Level Three

LEVEL THREE

The wolf looked at her and laughed. “You’re a murderer? Isn’t that what humans call people who have killed other humans? You?”

Selphie nodded. “I’d like to believe that the place we are now has nothing to do with the world we lived in before, but I think they’re the same thing—connected. I’m being punished for what I did.”

“Who’s punishing you?”

“God. The gods. Someone powerful and magical,” she whispered in a terrified hush. “I’ve never heard of a talking wolf before. I’ve never had white clothes before. I’ve never even seen white clothes before, even though they are talked about in fairy tales. I’ve never been to a place like this and I don’t think I can leave until I’ve been punished, so if you could please just eat me up, I want to disappear.” Selphie fell to her knees and let the knife in her hands slip away from her grip.

The wolf’s voice came deep and throaty across the space between us. “You think that’s how this story will end, with me eating you up? Why?”

“Wolves always eat the little girls up,” she cried bleakly.

“Because I have teeth, I have to use them to rip you apart?” the wolf asked.

“You’re just here to give me what I deserve for being a murderer! It’s not your fault. As I go up the levels, I’m going to see more things to remind me of the crime I committed. I don’t want to see them.”

“Obviously, you have to,” the wolf said sternly. “Who was that dead girl on the first level? Was she the person you killed?”

Selphie wailed at the mention of the dead person on the first pavilion being a girl. She snatched up the knife and the wolf rose to his feet and began growling.

“What are you doing?” he hissed, fangs showing.

Selphie had the knife to her throat. “I can’t live like this!”

The wolf barked in her face so loudly and so suddenly that Selphie was forced to drop the knife to cover her ears.

Once it was out of her hands, he snatched it up between his teeth and did the most extraordinary thing with it. He tossed it upward. The blade stuck in the underside of the first pavilion.

He snorted. “Try to get it now... if you can.”

Selphie cried on the floor until she fell asleep. When she woke up, she was in the bed. One glance above her showed that the knife had not magically disappeared while she slept as she hoped it would.

The wolf was awake, his nostrils flaring like he could smell something Selphie could not. “There’s another corpse on level three, isn’t there?” he grumbled.

“I don’t know,” Selphie admitted. “I didn’t go up that far.”

“Well, you’re going to go that far today. We can’t have a repeat of what happened last time. I don’t think I can make it all the way to the third level using those ladders. You need to go up to level three and push that dead body over the edge, down to me, Little Divine One.”

It was so strange. The way he said ‘little divine one’ had not changed since she told him she was a murderer. Didn’t he believe her?

“If there is a dead body on level three, it is not likely to be the body of a child. It’s going to be the body of a very large man. I don’t think I’ll be able to push it.”

The wolf rolled his eyes. “Wolves can’t talk. Fabric can’t be white. Wolves don’t climb anything besides rolling foothills. You can’t fall from a balcony and land on a bed. The impossible happens here. You can push that body off the edge of that ledge as surely as I can speak. And you must do it.”

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“Why? It’s not hurting us up there,” Selphie bawled.

“You have to feed me,” the wolf said without the tiniest note of compromise in his voice.

That got Selphie. She realized then that the wolf had made it up to the first level. He had eaten Carma... her only friend. He had not simply confirmed that the body had disappeared. He had eaten her.

Selphie swallowed. It was such a relief, she didn’t know what to do with the knowledge. Now no one would ever see that body again. She was glad. She had never known if Carma had a decent burial. However, the point of a decent burial was to stop wild animals, like wolves, from eating her corpse and drawing predators to the village.

What did any of that matter now? He had swallowed her whole.

“If I go to all the levels and push down what I find, will you eat me when I finish?” Selphie asked, her voice warbling, mingling hope and pain.

“What if you go all the way to the top and you find a way out and decide to leave me here all alone?” he grumbled. “How can I trust you?”

Before that moment, she had thought of the wolf as a part of the trap that had caught her. She had not thought of him as someone who was caught as well.

She had the advantage.

“I’ll come back because I want to be with my friend in your belly.”

That was all the promise she made to him before she started climbing the third ladder. Just as he said, when she reached the top, she found the body of Brawley, just the way she’d left it.

He stared, dead-eyed, upward.

Selphie had stabbed him in the throat, but she’d also stabbed him in half a dozen other places, just to be sure. The blood on Brawley was dried, like hot baked dirt that had cracked and separated. His eyes were open and staring, just as Carma’s had been.

Carma had been staring at her. Her face had an expression that Selphie didn’t understand.

The look on Brawley’s face was one of surprise. He had not expected a girl a third of his weight to take his knife and rip him a second hole to breathe through.

Selphie did not know what pushing his body over the edge would do. The wolf said he would eat him. Selphie wasn’t sure if she wanted him to eat Brawley after he ate Carma, but all the terrible things she’d been taught about wolves made the one thing he said more real than anything else in the tower.

He had to be fed.

She believed that when she wasn’t sure if she believed anything else. Nothing else was certain. Everything was so dreamlike. The way the light touched the wolf’s fur made each individual strand catch the light and spangle it like he was part chandelier. Like rainbows through glass. Or the way it felt to climb the ladders. Like height didn’t matter. Each pavilion led to a different white cloud. Yet, the cloud contained something terrifying. They were like memories so fresh they still bled.

Selphie was not sure how to start moving Brawley. She did not want to touch him with her hands. With that thought in her mind, she kicked his shoulder. She did not expect him to move and the shocked expression on her face mirrored the one on the corpse when he did move.

Winding up, she kicked him again and he moved. Both her movement and the movement of the corpse were the same as if she were kicking the same chunk of ice on her walk from the sawmill to the boarding house. He skittered and bounced the way something that has never been alive does when it’s kicked.

Selphie did not kick Brawley over the edge. She positioned him as close as she dared before she leaned over to see where he would fall before she made that fateful choice.

The wolf was below her, standing prone on the bed, ready as he would ever be.

“Don’t choke on his shirt!” she called to the wolf, stopping to notice the deep stains on the brown plaid and trying not to get choked up. “Please don’t hate me too much for being a murderer.”

The wolf gave a short howl. Selphie interpreted it to be an encouragement to get on with it. She had to kick the logger down.

Selphie kept her eyes on the wolf. She focused on him as though nothing else mattered. What happened next would matter a great deal to her if the wolf agreed to eat her. She needed to see how it was done,

She kicked.

The man slid.

The wolf surged upward in a powerful leap.

Then the wolf grew. Its muzzle became enormous, filling the entire tower with fangs, teeth, slurping tongue, and the deep black cavern of its throat. The sound was jaw snapping, bones cracking, things crashing… and then the silence of a man being swallowed by a wolf in one decisive bite.

Selphie stared.

The wolf fell back down to the bed licking his chops like a satisfied dog… a good dog who obeyed his master and ate well. He was small again.

Selphie did not understand, but feeling a little faint, she sat down and let her legs dangle off the balcony’s edge. She wondered about the dream she was having when she was awake and the dreams of the wolf she had when she was asleep. A dream inside a dream where everything was gone, except the wolf.