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The newcomer looked at her, surprise evident on its face—a face mostly suggested by the arrangement of dark and light spots and bumps and holes in the dun-colored surface. "You don't know me?" The voice was soft but surprisingly clear. "I'm the Stone Girl. I thought everyone knew me. But you didn't know enough to hide, so I guess that makes sense."
"I'm sorry. Thank you for helping me." She stared out along the empty hillside. "What . . . what were those things?"
"Those?" The Stone Girl gave her a look of mild surprise. "Just some Ji
"So who are you?" the little girl asked when she had straightened up. "Why don't you know about Ji
"Just a stranger," Renie said. "A traveler, I guess." The Stone Girl might look as though she had been quickly molded from raw soil, but there was an odd suppleness to her movements, as though she could bend in places other than just the normal joints. "Do you live here?" Renie asked her. "Can you tell me anything about it?" A sudden thought struck her. "I'm looking for some friends—one is a small man, almost as dark as me, the other is a girl with curly hair and paler skin. Have you seen them?"
The indentations that were the Stone Girl's eyes widened, "You sure ask a lot of questions."
"I'm sorry. I'm . . . I'm lost. Have you seen them?"
The little head tilted slowly from side to side. "No. Were you out in the Ending?"
"If you mean that place over there where things get . . . kind of strange, hard to see. . . . Yes, I guess so." Renie suddenly realized how tired she was. "I really need to find my friends."
"You need to get out of here, that's for sure. I do, too—I should never have been out so late, but I was trying to get to the Witching Tree to ask about the Ending." The Stone Girl followed this unedifying explanation with a moment of silent thought. "You'd better come with me to see the stepmother," she said at last.
"The stepmother? Who's that?"
"Don't you have one? Don't you have a family at all?"
Renie sighed. This had become another one of those incomprehensible Otherland conversations. "Never mind. Sure, take me to this stepmother. Is it far?"
"Shoes. Down by the bottom of the Pants," the Stone Girl added, equally cryptically, and waddled past Renie to begin clambering down the hillside.
It didn't take long for Renie to understand the geographical reference, although it was not the kind of understanding that really explained anything.
As they made their way down the hillside in the dying light, following the course of the river, which emerged through a gash in the hillside and splashed energetically down toward the misty valley below, Renie began to see that her earlier observations had been disturbingly true. The shapes of the distant hills mimicked that of human forms, although they were still true hills, made at least on the surface from soil and covered in vegetation, as though earth had covered over the carcasses of titan forms. But where the giant on the black mountaintop had been singular and unquestionably alive, these smaller and more numerous forms buried in the earth seemed the remnants of some impossibly earlier time.
"What is this place?" she asked her guide when she caught up with her again.
The Stone Girl tried to look back over her shoulder, but it was hard without a neck. "Haven't you been here? It's Where The Beans Talk. You can see all the giants that fell. They're big," she added somewhat u
"Real giants?" Renie asked, then immediately felt stupid. As if such a question could mean anything in a world like this.
The Stone Girl seemed to take it at face value, however. "They were. They fell. I don't remember why. Maybe you could ask the stepmother."
As they followed the line of the cataracts down, Renie began to understand the rest of the girl's strange description. When she had seen them through the mist, the land's unusual features had seemed only the effect of odd hills and shadowy copses of trees, but now that she could see better she began to make out a strange order. One great fold of hillside, a ridge with a line of trees stark along its spine, was now revealed to be a single huge. . . .
". . . Sleeve?" Renie said. "It's a sleeve? Do you mean we're walking down a . . . a shirt?"
The Stone Girl again twitched her head in the negative. "Jacket. We're in the Jackets now. The Shirts are over there." She pointed a stubby finger. "Do you want to go to the Shirts?"
Renie shook her head violently. "No. No, I was just . . . surprised. Why is this country . . . why is it all made of clothes?"
The Stone Girl stopped and turned, apparently tired of trying to talk over her shoulder without the proper anatomical equipment. She looked as though she suspected Renie of making sport of her. "Why, they came off the giants, didn't they? When they fell."
"Ah," said Renie, who could think of nothing else to say. "Of course."
As they descended through river mist down a long fold of one of the Jackets, picking their way between the small but stubborn pines that seemed to cluster on all the most narrow and difficult bits of the path, Renie asked her small guide, "Do you know anything about birds that talk?"
The Stone Girl shrugged. "Sure. Lots of birds talk."
"This one kept repeating the same thing again and again, no matter what I asked it."
"You can't really talk to the ones that are asleep," the girl told her.
"What does that mean? That bird was flying—it wasn't sleeping."
"No, that's just how they are when they first get here, all sleepy, doesn't matter if they're flying or nothing. Used to be, anyway—there aren't many that come anymore. But the new ones never understand much at first. Just say the same things, over and over. I used to try to talk to them when I was little." She darted Renie a quick look, just as any real girl would, to make sure that Renie realized she was very grown-up now, not just a kid. "The stepmother said it wasn't our business—we should let them sleep, let them dream."
Renie pondered this with a growing sense of excitement. "So the birds . . . are sleeping? Dreaming?"
The Stone Girl nodded, then swung herself down to a lower section of the path and waited for Renie to follow. "Yeah. Watch out for that part—it's pretty slippery."
Renie balanced, then let herself slide down beside her. "But . . . but what do you call this place, anyway? Not the . . . the Jackets, here, but all of this." She lifted her hands. "Everything."
Before the girl could answer, a terrible choking sob came echoing up the furrowed hillside. Renie flinched so badly she almost lost her footing and fell. "Oh my God, it's another one of those things!"
Her guide was calmer than she was, holding up her blunt fingers for quiet. For a moment, as they stood in the mists, Renie heard nothing but the soft rush and splash of the nearby river. Then another ragged cry rose from the valley below.
"It's farther away now," the Stone Girl pronounced. "Going the other direction. Come on."
Renie, only slightly heartened, hurried after her.
It was easier going as they neared the valley floor, but the mist was thicker, too, and the slow twilight seemed finally to have made the turn into night. In deepening shadow the strange shapes of the clothing, the mountainous shirts and pants only partially concealed by a cloak of earth and vegetation, seemed even more disturbing. Here and there Renie thought she could see smaller shapes moving in the mist, as though people watched her and the Stone Girl—people who did not particularly want to be seen in return. Renie was grateful to have a guide. Fumbling her way alone through these strange hills in growing darkness, especially with those screaming somethings on the loose, was not a pleasant idea.