The Fall of Never by Ronald Malfi
Prologue
In the darkness, shivering, she ran.
—someone let the baby out someone let the baby out someone let the baby out someone—
She burst through clawed tree branches, her body wracked and sweating, her bare feet raw and bleeding from the frozen earth. Her heartbeat pulsed just beneath the surface of her face; her throat burned with each wheezing breath. And for a moment she thought she would faint. Around her, the darkness became blindness…and the floating orb of the moon, wide and faceless beyond the sprawling canopy of bare trees, blurred and smeared, double, trebled, augmented to a greasy horizontal smudge. Only now, thrust into a wooded clearing, was she able to pause and catch her breath, and to wipe her eyes. Runaway tears had frozen the sides of her face, her temples.
—someone let—
She heard a branch snap behind her. Uttered a breathless scream. Turning, she could see nothing, and could only feel her pulse throbbing inside her head and through her arms and legs, rushing the blood, warfare-like, through her body. Was she breathing? She couldn’t breathe. Was she dreaming? She couldn’t tell for certain…
Another cracking branch, like bone: closer.
No!
Something shifted in the darkness ahead of her. Its proximity paralyzed her.
No…
Pressing her eyes tight, she willed herself away from this place, turning, turning, and called out for her sister, her sister, her—
She could hear him breathing—too close now.
She turned to run, her eyes still shut tight, the fingerlike tree limbs probing and cutting and clawing at her. Her mind summoned images of running brook water, of forested hillsides crested with snow…of the shape, shifting, materializing, fiendishly childlike…of her sister warning her to write it down, write it down, and not to forget it, any of it…
Her legs pumping, she ran. Her heart nearly bursting through her chest, she ran, and she found she could not stop, and though she was running, she was not going anywhere. She was running underwater; she was running in a dream.
A dream…
And she awoke. And she opened her eyes. And she was there, in bed, safe, warm. But afraid.
Because you are here. Because you are right here.
And she was.
And she was.
She screamed. She could not will herself back to bed, could not pull her solid form from this black woods and tuck herself back, back…could not force herself to believe she was not here.
A frozen hand fell on the back of her neck. She stumbled and fell face first to the forest floor. The side of her head struck something hard and unforgiving, and her vision briefly flickered. She dug her fingers into the soil but could not rise, could not move. Behind her, someone shifted, moved. She could hear breathing aside from her own.
“No,” she whispered. It took all her remaining strength just to get it out. “No…please…”
“Please,” a voice hissed from behind her. Very close.
“Please,” she managed again, breaking the word into hitching sobs just before the tears came. She could not think, could not move, and she felt herself falling deeper and deeper inside her own head: here, in my bed, in my room, safe, warm, here, here, here here here here, please God put me back in my room and not here here here—
The shape moved around her. She could hear footsteps crunching the dead, frost-covered leaves. And before her mind shut down, she was vaguely aware of long, icy fingers brushing back her sweaty hair.
“Pretty,” said the voice.
Part One
The (Hidden) Book of Frost
Chapter One
There is a cadence to Manhattan—an explicit hum-hum, steady-steady, walk-run. Most people who have lived there the majority of their lives recognize this only on a subconscious level, weaving in and out of the steady-steady like motors on a track, if they even register it at all. In a way, the looming presence of the city is comparable to the consistency of skin—it’s there, it’s vital, yet it’s infrequently observed. Strangers, on the other hand, feel the presence right away. It is like something falling on them, smashing them, squeezing them until their hearts burst and their brains shut down.
Kelly Rich knew what it meant to be that stranger. Her first year in the city, she’d felt the icy grip about her body, the calloused fingers of the metropolis probing her skin for attainable access. She was young, the ink hardly dry on her divorce papers, when she made a pact with herself to play the Manhattan Game. Unaccustomed to chance, she woke up one morning suddenly and completely cognizant of the fact, and found herself suffering through a hunger for newness, for challenge. In her mind she recalled glimpses of the city from her youth—a city that commanded authority and remunerated only those who faced its cold, cracked pavement and gray-chiseled skyline with unflinching audacity. The notion both excited and terrified her. And maybe it was a bad decision—perhaps she was being too hasty, even running away yet again—but she didn’t think it was. She was through not living. So, Manhattan…
There was the string of dismal, one-bedroom apartments coupled with a cast of roommates, most of them more colorful than a box of Crayolas. There were countless shift jobs—seven at night until three in the morning at the twenty-four hour developer; days in the Village, charging tourists three bucks a pop for Polaroid snapshots. Clever girl. She waited tables and found that she was good at it and that she could actually make some decent cash, but hated it just the same. Pink outfits and nametags had never been her style.