by Amanda Leduc
“I counted too,” Moira says. “When the scream came. I was in a bathroom, and I counted the tiles.”
“And you?” Tasha asks Darby.
“I was buried when the meteors came,” he says. A shudder goes through them all. “It took three days for people to dig me out. I spent most of the time thinking about going on vacation somewhere tropical and imagining the drinks I would buy, the things I would see when I went scuba diving. I’ve never been scuba diving.” He shrugs, then laughs a little. “Happy place, right? That’s what my therapist told me, years ago.”
Tasha tells them about the greenhouse—the long walks she took to its warmth in the winter, the madness and grief she experienced there that left her shaking on the ground.
“It got bearable,” she says, “eventually. As though the flowers…prepared me, somehow.” She looks at them all. “The same way that your lives—the things your lives forced you to know—prepared you.”
“So—what?” Darby laughs again, tiredly. “Only the broken survive? Is that it?”
“Nobody here is broken.” Elyse’s voice is fierce.
Moira only shrugs. “It’s not that complicated. Grief is boring. You get used to anything in time—even that.”
“But some people don’t,” Tasha says, glancing at Annie, who has come to stand in the doorway. “Lots of people didn’t—look at how few of us are left. Annie and Elyse and I are the only ones left in the whole city.”
At this, JJ—Joseph, Moira tells herself—stirs. “Everyone?” he says.
Tasha spreads her hands. “As far as we can tell. We’ve gone walking a lot. We haven’t found anyone else.”
“Anyway,” Annie says, abruptly, “we’re leaving. We should have left months ago.”
“But what about the centaur?” Moira says. Everyone freezes, and she watches them all register this fact again—they’ve been so wrapped up in Brian they forgot. Her too. “You’ve seen him?”
“I saw him,” Elyse says. “With Heather, by the greenhouse near the mountain. Just before the scream came.”
“Heather?” Joseph gets up from his chair. “She was there? With the creature—the centaur—whatever it is?”
“Who’s Heather?” Moira snaps.
But Joseph is looking at Tasha. “I told you that mountain was strange,” he says. “It brought me back again. Twice.”
“Who’s Heather?” Moira says. “What the fuck is going on?”
Tasha hasn’t taken her eyes from Joseph. “She died weeks ago, with the others.”
“Tasha, I think she’s alive.”
* * *
None of them can take in any more. Exhausted, they curl up in the chairs and try to sleep. Tasha and Annie sleep in the back room, near Brian, who is fitful. In the early morning Tasha checks him and finds that his fever has gone down a little.
“He’ll need something to eat,” she says, looking to Annie. “Let’s get him something warm.” The other woman nods.
They go outside and make their way to the townhouse, where they grab some rice and beans. They come back and light a fire in the alley pit behind the clinic, then take turns stirring the rice and beans over the fire. Annie is the one who brings it up again.
“Heather knew,” she says. “She knew this whole time.”
Tasha stares into the pot. “Looks that way.”
“Did you—suspect her?”
Tasha stirs for a while before she answers. “I don’t know what I suspected,” she says at last. “There was something about her that drew me in. Like—oh, Annie, I don’t know. Like she was family? Somehow? Or maybe I just thought she knew more about the mountain than she was letting on. But everyone else—there were so many stories. Foxes and murdered babies and people who disappeared. I didn’t know what to believe.”
Annie lets out a grim laugh. “I thought you were in love with her,” she says. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”
Tasha shakes her head. “It wasn’t that, ever. I—recognized her, somehow. She recognized me. That’s what it felt like. Even though I know she didn’t trust me. That’s what I was trying to figure out.”
They watch the pot for a few more minutes in silence.
“What happens now?” Annie asks.
“We’re leaving. Same as before.”
“Even if Heather’s up there on the mountain?”
“Yes,” Tasha says. She pours a bucket of dirty water over the fire and straightens. “We have the truck now—that’s as good a sign as any we’re meant to go.”
As they carry the pot to the clinic, they both hear it—footfalls. Horses, galloping closer.
Annie’s hands tremble; Tasha takes the pot from her.
Inside the clinic, everyone else is already crowded at the front window. Tasha sets the pot on a towel on the counter and checks on Brian, then follows everyone outside. They stand together and listen. Silence. Not even the birds.
Then, the sound of weeping. They shouldn’t be able to hear it, but the rest of the world is so silent it isn’t hard to make out. Hard sobs, thick and anguished. A voice she remembers, a voice she knows. She closes her eyes and feels the sudden rush of falling.
“Let’s go,” Tasha says, and she leads them all to Heather’s house.
* * *
Heather slides from Aura’s back onto the ground. There is no walkway to the front door anymore. She takes a few steps through the foliage and then drops to her knees. The vines and soft green things on the ground slide around her legs, but she pays no attention.
She doesn’t want to go in. This is far enough. She bends down and places her forehead against the grass. Her sobs come hard and angry.
Greta and Jilly, snuggled against her in their sling.
Greta and Jilly, crawling on the grass.
B’s hesitant smile.
All gone.
The centaurs stand guard around her and say nothing.
Then there’s another cry—a human voice. The centaurs stiffen around her. She stands up, slowly, and turns.
She sees pale hair first, and the relief is so strong she’s surprised.
“Elyse,” she breathes. Beside Elyse, Tasha. And Annie. And Joseph.
And then she hears the unmistakable click of a gun. On the other side of Joseph stands a stranger, her gun pointed at Estajfan’s face.
25
Heather is still pregnant, but even so she is thinner than Tasha remembers. She tries hard not to look at the centaurs, but this proves impossible. They are so large, so strange and beautiful—the brown-skinned one closest to Heather huge and tall, the other two pale and blond. Each centaur wears a golden cuff. Against the world’s vivid green they’re exquisite—a dream come to life that will fade if she blinks.
The darker one, she sees, has a bandage wrapped around its flank.
This is the one that Moira is staring at, her eyes glinting with fury, the pistol in her hands raised and pointing at its head.
“Moira,” Tasha says. She wants to fall on her knees and weep, touch her forehead to the ground, pray. Something. She keeps her voice low, a hand outstretched. “Moira, put the gun away.”
“I told you not to move!” Moira shouts at the centaur. “I fucking told you not to move!”
“Moira!” Tasha shouts, trying to snap her out of it.
“Brian is back there with a broken leg because of them!”
“Brian will be all right,” Tasha says. She forces a steadiness into her voice that she doesn’t feel, and takes a step closer to Heather. “No one else needs to get hurt today.” She nods to Heather. “The baby?”
“Fine.” Heather gets up, and looks from Moira and the gun to Estajfan and back. She moves to stand in front of him. “I think.”
“Where did you go?” Tasha asks. “When the scream came.”
“I was at the greenhouse. E
stajfan took me up the mountain. I was going to come back—I only went there to warn him, to tell him to hide…” She looks up at the house and then back to Tasha. “Did you go inside? Did you see?”
Tasha nods. “I’m so sorry.”
Heather wipes her eyes with her palm. “Were they—did they—”
“The plants came for them,” Annie says, her voice gentle. “The plants came for everyone, in the end.”
Moira is still holding the gun on Estajfan but Tasha can see something more than anger in her face now. Her arms slacken. The barrel dips.
“What are we supposed to do, Tasha?” Heather asks. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“I can answer that,” Joseph says. “We’re going up that fucking mountain!”
“Joseph,” Tasha says, “we can’t go up. It’s too dangerous—”
“I don’t fucking care! You heard Elyse—there’s food up there. We’ve been starving for over a year!”
At last, one of the centaurs speaks. “The mountain isn’t safe for you,” the dark one says. “I do not—” and his eyes shift to Moira, and the gun—“we do not wish you harm.”
“We just want to be left in peace.” This from the blonde female, a bag slung over her shoulder and between her breasts. “That’s all.”
“But Heather went up,” Tasha says.
The female nods and says, “She’s not going up anymore. None of you are.”
“You don’t fucking get to tell us what to do!”
Tasha sees Joseph grab Moira’s gun as if in slow motion. The surprise in Moira’s face, the sudden splash of terror on Heather’s. Elyse screams as Joseph shoots, Moira tackles him to the ground, something glinting in her hand.
“Let it go,” Moira says, and as Tasha comes closer, she can see that it’s the scalpel Moira showed her the day before. Moira’s voice is surprisingly calm now. “Let it go, Joseph.”
He stares up at her, anguished. “Why them? Why do they get to survive?”
To this, no one has an answer. When Moira finally leans back, Joseph pulls himself up to a sit, small and defeated.
“Moira,” Tasha says. “That scalpel. You said you found it by the water?”
“No. In the forest. After we were—ambushed.”
The female centaur steps over to them. “That’s mine,” she says, urgently. She holds out a hand. “That knife. Heather dropped it in the forest. Give it to me.”
“It’s mine now,” Moira snaps. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Where did you get it?” Tasha looks at the centaur. She can feel Annie watching her, confused.
“My father gave it to me. It was a gift,” the centaur says. “It’s important to me. Please.”
And Tasha drops to her knees after all. “There was a woman in my family,” she says. “Long ago. My mother told me stories. She was a travelling physician.” The centaur knows, Tasha realizes. Maybe she’s always known. She takes a breath and says, “One summer, she delivered triplets in a village.”
THE DOCTOR AND THE VILLAGE GHOSTS
The second time she comes to the mountain, the doctor discovers that the centaur has cleared the path she’d hacked on her first climb. It’s now free of brush, and in places the climb is so gradual it hardly feels like a climb at all. It ends exactly where they met. She finds him waiting for her there. She doesn’t know how he knew she was coming, and doesn’t ask. He is grateful for the textbooks. He doesn’t take her to the children.
The next year is much the same—and the year after that, and the year after that. Every time she asks him if she can meet the children his response is the same: not yet, they aren’t ready. He is grateful and polite but also closed to her. She continues to visit anyway.
Occasionally she travels to the wife’s village. She has five children now, all thriving and happy. The mother is happy too, most of the time. She never mentions her other children now, even when she and the doctor are alone. She is afraid for the safety of her five children in the village; she doesn’t like it when they’re away from her, she doesn’t like it when her husband takes them on trips. But she never goes. Once upon a time she had wanted a different kind of life; now the possibility of a different kind of life for her children terrifies her. The doctor knows that if the mother had her way, her children would never leave her.
The doctor has no children, only secrets.
The doctor brings the centaur medical supplies and history books and maps. She brings novels and books of poetry and mathematics texts that hold delicate equations; she brings dinner plates and wineglasses and cutlery.
She brings the centaur dried herbs and a mortar and pestle and shows him berries on the mountain that will help when his children have a fever; leaves to crush into a salve that will help with cuts and bruises. She brings him a surgeon’s needle and thread and teaches him how to stitch a wound. She points out other plants that he should harvest and dry and use.
“For pain,” she says, “and infection.”
As the years go by, the doctor continues to travel—growing slower as her joints stiffen, but her heart and her mind as strong as ever. Eventually she begins to hear stories of a monster in the old village, and stories of another monster in the city by the mountain. The village and the city are far enough apart that no one would ever note the similarities, but the doctor does. She is tired of people who lie and are afraid.
The village monster, so the story goes, is tall and black as night. It sweeps through the streets in the early-morning darkness, stealing random things. A cooking pot, a toy that lies in a child’s crib. No one can figure it out. What use would a monster—or even a thief—have for such things?
The monster in the mountain city is much the same—stealing furniture, coming and going like a ghost.
The city people tell her that spirits from the mountain come down to strike fear into the hearts of those who want to climb it. Leave the mountain alone, they tell her. As years pass, they tell her this more and more. People have gone up the mountain and disappeared, they say. It’s best to stay away.
And yet despite the stories, the doctor can’t determine if anyone from the city has ever actually gone missing. A friend of a friend of a friend disappears. A girl goes missing, a boy too. Perhaps they ran away together. People tell themselves all kinds of stories when they grieve.
One year she asks the centaur what he knows about the rumours.
“The humans are right to stay away” is all he says.
And yet he loves humans. He can’t get enough of them. Doesn’t he run among them and bring back their treasures? He boasts to her of all the things the children know—he’s taught them their letters, he’s shown them so much. Of the humans far below, he says, “They have only one heart,” as if she doesn’t already know. As if he, too, did not have only one heart himself long ago.
She brings the centaur blankets and jewellery, music boxes and more books. He never even tells her if the children have said thank you. One year a rich patient pays her with a series of handmade golden cuffs; she brings them to the centaur and drops them in a bag at his feet.
The centaur is struck almost speechless by this gift. He picks one up and puts it on his wrist right away.
“You’re supposed to say thank you,” the doctor says. Once more, she wonders if the children are still alive. Maybe there’s no one on the mountain but him and a shrine of human artifacts to his first love.
The centaur says, “Thank you. They’re very beautiful.”
He is very beautiful, the doctor thinks—the cuffs look ridiculous on her thin wrists, but on the centaur they are an adornment for a king.
“I want to see them,” she says. “I want to know that they’re all right. I want to know that they are happy.”
“They’re happy,” he says.
The doctor shakes her head. “I don’t believe you,” she says.
His face darkens; he looms over her, fists clenched. “I am not lying.”
The doctor stands her ground. In her head is a darkened room and a woman drugged and terrified on the table, three versions of a secret suddenly there before them all, screaming. “Maybe they are happy. But I would like to see. I brought them into the world; I deserve to know how they’re faring.”
The centaur is silent for so long that the doctor doesn’t know what to do; she’s hurt him, she thinks. All she meant to do was push. She wants to apologize but the words won’t come out.
“If you feel that way,” he says at last, “then perhaps you shouldn’t have sent them—us—away in the first place.”
“I was trying to save them! And you!” the doctor cries. “Surely you can understand that.”
But the centaur turns from her. “Do not come back,” he says. “I thought you were a friend, but you are no friend at all.”
She watches him walk away from her. She doesn’t follow him; she wants to, but she doesn’t. As she makes her way back down the mountain, her head is full of sadness, her eyes blurry with tears.
On the descent it starts to rain. When she was younger, the doctor would have kept walking, but she worries about slipping now, so she shelters under a large overhang and sets up camp for the night. In the morning, the sky is clear and the warmth of the sun soon dries her clothes. As she makes her way down, she ponders his words over and over.