Tay stands on the shore of a lake. If she was looking at the lake, she’d be completely taken away by its beauty. She’s seen the ocean, and she’s seen lakes, but she’s never seen a lake that looks like an ocean. And yet, here she is. If she took the time to really smell the air, to examine the feel of the water in front of her, she’d recognize with awe that there was no hint of salt in the air. She would exclaim with excitement at the idea that a body of water could be so huge as to stretch out beyond the horizon while simultaneously not having the familiar smell of the ocean. She would be pretty impressed with all of these things if she was actually looking forwards. Instead, as children are wont to do, she looks at what’s in her hand.
Tay is eleven years old. She admires the doll in her hand. She found it just an hour or so ago when the mission started. It was on the floor of a bedroom. The bedroom had the kinds of things that made Tay’s eyes go wide. Toys, blankets, food. It wasn’t anything particularly impressive. The village they were in was a small fishing village. A cluster of cottages nestled up by the shore of the immense lake. Canoes and other small water vessels peppered the landscape. Tay had seen stuff like this before, but for whatever reason, the small doll in her hand strikes her as the most beautiful thing in the world.
From what she can tell, it’s made from patches of burlap sewn together and stuffed with hay. It looks like a little girl. Straw hair frames its round face, which is complete with buttons for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Tay is old enough to know that the doll is made from these parts, but she’s young enough to also know that the doll is made of pure magic. It has a beauty that far eclipses the beauty of the lake in front of her. It is a blank canvas. She is a blank canvas. She can be a princess, a warrior, an artist, or anything else that Tay wants her to be. This makes her beautiful.
“Tayna, what are you doing?” The voice from behind her immediately causes Tay to stand up straight. Without thinking, she shoves the doll inside a pocket of her black cloak. She knows that Mother won’t approve of the doll, and she knows that her little sister won’t, either. As May stalks up from behind her, Tay wonders whether or not her sister saw the doll before she was able to hide it.
“Nothing,” Tay says. “Just looking at the water.”
May circles in front of Tay, standing between her and the lake. She looks at Tay inquisitively. Tay gulps. She may be older than May by two years, but she has never felt any sort of authority over her sister. She sees a wildness in May’s eyes and wonders if anyone has ever felt any sort of authority over her.
May circles around Tay like a shark. She’s a full head shorter than Tay, but her rigid posture makes her almost look taller. Tay crouches instinctively, not wanting to challenge May unnecessarily. “Well you’d better snap out of it,” May says. “And you’d better not let anything distract you.” Her eyes linger on Tay when she says this. Tay gulps again and sends off a quick prayer to the gods that she doesn’t know about the doll. “Mother trusted us with this mission.”
“I don’t want to let Mother down,” Tay says.
“You know,” May says with a smile, “Mother didn’t tell anyone else about this mission. It’s top secret. Just for you and me to know about.”
Tay frowns. She didn’t know that. She isn’t sure whether Mother told May something that she didn’t tell Tay, or if May just had the intuition to figure it out. Either way, Tay didn’t like it. Her frown deepens. “Yeah, I know,” she lies.
May grins. “Right. Do you know what it is? What we’re here to get?”
“A hat. Like the one that Mother has.” Mother was very clear about this. She likes her hat a lot. Sometimes Tay thinks that she likes her hat more than she likes her daughters. Or, at least, more than she likes one of her daughters. Tay doesn’t really understand how the hat works, but she knows that it makes Mother really strong. Another hat like that would make her even stronger. Tay shivers. She isn’t sure if she likes the idea of Mother being even stronger. She does her best to quiet the discomfort swimming through her body. May has a way of picking people apart. Any time May would see the slightest bit of pain, sadness, or unease in Tay, she’d use her words to pry it open like pliers in an open wound. Tay repeats the family mantra in her head as a kind of sick self soothing. Act now, think later, feel never.
She forces any tears escaping her eyes to vacuum themselves right back up, then looks at May. All the chest puffing and tear sucking was for nothing. May isn’t even looking at her. She’s looking at a large wooden structure, something that may have been some kind of lodge or hotel back in the Good Ol’ Days. May points to it. “If that hat is here, it’s gotta be in there.”
Tay waited for May to add a “What do you think?” or a “Do you agree?”, but of course she never did. Instead, she starts walking towards the structure and offers a curt “Hurry up.”
Tay looks at her elongating shadow. Daylight is dying. The time is now. They need as much cover of darkness as they can get without it being so late that everyone who lives in this lodge will be inside of it. According to Mother’s intelligence, most of the village should be out fishing for as long as they have sunlight. The time to act is, as it always seems to be, now.
Tay runs to meet May, who is already at the side of the building fiddling with a window. Tay looks around for any onlookers, but Mother seems to be right. Out on the lake, she can see plenty of fishing boats. She wonders about the people in the boats and what their lives are like, but she’s jerked out of her daydream by May tugging at her collar. “In,” she says, pointing at the now open window. It feels like the kind of thing that should be a question or a request, but May makes it quite clear that this is an unquestioned order by hoisting Tay up and forcing her through the window.
It isn’t lost on Tay that May is far stronger than she herself is. Tay would barely be able to lift May up despite them being roughly the same size. Tay does have to help May by scrambling all of her limbs up against the wall and window sill, but the fact remains that Tay is always painfully aware of how much stronger her younger sister is than herself. It also isn’t lost on Tay that May’s decision to shove Tay through the window first was likely a calculated one; not only does it serve to remind Tay of the former point, but it also has the upside of having Tay absorb all of the slings and arrows that anyone inside the room might be poised to throw.
Tay crashes to the floor of the room before immediately standing up and looking around. She finds herself in a small kitchen that is thankfully devoid of anyone else. That said, her ungraceful tumble had her clanging against more than one cast iron pot, leading to a sizable welt on her thigh as well as echoes of clanging metal being sent through the lodge. The sun already had them on a timer, but now the sound of the pots has put them on yet another.
A soft grunt escapes May’s mouth as she vaults into the kitchen, banging on nothing because every bangable surface has already been displaced by Tay. May puts her finger up to her lip, as if to tell Tay to shut the fuck up, idiot. Tay didn’t need to be visually told, but she nods her head in agreement anyway. Together, they slink through the shadows of the kitchen to a doorway on the far side of the room.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
They find a living room area, complete with three couches clustered around a central fireplace. Tay’s heart skips a beat. On each couch, mercifully sleeping, lies a man. They all look to be in their 20s or 30s, though for a youngster like Tay they may as well all be a hundred. The important piece of info for her is that there are people here, they’re bigger than her, and they look like they could squish her into a small basketball, dribble her up and down a few times, then Kobe her into the lake where she would get eaten by piranhas. She doesn’t know if Lake Erie has piranhas, but it feels like a safe guess.
On the near side of the room, just in front of where Tay and May stand, is a staircase descending into a basement. On the far side, beyond the three couches and three sleeping would-be Taysketball players, is an accompanying staircase ascending to the next story. May whispers, “I’ll go down, you go up.” Tay wants to protest, saying that May is the better fighter and would be more capable of fending off three fully grown men, but before she can articulate anything, May is already slinking down the stairs. She winks at Tay and mouths, “Meet up with me if you find it.” Tay nods begrudgingly.
While Tay is certainly the weaker of the two, she takes some solace in the fact that she’s much better when it comes to stealth. Tay hears every floorboard creak as May descends out of view. In contrast, Tay slips through the living room without so much as a sound, doing a sort of reverse moonwalk to keep her feet from making any noise. When she gets to the staircase, she steels herself. Stairs are tougher than flat floor. Stairs always creak. But Tay is determined to showcase whatever skill she’s got. Nobody can tell her that she isn’t damn good at what she does.
The stairs groan slightly under her feet, but she manages to keep her body lightly distributed by crawling up on all fours. This relieves the amount of pressure on each plank of the staircase, resulting both in a quiet ascension and a slight smile on Tay’s face as she imagines being a gorilla kunckling its way up a mountain. When she gets to the top, she stays on her knuckles for a moment, wanting to beat her chest but knowing that doing so could awaken the many people inside the building who will want to skin her alive. The thought sobers her up and straightens her back.
A short hallway in front of her branches off into five different rooms. Two on the left, two on the right, and one in the middle. Tay has never played a Legend of Zelda or Banjo Kazooie game before, but the treasure hunting instincts of a child don’t need to be nurtured by collection-based video games to thrive. She decides with conviction that, if the hat that she’s looking for is indeed in this village, and if it is indeed in this building, and if it is indeed on the upper story, then it’s almost certainly in the center room.
She sneaks down the hallway and presses her ear against the door. Not hearing anything, she reaches for the knob and gives it a good pull. Ten or so years from now, she’ll have perfected the art of silently opening doors. Today, though, she’s a young, unpracticed amateur. The door creaks loudly as she pulls it open. The hinges scream like a chorus of nut kicked little boys, loud and piercing and wide reaching. All of a sudden Tay’s heart bumps around from rib to rib like a pinball. Panic explodes in her mind. Because the door pulled out into the hallway, she at least was able to put herself in the small nook between the open door and the wall behind it, thus hiding her from anyone in the room who she didn’t happen to hear earlier.
A loud proclamation of “Who the fuck’s there?” from within the room tells her that her listening job was a C- at best. Almost in unison, she hears similar calls from lower in the house. Tay’s eyes go wide. The creaky door must have woken up the entire house. Not only is she fucked, but May is, too. She’s paralyzed with fear and self-loathing that she’s likely cost both herself and her sister their lives. The one silver lining, grim as it is, is that she’ll at least die at the hands of these people instead of at the hands of her Mother.
Footsteps quickly approach the door. Whoever it is that’s coming out, all they have to do is walk into the hallway and turn around, and they’ll see a little girl with thick brown hair and a soiled cloak. Once that happens, Tay will be as good as dead. All of a sudden, liquid panic crystallizes into rock solid determination. Act now, think later, feel never.
The foot steps are nearly at the door. From the sound of them, they belong to someone big - an adult probably, probably one with the ability to peel Tay’s upper jaw backwards until she’s a Pez dispenser. She quickly calculates that there’s only one way out of this: Somehow she needs whoever’s coming out of this room to not turn around. If they continue to walk down the hallway and down the staircase, she’ll be able to slip into the room and, if the gods are smiling on her, escape out the window. A drop from the second story doesn’t sound so fun, but she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
The footsteps are too close now. There isn’t time. Without thinking, Tay grabs the doll from inside her cloak. She whips it down the hallway. She hardly knows that she’s doing it - maybe its instinct, maybe its luck - but she happens to sling the doll just precisely so such that its button eyes are what make contact with the wall, creating the maximum possible amount of noise. Not only that, but the doll happens to hit just beyond where the stairs start descending. What this means is that the person coming out of the room, who happens to be a woman who looks like she eats children for breakfast without any milk, hears a clinking noise coming from far down the hallway. Assuming that this clinking noise was made by a would-be thief trying to make a quick escape, she lumbers down the hallway, each heavy step followed by a loud “fucking” or “kill you”.
Tay, still hidden in the little cave of the door and the hallway, watches the beast of a woman running down the hall. Tay crosses herself (not literally, because she doesn’t know what that is; instead, she makes a different motion with her hands that isn’t worth getting into right now, just think of it as crossing yourself) and slips into the room. She’d hoped that this room, the one that was in the center back of the hallway, which obviously meant it was the treasure room, would be ornate in some way. A big treasure chest, a wall that looked like it could be punched through, a suspicious looking water fall. She sees no such thing. Instead, the room is simple. A bed, a desk, a dresser, and clothes strewn about.
She doesn’t have time to second guess herself. She closes the door, opens the window so it will be an available escape route (she doesn’t look down from the window so she won’t hesitate later at the knowledge of how far she’ll have to fall), and she starts looking around. If she comes home empty handed, she may as well have died here in the lodge. She needs to find that hat. If it isn’t in here, then she’s dead either way. If it is in here, then she sure as shit better find it.
She yanks open drawers. Flings sheets off the bed. Rummages through papers on the table. Anywhere that a hat could be hiding, she looks. She doesn’t stop looking for a moment, not even when she hears yelling and banging erupting from downstairs. May could be dead. Her sister could be dead. She never really liked her sister, but she still loves her. Right? Sisters love each other. Doesn’t matter. Look. Search. Find. Where the fuck is that hat?
The banging sounds from downstairs get worse and worse until, after a loud crash and a Wilhelm scream, the building is eerily quiet - and not just because they’re on lake Erie. The only sound in the building is a set of footsteps coming up the stairs. Tay looks at the door, then at the window. Time is almost up. She can’t leave without the hat, but she can’t not leave. On the far side of the room, there’s one pile of clothes she hasn’t looked through yet. The footsteps outside are getting closer. They’ve reached the top of the stairs and they’re walking down the hallway.
Without much thought, she leaps towards the pile of clothes. Going home having failed the mission is simply not an option. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that she’d rather die at the hands of strangers than go back home a failure. Maybe, just maybe, if she does end up finding that hat, whatever powers it has will help her escape. She doesn’t really think that’s the case, but it’s nice to have a little foolish optimism when seconds away from death. She digs through the pile. Shirts. Pants. Lingerie. Interesting stuff, but not what she needs. The door starts to open. She looks with horror at the face of the woman as she walks through the door.
Only, it isn’t a woman. It’s a girl. Recognition washes over Tay like a rain of dog piss.
“You’re loud,” May says.
“May! May, what happened? No, nevermind, we need to look-- search the other rooms, the hat isn’t in here, but there’s four other--”
“--it’s not here, Tayna.”
“It’s... What?”
“It’s not here. They took it up north across the lake earlier today. It was gone before we were even in the village.”
“So... How do you know that? Were you interrogating them? What happened??”
May throws something at Tay. She instinctively raises her hand to block her face, but instead of feeling the weight or blade of a weapon, she feels the scratch of burlap. She looks down and sees her doll. She picks it up and admires it. It’s covered in a thick coat of blood. Tay doesn’t want to think of whose blood it might be. May is covered in blood, but she doesn’t have any visible wounds.
“Just doing what I always do. Cover up my older sister’s mistakes. Let’s go report back to Mother.”
May hops out the window as if it were no more interesting than a plain wooden door. Tay’s fingers tremble, and her doll drops to the floor. She looks down at her hand and sees that it too is now coated in a thick river of blood.