CHICORY

All I could think to do was hide myself behind the armchair. Suzuki remained silent in her seat with her head cocked to one side. The shine of her eyes lifted away from me to the direction of the thumping sound closing in. A shadow climbed over me, but it didn’t belong to the monster because it was Red standing to the left of the armchair with her hands in her pockets and a sour look on her face.

“You’re a boy, right?” she said.

I became aware of the stiffness in my neck as I gave a jerking nod.

“Well, toughen up.” Said Red.

“Red?!” said Suzuki, crossly.

“What?” said Red, “Am I wrong?”

“Now is not the time.”

The sour look didn’t leave Red’s face.

I had twisted round on my knees to look up at Red, so I turned back to sit normally again. That was when I came face to face with the monster which must have been able to move across the tower floor without making a sound.

Once, a guardian at Rootwork had told me to hurry across the mining town to a hunter’s wagon to pay for the head of a wolf which he wanted to mount on his cabin wall. When I first saw the wolf’s head I almost wet myself with fear because the hunter had held the head in his hands and made a howling sound when I neared the wagon. When I saw the wolf wasn’t alive, and the hunter had played a trick on me, I had laughed like I had hiccups. I felt sorry for the wolf that had lost his head, but relieved to see there was no life to the fur, and eyes, and teeth which were fixed into a look of rage.

Up close fully lit by the fireplace and lantern lights the monster’s face unlike the head of that wolf had eyes of white which were very alive.

They also had a twinkle to them and were surrounded by large eyelashes. Above the two rows of long clenched teeth was a woman’s nose that was small, having a slight doggish snout about it.

I looked up and what I saw forced me to rethink how afraid I was, because I had to ask myself what kind of monster would wear a wide-brimmed straw hat with a pink ribbon wrapped around the base. Donkey-like ears poked out of the straw hat on each side.

Seeing the monster so close without wind and rain and the dark of night I was able to find a pretty young woman’s face among the fur and teeth.

“Hello,” she said in a voice as soft as silk, “Please forgive my startling appearance, it isn’t my intention to frighten you. What is your name?”

“C-Chicory.”

“That’s a lovely name. I’m Angelica. Angelica Knighthaven.”

“Hello, A-Angelica,” I stammered, “I like your hat.”

“You do?”

She stopped crouching and stood to her full height, which was larger than Hress and Red by a head. I expected her body to be something horrible to look at; instead I could see that her chest, arms, and very long legs were like a normal woman’s, except for the light coat of fur. She wore a white dress which covered her torso and thighs and half of her long neck below her chin. There were several patches of different colours on the dress which made me think she had worn it a lot, and used whatever materials which were at hand to keep the dress in one piece.

“And your dress is nice too,” I said, meaning it.

She gave a happy grumbling noise as her eyelashes fluttered and her long ears twitched.

“Aren’t you the sugar that goes with the tea!” she said, bringing her large hands together.

Somehow she was able to speak without opening her mouth. Her teeth pushed up against her cheekbones in a way that looked exhausting; her mouth hadn’t moved at all since I first saw her and had remained locked tight as if she were wearing the lower half of her face like a mask.

Red ran her hand over the top of the armchair and said, “You know, it was Angelica who told us where to find you and Amaryllis.”

“Really?” I said.

Angelica’s huge spider-like limbs were mostly concealed from my view, but I could hear the sound of them stretching as she shifted forward a little.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you with me back then,” she said, “I can only talk to others when I’m inside this tower. I returned here as soon as I could and told Hress where to find you. I suppose Red ended up tagging along too.”

Angelica’s white pupils surrounded by white irises moved over to meet Red’s gaze.

“Does Chicory know about your curse?”

“No,” said Red, “And I don’t want to be here another second more than I have to.”

Red’s hand reached up to adjust the tough brown shoulder strap to the leather armour she wore. Maybe Red seemed in a bad mood because she couldn’t find relief from the tight fit– particularly around her large bust – and the brown trousers that seemed much too small for her size and hourglass shape.

“You’re both here now,” she said, looking from Angelica, to Suzuki, and then to me, “Chicory, would you feel safe if I left you with these two?”

I did feel at ease with Suzuki and Angelica, but for some reason the want for Red to stay tugged at my chest.

“See,” said Angelica, gesturing to me with open palms, “He wants you to stay.”

Red closed her right eye, her cheek lifting on the same side.

“Alright I’ll stay,” she said, “but introducing everyone one-at-a-time isn’t going to work. I’ll bring the rest down and get it over with. Any objections?”

The other two, satisfied with the outcome, remained silent.

“Okay, then. I’ll be right back.”

Red turned and headed back up the middle tower staircase. Angelica moved past me, patted her right hand on the surface of a third armchair nearest the fireplace, and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. Besides the fur covering her body, I could see her hands and feet were twice as large as they should have been; her feet looked big and strong enough to handle the weight put on them. I urged my gaze to the tower floor because I didn’t want to be caught staring.

“Chicory?” said Angelica.

“Yes?” I said.

“Recently I’ve been learning how to make dresses. I have a problem with tearing the clothes I wear as you can imagine. Would you like it if I were to make you a nice shirt and trousers?”

“Really? You would do that?”

“Of course!” said Angelica, “It would be my pleasure.”

“Can Amary have new clothes too?”

“Do you think she would like some?”

“Yes!” I said.

The only time I remembered having new clothes and not hand-me-downs was when one of the guardians, a kind lady named Miss Waxwood, had made new pairs of sleeveless shirts and bottoms; Amaryllis, Birch, Rowan, and Willow had spent weeks making those clothes for everyone, and Miss Waxwood had taught them how to do it.

“Splendid!” said Angelica, patting her large hands together and twiddling her fingers.

A line of saliva leaked from her teeth onto the tower floor, and I heard a hungry squelching noise coming from her stomach.

“Forgive me,” she said, “It’s the hunger pangs.”

She brought her other hand to her wrist where a large length of cloth was tied. She lightly dabbed the cloth to her jaw as if she had finished a meal.

Just when I thought I had seen enough incredible things for one day, what happened next made me gasp. From furred-head to clawed-toe Angelica shrunk down in size. If I had been looking away for a second I would have missed it.

In such a short amount of time she was no longer a head taller than Hress and Red, but had become equal in size to Suzuki.

Her dress and hat hadn’t changed size, instead they hung on her frame.

My gasp was raspy and sore from having sneezed and coughed a lot throughout the night and the morning.

“I shrink when I haven’t eaten,” Angelica said, “The longer I-”

Before she could finish what she wanted to say the sound of several footsteps descending the tower staircase drew her attention, including mine and Suzuki’s. I leaned over the same left side of the armchair I did before to view the staircase beyond.

At first I thought I saw an oddly shaped child waddling down the steps, but then I remembered Red had said something about a ‘large frog’; the creature was large, for a frog, but also about my height, either a little bigger or smaller, it was hard to tell from a distance. The frog had the body of a pudgy child, with stubby arms and legs, and an adorably misshapen face. Maybe I was actually asleep and not currently looking at a frog-man wearing sandals, and trousers, and a simple brown shirt.

Like with Angelica, there were more details to the frog than I could soak up in a moment. Red emerged closely behind the frog-man, and behind her, was what I could only describe as the walking corpse of a young man. From the distance between us I could make out the corpse’s blue-skin that was stretched tight across the skull and bones; the cheeks of the corpse were sunken.

As awful as the skeleton-man was to look at, there was something funny about the way his short brown hair, like dead grass, stuck to his head, or his black-glasses sat on the bridge of his deformed nose. I forced myself to look away from the skeleton-man before the need to be sick became too strong. The frog-man, Red, and the skeleton-man continued walking toward us.

The need to sleep called to me. Everything was beginning to feel raw and rough. But Amaryllis was sick and that meant I had to ignore how I felt until I was sure she would be okay. It didn’t matter if there was a spider-woman, a frog-man, a skeleton-corpse, Red, or Suzuki; the least I could do was stay awake and pay attention to what was happening around me.

Red and the new Accursed pair walked beyond my armchair and stopped short of the fireplace.

Suzuki shifted in her seat.

“Where’s Bailey?”

“Watching over Amaryllis with Hress,” said Red.

The little frog-man reached out his little hand for me to shake.

“Hi,” he said in a very squeaky voice, “Me Albie.”

“Hi,” I said back, shaking his hand which was soft and warm.

The skeletal young man with the blue-skin stood closest to the fireplace and didn’t seem to feel the heat pouring out from it.

“Alright?” he said, his very thin lips pulling back into a tight smile.

“I’m okay,” I said.

The skeleton young man eased a bony hand from a trouser pocket.

“I’m Guy,” he said.

His hand made a crunchy sound as I shook it. Out of everyone I met since being found by Hress and Red, it was Guy who seemed the strangest; not just because he was somehow alive but also dead, but because of the way he was dressed; I wanted to touch the shiny grey coat he was wearing which had a metal strip along the middle, and the odd black trousers that fit tightly to his skinny legs, and the shoes he wore which were red, but with the bottommost part, as well as the laces, being white; I searched inside my head to find any memory of a coat, trouser, or shoe that in anyway looked like what he was wearing, but none came to mind.

“How is the girl?” said Suzuki.

No one said anything for a moment before the bony fore-finger of Guy’s right hand creaked and pointed toward me.

“Maybe we should put him to bed first?” he said.

“Upstairs with the girl?” said Suzuki.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Red, “She’s…”

Red rubbed the back of her neck whilst choosing her words carefully, “…having a tough time of it right now. Except for those of us who are looking after her we should all stay on one of the other floors.”

“That is okay with me,” said Suzuki.

Angelica, noticing it was her turn to raise a concern if she had one, took a moment to straighten out her dress, the straw hat on her head bobbed just a bit from the extra looseness that wasn’t there before she shrank down in size. The time for her to make a comment past, so the conversation moved on.

“So,” said Red, “Let’s put Chicory to bed. Is that alright with you, Chicory?”

“Erm…” I said, feeling nervous in front of so many strange faces, “Is Amary going to be okay?”

Red squatted down by my armchair.

“We don’t know,” she said, “she’s sick. We’re doing the best we can to make her comfortable, but we don’t have any medicine.”

“Can you get some?” I asked.

“No,” said Guy, “It’s basically impossible. We’re alone up here on Wish Mountain. The fact you and the girl were found today is basically a miracle.”

“Okay,” said Suzuki, standing up, “Chicory must be very tired. I will put him to bed on the first floor. Red, Guy, can you please bring down one of the beds for him to sleep on?”

“Sure,” said Red. Guy sighed, though his body didn’t look capable of breathing, “Yeah, alright,” he said.

Suzuki offered me her hand. I almost decided against taking it. But the combination of tiredness, feeling sick, the warmth of the fire, and the ache throughout my body made me accept her hand.

Red and Guy had already sprung to action and hurried up the tower stairs ahead of us. Once they were out of sight Suzuki led to the staircase, I looked over my shoulder to Angelica, and Albie, and it occurred to me that, for the first time in my life, I was the most normal person in the room; Suzuki kept a step ahead of me as we continued up the winding black stairs, and as we walked I tried to remember that word I had learned once, which started with a H, and ended in ‘man’, it was a word that children at Rootwork used to try and make me angry, though it never worked. I remembered it: human. A human was a person. Amaryllis was human, Red was human, and so was Hress and Suzuki, but then Angelica definitely wasn’t human, and neither was Albie, the frog-man; was Guy, the skeleton-man, still human? He was ugly, and looked like he was dead, but maybe he was still human enough?

The impact of Suzuki’s heeled shoes on the black stone steps echoed loudly as my own tired legs carried me up the narrow staircase to the next floor, which was different from the one below it. It had the same stone floor, and walls, and low ceiling, and lack of windows; I spotted an old wooden cabinet lying sideways on the floor, and saw that it was one of hundreds of discarded items; from chairs and tables, swords and shields, straw baskets, lots of rope bundles, a dented bucket, and many other things hanging from beams of wood along the ceiling, and every nook and cranny.

The room had an immediate feeling of being quiet, and dark, and not a place anyone spent a lot of time in. I could only manage to look at a portion of the whole room, and not all of it at once, because, like the floor below, the room was actually one large ring, with the middle-most part of it being the staircase which led above and below.

Besides several small lit lanterns there wasn’t anything else in the room giving off light. I would have preferred to have slept in the armchair on the ground floor of the tower, because then I wouldn’t have been away from the comforting heat of the fireplace.

Suzuki cleared away a section of the mess that was in front of us. She didn’t seem like someone who was used to tidying things, she cleaned slowly, and with care, as if frightened of getting a splinter. If it were any orphan from Rootwork doing the tidying they would have charged ahead and gotten it done as quickly as possible because when told to get something done we didn’t have time to try and figure out the best way to do it.

Finished, she looked back at me, her eyes shining like a cat in the dim light. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, and my mouth and chin wobbled from the effort to keep from sobbing. I couldn’t see what Suzuki did next because the tears forced my eyes to see the room as one smeared blur, but I could hear her footsteps before her hands found the back of my head as she hugged me tightly.

“Shh, shh,” she said softly, “Everything is going to be okay.”

I was surprising myself. Somehow I had no memory of ever crying like this. There had been times where I would sit quietly and feel sad, but tears and the trembling had never happened before. I knew I had screamed out loud a lot whenever I was woken from my walking sleep, but that wasn’t the same kind of thing. From the moment Amaryllis fell over and was scooped up in Hress’s arms I had been fighting a horrible feeling in my chest that wouldn’t go away. It felt like being squeezed into a tiny gap.

Sometime after, maybe a few minutes, Red and Guy entered the room with a mattress held between them. They put down the mattress where Suzuki pointed and were in and out in a matter of seconds.

Suzuki sat by my side once I was lying down on the mattress with a blanket draped over me.

“Close your eyes and sleep,” she said, gently.

I closed my eyes and when I did she held one of my hands in hers and she began to whisper the words to a song I had never heard before in a language I didn’t know. The last thing I was aware of before falling asleep was of her softly singing and her thumb wiping a tear from my cheek.