The Atlantic beyond the shore worked itself into a frenzy, roiling in palette and texture to match the sky. The sands transmuted to an anomalous purplish violet, and as rain began to dampen the grains, to tear into the shoreline as if some tattooed Nordic man were up in the clouds throwing daggers, the scattered sandcastles and sandpits began to resemble the beaten pulp of a vast swathe of beached sea creatures. Visible at some distance, out upon those surging waves, a neon orange lobster claw the size of a three-story building surfaced, rose, and thundered back into the dark foam. On the rocks far to one side, where not long ago an odd little clown had delivered ice cream to a weeping fat man and a perplexed child, a giant-of-a-person sat dipping its toe into the sloshing ocean. It appeared to be dressed in a leopard print costume, sporting cropped hair, and yet when it turned just a bit, the other side of the figure with its pinned curls and painted face presented as feminine in contrast with the other more masculine half. In what seemed slow motion, the figure roared and ducked as a fiery sphere the size of the New Year's Eve Times Square dropped ball headed its way, flung by a guffawing, molten-faced giant-of-a-man swinging a loose chain as he and his fellow massive, half-naked, dripping partner sloshed their way through the shallows. The veritable comet smashed into the promontory and burst into a pyrotechnic display, showering the dual-gendered colossus with bits of ash and flame. Enraged, the half n'half hurled a handful of sand and rock toward the laughing men with its animal-skin-clad side, while with the other it waved in a mollifying gesture. And all of this happened in stunted time, in the resonating echoes of the abyssal plane, in the flickering crimson and white and midnight blue of a bit of time and space that no longer knew what or where it was supposed to be.

Beyond the strip of vacation homes, the shutters and deck furniture of which the arrival of a strong wind was threatening, various deep and weird shrieks and movements rent the sky, but such happenings were of no concern to Ramona, who'd moments earlier lost herself in the kunstkammer. That tent itself was beginning to spin in the maelstrom of winds now sweeping the shore, and in a carousel of pinwheeling black and white, moving swiftly and swifter still until the stripes became a blur of gray, the tent lifted into the air, flapped its sides upward like some gigantic swelling sea anemone, and in one blustering poof! vanished in a cloud of scintilla and sand.

Somewhere boundless, nothing to delineate edges, Ramona Curry moved through aqueous depths of oddities and wonders, junk to the eyes of many—treasures to the eyes of some—confusion to the eyes of the child. What exactly she was meant to find amongst these dunes and valleys of queer artifacts, leftovers and forgotten heirlooms, was anyone's guess. Where the ceiling of this cavernous void ended was impossible to discern as were any sort of walls; the interior of this netherworld was not the same as it had been when she'd traversed it with Oliver (and it'd been bizarre even then). Everything was darker, if that were possible, lit not by lamps or candles but by the flickering lights of moving creatures: floating, ever-mobile fish and cephalopods, jellies and siphonophores and many-legged creatures squelching silently along in their unpredictable iridescent displays. The sporadic lighting might have been a hindrance but for the fact that Ramona hadn't any idea what she was looking for anyway, and so no bright lights or obvious pathways would've been useful to her.

What had that horrid thing in her ear said? There'd been no real instructions. He'd asked her about the secrets she'd told, and she'd talked about meeting her aunt, and about her aunt giving her Bloomy. Ibane, really, though she'd told no one the doll's real name, as promised. And then she'd come inside this place . . . but why? Why here? She could only assume she was supposed to find something in this vast mess of strange items, and yet how to determine what was utterly impossible! Bloomy would know. She'd ask her friend—

Bloomy!

She'd left the doll on the roadside.

Ramona stamped her foot. She didn't regret it. No, she didn't! All of this was the doll's fault, and she was angry at the stupid thing. She wanted her family back, and Bloomy had promised nothing too terrible would happen. Well . . . that's not exactly what she'd promised. Not really.

Pausing by a twisted black shelving unit filled with crystals and little figurines made of moss and snail shells and other bits of the forest, Ramona pursed her lips and picked at a knot on the wooden shelf. If she were honest with herself, she had to admit that Bloomy had promised her nothing of the sort. In the doll's ineffable way of speaking, it'd actually communicated more the notion that, if Ramona had properly understood, things might get a bit sticky. Or perhaps it'd been prickly. Whatever Bloomy had meant, exactly, there'd been undertones of peril, but Ramona was only eleven after all, and an eleven-year-old's sense of danger was easily ameliorated with the prospect of entertainment, which the doll had guaranteed in spades.

Now Bloomy sat on the side of the road, though, prey to whatever was going on out there, and Ramona couldn't talk to her about what in the world she was supposed to do in this chasm of wonders. What had happened to that harlequin? If she could work her way back to the mute clown, perhaps she could get it to in some way help her, to indicate her purpose here; otherwise, Ramona could very well be stuck wandering forever while who knew what was happening to her family.

A chill caught the girl, shoulders to ankles—the thought of her parents' and brothers' possible torment was enough to get her moving.

Aimlessly she continued, working to attenuate the dull throb of fear at the bottom of her throat. Her inability to process time in this place gave her some hope; Ramona did recall how time had seemed to bend, to fold over and over like a napkin when she and Oliver had been inside, so that when they'd exited the kunstkammer, they'd not been gone more than a moment in comparison to the hours they'd felt they'd been lost, and she wasn't even here to study the artifacts, now. Glass tables, horn and ebony shelves, wooden shadow boxes, cabinets the size of wardrobes, rooms within rooms, spiral stairs leading to lofts and landings, alcoves and curtained niches, tracked ladders sliding along free-standing walls . . . there were so many places to look and there was so little proper illumination that Ramona chose in place of close inspection a general meander, hoping that perhaps at some moment, enlightenment would prevail upon her.

The peripheral movement of sea creatures assuaged more than provoked her anxieties. Never close enough to quite see and yet ever present, the often translucent, flashing menagerie reminded Ramona that she wasn't alone in this black hole, this strange subterranean yet not entirely underwater world, yet the further she delved into the depths, the more profound and shivering her rabbity fear pulsed within. She would've given anything at all for the feel of Bloomy against her heart, in her arms.

After some immeasurable time wandering, the girl felt the certain awareness that she was being followed, that right past a jar of keys or a fabulously intricate model of a pirate's ship or a bowl of dried, emaciated moles or a headpiece of black materials and miniature skulls some obscured little thing darted across an aisle or behind a piece of furniture. Whenever she caught such movement from the corners of her vision, she'd spin or crouch or rise to her tiptoes, but she was never quick enough; the thing always seemed just out of reach . . . until it wasn't.

Amongst a floor collection of veined, clear-glass orbs of varying sizes (everything from ping pong ball to birthing ball), Ramona noticed to her surprise what resembled a misshapen matte star. Lowering to her knees to inspect the thing, the girl saw it appeared more to be made of bone or perhaps a more fragile yet similar material, and rather than a star shape, it looked instead like a paper airplane, with tiny arm-like appendages sticking out near the top point. In its tip, a chimerical face was created by three holes—two perfectly round eye-holes and one awkward permanently screaming mouth-hole. Nothing was inside those holes to indicate the thing held any life; it looked more to be a fossilized sea creature. So when Ramona stood and began to walk away, imagine her surprise when the thing sent the glass spheres rolling in all directions as it jumped into her path.

A moment to catch her breath and Ramona tucked away any fear she'd had about something devious following her. The thing wasn't much to look at; why, it hardly came up to her knee. What did it want, though? It merely remained before her, unmoving, its face incapable of any expression beyond that unnerving look of surprise.

"Can I . . . help you?" the girl asked, suppressing a giggle.

But of course the thing couldn't speak. Instead it tipped on one of its corners (its feet?), spun about, and tottered off down an aisle of curios. Ramona was only too eager to follow, incautious of the thing's intentions and more than happy to allow herself some guidance.

Leading her like an impish misshapen sanddollar through the cluttered crypt milieu, the Jenny Haniver (for of course that's what it was) pattered on at a clipping pace, occasionally losing the child around a corner or over a ledge and necessitating a backtrack, but after some minuteless moments, the thing succeeded in its goal. The pair arrived at a wall painted pale pink (or so it seemed in the lighting), standing isolated at the far end of a passage cut through mounds of gauzy and twinkling fabrics, eyeless doll heads and undulating ribbons of black kelp. In that singular wall was a doorless opening, rounded at the top, but where that led, Ramona was not at an angle to see.

The Jenny stopped about a yard before the girl and turned to regard her with its static face. Ramona lowered her brow. "There?" she asked, pointing to the opening in the wall. "You want me to go in there?"

Without joints, the Jenny was unable to move, so it stayed put. But Ramona understood.

"All right," she shrugged. Stepping around her guide, the girl moved through the soft, shimmering fabric and seaweed hills, paying no heed to the doll heads that turned toward her or blinked bubbles as she passed, and approached the doorway. Though no sound or sight shifted to indicate importance, Ramona sensed a great heaviness drape across her shoulders like a shawl as she stepped through the arch and entered the tiny room beyond.

A playroom. A child's playroom with all the trappings—toys, cozy furniture, artworks and messes—and yet the whole of the alcove was pitch as night, twinkling motes of sea-life and dripping with weedy moisture. Though sight was impeded, Ramona sensed slimed things moving along the ground, in hidden places, nearer her than she'd have liked, yet her attention was immediately arrested by a girl in long-dress pajamas, similar in age and appearance to herself, standing in the center of the space, fussing with a huge cardboard-box creation the sides of which had been painted in black and white stripes. Cherry-red and apple-green Christmas lights twined in dimly glowing strands around the box, and on one side, in childish painted lettering, had been written L.I.L.I.'s Circus!

The child turned to Ramona with her flushed cheeks, pink even in the dark, curls of jet hair flouncing at her shoulders. "Can you help me?" she begged, noticing nothing strange in the new arrival nor in her surroundings. "I've been trying forever to get this right, but it—" She pushed her hands in through what was presumably an opening in the big painted box (which was as tall as, or really taller than, herself) and shoved something about. "I just—" The strange girl pulled and pushed at things Ramona could not see, then backed out of the shaking box in a huff and stamped a foot. "Oh dammit!"

Hoping to divert the girl's frustration, Ramona approached. "It's okay. I'll help. What can I do?"

The girl met Ramona's eye, and for a moment, the two held one another's attention, the former nearly twitching into a smile but catching herself suddenly. "My sister always plays with me," the stranger said quietly, "but she can't, now."

"Well, all right," Ramona shrugged. She wasn't sure what was expected of her but went ahead and looked into the homemade puppet theater anyway, intent on trying to help.

Once she saw what was inside, however, she lost all thought of play.

Four little marionette puppets, each about the size of her hand, danced about against a backdrop of impossible proportions and depth. An entire tiny audience, obscured though it was, somehow fit within the cardboard box behind those puppets, and the stringed dolls tapped about for it. Bits of light flickered; weird music played; and the marionettes themselves were the ugliest Ramona had ever seen. They in fact resembled goblins more than people, and the girl was about to shrug off the freakish display as another bit of nightmare, but when she'd caught sight of the one at the far end with its orange hair and ribbon tongue, she gasped and backed away.

As she did so, Ramona found she was no longer in a child's playroom but that everything around her had gone entirely dark. All she could see before her was the vanished girl-child's puppet theater, and yet her own position had altered—was she the audience, now? She was still so much larger than the puppets, though, and she could see no box walls around her. No, somehow the audience had fallen away, and the strings—the puppets' strings! The rim of the theater had disappeared, and now the manipulator's hands were visible, working the marionettes' strings with two enormous deft hands, delicate hands, pale and feminine, forcing those poor little puppets—Ramona's family!—to dip and sway in all their humiliation. As the child stepped back into the dark nothingness, away from the brightly lit theatrical rectangle, a ghostly creature with hollow features loomed forward above the arena, above the wooden crosses that the hands with their ten clever fingers worked. Clouds of black and ember tufted from its empty sockets, which smoked like chimneys. Ash fluttered downward into the theater, upon the marionettes, and from its gaping mouth poured water, ocean water—Ramona could smell the sea-saltiness of it from where she stood. The hands dropped the wooden controls, let slack the strings, and the puppets floated and flailed, suspended as they were in the liquid that stayed put in their theatrical aquarium. Then with a colossal step, the monster beyond the theater lifted a leg above and over it, brought its shapeless black form to tower before Ramona.

Like a wraith it was, face and hands translucent as a ghost's, visage gaunt and empty, no longer smoking and choking out water. Everything else about it was too dark to make out, but the child had nowhere to go, and she knew in her heart that this thing was not so terrifying as it was sad, terribly terribly sad. A little girl grown lonely. A little girl grown unstrung. A little girl grown.

Ramona swallowed her instinct to run (and where would she have gone, anyway?) and leaned nearer, felt the currents of anger and envy and, most heavy, sorrow emanating from every crease and ripple of this creature of the deep. The girl held out her hands, reached toward the faintly glowing thing which made no move or sound for some moments before at last lowering itself to the child's level and putting out its own spectral, tentacled hands as well. Between its thumb and forefinger appeared a metal sliver, and with its feelers it worked its thread, pulling together the girl's fingertips and wrists, running beneath that translucid top layer of her flesh, drawing no blood, its work so quick and clean, and it did not stop at hands. What webbing the creature worked throughout the child's body, across her scalp, beneath the tender skin of her throat and belly, her arms and legs and tongue and toes, the backs of her eyes and inner ears, until it reached the very heart of the girl, where it found already so many working strings, and there it put down its needle, withdrew a tiny pair of dagger scissors, and paused.

Through the molten deep-sea miasma that'd descended around them, comfort and understanding enveloped Ramon, who even in the midst of being sewn into a mucilaginous cocoon had felt no pain or protest. "You're here, Bloomy," the girl managed to say through the pearlescent shadowplay water, though her voice sounded so small and far, far away. "I knew you'd find me."

The creature's sallow, gaunt, empty countenance began to run, to drip like watered-down candle wax. It slowly closed its tentacled hand over the pair of scissors.

"They're your family, too," Ramona added sleepily, her hours of wandering at last claiming her. "We're a family. We have to find them."

Watching the child in its arms curl into slumber, the contours of the monster's eidolic form, which had somewhat firmed, began once more to quaver. It gently put aside its scissors before dropping them altogether and, with only the feelers of its free hand, reached within the girl and braided a new string into those already wound around her heart. The thing's transient shape fluctuated, undulated, until it was something close to a woman before shivering into a leviathan and at last transforming more deeply into the mud and ash and seasalty water with which it currently and everlastingly rested.

All the darkness around the two of them on that deep ocean seafloor shimmered into the black oil slick opalescence of a vast mollusk closing them into an endless embrace before the inevitable foam and primeval ooze reclaimed what it'd already consumed.