The land beyond the valley was uneven, grass littered with rocky bits where my wheel caught and turned. The sky was a mottled blue, the sunlight strange. I rode for a time alongside a stream that flowed but made no sound. I passed a quarry and crossed a bridge barely wider than a car, stretching over a ravine so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. The earth and sky looked unfinished here, sketches from a restless pen. The air was thick and silent. I wheeled through a tunnel of firs that moved their branches and smelled, disorientingly, like rain on hot pavement. Past them was a dirt road with endless flat plains on either side. Far, far away I saw a glittering line at the horizon. The ocean? I sniffed but smelled no salt.
I rode till the water in my stomach stopped sloshing and I was thirsty again. When I got close enough to see the water more clearly, I realized it was a desert of sparkling sand. At the edge of it sat the Story Spinner, looking like she had the first time I saw her. She wore a baby-doll dress and leggings and sat next to a sprawled-out blue bicycle. She was drinking something from a plastic thermos, and didn’t raise her eyes till I was right in front of her.
She squinted up, head cocked to one side. “You broke your story. It’s not worth being told now.”
“It was never my story,” I said. “It was yours.”
“Not here looking for revenge, I hope?”
The idea made me tired, a fatigue with no bottom. I shook my head.
“Good.” She stood, brushing sand off her leggings. “I can’t make any promises about what you’ll find back there,” she said. “Time works—”
“Differently than I think it does. I know.” I stumbled off the bike, my knees woozy and buckling, and stood in front of her.
Was there a right way to say goodbye to my maker? My captor? The woman who’d funneled me back into my sad and endless story as easily as a wasp led out through an open window?
She smiled at my confusion and gave a two-fingered salute, like a girl in an old movie.
No goodbye needed, I guessed. I turned away from her, knowing her eyes would be the last thing I remembered when all other memories of this place had flattened into photographs.
I stepped onto glittering sand, just over the border of the Hinterland.
The sand was hot as embers. The heat scalded my feet, then scaled my body, hurting worse than the spider sparks. I took a breath in to scream, but the pain was already passing. The sand was glittering white, then dun, then grassy, then just grass. When I looked up I saw an acre of overgrown lawn, running up to the edges of a slumping, tumbledown house. The Hazel Wood.
A terror clawed up out of the tiny part of me that wasn’t too tired to feel. How many years did it take for a place to fall apart like this? From a distance it was picturesque, but as I walked closer I could see its destruction. The great house looked like it had grown up from the ground, and the ground was trying to take it back. Vines grew through cracked windowpanes, and grass crawled over the steps. The swimming pool looked like a frog pond and smelled worse.
When I reached the steps, I lifted the skirts of my princess dress and kicked off the shreds of my slippers. I walked up to the door and knocked.
I waited a long time, but nobody answered. The door was locked, and while I could’ve climbed through a window, there wasn’t any point. The Hazel Wood’s warped clock had finally run down. If Althea was lucky, she was dead.
She wasn’t who I needed to find.
The Hazel Wood’s gates let me out into a normal wood. No ravine, no grove of glittering trees. I walked barefoot to the road, feeling every pebble, every acorn and piece of trash. The first few cars slowed down to look at me in my ragged dress, my hair that fell almost to the tops of my thighs. But none of them stopped. I tried to glean clues about how much time had passed from the make of the cars, without luck. No hovercraft, at least.
Finally a minivan drove by me, stopped, and backed up. In the driver’s seat sat an old woman wearing a rain bonnet over frosted hair. She rolled down the passenger window and peered at me.
“Now why on earth would you wear a dress that lovely into the woods?”
I was out of practice, talking to people. No words came. I tried to smile reassuringly. Don’t be afraid of me, old woman. It probably looked terrifying. I had, until very recently, been a literal fairy-tale monster.
She sniffed. “You don’t need to snarl at me. Either you’ve gotten lost during a costume party or your story is much more interesting than that, but either way—”
“I don’t have a story,” I said. My voice sounded like a rusty hinge.
“Well. Do you need a ride or not?”
I shook my head, then nodded, then walked slowly around the ugly hulk of the car to let myself in. The dashboard lights blinked like insect eyes, and the air inside smelled like nothing that should exist on heaven or earth. New car smell, I remembered. Keep it together, Alice.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, about five minutes too late.
“Good lord, you stink,” she said. “Have you been kidnapped? Did you just escape? Should I be taking you to the police?”
“What year is it?” I burst out.
Her eyes widened. “You poor child. You really don’t know?”
She told me, and I closed my eyes against her words. Two years. Two years had passed since I walked into the Hazel Wood. It was better and worse than it could’ve been; relief and terror warred in my chest and made me shake. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The panic folded over me like a hand, and I gave in.
When I was little I tried to walk across one of the parallel bars on the playground like it was a tightrope, till I slipped and fell onto it stomach first. The wind was knocked out of me, and all I could do was keen, a horrible sound that sent the other kids scattering.
That was what I sounded like now. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stop. Next to the messy specter of my coming undone, the woman’s driving peaked to frantic. She pressed her body toward her window and called someone on her phone. An eternity passed before the car screeched into a diner parking lot, where an ambulance was waiting.
When the paramedics opened my door and laid their hands on me, I went silent. They startled back before grabbing me again, helping me out onto the gravel.
“Can you tell me your name?” one of them asked kindly. He looked like a skinny Harold.
“Ella Proserpine,” I said desperately.
“Okay, Ella, can you walk with me, please? Try to unlock your knees.”
“No, Ella is my mother. I’m Alice,” I said. “Alice Crewe. Alice Proserpine. I’m Alice-Three-Times.”
The paramedics exchanged a glance over my head and half-carried me into the ambulance.
Somehow, I fell asleep on the way. When I woke up I was wearing a clean blue hospital gown. I flinched away from a terrible smell, woke up the rest of the way, and realized it was me. I was fully convinced another two years had passed since I’d last been awake.
I filled my lungs, ready to scream out fresh panic, then saw her sitting in a hospital chair. Her head was flopped onto her chest, a fresh starburst of gray running through the dark strands of her hair. She wore a black hoodie, black jeans, and the cracked red cowboy boots she’d had since forever.
My mother. Ella Proserpine.