She was the worst kind of monster. She had a cause.
As I began transcribing the mortgage contract on the desk, I heard Zelda’s voice in my head: Stop typing. You have a choice.
I was used to hearing voices in my head by then, but Zelda’s was so clear and sharp and unexpected, it startled me. “How did you get in my head?” I said out loud.
Rather a stupid question. You put me here.
“You can just talk whenever you want?”
That sounded vaguely fascist. But no, only when your cackle is up. For now, anyway.
“For now?”
I’m sorry about your sister and niece. You need to know that Em is gone too.
“I don’t know that.”
Nothing can survive Blanche’s cackle, except a Sojourner.
“I have to try.” I was on the verge of more tears. I refused to believe Em was gone too.
This whorl is Blanche’s link to Zaditor. It’s full of their magic. I can smell it. She’s used it to manipulate the whorl. There are only two ways out: do what she wants, or ride the Ghost. If you do what she wants, it will mean the end of reality as we know it, in this world and all worlds. You have to ride the Ghost out of here.
“How does typing a mortgage contract end reality?”
Don’t lie to yourself, Charlie. You’re not just typing, are you? You’re summoning your rekulak. If you leave a corruption of that behind in here, your rekulak will be trapped in this whorl—one of its fingers anyway—watching you type loop after loop. Rekulaks exist outside and inside of Time and Space. They can go wherever and whenever they want. By trapping a finger in Blanche’s whorl, you will make Blanche immune to Arawok’s vomit reflex. And the disease that she has become will spread everywhere, change everything.
I couldn’t believe that. If I believed that, then Em was dead. But Em was still alive. And she needed my help. I started typing again.
Stop, Charlie! Listen to me. Do you think it’s a coincidence that a cheese danish is sitting on the table over there? Here? Now? I know your pain, Charlie. You created me with it. Blanche and your mother manipulated you. They made the cheese danish the symbol of your pain, your weakness, because it existed here before your birth, in this whorl. To you, the cheese danish might as well be the Great Wall of China. Your pain was built to keep you from going beyond a certain point in this whorl. They’re using your weakness, a weakness they created, to hide their own, whatever that is. You have to overcome.
As farfetched as Zelda’s assertions sounded, they made sense. The cheese danish had been at the center of my childhood trauma. And now it was here in the worst moment of my life. And the prisoner had told me it would be here. This wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe Blanche was trying to hide something from me beyond it. I couldn’t trust her. I knew that.
Zelda was right. Em was gone too. After Blanche had been done with Sheryl’s body, it had fallen to the floor, lifeless, a spent balloon. Sheryl had not returned to it. Em would not return to hers. I couldn’t think of what that meant. I kept it an abstract concept in my mind, because if I touched it, if I attached any kind of thought to it, I wouldn’t be able to function. Em was a cupboard of fire to me now. Opening a drawer would only make the fire spread, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
I got up and went back to the leather chair, a soundtrack of encouraging words from Zelda playing in my head, and I placed the sourdough starter back in my lap. While I waited for the loop to restart, I went through my foundation gestures, searching for the pain. By the time young Lonnie came back into the room, I’d found it in tapping the quick Blanche had inserted into her heel to imprint this whorl.
“Why are you tapping the quick?” Lonnie said.
“Partly a backup plan,” I said, following the pain, “in case you fail me. And partly because I want to preserve the look on your face for my future selves.”
“What look? What are you talking about?”
“How did you do it? Some Sojourner trick?”
“How did I do what?” Lonnie crossed his arms over his chest, widened his stance, and rocked from side to side.
“We searched that whole tomb. We found the totem, but no book.” I frowned. “Odd. So odd. We even searched you. Remember? Where did you hide it? Did you go back for it later?”
“I can’t hide something that doesn’t exist.”
“Denial is such a powerful tool if you have the gall for it. People want to believe people. I’m sure it has been useful for you your whole life.” I sighed and shook my head. “We found the book. Has anyone ever told you you look like a rat?”
Lonnie’s face twitched, and I smiled and reached for the cheese danish on the table. The moment my fingertips touched it, I felt intense pain throughout my whole body, like my blood had turned to acid. I screamed, jumped back, tumbled over the arm of the chair, and hit the floor, where I writhed and whimpered. I’d worked hard to build up my pain tolerance, but I was not prepared for this. I was helpless, exposed. I would have done anything to ease the pain. If just touching the danish did this, there was no way I could go any further in this whorl, no way I was riding this Ghost.
As soon as I thought of
