Lisbet nodded, but something in her eyes told Anya she knew the words were a lie.
It made her angry. When she drew the blade across her sister’s wrist, the anger made her careless, and the blade bit too deep.
But Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.
She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist across the stone. She lifted her as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top. When Anya eased her down and set her back on her feet, Lisbet was as white as the flesh of an apple.
Anya turned away from her sister’s drained face and said the words that would make the blood into a door. Words the voice had said into her ear, three times so she’d remember.
All at once the stone wicked up the blood, and the red of it became lines of warm white light. The newly made door swung toward them, letting out a breath of warm air and a scent like clean cotton. They held hands and watched it open.
Then Lisbet moaned, and swayed, and crumpled to the ground. Her cold fingertips stretched out before her, nearly touching the door.
The door that wasn’t there, and then was. The door that her lifeblood fed.
At the moment she let go her last breath, the white light shuddered and went green. The green of infected wounds, of nightmares, of the rind of mold that crawled over week-old bread. The cotton scent turned dusty and stuck in Anya’s throat.
She threw herself against the door, but it was too late. It opened, inch by inch, yawning with dank air like the mouth of a cellar.
Anya didn’t think her mother could be behind that door, but she had nowhere else to go. She lifted Lisbet and carried her through.
Behind it was a room like the one they’d left—but reversed. Anya’s eyes went to the dark stain on the floor. It was fresh and pooling red. She ran across the room, still holding Lisbet’s body, and wrenched open the bedroom door.
The hall behind it curved left instead of right, and the lanterns on the wall were gone, replaced with paintings of people Anya didn’t recognize. Their eyes were burned-out holes and their mouths were wet and red. The hall hummed with that same heavy green light.
Cradling Lisbet in her arms, Anya moved through the house. It smelled of coal dust and blood. In every fireplace curled low green flames. On every table were plates of rotting meat, or blackened flowers with livid yellow pollen dripping from their hearts.
When she opened the front door she saw the sickness spread beyond the house. The branches of trees had become slender bones, and the dust of the road was crackling ashes.
I did this, she said to herself. I killed my sister—her death made a door, and the door opened onto Death!
It took her hours, but she dug up enough of the burnt earth to bury her younger sister. Then she set off toward town, to see if she could find anything living.
Town was a place of strange horrors. Not a body to be seen, human nor animal, just a heavy green sky that bathed the whole world in a light the color of disease, and locked doors of houses, and windows painted a blind black.
Anya saw no one. She needed neither sleep nor food nor drink, and when she ran the bone knife over her own wrist it didn’t make a nick in her skin. She climbed the dense black vines spilling over the walls of a cottage, to the crumbling gray stones of its roof. She jumped off.
But she drifted to earth like an autumn leaf, touching down unharmed. There she lay, praying for an end, even though every prayer tasted as bitter as the lie that had killed her sister. It was then that the voice spoke to her again.
It had been a long time since she’d lain on the floor of her mother’s bedroom letting it whisper secrets into her ear. Longer than she thought. Far away, her stepmother was dead, killed by a fever. Her father had taken a new bride. He had a son.
Can you take me back home? Anya pleaded.
You’re asking the wrong question, the voice replied.
It led her through town, back to the grave she’d dug in front of her father’s house. From it a black walnut tree had grown. Its rustling leaves were the only moving things in the land of Death. Lisbet, Anya whispered, and lay her hand on its trunk.
With a rustle like a sigh, the tree dropped three walnuts into her hands. She cracked them open one by one.
The first held a green satin dress the color of moth’s wings.
The second held a pair of slippers with the black shine of petrified wood.
The third held a translucent stone the size of an eye.
When she held it up to her own, the world around her burst into life. The day was bright, the trees were blooming, and a carriage was bearing down on her. The driver couldn’t see her, but the horse did—he reared up, hooves high over Anya’s head.
She dropped the stone—and found herself back in the land of Death.
The stone was a window onto the land of the living.
Do with it what you will, the voice said, but don’t squander your sister’s gifts.
Anya waited until the green light had faded to murk, marking night in the land of Death. She put on the green dress and the black slippers. She combed back her heavy hair. Then she raised the stone to her eye.
She saw her home as she once knew it, when she was a girl with a mother and a father and a sister named Lisbet. She held the stone in place like a peephole as she rustled around the house’s edges, peering into its windows.
She saw a beautiful woman playing the piano. Her father drinking a glass of sherry, his hair lined with white. And a boy just older than her. He was tall and narrow, growing into manhood but not yet there.
Anya’s father looked at him proudly, clapped a hand to his shoulder. The boy’s eye roved idly over the furniture in the room, his mother at the piano, and landed on Anya.
He stood up straight and came to the window. Anya shrank back as her father joined his son. The boy pointed at her, but her father just frowned and looked past her, shaking his head. Finally he pulled the curtains over the window.
Anya waited in the garden, in her dress the color of will-o’-the-wisps. When she lowered her arm, she stood in a place of rotting bowers and bone. When she raised the stone back to her eye, she could see the soft green of grass and the brief starlight of fireflies. She could see the boy walking toward her, his step tentative but his eyes eager.
You may ask me one question, she said. But it has to be the right one.
Who are you? he asked.
Anya said nothing.
Why can’t they see you? he asked.
Anya stayed silent.
You are very beautiful, he whispered finally, reaching out to touch her. Why do you hold your hand so high?
Anya smiled at him the way she’d seen her stepmother smile. She let him bend close to her lips, closer, before dropping her arm and returning to the dead garden.
It took him many nighttime meetings to ask her the right question. By then his eyes were hollow with sleeplessness, and he looked at her with a love like hunger.
How can I get you to stay? he asked, at last.
She smiled and moved her mouth to his ear.
She told him how they could be together. How he could remake the world just enough so she could reenter the land of the living.
It would take blood.
She taught him the words to say, repeating them three times so he would remember. She pressed her bone knife into his hand. And she watched as he slid his bleeding wrist over the wall of her father’s house, using it to paint a door. He swayed as he spoke the words, his face, a mirror of their father’s, going pale.