Behold
Page 28
“I wonder what color Chev’s eyes are?” Beth dug at a sooty spot overhead. A small rush of dirt dusted her hair. She coughed and scrambled back as a chunk of concrete fell at her feet and shattered. The sounds of a busy street tumbled down through the new hole.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know, darling. I don’t think he’s coming back. And if he does—be kind to him. He doesn’t even remember the sun.” I collected the fistful of flowers that the bright boy—Beth had named him Bracken—harvested from our small patch.
He never spoke a word, but smiled and followed Beth everywhere. His feet were bare and unflinching against the cold tunnel floor and his golden hair soon took on the texture of seaweed.
In Chev’s absence, the Kindred’s gapped smiles twinkled in falling bars of sunlight. The old adoption rituals were abandoned. Every elder now had a child—some two—and laughter sounded in the underground for the first time in living memory. There were now more children than tarps. The future of our line was secure.
***
A sound like a siren wailed through the tunnels. Kindred crawled from under tarps, blinking in the light. As the sound fell and then rose again, I realized it was a child. Crying. I raced around corners, down tunnels, now unfamiliar in their sunlit map, until I found the source of the cries.
Belle held a young girl in her arms, fresh from the streets above. The girl pushed at Belle’s face, her eyes wide with fear.
Belle looked to me, bewildered, her brows raised, raining concrete dust across her cheek. “What do I do? Why is it crying?”
Chev stepped out of the tunnel behind her. His face had grown gaunter, his eyes even blacker than before, as if he’d sheltered someplace deep, away from our growing light. “Because it isn’t Kindred. That’s a sunwalker child you’ve pulled down. Your greedy opening of the streets is contaminating our world.”
Belle looked in horror at the child, and dropped it. It scrambled away from her, backed to the wall, and reached up for the light from the hole Belle had dug. A woman was screaming in the street above, and the child screamed in answer.
Beth ran up behind me, her face pale, her hand clamped around Bracken’s fist.
“Go home, you two,” I said. “Let us handle this.”
The commotion aboveground intensified. The roaring screech of power tools sounded from the drain grate nearby. The understreets concussed with the assault of a jackhammer.
“They’re coming,” Chev said. “Leave the child and run. Its kind will claim it soon. Hide—or you’re finished. We all are.”
Beth lifted Bracken’s feet from the ground and clutched him to her chest as she splashed down the tunnel. I limped after them.
“Pack the tarps,” I called to the disappearing bob of her curls.
The Kindred packed their homes on their backs and vanished into the network of tunnels as the sunwalkers broke through to reclaim their stolen child. Dust rained all along the cracks we’d made—our unnatural breaches widened under the stress of the city’s machines.
Beth, Bracken, Chev, Belle, and I huddled in an enclave, listening to their frantic mission. A loud crack echoed from the tunnel. It traveled, ripping along the underground network. The air filled with dust. A roar like a wrecking train followed. And then all went black with soot, then as bright as day.
The stone all around us seemed to roar, the bricks at our backs throbbing with the vibrations of the world coming undone. Tides of dust rolled past our enclave, chased by light strong enough to throw our shadows against the walls.
The city had fallen. The understreets were now the settling ground for the rubble of that which had rested above our heads. Small tracts of tunnel remained, clogged with debris.
Chev rubbed at his eyes and gasped as the pure sunlight raked at his pale face. Beth reached up and took his face in her hands. His breathing slowed. His eyelids split and peeled back to reveal nothing but a field of white shot through with bulging red capillaries. The red spread through the sclera like a stain. His pupils had contracted to nothing, sealed, shut off from the light forever. Beth’s hands flinched back.
“You see what you’ve done, child? That’s an end to us all. The sun has risen on the understreets, and the time of the Kindred is over.”
I pulled Beth and Bracken behind me. Belle reached out and stroked Chev’s cheek. “What do we do now?” she asked.
Chev choked on another wave of dirt blowing through our small section of tunnel. He grasped Belle’s hands to his cheeks and a tremor slipped into his voice. “We do what we have always done. We follow the tunnels. Whatever is left of them.”
“But where?” Belle asked. In the light, her bulging white knuckles writhed like compost grubs.
“To the only place left—the last place, the Last Drain.”
***
Chev shoved Beth in the small of her back. She stumbled through the knee-deep water toward the metal grate. “You’re the expert with a shovel, child. Now, dig.”
I grasped Chev’s wrist and squeezed till he let out a grunt. “Touch her again, and I’ll send the rest of you where your pupils have gone.” Rage made me young again. But Chev pulled away from me and spat into the reeking water.
Belle held Bracken out of the water and stroked his damp curls. “Enough, the both of you. You wear my nerves worse than the sirens.”
The crooning alarms hadn’t quit since the dust had settled. The city above had rushed to the aid of its fallen streets. Crumbled houses wedged like barricades along our ancient pathways. Dane’s tunnel was gone. He and his three children were somewhere beneath the ruin of a home that had had green curtains and white walls.
Chev flinched with every strike as Beth’s trowel chimed against the cement that encased the bars blocking the opening of the Last Drain. Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I don’t understand . . . ”
“Don’t understand what, love?” I watched as her breathing turned slow and shallow again.
“If this is where you take the Kindred when they die, why isn’t there space already? How do they get through?”
Belle looked to me and shook her head.
Chev nodded to the grate. “You’ll find out soon enough, child. Sooner, the faster you dig.”
With the bar pulled free, we squeezed through the gap, the water at our feet flowing in a current that pulled us toward the space beyond.
“There,” Chev said. “We have passed through the Drain. All the Kindred are dead, now.”
***
Beth’s fingers scuttled up the side of my coat, gripping their way to my elbow. “Aemon?” She swept her foot across the unseen floor of the drain tunnel. “What are we standing on?”
The floor rolled beneath us, shifting like a landslide.
“Your ancestors,” Chev said. “Or my ancestors.” He reached into the dark and pulled a skull from the slick water. “I’m not certain they’d accept you as their own. Not after what you’ve done.” He held the stone face up to Beth’s. “Look into their black eyes and apologize, girl, so they may let us pass safely over their graves.”
“Enough, Chev!” Belle took the skull from him. She kissed its brow and lowered it back into the water. “What do they care anymore?”
We stumbled over the rolling bones of our ancestors till the drain’s pull grew heavy and its current pressed us against another grate. Beth hammered at the concrete while Bracken pulled, leveraging his tiny weight against the bars. When their arms grew tired, Belle and I took over. And when we wearied, Chev took the trowel from us and drove it into the crumbling rock.
“It seems there are drains beyond the Last Drain,” Beth said, rubbing the ache in her elbow.
Chev paused, running his fingers through the water.
“There are whole worlds outside of what you know, aren’t there?” she pressed. “This isn’t the end at all.”
The water beyond the grate ran clearer, the floor smooth brick interrupted with rusted train tracks. Numbered doors dotted the walls at intervals. Chev eyed them
suspiciously, as if they would burst open and pour forth an army of angry sunwalkers.
The water grew lower and lower, disappearing through invisible cracks, till it ran in isolated rivulets. Beth’s cardigan trailed loose strings into it like trolling lines from a fishing vessel. The tunnel echoed with gurgling—the sound of water falling. Belle had begun to squint and I realized that the tunnel was growing lighter.
The floor sloped to a low dip where the last water trickled into a grated drain. Chev stopped.
He crouched over the drain and pressed his face against its darkness. “Here is our path,” he said.
No one responded.
“Give me the trowel.” He held a gnarled hand out to Beth. She handed him the tool and stepped back.
“Daylight bathes the understreets. We must go under again. Under-under. The Kindred belong beneath it all, where rare flowers grow.” He threw himself against the bricks, driving the trowel between them.
“Or maybe . . . ” Beth looked over her shoulder at the growing glow at the end of the tunnel. Her eyes flashed a small sliver of blue. “Maybe we should keep going.”
Chev tossed a loose brick over his shoulder into the shrinking puddle behind them.
“We could teach them, up above. Show them. We don’t love small flowers any less for being in the light. That’s what makes us Kindred.” Beth moved toward Chev.
Chev panted and heaved at another brick. The edge of the grate showed through the old grout like an exposed ribcage. He laughed with what little air he could draw, but his smile faltered.
“Maybe you’re right, child,” he said.
Belle and I looked to each other. She pulled Bracken close.
“You were right about the Last Drain, after all.” The fight had gone out of his voice.
“What about it?” Beth took a step closer to Chev, her toes edging up to where he lifted the groaning metal from the stones.
“That wasn’t the Last Drain.” He swung his legs into the dark hole. He handed the trowel back to Beth. “This is.”
He vanished into the dark, falling with the water that spilled over its edge, its droplets glowing like bright eyes in the rising glow from the end of the tunnel. We never heard him land.
***
At the end of the tunnel, the metal of Beth’s trowel flashed like fire against the crumbling rock. When she paused, we saw our faces in it, pale and veined, pinched against the sting of pure daylight. Bracken reached through the bars and grasped at the tall grasses that grew up against the opening. I lay my palm against the bricks, the end of the understreets, and said a quiet goodbye to my home.
When we broke through into the stiff grass, we sank into it, burying our faces from the sun, and slept.
We woke as the sun dipped behind a distant hill, relieving our eyes from its sting. We were curled in a ditch—our tunnel set into the side of a hill that overlooked the fallen city. Clouds of dust rose from its ruin, glowing in places where flames shot from tears rent in gas lines and electric hubs. Between us and its endless light, the hill stretched, full of flowers. Blue, like Beth’s eyes. Curling leaves green, like mine.
Bracken ran into the field, hopping over and around the flowering clusters, lowering his face to the bright blooms.
We waded onto the hillside. Perfume rose around us and masked the dank funk of the compost and tunnel water.
“Can we live here? Can we make a living like this?” Belle clutched her hands to her chest. Tears traced pale tracks across her dusty face.
“I suppose we’ll try.” I reached for her hands and pulled them away from her heart, folding them into my own.
Beth called after Bracken. He danced away down the hill toward a tall rose. He cartwheeled around it, a breathless singsong of joy tumbling up the hill back to us. Beth ran toward him. “Bracken—” Her voice strained, the last syllable of his name a wail.
He righted himself and reached for the tall stem. The peach bloom bobbed, orange in the light from the setting sun. He wrapped his small fist around the barbed stem and cried out from the sting of its thorns. The hill seemed to roll beneath our feet as if the earth had turned to water. Bracken vanished.
Beth screamed.
Belle and I ran to her, long grasses catching at our feet. Beth had fallen, sobbing into a patch of blue flowers. I pushed her hair back from her face, cupped her cheeks in my hands.
“Shh, Beth, shh.”
She wailed like a sunwalker.
Belle wrapped Beth in her shawl. “That boy goes where he’s meant to. He’s a new kind of Kindred. He knows tunnels, and cities, and fields. He pulled at the tallest flower—and someone, somewhere, knows that makes him special. Might be it’s Chev, in the under-under, building a new world. And when we’re ready, he’ll hold a flower for us, child. Don’t cry.”
Beth rolled out of her embrace and ran her fingers through the grass, pinching each flower she came to, pulling at it, ripping it from the ground and moving on to the next. She carved a barren path in the hillside.
Belle and I sat in the blue flowers and watched her trail lengthen in the stretching dark.
“She won’t find it that way.” Belle brushed torn petals from her shawl and wrapped it back around her shoulders.
“She’ll realize that soon.”
“But will she realize it before she pulls out all the roots?”
“No. Not her.” My heart ached for her, but I smiled. “That one breaks worlds.”
“Then how will we find the lad?”
“He’ll be at the other end of whatever flowers are strong enough to grow back.”
HIRAETH
Richard Thomas
Down the river from the struggling village, a tiny farmhouse sat at the edge of a massive forest, shrouded in the shadows of oak, pine, and flowering dogwood. There wasn’t much on this farm, the land hard and difficult to till, but it’s all they had. They grew potatoes, the tubers somehow able to survive, the father a scowling presence in all of his height and bluster; the mother always in another room, busy with anything else; the boy forever expanding the hole that grew inside his chest.
Today the boy would go to town, a cart filled with the misshapen crop, a bent donkey pulling him forward. The father stood with his arms crossed, as he often did, lips moving, a litany of curses whispering into the air. His overalls were stained, the long-sleeved thermal shirt underneath torn in several places, stretched over his biceps, his fingernails grimy with soil. The mother wrung her hands, and then wiped them on her apron, her own incantations tumbled into the ear of the exhausted farmer. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. To confront him head-on would be unwise.
“Be safe, son,” she shouted, waving, as the boy sat down in the wagon, ready to go, to be anywhere but here. “No stopping along the way,” she grimaced.
He smiled, turning his head and waved back. He knew she meant well. And he knew what she meant.
“Be smart, boy, get the full value this time, no bartering for trinkets we don’t need to stave off winter.”
“Yes, father.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” the man asked. A familiar rote that he had taught the boy was what he referenced.
“Oil and coin and coal will suffice, canned fruits and vegetables are also nice.”
The mother beamed, as the father stared, waiting.
“Go on,” he said.
The blue sky clouded over, a few drops of rain pitting the dusty road.
“Toys and games and cards bore fast, barter only for goods that you know will last.”
The father nodded. “Go on, looks like rain.”
The boy sighed, cracked the reins, and moved ahead, toward the town. He scratched at his flannel shirt, his faded jeans cuffed, dark boots placed on the footrest. The hole in his chest grew, and the young man took a deep breath. Over the hill and down the road a hedge of thorny bushes held a glistening array of golden fruit. The boy vowed that today he would take one, no matter the cost.
***
Cresting the hill, the threat of rain still looming, a cool breeze pushed across the land, the scent of pine and cedar filling the air, paired with the musky scent of something sweet starting to rot. And at the base of the road, just before the creek and the trembling bridge, the Gilly bushes sat in all their glory.
There were many myths and stories told across the land—the albino wolves, which Jimmy had never seen, just one of them.
There were Garuda that lurked at the edge of the cliffs to the east, sulking in their caves, diving down to snatch up fish, and wayward children, from the drying lakes. It is said that the Garuda had the body, arms, and legs of a man, but the wings, head, and talons of an eagle. Jimmy didn’t believe in them, the boy at the market where he was headed today always waving a giant yellow feather, or two, holding up eggs as large as his head. Ostrich, was what Jimmy thought; that was what he told himself when the nights grew long and empty.
There were stories about bunyip lurking in the swamps down south, bulbous eyes fixed to the front of an elongated head—some versions with a long, forked tongue, others with yellowing fangs—webbed feet capped by sharp claws, a tail sometimes mentioned with thin, piercing spikes. When the boy and his father went fishing several months ago—a constant stream of curses, scowls, and insults filling the air—the oddly shaped object they found by the water wasn’t a saber-tooth, merely petrified wood. That’s what his father said.