Noah spoke up, “Something came after Mia, and then when we walked back home, it came after all of us. We decided to hide out, but…”
“But that was a little while back,” the girl in the checkered scarf finished for them. “And now things aren’t adding up. Your families are acting weird, clocks are all wrong.”
“Yeah,” Noah said.
“Time is wrong,” the little girl from before said. Noah had looked her way when he said Mia.
In moving her eyes from one side of the room to the other to follow the conversation, the girl in the checkered scarf saw a flicker of something.
She adjusted her Sight to look.
No fricking wonder the kid had been so fast. Even the way they’d gone still…
The four children stood before her, and each of them was shattered. They were like mannequins or dolls, finely detailed, everything in the right place, but bits had broken away. Whole chunks were missing, and cracks radiated across their whole bodies. Where gaps existed, mice had crawled into the holes. Teeming hordes, occasionally skittering along the outside surface to find a space with more room. Here and there, a mouse ate a smaller mouse, and like some cartoon, it grew by the slightest fraction.
Noah was different. There were mice, yes, but the horrific rent that extended from the crown of his head to his left shoulder was occupied by what appeared to be a mangy dog, nestled into the hollow space.
The girl in the checkered scarf exhaled slowly.
When she unfocused her eyes, the multitudes became single features. Patches of fur. One of Mia’s eyes was black from corner to corner, glossy. Focus properly again… the eye socket was shattered, the empty space filled with large black rats.
“Ah… crumbs,” she muttered.
“What?“Noah’s little brother said.
“Well, there’s bad news and there’s worse news.”
“That’s not funny,” Noah said.
“Nope,” she said. “Bad news is, this whole scenario here? Pretty much none of it is real.”
“That’s good,” Noah’s brother said.
“That’s bad,” she said. “When I say this isn’t real, I’m referring to you guys, too.”
She could see the confusion, the alarm, even a bit of anger.
“Screw you,” Noah’s brother said. “Don’t play with us.”
He was pale, with longer blond hair that had almost led her to mistake him for a girl. She could see the rather large rat inside him. Next to the dog, it was the biggest spirit present.
It would be making him more aggressive, confrontational, probably territorial, if she had to guess.
It looked gravid. Pregnant.
She pushed the thought out of her mind. Too weird to consider.
“You keep going quiet,” Noah’s little brother said, accusatory.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m… ah geez. I’m sorry. But you’re just pretend, kind of.”
“You keep saying that,” Noah said. “Stop scaring my brother and his friends or we’re going to have a problem.”
I’m bigger than you, she thought. How big a problem could we have?
She didn’t say it aloud. Instead, she turned to the nearest desk with paper on it. She still had the pens Sandra had given her. One proper pen, one mostly empty pen that made ink only some of the time. “Come.”
They were careful, slow to approach, quick to start when she moved too quickly.
By the time they’d gathered closer, she had the sketch finished. They smelled like musk, like dust and sweat too.
An animal smell.
She’d drawn four rough outlines, like the ones that might appear on a bathroom stall.
“Here we have four people. I caught some of your names already. Noah, Mia…”
“Benjamin and Olive.”
“Heya,” she said.
“Whatever,” Benjamin said.
The girl in the checkered scarf looked at the girl who’d been named as Olive.
Olive was blonde, freckled, and had an expression that looked perpetually angry. Her fingers clutched the fabric of her pants..
“Olive doesn’t talk,” Noah said. “Something’s happened to her teeth since all this started. She keeps biting her tongue, and the words don’t come out right.”
Without being asked, Olive opened her mouth. The girl in the checkered scarf didn’t have a chance to look away before she saw.
Yep. Olive had mouse teeth.
Olive also had mouse spirits filling her mouth, their bodies making her cheeks bulge as they squirmed past.. Some had blood on their faces, where they’d bitten her tongue.
She shut her mouth. The bulging stopped. Only the occasional mouse eye peeked out from the cracks that stretched from each corner of her mouth to the nearest ear.
“You went quiet again,” Ben said.
“…We’ve got four people here, named Noah, Mia, Ben and Olive. These four people have shadows.”
She extended each picture to show the shadows each one cast. She filled them in, then folded the paper, so the shadows were on the ground, the original pictures standing up.
“Well, there was a man who made a magical reality for himself. Let’s call him the sorcerer. Now, when wizardly types make these places for themselves, they base it on things they know, on reality. That’s pretty normal. But this guy, well, he worked it out so…”
She folded the paper forward and backward, then tore it along the middle, separating the shadows from their sources.
“…He could bring something very much like the real Noah, Mia, Ben and Olive with him. Along with the houses, and the streets and everything else. With me so far?”
“Oh my god,” Mia’s voice was faint whisper. A mousy whisper, but the girl in the checkered scarf didn’t want to do the kids the disservice of thinking like that.
“And now he’s making it the way he wants it, pretty much. That includes making deals with monsters. Monsters get to do what they did in the bad old days, when we had more superstition than outright protection against them, and he gets payment in some form or another, or so I understand.”
“That monster that came after me?” Mia asked. “The squirmy people? The beautiful woman and her wild child?”
“Betting they’re all people who paid the sorcerer for the chance to hunt you. And they can, because it’s not quite real. The real Noah, Mia, Ben and Olive should be out there somewhere, going about their ordinary lives. Maybe a little bit weaker or prone to getting sick since a bit of them got taken away.”
“Holy fuck,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “I… I really want to deny this, to say it’s impossible, that it’s… Fuck!”
The shout was so sudden it made both the girl in the checkered scarf and Buttsack jump.
“That’s a good way of putting it. Like I said, I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Bad and worse,” he said. “What-”
He stopped. The girl in the checkered scarf had raised a hand to interject.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s the bad. It’s not the worse.”
All four children stared at her, expressions stark.
“Listen, I was thinking I’d do this thing with scrunching up the paper, and then showing the damage it’d do, but you don’t deserve stupid little theatrics. All the stuff he’s doing to alter his reality, the stuff that you’re doing that’s different from how the real versions of you would act? Well, you’re fragile. You’re falling to pieces.”