“Okay,” said Zoe. “But how am I supposed to trust you if you won’t let me see you?”
The boy’s feet shuffled on the dirt floor. Now it was his turn to be nervous, she saw.
“I’m not much to look at. Kind of ugly, in fact,” the boy said. “I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Okay, but this voice-from-the-shadows thing is a little too Freddy Krueger. If you’re trying to be my friend, come on out.”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, I’ve seen The Evil Dead. As long as you’ve got a head, I can deal.”
Zoe watched the sneakers take half a step forward, revealing a length of filthy, torn jeans.
“I didn’t want it to happen like this, you know,” the boy said. “I had it all planned different. But then those assholes started chasing you.”
“What did you have planned? Who the hell are you?” She was ready with the razor.
A pause. “I was hoping maybe you’d know. But why should you? The real thing isn’t much like in dreams.”
Zoe sat on the steps, her mind racing. There had been something familiar about the voice from the moment she’d heard it. It tickled something far in the back of her brain, like some deep memory or half-remembered dream. She let go of the razor and said, “Valentine?”
The boy took a step back, disappearing completely into the shadows. “This is dumb. I should go.”
Zoe was up on her feet and crossed the room in a couple of painful steps. When she plunged her hands into the dark, all she felt was the rough stone of the basement wall. Off to her right, she could hear breathing, so she reached out in that direction. Her fingers brushed heavy cloth, and she closed her hand on the boy’s arm. There was no flesh there. It was as hard and unyielding as steel. Zoe stepped back into the middle of the room.
“Come into the light, Valentine. Please.”
The boy shuffled forward, his shoulders hunched, head down. Dark, unruly hair covered his face. Zoe reached out and touched his other arm. It felt as hard and artificial as the first one. She thought of the people she’d seen on the street, the ones with wood and metal limbs. She put her hand on Valentine’s shoulder and felt something more familiar there, like skin and bone. The boy kept his head turned away from her and all she could really see of him was his heavy, patched greatcoat. It had a stiff collar so high that he could hide half his face behind it, but Valentine’s familiar brown eyes glittered at her from behind the wall of the collar.
“It is you,” she said, and for the first time outside of her dreams, Zoe put her arms around her brother.
Valentine’s body was thin. He went rigid when she hugged him, and he didn’t make any move to hug her back. When she tried to kiss his cheek, he pulled back suddenly, stepping into the dark again.
“Valentine, you don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then why are you hiding? What’s wrong with you?”
A skeletal hand spotted with rust slid from the dark, pointing toward the stairs. “We shouldn’t stay here. They’ll be back.”
“Did I do something to hurt you?” asked Zoe.
Valentine stepped past her, moving quickly to the stairs. “It’s all right. We need to go.”
Zoe followed him, limping on her injured ankle, which, after her fall into the basement, felt like there were pins sticking into the bone.
“You’re hurt,” Valentine said. Her took her hand and helped her to the stairs. “Sit.”
Kneeling on the dirt floor, Valentine pulled a long, dirty white rag from the pocket of his greatcoat. He pulled off Zoe’s sneaker and socks and carefully wrapped the rag around her ankle and foot, slipping her sneaker back on when he was done. As he worked, all Zoe could see of him was the top of his head and the occasional glint of light off his iron hands.
“Try that,” Valentine said.
Zoe stood, slowly putting weight on her bad leg. It stung, but the pain didn’t make her want to retch anymore.
“That’s a lot better. Thanks.”
Valentine nodded and started up the stairs. At the top he turned and said, “Keep your coat buttoned and your head down. Walk slow, like you’ve got nowhere to go and all eternity to get there.”
“Do we have to go back out right now? I’m kind of freaked by this place.”
“ ’Course you are,” said Valentine. “You’re not supposed to be here. None of us are.”
He stepped out first, then motioned for Zoe to follow him. They walked down the wet night street away from the direction in which Zoe had been running. The rain was misting down, making tiny diamonds on her overcoat as she and Valentine came to better-lit streets. Zoe looped one of her arms around one of Valentine’s. She felt him stiffen for a moment, but he didn’t pull away.
They crossed a broad street that she recognized. They were near the bar and boardwalk where the crowd had spotted her, she thought, a little afraid. But this time she wasn’t alone. She looked at her sleeves, staring at the rain jewels there.
Heavily muscled, with bodies and huge heads that reminded her of the granite gargoyles on churches, enormous black dogs were eating something that lay in the gutter. The dogs from her dreams.
Zoe felt Valentine tug her arm. “Don’t look,” he said. “They’re Queen Hecate’s spies.”
Zoe couldn’t help glancing back. “What are they eating?” The dogs hungrily ripped into their food. “It almost looks like a body.”
“I told you not to look.”
Zoe closed her eyes for a few seconds and let Valentine lead her. All her life she’d wanted to live in her dreams with her brother and now her dreams had come true. But they weren’t alone and it was both wonderful and horrible.
When they were well past the dogs, Zoe whispered, “Valentine, what happened to the city? I was just here a day ago and it was beautiful.”
Valentine shook his head. “Nothing happened. The city’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. Father tricked you with pretty pictures and sweet lies. He showed you what you wanted to see so you’d get the hell out and never come back. Why did you come back?”
“I think I did something bad. I just wanted to see if he was all right.”
“You think you’re going to fix anything? Look at this place. Look at these people. Look at me.” He lifted his head a little way out his high collar. She caught a glimpse of stitches in his face. Not the kind the doctor had given her after she’d fallen as a kid. These stitches were thick and crude, like wires in cheap leather. “Don’t worry. Father hasn’t been here long enough to look like me. But he’s not exactly what you remember.”
“What the fuck is this place? Are we in hell?”
“Yeah, but not the one you mean.” They turned off the well-lit streets into a darker industrial area. Broken fences ringed fields full of strange and fearsome machines: cranes with what looked like claws, bulldozers with teeth. What lay ahead was even stranger.
Just a few blocks off the main road, the streets weren’t straight anymore, and neither were the buildings. They twisted around, over and under each other, like weeds and vines in an abandoned garden. Some buildings stood straight up while others lay on their sides like snakes, wrapping around other twisted buildings, strangling the upright ones so they shrank to almost nothing at the middle but bulged at the tops and bottoms.
Valentine said, “The city used to be called Calumet. That means ‘peace.’ Now it’s Iphigene. Only Queen Hecate knows what that means, and no one’s asking her.”
“That’s the queen the dogs spy for?”
He nodded. “She rules Iphigene. We’re her loyal subjects. She’s been the queen here for over a thousand years. Maybe thousands. No one can say exactly.”
In the distance, Zoe thought she could see a dark apartment building rise from the ground, windows and doors sliding into place as the place unfurled like a blooming flower.
“She doesn’t sound like much of a queen.”
“The city wasn’t always like this. Before Hecate, we had day and night just like anywhere else. They say that when she crowned herself, the first thing she did was steal the sun out of the sky and hide it somewhere in her palace.”