Alabaster

"Is this a riddle?" she asks the bear.

"I don't answer riddles," the bear replies.

"That's not what I asked you."

"If I still had a stomach," the bear says, "I'd like one of those chocolate bon-bons there," and then he doesn't point at the silver serving platter because he can't move, and Dancy decides she's better off ignoring him and looks at the two paintings, instead.

The one on the right shows a naked corpse so emaciated that Dancy can make out the sharp jut of its hip bones, the peaks and valleys of its ribs. Sunken, hollow eyes, gaping mouth, and the woman's left breast has sagged so far that it's settled in her armpit. She lies on a bare slab, and there's only a hard wooden block to prop up her skull.

"You could put one into my mouth. I might remember how to taste it."

"Shut up, bear," and now Dancy examines the painting on her left. This dead woman might only be sleeping, if not for the grief on the face of the old man seated there at her side. Her hands folded neatly across her breasts, and she's dressed in a satin gown and lies on a bed covered with white roses, two soft pillows tucked beneath her head.

"It is a riddle," Dancy says. "One is the truth, and one isn't. Or they're both true, but only partly true. They're both lies, without the other."

"Give me a bon-bon, and I'll tell you which," the stuffed bear growls.

"You don't answer riddles. You said so."

"I'll make an exception."

"I don't think you even know."

"I'm dead. Dead bears know lots of things," and Dancy's thinking about that, trying to decide whether or not she could even get a piece of the candy all the way up into the bear's mouth with her wrists tied together.

"All right," she says, but then there's a rustling sound behind her, like dry October leaves in a cold breeze, and the air smells suddenly of ci

I never knew ice had a smell, she thinks, turning, and there's a very pretty boy standing on the other side of the room, watching her. The door's still closed, or he shut it again. He's tall and very slender, maybe a little older than she is, and wearing a black velvet dress with a dark green symbol like an hourglass embroidered over his flat chest. His long hair is the exact same green as the hourglass, and his eyes are the color of starlight.

"Hello, Dancy," he says and takes a step towards her. He's barefoot and has a silver ring on each of his toes. "Who were you talking to?"

"The bear," she says, and the boy smiles and reaches into a pocket of his dress; he takes out a small stoppered bottle and holds it up where she can see. The glass is the amber color of pine sap or deep swamp pools stained by rotting vegetation.

"The Ladies have asked me to speak to you," he tells her. "I've brought them something quite precious, but they thought you should see it first. And, I admit, I've been wanting to see you for myself. You have a lot of people talking, Dancy Flammarion."

"Did you know he was coming?" she asks the bear, or her angel, it doesn't really matter which, since neither of them answers her.

"You're not exactly what any of us expected. Why did you come to Sava

"I'm not sure," she says, and that much is true, all her dreams after Waycross, all the things she sees in dark hours, only bits and tattered pieces, something broken, and there wasn't time to figure out how all the parts fit together.

"You didn't come for the Ladies?"

"They're not real monsters," she says. "They're nothing but witches and perverts and ca

"No," he says. "They're not. Did you come for me, then? Did you come for my master or one of the Parsifal?"

"I don't know."

"Did you come for this?" and the boy in the black dress holds the bottle out to her, and Dancy looks back at the bear again, imagines a story where he springs suddenly to life and leaps across the room to devour this strange boy in a single bite.

"No. I don't even know what that is," she says.

For a moment, the boy doesn't say anything else, watches her with his brilliant starshine eyes, eyes to read her mind, her soul, to ferret out lies and half truths. They're starting to make her feel light-headed, those eyes, and she glances down at the floor.

"Do I frighten you, Dancy?"

"No," she lies. "I'm not scared of you."

"Look at me then," he says, and when she does, Dancy sees that she isn't standing by the bear and the dead-woman paintings anymore, but sitting on the red sofa again, and the duct tape binding her hands is gone. The pretty boy is sitting beside her, on her left, staring down at the amber bottle in his hand. The glass looks very old, oily, prismatic. He shakes it, and inside something buzzes and flickers to life, lightning-bug flicker, and soon the bottle has begun to glow as brightly as the fancy lamps set around the room, and she can't look directly at it anymore.

"Some people still think that it's the Grail," he says. "It isn't, of course. The alchemist Petrus Bonus thought it might be a splinter of the lapis exilis, but it isn't that, either. For a long time, it was lost. It turned up a few years ago in a Portuguese fisherman's nets, trapped inside this bottle. The fisherman died trying to open it."

"So what is it?" Dancy asks, trying not to hear the low, thrumming voices woven into the light from the bottle. A rumbling thunderstorm choir to rattle her teeth, to make ashes of her bones and soot of her white flesh.

"Just a toy. An unfinished experiment. Some forgotten, second-rate wizard's silly trinket."

"Then it isn't precious at all," Dancy says, and her eyes have started to hurt so badly that she looks away. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, and the thrumming sound is starting to make her head ache.

"It's quite useless, but there are people who would die for it. There are people who would kill for it."

"You're just another riddle, aren't you?" Dancy whispers. "I'm sick of riddles." She's holding her fingertips to her temples, eyes squeezed shut, the voices stuck inside her head now and trying to force their way out through her skull.

"But that's all there is, I'm afraid. In the whole, wide, irredeemable world, that's all there is, finally."

"No. That's not true," Dancy says. "There's pain-"

"But why? Why is there pain, Dancy?"

"So there can be an end to pain," and she wishes on the names of all the saints and angels she can remember that the boy will stop talking, stop asking her questions, kill her and get it over with. She doesn't want to be alive when the voices from the bottle find their way out of her head.

"What do you hear, Dancy Flammarion? The voices, what do they sing for you? What songs do they sing for martyrs and monster slayers?"

"They hate you," she says and then bites down hard on the end of her tongue so that she won't say anything else, nothing else she isn't supposed to say. Her mouth tastes like salt and wheat pe

"That's nothing I didn't already know. What do they sing for my oblation, for your sacrifice?"

The throb behind her eyes folding and unfolding, becoming something unbearable, unthinkable, that stretches itself across the sizzling sky, ru

And for her answer, the rustling autumn sound again, though this time she thinks it's actually more like wings, leathery bat wings or the nervous wings of small birds, the flutter of ten thousand flapping wings, and Dancy knows that if she opens her eyes it won't be the boy sitting next to her. Something else entirely, something much closer to whatever he really is, and now the red room stinks of roadkill and shit and garbage left to slowly rot beneath the summer sun.