An Apple for the Creature

Callie opened her eyes to find herself back in Mrs. Gunwhale’s modular classroom, her classmates staring at her, gape-mouthed. She knew she must’ve looked like a bloody mess, but she didn’t care. She’d started this Remedial Wormhole Calling class with zero hopes of ever learning anything, and now she’d found that she’d conquered the entire syllabus.

It was a thrilling feeling—and she could go back to Death, Inc., tomorrow with her head held high and her ego ten times bigger than it’d been the day before.

Mrs. Gunwhale opened her blowhole to speak, but Callie raised her hand for silence.

“I just want to say thank you, Mrs. Gunwhale, and thank you, fellow students, for absolutely nothing.”

Callie smiled, her strength returning in leaps and bounds.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, grinning, “I’m going home. I’ve got a business to run.”

And without another word, Callie called up a wormhole and disappeared into the night, never to see the modular classroom at PS 181 again for as long as she immortally lived.

Iphigenia in Aulis MIKE CAREY

Mike Carey is the author of the Felix Castor novels and (along with Linda and Louise Carey) The Steel Seraglio. He has also written extensively for comics publishers DC and Marvel, including long runs on X-Men, Hellblazer and Ultimate Fantastic Four. He wrote the comic book Lucifer for its entire run and is the co-creator and writer of the ongoing Vertigo series The Unwritten.

Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl,” from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is mostly very fair so she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list: new children get the top name on the boys’ list or the top name on the girls’ list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.

Melanie is ten years old, and she has skin like a princess in a fairy tale: skin as white as snow. So she knows that when she grows up she’ll be beautiful, with princes falling over themselves to climb her tower and rescue her.

Assuming, of course, that she has a tower.

In the meantime, she has the cell, the corridor, the classroom and the shower room.

The cell is small and square. It has a bed, a chair and a table in it. On the walls there are pictures: in Melanie’s cell, a picture of a field of flowers and a picture of a woman dancing. Sometimes they move the children around, so Melanie knows that there are different pictures in each cell. She used to have a horse in a meadow and a big mountain with snow on the top, which she liked better.

The corridor has twenty doors on the left-hand side and eighteen doors on the right-hand side (because the cupboards don’t really count); also it has a door at either end. The door at the classroom end is red. It leads to the classroom (duh!). The door at the other end is bare gray steel on this side but once when Melanie was being taken back to her cell she peeped through the door, which had accidentally been left open, and saw that on the other side it’s got lots of bolts and locks and a box with numbers on it. She wasn’t supposed to see, and Sergeant said “Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her,” but she saw, and she remembers.

She listens, too, and from overheard conversations she has a sense of this place in relation to other places she hasn’t ever seen. This place is the block. Outside the block is the base. Outside the base is the Eastern Stretch, or the Dispute Stretch. It’s all good as far as Kansas, and then it gets real bad, real quick. East of Kansas, there’s monsters everywhere and they’ll follow you for a hundred miles if they smell you, and then they’ll eat you. Melanie is glad that she lives in the block, where she’s safe.

Through the gray steel door, each morning, the teachers come. They walk down the corridor together, past Melanie’s door, bringing with them the strong, bitter chemical smell that they always have on them: it’s not a nice smell, but it’s exciting because it means the start of another day’s lessons.

At the sound of the bolts sliding and the teachers’ footsteps, Melanie runs to the door of her cell and stands on tiptoe to peep through the little mesh-screen window in the door and see the teachers when they go by. She calls out good morning to them, but they’re not supposed to answer and usually they don’t. Sometimes, though, Miss Justineau will look around and smile at her—a tense, quick smile that’s gone almost before she can see it—or Miss Mailer will give her a tiny wave with just the fingers of her hand.