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Turn after turn revealed only more book-lined passages and brought me finally to what had to be the back wall, similarly encumbered with paperbacks. Rather than admit defeat in the face of so many square yards of peeling spines, I began my hunt. My sister would have been methodical, but there was no beginning to begin at and no end in sight. And I reasoned that working my way through the books in order would simply hammer home the hopelessness of the search. Instead, I chose a random spot, eyeballed half a dozen titles, then moved on to another.

Scores of books passed beneath my scrutiny and, having been told up front about Xavier’s strategy, I resolved not to be diverted from my search by intriguing titles. I lasted a good fifteen minutes before:

“Servants of the Wankh? That’s got to be a joke!” I levered out the slim volume, whose battered glossy cover displayed a classic example of that sixties sci-fi art which falls firmly into the so-bad-it’s-good zone. It wasn’t a joke. The book was by none other than the illustrious Jack Vance, a celebrated titan of sci-fi whose name was known by perhaps one in a thousand fourteen-year-olds. “Servants of the wanker…” I was still shaking my head when the earthquake struck.

Chapter 2

Rose

“If a baby died, if a mother’s heart were cut out and the father chased away by a black hound, never to be seen again, wouldn’t you want there to be a villain? Wouldn’t you want there to be a knife and a hand upon that knife, and a purpose behind that hand, and at the center of it all a soul to carry the weight and bear the punishment?”

“I suppose so,” said Rose. “No, wait, I wanted the truth. Wasn’t that why we had to come all this way?”

“The truth? You’re in the wrong place entirely, child!” The Rat shook his head like a dog fresh from the river, as if trying to rid himself of the idea. “Stories, now those I can do.”

“Then why did we—” Rose gestured to the dark fall of the willow, the bend in the river where the water ran so slow and so deep, the somber banks.

“Why did we come so far? Because, however I tell it…well, it goes poorly for the baby. And a story so dark needs a stage like this one. I could hardly tell it in summer with Moley wandering in halfway. The poor chap could never stand it. He’d go underground for a year. You know how he is. But we storytellers, we’re made of sterner stuff. If the need’s there—and I feel in my whiskers that it is—then we can tell almost any tale. Though there may be tears, my dear. An ocean of them.”

Rose hunched her coat around her and sat on the willow’s gnarled roots where they clutched at the bank like an old man’s hand keeping desperate grip on the river lest it wander away.

The willow formed a shroud around the pair of them, her and the Rat, who wasn’t truly a rat but a vole. The willow’s veil wasn’t green, just the thin black bars of innumerable trailing branches stripped bare by the cold wind that still worried at them.

At first, Rose hadn’t thought they’d come so far. Not from summer to winter. But the Rat had spun one story after another as they sat in the snugness of his little boat, and the current had led them on. And although she had forgotten entirely what the last of his tales had been, it had folded her inside it, deeper than deep, so that the seasons could change around her without notice.

She had thought immediately, when the prow bumped against the bank and shook her from the rhythm of the Rat’s voice, that this was as sad a place as she had ever seen along the river. Did that sorrow run downstream with the waters, she wondered, polluting everything between here and the distant sea? Or was water too fickle for that, shaking off sadness just as it shrugged away the excitement of a fall to relax in the deep pool below?

“Where are we?” she asked.

“The Wild Wood.” The Rat shivered. “The only place to speak of dark deeds. Watch yourself, mind. There’s all sorts round these parts.”

Rose peered upstream and down, seeing that on all sides tree crowded tree, stepping on each other’s feet as if they were a throng of suitors, all too nervous to approach the willow’s grace.

“Are you going to tell it then?” Rose asked. “My story?”

“Hold your horses.” The Rat wrestled with a wicker hamper, dragging it out from beneath his rowing bench. “We’ll need some fortifying before we’re done. I’ve brought plum cake, cold ham, pickled gherkins, salad— Oh.” He glanced upriver, nose twitching. “Perhaps I should just start after all.” He adjusted his boater.

Rose nodded. She had felt it too. A kind of shiver. Though upstream was where summer waited, summer and all the good things that the Riverbank had to offer. Any danger should come from the Wild Wood all around them, or from the Wide World that lay beyond—the Wide Wicked World where the river would spill its secrets once the woods released it. But this shiver, this threat…it came from upstream. Almost as if it were following them.

“Well, my dear.” The Rat settled himself, not as he had so many times in the prow of his small boat or on the grass bank, but on his haunches, hunched in his little jacket, as if ready to spring from the path of the hawk’s feathered thunderbolt. “We’ve come a long way for a short story. There was a knife. That much is true. Scalpel sharp, surgical steel, bright enough to find its own light on a moonless night. And who the hand behind it belonged to is the subject of much argument. Some say it was a stoat, born of the Wild Wood, conceived in wickedness. Some say it was a man, one who should have saved rather than slain. And others…well, some few, some foolhardy souls, slant their glance toward the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, old Pan himself. Mischief and music you might think of when there’s talk of the old one, naughty but nice. And that’s all true enough. But ‘panic’ is not named for him by accident. Pandemic…”

An icy wind rattled the willow’s branches, causing the Rat to look this way then that, then those ways and these ways.

“There was a hand on the knife. And that same knife cut out your mother’s heart. That same sharp little blade cut loose the black hound that chased your father from their home, and no doubt dogged him till the end of his days.”

“Was the baby my brother? Or would she have been my sister?” Rose asked, though the Rat had paused for solemnity’s sake and not for questions.

“Your mother went back to her writing and your father to the bottle. Book and bottle, both of them dangerous in their ways, deep enough to drown in, though you can drown in half an inch with enough help.”

Rose gave the Rat a sharp look. This didn’t sound like the Rat she knew, even when the weasel had come sliding through the long grass on a dim evening, all tooth and claw and hunger, and the Rat had shown both his fear and his cunning.

“What did she write?” Rose asked. This was why she’d come. This was why she’d demanded this tale and no other, dark though it might be. She’d found her way to the Riverbank after a long, long time alone in the garden with only Muse to watch over her. She’d had to dig and to squeeze and to crawl and, just as she thought she might never wriggle free, she had found her way into the Mole’s neat little underground house. Thankfully he’d been out, or he might never have recovered from the shock. Even now, mention of it still necessitated “a bit of a lie down” on his part. “Did she write about me?”

“Oh, my sweet child of summer. She didn’t write about you. She wrote you. She put you on her page, tears and ink together, grew you from the idea she had conceived. We’re all ideas, don’t you know, and what do ideas do? They grow! They gather substance. They find their legs and they run across the page so fast the quill can hardly keep pace, and the truths spill out willy-nilly, some of them bold as brass, there in the nouns and verbs, the colons and semicolons and all that rot. And some of them, the most important ones, get lost between the lines, waiting to be found again by someone with enough heart and soul to pluck them out.

“But back to the knife. The wicked little knife that put you in one box after another.”

“You’re not Ratty!” Rose knew it blood to bone. He had been the Rat. She was sure of that, but something else wore his skin like an ill-fitting suit now. The tale he was telling had its teeth in him, and as it shook him, whatever had made him who he was had fallen out.