r/HFY•8 mo. ago

[The Shotgun Girl] Chapter 9 of 17

OC-Series

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"Is it really so far-fetched, Brown?"

I was still in the overstuffed chair in the sitting-room, still had my arm against the shotgun barrel, still listening to Blackie. But I'm sure my expression was very different after hearing her go on for the last several minutes about her theory, her nigh-religious belief that we, the four of us, she, Blondie, Red, and myself, were just... were just...

"Characters in a work of fiction?" I repeated for, like, the third or fourth time.

"Why is that such a great mental leap to make?" Blackie had gotten up and was messing with the gramophone again, sorting through a selection of records. She cut her eyes at me, just for a moment. The knowing little smirk on her face was just her typical expression, yet it somehow had taken on an overtone at once sinister and a little insane. Or maybe it had always looked like that, and it was just the revelation of how her mind really worked that made it seem that way to me. "It's not that much of a step," she went on, "from thinking 'someone has stuck us in an artificial world for their own amusement' to 'someone created us out of whole cloth and stuck us in an artificial world for their own amusement.'"

She'd just laid out for me, in detail, her belief that the four of us were nothing more than fictional characters in a story. That someone, some authorial thing beyond our comprehension, had conjured us up along with our world and its bizarre rules, as some sort of artistic exercise. That those weird rules themselves began to make sense if viewed as aesthetic or stylistic choices. We'd all read novels before, she had said. Did Wendy Darling make trips to the potty? Did we get detailed passages of Don Quixote washing his face and combing his hair? We had no memories of our time before coming here because there was no such time. We knew things without knowing how we knew them, we possessed fragments of knowledge without the larger context for those isolated facts, not because we had forgotten, but because we had been created with that information, ex nihilo.

As explanations for our situation went, it managed to be both insane and... frighteningly complete. Looked at objectively, her theory had more to recommend it than Red's ramblings about Purgatory. It required less mental gymnastics about symbolism, at any rate. And yet...

It was one thing to say that the world of my perceptions was unreal. But to say that I, as the perceiver, was just an illusion experiencing illusions...

I shook my head, which was beginning to throb a bit. "I just can't believe that, Blackie."

Her response surprised me, even though it was classic Blackie. "Good. I'd rather you didn't." She peered closely at a record, then shook her head and set it aside. "I'm not looking for converts." She picked out another platter, nodded approvingly, and set it on the turntable. "I quite like you the way you are, Brown. I don't need you to believe in my theory. I only need you to accept that I believe it." She started turning the gramophone's crank. "Your demand was for an honest answer and I gave you one."

I chewed at my lip, mulling over what I'd heard as the crackling, somewhat draggy sound of brass instruments filled the background. Then a voice was belting out doggerel about dreaming of their dearest all the time and how they longed to be sweethearts. Knowing how tricky Blackie could be in debating, I chalked up her playing music as likely just an attempt at distracting me. But I wasn't going to be diverted, not when I was making some progress.

Progress. That was a weird thought, itself. Something I so craved and worked toward, but seldom saw and barely believed in. The idea of making headway toward escape, toward freedom, toward my just avengement. That was what kept me going, day-by-nigh-identical-day. Like in the attic earlier, looking beyond the walls. I kept straining ahead, hoping that this time might be different, that this time I might get some sign that an end goal was getting even marginally nearer. And I kept having that hope dashed. But, whether from bloody-minded determination or just plain idiocy, I kept on going.

Maybe Blackie was right about me being an optimist.

Regardless, the notion that I was onto something here, was learning something, was inching a step closer to my goal, even if I was just a pawn sliding to the forward edge of my square, there was a rush to it. A heady feeling, like I'd gotten into some Champagne that hadn't been sucker-baited.

The wheels in my head were turning. I might not be a deep thinker like Blackie and Blondie. I might not be as... comfortable... as adept... at rooting around in my own thoughts as them, but I've got enough brains to get the job done. "Soooo..." I drew the word out as I pondered and tied concepts together. "If you really believe all that, then I suppose your explanation for why you're always so damn lucky is that you are the main character, the protagonist of whatever drama we're in?"

Blackie was still standing at the gramophone, eyes closed and swaying slightly in time with the chorus of Let Me Call You Sweetheart. Red and I might be better than her at most physical activities -- climbing, fighting, sports -- but none of us could hold a candle to Blackie when it came to dancing. Even the small movements she was making there, floating hands and nodding head, were so graceful and refined that it was impossible not to watch.

Even the shrug she offered in response to my question was a thing of beauty, melding seamlessly into her rhythm. "That's one possibility, certainly," she replied.

I forged ahead in spite of all distraction. "And that would be why you smile so much, then. Because if this is a story and you're the protagonist, you know you're going to win in the end and everything will work out for you."

Her long, delicate hands stopped their airy floating, her head stopped its bobbing, and her hips ceased their gentle sways. She just stared at me, mouth slightly open, head cocked just a little to one side. A stray lock of magpie-black hair fell across her face, shaken from its side-swept placement, but she didn't seem to notice.

I just stared back at her, doing my own imitation of her arched-brow 'really?' expression.

She closed her eyes and shook her head, sighing like I'd just disappointed her in some big way. "No, Brown. That is not only not the truth, it's just about as far from the truth as anyone could get." She threw up those hands that had been doing little fairy-dances moments before. "And you were doing so well, too!"

For some reason, Blackie's condescension was harder to take than normal. A flare of anger went through me and I snapped, with some heat, "Well, enlighten me, then! You're supposed to be answering my demand, after all!"

If that perturbed Blackie in the slightest, she didn't let on. She propped against the gramophone-table, letting the last few notes of the song play out before she answered. "Brown, I smile so much because I enjoy life. Because I'm happy."

There was no way I could have heard that correctly. "Happy?"

"Happy. And not just happy." That slightly feral, slightly mad smile I'd caught a glimpse of earlier made its return. "Spitefully happy!"

I had to rub my temples. Had to. "Either I'm lost, or you're crazy. Or both."

"Really, Brown?" There was that line again. And I didn't even have to look to know the arch of her brow that went along with it. "With you and I so much alike, I was sure that you'd understand what I'm getting at."

"Just tell me."

"No." I could hear the widening grin in her voice. "Because just telling you answers is less fun than guiding you to find them yourself. As I said, Brown, we're more alike than you realize. You believe we're in some otherworldly 'zoo', being watched by some kind of alien voyeurs, zookeepers, what-have-you, for their own amusement. I believe we exist in the minds of readers, who observe us for essentially the same reason. Now, think about those hypothetical zoo-goers of yours. Are you eager to give them the show that they want? Will you jump through hoops and roar and sit up and roll over on command to please them, like a good little tamed lioness?"

I flashed back to my thoughts as I'd cut up my mirror-clone's arm earlier. "To hell with those bastards," I growled. "As far as I can tell, whoever's out there watching wants me to be traumatized and afraid, but lately all I feel is the desire to spill their rotten blood."

"Just exactly. Just exactly that." Blackie was back to sounding like a schoolmarm again -- how I knew what a schoolmarm sounded like, I don't know, but I knew that she sounded like one. "Those who watch us, whether alien beings who've trapped us in some pocket reality or readers following us in a story, they seem to want fear and drama from us. They want us to suffer so they can experience our trauma from a safe distance. That's the purpose of a horror story, is it not? The vicarious thrill. Feeling others' pain and fear and angst and struggle while being safely removed from same. Well, Brown, I'm no less rebellious than you. You respond to the trials we're put through with anger, with retaliatory violence when you can, to spite them. To show them that you're not afraid. And because you hope to one day be freed to inflict such fury and pain upon your tormentors. You believe that achieving freedom and revenge will make you happy.

"But I don't have the luxury of believing in eventual escape and revenge. After all, Huckleberry Finn doesn't get to leap off the page and bolt out the library door, lighting out for real-world territories. Rappaccini's Daughter can't reach beyond the printed paragraphs and strike down the reader with her poisoned touch. For me, there's only here and now and what I am at the moment. This, now, is all I have to work with." She trailed off there, clearly waiting for me to pick up that thread.

I put my hand on the shotgun barrel. Not as a threat, but just for the reassurance of it. Its solidity, its simple, pragmatic utility. I needed an anchor to keep my brain from whirling around in all these abstractions. "So... you're happy and smile all the time... because you think being happy... keeps these hypothetical readers from getting what they want from you?"

Blackie clapped her hands and threw them into the air, head thrown back in triumph. "Hallelujah! The girl finally starts to get it! Yes! I find myself stuck inside a horror story, but I refuse to play their little game. The reader expects angst and terror and drama from me, so I make a point of giving them the opposite. I smile and laugh and joke because I can't reach out of the page and claw their eyes out. I purposely find joy wherever I can -- a good book, a well-cooked meal. The companionship of dear friends." She straightened and her expression became dignified, almost regal. A queen captured and exiled from the chessboard but standing upright nonetheless. "I can't escape and I can't wreak revenge. But I can defy!"

I was moved -- couldn't help but be, with Blackie's fine voice and delivery -- but only so far. I scrubbed at my face. "I wondered if you were crazy before," I said, about a third-serious, "but if you're genuinely happy here, you're further gone than I thought."

She could have taken that as the snark it mostly was, but, flying in the face of her own sermonizing, her rebuttal was nothing but serious. "Happiness is largely a question of perspective, Brown. We can bemoan the rose bush having thorns or delight in a thorn bush bearing roses. What's more, we humans are nothing if not adaptable. If humans can live in an environment, we can thrive in it, from jungle to desert to arctic wastes. Why not in a horror story, as well? We know it can be done, because we're doing it. We've turned life in a piece of twisted fiction into an almost routine thing. Sure, we have to move from place to place and be on constant vigilance against an environment that tries very hard to kill us." She shrugged. "But so do nomads who live in the desert or on the arctic tundra. There's no reason we can't find ways to enjoy our lives, Brown. We can laugh, play games, listen to music."

Her smile suddenly twisted a little and she broke the eye contact she'd been holding with me. "We can even love... as Blondie and Red are probably proving even as we speak." She turned suddenly and started for the door.

"Wait." I stopped her just before she could leave. Something about all this had been nagging at me, a splinter in my mind that I kept feeling but couldn't quite grasp until that moment. "You're too smart to do things without a good reason," I said carefully, threading my way through the concept, "or more than one reason. You got me to play chess with you for demands, then lost intentionally." I rubbed at my chin. "You wanted to have this conversation, didn't you? This was all planned out from the moment you set foot in the study, wasn't it?"

She turned in the doorway to face me, still with a smile, but it was that one that went nowhere past her lips. That delicate brow failed to arch. "Your paranoia credits me with unbounded genius, Brown. Letting you think I'm that clever certainly appeals to my vanity... but Red would no doubt scold me for indulging in that sin." She shook her head. "I'll admit that I've wanted to discuss my beliefs with someone, especially you, for some time. But I haven't because, frankly, I'd rather none of you adopt my theory. Or even think upon it, really." She sighed. "You're all, in your own ways, creatures of hope. I, myself, can live just fine without it, but the three of you...

"You, in particular, Brown. Your hope, angry and spiteful as it is, gives you a drive that I greatly admire. I meant what I said about not wanting to take that from you. But I did -- do -- want you to understand me better. Especially after I realized the depths of your... doubts... about me. That's why I let you win and make your demands of me." Now her smile did spread, just a bit, to her eyes, an impish look. "When I first talked you into playing against me for demands, it was with the purely selfish intention of utterly trouncing you and claiming the prize for myself." She shrugged. "Believe that or don't, as you will."

"And what did you plan to demand from me?" I asked, suspicion prickling my voice.

She just regarded me for a long moment, but her attention seemed to be directed inward. I assume debating whether to answer me or not. Then she sighed, shoulders sagging a little, and turned on her heel.

And as she strode out of the room, boots clacking steadily on the hardwood, she simply said, "I wanted a kiss," and closed the door behind herself.

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