Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston Read Free Book Online

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    NO CRAZIES. NO PETS.
     
    A horse in the bathroom would pretty much violate both the NO CRAZIES and NO PETS , Kelley thought, still trying desperately not to panic.
    She stayed crouched against the door for a long time, her mind racing like a runaway train. This couldn’t possibly be happening. After a long few minutes of silence, she dared to hope her fit of hallucination had run its course.
    Then she heard the sound of water running.
    Kneeling, she put an eye to the antique keyhole in the door and, feeling dazed, noted that the horse had climbed entirely—impossibly—through the small casement window and was now standing in the tub.
    It also seemed to be running itself a bath.
     
    “No, ma’am, I’m not drunk,” Kelley said for the third time.
    This, after the eighty-five minutes she had spent trying to get a real person to talk to at NYC Animal Control. “Like I said, he must’ve come up the fire escape—”
    The receiver clicked in her ear.
    “Hello? Hel lo ?”
    Exasperated almost to the point of tears, Kelley hung up the phone and began to pace. Maybe the Animal Control lady was right. Maybe she was drunk. Okay, so she hadn’t had anything to drink, but that made about as much sense as a full-grown horse following her home from Central Park like a lost puppy, climbing up the fire escape, and squeezing itself through a tiny window into her bathroom, didn’t it? She stopped pacingand went to check on it. Still hoping beyond hope that she had , in fact, been hallucinating, she cracked open the door. The horse rolled a big, brown eye at her inquiringly.
    Kelley sighed in weary frustration and decided to attempt to physically remove the creature from the tub herself. She tried pushing from behind, pulling from in front, poking, prodding, enticing with a withered carrot she’d found in the back of the refrigerator vegetable drawer….
    The horse remained sweet-tempered throughout—and stubborn as a mule.
    It— he , she noticed—affectionately snuffled her shoulder, nuzzled at her fingers, and remained entirely disinclined to budge from the half-full tub. Kelley leaned on the edge of the sink and dropped her head into her hands, still dully disbelieving that any of this could actually be happening.
    Then she caught a whiff of lavender and jerked her head up to see a glistening white froth swirling around the horse’s legs.
    It was only then that Kelley’s state of shock evaporated, and the panic set in for real.
    Never mind the fact that there was a horse in her bathtub. The only thing that mattered to Kelley in that particular moment was that the horse had tipped over a bottle of her roommate’s insanely expensive bath oil, emptying its shiny purple contents into the water. The bottle with its elegant gold-lettered label bobbed on the surface.
    Tyff was definitely going to kill her.
     
    At around four in the morning, Kelley resigned herself to her fate and went out into the living room to wait for Tyff to come home from her date. At the very least, maybe she could try and get some script work done. But, to top it all off, she couldn’t find her damned script.
    The only thing on TV at that time of night was infomercials, so she finally drifted off to sleep on the couch during a sales pitch for “Eighties HIT-SPLOSIONS.” Deep within her sleepy brain, the bubblegum refrains of Wham! twisted and spiraled into minor keys, flowing seamlessly into the darkly alluring music that Kelley had heard as the world had disappeared around her under the waters of the Lake. The music enthralled her, leading her through a series of fantastic, strange dreamscapes.
    But when she woke up late the next morning, she couldn’t remember the tune.

VI
    O ut of this wood do not desire to go …
    And I do love thee. …
    Green eyes sparkled at him from the shadows beneath the branches of a nightmare forest. Laughter rang in his ears. The drumming of hoofbeats made it seem to