Chris Adrian - The Great Night

He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he’d flung open a door at the far end and plunged through — the Sparkling Gullet and the Panda Market and the Jade Toilet and the Mushroom Cathedral, he paused in each one only long enough to verify that they were empty of trees of any size or age, and then his mission pushed him onward. But at the Warm Frozen Waterfall he slowed, and in the Hall of a Hundred Little Windmills he paused, and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various , that lined the shelves. He thought they were translations of the same book into countless languages — none of which he recognized — until he found seven in a row in English, but none of them had the same first sentence. He half expected to read then Will picked up a book in the curious library and began to read or Make a wish, Bastien! but they were ordinary sentences about animals setting off on an adventure, a mole in one and a badger in another and in yet another a girl-pig named Davida. He kept that one, a souvenir for Molly to add to the others he had gathered for her. Molly! he thought. That wasn’t who he meant at all, and it seemed a worse crime than kissing her to imagine, even if only fleetingly and mistakenly, giving her the gifts that were meant for Carolina. He paused to imagine, firmly and concretely, Carolina’s face when he came to her with a little box containing the little tree.

He had found the door on the other side of the library and was reaching for it when it opened forcefully, as if kicked, knocking books to the floor when it slammed against the shelves. Before he was quite aware of what he was doing, Will found himself trying to hide behind the book he was carrying, his terror of the pursuing monster suddenly as fresh as when he had first seen her in the park. He recovered his dignity enough to lower the book even before he heard the voice. “Are you?” it began, and then the little man to whom it belonged snorted. “No, I don’t even have to taste you to know. Another mortal! Who let you all in?”

“A boy,” Will said, and then, “A little man,” which seemed like the wrong thing to say because of the bristling anger this little man radiated and the outsized knife he carried. “A tree person.”

“Well, it’s a fine night for tourists!” the little man said, punctuating the statement with a vigorous thrust of the knife toward Will’s face. He was a good ten feet away, and five feet down, but Will still flinched.

“Would you like a drink?” Will asked him, holding out his bottle of wine and thinking it might help him be less angry and antagonistic.

“There’s no time for that ,” he said. “Is that how you’re making yourself useful in this crisis? Where is that killjoy high-handed mortal seriousness when it might actually be appropriate? Eh? Eh?” He poked again with the knife, and Will said, “Hey, there. Settle down, little man. I’m on your side!” That made the tiny fellow howl and do a spastic dagger dance, swiping and stabbing at the air all around him. “Sorry! Sorry!” Will said, backing away.

“Oh, but you will be sorry, you ridiculous delay , if I don’t get this knife to my Lady in time. Now out of my way!”

“I didn’t mean—” Will began, but the little man was already running by him, swiping at Will’s feet as he passed. Will did a skip and a jump, and called after him, “Sorry!” and “I’m actually looking for the nursery!” but the angry creature was already gone. “A tree nursery,” he added softly, “not a baby nursery.” He cracked the door and peaked outside before he walked through it.

Will stayed longer at the Marble Pool (an Olympic-sized pool filled with marbles instead of water) and with the Singing Ferns, and then the fun part was over. He came to mildewed chambers that felt like they must be at the very bottom of the hill, because all the time he had been fleeing alone Will felt like he had been going down, and now there were no more carved pillars or mirrored ceilings or floors carpeted in tiny flowers but just rough wet stone and moss and coarse grass and danger, at first no more seriously threatening than the little mannikin with the wooden knife, but deeper down, more significant. They were a totally different category of danger than the thing he was running from, more ordinary sorts of extraordinary that called to the brave parts of him instead of commanding the craven parts, and made him want to stand up and face them instead of shitting in his pants and crying and lying down and giving up on everything. He started to get the definite feeling that the way out of the hill was guarded by challenges, that a person needed to demonstrate some kind of fortitude in order to find it. He imagined, as he fought his way through the snake vines and then pushed past the mud people and waited patiently (finishing his wine) for the three-eyed watcher to take a nap, that he was blazing a trail for the others and making it easier for them by his effort. And he imagined, of course, that he was fighting his way back to Carolina, since the way out was the way back to her, and there was something in the attack of a mud person and the bite of a snake vine and the stinging, sleeping slap of a three-eyed watcher that felt like it imparted an earned virtue to him that he felt sure would be apparent to anyone who saw him when he eventually emerged, battered and bruised, from under the hill. Certainly Carolina would see it, and it did not boggle belief to think there might be, at the end of this winding, challenge-strewn path, which he ran with an intermittently waving sense of terror at his back, a little golden tree whose roots were carefully bound inside a burlap sack, waiting for him to take it back to the place that could be his home again.

He had the sense, too, as the challenges intensified, that he was getting closer to the exit, and when he came to the last rock chamber, and his internal bathymeter told him he had gone as low as he could go, he felt ready to face a dragon, though he was armed only with a salt shaker and a book and an empty bottle and a very small knife. But what he saw in the chamber looked like a waving sea of thick flesh-colored anemones, until they got close enough — as soon as he entered the chamber they started hobbling toward him — for him to see it was a sea of disembodied penises, softly shambling toward him on variously sized testicle feet. He was drunk enough and not drunk enough to be afraid of them; they were less uncanny than they would have been if he was sober, and yet he was sober enough to remember how awful the thing chasing him was, and realize that they were comparatively innocuous. They nuzzled around his ankles, and he waited apprehensively for them to become erect and monstrous as they rubbed against him and each other, but they were as harmless as a roiling basket of puppies. He didn’t know what the challenge in them might be, unless it was to avoid stepping on one, and he was thinking that the hill was giving him an odd sort of goodbye present. He wondered if he might dare put one in his pocket for Carolina, since despite the awkwardness involved in making her a present of a detached penis the gift would prove beyond any doubt the truth of his story, when he heard a rustling far above his head, followed by a noise that put him in mind of a yawning cat, a stretched-out mewling that faded to a breathy sigh. He looked up to see a swarm of bats that were not bats. He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck. He ran then, heedless of the gentle sluglike cocks that he squashed, and felt blindly along the opposite end of the cave for the way out. It was there: a tunnel only a little taller than him, that narrowed as he went, so he had to stoop and then crawl, a flapping vagina harassing his bottom until the passage became so narrow that he had to crawl on his belly and it could only bump at his feet. His panic was rising again when he felt a little air move on his face, and he started to slither in champion haste when he caught sight of a light at the end of his tunnel. He wondered if it could be dawn already, and then he was sliding the last few feet and tumbling out into the lushly appointed wreck of a room. Molly sat weeping on a ruined bed not twenty feet away.