Chapter 18 Stepping Through
Valentina stood dangerously close to the Hole in Nothing. She was making her final attempt to will shut the rift, to heal reality and cast out the fawn by severing its tether to the outside. It was her last chance to avoid stepping through.
The teenagers sitting fireside fell silent, watching Green and Valentina poised like statues on the wrong side of the barrier.
Long minutes passed. Green hovered his hand just behind her collar. She was swaying like a reed and he worried that she could pass out at any moment. He tried to add his own will and hope to her efforts, desperately wishing to protect his new friend and guide.
Somewhere, a barred owl hooted his territorial “who cooks for you” call.
A log popped in the fire.
He stayed tense, his eyes on Valentina’s shoulders, ready to snag her when she fell.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
A gust of cold wind whipped through the trees, parting Valentina’s hair and showing a paper-white line of scalp. Green shifted his weight from foot to foot.
He risked a check on Catskill.
He saw the fawn rolling down the side of a steep ravine like a luminous pearl. The wolf raced behind, down a near-vertical surface. Both creatures were unaffected by the landscape, but Green’s stomach turned as he pulled his thoughts away.
When his mind stepped back up to the window of his own eyes, Valentina was looking at him.
Her face was drawn and haggard.
“It’s not working. I’m going to get my pack. I may need it if I arrive somewhere unexpected. It’s time I step through and close it.”
His throat tightened.
“Wait, let me try. I haven’t tried yet. Give me some of that poultice.”
“Mr. Green, look at me. It wouldn’t do any good. I have had practice with this sort of thing and I am getting nowhere. Your job here is to monitor the fawn.”
“What if we tried together, side by side?”
She shook her head.
“My vision is beginning to tunnel. Even if closing the hole merely deposits me back here, whole and free of the fawn’s influence, I may have already waited too long to survive these injuries.”
“And if you experience one of that thing’s more extreme effects?”
“Then it won’t matter, but within the scope of what I can control, I will prepare for the more hopeful outcome.”
Green couldn’t help imagining his teacher transformed into a plume of greasy smoke or sun-bleached bones clattering to the ground as she stepped through.
Even then, what if it doesn’t work? What if she sacrifices herself for nothing and the hole stays open, and the fawn stays and kills again?
“I am going to get my pack. In order to will the hole shut from inside, I need to be conscious. I told you to prepare yourself for this.”
“I’m just asking if we’ve tried everything.”
“No, of course we haven’t, but I am dying. Others may be dying. And…it’s more than that.”
“What do you mean more?”
“I mean that wolf in your head is this ecosystem’s primary immune response to an invader like the fawn.
Like a white blood cell attacking a bacterium.
And that response is failing. There is a reason that the glass fawn has only been seen a handful of times.
Whenever it squirms its way into our universe, nature rejects its presence. That rejection is breaking down here.”
“If Catskill had more time, maybe he could break the stalemate.”
“He doesn’t. Neither do I.”
She wrapped herself into a hug and stood shivering in the dark.
“The world looks resilient to humans because we live fast, distracted lives. We do not feel the planet spinning beneath our feet. We do not have much firsthand experience with systemic fragility. Many of the cataclysms we know of are locked safely behind the glass of the fossil record. Stone seems solid and the seas appear immutable. It is an illusion. Yes, the Earth is resilient, but ecosystems? Ecosystems are a green film above a thin layer of soil. So many species, including us, hang in the sky like hot-air balloons. A simple fire. A sheet of nylon separating the warm air from the cool, producing lift. We think nothing will disturb these systems because we do not remember them being disturbed. We have been in the basket of the balloon all our lives.”
Green looked at her death’s mask face and wondered if these would be his last, defining memories of his brief mentor.
“I know that ecosystems can be fragile. I’m talking about you. I’m talking about not exhausting all the options available to us.”
“And I’m trying to get you to understand that the glass fawn isn’t just an individual threat, nor is it a slow accumulation of greenhouse gases.
It is not arctic ice melt or a warming sea.
We work in the realm of ecologies built on the backs of single organisms. What is the glass fawn in terms of that framework?
A thing from outside our reality that tore a hole in the world to get in. ”
“You’re saying Catskill is failing to stop a dangerous trespasser. I get it.”
A strange, territorial anger flashed across Green’s mind like heat lightning.
Valentina started limping toward her pack.
“No, I don’t think he is failing to chase a fox away from a chicken coop.
I think he is failing to turn away a dagger sinking toward the heart of life in these mountains.
And it is quite possible I am thinking too small.
Nature does not let the glass fawn stay in our world.
Not anywhere. Biology doesn’t tend to produce globally observable needless behaviors. ”
Dread, certain as the mountain, dug a well in Green’s core and dropped stone after stone into its echoing depths.
Plunk.
Plunk.
Plunk.
“If we just had a little more time.”
“Mr. Green, every breath hurts now. I have endured and spoken and explained this much to reflect my very high opinion of you and your potential, but this needs to be over and done.”
She dragged her pack close to the warming fire.
There was nothing left to say. He bit back empty protests and nodded at his teacher. He looked up and saw that Alf, Jerome, and Casper were all staring at them, listening to their conversation.
Alf stood, unsteady, clutching a bottle in both hands.
“I’m…I’m real sorry.”
Valentina turned to him.
“So am I.”
She stood in the firelight and reached trembling, frostbitten hands toward the flames. Jerome set aside his guitar, stood, and wordlessly lifted her pack. Casper helped her feed stiff, unresponsive arms through the straps.
“Perhaps I am on my way to stand beneath that antique sky once more. Perhaps even a reunion with old friends. Stranger things have happened. I never tested the anomaly with a living animal. Its effect on me may not mimic a pine log. It’s impossible to know.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Then started again.
“Mr. Green, I cannot honestly say that I expect we will meet again, but I can honestly say I hope we do.”
He forced on a smile, then a landslide of terror hit him like a wave of shattered stone.
It’s coming.
It’s coming.
It’s coming.
Catskill burst through the door of Green’s mind. There was a fleeting image of the fawn blurring across the landscape, stretching to the horizon like spilled watercolors, outstripping its own afterimage. Then the light all collapsed into the distance and it was gone. Terribly, utterly gone.
Green staggered and fell to his knees, returning to himself just as his teeth cracked together.
A breath later, and he was back and shaping warnings on his tongue.
It felt impossible that it was already too late.
It was already too late.
The fawn was there.
It was just there, stepping from the shadows into the ring of firelight.
A bad punch line.
A tragedy so complete and absurd it was comedy.
Valentina stood by the fire. Alf and his friends hung about in their loose circle. Green swayed on his knees.
Then, they fell.
Valentina, Alf, Jerome, and Casper tumbled to the dirt with obscene little thuds.
Each of them convulsed on the ground like toppled windup toys and the fawn wasn’t even looking at them. It didn’t even pay them the respect of its active attention.
It was looking at Green.
Green didn’t have a chance to stand before the buzzing disk in the center of the fawn’s head drew his eyes and left him bodiless in the white wastes of an alien blizzard.
He passed long, weightless hours in that featureless nowhere, feeling paradoxically bereft of physical form and somehow soiled.
A senseless feeling of urgency gnawed at him, but there was nowhere to stand and analyze it.
There was no solid ground. There was no geometry, no motion, no breaths to measure out the time.
And if there was a job to do, any job at all, it must be to unmake the galling, hateful thoughts that stained the pale, smooth blankness.
The perfect forever. The pristine oblivion. The unbroken winter.
Something shook the world and Green’s consciousness flickered back into his skull just as clods of earth rained down, knocking the fire into a column of sparks and dimming the light.
Catskill erupted from the soil, given speed like thought by the mountains that were his breath and blood.
Green surfaced from a thousand years of deep, frigid water and gasped in a breath.
The wolf was at his side.
Taking hold of a lupine shoulder that rippled like liquid stone, Green hauled himself to his feet.
His mouth tasted like burning plastic. He spat. There was a kick inside his chest as his heart remembered to beat. Then, the horned wolf and Green growled as one.
The fawn didn’t move and already Green could feel too many fingers tapping at his windowpanes, reaching for his mind.
“Hold its thoughts,” Green said.
Catskill took a step forward, the shadows rolling back from his head, a dark flower blooming into a skull.
His jaw dropped open in a toothy, wolfish grin, a jagged mountain range of darkness rising on his back like a map of the young Appalachian range a billion years before the first mammal huddled in its den.