The Fall of Never(122)
Teeth gritted, eyes pressed shut, she could feel a pressure overtake her arm, insistent that she slam the hammer down, that she bring her arm down in one quick, arcing motion. She could still see it so clearly in her head—
Her arm trembled.
No! No, don’t! Stop! Please, stop!
“Do you feel trapped and helpless?” His voice was like a god’s, coming from every direction at once. “Do you feel alone? Good. Because now you are like me.”
“Never,” she breathed through clenched teeth. He face burned with tears. “Never like you!”
At the final moment, she realized she could not fight him and that her arm was going to come down. Yet Simon had not gone for control of her hips, of her legs, and she quickly shuffled to one side as the hammer came down. The claw-end slammed into the wall and dragged down, peeling back fleshy layers of the wall and exposing the sunlight of the outside world beyond. Then the entire wall seemed to waver, to contest its own reality, and she could see the shimmering forest on the other side and suddenly wanted to be there.
Dropping the hammer, she leapt forward and pushed herself against the wall—and passed through to the other side, her body slowing in midleap as if the wall had tried to retain its solidity while she was halfway through. Behind her, she heard the sounds of twine snapping, and then hit the ground with such force she could feel her brain rattle in her skull.
Around her, the world swam in and out of focus, the temperature seesawing from intense heat to bitter cold. Despite her pain, she wasted no time, and scuttled back on her hands and feet, her eyes locked on the house in the woods, her mind reeling nonsense—
(we almost killed)
(somewhere far away four boys find a house like this in the woods)
(blood on a jukebox)
(a hole in the ocean)
—her eyes locked on the place where the house had only stood moments before.
It had vanished.
Everything—the house and Simon. All of it, gone.
Everything seemed to slow. A rustling to her left and she saw the injured dog standing atop the embankment, staring at her. His injured paw was raised, his eyes black and muddy and trained on her. Then it turned and took off into the woods, trailing busted pieces of twine behind it.
Is it over? she wondered. Simon, are you gone? Did I cast you away?
And although he didn’t come right out and say no, she swore she could hear a faint laugh coming from all around her: the laughter of a thousand gods.
Winter and summer came and went with little fanfare. Having stayed away from the forest for some time, Kelly hardly thought of the ghost-boy called Simple Simon and the Land of Never, although she was always faintly aware of the boy’s continual presence at the back of her mind. Still there, but fading. And soon, her mind began rubbing out her time spent in the woods altogether, almost to a point where the name Simple Simon no longer meant anything to her—at least on a conscious level. Forcing herself to forget, as she’d done so long ago when she’d created a stone from nothing. And though her parents remained distant and unresponsive, Kelly found a new diversion in the presence of her younger sister and in the friendship of Gabriel Farmer. For once, these things made her feel normal and accepted. No longer did she dream of make-believe worlds ruled by kings and queens, where knights rode horses and Cheshire cats spoke from trees; such things ceased being important to her.
When she was fourteen, a crushing snowstorm came to Spires in early November. For days, snow piled up outside the house while sleet and freezing rain pelted the windows and ceilings. At one point the furnace in the cellar seized up, and her father’s newly-appointed house-man, a fellow named DeVonn Rotley, spent several hours downstairs in the freezing gloom until the furnace sputtered back to life.
One night during this storm, Kelly was forced awake by a blinding cold. She pushed herself up in bed, her skin hardened into goose-bumps, her teeth rattling in her head, and saw that someone had opened her bedroom window. A crest of snow and ice hung over the lip of the sill, and the carpet beneath the window was wet and frozen. The curtains billowed out like twin phantoms.
For a long time, she didn’t move. It was too cold…and something in the back of her mind had suddenly started to speak up, to warn her. She felt herself struggling for old memories, but the strength of her mind would not allow it.
She pulled herself out of bed and stepped across the room to the window, her body wracking against the freezing air. The carpet was soaking wet and freezing beneath her feet; the coldness stimulated her bladder. Halfway to the window, she stepped on what she thought was a chunk of ice. It cracked beneath her foot and she hopped off it, looked down.
It was a broken plastic fork. All but one of its prongs were missing.
She felt something stir inside her brain, something desperate to be released, but it was down too deep to excavate. Instead, she kicked the fork aside and went to the window, reached up, grabbed the sill, tried to pull the window down. The weather had frozen it stuck. Lightly, she began hammering her fist against the frame, but she feared it was making too much noise and stopped.
Looked out the window.
Froze.
A misshapen white form stood out in the snow against the side of the house, between the house and the steep incline that dipped down into the dark forest. The figure looked up at her, and although she couldn’t make out any details from such a height, she knew the figure was grinning at her.