The only sounds are their footsteps and a steady dripping from somewhere nearby, but the tunnel makes the most of it, seizing every footfall and the irregular xylophone beat of water striking water, magnifying, reverberating, and, “I bet this is where the King of Echoes hid from the Queen of Silences,” the brown girl says.
Emmie glances back over her left shoulder, but they’re far enough inside now that she can no longer see the pale glow of the entrance.
“Where are we going?” she asks the girl. “How much farther is it?”
“Well, truth be told, I’ve never been down here,” the brown girl confesses. “But I can’t imagine it could be very much farther. Barnaby said to just keep walking the tracks westward, and we’d come to it, eventually.”
“Who’s Barnaby? And what are we looking for, anyway?”
“You really do ask an awful lot of questions, Emma Jean Silvey,” the brown girl says, and the light in her hand bobs and sways when she almost loses her balance. The shadows on the walls bob and sway, too, and Emmie holds her breath for a moment until she’s sure the girl isn’t going to fall.
“Be careful! If you drop that thing, if it broke, we’d never find our way out of here in the dark.”
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic. All we’d have to do is walk back out the same way we came in. We might misstep and get our feet wet, but I know the way back. So do you, Emma. And besides, if this broke,” and she nods at the globe, “we wouldn’t have to worry about finding our way back. We wouldn’t live that long.”
Emmie almost asks her what she meant by that, that they wouldn’t live that long, but then decides she doesn’t want to know.
“Barnaby’s just a ghoul, that’s all,” the brown girl continues. “They aren’t all completely terrible. Some of them are decent enough people. I helped him find something that he’d lost, and, in return, he helped me get out of the house to assist you and Soldier.”
“Who’s Soldier?” Emmie asks.
“You’ll see,” the brown girl replies. “We shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves.”
“I’m tired,” Emmie says and stops walking. “I’m tired, and I’m sick of riddles, and I’m hungry, too.”
“Barnaby said that there’d be a little food. He put it there himself. If the rats haven’t found it.”
“Deacon’s probably looking for me by now,” Emmie says, and peers over her shoulder again; there’s nothing back there but the dark. “He’s probably already called the police.”
“You shouldn’t worry about the police,” the brown girl says. “They won’t find us here. They likely couldn’t if they tried. But they won’t. Try, I mean.”
“He’ll think I’m lost. He’ll think I’m freezing to death out in the snow.” And Emmie imagines Deacon searching the big house for her, searching it twice over, top to bottom, then searching the front yard, the backyard, and finally looking up and down the length of Angell Street, banging his fists on doors, talking to people he doesn’t know because maybe one of them saw her. She imagines him getting scared, shouting her name over and over until he’s hoarse. Then he’d go back home and call the police. He’d call the hospitals. He might call Sadie; he’d think it was her fault.
“There it is,” the brown girl says and points at something rising from the gloom and the water at the right side of the tracks.
Emmie stares at it a moment, trying to make sense of the strange, twisting angles and unexpected bulk of the thing. Her first impression is that she must be seeing the rusty red-brown carapace and jointed legs of some gigantic lobster or crab that’s dragged itself up from the icy water, which must be much deeper than the brown girl said to ever hide such a thing as that. And now the monster is perched right there at the side of the railroad tracks, waiting to devour them both.
“I told you. I knew that Barnaby wouldn’t lie to me,” the brown girl says and smiles.
It’s only a car, Emmie realizes. Only a shitty old car that someone’s dragged in here, her mind slowly making sense of the snarl of rusted metal, slowly recognizing the familiar made unfamiliar by the dim light and years of corrosion. A stripped and burned-out wreck missing its roof, not a giant crustacean after all, not something with pinching claws and blazing eyes set on twitching stalks. Emmie’s legs feel weak, and she imagines Deacon trying to tell the police what she looks like, what she might be wearing, Deacon trying to remember what her coat looks like, wondering which coat she’s wearing. And maybe the police would ask if he’d been drinking. Maybe they’d figure out he was drunk, or think he was crazy and was only hallucinating that he had a daughter who was lost somewhere in the snow, being chased by monsters and hiding in old railway tunnels.
“I know it doesn’t look very inviting,” the girl says, “but, sometimes, looks truly can be deceiving, Emma Jean.” And then she steps off the rail and over something crushed and folded in upon itself that Emmie thinks might once have been the driver-side door.
“You’re gonna cut yourself and get tetanus,” Emmie tells her, because that’s what Deacon would say—You’ll get lockjaw climbing around on something like that—but then the girl’s staring back at her from the middle of the wreck, and Emmie reminds herself it’s all only a dream. You don’t catch diseases in dreams, and even if you do, you don’t wake up sick.
“It’s got to be here somewhere; I’m sure of it,” the brown girl says, holding the ball of light out in front of her as she examines all the crannies and corners and the gaping holes torn in the metal. Emmie isn’t exactly sure what the brown girl’s looking for, so she waits and watches at the edge of the train track instead of following her inside the wreck.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
The brown girl stops looking for whatever it is she’s looking for and stares at Emmie a moment without replying.
“Forget it. You don’t have to tell me,” Emmie says, “not if you don’t want to, not if it’s a secret or something.”
“No, it’s not a secret,” the girl replies. “It’s just not something I have much use for anymore. Sometimes I almost forget about it. Isn’t that odd?”
“Well, you know my name,” Emmie says and leans closer, and now she can see that someone’s gone to the trouble of wrapping what remains of the car’s front seat beneath a couple of heavy blue blankets. “I could sit down there,” she says, “if you don’t mind?”
“Of course,” the brown girl says and shakes her head. “Why didn’t I think of that?” And it takes Emmie a couple of seconds to realize that of course wasn’t an answer to her question. The brown girl gets down on her knees and holds the globe so she can see whatever’s under the front seat. When she stands up again, she’s grinning and holding a brown paper bag.
“See?” she says. “Barnaby’s the most reliable ghoul I ever met.” The top of the bag is rolled closed, and the brown girl unrolls it and looks inside. “My name’s Pearl,” she adds.
“You’re not really going to eat something you found in here, are you?” Emmie asks and points again at the seat wrapped in blue wool blankets. “Is it okay if I sit down?”
“If that’s what you want to do. I’d wager Barnaby put those blankets there for us, too. He can be very thoughtful.”
Emmie steps off the pallet onto the rail, which is at least as slippery as it looked, and then she works her way carefully past the sharp edges of the twisted door frame to stand beside the girl whose name is Pearl.
“There are sandwiches,” Pearl says, still staring into the paper bag, “and two pears, and I think that might be…oh…well, ghouls have their own idea of food, you know. But the sandwiches are probably fine, and the pears.”
Emmie sits down; the springs beneath the blankets make a soft, crunching sort of sound, and she sinks a few inches into the seat. It feels good, being off her feet after the long walk, better than sitting down has ever felt before, she thinks, and it would be easy to shut her eyes and go right to sleep. She pulls off her mittens and gloves and stuffs them into her coat
pocket.
I’m already asleep, she tells herself, so maybe if I shut my eyes, I’d wake up instead.
“I hope you like liverwurst,” Pearl says, and Emmie sees that she’s taken one of the sandwiches from the bag and is peeling back the waxed paper it’s wrapped in. “Because I think that’s what we have here. Liverwurst and cheese and horseradish sauce.”
“I’ve never eaten it,” Emmie says, leaning back in the seat, “but it sounds disgusting.”
“It’s just sausage made from pigs’ livers, mostly.”
“No, thank you,” Emmie says and makes a face. “Besides, I don’t eat food someone left lying around in a boarded-up train tunnel full of rats and mushrooms and who knows what else.”
“Suit yourself,” Pearl tells her. “But you said you were hungry,” and then she sits down beside Emmie, and the car seat creaks again. The brown girl sets the glowing orb on what’s left of the dashboard, puts the bag on the seat between them, and takes a big bite of the sandwich. Emmie ignores her and watches the snow globe thing instead. Up close, it doesn’t look like it has a lightbulb inside. It looks like there’s a sun trapped within the orb, a star no bigger than a very large jawbreaker. She starts to touch the snow globe, and Pearl mumbles something around a mouthful of liverwurst and bread, and Emmie pulls her hand back and apologizes.
“What’s in there?” she asks. Pearl swallows and wipes her mouth. “It almost looks like a star,” Emmie says.
“It is a star. That’s one of my father’s later experiments, and he’s extremely proud of it. He was careful to take a star none of the astronomers had ever seen, so no one would miss it. It came from somewhere near the constellation Cassiopeia, I believe.”
“That’s impossible,” Emmie says and squints at the bright thing suspended at the heart of the orb.
“Be that as it may, it’s still a star,” Pearl tells her and tears away a piece of waxed paper to expose more sandwich.
“Your father put stars inside snow globes?”
“It’s not a snow globe,” Pearl says, glancing up from her sandwich. “It’s all very complicated, but my father moved places and moments. He was studying spatial and temporal translocation for the ghouls,” and the way she says translocation makes it sound like the most important word in the world. “But you shouldn’t stare at it too long. It could hurt your eyes. You might even go blind.”
“Yeah,” Emmie says very softly, not quite whispering, “if you say so.”
“You might at least have one of the pears,” Pearl tells her, looking into the brown bag again. “They’re perfectly fine, I promise, and you ought to eat something. You’ll need your strength.”
“No, Pearl. I need to go home. I need to wake up.”
Pearl sighs and takes another bite of the sandwich. Emmie stares at the snow globe again, at the star. “Well, you should at least make up your mind,” Pearl says with her mouth full.
“What?”
“Make up your mind. Whether you want to go home or wake up. Whether you’re really here in the tunnel with me, or whether you’re only having a bad dream.”
“This doesn’t feel like a dream anymore,” Emmie says, and immediately wishes that she hadn’t, that she’d kept that thought to herself.
“There’s a reason for that, I suspect. But what do I know? I eat garbage and drag frightened little girls away into blizzards when they have perfectly safe, warm houses.”
“If I believe you, Pearl, what happens next?” Emmie asks the brown girl, turning away from the snow globe, and her eyes trail yellow-orange afterimages that refuse to go away when she blinks.
“That’s not an easy question to answer,” Pearl tells her, “not even if you believe, and I don’t think that you do, which makes it harder.”
“But if I did believe you?”
Pearl drops what’s left of her sandwich back into the brown paper bag, then rolls the top closed again. “I hate liverwurst,” she says. “My father never makes me eat liverwurst.”
“I want to go home,” Emmie says. “I want to know if Deacon’s safe. I want you to tell me what happens next. I want to know when it’ll be safe to go home again.”
“You want a terrible lot of things,” the brown girl replies. “You may have to settle for less.”
“Fine. I want to know what happens next.”
There’s a loud booming sound then from the darkness waiting at the limits of the snow globe’s radiance, and Emmie covers her ears and grits her teeth. She can feel it in her bones, that sound, and it makes her think of the thing she saw on Waterman Street, the thing that wasn’t a mammoth or a mastodon or the Wendigo, the thing riding the wind. The booming fades slowly away, but Emmie’s ears are still ringing painfully, and something about the sound has left her slightly sick to her stomach.
“Be very, very quiet,” Pearl whispers and reaches for the snow globe with the star inside. It seems to glow the smallest bit brighter when she’s touching it. “They don’t know we’re down here, and it can’t see or smell through solid rock, and it loathes the tunnel. So, we’ll probably be safe if we just stay quiet.”
“I want to go home,” Emmie says again.
“I know,” Pearl tells her and holds the globe up, pushing back the darkness a scant few feet. “I know you do. I want to go home, too, Emma Jean.”
“Hold my hand,” Emmie says, and the brown girl does, her hand colder than ice, colder than the silty bottom of the deepest sea or the empty heart of a solar system whose star has been snatched away, leaving behind only ice and the endless twinkling night and dead planets frozen straight down to their cores. But Emmie doesn’t let go, and they sit together in the wrecked car, hand in hand, shivering and waiting for the booming to come again, waiting for whatever’s supposed to happen next…
…and when Emmie opens her eyes again, the cold and damp are gone, and she’s staring up into the widest night sky that she’s ever seen. There’s a cool breeze—cool, but not cold—a wind that smells like cinnamon and jasmine and dust, and when she sits up, she sees that she’s lying near the crest of an enormous sand dune. The old railroad tunnel has vanished, the tunnel and the wrecked car and the girl named Pearl. Instead, a vast desert stretches out around her, countless grains of sand to mock the stars overhead, and there’s something dark sparkling wetly on the horizon, something she thinks might be water, a river or the sea. The moon is high and white and only a few days from full.
“Damn it,” she says, lying back down in the sand, which is still warm from the day before. “I’m not awake. Maybe I’m dead now, and I won’t ever wake up again.”
“You’re awfully young to be so concerned with what is and isn’t a dream,” someone says, an old woman’s voice or only a woman’s voice weathered and worn until it seems old. Emmie rolls over onto her left side, and the woman, who doesn’t look old at all, is squatting in the sand only a few feet away. Her skin is black—not any shade of brown, but skin as perfectly, truly black as an obsidian arrowhead or a licorice whip—and her amber eyes shimmer dimly. Her eyes remind Emmie of her own, though they’re more golden than yellow. The woman is dressed in white muslin, and her hair is white, too, not gray, but white, arranged in long dreadlocks reaching down past her shoulders, framing her high forehead and cheekbones.
“I know the difference,” Emmie says, surprised that she’s not afraid of the woman, who she’s certain wasn’t there only a moment before. “I know when I’m dreaming.”
The woman smiles and takes a deep breath. “That’s a lot to claim,” she says. “That’s a mighty conceit, child.”
“I was here once before, wasn’t I?” Emmie asks. “These are the wastes at the end of the world.”
“It’s true some people have called them that,” the woman replies. “And some other people have called them other things. Myself, I’ve never thought them a waste, and this is hardly the end of the world. The world goes on far beyond this place.”
“But I was here before?” Emmie asks her again, growing i
mpatient and noticing that the woman’s earrings are the sharp teeth of some tiny animal strung on loops of silver wire. They glint in the bright moonlight.
“Were you?” the black woman asks. “Or was that only a dream? If you know the difference—”
“Yes, it was a dream,” Emmie sighs, exasperated and in no mood for games, and she sinks back down onto the warm, welcoming sand. “That’s what I meant to say. I was here before in a dream, just this afternoon, when I fell asleep in my bedroom.”
“Well, if you say so, since you claim to know the difference.”
“Where’d the tunnel go?” Emmie asks. “Where’s Pearl?”
“It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s right there beneath the hill, where it’s always been. And Pearl’s where you left her, asleep beside you. Don’t worry about Pearl. She’s safe, for the time being.”
Daughter of Hounds Page 28