Breadcrumbs*
Powder pressed her back against the front door and stared into the house.
It was dark… The lights weren't on anymore. The hallway stretched out on front of her, empty, and long, and black. At the end of the hallway, a strange green light was flickering from underneath the drawing room door. It moved slowly, like light in a pool.
Powder stared at it, her feet not wanting to move.
The walls had depth, and shadows, and someone who stood in the shadows, waiting for Powder to return…
Then she felt the cat's sandy tongue lick at the palm of her hand where the blood from the scrape was welling up. Powder hugged the bag close and stood a little taller. She took a breath and walked down the hallway, one step at a time, toward the drawing room door.
With every step she took, along the walls, the wallpaper rapidly aged and peeled in long, curling strips, decaying faster than a withering plant dying in a time-lapse video.
Powder walked down the hallway, step by steady step, pretending that she could not feel her heart beating faster.
As she passed the foyer, her eyes flicked to the light switch panel at the bottom of the staircase for a moment… Just for an instant, she remembered Violet standing there, smiling at her, turning the lights on for her the first day they moved in…
Then Powder pressed on.
She finally turned the corner and peeked into the drawing room, finding the door slightly ajar. The glow across the carpet drew her closer.
An emerald-green fire burned in the fireplace, hissing like snakes. Its smoke smelled like how Powder thought cyanide would smell, acidic and too sweet, like bitter almonds. The bug furniture had grayed now, almost laying around the room like unmoving skeletons, and the room's lights flickered dimly as if they were short circuiting.
The painting above the mantel of the strange boy was also there, but now his smile looked more wicked. Or sad. Powder couldn't tell.
There were no more cocoa beetles in the chocolate box. They had all been eaten. The jeweled cicada coffee table raked the carpet with its clawed insect leg, as if it were impatient for something.
At the end of the room, in the corner, sat the little door, which in another world opened onto a plain brick wall. Powder tried not to stare at it.
The windows were still draped with deep red curtains, cut out in the shape of great horned beetles. The walls were dull green with spiderweb patterns across them, but the light of the emerald-green fire in the fireplace made them seem to move, like the walls were breathing.
This was it, Powder knew. The moment of truth. The unraveling time.
Powder turned as a voice spoke from the darkness.
"So… you're back," said the other mother. She did not sound pleased. "And you brought vermin with you."
The other mother was sitting on the insect couch in the shadowy corner of the room, waiting in front of the fire. She brushed back a lock of her hair with a hand that glinted in the firelight, like metal.
Powder took a half step back.
More of the other mother's contour shone in the firelight. Limbs disturbingly long and made of bone. Her face cracked like porcelain. Her waist was pencil-thin and her back so hunched over sharp spines tore through the back of her dress.
It was funny, Powder thought. The other mother did not look anything at all like her own mother. She wondered how she had ever been deceived into imagining a resemblance.
The other mother was huge, and her skin very pale, the color of a spider's belly. The brown in her dress had retreated to a furry band around her collar. The rest of her dress had distorted with pointed black and yellow stripes, almost as though showing her ribcage through her chest like a glowing x-ray. Peeking out of the folds of her dress, she had at least four, incredibly long, thin, barbed, yellow and black striped insect legs that stabbed at the floor. Her once lilac hair had thinned to gray locks that writhed and twined about her head, as though dancing underwater.
She reminded Powder of a huge Yellow Garden Spider. Beautiful enough that you want to come closer to see its intricate body details, but so huge that you back away, intimidated, feel compelled to give it the power you have.
"No," said Powder, "I brought a friend."
The other mother rose from the couch, her head almost brushing the ceiling, her hands over where a heart should've been in her boney chest.
"You know I love you," she said as she stood and leaned forward, her sharp, metal fingers caressing Powder's cheek and lifting her braid. She smiled with teeth as sharp as knives.
And Powder knew it was true. She loved Powder as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Powder knew that she was a possession, nothing more.
"You have a very funny way of showing it."
The other mother seemed to shrug. Now, she stood at the center of the room, between Powder and the mantel piece. And she looked down at Powder with her black button eyes, glinting green from the firelight.
"So?" the other mother asked, "Where are they? The ghost eyes."
Powder leaned against an armchair, adjusted to the cat with her left hand, put her right hand into her bag and pulled out the three ghost eyes. They were warm and they clinked together in the palm of her hand. The other mother reached her needle fingers for them, but Powder held them back.
She knew it was true, then. The other mother had no intention of letting her go or of keeping her word. It had been an entertainment and nothing more.
"Hold on," Powder said, "We aren't finished yet, are we?"
"No, I suppose not," the other mother said with a scoff and a wave of her hand, as though there was a certain mutual familiarity between the two of them in the room that even she didn't want to admit. She arched her spiny back and sneered at the girl. "After all, you still need to find your faithful big sister, don't you?"
Powder simply narrowed her eyes and nodded defiantly. She held her head higher, not afraid to look the witch in the eye.
The other mother sneered wider, for a moment, terribly resembling Vi's sneer.
"Too bad you won't have… this," she said with a mock pout, flicking out from behind her back the stone with the hole in it.
Powder stared as the other mother spun the stone around her needle finger playfully then flicked it into the green flames in the fireplace. It cracked and dissolved into a fine powder amongst the ash as the other mother snickered.
Powder tried not to feel the lump in her throat. Vi had to be in here, somewhere. In this very room. Powder needed to buy time.
In the palm of her hand, one of the ghost eyes began to glimmer softly. As the other mother watched the flames, Powder turned her back to look at the circus ball that glowed in her hand.
"Be clever, miss," the sweet ghost girl, much younger than Powder, whispered urgently, "Even if you win, she'll never let you go…"
Powder squeezed the orbs in her hand, protectively. She glanced at the little door in the corner of the room, sitting locked behind the beetle cabinet. She pocketed the ghost eyes in her bag and bit her lip.
"I already know where you've hidden her," Powder said, throwing her voice confidently.
The other mother's smile from watching the flames turned into a frown. She stood tall and put her hands on her hips. "Well? Produce her."
Powder did her best to look convincing, if a little cocky. "Violet is behind that door," she said, nodding her head towards the little door in the corner.
The other mother remained statue-still, but the hint of a smile crept back onto her face.
"Oh, she is, is she?"
Powder didn't move her lungs. It was her only way home, she knew. But it all depended on the other mother's needing to gloat. Needing not only to win, but to show that she had won.
The other mother cocked an eyebrow, then waved her hand for the beetle cabinet to move out of the way. On her spindly legs, she stepped closer and closer to the door.
Powder was already starting, as quietly as she could, step by step, to back away towards the fireplace, looking around the room.
Vi had to be here. Where would the other mother keep a trophy?
Powder scanned the room as fast as she could. Nothing that had turned bug-like seemed familiar. The only things that looked like they belonged in her real house were the things placed on the mantel. Yet, everything on the mantel piece looked the same. Nothing was out of place. Except…
Powder blinked.
Vi's old bunny… it was leaning to the side, looking at Powder, with its arm laying outstretched as though reaching out to her.
The way it lay on its side… made her think of Vi laying on the floor in the mirror…
Powder approached the mantle, looking closer at the bunny.
Powder reached out her hand, inches away from taking it, but she jumped and pulled back her hand quickly when she heard sharp coughing. The other mother was bent in half and coughed up the black key into the palm of her needle hand. Her black button eyes traveled to Powder across the room. She looked back at Powder as though to give the girl one last chance to guess.
"G-Go on," Powder said, smoothing out her voice, "Open it. She'll be there, alright."
The other mother arched an eyebrow at her, then smiled a little bit wider before stooping down low in front of the little door.
The cat stirred uncomfortably in Powder's arms, as if it wanted to get down.
Just stay there a few moments longer, she thought, wondering if it could hear her. I'll get us both home. I said I would. I promise.
She felt the cat relax, ever so slightly in her arms. The other mother bent far down to the little door and pushed the key into the lock. She turned the key. Powder heard the mechanism clunk heavily.
The other mother slowly scrapped the door open, revealing a corridor behind it, dark and empty.
"You're wrong, Powder. Violet is not there," she said in a singsong voice, waving her hands at the tunnel.
The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see. She stood up and held the needle and spool of thread with the tips of her fingers, a wide smile stretched on her black lips.
"Now…" she said very quietly, her button eyes somehow bigger than ever, "You're going to stay here, forever…"
"No," said Powder, "I'm not!"
And hard as she could, she threw the hairless cat towards the other mother. It yowled and landed on the other mother's head, claws flailing, teeth bared fierce and angry.
Without thinking, without waiting for another heartbeat, Powder snatched the toy rabbit from the mantel, knocking over the stack of vinyl records in a cascade.
Powder quickly looked the bunny over and thought she saw a glowing coming from behind its button eyes. She ripped off one of its button eyes and grabbed something small inside its head. When she pulled out her hand, she found their mother's necklace inside it. The round, gold pendant, with a green gem in the middle, in the shape of a vinyl record. The metal felt colder than ice in her hand. So cold that the green gem had turned black.
Powder looked at it for a sign. For a heart-stopping moment, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. It was the same necklace they had at home.
What if she had guessed wrong?
But as she tilted the necklace in the light, something changed. Hidden in the shadows of the gem, behind Powder's reflection, a face that wasn't her own shone back to her.
It was Vi.
She was asleep, deeper than any fairytale princess Powder knew. Limper than Snow White after eating her apple. More lifeless than Sleeping Beauty. Colder than Hansel or Gretel wandering in the woods.
But as Powder held the necklace, the gem seemed to warm in her hands. Vi's eyelashes fluttered just a little.
Powder almost burst out crying.
The other mother shrieked, still struggling with the cat. Snapping back to her surroundings, Powder held the necklace defensively, away from the fighting.
"Sorry, Vi," Powder spoke to it, gripping their most fragile and sacred possession, tightly. "You don't have to be Mom anymore."
She lifted her arm above her head.
"That's enough, Powder!" the other mother cried, her anger shaking the room, clutching at her face. "Don't you want her to be happy? I can make it she never feels sadness again!" she stated between scratches that oozed lines of black blood across her face.
For a moment she almost seemed pitiful, under the cat's relentless attacks.
"If not me, then you!" she begged almost breathlessly, "You can take my place and inherit the power! Design this world exactly as you wish. No more wishing not to be left behind. You can make the stars bow to you!"
Powder thought about the vision of Vi and Caitlyn in the mirror.
Powder scowled. "I want her to have the real thing!"
Then she threw the necklace to the floor. The other mother screeched. Powder stomped her foot down dead center on the gem as hard as she could.
Upon impact, the gem splintered and shattered. Flashing like lightning, the pieces scattered in a thousand directions that flew around the room. The sound echoed like thunder, exploding tenfold in Powder's ears. The moment seemed to last for an instant and for eternity at the same time. Time slowed to a crawl as the pieces flew.
Then the instant was done.
Powder fell on her tailbone to the floor. There was a flash as the green smoke trapped inside the gem turned blue and filled the room. Then, as the cloud dissipated, Vi appeared, wearing the same torn, burgundy sweatshirt and jeans, lying unconscious on the floor.
For a split second, Powder thought she had done something wrong because Vi wasn't moving.
Then her sister's eyes flickered open, and she gasped, taking a deep breath like she'd been drowning, holding her breath for years. Colors suddenly returned to Vi's skin, which Powder hadn't realized until now had been so pale. Even her hair was more vibrant.
Her eyes shut tight, Vi rolled off her back, bringing herself to her knees. She expected the pain from wheezing, but as she caught her breath, she lifted her head to Powder, her eyes wide in amazement.
With every breath she felt better. Stronger. Healthier. As though she could breathe for the first time.
Vi looked at her hands and opened and closed them into fists. Strength was returning to her.
She was free.
She looked to her little sister in amazement and smiled, tears in her eyes.