What the Apprentice Said

AKA Moonlight Rendezvous 3. Didn't think I'd go back to this.

The gentle pulse of nighttime traffic swirled about the stones of the ruin the park was built around. There was a clatter as three figures swung themselves over the low chainlink fence beside the playground. A fourth figure leaned over the fence at them, speaking in an almost-whisper.

"Oh my God you fucking faggots," he said, enunciating every other syllable, "quit pussying around and go already."

"You realize you're talking to girls, right?" one figure said, "Using 'pussy' as a pejorative doesn't make much sense."

"Your daddy's gonna get mad at you for talking like that, Carmichael," a second girl said, "Once he gets out of prison for selling meth."

"Go fuck yourself."

"Guys, guys, calm down," the third girl said, "this is stupid, let's just go already."

Carmichael was a high school sophomore, a year older than the three girls in the playground. He didn't really look it - he was slight and pale, with light hair and sunken eyes. Nobody said what his father was in prison for, but everybody knew. The girls started towards the ruins.

"This is stupid you guys," Sue said. She had short brown hair which stuck out of a beanie she wore even though she'd long ago given up on impressing the skaterboys. Her father, who is looking for a new buddy now that Carmichael's dad was in the slammer, named her after a Johnny Cash song. He thought it was funny as hell. "What are we doing this for, so he'll let us hang out with his dumbass painthuffer friends?"

"We're doing this because I've been wanting to do this for ages," Henrietta said. She had long, straight black hair set in what she insisted be called a "hime cut." Her family has been living comfortably since the 18th century, and she had an original Monet in her bedroom, next to a vintage Daicon IV poster. "Carmichael's dare just reminded me of it."

"And why are the two of us here, then?" Rebecca asked, grinning. Her kinky hair was pulled back by a lime green hairband. She is the fourth of nine children. Her father is the city's mayor, and he's trying to get a reality show set up around that fact.

"Because it needs three people," Henrietta said, "and because you are my loyal minions."

Sue stood in the sandy playground as the others continued onward, excited despite themselves, hopping down the concrete divider at the end of the playground and running across the grass expanse that separated the rest of the park from the ruins. She watched them slowly shrink as they neared the handful of crumbling masonry columns, few much taller than the girls themselves, and go under the arched doorway, an artfully shaped arc which was all that suggested the scattered stones were anything besides the remains of a burnt-down factory. The sounds of their passing soon faded to the chorus of crickets, the rustle of trees, and the distant, omnipresent suburban traffic. Sue walked slowly, past the solitary stone that sat an arm's length from the playground. It was far from the rest of the ruins, but clearly belonged with them. How big had this structure been? What was it, anyways? Lawnmower marks circled around the stone, breaking the even rows of the rest of the field like ripples in water. The full moon hung big and low in the sky. Incredibly big. Sue stretched her hand out, fingers spread, and found she couldn't quite cover all of it. They say that atmospheric distortions abounded about the ruins. No one had ever bothered studying it. She could see her friends waiting by the arch, dwarfed by the scattered stones. Strange, it was always curiously hard to count them. Her arm fell.

"This is kid shit." she said to the sky.

"Hurry up!" she heard Rebecca shout. She broke into a run.

The three girls gathered around the patch of remaining flagstones roughly in the center of the ruins. This was a popular picnic spot - save for among the unusually superstitious. Henrietta dug around in the old leather handbag she'd brought, pulling out a lighter, a shrink-wrapped package of pillar candles she'd bought at a home goods store, and several sticks of incense she'd bought at the only shop in town that sells vinyl records.

"What's all that for?" Sue asked, "We're just supposed to join hands and say-"

"Shh, don't say it yet." Henrietta said as she stuck incense sticks in the ground and arranged the candles in a rough circle on the flagstones. "This is for effect, that's the most important part!"

Sue sat on the ground next to Rebecca as Henrietta buzzed about lighting things, chuckling through her teeth like she did whenever she bought a new video game. Rebecca shrugged at Sue.

"At least she's having fun."

"Alright, now quiet your minds." Henrietta said as she sat down opposite them. Sue didn't know quite what this meant, but the others were sitting with their eyes closed and making a very serious attempt at looking like they were meditating. She tried to do the same.

Silence pulsed in her ears, an unaccustomed widening of details. She could hear a tiny, pattern-less clamor - music, she realized. Was someone having a party a few blocks away? She ran her nails over the grooves of her threadbare blue jeans. She heard Rebecca shift around a bit. Henrietta's absolute stillness left a weird heavy spot in her mind. The incense sticks seemed to have gone out. A few of the candles similarly gutted. They don't make 'em like they used to, apparently. A slight breeze swept over the field. It rattled a charm on Henrietta's handbag, but slid noiselessly over the recently cut grass. It smelled like...like someone had neglected to clean up after their dog. Sue opened one eye and glanced sideways into the wind. A badly cracked and warped patch of sidewalk was illuminated by a solitary streetlight. Everything was terribly ordinary.

"We ready?" Henrietta asked. Sue shifted back to reality, reluctantly. She wasn't ready. Was that a bit of nervousness in Ettie's voice? She can't be that excited, Sue thought. Say a specific phrase in a specific spot under the full moon and Lucifer, the ghost of Elizabeth Bathory, and a crying clown will show up to grant your wish, show you who you'll marry, and or drag you to hell. This was the sort of thing kids believed in - the sort of things high schoolers only resorted to when supremely bored. They joined hands, only able to pinch each others fingertips, really. The patch of cobblestone they were sitting around was just a bit too big.

"Klaatu...Barada...Nikto" they said in clumsy almost-unison. There was a brief, stale silence. Headlights from a car backing out swept over the park, briefly casting big, dark shadows from the three girls and the ruins. Sue let go first.

"Well, that was fun." Rebecca said. Henrietta laughed.

"It was kind of lame as urban legends go," she said. "I think the incantation was actually some sort of meme. I tried to spice it up with the candles, but..."

"Nah, it was fun." Sue said, standing up and brushing herself off. "Looks like Carmichael's run off or something. Let's go back to your place and watch a movie."

The three girls turned to leave. The world turned in the opposite direction, grinding around them like the tumbler of a lock. It clicked in to place with a dull bell chime that played off the skin of their brains, and the ruined arch they'd expected to be facing was now filled with an ivy-covered portcullis, through which golden sunlight streamed.

The three girls turned from the portcullis and walked further in the regenerated ruins. The circular chamber where they'd conducted their ceremony, where Henrietta's handbag held down the plastic wrap the candles came in, opened onto a long bridge. It was of marble, with an abstract pattern of brown and black running down the center, and two rows of marble columns holding up a tile roof. They walked down the bridge, automatically, like they were only remembering walking down it, or dreaming it, or being compelled to by some evil force. Between the columns they saw that the landscape was hilly and heavily wooded, the bridge running along at just higher than the canopy, such that they seemed to be in a rolling sea of leaves. Golden sunlight streamed through golden clouds, flocks of things that were not quite birds flowing about them, the atmosphere heavy with dust, pollen, and heat haze. The sun was low and huge, bigger than an outstretched hand. In the distance, they saw mountains, dotted with trees, hovering in the air, slowly drifting about, each with several waterfalls dropping endlessly towards solid ground.

Sue wanted to say they were no longer in Kansas or some other cliche, hoping that hearing a voice would free them from whatever sleepy, muggy force seemed to be controlling their movement, but it was impossible. It would be like talking in church during a sermon, or making light at the scene of a grisly murder. You just couldn't do it, something about words just seemed childish.

The three reached the end of the bridge, where it joined with the flat top of a stone tower that disappeared into the trees below. The roof was ringed by wooden archways, those things people had outdoor weddings in front of, up which climbed trails of ivy. In the center of the roof was a door, unsupported. It opened for them, and suddenly they were in a room with no doors. It was circular, and way up the walls were windows filled with beautiful wrought iron bars instead of glass. Concentric circles of stone benches ringed the room, in which sat people in robes of green cotton and bones. In the center, which they slowly approached, was a golden bench, in which sat a man Sue was sure she'd dreamed about, once, when she was nine or ten. He was King Middlejack, she didn't wonder why she knew that. His face was beautiful. In front of the king stood a woman. She'd been speaking to him, but turned and looked, perplexed, at the three visitors, as they stepped forward and bowed, and someone in the back announced their names. The king, his court, and all of his realm were muted, blurry shades of green and yellow and brown, the air of a sun-weathered dirt road, whereas she was clear and cool. She had the figure of a superheroine and wore robes of royal purple and ultramarine, trimmed with gold. In her right hand was a tall steel staff, at her left hip a jeweled longsword. Her hair was long and curly, an incandescent white.

The king put on a crown of antlers and bounded over to them, taking Sue by the shoulder and grandly introducing her to the court. With a voice like bells he spoke of her, of how clever she was and how important she'd be in the future. She looked at the floor, smiling and blushing fiercely, hands folded over her lower stomach, like when she'd won a spelling bee in elementary school. She kept smiling as he stabbed her in the chest, a trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth. He left the dagger in, drawing two more for her friends, the rest of the court, in their tattered robes of dun brown, sprang to their feet, to attack or retreat or to dance. The clear-looking woman drew her sword, everything slowed down, Sue opened her mouth to scream or yawn and then all was as nothing.

-----
Did you know that this county didn't exist fifty years ago? I don't mean it was recently redistricted, I mean the space itself, the geology, literally did not exist. People just woke up one morning to find thirty or so extra miles between Keybridge County and Waiula Lake. Well, there was a housing crisis going on at the time, so people didn't question it as much as they should have. Trees were cleared and roads were paved, but the strange thing is, for such a new land Apple Valley County sure had a lot of ruins. They're kind of weird - the masonry is very different from colonial construction, and certainly unlike anything the Native Americans ever built. They tried to quietly demolish them, but ran into troubles - any explosives set off at the ruins inexplicably fizzled, picks and hammers had their heads slide off on the backswing, tractors and bulldozers had ruinous engine troubles as they were chained to the stones, and any of the demolitions crew who pressed the matter too much had a heart attack. The ruins seemed adamant that the only thing that could destroy them would be time. It was an inexplicable sort of thing, so they didn't bother to try and explicate it - the duplexes and strip malls were built around rather over the ruins, and life went on with only a few wild rumors. Now, Apple Valley County (which is mostly flat and has no apple orchards) is a peaceful and proud place, full of fancy downtown shopping centers, quaint little towns with bars that try to look older than they really are, and mile upon mile of roomy suburbs. For the past fifty years, the town council has quietly voted down any motions to study the ruins, or use them as tourist attractions.
-----

Sue moved her hands about in the darkness, groping at the loose, wrinkled pile of sheets. There was a stiff mattress and a thin Spongebob pillow that felt like it came from a hospital. Her hand met cool drywall. She was home again.

She pulled herself into a sitting position and rubbed her pounding head. Her clothes from last night were still on, but that was normal. She was trying to remember the dream she'd had last night, that terribly familiar dream. Was it the one where she fucked Orlando Bloom?

"Good morning!" a chipper voice said. Sue blinked incredulously. At the foot of her bed sat a little girl, with long, curly white hair and a powder blue dress. The girl smiled brightly. "Glad you finally woke up!