Grinning Cracks Read online

  Fail clutched her cat. “I like my bones on the insides!” she wailed. “I got a feeling whoever this bad man is, he wants ‘em on the outsides!”

  “A common conundrum,” Zen agreed. “Outside, inside, potato, pot-ah-to.”

  “You know my mommy?” Fail blurted out.

  Amyl gaped at the child. “We know what you think of her down here,” he said, his tone suddenly dark and old. “You don’t think that’s got somethin’ to do with this, eh?”

  Fail blinked. “What?” she asked, peering up at the boy. “I’m in trouble ‘cause I think my mommy looks like a potato?”

  “The woman is insufferable,” Zen pointed out. “She beats her! She screams! God, it’s enough to make my brain hurt.”

  Fail whirled back to the machine. “How does everyone know me?” she demanded. Shelly leapt from Fail’s arms, winding her way around the girl’s left foot.

  Zen’s gears and motors ceased, plunging the room into silence. “How do we know, Am?” he asked after a moment, his tinny voice now quieter.

  Amyl stared first at Zen and then down at Fail. As Fail felt herself be scrutinized, Shelly wandered away from her side, sauntering over to Zen; the cat began sniffing at the base of his cylinder.

  “I don’t know,” Amyl admitted.

  There was something about the boy’s expression that caused Fail to shiver. She felt a whoosh of electricity course through her, followed by a blinding pain like nothing she’d ever experienced. It was worse than when Potato beat her, worse than when her appendix burst. She doubled over, feeling ripples and then waves of blinding, white-hot agony course through her. Tendons snapped, bones broke and mended, hair pushed out of her scalp and body at an alarming rate. Her gums bled as teeth exploded from her mouth, only to be replaced by other, larger ones splitting the soft tissue apart.

  Moments later, everything was over, and Fail looked down at her shredded pajamas. Long legs and arms moved as she willed them to, but they were completely foreign and awkward. “What the—” She began to weep and looked up at Amyl, her eyes searching his desperately.

  And yet Amyl the child was gone. In Fail’s own agony, she hadn’t noticed the boy go through a similarly rapid transformation. A strange—yet strangely familiar—young man stood before her, his own burlap clothing also ripped to pieces.

  “This happens sometimes,” the young man said. His voice was now deeper, more resonant. “We might be eighty by the time we get to Mister Head.”

  Fail looked around for Shelly and, where once a medium-sized kitten cavorted, there was now a larger, sleeker cat, all muscle and sinew.

  “I don’t want to be a lady!” Fail shrieked. She clamped her palms over her mouth and gaped from Amyl to Zen with wide eyes. “Whose voice is that?” she demanded, even as she knew it was her own.

  “Just relax,” Amyl encouraged. He approached her cautiously. His hair was longer now, flopping over beady eyes and curling around his forehead. He put one huge hand over her shoulder. “You’re still you in all the ways that matter.”

  Fail took deep breaths and felt her racing heartbeat slow. Even as she felt her body calm, her mind spun faster. She had the distinct impression that new knowledge, new understandings of things learned from both book and experience were being poured into her brain. Terms she’d never heard before—physics! calculus! gerund! psychosocial dynamics!—popped unbidden into her consciousness, and as each one flashed like words on a screen, each one seemed both alien and familiar at once. The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. The life expectancy for a domestic housecat is fifteen years. Presidents, cities, mathematical formulae...she knew it all as if she’d spent decades in school and in the world, and yet—

  “Minutes,” she murmured. She looked at Amyl, soft lines around his eyes and clearly deep into young adulthood when not long ago he’d been a child. “We’ve been down here for just minutes, but I...” Her voice trailed off, and Fail clutched the sides of her head.

  “I know.” Amyl cast his eyes downward. “I’ve gone back and forth so many times...If we get small again, you’ll lose it, and it’ll be okay.”

  Fail glared at him. “A brain can’t take all that, it’s got to do some serious damage over time!”

  Amyl shrugged. “Structurally, I don’t know, but emotionally maybe.” His skin flushed pink. “I don’t remember the things I learn and forget, but I remember the gaining and losing, if that makes sense.”

  “Not especially.”

  “I hate to interrupt your existential crises, children,” Zen put in, “but we’re about to be interrupted anyway.” His metal legs scrabbled against the floor, and the entire cylinder moved several feet forward. “There’s—oh, dear, I dare say your mother’s on her way.”

  Fail gave a little shriek. “How?!” she demanded.

  “No, no, no, I’m mistaken,” Zen amended hurriedly. “But she knows you’re here. She’s trying to locate you somehow, somewhere.” Zen’s cylinder rotated a half-turn to the right, and a panel opened up just under the jar on the cylinder’s top. A small black circle appeared, and its center soon filled with a white beam of light. The beam began to flash images against the nearest wall.

  There was Potato but now she was so many decades older, skin shriveled and hanging loosely around her jowls and neck. Her body seemed more compact, shrunken into a much less imposing figure. Where there used to be a massive black beehive wound around her head, the potato now had only greying flyaway wisps floating almost disconnectedly from a pale scalp. Behind still-huge bifocals were rheumy eyes red from crying.

  “It’s been thirty years, but I still miss her,” she was saying to someone Fail couldn’t see. “Oh, my little Ophelia!”

  Then the image was gone. Amyl turned to Fail, and Zen’s form took on a posture that gave the impression of also studying her. Fail shuddered and rubbed her hands against her arms. “Please don’t look at me like that,” she urged. “Just because she feels bad now doesn’t mean she should be off the hook.”

  “She sent you here,” Amyl confirmed. “But I hardly think she knew what she was doing.”

  “Can’t I just leave?” Fail asked.

  “Doesn’t work like that,” Zen replied. “You’ve already begun. Am’s got to get you where you’re supposed to go.”

  The air was filled with a keening wail, and Amyl’s body tensed. “Oh, blast.”

  “She’s awake,” Zen groaned.

  “Who?” Fail asked.

  “Not so much who as what,” Amyl said. He plucked Shelly from the floor, eliciting a protest from the now-aged feline, and began sprinting for the entrance to the corridor. “C’mon!” he yelled over his shoulder. “We’ve got to get out of here before she finds us!”

  The wailing grew louder. Fail scrambled after Amyl, her legs protesting as muscle met too-tight fabric, and behind her she could hear the whir and clang of Zen’s machinery. The walls and ceiling began to shudder as the crying drew to a crescendo. At first, it had sounded like the cry of a human woman, but now the sheer volume and desperation of it conjured images in Fail’s mind of an animal—or a pack of animals—being skinned alive.

  Amyl skidded to a stop before a brick wall. He spun and handed the cat to Fail and then proceeded to shove fingers into the mortar between individual blocks. His fingertips were quickly bloodied, knuckles scraped raw, and he hurled obscenities at the uncooperative masonry.

  Fail gently let go of Shelly and crouched beside Amyl, studying his progress. “What’re you trying to do?” she asked. She pressed the pad of her index finger against a patch of mortar; the material was long-dried and slightly crumbly, but not so much so that they could tear their way through the wall with any expediency.

  “This is the only way through to the next level,” Amyl replied. Sweat stood out on his forehead, dampening his hair. He fell backward onto his sit bones and sighed, rubbing at his face. Bloody smears and fingerprints stained his cheeks. “God, I really thought this would work. Always has before.”

  “You�
��ve gotten through here, through the wall?” Fail asked. She stared at the brick again, wondering if there was some way through they weren’t seeing.

  “He has indeed,” Zen confirmed. “Though how, I’m not sure. I’ve only heard you tell this part of the journey, Am, never seen it in the flesh.” The machinery shook and a chuckle escaped the cylinder. “Well, in a manner of speaking, that is.”

  The wailing, which had briefly died down, whipped back up again, rising to such a high pitch that Amyl and Fail were forced to press palms to ears as hard as they could. Shelly tried to cower beneath Zen, flattening herself to the floor and drawing her tiny triangle ears back and down. The cat emitted a low hum of a growl, threatening and eerie, but it was no match for the screeching going on all around them.

  Even as Fail felt her eardrums threaten to burst from her skull, something about the wall drew her attention. One brick, one solitary rectangle, was not flush with the rest of the barricade. It was indented perhaps only a half a millimeter, and yet that was enough to give her pause. Fail rose to her feet. She looked down at Amyl, still crouching and crying from the sheer volume of the disembodied howl. Dispassionately, Fail noted that Amyl’s efforts had all been about destroying the hardened cement, all about using his fingers as knives, chisels, picks, and the results were bruises and blood. Fail studied the displaced brick closely. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she informed it. She leaned in slightly, pursed her lips, and exhaled a delicate stream of breath directly at the center of the brick. Even as she performed the act, Fail felt no self-consciousness or inanity, only cool, assured confidence. When a golden glow surrounded the brick, she wasn’t sure if she imagined the sight or not, but either way, Fail knew it didn’t matter.

  The brick slid gracefully backward. Behind the wall, gears, levers, and pulleys groaned. Near the ceiling, the wall began to peel away from the molding. As the wall inched down, ancient iron chains became visible. Eventually, the chains dragged the entire unit to the floor, drawbridge-style. As the wall gave a final thump upon finishing its descent, the wailing ceased.

  When Amyl came to his senses and saw the wall down, he gasped. “How?”

  Fail regarded him with a tranquil smile. “You can’t always go about trying to hurt things,” she informed him. She snapped her fingers at Shelly. “C’mon, baby girl,” she cooed. Shelly relaxed and padded over to her mistress.

  Beyond the fallen wall, the group exited into a dark passageway dotted here and there with scattered skeletons. The passage took several winding turns and finally pushed them outdoors into a forest. Grey, sparkling light filtered down from between trees so tall they looked blurry toward their topmost boughs. The leaves, grass, and shrubbery were all such a sharp, piquant green that Fail wondered aloud if they were painted with emeralds. She immediately laughed at herself. “How silly,” she remarked.

  “Don’t be too sure.” Amyl plucked a leaf from a flowering bush. Taking Fail’s left hand in his right, he rubbed the top of the leaf against her palm. When he took the leaf away, Fail was left with a fine, glittering powder pooled into the estuaries of her chirognomy.

  Fail gaped at the shiny dust. “Is that really...?” Her voice trailed off and she looked back at Amyl, who was beaming at her.

  Further discussion would have to wait. A tawny form plunged from above, crashing itself against Zen’s cylinder with a thunderous clatter and an all-too-familiar keening. Though quieter, it still caused auditory pain being so near, and Fail and Amyl dropped to their knees. Even as Amyl tried to cover his ears again, he heaved forward and vomited, lithe body wracking itself with surging thrusts that looked both painful and inhuman. Shelly hissed at the crying thing, her back arching; the fur on her tail puffed the appendage out to bushy squirrel size.

  Zen’s cylinder was left a crushed, ruined shell. The legs were broken off and only the jar remained unbroken. The creature stopped its shrieking and stood, revealing a humanoid shape wrapped head to toe in tight-fitting, tan bandages. No facial features or even individual digits were visible, just trunk, torso, arms, legs, and head. The only area not bandaged completely was around the top of the skull, where silken brown hair burst through in straight arcs that stood at attention, as if they were waves of antennae incapable of lying flat.

  Seeing the thing reduced Fail’s fear, and yet she was quick to turn from its notice to focus on Zen. “Oh, God!” she cried, kneeling at the side of the fallen cyborg. She picked the jar up and cradled it gently. “Zen?”

  “I’m fine.” Zen’s voice came directly from the jar itself, hollow and unamplified. Now that the jar was up close, Fail could see what she’d already supposed, that floating in liquid was the distinctive squishy whorls of a human brain. “I feel a bit motion sick, but I suspect that’ll wear off. Oh, wait, I don’t have a stomach!” Zen barked out a laugh, and Fail’s expression softened in relief.

  “Thank goodness,” she sighed. “Now we’ll have to carry you, of course.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  The creature asserted its presence once more, responding to Shelly with a hiss identical in sound and volume. Fail snapped her head up, narrowing her eyes at the thing. “What are you?” she demanded. “How dare you hurt our friend?”

  “And us,” Amyl added weakly. He was still on all fours, staring down dazedly into a pool of his own sick. “You’ve hurt us as well.” He raised his head enough to look at Fail. “That’s Ilden,” he told her.

  Fail gaped at Amyl. “You know this thing?”

  “Don’t mean I know how to stop her screamin’,” Amyl replied. “I know her name, but I don’t know fuck-all about even what the bloody hell she is. She just wails whenever she’s awake, which thankfully isn’t often.”

  A bandaged hand ripped pieces of cloth from around Ilden’s face, revealing an angular chin and thin-lipped mouth. “Ain’t no ‘what,’ boy,” a husky voice announced. “Ilden’s a ‘who,’ she is.”

  Amyl sat back on his haunches and wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand. “Fine, you’re a ‘who.’” Amyl allowed. “A ‘who’ with a voice that can cut glass and induce nausea. Happy?”

  Fail studied Ilden’s face. Human, entirely, and unremarkable without injury or blemish. Dirty, to be sure, and neither flush with youth nor haggard with age, but there was no indication of why she should be swathed in bindings. Around both wrists, Ilden wore dirty strings with what looked like tiny finger bones decorating them—macabre charm bracelets. “Are you entirely all right?” Fail asked her. She placed Zen’s jar to the ground gently and stood, approaching Ilden. The other woman shrank from her approach.

  “Ilden’s fine, miss,” she growled. “Get away.” She swatted in Fail’s direction with one hand.

  “If you’re fine, why do you scream?” Fail asked. “You scream so loud we can hear it no matter where we are. Your pain runs throughout the...the Abyss.” She faltered on the last word, as if trying to remember a term from childhood. So recently, she reminded herself. Childhood was so recently. I should remember. I do remember...

  “The Abyss is a cruel place,” Ilden said. She stopped shrinking from Fail and straightened up, squaring her shoulders. Without the crouching and beast-like posture, Fail saw that Ilden was tall, slender, with keen, tense muscules clearly visible beneath the bandages. “I was like you once,” Ilden went on. “They took me to meet Mister Head, but Ilden got away.” There was a flicker of a smile that quickly morphed into a grimace. “But Ilden gots the pain sometimes from it all, the pain in Ilden’s heart that tears up and likes to burn from the inside!” She clutched at her chest. “So Ilden’s got to bind herself, you see, so she don’t explode!”

  Fail’s heart sank. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said. She moved closer to Ilden. “You’re not going to explode.” Fail held out her hand. As her palm crossed beneath a sunbeam, the last dusting of plant emerald still clinging to her skin began to sparkle.

  Ilden squeaked. “You is an angel, miss!”

  Fail shook her head. “N
o,” she replied, “I’m just a person, just like you, and we’re going to make sure no child ever gets sent here again.” She turned to Amyl. “We can take you home as well,” she told him.

  “You’re mad,” Amyl accused Fail. “You’ll get as mad as this one if you don’t come along, and quick.”

  “Really?” Fail asked. “So children go here and you take them to see this Mister Head, and then what?”

  “Don’t ask!” Zen whispered through his jar. “For God’s sake, don’t ask!”

  “Why not?” Fail moved toward the middle of the collective, gesturing wildly at the forest around them. “Why are you people all so willing to just stay here when the clear option would be to escape!”

  “Ilden don’t remember before the Abyss.”

  “So?” Fail asked, whirling to face the other woman. “Can it be any worse than experiencing agony so horrific that can maim and kill, just from the sound of you expressing it?”

  Before Ilden could respond, Fail spun around to Amyl. “And you, you were sent here yourself but you lead other children to someone who turns them to bone? How dare you!”

  Amyl opened and closed his mouth, unable to speak.

  “You.” Fail turned now to Zen’s jar. “You were a man once, and they’ve turned you to this unnatural thing! Are you willing to help others kill innocents just because you’re grateful to be alive?”

  “It isn’t really a life, is it?” Zen allowed. The liquid in his jar grew cloudier, murkier, and the brain matter was harder to distinguish.

  Shelly scampered to Fail’s side and began pawing at her leg. “What is it?” Fail grumped. She started to look down at her cat when a twinkling far in the distance caught her eye instead. Fail squinted. “What’s beyond the forest?” she asked, pointing.