by Scott Carson
It felt clean somehow. The lack of options offered a cold comfort—he was down to the most simple and essential of existences.
Aware that the pain wasn’t going to subside, he began moving again. He’d forgotten what he had been counting—steps, heartbeats, or breaths?—and so he counted drips of water instead. Listened for them up ahead and kept tally of them. Each drip that was out of sight was a reminder that he had more steps to take into the darkness. There was still ground to cover, at least. There was that much promised to him.
When the thunder came, he dropped to his knees and covered his head, sure it was a cave-in, the mountain collapsing down on him.
No rock fell. He stayed there, huddled against an impact that never arrived, and then he heard the sound again, one just like actual thunder. Not the rumblings of rock but the crackle of an oncoming storm. The sound was clear, too. Not nearly as muffled as it should be this far below the earth.
Could it be that he wasn’t really so far down?
He staggered upright. Found the wall with his left hand again while adjusting his dying headlamp with his right. Walked ahead. He was moving on an incline now. A slight but undeniable upward slope. Thunder again, and he was sure of it this time. He was walking uphill, and there was a storm coming to meet him.
When the tunnel ended, he was more shocked than he should have been. At the start, he’d expected to find this wall of rock, impenetrable. The longer he’d walked, though, the more convinced he’d become that if it ended at all, it would be in some grander way.
Instead, it concluded in a bland slab of gray stone.
The wall was concrete, not the rough natural rock of the tunnel. Man-made. When he came closer, his dimming light showed cracks laced through the concrete. They brought to mind a strange memory, an image of the cracked driveway of his childhood home. Basketball games with his father, the two of them using the cracks for locating shots in H-O-R-S-E. Shoot from this one. A sneaker toeing a split in the stone.
He ran his hand over the wall. Some of the cracks were deep enough that he could fit his hand into them. Not big enough to let him through, though.
No choice now but to go back.
He sagged against the wall. The whole painful journey felt pointless. He’d affected nothing.
You said you were going to take a look. That’s all. Take a look and tell them what you found.
All right, then. Finishing the job meant going back to report his findings. He knew the way easily enough, because it was a straight shot, no diversions, no choices. No need for the headlamp, even, and it was dimming, so he should conserve power. He could make the walk back in blackness and save the light for a moment when he might actually need it.
He reached up and clicked it off. The world went dark—but not black.
There was still some light in the tunnel. Filtered slats of pale gray light, like dawn breaking through the trees.
He turned back to the concrete wall.
The cracks were letting light bleed through.
That was how close he had come to making it all the way across. There was open air between him and the surface. He couldn’t sneak through the cracks, but if light could…
He unclipped his radio once again.
71
A narrow ledge of chilled, damp stone ran just inside the top of the wall. Gillian crawled across it on her hands and knees. She didn’t have to go far, though. She could see them in the water just below.
She could finally see them.
They were underwater but they moved without regard for it. Slipped through the water the way most people passed through air. There were two dozen of them at least. Maybe thirty. All at work, a beautiful synchronized effort of smashing, chipping, and shoveling. They were pale and gaunt, yes, but as she watched them she thought that Aaron Ellsworth had been wrong. They weren’t tired. They were focused. Complete concentration could be misunderstood by outsiders. Unless you understood the mission, unless you shared it, you might misinterpret righteous effort for suffering.
Somewhere on the other side of the wall, back in daylight, her father screamed her name. It barely registered, though. It was background noise, soft static. The only sounds that mattered were on this side of the wall. The crack of metal on stone, the rasp of shovel blades, the cascading rock fragments.
The proof of a promise.
She told me the truth. All of those awful stories were not so awful after all. My grandmother told me the truth, and I disregarded it, disregarded her. Dishonored her.
She looked up the tunnel and into the blackness. How far had they come? All the way from the Chill. All the way beneath the mountain. Just as she’d been promised. They’d had to come without her, though. Her own promise unkept.
“I’m sorry,” she said aloud. Her voice echoed, boomeranging the meaningless apology back to her.
They didn’t want an apology. They wanted help.
So join them.
Of course. That choice was obvious, wasn’t it? She’d denied them and betrayed them, yes, and she was late, yes, but it was never too late to help. They wouldn’t deny her. Galesburg had always welcomed, never refused. Until people came to claim it—to steal it and destroy it—Galesburg had never refused anyone. Only then had they fought back.
Sin flows downhill, her grandmother would say, time and again. The city’s sins up here can’t be forgotten, and they will flow downhill in time.
Gillian remembered all of the ancient faces in old photographs, old sketches. She saw some of the faces in the water below her now. They paid her no mind, because they were hard at work. Just the way she should be. It was the only lesson that she couldn’t afford to forget, and she’d forgotten it—no, denied it, even worse—for too long.
She was a Mathers. She was of Galesburg. She knew the burdens of that, and she knew how to accept them.
What about New York, though? What about Queens? Her other home. Home to enemies of Galesburg.
It hadn’t been so bad in Queens. It had been good in Queens. The first place where Gillian had seen people who looked like her on a regular basis. The first place where Gillian had heard different stories of different faiths, no one feeling the deep need to protect her from other ideas, to remove her from the world. The city, her prophesied enemy, hadn’t been so evil in the end. They’d been ignorant of what had happened up here—that much was true—but did they deserve to suffer for it? To die?
Gillian’s old babysitter, Mrs. Baerga, still lived in the apartment below Gillian’s father. She was nearing ninety now. She lived alone, still swearing in Spanish at the Mets games and still cooking the most marvelous food. She was the only person alive with whom Gillian had ever spoken of sacrifice. The only person she’d come close to telling about Galesburg.
Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word.
She was such a kind woman. She didn’t walk well now, and she was alone. Who would come to help her when the city went dry?
It’s bigger than her. Bigger than you, bigger than Galesburg. They have to be reminded of their sins. Punished for them. Or they’ll repeat the pattern.
Down below, in the water, one of the pale faces turned skyward. Looked up at the surface—looked directly at Gillian.
It was her grandmother.
She wore the same clothes she’d had on the day she went missing. Hiking pants and a loose button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled above thin forearms. She held a pick in her hands. Her lips, so often curled into a smile that suggested a barely suppressed laugh, were now squeezed into a thin line. Her eyes, no longer blue but a dark, expressionless gray, were fixed on Gillian’s.
Tired, Aaron Ellsworth had said, and maybe he had not been wrong. She looked exhausted. How could she not be? All of these years, all of this work, waiting on help.
Waiting on Gillian.
“I’m sorry,” Gillian said again, and again her voice echoed, drawing no response except for a shout from h
er father on the other side of the wall.
Beneath the surface, as picks whirled and shovels spun, her grandmother stood stock-still in the chaos, staring up at her, just as she’d stood in front of the chalkboard in the secret schoolhouse room, waiting. Waiting on Gillian to give the right answer, make the right choice.
It was true, her eyes seemed to say. So what are you doing up there? Where do you think you belong, dear?
A pick hit the wall and then a rock broke free just below Gillian’s right foot. She tried to shift and keep her balance, but her foot slipped, and then her hand reached for salvation but found nothing but blackness.
She was facing her grandmother when she fell into the water.
72
The photographer came on down the trail and didn’t say a word. He hadn’t changed a bit since the day Deshawn had spoken to him about the source of the city’s water, since he’d been shown that photograph of the long, empty road through the silent valley. The day Teddy Biddle had posed for the camera.
Deshawn pushed back against the fence post as if he could retreat. The handcuff bit at his wrist. He looked at the basin wall.
No sign of his daughter.
The photographer set up his tripod just ten feet from Deshawn, looked in the viewfinder of the camera, and then stepped back and assessed the scene, his eyes working from top to bottom—the distant peaks, the gorge slope, the crumbling wall—and, finally, down to Deshawn.
He smiled then, his teeth startlingly white against the jet-black beard.
“Remarkable shot,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
Deshawn didn’t answer. He thought that speaking to the man—not a man; I don’t know what he is, but man is not the word—was very dangerous. Better to follow his own advice, then—the counsel he’d given to Aaron Ellsworth—and pass by with his head down.
Deshawn could no longer pass by, though.
The photographer lifted one hand, his long, thin fingers extended, and swept it through the air. “Just look at it,” he said. “The landscape itself, so lonely and rugged. Traces of the old wilderness. But then pan down… and we have the wall. Ah, a human touch! Wilderness conquered. But there’s a problem with the wall, isn’t there? It seems to be crumbling.” He squinted, cocked his head. “And that square of blackness is rather enchanting. Is it an entrance into the mountain, or an exit from within it? A matter of perspective, no?”
His eyes flicked away.
“Below the wall, we have the fence. Progress. Stone becomes iron here. But it seems there’s a problem with the fence, too! It’s decaying and abandoned. Forgotten.” His eyes lowered again, locked on Deshawn’s, and his face split into that bright smile once more. “Oh, and another problem with the fence: there’s a man chained to it! You’d have to frame that right, because the symbolism is rather heavy-handed in the foreground, don’t you think? And yet, the image is the reality. That’s an artist’s challenge, I assure you. Can you be starkly honest and still nuanced? I think you can.”
He stopped smiling. “I think I have been.”
Deshawn spoke then despite himself. Croaked out his question.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what, sir?”
“Capture them. Force them to stay down there. Is it the camera?”
The bearded man’s eyes widened. “Is it the camera? You think I’m, what, stealing souls with a photograph?” A rich laugh echoed off the stone and water at Deshawn’s back, creating a hideous chorus, each laugh chasing the other. “I don’t mean to mock, particularly a man in your condition, but that’s quite an amusing idea.”
“It’s the truth,” Deshawn said. “I don’t know how you do it, but you do. All these years, up and down the line, in tunnels and in reservoirs, in the work camps and in the construction sites. You’ve captured lots of them. How many?”
The bearded man seemed aggravated now. He stepped closer and knelt so his eyes were level with Deshawn’s.
“They write the story,” he said. “They always have. I just document it, sir. Someone must.”
“It’s more than that,” Deshawn said.
“Perhaps. But there’s a difference between an author and an archivist. Choices were made, I assure you of that. Choices must always be made, and I didn’t get to make them for you. Not you, or any of the ones who came before you. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It’s not so hard to find, really. A keen ear and a sharp eye. I watch and I listen.”
“For what?” Deshawn said. His mouth was dry and his wrist ached and he knew that he should stop talking, he was sure of that, and yet he couldn’t. He wanted to know.
“Contempt,” the bearded man said. His good-humored voice was empty now.
“Contempt of what?”
Another wave of the hand, a gesture across mountains, woods, and water.
“All of it,” he said. “All that they do not understand and yet claim dominion over. The absolute faith in their own power. That is the contempt I seek. I assure you, it has not been hard to find.”
Deshawn couldn’t stop looking into the man’s eyes now. They seemed to have taken on a liquid motion. The man himself looked ageless, but the eyes looked ancient. Eternal.
“Have you always been here?” Deshawn whispered.
“Here? Of course not. I go where the work takes me. I hope the work is discovered and understood.” He gave a disappointed sigh. “Being discovered isn’t nearly as hard as being understood. My work is known. Cave paintings in Rome. Carvings in Tenochtitlán. Some stone reliefs near Athens that I understand are quite well regarded. All sadly misunderstood. But in time? We’ll see.”
Only two of the three places he’d named had had any meaning to Deshawn, but looking into the man’s dark eyes, the message seemed clear. He stared, both entranced and horrified, as the pupils roiled and spun and seemed to sink, waterfall-like, into themselves.
“You destroyed those places,” he said.
“No such thing. As I’ve told you, I make no decisions.”
“New York,” Deshawn whispered.
“Pardon?”
“You’ve come for New York.”
The smile came again. “We’ll see, won’t we? They promise me a land of stories there. Eight million daily, or some such? We will see.”
“It won’t work,” Deshawn said.
The undulating eyes widened. “No?”
“You can hurt it. You proved that last night. You can hurt it badly, maybe. But you can’t break it. Not the whole thing.”
The bearded man looked at Deshawn with real interest. Studying him.
“That’s some real confidence,” he said. “What if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not,” Deshawn whispered.
The bearded man nodded with detached amusement.
“Of course you’re not,” he said. He straightened and stepped back. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this exchange short. You’ve been most engaging, but you’re not the subject of the day. No matter how tempting the whole tableau appears.”
He smiled and then returned his attention to the camera.
73
Gillian sank slowly and landed on her feet. After the initial shock, the water became a comfortable cold, pleasantly numbing. She expected to fall to her hands and knees, but the water helped hold her upright among the ghosts. The picks and shovels remained in motion. No one was going to give up their work for her. Not now.
She looked at them, waiting for recognition. For work. Many of the faces were familiar to her, but she wouldn’t be to them. They’d been part of the crew for decades before she’d been born. They’d occupied photographs on the walls of the Galesburg School long after they’d died.
Something silver and bright flashed to her left, and she turned and saw an outstretched pick. She looked first at the curved steel head of the pick, which was chipped and nicked but still sharp and strong, and then looked up and saw who held it.
It was her mother.
Gillian had no mem
ory of her. Only photographs and the stories her grandmother had told. Her dad hadn’t told her any stories of the two of them. Only that her mother had been a kind woman but a confused one.
Now they stood together in the water, and Gillian was vaguely aware that she had no need to fight for breath, that she had no real sense of being underwater at all. All that mattered was the woman in front of her.
More motion to her right. Another pick offered. This one in her grandmother’s hands.
Molly Mathers stood just beside Gillian, close enough to touch. She looked the same as she had on the day Gillian last saw her, only without the same emotion in her eyes, the sense of life. Looking into her eyes was like looking at Christmas lights in broad daylight when they seemed empty and foolish and sad, before darkness settled and restored their purpose.
Another silver flicker in the water, like a trout in the shallows. A hand on her wrist. Gillian turned to her left and saw that her mother had taken hold of her. The grip was as cold and strong as a handcuff.
You need to help them. It’s your turn. The day you always knew was coming.
Her grandmother leaned close, pressing the pick into Gillian’s hands. Her face was fine boned and elegant, the same as Gillian remembered hovering over her at bedtime each night, leaning down to leave a kiss on her forehead, the last touch of the day, usually the last sight of the day. Everything about her was familiar, and yet something was wrong.
Tired, Aaron Ellsworth had said. That was it. An overwhelming sense of fatigue. An exhaustion that knew no end.
She pressed the pick handle into Gillian’s palm. Smooth wood, the finish worn down.
Help them, Gillian thought. Fulfill your promise. Do your part.