Chapter 34 #3
It was the White Queen, except she was no longer a few years older than me. Her hair was shorter, her eyes darker, and the bundle she was dragging on the floor behind her was gray, not black.
I saw it all, saw the narrow dark corridor, the shiny black tiles on the floor as she dragged and dragged. I saw the door on the other side, white and polished, and it opened with a wave of her hand and a flash of purple light—purple, not white. But the door opened, and beyond it there was a room.
A wide room. A white room.
A room full of dishes.
Racks standing on wheels, none reaching over the woman’s hips. They were full of white cups and saucers, plates and silverware—full and clean, not a speck of dust anywhere that I could see.
The scene didn’t zoom in on her when she went through the door, though. I was left outside, still in the narrow corridor, watching, as she dragged the gray bundle all the way to the other end, then fell on her knees in front of the wall.
When she did, she turned to look back at the door, back at me as if she could really see me floating there in the nothingness.
In that split second, her mask fell off.
Her face crumbled. It collapsed like all that had been holding it up was gone, and what was underneath was not rage or cunning or cruelty—nothing at all what I expected.
It was something worse. Something that lived inside me, too.
Grief.
I knew it. I recognized it like an old friend. I felt it all the way to my bones.
Then the queen turned toward the wall and raised her hand, pressed it flat against the surface.
In the next tick, the image dissolved, and she was gone.
NO!
There really was no use.
The images were moving—and maybe it was just my imagination, but they moved with me. The faster my heart beat, the faster the flashes blinked in and out of existence, and the faster I seemed to spin.
Except I wasn’t twelve-hours certain of whether I was spinning or if the gallery moved.
Maybe both?
Calm down, I told myself, out loud or only in my head—it didn’t really matter.
The White Queen—that’s what I wanted to see.
The White and the Red, but mostly the White.
I wanted to see more. She’d taken the plaques, and she’d hidden them, and I needed to know where.
Such a strange room—with white walls and clean dishes on racks…
and why did it almost feel like I’d seen it before?
But my heart had steadied and the alarms in my head were no longer ringing, and the thoughts in there weren’t screaming, either. Slowly, I opened my eyes again, and then my breath caught right away—a baby.
I was looking at a baby, and the moments weren’t moving fast, weren’t flashing, so I could see it clearly.
It was a room, small but cozy, with candles on the windowsill, their flames barely moving. The baby lay there on a bed with rumpled sheets—an infant, really. Sleeping. Tiny.
There was a girl there sitting at the edge with it, wearing a black shawl over her head, her back turned to me. I saw her hands over her knees as she gripped them, head down, knuckles white.
Such a strange scene—and I thought the girl might be crying. Her shoulders shook a little, but maybe I was just making it up.
The queen, I thought. I needed to see the queen—not this.
But the baby, bundled up in white sheets, opened its eyes. Could have been a boy or a girl, but it had light hair—just a tiny curl over its forehead—which made me think it was a Spade.
The image changed, fell away, got replaced by another—but once again, it didn’t show me the queen.
A man carving a name into the trunk of a mechanical tree, his chisel sparking against the copper bark, tears on his face but a smile on his lips.
Two boys fishing at the edge of a canal in Neverwhen, their lines tangled together, arguing about whose fault it was that all the fish seemed to have swam away.
An old Heart woman on her deathbed, surrounded by family, pressing a glass heart into the hands of a young girl—who was the spitting image of her—and whispering something that made the girl laugh.
Another baby, this one older, in the arms of a Timekeeper woman nursing her by candlelight in a room full of clocks, all of them ticking at different speeds. The baby’s eyes were open and watching the hands move like she understood exactly what was happening, even if nobody else did.
A Diamond man weighing Sparetime on a silver scale; a little girl with flour in her hair standing on a chair to reach a kitchen counter, her tongue between her teeth; a young man hugging a black horse; a cat sitting alone on a field, watching the sky as a star shot right through the darkness…
All of these and more. So many more images rushed past me, bleeding into one another, lives and smiles and tears and heartaches layered on top of each other like pages in a book.
And I moved too fast to read all the pages, see all the details, but I thought I might try.
I thought, if I only had forever to fall, I could see all of it, everything that this gallery allowed me to see.
Yes, I decided. I could stay here forever.
After all, wasn’t falling better than standing when the ground underneath your feet could crumble and let go at any second?