An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  The ember of hope Marthe’s letters woke inside me burned. It hurt.

  Tyler’s hand tightened on mine. “Hal, we should go up to the house.”

  I tossed him a confused glance. He stared straight down the path, his white eyes gleaming. “There’s something down the road right now,” he said in a too-calm voice. “On the beach. And I think it just saw us.”

  My heart stuttered awake. “A Twisted Thing? We’ll get the soldiers—”

  “No,” he said, and squeezed my hand until it hurt. “Not a Twisted Thing. A man.”

  “Marthe said she saw a ghost,” I repeated with a seizing terror, even though I didn’t, not for real, believe in ghosts. Tyler pulled me backwards slowly, step by inching step, and I backed away with him and hated the weakness in my knees.

  “It’s not a ghost,” he said softly. “It’s walking toward us. And it’s real.”

  I dug my nails into my palms. “I can’t see it. How are you seeing this?”

  Tyler’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I saw the Wicked God die, Hal,” he said softly. “And now I see Twisted Things. I see everything.”

  I opened my mouth, soundless, and stared at his pale, thin face. “I . . . how?”

  He grimaced, dark, in profile, his eyes still fixed on that advancing threat. “We were on the front line when John Balsam killed the God. It was like the world exploded, but inward: the Great Dust swirled into the hole Balsam cut in the God’s heart, like water down an outhouse drain. And suddenly there were trees, and—” He shook his head, still ashen, still backing out of the orchard trees. “I’ve never told anyone this. It’s insane. I don’t want you to think I’m insane.”

  A feverish memory surfaced: Nat chasing a terrified Tyler down on the beach where Gus had dropped that first Twisted Thing, asking Do you have to act so insane? “Tell me,” I said, and gripped his hand tight. “Please.”

  “Inside Him, somehow,” he said, confused and, more confusingly, yearning, “there was this whole other world. There was a forest in the Wicked God’s heart: droopy, pointed leaves, blossoms falling free in the rain, warm and wet. Just the colors were—” He let out a shaken breath. “That’s what broke my eyes when the Wicked God died: I watched all the Twisted Things scatter into that world, running from the desert. But now,” he said, and shook his head like a stunned man, “I can’t stop seeing it.”

  “Seeing it where?” I whispered.

  “Everywhere,” he answered, and waved his arm wide across the night sky. “It’s laid over our own world like a veil. There’s a lizard-fox nest right in front of us, against that tree. The web-spinner birds are on a branch two feet higher, feeding their chicks something dead. But it’s not here; it’s there; it’s in the Wicked God’s world. They couldn’t see us if they tried.”

  We backed out of the orchard, into the plain, empty fields, into the plain, empty, mundane night. “It wasn’t just that bird you saw on the beach last week,” I breathed. “I knew it. I knew you lied.”

  Tyler’s eyes flattened. “A figure. A man, standing at the riverbank. How was I supposed to tell you I saw someone in another world?”

  I risked a glance behind us at the goat pen and the house on the hill. Our feet moved in concert; our hands were fused together. “You’re telling me now.”

  Tyler flushed, and nodded slow. “I see Gods in the lakelands. I see monsters. They crawl across the sky and through the walls at night. But all the way from John’s Creek to Windstown, I’ve only seen monsters. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a man there.”

  We backed painfully up the hill, the lamp swinging wild. The porch loomed, and Sadie leaped up from it, from the night-darkened house. She whimpered, confused by the smoke-stink on us and the palpable taste of our fear.

  “Is he still there?” I asked. The world was tipping like thin china, headed for the floor.

  The wind curled through Tyler’s shaggy hair. I lifted the lamp against the darkness, against something I couldn’t see. “He’s going up the hill,” Tyler whispered, and traced a path with a pointed finger. “Down the other side.”

  His finger dropped. Gone.

  “God, I’m tired,” Tyler muttered, despairing, and buried his face in his hands.

  Sadie whined and snuffled Tyler’s knees. I looked at them both, set the lamp down, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Ty.”

  He took it, enveloped it in his mittened palms. “That was the same man I saw on the beach, Hal. That man, whoever he is. And he saw me back. He saw us. If Marthe left that message, she saw him too, somehow. The Wicked God’s world and ours have never touched: not since John’s Creek. Not since the war. And I—Hallie, what do we do?”

  You’re asking me? I thought wildly, and swallowed the thought back. He needed me. To be smart, and brave, and strong.

  I squared my shoulders and curled my fingers around his. “Marthe left a message,” I said haltingly. “We wait for him to answer.”

  fifteen

  DAWN SMOKED CLOUDY ON THE HORIZON WHEN I WOKE, rumpled and still dressed, in my unkempt bed. Marthe clanked about downstairs, every piece of her steady routine stubbornly unchanged: the ring of the kettle on the stove, then the thunk of stacked wood to feed the fire. We are living amidst gods and monsters, I thought, and shivered in my quilt.

  She’d left Tyler’s shadow man a message. An answer might have come.

  There was one bun, one teacup on the table this morning, and my sister’s basket was full of washed milk bottles. “Good morning,” I said cautiously, and Marthe leveled her infamous stare.

  “I found Tyler Blakely on the sofa this morning.”

  My cheeks kindled. Of course she had. It had been much too dark to walk through the icy fields alone, and he and Nat both knew where our spare blankets were. “He, ah—” I started.

  “Let me guess,” she said dryly. “You can’t tell me.”

  The part of my head that could make up stories failed. “I’ll go get the eggs,” I blurted, and hightailed it out the door.

  The farm was eerily silent without Tyler’s sheep out; with Heron gone to ground. I crept, tiptoe to match it, down the orchard path to the river.

  Marthe’s letter had been disturbed in the night: the smooth gray letters duller by daylight, broken off mid-word. Robbed of the mystery of the night air, they looked absolutely crazy. I caught the edge of voices farther down the path—Heron’s low baritone, Tyler’s tenor—and hurried along the scree to find them, their heads bent over the shoreline.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked, and they jumped apart like guilty children.

  “Figuring out if we have enough firewood,” Heron said, and pointed down.

  The shoreline was rotten with Twisted Things: dead, stinking, crumbling. A pile of them lay soot-smeared and burning at Heron’s feet.

  “What—” I started, my eyes caught on whiskers, on ears like leaves. There were at least two dozen of them—a whole heaped massacre, drifting in and out with the current.

  “We found them,” Heron said numbly. “We came down to pick up those stones.”

  “You’re not even supposed to be outside,” I muttered. Heron looked awful: stubble-faced, blue-lipped, utterly exhausted. A Twisted Thing crawled from the beach toward us, smoke rising behind its lizard legs, and Tyler crushed it with his stick.

  “Where are they coming from?” I asked, and paced alongside the Twisted Thing’s trail. The rock had crumbled in its wake, turned into ash and the stink of burnt lizardflesh. I covered my nose and traced the blackened, glassy footprints down a small hillock and around the riverbend. The air shimmered. That same thinness I’d felt before scored my throat, made me cough. There was a circle of sand here, scorched smooth and entirely black. Its edges bled messily out across the beach, a burn licked into paper.

  “This is where we found that bird,” Heron said. His voice echoed weirdly in my ears. They felt full of water.

  Tyler walked a jittery circle around the stain, his white eyes sharply focused.

&nb
sp; “Tyler—” I started, and he wrapped an arm across my shoulders and yanked me back hard.

  “Hey, what gives—!” I managed, falling against him, stumbling together.

  The Twisted Thing materialized out of nowhere and flew, squawking, right past our noses.

  I let out a squeak. Heron yelped and flung a rock at the fluttering sparrow wings. It missed by whole yards and splashed into the river. The bird cawed and sped away, wild, into the clouds.

  “No way,” I managed, and shook myself free. “They can’t just come from nowhere.”

  “They aren’t,” Tyler said, his eyes squinted against a light that wasn’t there. He poked his shepherd’s crook into the air, waving it like a dowser through that shimmer of heat. It wandered through the patch of sky just in front of us—

  —and the knobbed wood smoked and vanished, inch by inch, into empty air.

  “What the—” Heron muttered.

  Tyler pulled the crook back, and it was six feet long again, the last foot a browned, sparking mess. “That’s how he saw us last night, Hallie. Now it makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said, and my voice cracked. “What is that?”

  “It’s where the Twisted Things are coming from,” he said, struck with awe and terror. “It’s a hole into the Wicked God’s world.”

  It was warmer in the smokehouse. Tyler held the door and scanned the empty fields as we scurried inside. “I’ll find Nat. She needs to know about this,” he said. “Don’t open up for anyone else.”

  “Of course,” I answered irritably, and he shut Heron and me into the dark. I wedged the shovel across the jamb and rubbed my cold fingers together. The smokehouse didn’t look familiar anymore; all its shapes had shifted in the weeks since Heron came. It was a wilderness of history—someone else’s now, not mine.

  Heron lit a twig off his battered striker and eased it into his cookpot. He fed the spark wood scraps until it smoked and glowed, until it flung the shadows of hand-carved cradles onto the walls. “God, I’m tired,” he said softly, as haggard as Tyler had been the night before.

  “I brought you breakfast,” I said, useless, and fished the other half of Marthe’s bean bun out of my pocket.

  Nat and Tyler tapped on the door half an hour later, flushed with running, Nat’s cheeks two bright round spots. “Did he tell you what happened?” I asked, and she fixed me with a furious glare.

  “Yes,” she said, “which is good, because I spent all night looking through ditches for my brother’s stupid corpse.”

  I flinched. “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be,” she shot back. “I can’t pretend you came home last night, Ty. That was the worst thing you could’ve done to Mum, the absolute worst, and I wish to God anyone was trying to make this family work but me.”

  Tyler looked up, suddenly dangerous. “You mean by trying to keep Mum off my back because I act so insane.”

  Nat colored helplessly. “Tyler—”

  “That was shit, Nat,” he said. “That was really shit.”

  “Children,” Heron said with a hard intensity. “We just pushed a foot of wood into thin air. Not now.”

  Tyler ducked his head. “Sir,” he said meekly. But his eyes found Nat’s and promised: This isn’t over.

  Heron crouched in the smokehouse corner, his dirty hands over his cookpot fire. “That’s the second time you’ve used that good eye of yours, Private. Is there anything we should know?”

  Tyler slumped against the wall. And then his head came up, slow.

  “Go on,” I said softly, and he cast me a bleak smile.

  “I see things,” he said, defiant, and held up a hand to forestall whatever Nat might have said. “Since the battle. Since the God died and my eyes went all—” He shrugged. “I see Twisted Things and the world that opened up when John Balsam cut the Wicked God’s heart.”

  “What do you mean?” Nat asked, too fast.

  Tyler flashed a sour grin. “As in: Am I acting so insane again?”

  “Ty,” I said, awkward. The awful smile dropped off his face.

  Heron watched Tyler with a naked, yearning fear. “You saw it. When the God went down: You saw the place on the other side of that knife cut. You saw the rain.”

  Tyler blinked. “How close were you?”

  The ghosts settled on Heron’s face. “Close enough.”

  “I saw it,” Tyler said, and looked down at his scraped hands. “I’m still seeing it. Those vines crawl across my ceiling every night.”

  “Allah, Buddha, and Jesus,” Heron said softly, and I startled. I’d never, ever heard him swear.

  The red spots were blanched clean from Nat’s face. “Tyler—” she stammered, and rubbed her face with both hands. “That can’t be. You can’t be seeing another world.”

  “Ask the uncles,” he said with a hard glitter in his eye. “Ask them about the time I stopped, three days out of John’s Creek, and pointed to a Twisted Thing as tall as an oak tree, a growing, walking tree made out of dead deer horn. They’ll tell you I was feverish. They couldn’t see it. They still can’t. We drove right through the thing, Nat. I thought it was going to touch me. I thought I was dead.”

  He shuddered, and his smile—his smile could break hearts. “I saw its insides when we went through, you know. Its heart was an acorn, seeping blood. Its guts moved like grass snakes. It sat five feet behind us, poking its bone-roots into the ground and popping grubs into its awful white mouth.”

  “That’s real,” Heron whispered, a thousand miles away. “I saw one of those at John’s Creek.”

  “It’s real,” Tyler said. “For weeks and weeks I thought I’d gone crazy, and then that Twisted Thing came through on the beach, and I figured it out: I see them, but they’re not quite here.” He shrugged. “No one else sees them. No one else has these eyes. So I kept it to myself. So nobody else calls me insane, Nasturtium.”

  Nat’s mouth was open. Her hand crept out toward mine and caught it, all her rage forgotten. “I’m sorry. Tyler—oh, damn. I’m such an absolute shit.”

  Tyler’s eyes caught the place where my hand squeezed Nat’s tight. “Apology accepted,” he said grimly. “And don’t you dare tell Mum any of this.”

  Nat’s eyes went impossibly wide. “God, Tyler. I would never.”

  “But you’re saying,” Heron pushed on, “the place with the rain is real too.”

  Tyler sagged against the wall and nodded. “It’s where the Twisted Things live. It’s their world, their home. It’s just a little off from ours, I think, like a pair of shears that don’t quite close. But they’re closing now. I saw that spinner bird, this morning, there,” he said, and shaped its wing with his hands, “before it appeared on the beach, here. It came from that world to ours.”

  “Through a hole,” Heron said hollowly. “Through that thin spot on the river.”

  “Something’s changed,” Tyler said, and turned his burnt walking stick end over end. “Something broke that hole between us and their home.”

  Something, I thought, and my whole body went cold. “Tyler. The man you saw. Marthe’s ghost.”

  “What man?” Nat snapped.

  Tyler squinched his eyes shut. “Right. There’s that too.”

  “Tyler,” Nat said dangerously, and my patience for their sibling swordplay snapped.

  “There’s a man on the other side of the—whatever,” I said, and Tyler shot me a reproachful look. “Tyler saw him walk up the orchard road and over our hilltop last night. Right where we found the stone letters. And from what Ty said, he saw us back.”

  “What?” Nat managed.

  “Marthe’s ghost could be real,” I shoved out. “Whoever he is, he left us that message. And after what Marthe did, there’ll be a reply.”

  Heron leaned in, wildly intent. “What’d he look like?”

  “Tall,” Tyler said reluctantly. “Thin as a corpse. The sleeves of his coat were all tattered, and his hat had a bowed brim.” He swallowed. “He looked lonely. He loo
ked mad as hell.”

  He looked like a veteran, I filled in, sketching about the edges. Like a ripped-up scarecrow thing put hastily back together.

  Tyler’s eyes were abruptly young again: the Tyler Blakely who’d sucked in a breath to steady his nerves before he kissed me. “I stayed on your parlor couch all night in case he came back. I had this hope I’d get a good look at his face.”

  “About that,” I said quietly. “My sister noticed.”

  “Oh, great.”

  Nat sagged against the cedar chest. “Mum noticed. I have no idea what to tell her.”

  “And I have no idea what to tell Lieutenant Jackson,” I added. “They’re looking around the property. They’ll find that pile of bodies on the shore.”

  We lapsed into silence: ceded the room to the twig-fire, the squeak of my stool, Heron’s labored breath, to imagining army camps in the broken barley.

  “How do we fix this?” I asked Heron. “We got the knife away. The Twisted Things aren’t even interested in that knife. So how do we make this all stop?”

  Heron knotted his hands in his long, dark hair. “I don’t know, all right?” he said, and his fists tightened. “Why does everyone think I have all the answers?”

  “You’re the man with John Balsam’s knife,” Nat said.

  “So what? I’m not a god,” he snarled. He scrubbed his eyes; scratched his arms with the bitten-down nails of that broken hand. “I don’t know how this works. I’ve dodged Twisted Things everywhere I’ve gone since John’s Creek. So fine, they don’t want the knife; they don’t go near it. They want something. They fall out of the sky after me, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

  Nat quirked an eyebrow mildly. “Get over yourself.”

  Heron’s chin jerked up.

  “They’re not after you,” she said, January-cold. “Tyler told me Ada Chandler’s pet lizards turned to dust inside two weeks’ time. If the Wicked God’s minions were picking holes in reality just to find you, they’d be everywhere from here to John’s Creek. You’d be dead already. Quit pouting and work on a solution.”