear him, but to feel him was evidence that she had finally and truly lost it. She calmed but did not slow, and understood she was running from that certainty, and that it was okay to run because here in this state of flight she could inhabit a last liminal sanity. It was okay to run — she wasn’t disappointed in herself and nothing anyone, real or imagined, could say would make her feel any differently — but sprinting through the woods made obvious just how much energy it took to run, and she started to feel tired, not just on account of the past five minutes of swift flight but on account of the whole past two years, on account of what seemed, in running reflection, like a titanic effort to stave off something she maybe ought to have just welcomed long before. What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane — clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves — was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that. Funny, she thought, how all it took was a breakdown — or really just the beginning of a breakdown, since she had probably only dipped her toe in it so far — to make everything so clear.

“You are a very nimble mortal!” the man said, running next to her. “But you can slow down now. We’re almost there!” That seemed true to Molly. She was almost there. She had almost reached a place where everything would seem different, a place where her life would change again, in measure with the change that came with Ryan’s death, and so what if that change came at the cost of her sanity? So what, really, if it was a change for the worse? She would be happy just to have a change. She sped up, hurrying toward it even though the man told her again to slow down, and shortly exhausted the trees. A clearing opened up in front of a flat face of rock in the side of the hill. She stopped running and stood there, too much out of breath to talk to any of the other people standing around. She leaned over with her hands on her thighs and craned her neck to look at them, a man and a boy.

“Welcome, brother!” said the boy, who was wearing a partial bunny costume, just the furry bottom and the tail and the feet, and was dressed in pair of baggy shorts held up with suspenders. “You found one too! I had two, but one got away. I win! I win!”

“I had three,” said the man who had brought Molly. “But two declined to come with me. And no one wins.”

“You look normal,” said the other man in the clearing, who was not dressed in a costume and looked to be made of ordinary flesh, and was in fact quite normal-looking if you excused how obviously terrified he was, a tall pudgy dude in a plaid shirt. He wasn’t bad-looking, and Molly could not think why her unhinged mind would have conjured him. He was missing a shoe.

“I’m not,” Molly said.

“Did you see that thing?” he asked.

“Is this all we’ve collected?” asked Molly’s escort. “Two mortals? There are more on the hill — I heard their voices. Our Lord will be sad with us.”

“What thing?” Molly asked.

“Our Lord will be sad,” said the boy, “as our Lady is sad. And sadness repels sadness. But shouldn’t it attract?” He ran up and pulled on Molly’s skirt. “Does like not cleave to like?”

“That thing,” said the dude. “That lady. Except she wasn’t a lady.”

“You mean she was a trannie?” Molly asked. The dude shook his head and gave her a look — he seemed scared and solicitous at the same time, and Molly thought for sure that if he had not been standing ten feet away he would have taken her hand.

“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I know exactly what’s going on.” Before she could give him the details — bad career choice, dead boyfriend, persistent failure of psychological recovery, and final florid breakdown — they were interrupted by the arrival of two more men. An old man, small beyond any reasonable shrinkage of age, came huffing and puffing into the clearing, dragging another, normal-sized man by the legs. The dragger was dressed in a perfectly pressed linen suit; the draggee wore nothing from the waist down. “Look,” she said to the man in the plaid shirt. “Now it’s getting interesting.” And she tried to decide which was a more extravagant effort on the part of her demented imagination, a man with no pants or a tiny grandpa in a nice suit or a boy with a bunny tail — as he pulled on her skirt and jumped up and down beside her, she decided that his tail was not a costume.

“Look what I found!” said the tiny grandpa, who seemed to get smaller instead of bigger as he got closer. “I win. Smell him. He’s special. I win!”

“I had two,” said Bunny Boy. “I win!”

“I had three,” said the Tree. “But …”

“Smell him! There’s something special. Something awful. It’s more points, when they’re special.”

“It’s not!” said Bunny Boy. “Whoever gets two and loses one is the winner. Those are the rules .”

“There are no rules!” said the Tree. “This is not a game. This is an emergency !”

“It’s a game!” said Bunny Boy. “If we’re all going to die anyway, I want it to be a game!”

“Will you please just smell him!” Tiny Grandpa shouted. The three of them glared at one another, but the other two went over and sniffed grudgingly at the man with no pants, who stirred a little at the pressure of the Bunny Boy’s nose.

“I thought he was dead,” said the dude in the plaid shirt.

“Why would he be dead?” Molly asked, really talking to herself, asking not just why would she present herself with a pantless dead man, but why the little grandpa and the bunny boy and why a talking tree? I had the strangest dream , she said to herself. And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, too. There were already midgets—über-midgets, actually, or under-midgets. She wondered if there would be flying monkeys, and if she would kill a witch and wake up whole of mind.

“Because something horrible is happening.”

“I see what you mean,” said the Tree. “Distinctive.” He prodded the man with a foot. “Are you sure he’s a mortal?”

“He is too ugly to be anything else,” said Bunny Boy. “But special, I agree. In the worst way.” He craned his neck down to sniff at the man’s bottom. “There’s something awful in there!”