Chapter Eighteen: Closer

"We're getting closer," the writer said. I didn't ask him how he knew.

Instead, I asked Tulip why she was traveling with us. "You don't even know where we're going," I said.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "I didn't know where I was going either. I was just...going." She refused to talk about what happened to her, only offering up information about "nobody," as she called it, and the other things that she has heard about. "It's better traveling in a group. I've heard of people targeted by something called the Cold Boy – he takes those that are alone, isolated."

This was the first I had heard of it and I had been isolated almost my entire life. I asked her about that and she said, "I don't know how it works. Maybe they are just picky about who they target. It doesn't really matter. From what I've heard, they all get you in the end."

"How many are there?"

"Lots," she said. "I came across someone who couldn't look in a mirror. Said a snake lady was just waiting in his reflection. And then there was the one who said his dead brother was after him. And another said they were being followed by a giant hound, black as pitch."

I sat back and thought about this. The ORACLE and the Ivory Woman were not the only otherworldly creatures out there. But they were different somehow from these things she was telling me – the stories she told me involved these creatures targeting a specific individual, driving them mad or simply killing them. While some ran, others decided to serve the creatures, saving their own lives by taking others.

The ORACLE was different, I knew. She didn't want me to serve her interests by killing. She had me find the writer so we could find the Wall.

But what was behind the Wall?

I put the question in the back of my mind and tried to listen again to Tulip's stories, tried to figure out some sort of logic, some reason in a unreasonable world.