Level One

LEVEL ONE

When Selphie woke up, she was very warm. A bit of the wolf’s tail hung over her bare legs.

When her eyes opened fully and she was still in the white room with the wolf, it spoke again. “You honor me with your careless way of sleeping,” it said, bowing its muzzle to her. Its nose was so low that it almost touched the blankets.

Selphie couldn’t answer. Instead, she sputtered, “Aren’t you worried about being trapped here with me? I think I might be able to climb these ladders and find a way out somewhere near the top, but what about you? You wouldn’t be able to climb the ladders.”

When Selphie was little she was taught that the best way to escape a wolf was to climb a tree and then make a lot of noise. Someone would hear her and come rescue her, and no matter what, the wolf would not be able to climb the tree to harm her. Wolf claws were for digging dens, not scaling anything, not even the multiple ladders that ran up every wall that surrounded them.

The wolf yawned. “I’m not in a hurry.”

“Do you know how we got here?” Selphie asked, still trying to make sense of what surrounded her.

He hummed and smacked his lips. “I’m not curious about it. I feel peaceful. I’m here with you. You are the most adorable creature I’ve ever seen… I don’t feel like I’m missing something being here instead of somewhere else. If you want to climb up and tell me what you see, that would be something. Do you want to give it a try?”

She looked at him sideways. “Aren’t you concerned that I’ll find a way out and leave you here?”

The wolf’s black lips spread wide and he laughed, showing two ferocious lines of teeth. “No.”

“Why not?” Selphie asked, puffing her cheeks in annoyance. “You are four times my size and I couldn’t carry you out of here if I wanted to. We’re trapped and you’re unconcerned?”

The wolf sat like a sphinx on the bedcovers and looked down at his crystalline fur. “I don’t think I used to be this white. This fur feels unfamiliar. It's as if I’ve never worn it before. My fur used to be gray, I think. I liked it because it hid me well in the snow and in the shadows of the forest. Now, I feel different inside myself. I want to sit and reflect.”

Selphie wasn’t sure she understood what the wolf was saying. If anything, she translated it to mean that he had no fear.

However, sitting only a foot away from him, she was full of fear. Even with the patient way the wolf acted and the fact that they had rested together in peace didn’t assuage her fear. So he didn’t eat her the first night? What did that mean? Probably nothing. He had flaunted his high values and not eaten her the first night. What would happen when a few days had passed and his hunger grew?

Selphie knew she was trapped. Whoever put her and the wolf in the trap room together was making it so that she could rest peacefully in the bed the first night but after that, she had to go upward and she would never be able to come back down because if she did, a wolf starved to insanity would strip the flesh off her bones.

The wolf was encouraging her to go upward.

“You don’t mind if I climb the ladders?” she asked cautiously.

“You should,” he said freely. “If you see something interesting, you can come back down and tell me about it.”

She had to take the chance to go peacefully before his hunger turned his high moral code into a spray of blood.

Selphie nodded, slid off the bed, and circled the room to the ladder that reached the lowest pavilion. It was strange that the bed was in the middle of the room. She’d never seen a bed that didn’t at least use a wall as a headboard. In her experience, most were shoved in corners.

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She put her hand on the first rung, then turned back for one last look at the wolf. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his front leg like he didn’t understand what he was looking at. He rubbed his nose in the fur and then bit the whole thing.

What was so interesting about his fur?

Selphie looked down at herself. She was wearing a white shirt with buttons down the front. Like the wolf, who said he was used to wearing a gray fur coat, she’d never owned a white shirt in her life. Every shirt she’d ever owned had been gray. Often they weren’t even girls’ clothes as they were rags discarded by the boys who worked at the mill. They had outgrown them, but they still fit Selphie. She wore a pinafore over her gray shirt that had straps that crossed in the back. The one she wore now was white too, with a faint plaid pattern. She had neither socks nor shoes, but that had been normal for her. She owned shoes only sometimes.

She paused to glance at the wolf again. He was looking at her, admiring her and encouraging her upward with his gaze.

She didn’t understand it. No one ever looked at her that way.

Tightening her hand around the rung of the ladder, she hoisted herself up.

Selphie had not climbed very many ladders in her life and her first impression was that it was marvelously fun. She’d always been taught to keep off the ladders. The truth was that she’d hardly ever even climbed stairs. Most people didn’t have two floors to their homes and she’d rarely been inside a house that had a second floor. Playing on the stairs was one of the perks of being a maid in a fine house. When the master wasn’t looking, it was time to play on the stairs and slide down the banisters! Either that or jump on the beds. Selphie cast her gaze behind her at the bed. That was funny. It hadn’t entered her head to jump on the bed. Normally, that would have been her first thought.

When she climbed to the first pavilion, she was surprised that the top of it looked exactly like the bottom of it. It was a smooth marble surface with no railing. Except there was a pile of clothes in the corner.

Curious, little Selphie ran over to see what was there more closely only to stop in horror. She backed up. Without thinking at all she backed up so quickly and so desperately that she didn’t realize that she walked full off the edge of the unrailed pavilion.

She fell.

She only started screaming three whole seconds after she lost her balance. She landed on the bed that had been placed in the middle of the room.

“What happened?” the wolf asked, on his feet and alert.

Selphie took a moment to catch her breath. When she spoke, she could only sputter the words. “There was a dead body on the first level.”

“A dead body?” the wolf repeated. “We may not be alone here.” It pointed its nose upward and for the first time, it howled. The howl rang upward toward the circle of light at the top of the shaft. The sound was like a prayer, like mourning, like a call for help, and became the loneliest sound Selphie had ever heard.

It was the sound of her own heart breaking.

Tears were all over her face and her nose was plugged. She couldn’t breathe. The wind had been knocked out of her.

Horrified, she realized that she was trapped both ways. She would never be able to go to level one or any of the levels beyond it. She could never risk seeing that dead body again. The unblinking eyes, the cold skin, the hard frozen limbs that had no choice but to mold and decay on the pavilion above her petrified her. How long would it be before the body liquified and blood and water and digestive fluids and pee came dripping over the edge of the balcony? The smell! The smell would come! And she had to stay on the lowest level with the wolf!

All at once, she was glad the wolf was there.

When she could manage her body, she sat up and put her arms around the wolf’s neck. He had not stopped howling, but when Selphie touched him, he stopped immediately.

“I need you to eat me,” she whispered. “I’m too scared. I can’t live like this.”

“You’re scared of a dead body?” he asked.

“Please, eat me. I want to be safe inside your belly. If I go through the pain of being eaten, I won’t have to go through any other pain again. Please, eat me,” she begged, her tears running so fluidly that they were wetting her clothes.

The wolf did not answer, but let her hold him for a time before gently shaking her off. He padded to the head of the bed and pulled the blankets free with his teeth. Before they had been tucked in. “Hide in here for now,” he instructed.

“I… uh…” Suddenly, she felt so tired that she found that holding her head up was asking too much. Arguing with the wolf was definitely too much, so she crawled the little way she had to go to get inside the bed covers.

The wolf pulled the blanket over her and, sitting down, he covered her eyes with the tip of his tail. “Don’t think about what you saw now. Go to sleep.”

Her eyes fluttered closed, and when she dreamed, she had a dream about the wolf.