Alex walked back down the hall. Nothing had changed. No one had moved. She had become a phantom. The heap of fur and blood lay unmoving on the carpet. It was unmistakable now that she made herself look, really look. A little dead body. There was blood on Loki’s muzzle.
“What happened?” she asked.
No one seemed to hear her.
“Hellie?”
Hellie turned her head slowly, as if the effort cost her something. She lifted her golden shoulders. Always she looked like a sun-burnished bit of treasure, something precious. Even now, slack and dead-eyed, her voice flat when she said, “We wanted to see if he and Loki would play.”
Alex knelt by the little body. He had been torn open, and there was almost nothing left inside him. His fur was still soft in the places it wasn’t sticky with blood. Alex had loved to stroke his ears with her thumb. They were mangled now, the cartilage exposed in stringy lines. His one remaining pink eye stared at nothing.
“Don’t be shitty about it,” Len said. “It was an accident.”
Betcha looked guilty and said, “We didn’t think Loki would get so excited.”
“He’s a dog,” Alex said. “What the fuck did you think he was going to do?”
“He couldn’t help it.”
“I know,” said Alex. “I know he couldn’t.” She
didn’t blame Loki.
Alex scooped up Babbit Rabbit’s remains and went to the kitchen. She cleaned off her flip-flops and shoveled the sauce and glass into a corner.
“Oh, come on,” said Len. “Rabbits are basically vermin. You’re crying over a rat.”
But Alex wasn’t crying. Not yet. She didn’t want to cry here. She took Len’s keys off the counter without asking. She could pay that tab later.
She tucked what was left of the rabbit’s body into a Ziploc bag and went out to the Civic. She hoped Hellie would follow. All the way down the steps, across the patch of dry lawn, the sidewalk, the street, she hoped. She sat in the driver’s seat a long time, still hoping.
Then, at last, she turned the key and drove. She took the 405 through the valley, past the Galleria and Castle Park with its batting cages, climbing the hill. That was what they’d always called it, “the hill.” Alex didn’t even know the name of the mountain range she was crossing, only that it was the great divider between the San Fernando Valley and the west side. You could stand on Mulholland and look west to the dream of the ocean, museums, mansions.
Or east to the valley and the consolation prize of smoggy days and cheap condos. The California dream for people who couldn’t afford Beverly Hills or Bel Air or Malibu.
She got off at Skirball and took the winding road up to the crest of Mulholland Drive. She didn’t really know where she was going. She just wanted to be up somewhere high.
It wasn’t until she was parked in a big lot next to a church, gazing down at the hazy basin of the city with that little plastic-wrapped body in her hands, that she cried, big bawling sobs that no one but the oaks and the greasewood bushes could hear. She wasn’t going to bury Babbit Rabbit here. She was afraid some coyote would dig him up and have a last go at him. But she’d needed to be someplace beautiful, someplace clean, where there was no history for her to stumble over.
Alex couldn’t name what she felt. She only knew she never should have brought Babbit Rabbit home. When Hellie pointed him out in the cages, she never should have picked him up, never should have held his small body against her heart. He should have belonged to some kid who lived in Encino, who would have given him a real name and brought him to class for show-and-tell, who would have kept him safe. Alex had stolen from her mother.
She’d lied and cheated and broken a lot of laws. But she knew that bringing Babbit Rabbit home was the worst, most selfish thing she’d ever done.
Nothing good belonged with her.
She watched the sun set and the lights spread across the valley.
“You could go anywhere,” she said to the night air. But she wouldn’t. She never did.
She wiped her eyes and crossed the road and buried Babbit Rabbit in the pretty landscaped yard beside the gate that belonged to some private school.
She shook him out of his plastic bag so that his body could decompose and feed the roots of the eugenia hedges.
Alex thought about lying down in the middle of Mulholland, right across the white dashes that split the road like a spine. She thought about some mother driving home with her kids in the back of the car, what she would see in her headlights in the moment before impact. She found herself floating, up over the pavement, the empty grid of the parking lot, the Civic idling with its driver’s-side door still open. She was drifting over the chaparral, the white sage and ancient oaks, over the houses built into the mountain, fearless on their stilts, their swimming pools glowing in the dusk, then higher still as the lights grew smaller, a garden of bright flowers, laid out neatly in their beds.
How long did she remain there, untethered and safe from feeling? At some point, the sun began to rise, blotting out the stars in a wash of pink light.
But the city below was not one she knew, not one she understood. She smelled autumn leaves and rain, the mineral smudge of wet concrete. She saw a wide-open park, paths crossing it in star-shaped patterns, three churches, their spires like lightning rods in search of a storm. The grass was green, the sky gray and gentle with clouds; the leaves rustled red and gold in their branches.
A breeze sighed through the trees, carrying the scent of apples and fresh bread, of any good thing you could want. Every surface, every stone, seemed to gleam with soft light.
She saw figures approaching from the corners of the park—no, the green.
She did know this place. Was she dreaming again, or had she woken? She knew those people, found their names in her memories. Dawes, Turner, Darlington. Tripp hadn’t made it. That was her fault. She remembered that too.
As they drew closer, Alex could see something had changed in their pilgrim raiment. Dawes still wore the scholar’s robes, but now they gleamed golden like the loris’s eyes. Turner’s cloak of feathers was woven with coppery oak leaves. The prince’s white armor suited Darlington better than it had Tripp, but now he wore a horned helm. And Alex? She held out her arms.
Her steel bracers were emblazoned with snakes.
She knew where they were meant to go. Back to the orchard. Back to the library.
Slowly, they made their way down the street that would have been Elm, past Hopper and Berkeley. There was no sense of the sinister now, no Yale scraped clean of beauty. Instead it was as if the university had been rendered by some hack painter, a scene from a snow globe, a dream of a college. She could see people eating and chatting and laughing in the amber warmth behind the thick leaded windows of the dining halls. She knew that, should she choose to enter, she would be made welcome.
The library didn’t look like a library anymore, or a cathedral, or an orchard. It rose in gleaming silver spires, an impossible castle, a palace of air and light. She met Darlington’s eyes. These were the places they’d been promised. The university of peace and plenty. The magic of fairy tales that demanded only wishes, not blood or sacrifice. The Women’s Table shone bright as a mirror, and Alex saw Mercy in it, pacing back and forth. “Are we
… are we in heaven?” Dawes whispered.
Turner shook his head. “No heaven I know about.”
“Don’t forget,” warned Darlington. “Demons feed on joy, right alongside pain and sorrow.”
The doors to the palace opened and a creature emerged. It had to be eight feet tall, and it had the head of a white rabbit but the body of a man. Between its ears, a crown of fire blazed red. It was as naked as Darlington had been in the golden circle, but the symbols on its body glowed ruddy like banked embers.
“Anselm,” Alex said.
The rabbit laughed. “Call me by my true name, Wheelwalker.”
“Asshole?” Alex ventured.
The creature shifted, and he was Anselm again, human in appearance, clothed. He wasn’t in a suit this time but his casual weekend best—jeans, a cashmere sweater, an expensive watch on his wrist, a picture of effortless wealth. Darlington without Black Elm. Darlington without a soul.
“I liked watching Darlington kill you.”
Anselm grinned. “That was a mortal body. Weak and impermanent. I cannot be killed because I do not live. But I will.”
Alex saw there was a leash in his hands, and when he tugged on it, three creatures crawled forward on hands and knees. Their pale bodies were emaciated, a clattering of bones barely held together by sinew. Alex couldn’t quite tell if they were human, and then the wretched details locked into place—one older, flesh sagging, hair cut in a gray crew cut; one young and frail, his curls patchy in places, his gaunt features haunted by the memory of beauty; and one woman, breasts shrunken, sores around her mouth, her yellow hair matted and clumped.
Carmichael, Blake, and Hellie. Around their throats they each wore a golden yoke like the one that had circled Darlington’s neck, each attached to a golden chain held by Anselm.
