Nettlie

By Avalynn Toill and George Mylonas

Nettlie is a dead girl that's very dead.

 

And as such a dead-deady she enjoys a solitary existence away from all living things. But unfortunately that changes.

 

Lots of things change actually, but I can't tell you everything, can I? You'll just have to read this grim-cute novel for yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: FindersGrove
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223521075

Book preview

Chapter One: The Book In Question

Forget everything you heard about her. And do your best to put out of your mind anything you will hear going forward, because it is all almost certainly lies. And perhaps that’s for the best, although that remains to be seen. Veracity means nothing to the voracious.

But I will do my part and prepare for you an account of the case of one Nettlie, a former patient of ours and a puzzling child— or should I say ‘puzzled child?’ Perhaps it could be said she was both puzzled and puzzling.

An enigma, after all, would be an appropriate summation of the book entirely— Not this book, but the one in her possession. Although I suppose it could come about that this book too could end up in her possession just as well, in which case there’d be no differentiating them. Either of them, that is. Either the books or the… Other elements.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and so are you.

Let me start by explaining three things:

1. She stayed alone.

2. She’d been alone for a long time.

3. She would definitely continue to be alone indefinitely if it weren’t for the animal. More on that later.

But as with most problems, hers arose from a combination of circumstance and habit.

After drawing, she made a point to devote some of her time each day to re-reading the problems in the Question Book, you know, the one she found in the dirt.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of a Question Book, then you might be normal. Nevertheless, I thought someone would have mentioned it to you by now.

The Question Book is actually rather important. Exceedingly so. The reason why is something of a question unto itself, isn’t it? Perhaps the most important question. Or the least important, in the grand scheme of things, because it’s not the reason for it that affects the effect it has.

How does one come across a Question Book and are there more out there? The answer depends entirely on how you say the question. I can tell you how Nettlie found hers but I cannot tell you how you will find yours.

In her case, she found her Question Book early one morning after it rained. Its corner stuck out like a strange rock at the dead-center of a murder of crows looking for grub. After what I would assume was a polite wave, she passed between the crows and discovered the book’s pages were damp and spotted blue with mildew.

As such, the insides were quite confusing to her. The ink ran and bled and smeared and faded, like memories of once familiar faces. It was too difficult to distinguish one word from the next.

But they weren’t words, of course. They were puzzles, or puzzle-likes. The questions, I mean… If they even were questions. Most of the time they didn’t have question marks.

Some were almost like riddles and others more like jokes. Written this way and that. One in the corner, another on the back, all mixed in with poetic phrases and illustrations and technical diagrams and cake-charts and such.

She scratched out the ones she solved and circled the ones she would return to later, denoting them with the use of a bold, black pen. If there were clues she could recognize, she’d double-circle them.

The answers she found, she kept in her own book, the one she used for drawing. It was always by her side. She kept it with her in case an answer materialized, first with a wave, and then by introducing itself politely and graciously— no that’s not how answers come, it’s more like a flash of lightning or like when you turn your head to see the thing you’re sure is there in the corner of the room and when you do, you see there’s just your shadow on the wall and it’s been there for who knows how long and who knows what it’s planning to do when you look away…

Anyway, she wrote these answers down and kept track of them because she didn’t want to risk forgetting them; it would be dreadful to let one slip away like that. After all that work, too.

But there were so many clues to be found! And so many lost on her. She circled the bits she thought ought to be important, but she often wondered about the phrases, pictures, numbers and words she couldn’t recognize as being clues (for that didn’t make them any less important, though their meanings couldn’t be sussed from what was given and what was given wasn’t much to go on).

And those were the ones in the book.

There was one puzzle left outside of it that had her stumped for years and years, and it must have stumped others for far longer before she came around, for it was carved in an ancient stone and left half-buried in the dirt behind her home.

She didn’t know where to start with it, although there seemed to be a lot of notes in the Question Book, many lines full to the brim. Even the margins were populated with copies of it, but the words made no sense, they weren’t even words! See?

Y C O D E U B I Y B P Z M N E D R E A M L Y L R E H T O D A E R O T T N E W L W O E M A G

Maybe whoever made the puzzle didn’t put the puzzle there, or at least didn’t mean to make it like how it is here. That seemed likely enough. Stones are old and the one this was carved in looked very old indeed. But maybe it wasn’t carved. Maybe it was just like that. It was difficult to tell— Stones are generally hard to read. It’s like they have a wall up, isn’t it?

Well, in any case, the meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem, will… eventually… be deemed.

Chapter Two: A Welcome Guest

Nettlie restlessly turned this way and that in her chair, swinging her leg over the top of the armrest, then back down, then draping her opposite arm over the headrest, then folding her legs up so her feet were on the seat and her elbows on her knees, scrunching herself up so tight she could barely reach her drawings.

But she didn’t want to look at them any more, she wanted to look out the window just off from the corner, the one overlooking the expanse of the yard, filled with its saturated shadows, its painted skies of auburn suns (one a day) and lilac clouds (sparse and scattered, going sideways). And though she didn’t smile, she found a kind of calm in the finer details that could only be seen after some time, taking note of the qualities she imagined were there and only there alone.

Off in the distance, calling out over the whirling wind, came a repetitious clang from the gate that wouldn’t stay closed (or open, for that matter). It swung with each inhale and exhale of the lackadaisical breath of the breeze, creaking on its own rust-grown hinges.

Besides that, there was also the scent of burnt hair that never went away. It settled in the nooks and crannies of the planks and boards of this humbug-house. Where it came from, she couldn’t quite recall, but it reminded her of a time— it must have been years ago— when she left her dolls under a magnifying glass—

Suddenly she was there, outside with her dolls, in another time, in another place. She could feel the sun’s warmth and see the ants crawling on her skin, they were all over her and—

No, no no, she thought. She didn’t want to think about it, oh no! She shook her head like an etch-a-sketch until the worry went away and she was back, safe in her room far away from all that.

Even though she stopped shaking her head she still felt dizzy and topsy-turvy, like the world spun faster than it normally got up to.

Her swirling eyes returned to the lookout-point of the window and the familiar sight of this familiar place.

But then a new fixture came to light, one that shouldn’t be there, one that simply did not belong: A fuzzy, grey streak that flew over the fence and dove into the tall grass.

She squinted and lifted her mask just over her eyes.¹ But in that split-second when her sight was obscured, the thing vanished in a waving sea of green.

She leaned closer and searched— There! Just diagonal and down! That’s where it landed, where the blades of grass bent and folded one after the other.

Nettlie shot up out of her seat to follow it.

The spot continued to move in a curlicue fashion, snaking in and out in a meandering sort of way, coming and going before suddenly veering off toward the far side (that being the one nearest to her) and once at the edge, it jumped out into the open— The animal.

It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before.

Its otherwise white fur split apart into stripes of varying shades with a predominance leaning towards galvanized grey. And the way the grey contorted about its curves and crevices divided sections of its surface by rummaging them rambling² into fading, black spirals, dashes and schisms.

As an aside, other lines, further along, formed a sense of a mottled sort of inkblot shape when taken as a whole where the assembled image on its head, a dark sort, ruptured in opposing, yet symmetrical arcs that held its haunted eyes in the center of tendrilous arms.

She noticed all of this at once for the simple fact that it allowed her to, although it was seemingly unaware of being watched: It paused on its paws and took stock of its surroundings, with both of its ears perked in a peculiar manner, one being taller than the other and misshapen.

Attentively, it licked its nose with a gnawed tongue that flapped from its open, swollen mouth. Then the animal turned its oddly angular head this way and that with frantic, mad eyes before ultimately racing towards the wall of the house, the very house where Nettlie sat, where it—

Where it—

…Oh, she’d never be able to see from here.

But that didn’t matter now, something else got her attention. The sound was unyielding and it originated somewhere on the floor below. It was a sharp, noisome sound, an irritating sound. Most upsetting, wasn’t it? What was the cause? Nettlie opened the door to her room and stuck her head out into the hall.

Shining specks of fuzz flowed through the sour air, propelled by the sudden disruption in space.³ They blew apart when Nettlie moved from the door.

Echoes resounded in the emptiness of the house, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where the noise was coming from but, nonetheless, she walked down the hallway to the left, thinking perhaps the source would be easier to determine from nearer the stairs.

And so it was.

But nonetheless, her father’s stuffed fowl glared at her from its roost high up on the shelf overlooking the corner where the hallway split into three.

To the left, only a short ways off from her, was the hall to the study with its fallen shelves and piles of readable errata.⁴ Further on, at the end of the middle hall, was her parents’ room, which was locked, and for good reason, just as it had always been. And to the right were the stairs leading down, down and further down.

She went right, and felt the fowl judge her for this decision. She didn’t know what she did wrong by going this way; I’m just following the sound, she thought.

The sound persisted, louder now, and surely came from just below the landing.

But even though she was eager to get down there, she descended with great care, for the steps were old and unreliable. Some of them had already caved-in while others creaked nervously under the weight of even so much as a tap of a tippy-toe. This house, let me remind you, was not very well kept.

But before she got very far, a thunderous ruckus trembled through the walls and dropped the frames of black and white pasts from their brass hooks and iron nails.

One such photograph fell just ahead, crashing and spilling glass on the last step. Her eyes immediately focused on that, a reflex without a thought. She didn’t notice the arm creeping behind her. She didn’t even feel it push.

The next thing Nettlie knew, she’d lost her footing and fell, hitting her head against the wall where the stairs diverted their course, and tumbling further down. She threw an arm out to grab the railing but her fingers only grazed the safety hold and now it was too late to prevent what was coming for her: Even in the dim light she saw their crude, vicious points, the broken glass glistening at the bottom of the staircase.

But instead she landed with a smash, and not a crash at all—

Hey! Watch where you’re falling!

The girl opened her eyes to a… A wet nose.

The nostrils flared. Well? it said. Are you going to get off of me, or do I have to shake you off?

¹ She liked to make masks out of paper-mâché and wear them on special occasions— whatever the special occasion may be; it just seemed like the thing to do. It’s never too early to wear a mask, she reasoned.

² ‘Rambling,’ in the sense of a wandering walk, not the kind of rambling espoused by a broken mind talking about the end of days and the start of endless night.

³ A dance made of this sort could be called a ‘dust-waltz,’ but the music for it would sound very different from the compositions of Strauss, Lanner, or Glazunov.

⁴ Lists of corrections without source material read like poetry, but that’s not why they were kept.

Chapter Three: Meeting The Guest

Huh? uttered the girl rubbing her head, seeing now that the object she hit was actually no object at all, but a fiendish animal, a quadrupedal creature with stark, crazed features.

Its spotted fur crumbled apart in tufts crusted with dried mud, the very same substance that its paws had left trailing in small clumps, which, as it so happens, could be traced over the oriental rug, under the imported dining room table, across the wide hall, over the bureaux in the lounge, under the photographs of provincial plants,⁵ then back on the floor, then up on the grand piano, then back down from it, returning to the hallway (just missing the door to the basement), curving around the hairpin corner behind the stairs, and continuing all the way to the far corner in the back of the house where a crack split apart the plain wall and led upwards in a winding, deviating maze that then turned into a variety of dead ends.

That is to say, every turn turned out to be dead but one, which, as might be guessed, was the single turnabout in the wall that went into itself and so formed what could be called a hole. Or a window. Technically, it was an open window, hence the hole, and though it was rather narrow, it was still wide enough for an animal to crawl in through, if it chose