Dreaming of Roads Not Taken

11/30/4722

The bed is too soft for a body that doesn’t need much sleep, but Nadja lies down anyway. Old habits, da? The crossroads still hums in her glass eyes—that place where the veil was thin as spider silk, and she looked through. Foolish little vedma, she thinks. Your Patron would box your ears for looking. But Nadja never was good at doing what she should. The room grows colder. Her glass eyes won’t close, but darkness comes anyway.

The crossroads pulls her back.

She stands at the center stone again, but wrong. The four roads don’t lead north or south—they lead sideways. Into directions that twist like broken fingers. Into spaces between Yav and Nav, between living world and dead world, between what should never have been seen.

The veil hangs like rotted silk, like funeral shrouds, like the skin kikimora sheds when she crawls from beneath floorboards. It moves though there’s no wind. Breathes though it has no lungs. And through the holes in the weave, she sees them.

The Nadjas.

Not ghosts—these are her. Living? Real? Moving in their separate worlds like maggots in different cuts of meat. And they’re all looking back.

There: Village-Nadja, forty and fat, but her eyes are sunken too deep, her smile too wide. When she opens her mouth, black beetles pour out. You left us to rot, the beetles whisper. You abandoned every version who didn’t die. How dare you think you’re special.

There: Merchant-Nadja with throat cut, but she’s not dead—she can’t die, not here. Blood pours eternal from the wound, pooling at her feet, rising to her shoulders. She drowns in her own death forever, fingers scrabbling at the veil. Liar. LIAR, her gurgling mouth says.

There: Mother-Nadja surrounded by children with too many fingers, too many mouths. Their eyes are glass like hers. They stare and never blink. Mama, they chorus. Mama, why didn’t you become us? Why are you the broken one?

This is what the kikimora sees, whispers something against her neck. This is what happens when vedma looks through veils meant to stay closed. You become what should stay buried.

The other Nadjas press against the veil. Hundreds. Thousands. Their hands push through the rotted silk, reaching. Some are flesh. Some are stitched fabric. Some are bone. Some are things without names. They want to touch her. Pull her through. Make her one of them—or them one of her.

“Enough,” Nadja says, but her voice cracks. It comes out layered like she’s speaking with thousand mouths, all screaming. “This is ridiculous. I am real. I am HERE. The rest of you—you are just shadows in other windows, da?”

One gets her hand through. Grabs Nadja’s wrist. The touch burns cold. The hand is her hand—same stitching—but pulling, dragging, trying to yank her into a world where she vomits beetles. Where her throat never stops bleeding. Where her children have too many parts.

You saw through veil, the crossroads whispers, hungry. You looked between worlds. Now you belong to the between. Now you are threshold. Now you are door. All the Nadjas can pass through you, little vedma. You are the crossroads now.

“NET!” Nadja snarls, yanking back, but there are more hands. So many hands. Grabbing her dress, her hair, her face. Fingers trying to pry out her glass eyes. “I am Nadja. Singular. The one who refused to stay dead!”

But she feels herself splitting. Not breaking—worse. Opening. Like a door. The other Nadjas pouring through her, into her, becoming her, until she doesn’t know which thoughts are hers and which are theirs.

In every world, at every crossroads, every Nadja is screaming. Every one feels the others trying to get in. Every one is both invader and invaded.

The veil tears.

Nadja wakes with glass eyes wide, unable to scream because she has forgotten to breath. Her hands are shaking—but poppets don’t shake unless something inside them is moving when it shouldn’t be. For just a moment her hands flicker through versions. Flesh. Not-flesh. Young. Old. Rotted. Whole.
She touches her face. Her stitching feels loose. Like something pushed from inside.

Foolish little vedma, she mutters, accent thick with something else now—an echo, like other voices speaking under hers. Now you know too much. Now you see too many.

Her voice sounds wrong. Layered. Like she’s not alone in her own mouth.

She sits until dawn, wondering if she’s still keeping them out, or if some got through. Wondering if the hands she sees are really hers, or if they belong to one of the others now.