Seven

The thing called Mister Sticks felt Penny bend slightly to feel around for whatever it was that she had just stepped onto. She gave a soft grunt of surprise, then muttered, "It's a grate. Set into... concrete? Covered in grime, too. Ech. Disgusting."

She straightened up, and he heard the soft rustling of her wiping her hand on the jacket of her suit. "We're not in the forest any more," she said flatly. "Feel around. I think we're in an alley or something, but fuck me if I know how."

He lifted the one of his overlong arms that wasn't busy keeping him anchored to the clown and took a few shuffling steps around. His wooden fingers came into contact with something that, while indeed covered in dirt and grit, was undoubtedly a brick wall. A moment later, there was a loud bang as one of his knees impacted the side of a rusted dumpster.

"Well, this is weird," he rasped.

"This entire place is weird," said Penny sharply. Her voice was still slightly strained, as if she were fighting to keep control of herself but simultaneously trying to hide that fact from him. "Walking into a city without seeing it is hardly weirder than anything else. Hold on, I think I see something."

He saw it too, just a second after her. There was a distant, faint light in front of them, outlining the mouth of the alley. Wordlessly, the two of them crept forward until the dimness became clear enough for them to tell what it was: the glow from a nearby house's window.

It was a city, or at least a suburb. The street they had just walked onto stretched away to the left and right, curving slightly until it intersected with another, larger one some distance away on their left and disappeared over a hill on the right. There were no cars, but there were lights on in some of the houses.

And, at regular intervals along the side of the road, tall lampposts with large brass flowers as lights.

"The forest is gone," said Penny's voice. He looked down. She had turned around and was staring back into the alley from whence they had arrived. "It's a dead end."

He turned as well. It was, indeed, a dead end; the alley just behind the grating was blocked by a decidedly solid-looking brick wall.

"It's making a new one," he said. "Wherever we are. You said it would change every time you woke up. And now it's changed anyway, even though you didn't-"

He stopped. The thick makeup on Penny's face was smeared heavily, and had run in large tracks down her cheeks. She had been crying - was still crying, he saw. A large tear was running down her face, and she was blinking rapidly. Her right hand was clenched tightly around a set of scratches on her left wrist, squeezing sporadically. She won't be okay for hours.

"Come on," he said. "Let's find somewhere to hide out. Maybe we can get into one of these houses."

She snorted. "Yeah, right," she muttered. "Like anyone will let us in."

But she fell into step beside him as he started off down the street, towards the hill. It was high ground, the highest that he could see, and might let them catch a glimpse of an easier path towards their destination. And there were houses up there, so if nothing else panned out they could at least find somewhere to rest.

He became aware, gradually, that Penny was staring around wildly at every house they passed.

"What is it?"

"I know these houses," she said. Her hand clenched tightly around her wrist again. "But they're all in the wrong places. And the streets are all labeled wrong, or missing. The signs say this is Cockbill Street, but the houses are from Everton, and Ash is supposed to come before Oak, and West Main is missing entirely." Her voice became more rapid and edged with frantic urgency with each word.

He looked around at the houses. There was a faint twinge of familiarity in the back of his brain, but that feeling had been triggered by almost everything that he had seen since waking up in the forest. "What is this place supposed to be, then?"

"My hometown," said Penny. Her voice was high and quiet, more a squeak than anything. "And my house should be up on the hill."

He nodded. There didn't seem to be anything else to say, so the two of them walked in silence for a few minutes. Then they reached the bottom of the hill, and he spotted the other house.

It was tiny, hardly more than a shack, with a glass door that had been cracked heavily at some point in the past and then never repaired. The windows were all dark and covered in grime, the shingles on the roof were falling off, and the aluminum siding was overgrown with Virginia creeper vines. The car sitting in the driveway was an ancient-looking Oldsmobile, covered in rust and with half the tires obviously deflated.

He glanced around. All of the other houses in the area were, while not exactly opulent, at least well cared for, and larger.

"I don't like this place," Penny muttered. He looked down. She had wrapped both arms tightly around herself, and had both eyes squeezed shut. "It's wrong. It's all broken. It's not my home. It's a mock-up. It's creepy."

The shack pulled his gaze back to it. He wanted to go inside, to see why it was so different - but there was Penny, obviously just a few moments away from panicking again. She was fighting, but...

"Come on," he said, taking her shoulder again. "Even if it's a mock-up, we can get in your house and rest for a while."

She nodded slightly, and started walking again.

Eventually, they reached the top of the hill, and Penny wordlessly pulled him towards the third house on the right. It wasn't particularly large, but it was well-kept, like the rest. It was a two-story affair, as well, though it wasn't very broad.

There were no lights on inside.

Penny walked up to the door, then stopped, frowning. "I don't have my damn keys," she said. "How are we supposed to get in?"

He staggered up beside her, leaned back for a moment, lifted one awkward leg, and kicked the door so hard that the frame flew into splinters as it swung open.

"Like that," he said flatly.

She stared up at him for a moment, her expression entirely blank, then shook her head and walked in, picking her way carefully over the fragments of wood. "I feel like I should care," she said, "but honestly, I just want to curl up on my couch with some ice cream."

He had to stoop to make his way through the remains of the door frame. Inside, Penny flicked on a few lights, bathing the hallway they were in with warm yellow light.

"At least this is normal," he heard her mutter to herself, just before disappearing into a side room.

It wasn't a particularly lavish house. There was a living room with a television and a leather sofa, a kitchen with a refrigerator and island counter, a sitting room with a few small bookshelves, and a dining room with a table barely large enough for two and a mirror on one wall.

There was also a staircase leading up to the second story. Penny was stomping her way up, taking off the outer layer of her clothing as she went. The shoes, jacket, and hat she had worn were already discarded carelessly by the banister.

"I," she called, without looking back at him, "am going to take a shower. Eat whatever you want, I don't care. Just leave me some ice cream." Then she disappeared.

He thought about following her, or at least exploring the second story, but something in his head told him that she'd rather be alone at the moment. So he lurched into the kitchen instead.

To his own surprise, he wasn't hungry. Come to it, he wasn't sure that he could be hungry given his current circumstances, but whatever the answer to that, he wasn't at the moment. He checked the contents of the refrigerator anyway. Normal.

He wandered out again, into the room with the television. It worked as well - at least, so far as turning it on. A commercial for Dawn dish soap was playing. When he pushed one of the buttons marked CHANNEL, however, nothing happened. He tried the remote as well, with similar results. After three minutes of consecutive uninteresting commercials, he gave up and stalked into the sitting room instead.

The bookshelves were all about waist-height, and packed to bursting with everything from cookbooks to high fantasy. He selected one of the latter at random - the title proclaimed it to be The Sword of Shanarra - and flipped it open.

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.

He stopped.

That was all that was legible on the page. The rest seemed... foggy, as if the words were just out of sight even when he looked directly at them.

He turned the page.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

Another.

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?

Every word was familiar to him, every phrase another sparkle in the shattered glass of his memory. He knew these words. 

He turned another page. There were two legible snippets on this one.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

There was a loud, wailing shriek from the dining room. It wasn't Penny's voice, or any voice at all, but the sound of metal scraping on metal, like a power saw through a wrought-iron fence. He dropped the book and rushed in.

The noise stopped just as he spotted the mirror. There, etched into the glass as if scratched onto the back side of the mirror, were the words:

SHE'S

MINE