It was true. I didn’t know a thing about his mother. I’d just wanted to hurt him and make him shut his gob. You can do that talking ugly about folks’ mothers. Everybody knows that. Even grown people hate it when you say something ugly about their mothers. When I told him Nothing his eyes opened and set to stone again.
“What will you do?” he said then.
“When?” I said.
“If we get to the top,” he said. “And you have to go outside. You know.”
“Oh, let me be,” I told him, sighful, without even looking.
“What will you do though?” he said again.
He held his brow and staggered. Pretended to weep, rubbing at his eyes with fists. He had a point.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I thought I’d get out first. Then … I’ll see.”
“You will see,” he started up at me. “They’re a wild mob that live out there. They’ve got hair all over them.”
“You don’t know,” I said. “How would you know?”
“I’ve been outside,” said Dolyn.
“So I hear,” I told him, hopeful I’d stop him by shaming him about the boy.
But he took no notice.
“I get round. You don’t know what’s out there,” he went on. “There’s them Northern women with not a man left between them. Ate them.”
“Well, I’ll be dropping in up there, then,” I told him straight. “Want to come?”
He grinned then but there was no laughter in it. It was only a speck of a grin and was gone quick smart. He looked like he’d forgotten what to do with his face when he wasn’t sulking.
“And the moaney’s full with mud-folk,” he said. “All the bog demons flying up there thick as midges. Then you’ve got them hedge-witches and changelings and boggarts. Plenty of them.”
I walked to the far corner of the rock ledge where a gravelly steep rose into nothing. He followed me, still talking. He looked to be warming up.
“Them that come down to trade have learned to hide the hairiness, see? They can pull the hairs right back inside so they look like anybody else. They leave their beards and head-hair on, and they walk about town with nobody knowing. Nobody can tell they’re not regular folk. And all the time, inside, they’re hairy old bugganes with not a rag of right in them.”
I listened to the waters so I wouldn’t have to hear the words. The streams and falls were pouring louder into the inside-sea and I was right thankful for them. Without them there’d be just me, and him and his mouth.
“They can suck the hairs in a while,” said Dolyn Craig right in my ear. “But in the end they have to come out.”
He stopped.
“It’s only a matter of time,” he said. “Before it all has to come out.”
“What has to?” I asked. I had to know.
“What they really are,” he said, tugging my braid hard. “Whatever’s in them that makes them like that.”
I pulled my braid out of his hand and of a sudden I was aware my hair was untied. My braids were hanging to my waist. One was even undone.
“Let go!” I said, retying it. “Liar!”
“Pig-girl!” He spat back straightways.
“Bully!”
“Witch!”
Lovely was starting to bristle. I picked her up. She growled at Dolyn from my arms.
“You still fasting against the Father?” I asked. “Weepy.”
“You still scared of me?” he said, very close, very quiet. “Vermis.”
I didn’t even ask what that meant. I went straight to tearing the heart out of him with more talk of his mother.
But I couldn’t hear myself.
While we’d been badmouthing, the draining inland waters had gotten louder. All the seeps were now trickles and the trickles, streams. Water was shooting like silver threads into the air. Rivers that had been locked away in the rock started rushing out. Sticks and leaves spat-out on their waters and the sea was soon spoiled with them. Then the waterfall thundered of a sudden and crashed down into the stone bowl. The air was full with mists and rainbows. The light-fish scattered. Lovelypig struggled to be put down.
The inside-sea was rising.
The shore was gone under lightwater and the shingle was floating. The swirling waters were already at the second ledge. They would soon wash me and Dolyn Craig away like so much rubble into juts and pits where we’d never be found, not even as bones to bury. The wallweed seeped like heavy curtains over the rock, too slimy to hold.
Dolyn Craig was shrunk up inside his sodden robes. His black eyes were glittering. And he’d bit his lip until blood came.
We saw it together, at the same time.
The inside-sea was going to flood the cavern entirely.
And we saw together, the way that might take us out. A passage opening off the ledge below and to the right. A passage big enough, close enough, and still unflooded. We saw its walls lit by the light specks, and only shallow waters rushing into it. Lovelypig was at the end of our ledge, closest to the passage below. She was dancing right on the edge, looking back at me. It was her changed face she turned on me, the face that came home on her after Midwoodpool.
Like she’d had enough.
I saw what she was going to do straightways and my mouth went No but no voice came.
And she turned and gave me her What are you waiting For face, and she jumped. She dropped. And called me as she dropped, loud and rough. More like a gull than a pig. I reached out but she was gone. Her body hit the water with a slap I could hear right over the flood. Then she was in the threshing sea, running as quick as she could. Rolling side-to-side in the water. And then I tried to jump too.
Honest.
I tilted to the water and waited to fall. I rocked into the drop but my feet were rockfast. I called out her name – but I couldn’t go to her. She called and called. I had a sharp stone in my throat. The heat rushed into my blood. My heart bolted. And they were on me.
High-to-deadly.
And with Dolyn watching too. His own face was shut nice and tight, while mine was flying open. He liked it when I was frighted; I could tell. Some folk are like that. You never see them with a feeling on them and when others have one, they watch like it’s a fiddler or a three-eyed cat.
Now I couldn’t move at all, even to help Lovely or save my own life. I covered my face.
And that’s when Dolyn Craig pushed me. Like he’d pushed me into Midwoodpool. He pushed me hard but this time, as I fell, he shouted.
“Pufferfish!”
I dropped with every inside-part trying to leave my body. The sea came up at me, but slow, slow. I dropped, sinking rather than falling. Feet-first through spit and spray. My face was bloodspotted by mite-clouds and I was mobbed by falling earwigs. I fell so slow it was like I’d been falling forever.
I had time to see.
The waters below were full with milky beams and light-slicks, circling sticks and leaves, gravel, beetles, and grit. And then in the middle of it all I saw the scaan Pond-Averick, still as Spindlestone. Her long pale form wavered in the waters, she looked up at me with waterstone eyes. Her hair spread out on the water, compassing her body in rays. Then she went coiling away, snaky, through the waters toward the light-specked passage.
And she was waving her hand, like Come on, come On.
Chapter Fifteen
Tubeworm
AS I DROPPED I ALSO HAD TIME to change my mind. I didn’t want to slap into the water like poor Lovelypig. So I turned in mid-air and went headlong, thinking to cut into it. Dolyn Craig had shouted Pufferfish as he shoved me, so I took a lungful of air and held it tight as the inside-sea came up at me.
But I hit the icy waters face-first and all that breath rushed out of me and my mind ran to seed. Then I was hanging in the waters with fathoms of sleety cold underneath and all around, the impossible rock. I turned my face to the ceiling. It looked to be faraway as the sky.
Then slow, slow as I’d fallen, I sank.
Somewhere in
the gulp of waters Lovelypig found me. Her legs came running above my head; her trotters stirring like ladles. I grabbed at one but it slipped out of my icy hands. Next time I grabbed, I gripped and held fast.
Lovelypig did her best but she’s not a big pig or a swimmer, and after a few heaves she started up sinking too. Her face came at me under water then, wind-brisk like Come on then. Are we Going?
And then I was swimming.
Well, I was on top of the water, instead of drowning in it and that’s the same thing to my mind. It might have been somewhat piggish – but it did.
The inland waters move in strange ways. Now it had risen almost to the roof, the inside-sea was streaming away again. The waters thundered out of the cavern and back into the deeps of the mountain, pouring through every possible seep, tube and tunnel. It dragged us along in a slow-boil of sticks and leaves, and looked to be rushing us toward the speck-lit passage.
Dolyn was behind me somewhere. I heard him cursing: me, the cave, the Father, Lovely, Spindlestone, Market-Shipton and then the whole world.
I gripped my handful of Lovelypig as the slow-boil turned to a rush and we were washed out of the cavern into the sucking passage. As we drained away from the inside-sea, a new darkness closed in. The red and yellow specks went by too quick to give much light. My knees and hips and backbones hit juts and sharps under water, and my elbows were scraped from holding onto Lovelypig, but my ice-bones felt nothing now.
The water was shallow enough to stand but the suck just lifted my feet from under me. All I managed was to cling to Lovely and let the drags do the work. There was nowhere to go but where this passage led, no matter if we walked or swam or flew its length.
There was only one way and this was it.
And as we went, the waters kept rising. They rose until there was nothing but thunder and choke. And then dark came. And it pressed on me heavier than the water or the rock, or even the notion of dying.
That was the worst time.
I went blind on my back then, holding Lovelypig’s round, chilled body to my chest. She flattened herself there, spread like some wolf-spider between me and the roof. I went where the drag took me, and I tended my heartbeat.
There was nothing else to do.
At last the waters slowed. They went along softer. I could still hear Dolyn behind and was glad for it, though travelling on with Dolyn Craig was no uplifting thought. He’d brawl with angels.
There was only a span between the waterline and the roof. Me and Lovely floated in that span. I sucked in breaths from between the roof-rock and the waterline. Each small breath was brimstone. The airs inside the rock are strange as the waters, full with a prickling salt and a sour taste. I clung to Lovely, I felt the cold rock under my palm, and I breathed.
And I’d like to say that I thought on my sins and regretted them. That I thought of Mam and Da, and the sibs, with love. That I prayed for them, or prayed for myself, or prayed for Dolyn Craig fighting to stay afloat behind me. I’d like to say I looked forward to some sort of heaven. But I didn’t.
I just wanted to be alive in the sun with my pig.
Three things happened next.
We were sucked into a deep curve in the passage.
The passage ahead lit up in a bright milky glow.
And Pond-Averick hoisted herself up-and-out of the waters and went up-and-out through a hole in the passage roof. She must have been just ahead of me all the time. I saw her feet dangling into the passage and then they were gone.
“Up! Up!” I bawled and raised my arm high as it would go, reaching for the hole, hoping Dolyn would understand.
As we washed under the hole my lifted arm was caught and I grabbed at its rim. The stone was ringed with waxy folds and I gripped a fistful of them and hung on. It was enough. I braced my feet on bedrock and we stopped.
I crowed. I shouted. My voice went calling over-and-over away into the mountains.
I stood and heaved Lovelypig above my head, pushing her up through the hole. My legs pushed against the rock and I was out. Then I reached my arm down into the hole and waved my hand about for Dolyn. I thought it likely he’d rather be washed away than take my hand, and I wondered what I’d do then, but he grabbed at it straight-up.
He grabbed it hard. His hand was bony but strong. It was like getting bit by a lizard.
I leaned right back and hauled him up. He came slow, grunting, sodden, then in a rush folding onto the dry ground. We lay spreadeagle, panting.
And I thought we were out then for sure.
“How long have we been in here?” I said.
Night had come while we were inside the mountain. It had come dead-still. There wasn’t a whisper. Not a scuttle, not a stir. Not even the sound of wind. I stared hard into the blackness, until my eyes crossed and ached. There was nothing. Nothing but a lot of stars glittering, clear and faraway.
The blackness rocked me and I held onto the ground with my hands, waiting for the Swoon to pass. When I’d thought on outside, I’d never thought there’d be nothing there. That nothingness was more frightful than any upland monsters. I felt Dolyn Craig’s robe wet beside my arm.
His hand was right there next to mine. He didn’t move it away. Not straightaway. I was thankful for it. He wasn’t perfect but he was there, and that was better than nothing.
“All right?” I said.
He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t curse and call me witch either. We sat up and we were dripping my scaan’s left over lightwater. We sat and glittered a bit in small, pale puddles of it.
Slow, slow, the stars did their work.
Slow, slow, my eyes came good.
I was starting to see and the first thing I saw was that we weren’t outside. We were still inside the earth, in a high and slanting cavern. It was some sort of starchamber. Only the stars were glow-worms in the roof. I know because some of them fell and wriggled starry on the floor.
Some tiny patches of light fell through a few skylights. They fell on Dolyn, drenched, shivering, all-bones. They fell on Lovelypig, a small half-drowned thing running to-and-fro. And they fell on the Otherway lit bright again – and they fell on Pond-Averick.
At the farside of the cavern.
Looking my way.
Slipping off.
I snuck a look at Dolyn. He’d seen. And he saw that I saw he’d seen.
“What’s that?” he gripped my arm above the elbow.
I didn’t know where to start, or where to end if I did.
He threw my arm back at me like it was bad meat.
“Is it only pigs and scaans?” said Dolyn Craig. “Or what?”
He pointed after Pond-Averick, and then back at me, and then down at Lovelypig who sneezed at his shaking hand.
“What are you?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re a witch,” he said. “Say it!”
“I’m not,” I told him.
If you’d told me that one day I’d be standing in the middle of the earth, fighting with Dolyn Craig about witches, I’d have had you along for a cure. But there he was, biting his lips and hunting the starchamber like he thought there might be witches hiding everywhere.
“You sure you’re all right?” I asked.
“Was that other one a witch?” he said, looking about for Breesh Dunnal.
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “She doesn’t act like one.”
It was strange to talk right out loud about her.
“What does that mean?” he asked, grey-faced and swoony. “How do you know what they act like?”
I didn’t have time for this. If he wanted to think I was a witch, he’d just have to go ahead. All the time we talked Pond-Averick was away up the moonglazey tunnel, leading the way out of this rockfast place.
“Let it be,” I said. “She’s gone anyway. Let’s just get out.”
But Dolyn wouldn’t talk any more. He wouldn’t stand. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“Get up,” I said.
&n
bsp; But Dolyn wouldn’t get up. He wouldn’t stir to help himself. He sat there stiff-necked and impossible.
“Get up,” I shouted at him and grabbed his arm.
I stooped to give him what-for and that’s when I saw his trouble. He couldn’t hide it from me. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t get up.
His trouble was he couldn’t.
Dolyn Craig had the Frights.
He was shrunken up on them. He’d almost folded in half. His eyes stared, his hands trembled, and he ate his lips like that might be the answer.
“What’s the matter?” I said soft as I could.
Dolyn didn’t like softness. He didn’t like being helped. And there was no telling him anything.
“Nothing,” said Dolyn from inside his hair.
“You going to cry?” I said.
It had worked to get him under that fallen stone.
Being kind to him was not going to help; I could see that. The Otherway led right across this starchamber. It led where Pond-Averick had gone and that was out, I was sure of it.
“Are you?” I spat.
I kicked at his leg.
Lovelypig came to see.
“Great steaming maggots, Dolyn Craig,” I said to him, cold as fish, hard as iron. “Don’t be gormless. Get up.”
I turned to walk away. There was a gritty scrambling and quiet cursing behind me. I didn’t look back. I just kept walking. And I kept on walking with Lovely across the block and scree. I found my footing between the sinkholes and the bladestone and never looked back once. I had to. I had to keep walking.
Because Dolyn was following.
And if I looked back, he might bolt. He might see I knew he was frighted. And if he saw that, maybe he’d run back into the caves forever on the shame of it. Maybe he’d run to tell everybody I was a witch. Or maybe he’d not be able to stand it and go me hard as he went that Quirk boy.
I’d seen Dolyn Craig the day of the beating. I never said I’d seen and neither did he but I saw all right. And he saw me see him too.
That day everybody had been at the Brothers’ progress in Shipton-Cross and I’d been hanging low-to-middling frighty, on the palings. I saw Dolyn running, hard, back down the Upward. All his boys had scattered, he was alone on the path, flying from something.
Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart Page 10