Outside and in Read online

  “That’s not instant at all,” Clara said. “That is a pot of lies. How will cousin Nallah fit inside somebody’s head? She’s too big. Will you shrink her?”

  Bekah snorted. “She’s not going in there physically. She’ll sort of... think her way in, send her mind inside, and her body will stay here.”

  Clara turned to me. “Would you like to take a walk inside my mind?”

  “I think we’ll start her off with something a little simpler,” Bekah said. “Like Trey’s mind.”

  “Ouch,” Trey said cheerfully. “After dinner, or?”

  “We might as well get started now,” Bekah said. “If you’re ready Nallah?”

  “What if I hurt him?” I said. “What if I—scramble his brains or—erase things, or, or who knows?”

  “We’re not sending you in with weapons,” Bekah said. “And Trey has protections laid on him, too. This is just exploratory. A way to test your powers.”

  “Why his mind? Why not yours?”

  “Bekah’s mind is full of smoke and mirrors and ghosts and monsters and magic,” Trey said. “That’s some serious interior territory there. Whereas my mind, well, I’m basically just a guy.”

  I had to trust they knew what they were doing. “All right. I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all anyone can ask.” Bekah sat down in an armchair. “You two, sit on the couch, turned toward each other. Closer.” We obeyed. It was oddly intimate, sitting so close to someone, our knees touching. I don’t really do the sex thing—I’ve never seen the appeal—and while I like snuggling as much as anyone, it had been a while since I’d been physically close to anybody.

  “Trey, close your eyes. Okay, Nallah, your gift is connected to the key on your hand. Just reach out, and gently touch his eyelid, and think about... going inside.”

  I didn’t expect it to work. I’d never attempted anything like this before—I’d never even thought about something like this—and so I was utterly shocked to find myself standing in a clearing in a forest, late afternoon light slanting down and making the trees on all sides glow like they were made of gold. I spun around, looking for a door, because if I’d come here, there had to be a door, even if it was just the trunk of a rusted-out car in the weeds, but there was nothing.

  Then the wind blew, and the leaves on the trees changed color, from green to red and yellow, and they began to fall. Another breeze, from a different direction, and there was snow, not falling, just all over the ground and on the trees, and then another, and the snow was gone and everything was green and the sun was straight overhead.

  Trey walked out from between two trees, crunching an apple. “Hi,” he said. “Welcome to my happy place. Nice, huh? This is pretty much the woods out behind my house when I was growing up. We called this place ‘the ballroom’ because it’s so wide open, even though it’s in in the middle of the forest. All this is gone now, in the real world, but I can still come here in my mind.”

  “We’re inside your head?” He looked just like he had in the living room, not like a figment of his own imagination at all.

  “I’m always in my head.” Trey leaned against the trunk of a tree. “But yeah, now you’re in here too. Bekah says she wants you to find... oh, lord, the name of the first girl I kissed.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Well, this isn’t a place of physical matter. It’s a place of thought. You’re here, and that means you can change the environment with your will. That’s all magic is, really, Bekah says: the exercise of will. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a lawyer; I deal with a different kind of wills.” He grinned. “Sorry. Dad joke. Comes with the territory. You could try to, I don’t know, conjure up a filing cabinet with a drawer marked ‘Trey’s romantic history,’ but probably you should use what you know, right?”

  “So I should....” I stared at a tree trunk, the largest one in the vicinity. Gradually, lines appeared in the trunk, drawing an archway almost as tall as me. A knothole appeared where a doorknob should be. “Make a door?”

  “Worth a try,” Trey said.

  I walked to the tree. Normally, when I use my door to travel from my room, I have to know where I’m going. If I hadn’t been there personally, I at least needed to see pictures, to know what door I was passing through. But then, normally, I couldn’t conjure doors into the trunks of trees. The rules were different, and I could be flexible.

  I opened the door, focusing on my task—his first kiss—and opened the door on the tree trunk. I ducked through, twisting sideways to fit, and emerged beside a dirt driveway. Trey—teen Trey, in acid-washed jeans and a heavy metal t-shirt—stood awkwardly next to a petite blonde teenager wearing a pink blouse and a pencil skirt. A gold cross twinkled at her throat. They were beside a dull brown hatchback, and seemed to be at a loss for what to say to each other.

  Finally Trey leaned in, tentative, and the girl closed her eyes, and pursed her lips, and Trey kissed her, brief and soft as a butterfly landing on a flower, and then leaned back. “Uh. That was. Wow. I’ll see you tomorrow? At school?”

  The girl took his face in her hands and drew him closer, and this time the kiss was longer, and when their mouths opened, I looked away. Kissing is pretty gross. Tongue kissing is super gross. She drew back. “There. Much better. Call me later.”

  Trey stumbled off, almost like he was drunk. I stepped out of the shadows. “Hey,” I said.

  The girl looked at me, entirely without curiosity. “Hi.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Megan Kimble,” she said.

  “Was this that boy’s first kiss?” I asked in case this was some kind of trick question.

  Megan seemed to consider. “He sure kissed like he’d never done it before.”

  I was curious about the extent to which I could alter “reality” here. “What would happen, if I grabbed on to you, and dragged you out of here?”

  “I’m not expert,” Megan—or the bit of Trey’s mind that currently looked like Megan—said. “But I think Trey would forget my name, and this whole experience.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  Megan gave me a little wave, got in her car, and drove away.

  “Okay,” I said. “I got the answer.” Nothing happened. “Trey? Bekah? I can come out now.” Still nothing.

  I knelt and drew a door in the dirt of the driveway, but that was wrong, so I scuffed it out. I drew an eye, instead, closed, fringed with lashes.

  I reached out, and opened the eye, and opened my eyes, and I was on the couch.

  Trey was rubbing his eye with the palm of his hand, and Bekah was fussing over him.

  I jumped up from the couch. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Felt weird, didn’t really hurt.” He waved his hand at me, reassuring.

  His eye, when he uncovered it, was a little red and watery, and I felt terrible, so I blurted out, “I feel terrible!”

  “Oh, I get worse in allergy season,” he said. “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

  Bekah looked up at me. “Did you get the name?”

  “Megan Kimble.”

  “Oof, yes, her,” Bekah said. “She still lives in town. She’s married with three kids but I still see her checking out Trey’s ass when we run into her at the grocery store.”

  “It’s an excellent ass,” Trey said. “Everyone tells me so. Meghan was the first one to tell me, now that I think of it.”

  “Insufferable man,” Bekah said. “Go make sure Clara doesn’t burn the house down?”

  “She only did that one time,” Trey said. “That’s why we have a phoenix feather hidden in the wall—okay, okay. Nallah, it was nice to meet you. I hope we see you for the holidays. At last year’s Grace Family Christmas, we got attacked by a vengeful ghost, but the egg nog was fantastic, so on balance it was a success.” He rose and left the room
, still rubbing his eye.

  They were strange people, but... I kind of liked them. I deliberately pushed that feeling down and closed the door to my heart. I wasn’t sure I could trust them, and even if I could, they had their happy little family, and I was on the outside of it, all that “auntie” business aside. I had no reason to think they’d remain interested in me after I did what they wanted. Best to just do it and move on. “So what now?” I said. “We go to DC and I... go into this kid’s mind?”

  “That’s the idea. But this time, you need to go in armed.”

  We emerged from the closet in the bedroom of Hudson Dylan Raisfeld, age eight, lover of Minecraft and baseball, known as “Huddy-D” to his parents and friends. Bekah had shown me a picture from happier days: he was brown haired and round-cheeked with a gap-toothed smile.

  The boy in the bed didn’t look much at all like the one in the picture: he was thinner, paler, hair matted with sweat, eyes red and puffy, skin covered in long scratches. He thrashed and howled, seemingly pinned to the bed, though there were no straps holding him—Bekah’s magic, I assumed.

  When he opened his mouth wide to shriek, I saw his tongue was black. I’ll always remember that.

  “Where are his parents?” I said.

  “Nearby,” Bekah said. “Once I realized what we were dealing with, I cast a spell on them. They’re puttering around downstairs. They think it’s a summer Saturday and Huddy is at sleepaway camp. They were about to call in a priest and try to do an exorcism, even though they aren’t religious, because they were so desperate, and the doctors couldn’t help. Exorcisms can be dangerous, so I stepped in. We stepped in.”

  “From what you said, though, it sounds like he does have a demon.” I clenched my hands into fists. The right one was sore.

  Bekah made a face. “Sort of. You could call the parasite a demon I guess. It’s an extradimensional entity. But they don’t have Catholicism where it comes from, so all that Latin and stuff wouldn’t mean much to it.”

  “Is the thing inside him maybe just confused?” I said. “Lashing out because it doesn’t understand what’s going on in this world?” I remembered the first time I’d stepped out of a door into a crowded market in the Middle East—the riot of unfamiliar sounds and scents and sights had been so overwhelming, I’d ducked right back into my room again. “Maybe if we talk to it—”

  “I will eat you with this mouth,” the boy said. “I will chew you with these teeth. I will swallow you into these guts and pass you through this bowel. This world is meat and meat and meat and meat—”

  Bekah gestured in an odd finger-curling way, and the boy’s teeth snapped shut. “Yeah, no. The thing in there learned English from Huddy’s mind. We’ve talked. I guess where it comes from, there’s a lot of appetite, and not a lot of sustenance. It’s very excited to be here where there’s so much to consume.”

  “I have to face that thing?” I said.

  “You don’t have to. But if you don’t.... I’ll try to save him myself, but like I said, my way is not as elegant. You’re a key, and I’m high explosive. I can get in there, and I can get that thing out, but I can’t do it without making a mess.”

  “I’ll try to help him.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the boy. His eyes were closed, now, rolling behind his lids. “Is Huddy awake in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Bekah said. “I hope not.” She took my left hand in hers. “If it’s too scary, too weird, too dangerous, come out, okay? You’re sending a part of your mind into Huddy’s, and that means you’re vulnerable, too. The parasite could infect you. You have to lock the doors of your mind against it.”

  “Doors and locks, I can do.” I squeezed Bekah’s hand and turned back to Hudson. I reached out and delicately touched his eyelid with my left finger. Even with that small contact, I could feel the heat radiating off him.

  I stepped into a new place. It was a baseball stadium—I don’t follow sports, so I don’t know which one—the stands all empty, but the lights bright and glaring. I was standing on home plate, but facing the wrong way, toward where the catcher should be instead of out at the field.

  I had a horrible thought and ducked down. A baseball flew over my head and smashed into chain link backstop. When the ball hit, it cracked open, like an egg, and hundreds of guinea worms came showering down.

  I spun toward the infield, expecting to see a monster on the mound. Bekah had been unable to tell me what to expect: “The parasite can look like anything. I’m not even sure they have bodies where it came from. It could look like a person, or a monster, or something harmless. A shovel or a shoe or a dog. I really don’t know.”

  The parasite looked like two and a half of the things she’d mentioned: a person, a monster, and something I’d once believed was harmless.

  My old partner Dwayne stood on the pitcher’s mound, dressed in a pin-striped white uniform instead of his usual “I’m not a drug smuggler, I’m an entrepreneur” suit.

  He flung another baseball—this time it just looked like an egg, though, doubtless full of parasites ready to colonize my mind.

  I dodged out of the way, ignoring the wet crack of its impact behind me. I rushed toward him, weaving and ducking, moving faster and more gracefully than I could in reality (and I’m plenty fast and graceful there, thank you very much; living like I do keeps you in shape).

  He threw more eggs, and by instinct or inspiration I started opening doors in the air, just jagged little portals, and letting the eggs pass through them and fall harmlessly through other doors way up in the stands. Being able to conjure doors from nothing was a skill I would have liked having in reality.

  Once I got close enough, I crashed hard into him, and shoved him through a door I made behind him.

  We landed in my room, and I somehow knew I’d changed the parameters of the situation. That was confirmed when he reeled back against my wall and screamed, “What did you do, where did you take me, where is the boy?”

  I’d yanked the parasite right out of Hudson... and into me. We were in my mind, now: my own psychic world. Oops. I wasn’t supposed to do that. Oh well. This was my first time fighting an interdimensional though-monster. At least this way, probably, Hudson was cured.

  The Dwayne-thing started to shift, his skin bubbling, strange shapes pressing their way through the flesh, all spines and spikes and mouths. His original mouth filled with teeth curved like suture needles, all angled in various directions, and his tongue was black, too. “I’ll eat the world with your mouth, door-girl, I’ll open all the doors, I’ll go everywhere—”

  I don’t like people who call themselves pragmatists. People use that word as an excuse to be cruel and run over the feelings of others.

  That doesn’t mean I can’t be pragmatic myself, sometimes, though. There was no point in talking to this thing, I realized. It was just hunger and malice. Better to do the thing and be done with it.

  As the parasite raved and bubbled, I reached out with my right hand. My palm was still sore from the fresh tattoo Bekah had given me back at her house. In the course of tracking my parents, she’d found a tiny vial of my father’s ink, still imbued with the magical properties of his blood. She’d saved that ink, for me, and we talked about what she should put on my hand. “My father would have gone with a net,” she said. “Or a bottle. Something to trap the parasite, bring it out, hold it for later use. We can do containment, if you like. But... I don’t want a pet parasite in a jar. I don’t like the idea of something like that sitting on a shelf. How about you?”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s do the other thing.”

  I reached out my hand, and a sword appeared, a long and gleaming silver blade, the hilt filling my hand where a tiny version of the sword was tattooed. The blade extended as the sword appeared, and pierced right through the thing’s heart—or its melting, bulging chest cavity, anyway.

  I slashed, and t
he parasite came apart, bubbling and dissolving, melting into a puddle of slick silver liquid... and at the center writhed a white worm, the size of my forefinger.

  I sliced the worm in two. Both halves wriggled for a moment, and then went still. I didn’t want its pieces lodged in my mind—who knew what infections that might cause?—so I pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves from a box by the bed and picked the worm-bits up carefully.

  Then I turned to my door. It looked the same as usual, but the doorknob wasn’t made of crystal here: it looked like an eyeball, its iris the color of my own.

  I turned the knob very gently, glad I was wearing gloves, and stepped out of my own mind back into Hudson’s room. I blinked and groaned. My eyes burned like someone had rubbed salt water into them.

  Bekah was sitting with the boy, who was still pale and sweaty but undeniably more healthy looking. They were on the floor, perusing an illustrated book. “And this,” the boy was saying, “is a zombie pigman.”

  “I’ve met a few of those,” Bekah said.

  I groaned and sat up in bed.

  “Your niece is awake,” Hudson said. “Who’s that sleeping in my bed?” He laughed, and I’ve never even really liked children, but it was a beautiful sound.

  Bekah came to me and fussed over me, but I waved her away. I opened my hand and showed her the pieces of worm in my palm. They looked just like they had in my mind, gross and sundered.

  She leaned in close for a look, then opened her own hand. I tipped the worm pieces in, and she squeezed her hand into a fist, and a brief pulse of light flared inside. Then she dusted her palms together, and that was that. “I was worried about you, when Huddy woke up and you didn’t.”

  “I just... acted by instinct. I know it wasn’t the plan, I’m sorry—”

  She shook her head. “Hey, no, don’t apologize. By definition, you are the world’s leading expert on doing what you do. I take it the weapon worked?”

  I opened my hand and looked at the sword tattooed there. It looked like one of the swords from a tarot deck I’d seen once and really liked. I’d described it, and Bekah had drawn it perfectly. “It sure did. I don’t suppose I can conjure a sword here in the real world?”