“No.” I don’t know whether I’m agreeing or disagreeing with her. My lips feel numb.
Eva rises slowly from the table and takes a book from the shelf. The cover is worn red cloth, with a purplish stain on the back. “This was here when I arrived, somehow. It belongs back in your world, I suppose.” She tries to say it casually, but I see the way her thumb moves along the spine.
I reach for the book with a feeling of profound unreality, flipping through the pages because that’s what you do when someone hands you a book and you don’t know what to say. Rackham’s art flutters past like tangled shadows: branches and ball gowns, towers and thorns, dozens of dark tales told so many times they came true.
I think of Dr. Bastille saying tartly, The existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller. I guess there must have been a first time each of these stories was told, somewhere in the way-back reaches of time, centuries before the Grimms ever tried to turn a profit on them. It was probably just some ordinary person whispering across a fire or carving pictures into whalebones or daubing mud on the walls of a cave, casually calling a new universe into existence.
It occurs to me with a sudden, slightly hysterical surge of hope that I am a pretty ordinary person, myself. That the only thing stopping me from writing a new story is the fact that I’m bad at it, and dropped my creative writing class after three weeks rather than suffer a B+. I felt self-conscious and stupid every time I sat down to write, very aware that I was just making things up. But maybe every story is a lie until it isn’t; maybe I’m not the one who has to tell it, anyway.
“Do you have a pen?” My voice sounds completely normal, as if my pulse is not double-timing in my throat, as if my whole heart isn’t resting on the success or failure of this extremely sketchy plan.
Eva produces a trimmed feather and a pot of ink, looking at me as if faintly worried about mental stability. I turn to the very back of the book, past the afterword and the publisher’s note about the typeface, past Rackham’s final, curling vine. There are three extra pages at the end, entirely blank.
I set the quill to the page and write: Once upon a time …
And I swear, the universe listens. I feel it as a silent thrumming through the soles of my feet, the plucking of a string too vast to hear. The windows rattle in their frames.
I add another clumsy sentence or two about a princess who grew into a queen who became a villain and then, eventually, a hero. I spin the book to face Eva and slide it across the table. “Your turn.”
She reads the page and her face goes tight and still. A muscle moves in her jaw. “I don’t know what happens next.”
I twirl the feather. “It’s your story. You tell me.”
I can’t tell if she understands what I’m trying to do, or if she thinks the whole thing is some sort of inane therapy exercise, but when she takes the pen, her hand is shaking. She sits for a while, rolling the quill in her fingertips and staring at the page with a faint frown, before she begins to write.
It takes a lot longer than I expect it to. Eva pauses after every sentence to do some more staring and frowning. She blots out entire paragraphs and starts them over, often several times in a row. At one point she actually makes a motion as if she’s going to ball the page up and toss it away like a novelist in a bad movie, before apparently recalling that she’s writing in my favorite childhood book. She restrains herself to crossing out another paragraph.
I watch her, listening to the sound I can’t really hear, hoping for a future that doesn’t yet exist.
Night has fallen by the time she finishes. She doesn’t set her pen down in triumph or anything, but I know the story is done because I feel it. The thrumming stops. The air changes. It’s like someone has opened an invisible door and let in a breeze that smells like frost and fresh apples.
Eva gives a little sigh and un-hunches herself from the page.
“Looks good,” I say over her shoulder, and the queen startles so badly she chokes. Apparently she hadn’t noticed me getting up, rummaging for candles, asking three or four times if she was hungry, and eventually giving up and standing behind her. I thump her good and hard on the back. “Needs a title, though.”
When Eva stops coughing, she flips back to the beginning of her story and runs her finger across the empty space above the words once upon a time. “I don’t know what to call it.” Her voice is hoarse and low. “I’ve never done this before.”
I drag my chair around the table so I can sit catty-corner to her. “Well, it’s your call, but the Grimms generally named their stories after the protagonist.”