No. He didn’t think it meant him any deliberate evil. It wanted him to have things that would make him happy, that would comfort and reassure. It would do its best to give him everything and anything he longed for, denying him only a single desire: It would not let him go.
Perhaps it couldn’t even entirely help responding to his unconscious wishes. Proof of this hypothesis was close at hand, quite literally. While he wasn’t paying attention, a roll of cottony white toilet paper had materialized on a rod, rising out of the cloud. He collected a fistful and wiped and had a glance. Blood. The great wad of smoke stuff was saturated with it.
He cleaned himself as best he could. He had blood down the insides of his thighs, had been bleeding even before he got to the toilet. One good thing—no matter how much toilet paper he used, the roll never got any smaller. When he was done, he gathered a fistful of the cloudcotton and wadded it inside his underwear before zipping up the jumpsuit.
Aubrey hobbled to his bed and pulled himself into it. He fumbled for the blankets, and his hand found the stuffed Junicorn. He clutched it to his face. Held it to his nose and smelled detergent and dust and polyester. The Junicorn was bedraggled and worn, which made it all the more precious. He was grateful for anything that lacked the smooth, chilly perfection of the objects made from the cloud, grateful for anything he could hold on to that was real. You knew what was real not by its qualities but by its imperfections.
He stared blearily at the great white egg rising from the center of the palace, considering that one consistent, improbable feature of his cloud island. The one consistent feature he had noticed anyway. Sudden uncertainty gnawed at him. It seemed to him there’d been at least one other irregularity that was not quite irregular enough to be completely accidental, but he could not for the life of him summon what it might’ve been.
So. Leave it. Come back to it later.
For now he considered the dome, the pearl, at the heart of the palace. When he’d tried to climb it, it had brought a black, glassy sledge down upon him, hard enough to knock all the thought out of his head. He had surrendered, gone back down, and what had happened then? It had dreamed a girl into being. The girl he wanted as he’d never wanted anyone else in his life.
We shouldn’t fight, the cloud had all but said to him. Here. Let me have my secrets and you can have Harriet. Let what’s buried stay buried and—
Aubrey’s thoughts snagged on this final notion. His flesh responded, fine hairs standing up on his arms. He wondered again if he’d seen anything on the island that didn’t look completely random and was met with an idea, a very bad idea.
He knew he had to climb the great white hill at the center of the cloud. There was no getting around it. When he went, it would try to drive him back, as before, would lash out at him with whatever it had.
And did it know he was planning another climb? Could it see that in his mind? He redirected his thoughts toward the first image that occurred to him: the Junicorn in his hands, his purple stuffed Junicorn with its bent horn and twee little wings. It troubled him to think he needed to hide his own thoughts, even from himself.
He closed his eyes, burrowing his head into the pillows. He wasn’t ready to take a pass at the hill now. He was too frail, too wiped out, needed to recover some energy. He might’ve slept if he hadn’t felt something brush his cheek. His eyes sprang open, and he looked up into the face of an enormous horse, shaped from cloud.
Aubrey cried out, and the horse took a nervous step back. No. Not a horse. There was a spear rising from the center of its head and absurd little wings fluttering behind its forelegs. Its blind gaze was morose and stupid and shy. A Junicorn.
He sat up and grimaced, needles of pain bristling in his stomach. The Junicorn stood beside the bed, watching him with dubious eyes. He stroked a hand over one alabaster flank. It felt as cool and smooth as a horse made out of plaster. He had concentrated on a Junicorn, and now, predictably, one awaited his command.
As long as he didn’t command it to fly him back down to earth or ride him up to the top of the great white dome. He already knew that shit wasn’t happening. But maybe he could make use of it anyway. He was too weak for a hike, but he thought he could ride, and the Junicorn was already saddled.
He caught a foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up. His shredded insides shrieked. He gasped and fell across the Junicorn’s neck. Sweat prickled on his flushed cheeks. He felt for reins, found them hanging loose, and gave them a tug. It had been a few years since he’d ridden, but his mother’s side of the family were all farming stock, and he was not unfamiliar.
The Junicorn turned and trotted along the edge of the cloud, bouncing him in the saddle. At first the going was hard. Each jolt filled his stomach and bowels with pinpricks of pain, as if his guts were full of steel shavings. He soon found, though, that if he stood in the stirrups, it wasn’t so bad. The throbbing in his abdomen subsided to a weak pulse, and he began to breathe easier.
He rode along the shores of his island, over low dunes and across barren strands. It was all both familiar and completely new at once. The landscape was continuously being remade by the wind, and yet somehow it was always the same, acre after acre of mashed potato.
The last time he’d traveled the circumference of his little fiefdom, he lost himself in a maze of crags and gullies in the east, but those were gone now, the land blasted almost flat. He remembered some fluffy boulders that looked like a bulldog. Also gone.
He saw nothing he remembered from his earlier journey until he’d made it three-quarters of the way around the isle. He was half dozing in the saddle by then, the rock and roll of the Junicorn a natural soporific. A sudden ugly jolt thudded him out of his trance, the ache flaring through his clawed-up insides. He cast his gaze around and saw they had just come down off a snowy bulge shaped almost exactly like a speed bump. They were about to go over another, and a third lay just beyond. Three tablet-shaped mounds in parallel rows. He grimaced, yanked on the reins, and pulled the mare to a halt.
Slowly, gingerly, he slid out of the saddle and down to his feet. He leaned against the horse to steady himself, waiting for the world to stop whirling. When it did, he took a breath and considered where he found himself.