Ashley Bell: A Novel (58 page)

“Six months after I came to live in the apartment, eight months after your terrifying experience, you finally trusted me enough to tell me about it. You felt you couldn’t tell your mom and dad, that they wouldn’t…well, wouldn’t understand. Whether that was right or wrong…it seemed that forgetting was for the best. And there I was with a way to make forgetting possible. A coincidence? I’ve never believed in them. And knowing the kind of girl you are, how fast you’re growing up—I mean, in mind and heart, so wise for one so young—I suspect eventually you also won’t believe in coincidences. Anyway, you told me your colorful, very wild and dark story, and stupidly, in the way that unimaginative adults can be stupid when they’ve long lost their sense of wonder, I tried to dismiss it as just a bad dream. So you proved it to me. No experience in war ever so terrified me as what happened there in my apartment kitchen. The purpose of this tape, which I will tell you when I give it to you, is to serve as…I don’t know…as some kind of restoration of the way things might have been, as some kind of therapy for you if it turns out I was foolish, even reckless, to help you forget what you had done, what you could do, if I was a damn fool to teach you the memory trick.”

In the recess under the desk, Bibi wept for the captain, that he had suffered regret and worried about having harmed her, when in fact his coming to live above the garage had been a great blessing. This freshening of grief to no extent displaced her fear. She felt sorrow and terror in equal measure. And though she told herself that Valiant girls did not hide from anything, that they stood up and in the open, facing threats forthrightly, she remained in the shadowed kneehole, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, and let out a thin sound of distress when, from out of the past, Captain’s voice came to her with revelations.

Bibi loved the book as much as her mother had promised that she would, as much as her mother, too, had loved it when she was a little girl.
Cookie’s Big Adventure.
Words and pictures. Bibi had graduated to books with more words a year earlier, and recently had been able to read them all by herself, without her mother narrating. She took pride in her ability to read at a level beyond her years.

Cookie, who was a gingerbread cookie in the shape of a man, with chocolate-drop eyes and a white-icing smile, was the best character in any book that she had yet to read. He was funny and cute and eager for adventure. Cookie came to life after being baked, while cooling on the baker’s tray, though
why
was a mystery; the author didn’t say. Cookie wasn’t brittle, didn’t break apart easily, as you might think he would. He was supple, strong, and quick. He remained gingerbread through and through, but there was magic in him, like in Frosty the Snowman.

When Cookie left the bakery and found himself in a busy city, he was so happy to explore and discover and learn. He had scary moments, when a truck almost ran over him, almost smashed him to pieces, and when a hungry dog chased him. But for the most part, his adventures were exciting in a good way, and hilarious.

In the week since her mother had given her the book, Bibi must have read it a thousand times, maybe two thousand, she didn’t count. Cookie sort of became her best friend. She didn’t easily make friends her age. The kids in preschool were mostly boring. Aunt Edith and a few other relatives thought Bibi was
different.
She’d overheard them saying so to her mother. She didn’t know what they meant, how she was different, and she didn’t really care. If anyone had asked her, Bibi would have said that those same relatives seemed strange to her, and she could no more explain why they were strange than they seemed to be able to explain why they found her different. Then into her life came the amazing Cookie, who was different, too, with a brave heart and a daring spirit, much as Bibi wished herself to be. Cookie and Bibi, best friends forever.

Between readings of the book, Bibi sometimes made up stories of her own about Cookie, his further adventures. She couldn’t draw well. She didn’t attempt to sketch his exploits. But she could see them vividly in her mind, in color, full of lively action, like waking dreams.

On this evening, after being put to bed and kissed goodnight, Bibi sat up again to read
Cookie’s Big Adventure
several times, by the soft light of her bedside lamp, while the muffled voices and music of the TV came to her from the living room. Maybe she dozed off, the book hugged to her chest, because when she scooched up from the pile of pillows into which she had slid, the house was quiet. Her parents had gone to sleep.

She sat for a while, looking at her favorite picture of Cookie and talking to him as if he were indeed her friend and capable of listening, caring. She told him that she wished he would come to life for her, the way that he had come to life in the wonderful story, and she really did wish it, want it, need it. She could so clearly see him rising from the page of the book as he had risen from the baker’s tray before setting out into the city.

When the incident began, it was pure Disney. But not for long. Cookie didn’t at once spring from the book and stand before her, ta-da, arms spread, sparkling with sugar or fairy dust. He didn’t speak to her in a cartoon voice. No, at first he turned his head slightly in the illustration, as if to assess Bibi more directly. She wasn’t even sure it happened, that sly turn of his head. Then Cookie winked, and Bibi’s eyes widened. Cookie’s smile curved into a lopsided grin. Bibi’s mouth formed an
O
of amazement; she let out the word “Oh,” and gasped it back in. This wasn’t an interactive book. The illustrations weren’t holograms that changed depending on the angle at which they were viewed. Suddenly Cookie turned three-dimensional, while the rest of the illustration remained as it had been, and he began trying to extract himself from the two-dimensional image, which was when it wasn’t quite so much a Disney moment anymore.

Bibi flung the book off the bed, to the floor, where it landed spine-up, standing like a tent, its fanned pages thrashing as the gingerbread man struggled to be born from them. She knelt on the mattress to watch, wondering but also fearing a little, perversely delighted but somewhat alarmed, transfixed by the sight of the book when it began to clatter this way and that across the floor, as if it were the A-frame shell of a large exotic bug.

Cookie was kind and funny and wouldn’t harm even the hungry dog that had wanted to eat him. Nothing bad ever happened to the children in the books that Bibi read; those kids went on great adventures with talking animals, with elves and fairies, with favorite toys come to life and silly creatures from other planets, but nothing harmed them. When Cookie was finished pulling himself from the book, he would be like Winnie-the-Pooh, and she would be like Christopher Robin, and they would be the best of friends. Most likely. But…But there was something about Cookie’s lopsided smile that disturbed her. He had winked at her with one glossy chocolate eye, and that had been okay. The wink had seemed friendly, like sharing a little joke. But the smile made her think maybe they wouldn’t be best friends forever.

The book fell over, flopped open on the floor. The gingerbread man rose from the pages, which beat around him like furious wings. He crawled out of the book, dark and strange and not much like the happy-go-lucky Cookie. He…No,
it.
It was not well formed, a lumpy and distorted figure, which staggered to its stumpy feet with effort. Not thin like a cookie but inches thick, six or eight inches tall. Twitching, jerking, graceless. It seemed to be tormented, white lips opening wide in what might have been a silent scream, rolling its misshapen head side to side, pulling at its flesh with mittenlike hands.

Flesh. Even from a distance of eight or ten feet, Bibi could see that this thing was not made of gingerbread. In the book, Cookie was made of gingerbread dough, rolled and shaped and baked. Of course that was silly. Even though she loved the story, Bibi had known that part was totally silly. That’s why magic was needed, a little Frosty the Snowman magic, to make Cookie supple, strong, and quick. Bibi didn’t know any magic. When she wished Cookie alive, she thought of him—if she thought at all about this part of his manifestation—as some kind of gingerbread animal, but what she got was all animal. Or it was less than an animal, elemental and primitive, as if a rotting mass of plant and animal tissue in a swamp had been lightning-struck and thereby animated with something less than life itself.

Still silently screaming, the thing picked up the book, which was bigger than itself, and flung it at Bibi. The whirling volume missed her but clattered against the bedside lamp, switching it off and knocking the shade askew.

Bibi would have fled if the minikin that she had wished into existence hadn’t been standing between her and the door. The only illumination came from the Mickey Mouse night-light her parents had recently installed, which until now she had found embarrassing, which she had plotted to dispose of one way or another. She was a child, yes, but not a baby in need of a night-light. She was years past being a baby. As the thing on the floor hitched out of the Mickey glow, disappearing in the shadows, Bibi didn’t want to scream for help, like a baby. Maybe she couldn’t have cried out even if she’d wanted to, because her hard-knocking heart seemed to have risen into her throat, so that she couldn’t easily swallow, and when she tried to say
Go away
to the minikin, no sound escaped her except a thin and tremulous wheeze.

Besides, if her mom and dad came running, maybe they wouldn’t be able to see the thing. In stories, kids were often able to see elves and fairies and all kinds of creatures that grown-ups couldn’t see because grown-ups didn’t believe in them. Then she would seem like a big baby, and they would never stop treating her like one. Worse, the thing from the book, the terrible not-Cookie, might hurt them. It was small, evidently toothless, but it was strong for its size, considering how it flung the book. If they were hurt, the fault would lie with Bibi. They would say it wasn’t her fault, “It’ll be what it’ll be,” but she knew the truth was that it would be because she had made it be.

Kneeling on the bed, she listened to the thing creeping around the room. Judging by the way it thumped and scraped and squished, she decided it was even slower and clumsier than it had first appeared to be. There was no magic in it. Maybe it was blind. It seemed unable to scream or speak, so possibly it couldn’t hear, either. Or smell. If the only thing it could do was fumble along the baseboard, it could only find her by chance. If it wanted to find her at all. Maybe it didn’t have a brain. Maybe it wasn’t able to want anything, just a stupid lump of twitching stuff.

Although her heart raced as fast as ever and seemed to pinball off her ribs even as it jumped into her throat, Bibi told herself that if she had wished the creature to come out of the book, she could wish it away just as easily. In fact that was what she had to do. Dispatching it was her duty. Her responsibility.

She slid under the covers once more, half sitting up against the pile of pillows, and she thought hard about the not-Cookie, picturing it crawling back to the book on the floor, slithering in among the pages, melting away into the illustration from which it had arisen. For almost an hour, there were silences periodically broken by new spasms from the creature. She was dry-mouthed and dizzy with wishing, with
imagining.
When eventually the horrid thing fell into a longer silence, she assumed that she had at last succeeded. She lay stone-still, listening. Second by second, minute by minute, she became more encouraged, though if her heart thumped not quite so fast as before, it beat harder.

Yet again the quiet ended. The thing scrabbled along a nearby wall. The lamp cord rattled against the back of the nightstand. If not by any of the usual five senses, the grisly little beast seemed to be finding its way to her by a sixth. She expected it to ascend to the top of the nightstand, two feet from her face. Then it moved under the bed and became quiet once more.

She had been wrong about it being brainless. It could think, all right. Think and know and want and seek. In the silence of the room, the only sound was within Bibi, the frantic pump in her breast, which beat her into a strange submission, into a kind of paralysis. But she could almost hear, too, the creature scheming in the darkness under the box spring.

She would never know how it progressed from beneath the bed and under the covers without her hearing it or sensing its movement. When it touched her bare foot, she threw aside the blanket and the top sheet, her scream no more than a dry whistle in her throat.

So it came to this. The confrontation of creator and created. In the dim light of the five-watt Mickey lamp, Bibi bending forward, seizing the thing with both hands, peeling it off her ankle. Cold but not slimy. Throbbing irregularly. Torsional. Difficult to hold. Her heart booming, quaking her entire body, breath fast and shallow and ragged, she wished it away, wished so hard that a headache split her skull, her ears popped as though from a change in air pressure, and a capillary burst in her nose, unraveling a thread of blood out of her left nostril. Yet the would-be best friend escaped her grip, twisting and flopping up her chest, toward her head. They were face-to-face when she seized it again, and the chocolate-drop eyes were not gentle or kind or chocolate, but wet holes in which pooled some thick, oily substance that she thought must be all the hatred in the world boiled down to just two spoonfuls. Openmouthed, the thing bent its flat face closer, closer, as if to suck out her breath of life. Migraine sawing through her skull, a blood haze tinting her vision, Bibi dug her fingers into the creature’s yielding flesh and did not wish it away anymore, but
commanded
it to be gone, this abomination that she had imagined into existence. To emphasize her authority, she punctuated her command by spitting upon the thing. It relented, and as it stopped struggling and diminished in her hands, she heard the pages of the book thrashing somewhere in the gloom, as the thing that was not Cookie nevertheless returned to Cookie’s world. When Bibi’s hands were empty, the book gave out one last rustle, and a hush fell upon the room.