Challenge Three*
Powder climbed out of the theater and up the stone steps outside the house. She felt a great relief wash over her as she stood on the lawn, breathing the fresh night air. She knew this wasn't over, but her body relished the moment to rest.
Her eyes fell on Dr. B's staircase, and she knew without any other clues that somewhere up there was another soul hiding.
She climbed up Dr. B's staircase, ignoring the cramps in her legs she never noticed until now. As she climbed, she looked at the sky and saw the full moon was getting smaller. But now Powder realized it wasn't a shadow covering the moon.
No, instead, the shadow was of a giant button, growing larger across the moon's face. Halfway covered.
Powder shook her head and focused on the climb instead.
But when she reached the top, she saw the flag above Dr. B's flat was gone. Instead, hung a pair of skeleton gloves, attached to the arms of a black firefighter coat, and fluttered in the breeze with the legs of jeans and a pair of ratty, old shoes.
"Oh no, Ekko…"
Powder wanted to scream. So, she did.
"EVIL WITCH! I'M NOT SCARED!" she yelled until her voice was hoarse and echoed across the woods.
Powder thought she could hear the other mother's laughter in the wind.
The door to Dr. B's flat clicked open behind her. Powder glared at the door.
"I'm an explorer," said Powder out loud, but her words sounded muffled and dead on the misty air. She had made it out of the cellar, hadn't she? And she had, but if there was one thing that Powder was certain of, it was that this flat would be worse.
…
Like the theater, the attic was cold, and dusty, and abandoned. The cannons that lined the entryway looked decades older, and the popcorn machine was equally rusty. The little tent at the back was quiet. No warm lights were on.
A shadow crawled somewhere in the dark room. A glove touched Powder's shoulder.
"Hellooo, Galobooska..."
Powder jumped back, turning around to face the man. But she didn't see his face. Instead, she saw his clothes, his hat so far forward it covered where his head should've been.
"I'm Powder," she said, feeling the need to introduce herself again. This wasn't the same man.
"Is this what you're looking for?" the voice asked.
It almost sounded like Dr. B, but it slurred its words, getting lost in a heavier and heavier accent. It was a rustling voice. It was scratchy and dry. It made Powder think of some kind of enormous dead insect. Which was silly, she knew. How could a dead thing, especially a dead insect, have a voice?
With a wave of his arms, something rolled out of his sleeve as he held out his gloved hand to her. The red circus ball with a yellow star rolled in the palm of his hand.
Powder looked through the stone with the hole in it. The ball glowed bright yellow like the sun.
"Uh-huh," she nodded.
Before she could take it from his hand, his arm curled up like a recoiling fern plant, coveting the ball away.
"You think winning game is good thing?" he asked, his body bending backward in a way that wasn't natural.
His limbs crab-walked his body across the floor until she thought he would run into the side of the brick chimney, stopped like a mindless robot toy. But instead, he disappeared in a puff of smoke, slinking somewhere in the shadows.
"You just go home and be bored and neglected, same as always," his voice echoed around the attic.
Powder tried to look for him through the stone again, to find the light of the soul, but she couldn't find it.
Then a voice suddenly said above her, almost in her ear, "Stay here with us..."
Powder turned and jumped back as Dr. B's coat swung over her head, hanging upside down with his legs curled around a beam in the roof like a snake, reaching its coat arms out to her.
"We will listen to you and laugh with you…"
It suddenly dropped from the beam and plopped to the floor on its head. Without seeming hurt, its legs walked away, dragging its upper body behind it as it swooped away through the entrance of the little tent.
Powder adjusted her bag, got on her knees, and crawled through the tent flap.
The inside was still the same spacious arena from before, but the rabbits were nowhere in sight, and a pile of beets and rotting vegetables sat in the middle of the ring. Dr. B's coat was crouched on top of it, like a dragon guarding its precious hoard.
"If you stay here, you can have whatever you want! Always..."
Powder looked once more through the stone and saw something. There was a glow coming from the coat of the man, at about chest height. Through the hole in the stone, the glow twinkled and shone yellow-white as any star.
She wished that she had a stick or something to poke him with. She had no wish to get any closer to the shadowy man at the end of the room, but Powder took a step closer to the man.
"You don't get it, do you?" she asked.
The thing shook its head as though thoroughly in pain.
"I don't understand..."
Powder took another step closer.
"Of course, you don't understand. You're just a copy she made of the real Dr. B."
His arms hugged himself, his breathing ragged. "Not even that… anymore…" the voice groaned with a husky sigh.
Then the voice seemed to morph and change. It became high and whiney, and it split into dozens speaking at once.
"Violet screams in the very depths of her soul for her mother, too..."
Powder stopped on one foot.
"For guidance, for wisdom, all for you… But most of all, she wants her mother to hold her, keep her safe... We have you to thank for it, Powder. The only thing more delicious than a child's soul is a young woman's broken heart…"
Furious, Powder reached out and grabbed at the top hat, ripping it away. A rabid-looking rabbit with sickly yellow teeth squealed at her.
Powder jumped back as it hissed at her, and the last of Dr. B fell apart.
At once, butterscotch rabbits leapt from the sleeves and from under the coat and hat. A score or more of them. Black button eyes almost shining red in the dark. They chittered, and stamped, and they fled. The coat fluttered and fell heavily to the floor. The hat rolled into one corner of the room. Powder reached out one hand and pulled the coat open.
It was empty, although it was greasy to the touch. There was no sign of the circus ball in it. She quickly scanned the room, squinting through the hole in the stone and caught sight of something that twinkled and burned like a star, at floor level by the doorway.
The red circus ball was being carried in the forepaws of the largest, sickly rabbit. And as she looked, it slipped away. The other rabbits watched her from the corners of the room as she ran after it.
Now, rabbits can run faster than people, especially over short distances. But a large, sickly rabbit, holding a ball in its two front paws is no match for a determined girl, even if she is small for her age.
Smaller rabbits ran back and forth across her path, trying to distract her. But she ignored them all, keeping her eyes fixed on the one with the ball, who was heading straight out of the flat towards the front door.
They jumped onto the foot pedals of the cannons and shot cotton candy at her. With cries of protest, Powder tried to dodge them, running straight through. But she tripped and collapsed to her knees. The rabbit was nearly out of the door.
Glancing at the stone in her hand, Powder made a quick choice. She threw the stone, aiming straight for the rabbit's feet.
But the rabbit saw it coming and hopped out of the way of the stone's path. Her eyes went wide as the stone sailed past the rabbit, past the door, past the metal staircase, and disappeared somewhere outside.
"No!" Powder cried, standing up and running out the open door.
They reached the steps on the outside of the building. Powder had a second of time to observe that the moon was getting closer and closer to becoming covered, nearly a whole button. Even the shadows of the ground grew longer, slowly engulfing the lawn in darkness, closing on the silver of moonlight that Powder was still standing on.
Then she was simply racing pell-mell down the steps in pursuit of the rabbit with no room in her mind for anything else, certain she was gaining on it.
She was running fast. Too fast, she discovered, as she came to the bottom of one flight of stairs and her foot skidded, twisted, and she went crashing onto the concrete landing. Her left knee was scraped and skinned, and the palm of one hand that she had thrown out to stop herself was a mess of scrapped skin and grit. It hurt a little, and it would, she knew, soon hurt much more.
She climbed to her feet. As fast as she could, knowing that she had lost it and it was already too late, she went down to the final landing at ground level. She looked around for the rabbit, but it was gone. And the final ghost eye with it.
Her hand stung where the skin had been scrapped and there was blood, trickling down her ripped pajama leg from her knee. It was as bad as the summer her sister had taken the training wheels off Powder's bicycle. But then, back then, in with all the cuts and the scraps, she had a feeling of achievement. She was learning something, doing something that she had not known how to do. Now, she felt nothing but cold loss.
Powder looked up at the sky and saw the button's shadow closing on the moon. The shadow cast from the moon spread over the ground, enclosing her in a smaller and smaller crescent in the grass. She reached into her bag, holding the knob and the pearl ring. But the circus ball was long gone. And she had no hope of finding Vi.
She had failed the ghost children. She had failed her sister. She had failed herself. Failed, everything.
"I lost… I lost everything," she thought aloud.
She closed her eyes and wished the earth would swallow her up.
There was a cough.
She opened her eyes and saw the rabbit. It was lying on the brick path at the bottom of the stairs, with a surprised look on its face, which was now several inches away from the rest of it. Its whiskers were stiff, its eyes were wide open, its teeth visible and yellow and sharp. A collar of dry sand glistened at its neck.
Besides the decapitated rabbit, a smug expression on its face, was the hairless cat. It rested one paw on the red ball.
"I think I once mentioned," said the cat, "that I don't like hare at the best of times. Looked like you needed this one, though. Hope you don't mind my getting involved."
The cat batted its paw and the ball rolled towards Powder's feet.
"I think," said Powder, trying to catch her breath, "I think you may have said something like that."
When Powder picked up the ball from the ground, the green color of the grass beneath her feet flaked away and became brittle. It spread until the whole lawn became gray and cracked like stone.
"I'm heading inside," Powder said to the cat, "I still need to find my sister."
Powder placed the ball into her bag, then looked up at the sky as something white fell past her nose like a snowflake.
Something else was happening. The crackling grew louder. It grew into a roar.
The shadow of the button finished its course and closed completely in front of the moon. The instant it did, the four white buttonholes grew bigger, beginning to flake away, breaking apart like black glass falling, to reveal the white nothingness behind it.
The whiteness grew and grew, splintering past the edges of the moon, spreading freely across the dome of the sky. The woods in the distance seemed to disappear, like a white fog was rolling in as quickly as a flashflood.
But Powder knew the whiteness wasn't fog. It was heading toward them.
It was overtaking the other mother's garden. In a matter of seconds, it was gone.
The fantastical plants on the lawn withered and seemed to unravel. Then the ground was suddenly cracking, and pieces of it were flying away, ripping more and more chunks away, getting sucked into the white sky.
There was nowhere to go. The house was the only place that remained, in the center of it all.
"Come on, quickly!" Powder urged the frightened cat, opening her bag.
Without question, the cat leapt inside the bag, and Powder ran up the porch steps, mere seconds before the wood broke apart and was ripped away from under her feet. She wrenched the front door open, dove inside, and threw her body against it, slamming it shut.
As the door slammed shut behind the two, the crackling of the world shattering around them silenced itself. Powder slouched against the door, closing her eyes, and panting in the quietness of her house.
Or rather, the house that wasn't hers.
Behind her, Powder knew the world outside no longer existed. Not even as a white misty nothingness that she could walk endlessly through. Rather as something dangerous that would tear her apart, like a blackhole.
It was the only thing she feared worse than being in the empty house, alone, with the other mother.