It reacts to that name just the way she did the one time I tried it, with a sharp spasm and muscles knotting tight, a kind of rictus distorting her face. The only difference is that its limbs are so tangled that it can’t yank back a hand and hold it poised to strike me. I take my arm away from the thing’s neck, its tendons jumping now, and hold myself away a few inches: far enough to watch its eyes.
“Did you talk to one of them?” it snarls, and its voice could be a recording of Ksenia from almost two years ago, played back into this unnatural twilight. Not a single note, not one flex of her breath, has changed. “If you did, you’d better tell me.”
“What do you mean?” I ask it; I may not know where I am, or what precisely I’m speaking to; oh, but I still know my lines. That conversation made a terrible impression on me: I’d never seen such an awful look, like a bubbling wound, on anyone’s face before, and at the time I shrank into myself, frightened by what I’d evoked. “Are you asking if I talked to somebody about you? ’Cause if that’s it, just Josh, and you already know that.”
“Then why did you call me that?” A pause. “Even Josh doesn’t know they called me that. Are you telling me you just made it up?”
Just two soft little syllables, but already I knew better than to repeat them then, and I don’t repeat them now; once was enough. I’m trying not to glance to either side, since it feels important to keep my stare fixed on this thing’s gray eyes, but in my peripheral vision I can see the slither of its limbs retracting.
“I just thought it sounded nice, Ksenia. I’ve never really liked Kezzer as a name for you.” I paused back then, giving myself a moment to master my fear while we sat alone together near the gorge, Josh off pissing in the woods; I pause now. “You might want to put that hand down, before you do anything completely stupid.”
“I don’t believe it.” Ksenia’s voice echoes from the past and emerges from that thing’s mouth; but oh, its legs are buckling, shrinking, dragging back toward its body in white wormlike trails through the dusk and mud. Two years ago, this was the moment where her hand dropped back onto her leg, and I saw that she was shaking, violently. “I don’t believe that just came out of nowhere. Don’t think you can mess with me, Lexi.”
“If I say something,” I told her, “then that means it’s true. And if you can’t accept that, and I mean absolutely, then you’re not worth being my friend.”
That’s what I snapped at her then, so I recite it now, and I barely remember which time I’m in, which place; ever since I first glimpsed Josh through the window of my car, I’ve been so hopelessly swept up in dreams. But I remember that I felt just a bit cruel, speaking that way to Ksenia, because I knew in my heart that she wasn’t secure enough to say such a thing to anybody herself, not really. I knew she wouldn’t be able to withstand those words, coming from me. She was the one who’d raised her hand to me, ready to land a blow, but from the look in her eyes I had delivered that blow straight to her. She couldn’t even speak.
That poor pale-limbed monster has folded itself almost to nothing now, twisting into a tight rope of arms and legs, with Ksenia’s shocked face perched at the top. It looks away from me, just the way Ksenia once did, using all her strength not to sob, and I walk around it, slowly, carefully. The woods are so close, so close, though I can hardly see anything of them now but frayed darkness against a violet-gray sky.
The Ksenia-thing is at my back now, and I can hear it starting to whine, in a slow, sour, piercing drone. I can’t risk looking at it, can’t bear to feel so sad for anything; instead I pace as evenly as I can toward the opening between the trunks. The whine grows louder, creeping up the scale.
“I’m sorry,” I tell it, calling over my shoulder without letting my gaze turn. “I hope you’ll be okay.” And then I push my way into the darkness of the path.
It lets out a kind of shriek, and at last I look back. Just for an instant, I swear it.
Four figures are standing in a shaft of moonlight that seems to have come out of nowhere, and the Ksenia-thing isn’t one of them. A heap of old straw, of broken sticks, sprawls where the spider-Ksenia watched moments before, and instead I’m looking at the trio that followed me, lace and scale and seafoam. I’d forgotten all about the bite on my calf until I saw them, but now I can feel the pain of it, a dull, steady throbbing. The boy with the foamy hair is holding a small brown girl by the hand, and at the sight of her yearning little face I nearly forget myself, nearly scream and go charging back to them.
Because I know her. I’ve read her stories before, bounced her on my knees; I’ve chased after her, growling like a monster, while she screamed with laughter.
It’s Olivia Fisher, the daughter of my parents’ close friends. And she died six months ago, still just five years old; died of a disease that no one has been able to identify. She’s buried not far from Ksenia, swathed in the same dewy grass; I only have to wander a few steps to share my flowers between their two graves.
Oh, so this is the better world Josh talked about; this is where no one, so he claimed, will ever be wounded again.
The impulse to run to Olivia fades with a new understanding: how close I’ve come to joining her, and how close my parents are, even now, to weeping by a stone with my name on it, and I suppose with some awful mimicry of my body just below. If I ever thought before that I knew what terror is, I was wrong: it’s an electrified cloud, blindingly white, that steals my breath and my vision, disintegrates my bones, fills my throat until I feel sure I’m choking. I have to turn, to race up the path, but my legs won’t listen to my mind.
“Lexi?” Olivia whimpers, and then my paralysis shatters like a windowpane, my body spins away from her, and my fear turns from stillness into speed. I pound through the woods, guessing my way in the darkness, half-convinced I’m lost, but then I see the blackberry thicket like a mass of black teeth. I throw myself onto the ground and scramble through, not caring how the thorns tear at my face. Ksenia’s sweater snags and I thrash so hard the sleeve rips.
And then I reach the far side, and even though I’m still in the night, the woods, something in the atmosphere eases and my breath glides smoothly from my lungs again. I only really understand the oppression I felt in that impossible place, that travesty where Josh and Ksenia are living, now that I’ve left it behind.
Now that I’ve left them behind, along with little Olivia Fisher—and of course, of course, those other children who’ve died of the same unknown ailment in the past nine months. I lie on the dirt and twigs, letting the tremors slowly drain from my limbs, letting my breath gradually descend into something resembling normalcy.
I escaped, and that was all Ksenia wanted. She practically begged me to go. What can I possibly tell everyone—that I saw her alive, and Josh, and Olivia? Saw them captive—because isn’t that what they are?—in a world that I could hardly distinguish from ours—because isn’t that right, too? It was like a perfect simulation of here and now; at least, it seemed the same until I provoked it.
My phone is ringing, and I hesitate to answer—just in case I’m wrong, and I never got out after all. In case it’s Josh, his undertone rolling with bells. But no, the screen says Mom.
“Hello?”
“Lexi! Sweetheart, thank God! We’ve been beside ourselves with worry. Are you all right?”
I try to answer, but my voice becomes vapor, becomes clouds, and instead I burst out sobbing. Because how can I ever expect her to believe in the reality of what I’ve seen?
Because how can I tell her that I left my friends trapped, just so I could save myself?