by M. E. Breen
It took Annie a moment to register that she was the dead child in question, which made Aunt Prim the sly weasel. She liked Grandmother Hoop rather more now.
The old woman looked at her narrowly. “Who are your people, child?”
“I have no people.” The words sounded awful, but Annie didn’t feel awful saying them.
But Grandmother Hoop looked afraid. Her eyes darted around the green. “Run, child. Get away from here.”
“But where? Where should I go?”
“Take the eastern road. Stay close to the ditch. If you see a wagon coming, you jump in that ditch and lie down till it passes. Otherwise don’t stop until you cross the line into Broad County. Don’t stop for anything, you understand me?”
“Yes, Grandmother.” As Annie turned to leave, Grandmother Hoop caught her hand and pressed the vial into it. “Take this. Drink it. For the heart and for the belly.”
Annie had never been so far east before. The bare, rocky landscape of the coast gave way to gentle hills. Reddish grass poked through the dirt. Where the road wound closest to the wood she could hear the thud of the cutters’ axes. On her uncle’s map of Howland the forest covered Dour County like a storm cloud, the cross-hatched lines of ink blurring into solid black in the map’s northwest corner. There the land bulged into the sea like a fist. Finisterre, it was called, the nest of the kinderstalk.
But moving east, as Annie was, the cloud of forest floated up to the top of the map, thinner and thinner. By the time you reached Magnifica no more than an inch of black ink showed along the northern border. By the time you reached the east coast, the forest had dwindled to nothing. Annie wondered what it would be like to follow this road all the way to the beaches of the eastern sea.
“Flat for miles and covered in sand,” Page told her.
“Sand?” Annie had been skeptical. In Dour County, the cliffs dropped straight into the water.
Page grinned. “Pink sand. Pulverized ringstone.”
“Ringstone sand?”
“Well, all kinds of stone.” Page read aloud, “Granite, quartz, shiproke—but there’s enough ringstone mixed in to make it look pink. Pink sand, Annie! Someday I’ll take you to see it.”
She passed a string of abandoned farms, then a yard where a woman stirred laundry in a tub of boiling water. Without thinking, Annie raised her hand in greeting, but the woman frowned and turned away.
She made a list of the things she had eaten in the past week. Bracka berries: many (sour). Rinkle nuts: one (inedible). Rum cakes: five (quite good). Rum drink: two sips (fiery). For the twentieth time, she took out Grandmother Hoop’s vial and looked at it. For the heart and for the belly. She even opened it once—it smelled like fresh baked bread—but she was afraid to drink.
And then she saw it, just on the other side of the hill: whitewashed, gabled, with two full stories and a slate roof. But it wasn’t the house that made her gasp and sway on her feet. It was the garden.
Yellow squash bumped sides with glossy orange pumpkins; blue eggplant gleamed among heads of pale lettuce. Between the house and barn grew rows of fruit trees bearing pink apples and flame-colored persimmons. Rose bushes, one red, one white, bloomed on either side of the cottage door. Around all of it spread a vast, perfect lawn, so that the house, the barn, the pumpkins all seemed to float in an emerald pool. A fence circled the lawn and contained it.
Without quite realizing how she had gotten there, Annie found herself standing outside the fence. The gate was unfastened. The cats had hung back, but now they rushed forward, whirring with agitation.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.”
It only took a moment. As she left the yard, a swollen tomato in one hand, an apple in the other, Annie noticed for the first time that the top bars of the fence were smeared with tar. Shards of glass poked up from the tar like a set of jagged teeth.
An old chicken coop lay on its side where someone had thrown it over the fence behind the barn. The door listed open and the wood had begun to break apart with rot. Decades of chicken droppings varnished the floor. It was the perfect place to eat lunch.
Ox! Goose! Numbskull! Ditherer! And Page’s favorite name for Uncle Jock, the vilest insult: Soup-for-brains! She should be across the county line by now. She should have kept walking and not stopped for anything like Grandmother Hoop told her. And what had she done instead? Taken a nap.
Annie groped for the lantern and matches. She kept her eyes shut tight, for she could tell by the feel of the air—heavy and soft against her lips and eyelids, like a cloth lain over her face—that night had fallen.
Her mouth tasted awful, her fingers and chin sticky with juice. At last she got the lantern lit. The candle was no more than a smudge of wax now, but she could see the cats well enough. They were sitting by the door of the coop, watching her.
Annie’s heart sank. She tried anyway. “Come here, little Prue! Come here, Izzy!”
Izzy swatted her extended hand, claws not out but not entirely in. Stubbornly, she pulled him toward her and started to pet him.
“Ouch! Go on, then. Leave me here all alone. I hope the kinderstalk eat you. No I don’t. Be careful.”
She couldn’t help staring after them, though it was pointless. Or was that Prue stopping to look back, giving a little shake of her tail?
Of course it wasn’t. Annie slumped down. The lantern’s light could never reach so far.
They hadn’t been gone long when she heard it, though time—like distance, like everything—was hard to measure in the dark. The first howl was answered shortly by a second, then a third and a fourth, until she lost count. How many? How close? She thought of the gashes in the trunk of the oak tree. The coop, which had been a small, lit world of its own, now felt like a trap.
The front door of the barn was locked, as she’d expected, but she remembered seeing a square opening just below the roof for pitching hay into wagons parked below. If only she had some kind of ladder, or … her toe struck something hard. Annie crouched down. A ladder. There were even notches cut into the ground beneath the window where the ladder’s feet should go. But the ladder was big and heavy, and it took a long time and a great many scrapes, bangs, and thuds before she got it into place. I might as well just howl to tell them where I am, she thought, and started to climb.
A few steps up the ladder and the ground disappeared into blackness. Above her, too, was blackness. The same vertigo she had felt in the tree swept over her. Was she upright? If she fell, would she keep falling? The rungs under her hands and feet felt like the only things connecting her to the world she knew. Carefully, Annie stepped backward until she reached the ground and then started up again, counting.
“The ground is one rung down. Two rungs. Three rungs.” She kept her eyes focused on her dirty knuckles, the wood grain of the barn wall.
“Nineteen rungs.” She’d reached the top.
But the notches for the ladder had been in the wrong place. The pitching window was several feet to her right and a little above her, so she had to stretch to reach the window ledge.
She had one hand on the ledge and the other on the ladder when she heard him laugh.
“Like flies to honey,” said the scarred man. “Every time.”
He was carrying a torch and a rifle and smiling. “It’s touching, really, how you all count the rungs. But you’re gutsier than most, little”—he squinted up at her—“what are you now? A girl? You’re gutsier than most, to try it in the real dark.”
Then casually, almost lazily, he kicked the ladder. It tipped away from the wall and stood on its own for a moment, then fell backward with a whoosh. Annie let out a hiccup of pain as the weight of her body dragged against her arm.
“Now climb back down here at once, young lady!” The man scolded in a schoolmistress voice, then laughed. “Oh, if you insist. It’s been weeks since I had any good target practice.”
He fired before Annie could speak, or even think. The bullet whizzed past her hip and emb
edded itself in the side of the barn with a splintering sound. To her astonishment, she did not let go of the window frame.
“Oh, come now. I won’t let you break your little bones.” Another bullet hit the barn wall, a few inches above her head this time. Annie held on.
When he spoke again all the humor had left his voice.
“I can part your hair with one of these. Do you want a scar like mine?” Another bullet, so close to her face she could feel its trail of heat. “Do you?”
She let go.
He caught her. It was worse than hitting the ground. His arms were harder than wood, and he smelled bad—not of sweat and manure, as she’d expected, but of a ripe, almost rotten sweetness. Annie started to struggle and kick. He dropped her, no, he tossed her, to the ground. By the time she had scrambled upright he had the nose of the rifle pressed into her spine.
“This way.”
His torch cast enough light that she could walk without stumbling, but Annie dragged her feet. This would be her one chance to get away, before they got to wherever they were going. If she could just find something to distract him … oh, where were the cats?
“I wouldn’t waste the thought, gal. There’s nothing but forest to the north of us, and miles to town. But don’t worry, you’ll be snug as a bug where you’re headed, snug as—” He stopped. “What is …?”
The kinderstalk had started to howl again, but the sound had a different quality from what Annie had heard in the chicken coop. Those howls had sounded like questions, she realized now, questions and answers. These were fierce, urgent. And closing in.
“Move!” The scarred man grabbed her arm and started to run, half carrying her across the yard. He stopped at a wooden door in the ground with a ring in the center.
“Lift it up.”
He watched her struggle for a few seconds, then reached down and pulled the door free with one hand. A ragged circle opened in the earth.
“In.”
“No.”
He looked at her in real surprise. “You don’t hear them? You think you’re better off out here?”
“I won’t. You’ll have to shoot me first.”
Behind them, a kinderstalk snarled. The man whirled around, firing his rifle wildly into the dark. Then, quick as a snake, he turned and struck Annie behind the knees with the barrel.
“No good to us dead,” he hissed.
She pitched forward, the black mouth of the pit opening wide to swallow her.
Chapter 4
A beetle inched past Annie’s nose. Dirtcarver, or maybe a mudmopper. Gregor would have known. She poked the beetle and it melted into the darkness. Her head hurt, and her shoulder, and her hip. She eased herself into a sitting position and did a quick inventory of limbs. Nothing broken, but she’d taken quite a knock. Her eyesight kept shifting between clear and blurry, and the light had a queer brown tone to it. She held her hand in front of her face: five fingers, just as usual. She straightened her arm and the hand disappeared into the dark. Bent her elbow, the hand came back. She supposed she should blow out the lantern. It was a wonder the candle had lasted as long as this.
The lantern lay on its side a few feet away. Reluctantly, she reached for it.
Annie snatched back her hand as if stung.
The handle of the lantern was cool. The glass windows of the lantern were dull and cold. The candle had burned to nothing. And yet she could see the bit of string that tied the end of her braid, and the matted hair above it. She could see the coarse gray fabric of her dress spread out across her lap, down to the pucker in the cloth where Page had darned it. She could see the dotted lines of dried blood on the backs of her hands where bracka bushes had scratched her. Annie squeezed her eyes shut and the world went dark. She opened them and there were her hands still in her lap, gripping the fabric of her dress tightly now. She picked up the lantern and examined every inch of it, but there was no denying that it was not lit and had not been for some time.
The light must be coming from overhead, or behind her, or … Annie scrambled around the confines of the pit, objects coming into view as she got nearer to them, sinking back into darkness as she moved away.
The dirt walls formed a rough circle that narrowed toward the top, with the underside of the wooden door forming the roof. The floor was about as wide across as she was tall. To one side was a bucket, to the other a filthy blanket full of holes and a heap of moldy vegetable rinds. Neither the door, nor the walls, nor the blanket, nor the bucket emitted any light. Desperately, Annie kicked the vegetable rinds, but they were just vegetable rinds.
She studied her hands again, holding her right wrist with her left hand to keep it from shaking. If she kept her hand close to her face, she could see every detail: the sworl of prints on each fingertip, the branching lines on the palm that Grandmother Hoop claimed she could read to foretell a person’s future. When she moved her hand away, its outlines grew softer, the surrounding light deeper and deeper brown, as though she were submerging her hand in murky water. Each time she repeated the experiment she thought she could see her hand a little longer before it disappeared. Something like fascination crept into Annie’s chest alongside the fear, but she squashed it.
I hit my head. This won’t last. It’s … it’s … She struggled for the words Page would use, words from her books that made things sound exotic but comfortingly remote, easy to shut up and put away, like the books themselves. It’s a conundrum. It’s an oddity. It’s an aberration.
If a cow wanders into the yard, be quick to shut the gate.
Not Page, but Aunt Prim, reading aloud from The Book of Household Virtues. For the first time in Annie’s life the saying meant something.
A second inspection of the pit convinced her that the only way out was through the opening at the top. Standing, her head just grazed the wooden door. She pressed her palms flat against it and shoved as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. So this was why the scarred man had wasted those precious seconds watching her struggle with the door, to be sure it was too heavy for her. She yelped in a sudden rush of anger and panic and pushed again with all her strength. Then she felt it, a slight vibration against her palms, the strick, strick of nails against wood.
Annie shrank back. The kinderstalk. Even here, they could smell her.
More scratching, then silence, and then a different sound, almost too faint to hear.
A meow.
“Izzy! Prue!”
The cats meowed again.
Annie sagged against the wall, then let herself slide down it until she was half sitting, half lying on the floor. All that long night, whenever she called out, they answered.
The ax, or whatever the weapon had been, had split his head into two globes. A dense ridge of scar tissue ran between them, bumpy and faintly blue like thick ice. At first she had tried not to look—he couldn’t help it, after all—but after a while she realized he liked the scar, the suggestion of violence it carried. When he spoke he dipped his head toward her, as if to ask, what do you suppose happened to the man holding the ax?
She’d had plenty of time to study him since he hauled her from the pit at daybreak and marched her back to the barn. He pushed her into a wagon and bound her ankles together, then looped a stout rope several times around her waist and tied the ends to one of a dozen metal rings fastened to the inside of the wagon bed. He fit the rain cover over the top and sides of the wagon.
Her hands he left free. Breakfast consisted of a wedge of bread, a blackened fish head, and a couple of knobby potatoes with bits of earth still clinging to them. Annie ate it all. And she drank from the bucket of water he’d given her, drank until her stomach swelled like a gourd. The water tasted of tin and damp wood and something else, something faintly sweet. She tipped the bucket nearly vertical to drain it.
“Oy!” The scarred man knocked the bucket away. “Easy now.”
Annie was glad he’d tied her facing away from him because she was crying. She’d tried. She’d really tried very hard t
o avoid this, and it had come to nothing. Annie covered her face. Tears slid down her wrists into the sleeves of her dress. Worse than being bound like an animal, worse than what waited for her, was the fact of her own stupidity. She should have listened to Grandmother Hoop.
“You cry, if it makes you feel better,” the scarred man said cheerfully. “After today, you won’t have the energy to spare.”
They drove west past Gorgetown, covering the very ground she had covered the day before. When they reached the cliffs they turned south, and the landmarks Annie recognized from her games with Gregor—the black rock jutting over the gorge like a giant anvil, the cluster of stones ringed with tonsure moss where they had buried the body of a bird—gave way to a flat, unchanging landscape of yellow dirt and scrub brush.
The first sound she heard was familiar, though out of place: the thud, swing, thud of ax against wood. There was a high, whirring noise she couldn’t place, and a soft tink, tink that sounded like breaking ice. Then men’s voices, and the unmistakable gong! of a dropped iron pot. The wagon rolled past a cluster of tents, then past a cooking area cluttered with dirty pots and pans and water buckets, then on past a group of men repairing baskets made from birch bark. The last thing they passed was a long, low building without windows, set somewhat apart from the rest of the camp. Thick smoke hung over the building, though Annie could see no chimney.
The wagon shifted as the scarred man got down from his seat. And then he was facing her, smiling.
“Welcome to the Drop.”
A bald man with a furry mole on his scalp hurried over.
“Chopper. He’s here. Just a friendly visit, he says. Just a friendly visit.”
Annie glanced at the scarred man. Chopper was his name? Well, it fit. He was looking past her, his expression anxious, almost wistful. She followed his gaze. Walking back and forth along the cliff top, his hands clasped behind him and his head tipped forward as though he were composing a poem, was Frank Gibbet.