Dream of the Wolf

“No one wants to eat a human! They are sacred animals,” the wolf said gravely.

Selphie had never heard an animal talk before and to hear the wolf explain in such eloquent language the philosophies and privileges of being a wolf was frankly astonishing.

“And eating an underage, human woman is out of the question. No one would do that unless they were starving to death and even then the level of self-loathing they would experience for the rest of their life might not make the ordeal worth it.”

“What’s so special about a human woman?” Selphie asked, looking down at her white arms and touching her flushed cheeks. She had never been treated like she was anything special. A boy was something special, especially if he was strong, if he could wield an ax, if he was healthy, and if he was brave.

“She’s a descendant of the Gods,” the wolf explained seriously. He was very white. Selphie had never seen an animal as white as him and certainly not a wolf. He was as white as a ghost. Each of his hairs reflected so much light that he barely seemed to be in the room at all. His eyes were steely, framed by very black waterlines. He appeared to be a supernatural being to Selphie and if he said that she was descended from the Gods, as God’s messenger, haloed by light, he was completely entitled to say it.

“What about boys?” she asked between the fingers she had raised to her mouth.

“Boys? Human men? They would be equal with women if they behaved themselves. A proper son of God could never be killed by a wolf. There is no reason for you to fear being here with me.”

Selphie did not understand what was happening around her.

She was in a room with no doors and no windows. The only way out was up and it was a long way up, and it was only a possibility, not a certainty. On the bottom floor of the room, where she and the wolf were, was a bed. The wolf was tired and he was busy informing her that he was going to sleep in the bed and she was welcome to sleep in it alongside him as he was not hungry and, even if he were, he would never kill a human woman child.

He closed his eyes to show his intention, but Selphie still did not understand what was surrounding her and she could not go to sleep until she understood.

The ceiling of the room went up and up. There were ladders on the walls, all four of them. In each corner, terraces that poked out here and there in quarter circles filled the corners. She couldn’t see the ceiling of the room. As far as Selphie could tell, the room went up for eternity. If she was supposed to climb a ladder, how was the wolf going to follow her? There was no way out on the bottom floor, except by way of a ladder. Selphie had tapped on every panel, yanked on every baseboard, and pulled on every wainscotting. The tapping did nothing, but make a sound as low as if there was a brick wall on the other side of the panels. She couldn’t find a single nail holding the baseboards in place. Reefing on the wainscotting had to be the most depressing as it should have been flimsy.

Where were they?

Was the wolf meant to terrify her and keep her chasing upwards? If that was the intention of the setup, that she was like Daniel who had been placed in the lion’s den, then whoever inserted the wolf did not understand the animal’s logic.

Yet, animals had killed people lots of times. They’d killed women lots of times. Out in the world, in the forests, in the wild places, a lone woman could be killed by a wolf. Selphie had heard so many stories.

She glanced at the wolf.

His eyes, which had been slightly open slits, closed immediately.

Selphie shook her head. If the wolf wanted to kill her, he certainly could have done so already. She was a thin girl, slight, and weightless, though not in a good way. It was in an undernourished way. She felt the sinewy meat of her arms. There was not enough muscle to hide her bones.

If she had been industrious, she could have climbed the first ladder. If she had decided to be suspicious of the wolf and slapped him to assert her dominance. She could have sobbed on him to establish reliance. She could have done any number of things. She could have screamed, accused the wolf, she might have even tried to kill him if he was being so docile, but none of those things crossed her mind.

Instead, she felt heaviness in her eyelids. She was so thoroughly tired and a bruised ache spread over her body. It was how she always felt: unwell, unsure, unsafe.

She’d also never had a human being tell her she was a daughter of God and that she was so precious they wouldn’t harm her. She’d believed lots of people before when they said they wouldn’t harm her. Some of that trust had been mislaid.

So, she got on the bed and didn’t even try to put any distance between her and the wolf. If the talking wolf said he wouldn’t hurt her, there was more reason to trust him than any human. Besides, no matter what happened next, she had every intention of dying warm. She cuddled right up to him, pretended he was her puppy, buried her face in his strange white fur, and let his heat soak into her until it entered her heart.

She fell asleep and dreamed of the wolf.

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.

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.

LEVEL TWO

The ceiling above Selphie was white. She supposed there was a circle on the ceiling. She’d thought the ceiling looked like a circle when the wolf was howling at it, but now it seemed more like a flower with the corner balconies spreading in a pattern that looked like petals. Was the circle on the ceiling supposed to be a moon, a sun, a star, a line of infinity that loops across itself forever?

Selphie looked up at the circle of white above her. Her eyes moved to the first-level balcony when the wolf’s face eclipsed her vision.

“The corpse,” he said calmly. “It’s gone.”

Selphie rolled over. “What do you mean it’s gone? How could you possibly know that?” Selphie had a hundred more questions she was going to blurt out, but when she sat up and turned, she saw that the ladder she had climbed yesterday was also gone.

Well, it wasn’t gone so much as destroyed. Obviously, the wolf had tried to climb the ladder and he had broken it to pieces in the process. The claw marks went all the way to the top. If he hadn’t made it up to the first-floor balcony, he had definitely been able to get his nose over the edge so he could see what was there. He had to be telling the truth. The body was gone.

“Why did you do that?” Selphie asked, staring in wonder. “It couldn’t have been easy.”

“Don’t think about it,” he advised sagely, giving her a little lick on the forehead. “The important part is that the body is gone and there is no reason for you to be afraid anymore.”

“Are you sure? What about the other levels?” Selphie asked, still nervous and worried as she wrung her hands.

The wolf rested on his side on the bed. “You can stay down here with me if you like, Little Divine One. I’m quite tired and I could use a nap. You just woke up, but I bet you could have another nap if you closed your eyes.”

Selphie put her head back on the pillow, but everything was too strange, too upsetting, and then suddenly all right. Having terror and tranquility side by side made her feel like the tranquility had to be a lie.

Once she was certain the wolf was asleep, she got to her feet and went to the ladder that led to the second balcony. If she climbed that ladder when she reached the halfway point, she would be able to see for herself whether or not the dead body was still on the first pavilion. She just had to promise herself to hold onto the rungs. No matter what, she had to hang onto the rungs.

She put her hands on the ladder. Then she leaned forward, her chin resting on a rung in front of her. She breathed. Her legs were shaking. Could she really climb the ladder if she was that afraid?

Steeling herself, she started moving upwards, hand over hand. At the halfway point, fourteen rungs up, she promised herself she would turn around and look over her shoulder. She’d look to see if the body was still there. That was what she told herself, but she found that she couldn’t stop moving upward. It wasn’t the wolf that made her go on. It was the horror inside herself. When a person has a sliver under their skin, they have to find a way to remove it. That means they have to look at the sliver and make a plan. Ignoring the discomfort will only bring more discomfort.

She had to look and see for herself.

She pulled herself onto the second balcony. Then carefully, very carefully, she peered over the edge.

The wolf was right. The corpse was gone.

She stepped back and began doubting herself. Had she been seeing things?

If Selphie had been making up things to see she certainly would not have made up that sight.

She took a few firm deep breaths before she turned around and saw another unwelcome sight. In the corner of the room, hanging from a string was a knife. Not just any knife, it was a knife she was very familiar with. Unlike the corpse, it was not something she feared anymore.

It had a long blade and a solid hilt like it was expecting to be used for something more than just skinning rabbits. The handle had finger grooves. The knife had been well-loved. Not by her. It was not her knife.

She took it in her hand and the string it was hanging from snapped in two of its own accord. Selphie had not pulled on it. The knife rested in her hand.

It was too large for her to hide, but after what the wolf had done for her to check and see that the corpse was gone, she wanted to reward him by telling him what she found.

With the knife in one hand, she climbed down the ladder. At the bottom, the wolf was waiting for her, his eyes like twin moons.

“What have you got there, Little Divine One?” he asked with a yawn that belied his awareness.

“This is a knife that used to belong to one of the men at the sawmill. His name was Brawley. I stole it from him, but I lost track of it. I don’t know why it’s here,” Selphie said slowly, wondering if it was a good idea to show such a thing to the wolf. Maybe he would think she was threatening him. Maybe he would think their friendship was over. Maybe they couldn’t be friends, even if they wanted to be.

The wolf looked at it and then at her. “I’m familiar with that knife. I’ve seen it before.”

“Really? When?”

He revolved his ears and lazily yawned again. “I’d rather not talk about it. I’d like to think that this place has nothing to do with the place where I used to be. Isn’t that what you want too?”

Selphie nodded and held it out to him balanced across both her palms. “What should we do with it?”

“Nothing. I have claws. I have teeth. You don’t really have either of those things. In defeating a wolf, a human’s best strategy is climbing upward and calling for help. You’ve climbed, but you haven’t called. Not the way you’re supposed to call if you want help. Do you want help?” His gaze came around and rested on the girl.

“If I called for help, no one would come for me,” she admitted drearily.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a murderer.”

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.”

“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.

LEVEL FOUR

Carefully, Selphie changed the ladder she was climbing. The ladder that led to level three did not lead to level four, but she was close enough to it that she thought she could grab it. Then she could move herself over without having to go all the way down and then all the way back up. The levels were getting high enough to scare her. Level one was like climbing onto the roof of a house. Level two and level three were still like climbing tall trees, but, no matter what, the height of level four frightened her. It was very high.

However, she had hoped that level three contained the end of her story and her punishment.

Selphie and Carma did not have a nice life living at the boarding house. Selphie was not entirely sure how old either she or Carma was because she didn’t know their birthdays. They were orphans, but they were old enough to fetch and carry, so they had both been taken in by the landlord of the boarding house where the men who worked at the sawmill lived. The two girls worked in the kitchen and it was their job to take food to the mill. Because they carried food near the woods, they had been lectured about the dangers of wolves, bears, wild cats, and anything else that might be interested in an easy dinner. They had been taught to climb trees to escape the wolves.

Selphie had done it a few times. Carma had done it more.

Having a job in a kitchen in a place like that was less fun than it sounded. It was very isolated. The biggest problem was that there wasn’t enough food to go around sometimes. There was food brought in on supply runs, which were unreliable. Sometimes they were early, but most of the time, they were late. If the men left work to hunt, they didn’t always share their killings. Often there wasn’t much to share when you were one man and you only snared one rabbit. The men who were less skilled at hunting and trapping would come after Selphie and Carma, bullying them for kitchen scraps.

Think of Esau returning from a hunt empty-handed and finding Jacob with food. He traded his birthright for the meal, but even if birthrights of loggers were up for grabs, Selphie and Carma had nothing to trade. They had their meals taken from them in times of want.

It was a day like that, a night like that, a time like that when Brawley took out his frustration on Carma. She was a little girl with small hands, slight bones, wild hair, and almost nobody at all inside her pinafore. He’d been picking on her for months. In his rage of not getting what he wanted just because he wanted it, he slapped her so hard... something inside her neck snapped and she fell broken on the floor. The wood under her sounded hollow like bones.

Time stood still. Brawley didn’t move because everything had stopped in a heartbeat. Then, without warning, one thing moved.

It was Selphie.

She snatched up his knife, which he had carelessly left within her reach. “Want some meat? I know where we can find some,” she said in a dangerous whisper like she was the broken girl and not Carma on the floor.

For a moment, it seemed like he thought she was finally offering him food, but she was not.

She lunged at him. She didn’t try to take a slice from his arm. She went at him exactly the way she would have killed an animal who had already been shot but needed a finishing blow.

If Selphie had only meant to frighten the woodsman or if she had meant to kill him, she didn’t know. Her intention didn’t change the fact that she sliced his throat and his blood covered the floor in a horrifying red pool that kept growing.

With the threat down, she turned to see Carma. The pool of Brawley’s blood spread across the wood floor so that it touched the white knuckles of the girl on the floor. Selphie’s gaze moved from Carma’s white hands up to her white face. Her face had no expression. The lack of expression, the glassy look in her eyes, and the odd angle of her neck all meant she wasn’t safe.

She was dead.

Selphie’s brain sat stupified in a brown and red muddle that suddenly meant too much for her to comprehend. Her fingers grasped the knife and she stabbed Brawley in the chest several more times in a frenzy of blood splatter and horrifying cracks.

Her heartbeat slowed as the danger passed. As each of her heartbeats ticked like the second hand on a clock, the rage of her crime receded and she recognized the terrible scene that surrounded her. She dripped with blood and she knew at once that she couldn’t stay there. She was a murderer. She took the knife and ran.

Bloody footprints.

Dripping blood.

That was what she saw when she arrived at level four. It was a line of her own bloody footprints on the white floor like the ones she had left in the white snow.

Selphie swallowed and knelt on the floor next to the bloody footprints that were unmistakably hers.

She had fled into the woods. The men would be able to track her. She had to hurry. She had to get rid of the blood.

On the fourth level, Selphie pulled on the straps of her pinafore. She had to clean up the blood. She’d start with the jumper. When it was full of blood, she’d use her shirt. If it too filled with blood, she had her chemise and her underclothes.

She mopped up the blood.

She used her pinafore.

She used her shirt.

She used her skirt.

She used her chemise.

Even her underclothes.

That was enough. Every piece of clothing she had soaked up so much blood that not even the tiniest bit of the fabric appeared white.

Then she got dressed, putting the bloody clothes back on her body.

She couldn’t leave the clothes on level four. Nothing had been left on the other three levels. The knife was down on the first level, but in a way so were Carma and Brawley. She couldn’t drop her bloody clothes down for the wolf to eat and she couldn’t continue on naked.

Selphie had to let herself be seen for what she was—someone covered in blood.

She found the ladder that led to level five and moved toward it.

LEVEL FIVE

When Selphie reached level five, she knew she had come to the last level. There was another dead body that Selphie did not want to see.

As she stepped toward it, she said out loud, “I’m really sorry about what happened. I… wasn’t lost… I didn’t tell you I was lost. I was dripping in blood and if I had washed off more than I did in the snow, I thought I would die of cold. I should have dropped the knife. I see that now.”

She took a step toward the lifeless form that was sprawled on its side on the floor.

She bit her lip.

At least, she did not have the knife with her now.

“I was leaving a trail of blood with my footprints. Tracking someone in the snow is pretty easy work even if they aren’t leaving red marks with every step they take. Dogs were coming. I could hear their howls. The men were coming. They had seen what I had done, how I had killed Brawley and they were coming for me. I’m so sorry, but I was looking for a wolf’s den.”

The fur on the dead wolf’s back seemed to prickle. Was he not dead after all?

Selphie got on her knees in front of the gray wolf’s muzzle. “I’m so sorry. Climbing a tree would not have saved me from the loggers. They climb trees when they do their work. I don’t know what they would have done to me, but I knew what a wolf would do to me. I thought I had a better chance with a wolf family. I’d heard stories about how wolves raised children sometimes, and if I didn’t get out of the cold, I was going to be dead either way. I chose you rather than them.”

Then, just as she had done in the forest, she lifted something she should not have lifted and came in without an invitation.

She opened the wolf’s front legs and curled up inside the curve of his still embrace. She was certain now. The wolf on the marble floor was dead.

The wolf Selphie had met inside the den was alive. It sniffed the blood. The predator awoke. All the claws and all the teeth sunk into her.

Reflexively (it had been a reflex), she turned her knife on the wolf to combat the teeth in her neck and shoulder.

Though wounded, the wolf tore her apart. Her last thought had been that it would be over soon and, at least, she would not die cold.

Now, as she lay on the floor in the arms of her killer, she understood that she had killed him too. She hadn’t seen cubs in the den. She hadn’t seen anything in the den. It was dark. If he had a mate or cubs, she hadn’t seen them. Had she deprived a family of their father?

She pushed the thought out of her mind and remembered the white wolf on the bed on the bottom level. Was he the same wolf as the one she had killed? Was that why they were here together? Because they had killed each other?

Selphie fell asleep.

She dreamed of a wolf.

In her dream, the gray wolf was circling her. Couldn’t he speak? He looked into her eyes and licked her face. She cried and put her arms around his neck. He licked the spot where he had torn her neck from her shoulder.

When she awoke, she was alone on the floor of the fifth level. She lay there and looked at the circle over her head. Circles weren’t supposed to have an end, but this one did.

She had gone around the circle once when she lived through it. She went around again when she recounted it. Now, she knew she had a choice ahead of her. On the top level, she learned the truth. There was no door out. There were floors in the corners that went up and up, but Selphie knew they would be bare. She had already seen everything this place had to show her.

Now there were only three things in this place.

There was her, the white wolf, and the knife.

She could choose to do what she did before. Take the knife in her hands and kill the wolf or she could let the wolf swallow her whole like he had the other corpses.

She was ready.

Selphie walked to the edge of the balcony. “There’s another body for me to throw down. Make sure you eat it!”

The wolf poised himself to jump.

Selphie took a few steps back.

She ran.

The wolf leaped in the air.

She fell down the shaft of the tower.

Time stopped and it felt as if she floated.

His jaws were open as he shot upward.

And then, despite everything, he caught her in his arms. She felt his fur and his bones come around her to hold her. With the whiteness surrounding them, they fell together, not to the first level. The first level was gone. They fell further, fell through the white until the light around them became so bright that they couldn’t see the ladders or the floors of the tower.

Falling was the way out.

LEVEL ZERO

“Do you think we’ll find God if we keep walking?” Selphie asked the wolf. They walked on a white path with white trees on either side of them. She should have felt like Little Red Riding Hood, but her clothes were not red. The whiteness that surrounded them wiped it out. Besides, she was long done being afraid of the wolf. She put her hand on his back and scritched him between his shoulder blades.

“Eventually, but there are probably a few more people we need to meet before we get to Him,” the wolf said smoothly. It was the voice of someone who knew that everything was going to be alright.

“My parents?” she asked with a playful hop. “My friend, Carma?”

“I hope we meet people who love you as much as I do,” the wolf replied.

His candid love for her took her breath away. She couldn’t talk about the greatness of his forgiveness or how she had found a friend in the least likely place. She let her hair fall in her face to cover her emotions.

“You’ve had a challenging day,” the wolf observed. “Why don’t you ride on my back for a while?”

“Can I do that?”

“Of course!” he offered jovially, as he crouched low enough for her to mount him. “I couldn’t have done it when I was a forest wolf, but now, how strong I am and how heavy you are have nothing to do with my ability to carry you. Now I can carry you anywhere for as long as we travel together.” He looked into her eyes and then pointed his nose at his back in invitation.

Touching him gently, she got on his back, and he rose into the air. It felt as if he lifted her almost as high off the ground as if she were riding a horse.

“I’ll carry you for eternity, God’s little daughter.”

Together, they disappeared between the white trees that made up the infinity that surrounded them, and they were never seen again.

The End