The Insides (26 page)

Ulysses is out; he’s already in the kitchen, heading back the way he came in. Donald is last to emerge.

“Get my bag,” Ollie screams over her shoulder, as she pushes Jesse around the corner, into the kitchen. She’s not going to let this fucker get Guychardson’s knife, the shard, whatever it is—she’s not going to let this thing get its hands on something with that kind of power. She does not want it to have the power to rule.

“What?” she can hear Donald yell, behind her.

“My
bag
,” she says, but there’s no more time—she and Jesse barrel through the kitchen, through the mudroom, out onto the porch.

In the driveway there’s a woman. Pale face and a ruff of dark hair. This woman stands there, empty-handed, watching Ollie. And Ollie remembers her. It’s the woman she
bumped into on the street, last night, outside of Carnage. But it’s not just that she recognizes her from sight alone. It’s more than that. It’s that she recognizes the feeling of this woman
seeing
her. This woman has had her eye on Ollie for days now—watching her, perceiving her,
tracking
her—and all at once Ollie knows it. She doesn’t know the exact nature of the witchery but she knows that this is the woman who made it possible for her to be found.

She releases her son and begins to advance on the woman. She’s not quite sure what she’ll do if she reaches her, but something. She will dig out the woman’s eyes with her thumbs. Something. In response to Ollie’s advance, the woman bolts, runs to the end of the driveway, beyond the woodpile, around the corner of the house. Ollie takes one step, prepared to follow, to enter pursuit, but then she catches herself, opting instead to use the moment to quickly take stock, count heads, make sure everyone’s safe. To figure out a way to put some distance between themselves and the thing in the house with the gun.

Jesse’s by her side. Ulysses is ahead of them, on the lawn, in a half crouch, hands on his knees. Donald is behind her; he’s just exited the house. Ollie looks to see if Donald has her bag. He doesn’t.

Fuck
, she thinks.

However, in his hands instead is his bow.

We can work with that
, Ollie thinks, after a moment.
We can end this
.

Maja sprints around to the rear of the house, breathing hard, arms pumping. She knows the blade is still inside; she knows that once they get it all of this will be over. And so she plunges through the shattered back door, into the breached house.

Pig is there, in the ruined room, holding his rifle; he whirls to face her, the eyes of his mask like little dead circles drilled in the world.

“Where is it?” he says.

“In the bag,” Maja says, pointing. And he sets the rifle down on the table, amid the broken glass and plaster, and he lifts the bag with both hands and upends it. A lacquered box falls out, and he tears the lid from it. And then he has the blade in his hand. After all this time, it’s finally in his hand. He raises it before him, brandishing it, and actually seeing it, with her own eyes, up close—it’s—it’s the most intense thing she’s ever seen. It’s like a piece of a star. It carves an incandescent shape into her field of vision as he moves it.
It seems to be drawing forces of history toward it, inexorably pulling them into the room, through time. She can feel fates flowing past her—the fates of soldiers, of slaves, of nations—they flow past her and drain though the knife, filtered off to elsewhere.

Pig begins to use the blade to carve a hole in the air. When it’s reached a suitable size he forces his free hand in. She watches his arm vanish, inch by inch, boiling away into nothingness. He pushes and pushes until he’s in up to his shoulder and then, with a roar, he withdraws, pulling his arm back into this world, and bringing with it the rest of the sword, the base, complete except for its broken tip. He holds the base of the sword in his left hand and the missing piece, the point, in his right hand, and something happens in the room, the force of the gathered fates redoubles, the flow no longer just draining and eddying but instead beginning to twist, to seethe, to form a vortex. Her hair begins to stand on end.

The broken sword wants to be repaired. It
longs
for it as though it had a heart. The pieces pull on one another with yearning. The missing point twists free of the wooden handle that someone, long ago, set it into in order to disguise it as an ordinary kitchen knife. Pig flings the useless, disintegrating handle away and the point floats out of his hand, floats quietly upward, seeking its proper place. The point turns gently in the air, and the room, around it, seems to saw nauseatingly, teetering atop some swell of history. Excess time gushes into the room through every available opening. It’s heavy, like syrup, like blood. You could drown in it if you weren’t careful, Maja realizes.

She watches the point find its proper place at the top of the sword, watches an old dormant magic, the magic that forged these materials, knit the pieces back together again, into a whole, which Pig holds aloft. And then she has to close her eyes. She can’t look directly at it, not anymore. Her hair begins to coil. Her nose begins to bleed. A chorus of indistinct voices churns up into her consciousness; a shearing force rips at the edges of her mind.

“We win,” she can hear Pig say.

And then there’s a sound, a wet impact, like a boot stomping on a rotten log, and whatever magic was accumulating in the room stutters for a moment; Maja opens her eyes, snapping back to reality.

Pig has been hit in the chest with an arrow.

She blinks, she turns. She follows the line of the arrow’s path back out through the door, all the way back to a man standing outside with a bow, fifty feet away.

Pig, still holding the sword in his pose of triumph, opens his mouth as if to say something, but all that emerges is an angry hiss, the sound made visible by the droplets of blood that fleck its edges. He uses his free hand to go for the rifle, lying there on the table, but as he reaches out the arrow puts pressure on something inside him, and he groans and stiffens, unable to bend. He fishes at his waistband for his other gun, but his hand isn’t quite working correctly: the pistol tumbles away before he can fully get a grip on it, and it bounces away under the table. He closes his eyes, and for just a moment he wears an expression that is utterly ordinary, that of a man thwarted by small indignities: the look of a man, weary at the end of a day spent on fools’ errands,
who has just witnessed the last train of the evening pulling out of the station without him.

And then he opens his eyes, and sets his face into an expression of grim determination, and he puts both hands on the hilt of the sword and lifts it, groaning, and he uses it to continue work on the hole which still hangs in the air, widening it. An escape route?

She turns, looks outside: the man out there is readying another arrow. She backs away, glass crunching underfoot, putting some distance between herself and the shattered door. Defenseless, she backs up until she bumps the table, and then she edges around it, continuing to back up, hoping to get out of the room, keeping her eye on the man with the bow.

Forget him
, warns the Archive.
Where’s that woman? The woman who wants to kill you?

And Maja looks, and realizes—the woman is right behind her, having crept in through the kitchen, and before Maja can react the woman reaches up and tightens her hands around Maja’s throat and begins to squeeze. With the pressure comes a jolt of information, literally being throttled into her. She learns the woman’s name: Olive Krueger.
Ollie for short
.

Don’t fucking touch me
, Maja thinks.

Maja reaches up and grabs the woman’s wrists and tries to pry herself free. But that means more contact. And Maja’s not wearing her gloves. Stupid, stupid. She doesn’t want to touch this woman but she needs to breathe. So she digs in. She has to.

Ollie’s hands on her throat, her hands on Ollie’s wrists:
they’re joined at four points, a tight knot, a shape that information flows through. Maja’s pulse hammers desperately at the center of it.

She starts to pick up Ollie’s history. She can’t help it.

Stop it
, she thinks, but it doesn’t stop.

She learns of Ollie’s love for her son, its shape congruent with the shape of Maja’s love for her brother. She learns the son’s name: Jesse. Images of Jesse burst open inside her then, polluting her, filling her with noise, traces of a boy who is not hers, who was never hers, a thousand false records filed into the Archive, scattering the pieces that are Eivind.

No
, Maja thinks, in the face of the confusion.
Don’t you fucking take that from me. Stop
.

But it doesn’t stop. Still more is forced into her as the two women struggle there in the doorway. She learns of Ollie’s sadness at having lost Jesse. This sadness also finds its echo: it locates Maja’s own sadness, her own loss, and begins to take it over. Feelings that are not hers flood into her, find their matches in the feelings that
are
hers, and they bind, like the molecules of a drug finding their receptors. Like spores from an invasive plant, finding niches to colonize, threatening to usurp that which properly belongs there.

Please
, Maja thinks, as her vision begins to tunnel. But still it doesn’t stop. She gets memories of Ollie’s childhood, flashes of a city, New York City, experienced through the eyes of a child who was alone and scared.
These aren’t my memories
, Maja thinks.
This isn’t me. Please. Please stop
.

And then, as if her plea had been heard, Ollie releases her, drives her down to the floor with a swift hard kick to the small of her back.

What did you do to me?
Maja thinks, as she pushes herself up to her knees, her hands in glass.
What the hell did you do?

She looks up at Ollie and tries to remember that she’s not looking at herself.

She presses her bloodied fingertips against her bruised throat, as though she could take the knowledge that has been thrust into her and dig it back out.

Take it back
, Maja thinks. But Ollie’s turned away from Maja. She’s looking at Pig now. Maja follows her gaze and sees that Pig’s managed to use the sword to cut a slit in the air that’s the height of a door. An entryway to the Inside. If he gets in there there’s no telling where he could end up.

And Ollie perhaps understands this as well, for she lunges at him, her hands extended, but she’s too late: he escapes through the gate and is gone from this world.

Ollie hesitates at the edge of the rift for a moment, just for a moment, and then she follows Pig, as though she were passing through an opening in a curtain.

They’re both gone. Maja is alone in the room. The portal twists in the air, a ribbon of ink. Maja stands, advances on it warily, although the closer she gets to it the more familiar it feels. If there’s anything about her past that she knows for certain, anything that’s been left unpolluted by the memories that Ollie just forced into her, it’s this: she’s been living adjacent to the Inside for a long time, learning how to ask it questions, learning how to receive the information that it has seen fit to gift her, over all these years. It feels almost like a friend to her. And right now—hurt and confused, her head stuffed with a shifting heap of mirror shards—she wants help from a friend.

She can find Ollie, in there. She knows she can. And once she finds her, she can make her take it all back. There has to be a way. She just has to cross the threshold. It’s either that or stay here and get shot full of arrows.

And so she takes one step forward. She steps in.

Ollie has her eyes closed. She’s doesn’t know what she’ll see if she opens them. She’s afraid to.

But you can only be afraid for so long. This is a thing she’s told herself again and again in her life. It’s OK to be afraid. But at some point you have to be done with it, and it’s only then that you can get to work.

She opens her eyes.

Her first thought is that she’s inside the belly of a whale. She is somewhere dark and red and vast and vaulted, a space bounded by curving riblike columns that yawn upward, presumably joining somewhere far above her. Between every set of ribs is the entryway to another vault. She tilts her head and suddenly she feels like she’s in a chamber in a cathedral; the space seems slightly more sane if she can understand it as a kind of impossible architecture, replicating itself uncontrollably. Except no: it’s not architectural because it’s so clearly animal. Except it’s not animal because it’s so clearly architectural. It’s all of the above. It’s none of the above. It
seems to breathe even though it doesn’t move. It seems wet even though it isn’t moist. It’s a building that houses a beast that’s swallowed the building. It’s leviathan.

It smells like sweat: her own sweat.

She keeps her eyes open. She takes a step forward, just to see if she can move in here. The galleries of infinite space around her reel vertiginously. It is as though she is trying to make her way down the corridor that opens up when two mirrors face one another. She reaches out, clutching for a support that is not there, and she can feel the gesture echoed, reflected, amplified through the spaces around her. She understands this, distantly, as a form of power, but has no clear idea on how to utilize it.

She looks down, hoping that she’ll stabilize if she keeps her eyes on her feet, on the floor. Except what’s beneath her isn’t really a floor: it’s a kind of shifting tissue, a design that seems to squirm, like an intricate carpet that, when seen out of the corner of your eye, reveals itself to be a seething field of insects. Just beneath its surface she can feel larger beings forming and reforming themselves—tendrilous things, massive starfish, faceless gnarls of unearthly tissue—she can feel them gathering beneath her feet, threatening to rise, the risk becoming greater with each additional moment of hesitation.

She lurches forward, or what feels like forward, although it somehow also produces the sensation that a reflected version of herself, a twin, is moving backward. She tries to focus on what she’s after, why she came in here in the first place.