The dress announced her as female, but otherwise it would have been hard to tell. Her face was a mass of lumps and large infected boils. A red-rimmed crack ran down the center of her forehead. One eye squinted, the other bulged. Her upper lip rose to her gnarled nose, revealing teeth that had been filed into fangs. Worst of all, the throne was surrounded by a semicircle of bones that were almost certainly human.
Radar began to cough. I turned to her, put my head down next to hers, and looked into her eyes. “Hush, girl,” I whispered. “Please be quiet.”
She coughed again, then fell silent. She was still shivering. I started to turn away and the coughing started again, louder than ever. I think we would have been discovered if Hana hadn’t chosen that moment to break into song:
“Stick-a-sticker Joe my love,
Stick it where it goes my love,
Stick-a-sticker all night long
Stick me with your prong-de-dong.
Prong-de-dong, oh prong-de-dong,
Stick me with your prong-de-dong!”
I had an idea that probably wasn’t from the Brothers Grimm.
She went on—it seemed to be one of those songs like “One Hundred Bottles of Beer” that has a zillion verses—and that was perfectly fine with me, because Radar was still coughing. I stroked her chest and belly, trying to ease her as Hana bellowed something about Joe my dear and have no fear （I half-expected “stick it in my rear”）。 I was still stroking and Hana was still bellowing when the midday bells rang. This close to the palace they were deafening.
The sound rolled away. I waited for Hana to get up and go into her kitchen. She didn’t. Instead she pressed two of her fingers against a boil on her shovel-sized chin and squeezed. Out came a gusher of yellowish pus. She wiped it up with the heel of her hand, examined it, and flung it into the street. Then she settled back. I waited for Radar to start coughing again. She didn’t, but she would. It was only a matter of time.
Sing, I thought. Sing, you great ugly bitch, before my dog starts coughing again and our bones wind up with the ones you’re too fucking lazy to pick u—
But instead of singing, she got to her feet. It was like watching a mountain rise up. I had used a simple ratio I’d learned in math class to figure her standing height, but I’d underestimated the length of her legs. The passage between the two halves of her house had to be twenty feet high, but Hana would have to bend to go through it.
When she was on her feet she pulled her dress out of the crack of her ass and let loose with a resounding fart that went on and on. It reminded me of the trombone break in my dad’s favorite instrumental, “Midnight in Moscow.” I had to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from braying laughter. Not caring if it started a coughing fit or not, I buried my face in the wet fur on Radar’s side and gave vent to a burst of low gasping: huh-huh-huh. I closed my eyes, waiting for Radar to start up again, or for one of Hana’s enormous hands to close around my throat and twist my head right off my neck.
It didn’t happen, so I peered around the other side of the fountain’s pedestal in time to see Hana thump her way to the right side of her house. The size of her was hallucinatory. She could have looked in the upstairs windows with no trouble at all. She opened the oversized door, and the aroma of cooking meat came out. It smelled like roast pork, but I had a horrible feeling pork wasn’t what it was. She bent down and went in.
“Feed me, you cockless bastard!” she thundered. “I be hungry!”
That’s when you must move, Claudia had said. Something like that, anyway.
I mounted the three-wheeler and pedaled for the passageway, bent over the handlebars like a guy in the last kilometer of the Tour de France. Before I entered it, I took a quick glance to my left, where the throne was. The castoff bones were small, almost certainly the bones of children. There was gristle on some and hair on others. Looking was a mistake, one I would have taken back if I could, but sometimes—all too often—we can’t help ourselves. Can we?
2
The passageway was about eighty feet long, cool and damp, lined with mossy blocks of stone. The light at the other end was brilliant, and I thought when I came out in the plaza I might actually see the sun.
But no. Just as I exited the passageway, bent over the handlebars, the clouds swallowed up the brave little patch of blue and shadeless gray returned. What I saw stopped me cold. My feet fell off the pedals and the three-wheeler coasted to a stop. I was on the edge of a great open plaza. Eight ways curved in from eight different directions. Once their paving had been brightly colored: green, blue, magenta, indigo, red, pink, yellow, orange. Now the colors were fading. I supposed they would eventually be as gray as everything else in Lilimar, and so much of Empis beyond. Looking at those curving ways was like looking at a gigantic, once jolly pinwheel. Bordering the curving pathways were poles bedecked with pennants. Years ago—how many?—they might have snapped and fluttered in breezes untainted by the scent of rot and decay. Now they hung limp and dribbling rainwater.