Waycross
"Rise and shine, Snow White," the Gynander growls, and so the albino girl slowly opens her pink eyes, the dream of her dead mother and sunlight and the sheltering sky dissolving to the bare earth and meat-rot stink of the cellar.
Go back to sleep, and I'll be home again, she thinks. Close my eyes, and none of this has ever happened. Not the truth, nothing like the truth, but cold comfort better than no comfort at all in this hole behind the place where the monster sleeps during the day. Dancy blinks at the darkness, licks her dry, chapped lips, and tries hard to remember the story her mother was telling her in the dream. Lion's den, whale belly, fiery-furnace Bible story, but all the words and names running together in her head, the pain and numbness in her wrists and ankles more real, and the dream growing smaller and farther away with every beat of her heart.
The red thing crouched somewhere at the other side of the cellar makes a soft, wet sound and strikes a match to light the hurricane lamp gripped in the long, raw fingers of its left hand. Dancy closes her eyes, because the angel has warned her never to look at its face until after it puts on one of the skins hanging from the rusted steel hooks set into the ceiling of the cellar. All those blind and shriveled hides like deflated people, deflated animals, and it has promised Dancy that some day very soon she'll hang there, too, one more hollow face, one more mask for it to wear.
"What day…what day is it?" Dancy whispers, hard to talk because her throat's so dry, hard to even swallow, and her tongue feels swollen. "How long have I been down here?"
"Why?" the Gynander asks her. "What difference does it make?"
"No difference," Dancy croaks. "I just wanted to know."
"You got some place to be? You got someone else to kill?"
"I just wanted to know what day it is."
"It isn't any day. It's night."
Yellow-orange lantern light getting in through Dancy's eyelids, warm light and cold shadows, and she squeezes them shut tighter, turns her head to one side so her face is pressed against the hard dirt floor. Not taking any chances because she promised she wouldn't ever look, and if she starts lying to the angel he might stop coming to her.
"Sooner or later, you're gonna have to take a look at me, Dancy Flammarion," the Gynander says and laughs its boneshard, thistle laugh. "You're gonna have to open them rabbity little eyes of yours and have a good long look, before we're done."
"I was having a dream. You woke me up. Go away so I can go back to sleep. Kill me, or go away."
"You're already dead, child. Ain't you figured that out yet? You been dead since the day you came looking for me."
Footsteps, then, the heavy, stumbling sounds its splayed feet make against the hard-packed floor, and the clank and clatter of the hooks as it riffles through the hides, deciding what to wear.
"Kill me, or go away," Dancy says again, gets dirt in her mouth and spits it back out.
"Dead as a doornail," it purrs. "Dead as a dodo. Dead as I want you to be," and Dancy tries not to hear what comes next, the dry, stretching noises it makes stuffing itself into the skin suit it's chosen from one of the hooks. If her hands were free she could cover her ears; if they weren't tied together behind her back with nylon rope she could shove her fingers deep into her ears and maybe block it out.
"You can open your eyes now," the Gynander says. "I'm decent."
"Kill me," Dancy says, not opening her eyes.
"Why do you keep saying that? You don't want to die. When people want to die, when they really want to die, they get a certain smell about them, a certain brittle incense. You, you smell like someone who wants to live."
"I failed, and now I want this all to end."
"See, now that's the truth," the Gynander says, and there's a ragged zipping-up sort of sound as it seals the skin closed around itself. "You done let that angel of yours down, and you're ashamed, and you're scared, and you sure as hell don't want what you got coming to you. But you still don't want to die."
Dancy turns her head and opens her eyes, and now the thing is squatting there in front of her, holding the kerosene lamp close to its face. Borrowed skin stitched together from dead men and dogs, strips of diamond-backed snake hide, and it pokes at her right shoulder with one long black claw.
"This angel, he got hisself a name?"
"I don't know," Dancy says, though she knows well enough that all angels have names. "He's never told me his name."
"Must be one bad motherfucker, he gotta send little albino bitches out to do his dirty work. Must be one mean-ass son of a whore."
When it talks, the Gynander's lips don't move, but its chin jiggles loosely, and its blue-grey cheeks bulge a little. Where its eyes should be there's nothing at all, blackness to put midnight at the bottom of the sea to shame. And Dancy knows about eyes, windows to the soul, so she looks at the lamp, instead.
"Maybe he ain't no angel. You ever stop and let yourself think about that, Dancy? Maybe he's a monster, too."
When she doesn't answer, it pokes her again, harder than before, drawing blood with its ebony claw; warm crimson trickle across her white shoulder, precious drops of her life wasted on the cellar floor, and she stares deep into the flame trapped inside the glass chim-ney. Her mother's face hidden in there somewhere, and a thousand summer-bright days, and the sword her angel carries to divide the truth from lies.
"Maybe you got it turned 'round backwards," the Gynander says and sets the lamp down on the floor. "Maybe what you think you know, you don't know at all."
"I knew right where to find you, didn't I?" Dancy asks it, speaking very quietly and not taking her eyes off the lamp.
"Well, yeah, now that's a fact. But someone like me, you know how it is. Someone like me always has enemies. Besides the angels, I mean. And word gets around, no matter how careful-"
"Are you afraid to kill me? Is that it?"
And there's a loud and sudden flutter from the Gynander's chest, then, like a dozen mockingbirds sewn up in there and wanting out, frantic wings beating against that leather husk. It leans closer, scalding carrion breath and the fainter smell of alcohol, the eager snik snik snik of its sharp white teeth, but Dancy keeps staring into the flickering heart of the hurricane lamp.
"Someone like you," she says, "needs to know who its enemies are. Besides the angels, I mean."
The Gynander hisses through its teeth and slips a hand around her throat, its palm rough as sandpaper, its needle claws spilling more of her blood.
"Patience, Snow White," it sneers. "You'll be dead a long, long time. I'll wear your pretty alabaster skin to a thousand slaughters, and your soul will watch from Hell."
"Yeah," Dancy says. "I'm starting to think you're gonna talk me to death," and she smiles for the beast, shuts her eyes, and the afterimage of the lamp flame bobs and swirls orange in the dark behind her lids.