The Children(110)

Mother (2025)

Ennis Sharpe (1991–)

The Burgess Factory, Brooklyn





Guin was in the dark. The dark was absolute.

Panic made her weightless, made her sway and stumble. She dropped to a crouch, both palms pressed to the floor.

It had been a long time since Guin had experienced genuine lightlessness. She’d lost her immunity, grown soft on incomplete city darks. The blackness took her like a river and carried her back to a night that was almost as dark as this room, barely lit by a paring of moon.

The memory of their flight through the woods couldn’t hold her anymore, she wouldn’t let it. But it could move past her and knock her down, like the careless brush of an animal. Her shoulders tensed, her head bowed. Don’t get lost, Guin. Name what you can.

The floor felt gritty. Her fingers slid over poured concrete and met resistance. A strip of tape, peeling. It took her longer to name the odor on the air. Thick. Waxen and sweet. Then a vision skidded over the dark: pollen on petals, falling in a lurid dust. Lilies, that’s what it was. Beneath it, the closet-y breath of camphor.

Though she could see nothing, her eyes kept forcing meaning onto the dark, scribbled in sizzling filaments and smudgy will-o’-the-wisps. When an actual bulb switched on, ahead and to her left, all the imaginary lights snapped flat.

Guin stared, breathing through an open mouth, fingertips pressed to the floor. It was a ghost light, standing in the gloom like a Narnian lamppost. Another blinked on, to her right. Then another, and another. Guin knew the structures coming into view had been there all along, but she couldn’t shake her sense of them as photosensitive creatures, rising like moths to meet the light.

I know where I am.

The freestanding bulbs, the lily-and-camphor air. The erratic outline of hostile structures stretching ahead of her and out of sight, fit impossibly inside the factory floor. Of course Guin knew what this place was meant to be. She was standing in the Dreamers’ Graveyard.

This perilous precinct of the Ninth City appears in The Wicked Few, the last book Edith wrote. It’s the subterranean sinkhole where dead dreams go, a seemingly endless patchwork place where no one lives and few enter, and the only thing moving is the occasional dream picker’s cart. These foolhardy few scavenge dead places for the magical objects that can be found inside them, glowing like items in a video game.

Guin’s chest pulled around every breath. She was in too many places at once, pinned together too thickly. In Red Hook, in the Ninth City, inside her brother’s mind. She didn’t think she could make herself take another step.

Then the building right ahead of her, narrow and eccentrically peaked, resolved into familiarity. Once dear and long departed, its windows flickering boxes of silver and blue. Art Church.

My god. She thought it helplessly. What was Ennis doing? Did he hate her this much?

Every reconstructed line of their father’s studio was as she remembered it. Yet as a whole it was wrong, possessed with an aura of malignancy. Guin crept closer anyway. She peeked in the windows and lost her fear in the strangeness of what she saw.

The flickering came from a dozen old TV sets. They faced the windows, perched on stands and tables and the floor. They were probably as old as she was, but, taken together, had a futuristic effect. A nightmarish sci-fi movie future, a villain’s lair stocked with moving images.

Llewellyn played over every screen. He paced and sweated and fought, embraced and stabbed and leaped acrobatically. He laughed and wept and drank poison, and thus, with a kiss, died. Grainy and young and alive. On every screen a different performance, all running in heated silence.

Guin pressed herself to the window, heart sweating acid like a busted battery. Handsome and callow, her father had been. Also, brilliant. With the volume off you could see it clear as anything. There could be no crueler contrast than the one between these beautiful specters and the man she remembered at the end, aged before he was old.

When she did manage to look away, Guin was disoriented by the return to reality. To Ennis’s built reality. No, she thought savagely. Ennis didn’t build anything. He only gave shape to something unspeakable.

Cold light sheered eccentrically off plywood and brick and cement. Shadows pooled in black wedges beneath every overhang. Guin couldn’t see far, couldn’t anticipate. Every time she started to perceive the gaps in the illusion—places that were fronts, bits of trompe l’oeil, all those stage-set tricks—she’d blink, take a step, and the illusion would reseal itself.

She passed the husks of an old-school coffee shop, a stucco-front bungalow, a patch of lush fake grass behind a wrought-iron gate. These lost places must have meant something to Ennis. All she could see was proof of the years he’d spent without her, making a life she didn’t recognize. Then she saw the theater.

Neither the Mortal Cinema nor the movie palace of Film Still. Something humbler.

It was a re-creation of that narrow revival theater in Vermont where she and Ennis spent so many hours. This Graveyard doppelg?nger was dull and unwelcoming, but for the movie poster pasted beside its doors. Curling at the bottom, free of text, it showed a beautiful girl, her limpid eyes cast like Dietrich’s to the heavens. Maeve Carter.

The sight of her face filled Guin with an impersonal kind of sorrow. Maeve had seemed such a villain when they met, but she’d been a child. She was only ever a child. She died at sixteen, in the long gap between the Farmhouse fire and the delayed filming of The Ninth City. There was a shady boyfriend and prescription drugs and a sordid mess of undisclosed detail, and paparazzi shots of her blondined mother behind black glasses, looking like the walking dead.