Indexing (22 page)

“There has to be something we can do.” I looked desperately back at Sloane, my hand still clutching Jeff’s shoulder. Part of me felt, however irrationally, like letting go even for an instant would be the same as letting go forever: he would slip away, and I would never find the right combination of words and gestures to bring him back to us.

“I’m not an archivist, okay?” Sloane shook her head. “We could call Dispatch, see if they know anything about snapping somebody out of this sort of fucked-up fugue state—” She took a step forward, reaching for Jeff’s discarded walkie-talkie. Why she wasn’t going for her own, I didn’t know, and I didn’t have time to wonder for long.

“No!” I snapped, putting out a hand to keep her from reaching her goal. She stopped, looking at me quizzically, too confused to be annoyed. “Don’t call Dispatch. Not yet.”

“Why don’t you—oh.” Understanding washed across her face. “You don’t want this going in his file.”

“Not until we know what’s happening.” Jeff had been active but stable for years. If an active narrative flare got entered in his file, he’d be pulled off field duty and trapped in the Archives until someone certified him safe for public duty. It was the exact opposite of the way people with stories like Sloane were treated: the more likely she seemed to flare up, the more likely it was that she’d be shoved into the field at every opportunity. But that was because “evil” stories traditionally had a short shelf life, and human resources wanted to suck every drop of useful service out of her that they could before she inevitably self-destructed. Jeff was a solid, hardworking, domestic sort of a story. He could last forever in the Archives. There were people who thought he should have been there all along.

If they took him out of the field “temporarily,” it would turn permanent with the application of a single stamp. He’d never see the outside of an office building again. And that would be a shame, in every possible way.

Sloane nodded. “Okay, well, here are our options. We could kill him.”

I gaped at her. “That’s not an improvement, Sloane.”

“I didn’t say I was offering options you’d
like
, but fine, we’ll take murder off the table for right now. It was just an idea.” Sloane shook her head. “We could poison him. A ten-year nap makes most things better.”

“I am not poisoning Jeff. Keep trying.”

“We could find him a handsome prince and get him kissed. Kisses break all the shit that enchanted naps don’t. Hell, they even break enchanted naps.”

For a long moment, I didn’t say anything. Finally, I asked, “Does it have to be a prince who does the kissing? Because I hate princes.”

Sloane blinked. “You’re actually considering it? Damn, you are worried. No, it doesn’t have to be a prince; it just has to be someone who the narrative has coded as royalty. You know, kings and queens and the occasional duke’s eldest son who doesn’t know how to feel fear and all that bullshit and—”

Sloane stopped mid-sentence as I pulled my hand off Jeff’s shoulder, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head up. His glasses were aslant on his nose, and his eyes were tightly closed.

“Oh, you are
not
gonna—”

“Please, please don’t file a sexual harassment suit against me for this, okay?” I muttered, pulled Jeff closer to me, and kissed him.

Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 440 (“The Frog Prince”)

Status: ACTIVE

“I’m a married man,” said Andy dubiously, still eyeing the frog, which still seemed to be trying to smile at him. It was a creepy thing to see outside of a cartoon, a frog plastering a pleasant expression across its little froggy face like it wanted to be mistaken for something human. “I can’t do anything that would make Mike angry.”

“But you see, that’s where your conundrum comes into play,” said the frog, which sounded more articulate and less … well, frog-like … with every sentence that it uttered. Andy was reasonably sure that was a bad sign, but he was starting to have trouble remembering precisely why that was. “If you lose the wallet, your precious Mike will be angry. So which is going to offend him more deeply, and be more difficult to repair? One little kiss, or an entire missing wallet?”

“You’re a
frog
,” said Andy. “I think that kissing random wildlife is sort of inappropriate, Mike or no Mike.”

“More or less inappropriate than the time you kissed that sunny-haired boy with the fairy tale eyes?” The frog hopped closer. Its smile was gone. Somehow that didn’t help. “He was trying not to become a Cinderella, and you could have given him bus fare and the address for a safe house, but instead you kissed him behind the bar where he’d been bucking bottles for a dollar an hour, didn’t you? You drove him almost a hundred miles and you told your precious Mike that you’d been stuck late at work. You weren’t unfaithful with your body—not any more than a kiss, and those haven’t been an executable offense in centuries—but you wanted to be, didn’t you? You dreamt of it. You’re dreaming of it still, when the night is dark and your heart betrays you.”

Andy’s mouth was dry, and his breath came in short heaves, like his lungs no longer quite knew how to do their job. That had to be what was making him light-headed: he was a big man, he needed his air if he was going to keep going. “You … you can’t know about that,” he stammered. “No one knows about that.” Not even Henry. He’d told her that the kid (
Jason his name was Jason
) didn’t trust the buses, that he was too afraid of being caught there by his wicked stepfather. And she’d believed it, because Andy was trustworthy, and because she’d never had an impure thought in her lily-colored life.

“I know because you know, and you didn’t really think that you were talking to a
frog
, now, did you? Frogs don’t talk.” The frog winked one enormous golden eye. “I’ll just go fetch that wallet for you now, and then we can have a serious conversation about what you’re really willing to pay to get it back, all right? You just wait right where you are.”

With a single mighty hop the frog was back in the water, disappearing into the black. Andy tried to convince himself to stand, and found to his dismay—if not to his particular surprise—that his legs would not obey him. He was going to wait, it seemed, until the frog-that-wasn’t came back with his wallet and the bargaining began in earnest.

Andy Robinson sat alone in the mud and thought that he had never been so frightened in his life.

For one terrifying moment, it seemed like my grand gesture was going to be just that: a grand gesture that changed nothing and didn’t bring Jeff any closer to home. Then the slack lips pressed against mine shifted, slightly at first, but with increasing intensity, until Jeff was kissing me back with an urgency that I could never have imagined. He shifted positions, and I thought he was going to pull away until his hand hesitantly touched my hair and I realized that he was actually trying to draw me closer. I scooted forward on my knees, encouraging the motion. Anything that would keep him with us.

Behind me, Sloane started laughing. “Holy shit, Snowdrop, you’ve got the Professor’s motor up and running.”

I freed a hand, held it up behind me, and flipped her off. That only made her laugh harder.

I turned my attention back to Jeff, but it was too late; the damage had been done. As soon as I had become distracted, he had stopped responding quite so enthusiastically, and now he was pulling away from me. I leaned back, not forcing the issue.

“You okay?” I asked.

He blinked at me, mouth working silently as he tried to process the question. His eyes were open now and very wide behind the wire rims of his glasses. I’d never noticed before just how brown they were, flecked with little spots of hazel and almost-gold.

Finally, he figured out what he wanted to say: “Henry, you
kissed
me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. You were story-struck, and we needed to get you out of it any way that we could.” I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, grimacing. “I’ll understand completely if you want to file a harassment claim or something, but in my defense, we were trying to prevent you getting reported to Dispatch as a victim of the narrative, and—”

Jeff’s kiss cut me off before I could get another word out. I squeaked in surprise before allowing myself to sink into it, enjoying the moment while it lasted. It was probably just left over narrative pressure encouraging him to behave like a good prince. And since he hadn’t kissed me while I was sleeping in a glass coffin, it wasn’t like he could do me any damage, story-wise.

When he pulled away, his cheeks were flushed. “I really appreciate you snapping me out of my story, even though it’s going to be hard not to document ‘kiss from a beautiful woman’ as a means of paying your elves,” he said. “But I assure you, I’m not going to be filing any sort of complaint against you for doing something I wanted done so very badly.”

“Oh,” I said dazedly.

“Yeah, yeah, the dumb bitch is the fairest in the land, we know,” said Sloane, sounding bored. It was an affectation; there was an edge of concern under her words that rendered them both softer and more biting than usual. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, how about you tell us what happened?”

“The story.” Jeff’s voice turned hollow. It was like he’d seen a ghost. I shifted positions so that I could sit beside him, letting him see both Sloane and me as he spoke. He caught my hand before I could get too far away, and I stopped moving. If he needed me for comfort right now, he could have me. “It was … it was here.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I heard the sound of hammering in the van. Shoes being made, leather being cut … it wanted me, Henry.” He glanced at me, the streetlight glinting off his glasses. “This isn’t happening because of some impossible concordance of events. This is intentional. The narrative is hunting, and I think … I think that it’s hunting for us.”

Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327A (“Hansel and Gretel”)

Status: ACTIVE

Demi stepped out of the trees and into something out of a dream—or a nightmare. It was impossible to tell the difference, because there was just no way that it was real. No matter how strange her life had become in the past few months, things like this just didn’t exist outside of … outside …

Outside of fairy tales.

The house was the sort of place where you could raise a family or live by yourself, content with your music and your books and maybe a small dog or something, so that the nights wouldn’t seem so lonely. It was easily three floors in height, built so that it would have blended easily with the houses in the development outside the wood … if not for its building materials. Demi loved it on sight, and feared it, too, because of what it represented.

Every inch of the house, from the base of the foundation to the tip of the roof, was made of sweets. Great slabs of frosted gingerbread formed the walls, decorated with curlicue swirls of frosting and with dozens of pieces of penny candy, candy corn, and jewel-toned hard candies. The windows looked a little too thin and irregular to be glass, but they could be hardened corn syrup and cream of tartar. Sugar glass was easy to make, if you knew how, and she’d learned from her grandmother years ago.

Smoke wafted from the red velvet brick chimney, and that was the most impossible thing of all. No one could possibly
live
in a house like this, made of sweets and sitting in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t sanitary. It wasn’t up to building code. It had to be some kind of a trap.

The front door swung open in silent invitation. Demi took a step forward.

“Gregory? Hannah? Are you kids inside the creepy candy house? Because I want you to come out of there
right now
.” Her voice wavered a little at the end, but she felt that it was a good command, overall. It sounded commanding, at least, and that was all she’d really been hoping for.

This time, the giggling came from inside the house. Demi took another step forward.

“Stop messing around!” she shouted. “I have to get you back to your parents!”

The giggles stopped. The candy house didn’t change, and yet somehow everything changed, as it went from whimsical and silly to looming threateningly over her, a haunted mansion waiting for its next victim. Demi shuddered as she took another step. The kids were inside. She had to get the kids. She couldn’t go back without them. She couldn’t possibly—

Her flute felt hot in her hands, like a burning brand plucked from the center of a fire. She would have thrown anything else aside if it had come so close to burning her, but not this, not now. Instead, Demi closed her eyes and raised the burning metal to her lips, fingers already starting to trace a song she didn’t need any sheet music to know. This song was part of her story, and since she was part of her story, that meant that the song was a part of
her
. All she had ever needed to do was let go of the things that were stopping her from seeing how important it was.

All she ever had to do was play.

Sloane twitched. It was a strangely convulsive motion, like she had just been stung by a bee that no one else could see. Jeff and I both turned to look at her. He was sitting on the van’s bumper, drinking from a bottle of Gatorade as he tried to steady himself enough to join us in the field. After what had happened with his story, there was no way we were going to leave him alone again.

“Sloane?” I said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “The narrative is spiking, and I don’t know why.” She gave us a serious look. “This is bad.”

“We already knew that,” I said.

“I can testify on the matter,” said Jeff.

“I don’t mean this is ‘see who can get the snarkiest quip in’ bad; I mean this is
bad
,” Sloane said. “Jeff, were you recording when the noises started?”

“No, but I talked to Henry on the walkie-talkie while they were going on,” he said, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “Why?”

“Henry, did you hear anything out of the ordinary?” Sloane turned to me, a strange, fierce hopefulness in her eyes. “Banging, clanging, anything that would say ‘Jeff has opened an illicit elf shoe shop behind his desk’?”