The Fog Tunnel

Her worn leather boots struck the slate in slow, heavy beats, and every stone she crossed was slick with a film of moisture that shone like oil.

Elowen hitched the strap of her old buckskin pack higher on her left shoulder and pulled her ash-gray wool coat tighter with her free hand. She did not carry much. A few baked potatoes, gone so cold they had set into lumps as hard as river stones. A hip flask of the fierce plum wine her father brewed every autumn in the shed behind the house. Two hand-drawn maps with rotted edges. A pouch of tinderstones.

But the thing that mattered was in her breast pocket, pressed against the anxious drumming of her heart, and her fingers, cracked and bleeding from the cold, had not let go of it for a single step.

It was a music box, no bigger than her palm, made of silver-plated brass. The paint had flaked away at the corners. On the lid, someone had carved a six-petaled snowflake with great care. Edmund the lamplighter's son had given it to Elodie on the day he asked for her hand, three weeks before the fever took him, and it was the only thing her sister had left on the vanity table before she walked out onto a road with no way back.

Elowen drew a slow breath and ran her forefinger along the cold rim of the lid until it touched the winding key. One turn, and the little mechanism inside would pluck out a tune so fragile it sounded like glass touching glass in a winter wind. She knew that tune better than her own name.

She had heard it every night of her childhood. Her mother had sung the words of it over the cradle, and Elodie had sung them over Elowen's, in a voice so small and serious that it made the whole room feel like a church. Ember, ember, keep the night. There was more after that. There was always more, and the box always stopped one note before the end, as though it, too, had forgotten.

She did not dare wind it.

In a dark like this, she was afraid the music would call up things that ought not to be called. Worse, she was afraid the fog would simply swallow it whole, and that she would hear the silence close over the last note.

The place was called the Fog Tunnel. It was the only gate between the bright, colored world she had left behind and the Dim Snow Land, the country the old tales kept for their cruelest endings.

The fog was not like any fog she had ever walked through.

At home, fog was a thin thing. It lay along the river on autumn mornings and thinned out by noon. Here it had weight. It was thick as pine resin and the dull gray of old pewter, and it closed around her like a second skin, cold and wet, pressing on her ribs. Every breath she took felt like swallowing a handful of frozen wool.

Yet the cold was not the worst of it. Nor was the suffocating weight.

The worst of it was the way the fog got into her head.

It began as a numbness at her temples. Then, slowly, it laid a gauze over her thoughts, so that each one reached her a little later than it should have. She noticed her mind slowing, and the noticing frightened her more than the dark.

One. Two. Three. She counted her steps, and it took all of her strength to do it. She reached ten, and the number was simply not there.

It happened in an instant. It was exactly like watching a hand pass a wet cloth over a slate and wipe the writing clean. Elowen jerked and swayed, and her fist tightened so hard around the music box that its corner punched through the wool and into her chest. The pain was sharp and small and bright, a single spark flaring in a dark room, and it dragged her back to herself.

The fire answered.

The Emotion Fire, the old gift that ran in her family's blood, rolled up from the center of her chest in one slow wave of warmth, out along her arms and into her numb fingertips. Her head cleared.

Don't fall, she told herself, and bit her lip hard enough to taste iron. Don't you dare fall down here. The blood on her tongue was better than any smelling salts.

The fog murmured around her. It sounded like thousands of voices with no faces, leaning in close to her ear, urging her to put her pack down, to lie on the nice cold stones and close her eyes. Only for a moment. Only a moment.

But how could she close her eyes?

Elodie's face came to her, quick and clear as a torch thrust into a cellar.

…

Six months ago, her village at the foot of the Scenery Chalk hills had been the quietest place in the world. Then one gray afternoon a letter had appeared on the family table, delivered by the border post, folded small on paper so thin it was nearly skin. It had no name on it. It held a single line in faded ink, in Elodie's slender, hurried hand.

Do not look for me. I have seen the door to the Dim Snow Land. The answer to what we have always longed for is behind it.

That night, her sister was gone. She left the music box on the vanity. She left a green dress half-sewn on the form, with the needle still in the hem. She left a house so full of her absence that the floorboards seemed to hold their breath.

People talked, as people do. They said the Dim Snow Land was where the cursed went to be forgotten. They said a faceless wizard ruled a castle of glass there, and that he took the memories of anyone fool enough to climb his mountain. Her father wept until he could no longer see the hands in front of his face. Her mother took to her bed and stayed there.

Elowen could not stand and watch her family break apart in front of her. She packed her pack, hid the music box over her heart, and left on a bleak winter morning without once looking back.

The memory kicked at the fire in her blood. She drove her legs forward, harder, through the thick gray.

Every step was a fight to keep hold of one more thought. The fog stroked her face and breathed into her ear, softly, coaxingly: Who are you? Who are you looking for? Forget. Forget it all and the hurting will stop.

"No," Elowen growled.

She called up her fire. A thin amber glow rose around her, and the fog drew back a few inches from her skin. It was only a small gap, but through it, at the far end of the stone-arched tunnel, she saw a gray brightness.

The exit.

She put every last scrap of strength into legs she could barely feel and flung herself at the light, around the final bend of the tunnel.

…

The fog tore away like a curtain. A blast of cold, clean, razor-clear air hit her full in the face. She stumbled out from under the arch, her knees folded, and she went down on a surface that was hard and bright and glittering.

She dragged in breath after breath, each one blossoming white in the silence. When she lifted her head, the world in front of her stopped her heart for a moment.

The Dim Snow Land.

She had heard it described in a hundred frightened whispers at the border, by men who had never set foot beyond the arch. None of them had gotten it right.

It was not ordinary snow. Nothing soft was falling from the sky. What covered the whole of that wide valley was glass.

Billions of tiny grains of it lay in drifts over the ground and over the bare, twisted trees and over the long hills that rolled away into the distance. Each grain was sharp and perfectly clear, like the shards of some enormous broken window. Under a sunless sky the color of ash, they gave off no warmth at all, only a cold, dead, silver shine.

And there was no wind. The air was so still that her own ragged breathing came back to her as a thin, brittle echo. And yet the glass snow on the slopes was moving.

It flowed. The grains slid over one another in slow, thick rivers, like the sand in some giant's hourglass, and they made a tiny, ceaseless sound, a hiss and a crackle, steady as a pulse. It was the only sound in all the valley.

Elowen put out a shaking hand to touch the drift. The grains bit through her buckskin glove at once, each one a pinprick of ice. They did not melt on her warmth. They drank it. The leather darkened, and a dull gray frost crept out over her knuckles.

She snatched her hand back and scrambled to her feet, suddenly terrified. She checked herself over, as a mother checks a child who has fallen.

The fog was behind her. But its cold fingerprints were still all over her mind, and she needed to know what it had taken. She reached for the most familiar things she owned, the ones she was sure of, as if gripping a rope.

My name is Elowen. My father is Thomas. My mother is Martha. My sister is Elodie.

All of it was there. She let out a long breath of relief.

Then she tried to picture the house where she was born, with its vegetable patch, its crooked fence, and the small shape that always came tearing out to meet her whenever she came home from gathering firewood. Warm brown fur. Long ears, a stub of a tail. A damp nose pushed into her palm.

"What was his name?" she whispered.

Her voice shook.

She pressed her hands to her head. She could see him as plainly as ever. She had raised him for eight years. She remembered the weight of him in her lap, the silk of his coat, the small white scar on his right ear where he had once tangled with a hedge. She remembered it all.

But the name was gone.

There was no trace of it. Not even a hollow. It was like a page cut cleanly out of a book, so neatly that the binding did not show.

"No. No, that's not possible."

She stumbled back, both hands clamped to her skull.

The rumors were true. The fog and the snow of this place really did eat memory. It did not take everything at once. It worked slowly and without mercy, one small detail at a time, one thin thread after another, until a person forgot who they were and why they had come, and sat down in the drifts and turned into a statue.

Panic rose and nearly closed over her head. She crushed the music box against her chest, using its corner to find the pain, to stay awake.

Elodie. I can't lose Elodie. She would forget the dog's name if she must. She would forget the color of her first dress, the taste of her mother's bread. But she would not forget her sister.

Not her. Not her.

Elowen lifted her head and made herself look across the valley, searching for any direction at all.

And she saw it.

It stood at the very center of the glass-snow valley, rising out of a crown of ice-bound ridges and wreathed in a thin ring of mist. The Glass Castle.

It crowned an enormous mass of ice and rock. It had no brick and no timber, no stone. It was made of glass, and glass of every sort, glass that shone and glass that reflected. Its spires drove up into the ash-gray sky. Its vaulted roofs glittered silver. And it was wearing a thousand huge panes, like eyes, and every one of them held the slow rivers of snow flowing below the hill.

It was beautiful in a way that made her skin crawl. It looked at the world with perfect indifference.

As she stared at the shining spires, a strange shiver ran down her spine, and it did not come from the cold. It came from somewhere deeper. It came from instinct.

That isn't a building, she thought. Not just a building.

The great glass faces of the castle seemed to be angling themselves as she watched. They shifted, a few degrees at a time, and tilted the pale light of the valley toward her, and she had the dreadful, clear sense that the whole castle had turned to look.

It was looking back at her.

A thousand glass eyes, all along the soaring walls, were watching the one living thing that had just stepped out of the fog. And what they held was frozen and cold and mocking. It was the gaze of something that had been alone for a very long time, and had grown proud of it.

Elowen swallowed. She settled the pack on her shoulder. The fire in her chest gave a hard, warning throb.

Her sister was in there. Or, at the very least, the answer to where her sister had gone.

She took her first step down the slope. The glass crunched under her boot with a sound as clear as breaking ice, and it rang out through the silence like a challenge.

She began to walk toward the heart of the Dim Snow Land.