‘I’ve planned for that,’ he said, ‘But I need your help.’
He bolted from the room, leaving her bewildered. She heard him rummaging in his room; a light pang signalled something metallic hitting the floor. Seconds later Hosea returned with an open tin of shoe polish in one hand, which he handed to Hannah.
‘What is this for?’
‘The runes,’ he said. He smiled. He was proud of his idea, even if it was only a ruse.
‘I don’t understand.’
Hosea pulled his shirt over his head.
‘Oh!’ Hannah clutched at the fabric over her chest with her free hand.
Hosea stepped forward slowly. ‘You know the runes as well as I do. We look up at them every night. We’ve looked up at them together. They are there to protect us, aren’t they?’
‘Y—yes,’ she whispered.
‘So we will use them to protect me. I need your help . . . to put them on my body.’
They stared at each other with nervous anticipation. Hannah’s hand rose and hovered over the tin. As she dipped a finger into the polish, she stepped lightly to the side and around to Hosea’s back. Her breath caught in her chest as she touched his shoulder. Trembling fingers traced the first rune uncertainly. But when she dipped again into the polish—two fingers this time—she sighed pleasantly. The matter became one of fascination. She wrote curves and lines smoothly, if absently, not caring about the symbols, caring only about the skin beneath. She covered his back with five symbols and put one apiece on his upper arms. Then she stood before him and looked again into his eyes. She began a new rune where his collarbone met his left shoulder. She traced a curve down towards his sternum, angled upward, and then ran across his breast. Hosea felt his body responding. He hadn’t thought of that. He watched her slide her fingers through the polish. By the time she began the next rune, his condition was obvious. He hoped she wouldn’t notice almost as much as he hoped she would. She was marking a swirl on his abdomen now, though he thought she was looking past her hand. Her movement slowed; she lingered. His stomach quivered. She finished the base of a symbol just above his waist. She looked up at him and raised a single finger.
‘Your face,’ she said.
He craned towards her. She eased her body forward against the resistance of his erection. She raised her face to his and raised her hand to his cheek. She drew on his forehead and dotted his chin. When she took her hand away, he kissed her. His desire for her overwhelmed him. He wanted to touch her but he didn’t know how. Then he felt her hand move between them and she grabbed hold of him; not knowing what to do, she squeezed repeatedly. Almost immediately a bolt of heat surged through him and he moaned. The release was so intense he felt dizzy and he stumbled backwards, stretching a hand out in front to steady himself. He saw that Hannah seemed mortified. She held her unmoving hands before her, one brown with polish, one pink and chaste, having no idea what had happened, what Hosea was thinking, and what to do next.
Hosea was embarrassed. He didn’t know where to look, so he looked at his feet and saw the smear of brown polish on the front of his pants.
Hannah felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could think to say.
Hosea didn’t know what she meant. He shook his head and said, ‘No.’
Hannah began to cry. She thought she had sullied both of them and the love they had. And because of what she’d done, he was rejecting her.
Hosea’s heart went out to her. He knew it was painful for her to see him leave. Now, more than ever, he wanted to stay, knowing there was so much more they could be together, knowing that longing was only a short bridge, easily crossed, with untold rewards waiting on the other side. But he had made up his mind. He wanted to console her and comfort her with earnest words of love, but he thought it would only hurt her more to hear them and then watch him go. Even now he could see her confusion; how would she feel if he told her he loved her as much as he did?
Because he knew he must say something, and because he wanted to at least give her some hint of his affection, he said, ‘I will think of you.’ He grabbed his shirt and went out. He steeled his resolve, trying not to be stayed by the uncontrolled sobbing that followed after him.
Hosea darted between the narrow houses, ducking as he passed each window. He clutched the collar of his shirt so that it hung over him like a small cloak. It stuck to the drying polish. Hosea tried his best not to smudge the runes, though he wasn’t sure why he took the precaution. He was able to avoid the few people that had emerged from their houses after dinner. Most that had were children at play too preoccupied to notice Hosea; those few that did were dumbly mystified by his behaviour and, finding no adult present to supply explanation, hastily dismissed it from their minds. Hosea leapt the town ring without fanfare and cantered to the stand of rocks where his pack waited, unmolested. Only here, crouched out of sight, did Hosea pause for breath. He listened intently but heard only the usual placid murmur and drifting laughter behind him. He peeled away his shirt. He was glad to see most of the runes had remained intact. He did not care for their supposed protection, but he liked the idea that Hannah’s touch was marked on his body and he hoped it would be slow to fade. He tied the shirt arms around his waist, frowning at the brown smear on his crotch as he did. He tried to position the shirt to cover the spot before tossing it aside so that he could urinate. The matter of the shirt and the spot seemed discordantly trifling to him at the time of his great transition, and he shoved the offending item into his pack.
He hurried away from the town before the evening strollers began exploring the paths. He crossed the river and went up the bank, across the road, and further down to the stand of trees he and Hannah had visited only two nights before. It seemed incredible that so much had happened in so short a time. He drifted among the birch trees and peeked back towards the trails, wondering if anyone would venture so far afield, but no pair left the lower paths. The All-In bell rang.
One hour, he thought. I should go. He reconsidered. Why? Before is the same as after. And I have never seen the cover of night from this side before.
He waited. He thought he might hear voices raised in alarm, but none came. He guessed Hannah had kept silent. And his mother either did not care or was not there. He found this disconcerting, but shook his head against it. It doesn’t matter.
Then he heard the familiar sounds—distantly. Hosea was awestruck. The great arc of the first rib emerged from behind the houses at the far side of town. Shadow deepened within the vast maw as it swung up. For as many times as he had been swallowed inside, Hosea was unprepared for the grandeur of the sight, for the incredible breadth of the great cover moving in its entirety as viewed from the outside. Though he was determined never to return, he nevertheless felt a deep-rooted compulsion to sprint madly over the fields and dive inside before it closed. But this he did not do; he held fast and allowed himself the experience of watching the dome close. Soon the opening narrowed to a sliver of undefined dark which disappeared with a mighty thump as the cover settled shut.
After a few minutes, his awe at the effort waned, and Hosea felt somehow disappointed. As large as the cover of night was, it was still dwarfed by the expanse of nature surrounding it, which rested impassively whether the cover was up or down or existed at all. The tarp itself was faded and revealed as an ugly yellowed bone colour from the outside. The runes were cracked and somehow artless from his vantage. And now, with the cover closed, nothing more would happen. The marker of his departure had passed. And the valley rested passively whether he left or stayed or existed at all. Hosea knew there was no profit in wallowing. He collected his pack, looked once more at the great, pallid wart, turned, and began to walk.
He drifted down to the roadway. Though unpaved, the ground was flat and unchallenging. Hosea didn’t know if the access road to the village would cross another or if it was a single vein reaching all the way to Denton. He had seen pictures of paved highways, but he didn’t know whether he should expect the road to b
ecome paved at some point, or if it was dirt with a scattering of gravel for fifty miles ‘east and a bit south’. The valley narrowed but elongated in the direction he was heading like the top of a sidelong teardrop. It would take longer than he’d expected to breach the valley mouth, but he felt sure he’d cross it before the brief true night overtook him. He wondered if he should sleep in the fleeting dark or remain wary or press on. He smiled, realising his thoughts were of things before him, not of the home he’d left behind.
The trees became more common and grew nearer to both sides of the roadway. Hosea slowed, startled to see another small tree uprooted and stuck back into the ground. The one that he and Hannah had seen could have been turned by someone from the town (for whatever unknown reason); this one was too far away for that. Its position was clearly unnatural —staged—but more than that, as before, Hosea felt that the scene was unnatural, as though the wood itself were grossly contaminated during inversion. He quickened his pace.
He drew near to the narrow mouth of the valley. Beyond, he saw open fields glowing gold from the lowering sun, and grand, welcoming mountains beyond. His rising smile died with the first scream. A chill swept his body. Had it been anyone else, he may have thought it the call of a bird of prey or the final complaint of a wounded animal, but he recognised it immediately as his mother’s voice, even if it had never expressed such wild pain. The sound came from down the slope to his right. Streaks of light carved pooling twilight beneath a stand of trees. He saw flailing movement in the centre and ran to it. He stopped, frozen with horror, at the sight of his mother thrashing between the gnarled roots of five inverted trunks. Her legs did not touch the ground except when they dragged there momentarily. She was being thrown about by unseen hands. As she flew from trunk to trunk, she swung one red hand wildly. Hosea saw his mother clutching the hunk of cinnabar, striking aimlessly with it, unwilling to let go. Her hand bled, cut by the edges of the crystal; drops of crimson splattered her dress. Her eyes were closed. She screamed hoarsely, with defiant anger to match the pain.
Hosea ran forward and grabbed his mother’s frail frame in his arms.
‘Stop it!’ he shouted.
He felt his mother’s body jerk spasmodically. She writhed in his grasp, as though resisting his protection, but he knew something else moved her body. He knew she was being pulled in different directions, even if he could not see the hands—or whatever else—that might have hold of her.
Again: ‘Stop it!’
It swelled in his skull, over, under, through his mother’s wailing: the roar, the hollow howl rushing through his head, scouring the back part of his thoughts.
‘Damn you!’
Hosea kicked at one of the inverted trees. It angled sideways only slightly. He cursed and kicked again and again until the trunk slumped to the earth. Still carrying his mother (now slack), he went to the next stump and cracked it nearly in half with a single kick. The roar lessened. He set his mother gently on the ground and then went around to the other stumps. Though they protested and refused at first to budge, he squeezed them to his shoulder and pulled them up one by one, until the pentacle was razed and his head and the valley were silent.
At first, he thought his mother was dead. Her bloodied hand still clutched the cinnabar, red on red. Her eyes, gone milky-white, stared at open sky. But he saw her chest shudder and, when he went to scoop her up, heard her tight, hissing breath.
He carried her back to town. He laid her against the tarp at the point where, just on the other side, the take-up rope was latched to the first rib. He stood for a while watching her until her eyes finally closed and she slept whatever sleep she would know for the rest of her life. He wondered what to do. He sat beside her and felt the cool canvas sag against his back. He knew the cover would not be opened again until morning, no matter what ruckus he raised. He thought about cutting the tarp and sneaking back to his house, but he knew that if the opening were discovered—and he could think of nowhere it wouldn’t—there would be a great alarm in town and possibly severe reprisals. He considered waiting until the cover was lifted and re-entering when no one would notice, though he knew that his mother’s condition could not remain hidden. Even if he tucked her out of sight temporarily, he was nearly certain she would never improve. And if she did not? What, then, would he do? He was determined to leave scant minutes before—how could he imagine staying now, when it had become so much worse for him? But how could he go?
The more Hosea thought, the more unsolvable his situation seemed, and the more confused he became. His weary body slumped and his mind spun. The sky darkened. Real night covered him. He knew he had at least an hour during which he could sleep safely before day returned. The Tornit are afeared of night. He promised himself to awake with the first light.
There were five of them waiting for him when he opened his eyes. They towered over him and his mother, each of them over seven feet tall. Their rusted-bronze skin turned black beneath their knees. Black hair was knotted on top of their heads and shaved clean around the crown. Their eyes swam even as they stared at him; fish-belly white tears swirled over pale blue windows. Painted black streaks ran from the corners of their mouths angling out to their jaws, then straight down their necks and out again across their collarbones. They wore only animal-hide breeches cinched over their navels. The two on the ends held spears with barbs at the ends, like long harpoons.
The one in the middle squatted in front of Hosea and leaned towards him. He opened his mouth and a low horn moan filled Hosea’s ears and head, ‘Naaaaoowwww-chok!’ The giant cocked his head back contemptuously and scowled down the length of his nose. He put two fingers to his chest and traced a shape; he then made a fist and flicked all his fingers open with the accent, ‘Pah!’
Hosea understood: Those symbols are meaningless.
‘Then why can’t you touch me?’ he spat back.
The man laughed without mirth, showing filed, yellow teeth. The giant next to him stepped forward and kicked the first to the side, who tumbled over and sprang backwards respectfully, though staring darkly at Hosea. The second giant squatted. He poked his thumb at himself and then pounded his chest twice. He pointed at Hosea and pounded his chest twice again.
Hosea shook his head. ‘No.’
The giant repeated the motion, more vigorously.
Blood of my blood.
Hosea denied him again, ‘No! I have no father!’ He wondered if his shouting would wake anyone in town.
The giant nodded at his mother, who remained catatonic. His face was calm and expressionless, which made it harder for Hosea to understand him. Was it, Why would you stay here with her? Or he might have been telling Hosea, You can’t stay here with her.
Hosea jumped to his feet. The giant straightened. Hosea frowned defiantly at him.
‘I will go my own way! I will leave the valley!’
At that, the other four giants erupted with laughter. They stepped back two to each side, facing the opposite pair. The giant before him did not laugh at Hosea, but he also moved away and motioned an invitation towards the mouth of the valley. It seemed to Hosea that, from where he was, next to the town, he could somehow still see the vista he’d glimpsed beyond the mouth of the valley, the brightening field and dim blue and green ridges, though he knew that such sight was impossible.
The giant’s voice did not sound in Hosea’s head. Instead, the deep, struggling growl that emerged from his mouth and which seemed to profane Hosea’s language was terribly alone in the suddenly, intensely silent valley. ‘Youuu waaaant . . . ?’ he said, ‘Youuuu leeeaaave.’
The bleary eyes of the giant made it impossible for Hosea to tell if his words were a genuine invitation or a challenge. He looked from the giant’s clouded eyes to the gentle wash of colour beyond the valley as it shimmered and rippled with summer wind, the beautiful, impossible world he’d only dreamed of. But Hosea knew he couldn’t leave his mother lying on the ground in her condition, even if she was sure to be found as soon as the
cover of night was retracted. He looked where she lay, but she was not there. The only marker that she’d been there at all was the clump of cinnabar in the dirt, dulled with drying blood. He raised his head again, but the giants were gone. He was alone.
He heard the first muted, ‘Hup!’ behind him. He had left his pack back where the invisible giants had attacked his mother in her dreams. He knew no one would find it there, and so planned to retrieve it later. The spackled crystal glimmered at his feet. He kicked dirt over it and then hurried a short distance away to duck behind a bush as the retraction of the cover began. He crouched and watched. Soon, people emerged from their small houses a few at a time and commenced their contented, casual industriousness as they had a hundred hundred days before. He decided to wait until most had gone to their chores in the buildings outside of town or to the river or the beehives or the fields. His skin burned. He didn’t know if it was from the sun or the polish was irritating him. It became intolerable. He scratched at the ground and rubbed black earth over his arms and shoulders and chest to cool down. The runes fell away as he scoured himself clean and Hosea felt relieved.
He decided he had waited long enough and he hastened back to his house in much the same manner as when he’d left. No one took notice of him as he scurried between houses. When he approached his own house, he was surprised to see Hannah waiting on the stoop. Her head was bowed and she was weeping quietly. The sight of her thrilled him in a way he had not expected and he thought it would be impossible to leave her again. He called her name but she did not look up at him. He laughed, thinking she was embarrassed to be caught crying. He ran up to her. He squatted beside her and wanted to hold her close to him but he knew he couldn’t; they were in public and he was yet half-naked. He tried to nudge her with the lightest touch and in truth barely felt it himself. He spoke softly, lovingly, ‘Hannah, it’s me! I’ve come back! I’m back again to be with you! Oh, Hannah, don’t be mad. Please, look at me! We can be together, you and I. Won’t you say something? Please, Hannah—look at me!’
The Hidden Back Room Page 20