Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 13 of 22

The line ran long by morning. Then the floor began to breathe. Daisy felt it under her boots, a slow rise and fall near the star-flecked stove. The heat had woken something below. She had ignored it since she lit the stove. Now the boards groaned. A crack split the floor, and cold, wet air pushed up through it. Coins rolled off the counter. Her customers backed toward the door and fled. Skeeter arrived tapping his cane against the shaking boards. Her ex, the crystal-boned dancer, cocked his head at the crack. "A guest that sleeps under the house," he said, "pays rent in bad dreams." His emerald eye glinted. "Feed it, or it eats the floor. And you with it." "Feed it what?" Daisy asked. The crack widened. Water climbed out of it, a vertical ribbon of silver-blue that stood upright and rippled without falling. Icicles hung along its length. It hummed low, a sound like a hungry stomach. Beth pushed through the door, wings tight, face flat. The cosmic witch who felt where magic ran thin. She stopped short and stared at the standing water. "That's not a leak," she said. "That's a mouth. It's starving. I can feel it pulling." She looked at Daisy. "It wants something. It won't leave until it's fed. I sound grim. I'm right." Daisy knew hunger. She fed hungry things all day. She ran to the counter and grabbed the dream-cream chilling by the frozen corner. Then she stopped. Cream alone would crumble into nothing down there, unanchored. It needed a tie to the waking world, or the thing would spit it back and take the floor instead. She thought of what slept and hated waking. She pressed her palms to the cold cream and bound a flavor into it: the taste of a long sleep no one wants to leave. A Sunday you stay in bed. She named it as she worked. The cream went still and heavy in her hands. "Here," she said. She lowered the bound cream into the crack. The standing water bent toward it and drank. The hum dropped low and soft. The icicles dripped and shrank. The ribbon of water sank back through the floor, slow and full. The boards settled. The breathing stopped. Beth pressed a boot to the seam. "It's asleep," she said. "For now. You feed it, it stays down. You forget, it wakes." She shrugged. "You've got a tenant." Skeeter tapped a slow beat over the sealed crack and grinned. "The house keeps its sleeper," he said, "and the sleeper keeps the house." Daisy looked at the settled floor. She had not driven the thing out. She had made it part of the bakery, one more mouth on her daily bake. Pluto's would keep standing. But every morning now, before she baked a single loaf for the waking world, she would owe a dream to the floor.