Page 13 of Seasonal Fears

Melanie stares at her. “Okay, cool, so I’m still asleep.”

“No, this is really happening. You’re as awake as I am.”

“First up, not sure you exist, so make a note of that. Second, you’re saying I died—I’m guessing when I collapsed on the football field? That seems like it would be the most logical time—and I’m still up and walking around, which would make me some sort of zombie. So shouldn’t you be running before I get it in my head to eat you or something?”

“You’re not a zombie,” says Jack. “Zombies don’t exist. You’re the Winter Incarnate, or you have the potential to be, anyway, if you progress faster than the competition does. I’m rooting for you, if that means anything. Most of the other candidates aren’t very nice.”

Melanie blinks. “I thought you said you were the Winter whatsit.”

“I’m the Winter Ascendant. You’re the Winter Incarnate. They aren’t the same thing at all, and I’m sorry, I should have told you all this as soon as I came to serve the crown, but I got the post because the last Jack in this region tried to get past the threshold, and your father made him go away. He’s made a whole bunch of us go away over the past decade or so, and we don’t always have time to tell each other what’s going on. This is supposed to be a job you can do for a century, but my predecessor had less than six months. Do you remember him at all?”

Melanie frowns and shakes her head. If she can’t break out of this dream, she may as well play along. “I don’t know anyone named ‘Jack,’ I’m sorry,” she says. But that’s not true, is it?

There was the teacher’s aide in her seventh-grade classroom. He’d encouraged her to experiment with pastels, and praised her art, and called her very clever. One day when she’d come to school exhausted from a weekend spent in the hospital, he’d talked about setting up a home visit to talk to her father about ways to balance her medical needs and her classwork, and he’d never come back to school after that.

None of the other students had even seemed to remember him. Melanie hasn’t thought of him in years. She blinks, slowly, and is silent.

Jack looks satisfied. “I want to do this for a long, long time,” she says. “I was only twelve when I became Ascendant, and that’s in part because your father has been stripping and casting down so many of us. I should never have been up for the job. Well, now that I have it, I’m holding it, and no overmedicated cheerleader is going to take it away from me.”

She gives Melanie a challenging look. Melanie, who has no living idea what’s happening here, who is, in fact, so confused that she still isn’t sure she’s not still asleep, says nothing as she sits down on the edge of her bed.

“None of this makes any sense,” she says. “What do you mean, you’re the Winter Ascendant?”

“All right, this is where things get weird,” says Jack.

“Things got weird a while ago,” says Melanie.

“True enough.” Jack doesn’t sound bothered by that. If anything, she sounds pleased. “The world doesn’t need humans to function. It doesn’t even particularly want them. We’re sort of a byproduct of the universe organizing itself, a natural form of static in the signal. Little bits of time and matter that organize enough to think for themselves, and want things, which is very inconvenient for the world, since it has to keep going while we wander around in it having all these desires and feelings and ambitions. It has to fit us in, learn to live with us.”

“Okay,” says Melanie, even though it isn’t; even though this isn’t helping things make any sense at all.

“So reality started tying humans to essential functions of itself. It keeps us busy and from making too much trouble. Issue is that once you give a human face to a function of reality, the function stops working right if no one represents it. There was a first person ever tapped to stand in for anything that embodies itself on a regular basis these days, and whatever that thing was, it did just fine before it learned how to be human. Once it understood the concept, though, it got addicted. Take the human away now, and you take the concept from the whole universe. You following me so far?”

“No. Not at all.”

“I’d say it was going to get easier from here, but it’s probably not, so.” Jack shrugs. “Sorry about that.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Nope, not a bit. I mean, I’m sorry I’m the one trying to tell you all this, since I’m still pretty new to it myself, but hey. The lady who explained it to me was a Corn Jenny, and she would have done a much better job with you. It’s too bad she’s not appropriate. I still have her phone number.” Jack brightens. “I bet she’s with your boyfriend right now, since he flared up the same time as you did. I bet she’ll explain things real good, and he’ll be able to help you understand. Won’t that be nice? Because I also bet you’re better at listening when you’re talking to someone you actually care about. You’ll care about me eventually, if you win. Until then, I’m just the weird kid in your bedroom without an invite.”

Melanie frowns. “I am so lost.”

“And you will be forever, unless you win.” Jack leans forward, elbows on knees, and looks at her seriously. “Look, before the first Stingy Jack was called to serve, the fall happened just fine without a human face to show the world, but once it got tied into a human skin, once it knew what it was like to breathe the air and walk among the other men, it got addicted, and now, if you take Jack away, you take the fall away at the same time. Summer surges straight into the winter, and everything falls out of balance.”

Melanie says nothing to that. She simply stares.

“The seasons ascendant came about one at a time, as the year figured out how to divide and subdivide itself. Jack in the Green shepherds the spring. Corn Jenny keeps the summer. Stingy Jack sees to the fall. And yours truly, the lovely and inspiring Jack Frost, takes care of the winter. But the longer we served, the heavier the year became, and finally we lost control of it. The two stronger seasons coalesced into the crowns. Winter and summer. And they became Incarnate as well as Ascendant.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning you’ve always gone outside in the winter without a coat, and even when you were so sick you couldn’t hold your head up on your own, you forgot your socks and gloves. Meaning you don’t know what brain freeze feels like, and until your father figured out how to medicate you away from your season, snow didn’t melt on your skin.” Jack smiles. “Meaning I was born with the potential to serve the season, but you were born with the winter in your bones. And now the old Winter King is dead, and you have the chance to claim the crown. You’ll have to be quick, because you’re not the only one in the running, but if you get there first, you’ll live for as long as the winter wants you. And if you don’t, you’ll die.”

“Oh,” says Melanie. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Sure, in crazytown.” Melanie lies back down, head on her pillow, and closes her eyes. “I’m going to sleep until it’s time to get ready.”