Trapped*
Her eyes ached, her body still hummed under her skin as though she couldn't stand laying still, couldn't stand the feeling of the sheets around her anymore, despite their protection. Powder opened her eyes from the blackness and thought she saw sunlight glow through her bedsheets. Her heart lifted in her chest.
"Vi! I'm home!" she shouted.
She threw back the covers… and her heart immediately sank in her chest.
It wasn't sunlight. It was moonlight. It wasn't her old, musty, cracked ceiling bedroom. It was the same brand-new room, in the other world. Her toy chest, and vanity, and rocking chair, and trunk still blocked her bedroom door.
Powder hugged her knees, tightly. "Oh, God. I'm still here?"
Her mind reeled as she tried to figure out what went wrong. Then she thought, Oh no, that's right. I physically came here through the little door. Maybe going to sleep won't work anymore.
Still, she tried hiding under the covers again anyway, hoping beyond hope they would take her away from here.
But nothing happened.
As the time ticked on, it became too suffocating to stay under the hot blankets any longer. Especially, still wearing the gray sweater and black velvet pants. As Powder crawled out, she looked around for her clothes, the outfit she wore yesterday when she crossed over.
But they were gone.
Nothing else was touched in her room, but her own clothes were gone. Powder had the sinking feeling she knew who took them and she wouldn't see them again.
…
After removing all the furniture in front of her door, Powder tiptoed out of her room, down the staircase, crept down the hallway, and snuck toward the drawing room. The house was dark and cold. She didn't see or hear a sign of the other mother.
For the first time, Powder found the entrance to the drawing room closed by the pair of thick double doors. Pulling on the looped double handles, she found them to be locked.
Powder went into the kitchen, but it was deserted. Still, she was sure there was someone in the house.
Then Powder heard notes from a piano playing down the hallway, each one hitting the E string, slow and monotonal.
Powder stomped her way down the hall until she reached her father's study and discovered that it was occupied. She found the other father sitting at the piano, his back to her.
"Hey, you!" she screwed up her courage and demanded, "Where is the other mother? I wanna go home!"
"All will be swell… soon as Mother is refreshed," he said, slowly turning on his stool to face her, which made Powder recoil, "Her strength is our strength…"
He looked less like her true father today. Slopier. There was something slightly vague about his face, like bread dough that had begun to rise, smoothing out the bumps and the cracks in the depressions.
The gloved hands suddenly popped out of the piano case and covered his mouth harshly. One hand shook a finger at him, scoldingly, before releasing him.
"Mustn't talk when Mother's not here," he said, slowly.
"If you won't even talk to me, I'm going to find the other Ekko. He'll help me," Powder argued.
"No point," the other father answered, pulling down at his lower lip in a frown that stretched too long to be humanly possible. "He pulled a long face… and Mother didn't like it."
The gloved hands angrily clasped around his head, shutting his mouth closed and turning him away.
Disturbed, Powder ran out of the house, getting away. Past the garden, past the trees, up the hill where the well was. It wasn't until she was in the old apple orchard that she slowed down to a walk, panting.
Where Powder came from, once you were through the patch of trees, you saw nothing but the old meadow and the old tennis court. In this place, the woods went on farther. The trees became cruder, and less tree-like the farther you went. Pretty soon they seemed very approximant, like the idea of trees. A grayish brown trunk below a greenish splodge of something that might have been leaves above.
Powder wondered if the other mother wasn't interested in trees, or if she just hadn't bothered with this bit properly because no one was expected to come out this far. She kept walking. And then the mist began.
It wasn't damp like a normal fog or mist. It was not cold. It was not warm. It felt to Powder like she was walking into nothing.
I'm an explorer, thought Powder to herself, And I need all the ways out of here that I can get. So, I shall keep walking.
The world that she was walking through was a pale nothingness, like a blank sheet of paper or an enormous, empty, white room. It had no temperature, no smell, no texture, and no taste.
It certainly isn't mist, thought Powder, although she did not know what it was.
For a moment she wondered if she might have gone blind, but she could see herself plain as day. But there was no ground beneath her feet, just a misty, milky whiteness.
"And what do you think you're doing?" said a shape to one side of her.
It took a few moments for her eyes to focus on it properly, she thought it might be some kind of lion, at first, some distance away from her, then she thought it might be a mouse. And then she knew what it was.
"Well, I'm getting out of here. That's what I'm doing," she told the cat.
She furrowed her eyebrows, trying to remember how far she had to walk before finding the old well.
"Something's wrong," she said as she continued walking, "Shouldn't the old well be here?"
The cat huffed, "Nothing out here. It's the empty part of this world. She only made what she knew would impress you."
"But why?" Powder asked, "Why does she want me?"
"Maybe she wants something to love, something that isn't her," the cat said, "Or maybe she would love something to eat."
"Eat? That's ridiculous. Mothers don't eat… daughters."
The cat shrugged. "I don't know. How well do you taste?"
He chuckled at himself and leapt onto a rock. The ground was starting to change, color returning. A shape began to appear in front of them, something high and towering and dark. And then it took a shape in the mist. A dark house which loomed at them out of formless whiteness.
"But that's –" said Powder.
"The house that you just left, precisely," said the cat.
"Maybe I just got turned around in the mist," said Powder, thinking about going back the way she came.
The cat curled the high tip of its tail into a question mark and tipped its head to one side. "You might have done," it said, "I certainly would not. Wrong, indeed."
"But… how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?" asked Powder.
"Walk around the world," the cat answered.
Powder shrugged. "Small world."
The cat's ear twitched, and he suddenly crouched. "Hang on –"
It gave a shiver and a leap and before Powder could blink, the cat pounced into the bushes. Something furry jumped out.
A rabbit scurried away from the cat, thumping its feet on the ground loudly. The cat pounced on it, holding it down, grabbing its neck in his jaws.
"Stop! He's one of the circus bunnies!" Powder exclaimed.
The cat bit down anyway. Powder gasped in horror, but the instant it did, the rabbit's butterscotch fur stretched, and pieces flaked away. Out of its open mouth spilled sand. Its limbs lengthened until it looked like a disgusting, boney, rabid hare with its neck broken. It's skeleton showing through holes in its rotting fur. It's black button eyes glassy.
It wasn't until then that Powder truly understood that everything, and everyone, here, was created by her. These creatures weren't innocent individuals. They were her puppets.
The cat spat the dead rabbit to the ground. "I don't like hare at the best of times, but this one was sounding an alarm."
And then the cat picked the rabbit up in its mouth and carried it off into the woods.
"Good kitty," Powder muttered.
Then she looked at the old house waiting for her. Powder bit her lip and considered her next move. Powder walked back toward the house.
She eyed the front porch and spotted the umbrella stand by the door. Rummaging in it, she found a cane that felt heavier than the rest. She could tell it had a metal rod in its core.
Entering the house, Powder hefted the cane in her hand. She slid one end of the cane through the double door handles and pried backward, planting a foot against the door. With a rather loud, sickening splinter of the wood and the heavy clatter of metal on the floor, the door handles popped off at their screws, nicely.
Powder looked back over her shoulder, then pushed one of the doors open to the pitch-black room.