The figments. She had seen them all through the house. Josiah hadn’t liked even to acknowledge they were there.
“There were … sort of fictional characters walking around all the time,” said Freddy. “But they weren’t very real.”
“We attract them,” said Josiah. “You thought it was Cuerva Lachance creating them, but it wasn’t. They turn up wherever we live because they think we’re like them. Well, ‘think’ is the wrong word. They’re mindless. People tell them as stories, so they float around like … like ghosts.”
“There’s always been something different about Three,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Something stronger. Josiah tells me you saw the first Three. I don’t remember that far back, but I think … we hadn’t become entirely real yet then.”
“We made ourselves real. It wasn’t Three’s doing,” said Josiah.
“But Three did make you,” said Freddy. “You have no right to … to break free like this.”
Josiah applauded, his face twisted into a sarcastic scowl. “Oh, nicely done. What beautiful hypocrisy. Aren’t you the one always whining about how you hate being restricted because you feel trapped and fated when you’re travelling in time? And now you want us to go back to not being real people? Doing what he tells us to do … thinking what he tells us to think?”
“If the alternative is you strangling me with a living rock,” said Freddy, “yeah, I do.”
They were dangerous … weren’t they? Roland had kept telling her how dangerous they were. The thought of unreal people who had somehow broken into reality having as much power as Cuerva Lachance and Josiah was kind of terrifying. Dimly, she remembered Filbert and the other future Threes. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had apparently not been around in the future. Was it because of what happened here and now? Could Roland tame them or even destroy them?
Did she want him to?
“Then you’re worse than I am,” said Josiah. “And we’re not going to let you do it.”
“Snakes,” said Cuerva Lachance, grinning. The ground began to writhe.
“I cast ‘Protection from Evil.’” Mel’s voice came out as a squeak. Freddy thought they were just words until she saw the blue glow starting at the tips of Mel’s fingers. It coiled out and around Mel, then Freddy and Roland as well. Mel may not have been expecting the spell to work; she gazed at her hands in amazement. Freddy’s feet left the ground. She looked down. Beneath her, what had once been grass was a slithering mass of bodies.
Roland roared, “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea!”
They were on a boat … a little sailboat about twenty feet long. The pleasure-dome still stretched above, but they were being knocked about by the waves, which were teeming with strange, slippery creatures. The waves were eerily silent. Back on her feet again, Freddy staggered and faced Roland. “Slimy things…?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s a poem. It may be Coleridge. A different poem, not the first one,” said Roland. His words came out breathless and panicky. “There are all kinds of things in my head.”
“I think you need to go beyond Coleridge,” said Mel. “Use your own imagination.”
“But I just read the manuals,” said Roland. “I don’t really make stuff up.”
“That’s not true, and you know it.”
“And even if it is, learn how,” Freddy shouted as Cuerva Lachance sent the boat racing up the side of a monstrous wave. Freddy leaned into the railing as the deck threatened to turn into a wall.
Roland was sliding towards the mast. “I don’t know what to do. This has to be structured like a story or it won’t work. But they’re still controlling everything!”
“They’re not,” said Mel, clinging to the railing and trying, with limited success, to sign one-handed. “This is your world; you made it. They’re making you think they can control it.”
“Watch,” said Freddy. There was something she hadn’t done yet: something she knew she was going to do because she’d seen the evidence of it four years ago. She might as well use it as a demonstration.
Lurching against the trembling boards, she ran at Cuerva Lachance. No one had been expecting her to do that. Cuerva Lachance threw up her hands as Freddy brought the handcuffs, still dangling from one wrist, around in an arc. The free cuff caught Cuerva Lachance on the cheek, digging a groove in her flesh. She had already been off balance; now she cried out and fell down. “They can be hurt,” Freddy screamed back at Roland just as the boat topped the wave and began to dive down its other side, sending everyone not clinging to something sliding back down the deck’s suddenly reversed slope. “They’ve made themselves too real. If this is a story, hurry up and write the climax!”
“Climax,” said Roland, gasping a little. He had anchored himself to the mast. “I can do that. I can—”
“Oh no,” said Mel. “All Roland’s climaxes have—”
Something erupted from the ocean so violently that it sent a concussion through the air. The ship twirled and plummeted away from the abruptly flattened wave, smashing into the surface of the sea. Freddy was knocked down beside Cuerva Lachance. Side by side, the two of them looked up … and up. After that, they looked up some more.
24
“Tentacles?” said Cuerva Lachance. “Really?”
“Big tentacles,” said Freddy. “Extremely big and twisty tentacles.”
“They make good final monsters,” said Roland a little too calmly.
Josiah said, “This is why we don’t leave the Threes in charge. This is why we need to control them with the choice. Do you understand yet, ducklings? Isn’t it fun what an unfettered imagination can do when it’s capable of making stories come to life?”
The tentacles kept rising, as silent as the sea. Freddy wasn’t sure how many there were, but she also wasn’t sure it mattered. They blocked out the pleasure-dome. They were going to fall on the boat and sink it. The boat wasn’t moving much at the moment, but she thought that may have been mostly because Roland was so focussed on the tentacles that he had forgotten about everything else.
She stood. A second or so later, Cuerva Lachance did as well.
“Roland,” said Mel, “did you have to?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. It just happened. There are always tentacles.” He looked thoroughly awed by what he had created.
Freddy said, “Well, make them go away.”
“He can’t,” said Josiah. “He’s just the storyteller. He’s written them in. Immediately writing them out again would be cheating.” He looked sourly at Roland. “But he can tell us to stop them.”
Everyone turned to Josiah.