awful place.” He made it up onto the bed with little trouble, as if he'd done it a thousand times before. He rolled to face away from her. “Well, go on now, fancy lady.” She watched him laying there, rolled up like a sausage. One somebody threw away. Mary's heart ached for him, though he was already long dead, stuck in this in-between place like she was. On small steps she went to his bedside and tugged at the buckles keeping him wrapped up.
“What you doing, loony?” He struggled against her, a worm trying to stay buried in the dirt. “Lay off now.” Mary just kept pulling at the raw hide still she got some give and manged to undo one of them. “Hey don't, don't, you hear!”
“Be still! I've only got one left. Then we can get out of here.”
“No! I can't, you can't!” Was he sobbing? Was he smiling? His face flickered in and out again so Mary couldn't tell. Finally she manged to get the last clasp undone. She took hold of the edge of the linen and with a tug, rolled him out of the blanket. Slim's body was as small a doll. Little more than a skeleton painted skin pink. His little arm flopped a bit as he tried to use muscles that just weren't there anymore. She could count his ribs and see the outline of his guts.
As the air hit his skin it began to crack and peel away, like paper being eaten by fire. She picked his big head up in her arms and laid it across her lap. Horrified, she stammered nonsense words and shed tears that fell onto Slim's big brow. He just looked up at her with fear in his eye but a smile on his face. He kept that smile until it too burned away and all she held in her arms were bones. Those bones turned to dust at the slightest of movements. Mary slumped back in a cloud of it, almost falling off the bed completely. He was gone, off to walk the Summer Land at last. Maybe he'd eat his fill finally, til his belly was fit to burst.
What horrors had kept him here, she wondered. If his body was any indication, did she really want to know? A smell of swamp rot wafted up her nose and she shuddered. It was coming closer, she had to keep moving.
She took up Slim's bow and peeked out the door. A trail of sludge ran across the carpet heading to her right, so she darted to the left. It just went on forever, an endless series of paintings and door ways. Many of the doors opened to empty rooms, but she tried them all. One must branch off, had to. She wouldn't let herself think of anything else. There must be a way out. After the ninth door, things started to change.
The rooms became more sparse, little more than empty squares with a hay bed in the corner. Finally after what felt like hours, she came across a desk. It was loaded down with papers and scrolls. Quills lay scattered all around. One drawer was open, stuffed with ink wells. Mary split the wax seal of the scroll on top. It was some sort of intake list. People's names, the cities where they were from, what crimes they had committed.
The crimes seemed to range from pick-pocketing to murder. There were a few hysteria and sodomy charges tossed in. More than a couple were listed simply as undesirable. Given up by their families for anything that might bring shame. Mary had heard of noble parents locking away their children for things as trivial as a hunchback. She thought of Slim.
She shifted through more of the papers, hoped to find something more about what was going on here. Seems the building was called Last Hope Asylum. It was ran by a cult, the Brothers of the Sun. They seemed obsessed with the idea that only light could drive out a man's darkness. It was a phrase echoed on a dozen or more papers.
What that meant she wasn't sure, but the other things detailed made her skin crawl. Food therapy, which was just starvation on a long term plan. Water treatment, which had led to seventeen drownings. Something called the Daybreaker, used to “Shine through the madness.” Lists of body parts for heat application and what they were supposed to change. It just went on and on, detail after detail of atrocities committed under the guise of healing.
Mary pressed on, jogged for spans at a time to ease the strain on her legs. She was trapped in a madhouse with ghosts put through some of the most horrific tortures she had ever heard. She felt like a thread of spider silk being pulled at both ends. How long could she hold before it all became to much and she finally broke?
The hall opened up ahead of her a bit into a circular seating area. She slowed to a crawl, catching sight of the giant sphinxes lounging on twin cushions. Her pack shook with fear.
“Come now, come now,” they said in unison. “Lets get a look at you. All warm and sweet-smelling.”
“Like a steak on a fire.” The one of the left said
“Or a boar on a spit.” The right one replied.
“I don’t want any trouble!” Mary shouted before she was knocked to the ground from behind. She rolled like a ball of string. It had moved so fast that she hadn’t seen the left one dart behind her. A blink was all it took for the monstrous cat to have her at its mercy. Its paw was as big as her chest.
She could feel the sword sharp claws ready to spring out every time it patted her back and forth. Its fur was tawny with bits of brown. On its chest was a triangle of what had once been white fur. Now stained with blood and gore from other sweet-smelling things.
“Don’t bruise the meat, sister.” The other said, stretching out its long body before sitting up. This one was speckled with black like the desert cats of the east. It too wore a grizzly bib of blood-stained fur. Her attacker bent down its bald, human head and smiled at Mary. Teeth sharpened to points, rows and rows of them, loomed above her.
She remembered her father as death prepared to send her into that horrid maw. She remembered a nursery rhyme he used to sing to her as he helped settle Oats into the stable. The words were a mess, something about a great knight challenging the queen of cats to a riddle game.
“Don’t you want to hear a riddle?” Mary stammered. Those glaring teeth stopped and a paw eased its pressure on her chest.
“A game it asks for,” the other one said.
“It begs for.”
“I beg too. It has been so long since we had a good game.”
“There was that one.”
“It was hardly fun, though.”
“He was so bad at guessing.”
“Well, he didn’t have a tongue, to be fair.” The two of them went on and on like that until finally agreeing that yes, a good game was in order.
“You’ll let me go?” Mary felt the paws pull away. They moved back to their sofas and flopped over.
“You haven’t even played yet and here you are winning,” the left one laughed. It was a sound similar to a scream on the wind.
“So, confident one, you get to start,” the one of the right said. Mary’s legs were shaking so much she could barely stand. She kicked her pack on the floor. Nothing, no voice from within, no movement, playing dead. There would be no help this time. Mary had never felt more alone. Why had she even thought of riddles? She had never been any good at them, how could she hope to beat them?
The sphinx was known to be as smart as it was savage. Mary knew she’d have to watch her back even if she managed to win. There were two, after all. She rattled her brain. The noise must have been annoying to her two captors because they began to growl low in their throats. The hair on their lion bodies stood up and one gnashed its teeth at her. They were getting bored and she knew time was not on her side. She blurted out the first thing that made any sense at all.
“I have a heart that never beats, a home but I never sleep. I can make a man's house and build another. I love to play games with all my brothers, though it makes me feel like a king among fools. Who am I?” The two monsters looked at each other for a long moment, their eyes narrowing to slits.
“What do you think, sister Sha?” The one who had pounced on her before asked the speckled one.
“A good one, Shil, but who is she asking?” Sha licked her sisters ear with a tongue as long as Mary’s arm.
“Well which one is it? Come on girl, you’re doing well. So far.” Shil rolled around in her seat, which Mary could now see was covered in dried blood. She noticed piles u
pon piles of bones under the tables and chairs. Mary swallowed hard.
“You Sha, if it pleases you.”
“Such manners! And yes. It does.” She yawned again, “It is the king of hearts. Never did care for cards though. So easy to cheat.” Mary’s own heart fell. Her riddle hadn’t taken any time to answer and that made her worried. How many before her had tried to best the sisters in a game she wondered? Would her own bones end up tucked away under some stool, her soul resting in their bellies forever?
“My turn then, yes?” Shil turned to her sister for confirmation. Sha nodded. “Yes! Alright then. What cannot see but knows the way. Even the youngest has a face covered in lines. It is one a sailor dares not leave behind, but in the wrong hands makes everyone blind. What is it?”
While Mary pondered it over she ran her hands over Slim’s bow. For a child's toy it was sturdy and polished. The string wasn’t frayed at all, and there wasn’t a scuff on the dark wood. It looked fresh and new, as if it had been made yesterday. Still carried a faint whiff of black pine.
Black pine. May loved the smell. It reminded her of long hikes and camp fires. Stories from her father and that one time he'd gotten them more lost than a frog in the sky. Lost, her mind echoed. Lost like a sailor at sea. And why was the sailor lost then, what had he forgotten? What always knows the way?
“A map.”