Dust City (9 page)

I’m not saying I’m innocent. I’m just saying I was under the influence of something that day. Something evil. That doesn’t make it right, of course it doesn’t, but I thought that maybe if you knew, you might see fit to come visit me sometime. We could talk about it. I miss you, son.

Dad

Dear Henry,

I suppose you’re not coming, are you? I understand that. I wanted to tell you face-to-face what I’m going to tell you in this letter, but it doesn’t seem I’ll get the chance. It has to do with what I told you in the last one. And a bunch of ideas I’ve had along with that shrink I’ve been seeing, the one I told you about. I better just come out and say it:

The fairies are still here.

They never left us, son. They didn’t abandon us like everyone says. That’s all wrong. We figured it out, me and the Doc. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. There’s no dust around that can turn a regular guy like me into a coldhearted, bloodthirsty killer. That’s old-time magic. It could look inside you and bring out the best or, like in my case, the very worst. That kind of magic only comes from fairies, right? That’s why I need you, son. I’m in here and I’m not getting out anytime soon. And who’s ever going to believe a murderous convict like
me? But you, son, you’ll be out of St. Remus soon. Then you can help me. You can find them. Because I think I know where they are.

Dad

Dear Henry,

Why don’t you come see me? I really miss you, son. If you don’t believe anything I’ve said, that’s fine. If you think I’m a crazy old dog, I understand. Forget all that other stuff, and just come for a visit. I’d love to see you. Just once.

Dad

That’s the end of them. Four letters in total, undated and written with penmanship that’s shakier and shakier with every paragraph. When I look up, I see I’m the only one left. I’ve been so absorbed in reading, I didn’t even notice when the nixie seeped off into the night.

“Sorry, sugar,” says the woman behind the counter. “You’ve been here long enough.”

Outside, I find I’m tired and full of questions, but I need to sleep. I need to be sharp in the morning because tomorrow, for the first time in many years, I’m going to see my father.

14

THE EDGE OF A WOOD

THE DREAM IS THE SAME EVERY TIME. THE DETAILS SHIFT FROM NIGHT TO
night—the depth of the darkness, the distance from the road to the cottage, the way the wind blows—but everything that matters is the same. I’m always some amalgam of my father and me.

It starts on the edge of a wood, late at night. The trees loom over me. The sky is fevered with fast clouds and the moon hangs like a phantom. I drop to all fours, padding deeper and deeper into the trees. Every one I pass comes alive, electrified with wind. Soon all I can hear is an endless swish of leaves. I still keep going, stalking forward, my belly skimming over the peat.

There’s light up ahead, black leaves against a warm glow. Beams of firelight shine out through circles of thick glass. It’s a cottage in a clearing. And there’s an unlocked door.

Inside, I see a little girl. She’s curled on a rug, covered up and warm inside a bloodred cloak. I push in on all fours. The door drags against my flanks. I urge the girl to sleep, hoping she’ll remain dead to the world. But each time she wakes up.

Her eyes pop open. She’s a thinker, this girl, I can smell it. Before I even see her move, the poker’s in her hand, the tip glowing as deep red as her cloak.

She jabs me with the poker, but I don’t feel it. The heat against my hide is nothing. I even watch as she tries to beat me, as my clothes and hair are singed and smoldering, as the hook of the poker sinks into my ribs and tears away the hide. I just stand there, letting her do it.

Then, suddenly, I’m exploding with rage. I rise up to the ceiling in this tiny cottage and smother the girl with my weight. I sink my teeth into her throat. She’s dead with a single snap. Then, from somewhere behind me I hear the click of loose nails. The creak of old wood.

Someone else is here. It’s the girl’s grandmother. She’s a spare figure, crooked as a winter willow. She also wears a cloak, but hers is black. The hood is pulled over her head so that her face is in shadow. The girl’s blood is all over me and I rise again, leaving the throatless body by the fire.

The old woman is silent, standing motionless at the base of the stairs like a heap of rags thrown over a broom. There’s hardly anything to her, and I can’t even see her face. The rage fills me again and I lunge.

The old woman doesn’t flinch. She lets herself be broken inside my jaws—and at first, it’s easy. Her body’s hollow, just skin and bone. But mostly bone, bones held together with papery flesh and threads of sinew.

Frail as she is, though, I can never finish her. I gnash
at her bones inside the cloak, extracting mouthful after mouthful from the rags, but there’s always more. Sometimes her face emerges briefly from the hood. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of a wicked grin.

That’s when I realize—too late—that I’ll
never
finish her. The bones are growing faster than I can swallow them. The clicks and creaks aren’t coming from the stairs or the loose floorboard, but from the woman herself. Every joint has a flinty mind of its own. The old woman blossoms again and again, renewing herself with my every bite.

Sometimes, that’s when I wake up. On those nights, I stand half a chance of getting back to sleep.

But there are other times, too, when the dream keeps going, nights when a pain starts in my belly.

It’s the bones. I can feel them, still moving inside me. Spidery shards that crawl together to weave and knit themselves into hands and teeth—and they’re anxious to escape.

The first ones come out through my stomach. Then one will burst out from between my ribs. Others come through the chinks of my spine.

Soon, I’m on the floor, howling. That’s when they really start tearing me apart. They snake up and crackle into my lungs. They puncture my heart, my throat, my face. And if I’m not awake at that point, I can always count on the two great horns that punch out through my eye sockets to do the trick.

15

GEORGE WILLIAM WHELP

THE EAST CITY PENITENTIARY IS A SQUAT COLOSSUS, EMERGING THICK AND
crude from the borough of Darkforest. It’s built on the crest of Sea Way Hill. From up here there’s a good view of the city. Smog grips every building like a fist, while on the opposite side the deadwood forest spreads out over the tundra. The prison reminds me of St. Remus: the high walls, the mechanical gates, the sandstone bastions. The place even comes with poker-faced guards, every one of them a glob.

The ones controlling the gates eye me suspiciously. I have the blazer of my St. Remus uniform turned inside out. It may look like I don’t know how to dress myself, but at least they can’t tell just from a glance that I’m a juvie on the lam.

“Can we help you?” one of them asks.

“I’m here to visit somebody.”

The guard has a face like porridge filled with rotten fruit. He shifts a pair of watery eyes to the clock. “You’ve got less than half an hour, y’know.”

“It won’t take long.”

He pushes a sign-in book at me. A cool breeze whips up the hill and the pages riffle. I dash down the first madeup name that comes to mind.
Harry Wells.
The guard, meanwhile, doesn’t pay attention. He picks up an old black telephone. “Who’re you here to see?”

“George William Whelp.”

I’m sitting alone at the center carrel in a bare room. A couple feet in front of my face is a glass wall with holes drilled through it in a pattern that resembles a flower. On the far side of the glass there’s another room, bare as this one. A buzzer sounds. There’s the squawk of an electric lock and the steel door on the far side creaks open.

When my father enters, he’s draped in chains. There’s a guard on either side of him. Dad sees me and stops. His head hovers, looking too heavy for his neck. He peers at the first guard, as if that bullish face can explain what he’s seeing. Me. He looks backward, too, back out the door, but the other guard prods him forward. He hobbles to the glass.

He’s nothing like I remember. I really have to search to see him. He’s an unfocused image of himself, a faded photograph. They push him into a metal chair and lock him down by the chain around his waist. He’s so thin. The hair on his face is molting away in patches. Underneath, his skin is pale and blemished. Several of his teeth are missing.

“You got less than ten minutes,”
says a loudspeaker.

I put one paw to the glass. “Hi, Dad.”

He barely moves. His lips tighten and his jaw opens and closes.

“I came to see you,” I tell him. I can hear the clock’s second hand, going
sip-sip-sip
, swallowing our time. “I got your letters.”

Dad turns and scrutinizes me out of one side of his face. There’s a bald patch on his throat. There’s a bruise, too. It snakes down from what hair he has left and slithers, mottled and blue, into the neck of his shirt.

“They let me go,” I lie to him. “I’m free now. I can come anytime I want.”

“Henry,” he says. His lips tremble. “You’re just in time.”

“What?”

“I heard about what they did to Doc.”

“He killed himself.”

He shakes his head, pulling himself forward. “They made him do it!”

“Who?”

“Same as they made me do it. The nixies.”

He’s not listening to me. He’s wrapped up in his own world. All I want to do is talk to him. “How are you doing, Dad? Are you okay?”

He ignores me. “I knew they’d let you go,” he says. “And now you can find them.”

“Find who?”

His eyes sparkle. “You
will
find them.”

I look at him, trying to gauge how insane he is. “You mean the fairies.”

“They’re still here, you know.”

My dad’s face is in the midst of a slow collapse; his mouth is devoid of molars, and his eyes are sinking into his cheeks. “Dad? The fairies are gone. You know that, right?”

He shakes his head vigorously. “Not true,” he says. “The nixies have them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why do you think their stuff is so potent? The only ones who could produce a dust like that would be them—the fairies.” He’s speaking so plainly I almost believe him. “That’s how they were able to get me to do it, to send me down the wrong path. Only
real fairydust
could’ve done that. It could only come from them. Which means—”

“Nixiedust is fairydust.”

Dad nods excitedly. “Means they’re still here! And
you
can bring them back!”

I almost laugh. “Me?” I point at the guards over by the exit. “Why not the police?”

Dad scoffs. “They’re on the payroll. The nixies bribe them. Can’t trust them. But if you could get close to Skinner, you could find something. Some proof.”

“You want me to be a runner? Like you were?”

“I’ve got a friend in there, Mattius. We used to run together. I hear he’s still there, though I’d be surprised if he’s still running. He’ll look out for you.”

“But—”

“Skinner holds tryouts about once a week. The next ones
are tomorrow night.” Dad rattles off a whirl of details: a tavern in Dockside called the Woodsman; a secret entrance to an underground warehouse; a midnight race pitting wolf against wolf to find the fastest. “You’re fast, son, I know you are. It could be you.”

“You realize this is insane.”

He ignores this rather astute observation and presses on with his fantasy. “Now, whatever you do, if Skinner offers you dust, don’t take it. You understand me?”

“Not really.”

“Then listen!” His eyes bulge in their pits. “Skinner’s dust can make you do things—
awful
things. But here’s what I learned—in the hardest way possible: If he doses you up, there’ll be a moment, see? This one moment when you’re about to do something awful. That awful thing will fill you up and there’ll be a short circuit inside you.” He taps his skull with a claw. “For that one moment you’ll be in control. I didn’t see it coming, so I couldn’t do anything, but if you know it’s there, you can use it. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Barely.”

“Good,” he says. “There’s a place in Skinner’s refinery where all the conveyors of dust come from. No one’s allowed in there. I think that’s where they’ve got them.”

“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head, examining my paws. What I really mean is:
Dad, you are a total crackpot
. Good thing he’s too wrapped up in his mad reverie to read
between the lines. “Look, Dad, can we just talk? I haven’t seen you in—”

“We
are
talking. What else is there to talk about except this?”

I sigh. “Okay, even if any of what you’re saying is true, then what?” I move my eyes in a wide circle over the grim room with its guards and its dingy tiles. “Would it mean they’d let you go? Would finding the fairies do anything to help you?”

“Maybe there’s someone else it could help.”

“What do you mean?”

Dad leans forward until his lips are nearly pressed to the blossom of drilled holes between us. “What if they could bring her back?”

He doesn’t have to tell me who he’s talking about. “That’s impossible,” I tell him. “Nobody can do that. Not even them.”

On the counter in front of him, Dad lays his forepaws, staring down at the vacant space between them. “You’re probably too young to remember this, but after Mom died, there was a fairy who came to see me. I met her in a park one night, on my way home from a dust run. She heard me whimpering to myself about Mom and she wanted to comfort me.”

“Faelynn.”

He looks surprised that I know her name. “You remember her?”

“A little. Not much more than her scent. The smell of old trees. I remember her rings, too. A whole handful of blue ones.”

Dad smiles. “I used to tease her about those. ‘How do you fly around with all that hardware?’” He taps the counter with a claw. “We became friends, she and I. It was an odd match—a wolf and a fairy—but somehow we got along. It was so nice to have someone to talk to after Emily was gone.” He’s calm now, almost solemn. “One night we’d been drinking. We were talking about your mother, and she said something. She said, ‘Sometimes I wish we were allowed to bring them back.’ And I thought, ‘
Allowed?’
So I asked her flat-out, and she said it was possible, there was a way, but it was forbidden. It’s the first prohibition on the old-time magic. You can’t bring them back.”