“Go back!” Leah shouted. Blood sprayed from her ragged liberated mouth. Droplets struck the emerging thing and sizzled. “I, the Queen of Empis, command you!”
It continued to emerge, now flapping both of its thorny wings. Strings of some noisome fluid sprayed from it. The light from the shattered moons had continued to fade and I could barely see the humped, twisted thing that was rising, its sides bulging in and out like a bellows. Elden’s head was disappearing into its strange flesh. His dead face, stamped with his final expression of horror, looked out at us like the face of a man disappearing into quicksand.
Radar’s barks were now more like screams.
I think it might have been some kind of dragon, but not of the sort seen in any book of fairy tales. It was from beyond my world. Leah’s, too. The Dark Well opened into some other universe beyond all human comprehension. And Leah’s command did nothing to stop it.
It came out.
It came out.
The moons had kissed and soon it would be free.
9
Leah didn’t command it again. She must have decided it was useless. She only craned her neck to watch that thing as it grew from the well. Now there was only Radar, barking and barking, but somehow—miraculously, heroically—holding her ground.
I realized that I was going to die, and it would be a mercy. Assuming, that was, life didn’t continue in some terrible hellish drone （AAAAAAA） once I—and Leah, and Radar—were taken into the thing’s alien being.
I had read that at such moments one’s whole life flashes before one’s eyes. What flashed before me, like illustrations in a book whose pages are quickly fanned, were all the fairy tales I had encountered in Empis, from the shoe woman and the goose girl to the houses of the Three Little Exiles to the mean sisters who never would have taken their beautiful little sister （or deformed little brother） to the ball.
It was growing, growing. Thorny wings flapping. Elden’s face had disappeared into its unknowable guts.
Then I thought of another fairy tale.
Once upon a time there had been a mean little man named Christopher Polley who had come to steal Mr. Bowditch’s gold.
Once upon a time there had been a mean little man named Peterkin who had been torturing the Snab with a dagger.
Once upon a time my mother was struck by a plumber’s truck on the Sycamore Street Bridge, and killed when it drove her into one of the bridge stanchions. Most of her stayed on the bridge, but her head and shoulders had gone into the Little Rumple River.
Always Rumpelstiltskin. From the very beginning. The Original Fairy Tale, you might say. And how did the queen’s daughter get rid of that troublesome elf?
“I KNOW YOUR NAME!” I shouted. The voice was not my own, no more than many of the thoughts and insights in this story belonged to the seventeen-year-old boy who first came to Empis. It was the voice of a prince. Not of this world and not of mine. I had begun by calling Empis “the Other,” but I was the other. Still Charlie Reade, sure, but I was someone else as well, and the idea that I had been sent here—that my clock had been wound and set years ago, when my mother walked across that bridge, munching a chicken wing—for just this moment was impossible to doubt. Later, when the person I was in that underground world began to ebb away, I would doubt it, but then? No.
“I KNOW YOUR NAME, GOGMAGOG, AND I COMMAND YOU TO RETURN TO YOUR LAIR!”
It screamed. The stone floor shook and cracks ran across it. Far above us, graves were once more giving up their dead and a great crevasse was zig-zagging its way across the Field of the Monarchs. Those huge wings flapped, raining down stinking drops that burned like acid. But you know what? I liked that scream, because I was a dark prince and that was a scream of pain.
“GOGMAGOG, GOGMAGOG, YOUR NAME IS GOGMAGOG!”
It screamed each time I spoke its name. Those screams were in the world; they were also deep in my head, as the hum had been, threatening to burst my skull. The wings beat frantically. Great eyes glared at me.
“RETURN TO YOUR LAIR, GOGMAGOG! YOU MAY COME AGAIN, GOGMAGOG, IN TEN YEARS OR A THOUSAND, GOGMAGOG, BUT NOT THIS DAY, GOGMAGOG!” I spread my arms. “IF YOU TAKE ME IN, GOGMAGOG, I’LL BURST YOUR GUTS WITH YOUR NAME BEFORE I DIE!”
It began to retreat, folding its wings over those hideous staring eyes. The sound of its descent was a liquid shloooop that made me want to vomit. I wondered how the hell we were supposed to make that gigantic derrick lower the lid, but Leah had that one. Her voice was hoarse and broken… but couldn’t I see lips emerging from the mangled wreck of her mouth? I’m not sure, but having been force-fed so much make-believe, I gladly swallowed that one.