Slice Of Cherry (12 page)

“We sure can.” She squeezed Fancy back. “I don’t know about you two, but I had enough socializing for a year.”

“Two years,” said Fancy. She looked at Kit, expecting her to say, “Three years.” Any other time she would have.

But Kit was too busy staring at Gabriel.

I
SAW
C
HERRY HANGING OUT AT
F
OUNTAIN SQUARE.
I
SAID HI, BUT SHE TRIED TO PRETEND LIKE SHE DIDN’T KNOW ME.
W
HEN
I
FINALLY GOT HER TO SPEAK, SHE CALLED ME
F
RANNIE.
B
ITCH.

Fancy snatched “Singin’ in the Rain” off the phonograph and whirled it like a Frisbee across the room.

“Hey! I was listening to that.”

“You got no business listening to something that cheerful,” said Fancy. She abandoned her losing hand of solitaire to rifle through the crate below the phonograph stand for a more acceptable record.

Madda had long since left for work, and both Fancy and Kit were at the tea table with only the dim orange glow of a hurricane lamp to keep back the darkness. The sisters, fresh from their cold-water baths, had stripped down to their sleep clothes. They could have been haunts, so still and somber-eyed in the half-dark.

Fancy put “My True Story” by the Jive Five on the phonograph, a depressing song completely in synch with her mood.

“Wanna play beauty shop?” Kit asked, waving her gooey nail brush practically under Fancy’s nose.

“I don’t wanna play with you.” Fancy dealt herself a new hand. “And why you gotta do your nails right next to me? You know I hate that smell.”

“I have a bottle of polish that smells like violets. I could paint your—”

“No.” She felt Kit’s gaze on her but ignored it.

“If it’s just the smell that’s bothering you—”

“Nail polish is
not
what’s bothering me.”

“Fine.” Kit disappeared under the tea table and then laughed when Fancy squealed at the touch of Kit’s mouth on her bare foot. “I’m sorry. Sorrysorrysorry.” Every time she said “sorry,” she kissed Fancy’s foot. “I’m sorry. How many is that? A hundred? Is that enough?”

“No. Ow!” Fancy snatched her foot away from Kit and rubbed the bite mark her sister had left on her instep.

Kit crawled out from beneath the table, frowning, and slumped on the stool. “It’s not my fault my hormones keep getting in the way.”

“It is your fault. You don’t have to give in to it. Especially over a guy like
Gabriel
.”

Over the sound of the music Fancy heard the ping of bugs bouncing off the screens. The lamps drew them. Sometimes, especially on moonless nights, the light in the sisters’ room was the only light for miles.

“Why don’t you like him, Fancy?”

“Cuz he’s a big phony. Fussing at you for trying to rip out a guy’s tongue. Meantime he’s going around shoving sticks into people’s eye sockets.”

“It was just a severed head.”

“That’s not the point! Besides you already have one man. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“What man? Franken?” Kit laughed. “I can’t exactly take him home to mother. I can’t take him anywhere. Except on Halloween.” She clapped her photo-shoot-ready hands together. “You know what? If you take a hostage, we could double-date!”

Fancy shoved her finger into her mouth and pretended to gag.

Kit grabbed her hand. “Look at those nails. You need a manicure even more than you need polish.”

Fancy snatched her hand back. “I said no.”

Kit looked so dejected that the last of Fancy’s anger sloughed away. “I forgive you, Kit. Okay? Let’s just forget about what happened today.” She reshuffled her cards. “But I like my nails the way they are. I like
everything
the way it is.”

Kit looked at her own blood-colored nails and seemed more dejected than ever, yet she smiled. “Let’s just do what you wanna do, then.” She took the cards from Fancy and began to deal. “Whatever you want. Like we always do.”

“Fancy . . .”

Fancy awoke in Kit’s bed with Kit’s breath in her hair, their chests rising and falling as one.

“Fancy . . .”

Fancy rolled over, rubbing her eyes and shoving Kit’s knee out of the way. “What?”

But Kit was fast asleep.
“Fancy.”

Fancy shot up, squeezing the sheets to her chest. The voice had come from across the room, from the phonograph Kit had forgotten to turn off; it hissed and crackled her name from the
dark throat of its horn, darker even than the night surrounding it. She knew that voice.

Fancy shivered as the leaves washed against the screens. “Cherry?”

“You have an appointment to keep,” hissed the voice, “in the dark park.”

Fancy threw the covers over her head.

“Fancy.”
The voice was reproachful, but Fancy didn’t budge. “Remember what’s at stake, Fancy. Your future. Your sister’s.”

Fancy lowered the covers and got out of bed.

“Come here.”

Fancy went forward and stopped before the phonograph.

“Reach inside.”

Fancy reached into the icy throat of the horn, skin crawling, expecting it to clamp on her arm at any second. She flinched when her fingers bumped something.

“Take it.”

Fancy grabbed the object and ripped free of the phonograph horn, her arm as numb as if it had spent thirty minutes inside a refrigerator.

“That will lead you where you need to go.”

The object in her hand was a piece of paper, but in the dark she couldn’t make out what was on it.

“Remember, you have to go alone. If you can’t get it on your own, you don’t deserve it.”

“Get what?”

“The key. Good luck.”

A sharp snap resounded in the room as the phonograph shut itself off.

Fancy chained her bike in the parking lot of St. Mike’s, which was across the street from the dark park. The sun floated just over the horizon, the sky streaked with red as though God had killed someone and hadn’t bothered to clean it up. But the dark park seemed to shun the light. Just the sight of those sunless, tangled trees, tall as skyscrapers and stretching wider than her eyes could see, had Fancy ready to hop back on her bike and pedal off. She lived in the woods and felt at home there, but the dark park was something else entirely—a creaking ancient forest full of doors and the monsters that had come through them. The only thing that made what she was about to do even remotely bearable was that the parking lot of St. Mike’s was packed with shiny green trucks. Mortmaine trucks. They often
patrolled the dark park, keeping the monsters that lived inside in check.

If things got out of hand, Fancy could just scream for help, and if the Mortmaine weren’t too busy or too far away or too indifferent (as they sometimes were), they might come to her rescue. Maybe the Mortmaine presence in the dark park had sent all the monsters into hiding; maybe Fancy wouldn’t even see one grotesquerie the whole time she was inside.

Thus comforted, Fancy crossed the street and entered the dark park.

To her surprise and relief she spied a sunlit trail and quickly began to follow it. She unfolded the paper she’d gotten from the phonograph as she walked along. It was as blank as it had been all morning. She had no idea why—

As Fancy watched, a pink dot appeared at the bottom of the paper, while at the very top appeared a thick black
X
. The dot was moving, inching turtle slow up toward the
X
. When Fancy stopped moving, so did the dot. When Fancy walked backward, the dot disappeared. But when she walked forward, the dot reappeared.

Assured that she was on the right track, Fancy hurried on.

Though the line on the map was perfectly straight, Fancy’s
way was not. But no matter how she swerved, the dot kept straight on the map. When she chose the wrong fork in the road, whenever she went in the wrong direction, the dot vanished. Fancy panicked every time it happened, as though she herself had vanished, but she always managed to get herself turned in the right direction.

The dark park was normal at first, similar to the woods surrounding her home. But the deeper she went in, the weirder it got. The leaves seemed to reach out to her and trail along her arms and hair. Fancy pretended that the wind was doing it, even though there was no wind.

At one point Fancy passed a giant cobweb just off the path, with large bones stuck to it. Animal bones, Fancy thought, even though the partial rib cage and femur looked disturbingly human. Just old animal bones in a web that had been abandoned a long, long time.

“Hey!”

Fancy shrieked and broke into a run.

“Hey!”

The voice was human. Mortmaine?

Fancy slowed and looked back, startled to hear a human
voice after what seemed an eternity, but there was no one on the path.

“Hey!”

She peered through the dark trees to her left and saw it.

Fancy knew right away it wasn’t human, no matter what it sounded like. It had a head, but the rest of it was some kind of yellow jelly. The nose it had given itself kept sliding into its mouth. As she watched, the jelly morphed itself into a humanish shape and began to walk toward her. “Hey!” A bit of its yellow blob stretched from the center of its chest and made something that looked like a hand. “Hey!”

It reached for her, and when the hand it had made came into contact with the sun beaming along the path Fancy stood on, it caught fire. The thing shrieked and lost whatever humanness it had tried to give itself. It shrank into a ball of goo and squished out of sight through the dark trees.

“Sunstroke,” Fancy said, shaking so hard that her teeth were chattering. She then checked the map. “I’ve been in this sun forever; that’s why I saw that.”

She was three fourths along the line, almost at the
X
. It would be ridiculous to run screaming out of the woods when
she had come so far. It was just sunstroke and animal bones and the wind. After Fancy got the key, she and Kit could both do whatever they wanted and there would never be any consequences, and for that Fancy could put up with anything.

Fancy squared her shoulders and continued forward along the path, and the dot on the map disappeared.

She backtracked until the dot reappeared and then scouted about but found no alternate trails, as she had the other times the dot had vanished. There was just the sunny path and the dark woods pressing malevolently on either side of her. She sidled to the right, and the dot disappeared, so she sidled left . . . and the dot stayed. She had to keep going left. Off the path. Into darkness. Where that slugboy thing was waiting for her.

Fancy stared horrified into the woods. She had to do it. For Kit she would do it. If she quit now, she’d never have the guts to come in again, not after what she’d seen. She took a deep breath and plunged into the trees at such a high speed she was sure her feet didn’t touch the ground for at least five yards. As soon as they did, she stumbled and crashed head over heels right out of the trees and down an embankment. After a swift, stomach-churning free fall she landed on her butt in a green, piss-warm stream.

After several moments spent shaking and assuring herself that nothing was broken, Fancy stood and consulted the map that she’d still managed to hang on to through all her long fall. The pink dot was there and—thank God—closer than ever to the
X
. She tested possible directions and determined that she had to go upstream in the flowing water toward a bridge. She moved quickly; the sunlight was strong on the stream and made her feel safe, but the sooner this quest was over, the happier she’d be.

Before too long Fancy found herself standing beneath the bridge. As soon as she unfolded the map, the pink dot, which had moved directly over the
X
, floated off the page. Fancy gasped and flinched as it drifted up past her face to the bridge’s underside, which someone—a crazy someone, obviously—had decorated with junk.

The pink dot rolled along the shiny pieces of randomness overhead—cracked CDs, wine bottles, a toy submarine, stained glass, tinfoil—and then came to a stop over a long brass . . . something.

Fancy jumped up and grabbed the thing by its wooden handle and struggled to pull it free. It was difficult, and the more she pulled on the handle, the more she saw what was
holding all the junk to the bridge—slime. When she yanked the brass object free, a big drop of slime, pink slime, fell on her map. The line and
X
that had sustained her along the sunny trail had disappeared, replaced by one word in pink script:
RUN
.

Fancy looked up. Several amphibious creatures hung above her, hiding the shiny junk from sight, leering down at her. The slime attached to her map had dripped from the mouth of the creature directly above her. When the map jerked from her hand and into the creature’s wide, wet mouth, Fancy realized it hadn’t been slime, but a tongue.

Fancy took the map’s advice and ran.

She raced along the stream and then up the embankment, going back the way she’d come. But the frogmen were quicker than she was, leaping over her head and catching hold of the trees, waiting for her to pass by, like it was some game. They were greenish-brown, blending so well with the trees that she didn’t see them until they whipped their tongues at her, at her skin, stripping bits of it off. Snacking on her.

She made it back to the path, but she was no longer safe, assuming she had ever been safe. The frogmen were right behind her. Unlike the slugboy they had no fear of sunlight. A tongue on her leg tripped her up. She hit the ground on her
back and watched the frogman greedily swallow a good bit of her shin. Fancy screamed and ran on mindlessly.

Straight into a green wall.

She bounced off a Mortmaine woman dressed all in green. With her were two companions: a Mortmaine boy, also in head-to-toe green, and a girl in purple—a Porterene, judging from the silver key dangling from her purple bracelet, though Fancy had never heard of a Porterene who wore color outside of church. And she had never heard of a Mortmaine wearing anything but green.