The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  He finishes reading the story, while Judy kneels before him, her head bowed forward. When he closes the book, she stays like that, unmoving.

  “Judy?” he says softly.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Judy, do you still feel the baby?”

  Her hand creeps to her belly, slipping under her coat. “I feel it all the time,” she whispers.

  “Can I feel it?” he asks.

  She undoes her coat and peels her sweater up over her stomach. Her belly looks, to him, as flat as always, but he removes his glove and lays his hand on it. Feels nothing.

  * * *

  —

  They sleep, and he wakes only once. He thinks he hears something creeping near in the wood, and reaches for his rifle, but he has none. He calls out and hears nothing answer. Not even Judy stirs. After falling back asleep, he dreams of a face, watching him from those trees. The dark eyes of a woman his mother’s age, lines at the ends of her mouth. Her hair, in the low light of the moon, is a silvery gold. She disappears with the dream.

  In the morning, they set out again. He can think of nothing but his hunger. Once when he was young, a starved man came to their door. His mother allowed him in because it was clear he had so little time left. He threw up the food they offered him, and his feet were blackened with filth and bled steadily, his blood too thin to clot. Eban asked him why he had no shoes and the man replied that he had eaten them. Since then he had vomited many times and not relieved himself at all, and there had been no sign of that shoe leather, so it must have remained within his body, even as he died, fighting to digest it.

  “Judy,” he calls. “Are you hungry?”

  She stops abruptly, as if annoyed by the question. But she says only, “Look.”

  Just ahead, the forest dwindles to a sea of blackened spears. There’s no ash or smell of smoke in the air, and at the roots of the trees, moss and low scrub have already sprung out of the scorched soil. Whatever happened, happened some time ago. Maybe years.

  “They’re all dead,” she whispers. “For miles and miles.”

  “Burned.”

  “Wildfire?”

  He runs his hand over one of the charred trunks and then gazes down the line of trees. “Look how this trunk is burned on both sides, like it was surrounded by fire. But the outer edge of a wildfire, spread by wind, would burn the side the fire started from. This burned so evenly. And look.” He points to the tree behind it, its upper branches still green with needles. “Scarcely burned at all. Look how square the border is, between trees burned and not burned.”

  “You think someone did this on purpose?”

  “They contained it somehow. They wanted only these ones burned. This stand of trees.”

  “But it’s endless. I can’t see green trees in any direction except the one we came from. How many people, how much water would it take to do this?”

  “I would rather know why.”

  They walk more slowly now, looking about them in silence. Laid bare like this, everything revealed, the forest seems darker and more threatening somehow. No creature could hide or hunt in this burned forest—and yet Eban has never felt more sure they are being watched. Every step feels like a performance for invisible eyes.

  They eventually pass out of the burned forest into a blackened plain stippled with the stumps of felled trees.

  “This happened more recently,” Eban says.

  They pass human debris; a cartwheel, bent and black. The melted waxen smudge of something plastic, coiled in rusted wiring. Wrapped around one of the stumps, like a marker, is a red scarf, untouched by fire. Judy unties it and slips it around her neck without a word. They walk on.

  The sun is dropping, making long shadows of even the shortest stumps, when they find the bones.

  First a rib cage. Judy gasps, pointing. “From the fire,” she whispers.

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  “Where is the rest of the body? The skeleton, I mean?”

  “Yeah. I wonder.” He continues walking, but she lingers behind him.

  “It’s so small,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “A child.”

  “Maybe.” He knows without looking that she’ll have put her hand to her stomach.

  They find a femur, several jawbones, a skull. Broken bones he can’t identify. In one place, a pile higher than his waist, some animal, most human.

  “I’m frightened,” she tells him.

  “I think we’re meant to be.” It’s as clear as if the bodies had been hanged from a post, marked with an x. It is a message from the people who burned or killed or fed here. Or maybe did none of these things, but wished them to believe it.

  * * *

  —

  Judy has gone farther ahead than he realized when she calls out to him. He hurries after the sound of her voice, stumbling in the near dark.

  She stands at the edge of a forest of trees untouched by fire. As he watches, she walks into it, disappearing inside. He has to run to catch up.

  After the day’s travel across a scorched warning of a landscape, the green, needled trees feel secretive. Too deliberate an obfuscation, the wood swallows them totally.

  Hunger drives them on. And fear and even, Eban knows, some other instinct, something they shouldn’t trust. A perverse curiosity that wants to solve the mystery of this wood. Through the dark, they stagger forward, their hands before them, groping at branches and tree trunks to sure their steps. The moon has risen to the centre of the sky when they see it.

  In wonder, Judy whispers, “We’re here.”

  VIII

  For a long time, they stand without moving.

  If only they’d stopped for the night sooner. He’d feared to rest in the burned wood, so clearly within the territory of another. But now, it is too dark to make sense of the place where they’ve arrived. And sleep is out of the question.

  “It’s true,” is the first thing he says. “It all was true.” Even at his most credulous, he imagined that whatever they would find at the end of their travel would reveal a wild lie at the heart of all the rumours. But here it is before them. A city in the wood.

  She doesn’t answer. Taking a few steps forward, she touches the wall of the first house with her hand and then looks back at him. Something in him comes undone at the sight of her face then. What she feels now, he knows, is the furthest possible thing from the fear that has seized every nerve in his body.

  “I thought someone would meet us,” she says. “They must have known we were coming.”

  She stumbles between the first two houses, following the path deeper till the spill of moonlight through the trees no longer illuminates her, and he gasps at her boldness. She is closer now to them than to him. He has no choice. He follows her.

  Eleven houses stand in a circle around a stone well. Like her, he turns around and around, as if it all will vanish or alter if he looks away. Wonderstruck. What place is this?

  The houses are built of hewn timbers, straight and solid. Roofs of tin or some other metal. Windows of glass.

  “What tools do they have?” he asks softly. “What way did they bring all this here?”

  A stone chimney erupts from each gleaming roof. But he sees no smoke.

  “Are they hiding?” she asks.

  Before he can stop her, she has run to the door of the first house, knocking against it with her fist. “Hello,” she calls, and then she knocks at the next door, and the next. “We’re hungry and have no food.” She stands back and waits for the doors to open. More softly, she says, “We’ve come a long way to find you.”

  Eban backs away, turning in circles again as he watches the doors of the houses for any sign of movement. But there is nothing, none. Wind passes through the trees that surround the tiny village, sifting moonlight through their branches. “Come away,” he
says urgently. “Come away from the doors.”

  Judy looks up at him, an expression of confusion on her face. Then she steps toward the well and draws her hand across the opening. “Cobwebs,” she whispers, shaking them from her hand. She snatches a stone from the ground and drops it inside. A moment later, they hear it rap against the dry bottom of the well. “This hasn’t been used. Not for…” She stands again and crosses to the fourth house.

  “Judy—” But already she has turned the knob and, to his astonishment, the door swings open, as easily as if she were invited inside. He hurries to join her, his heart calamitous in his chest. “Judy, stop.”

  He stands behind her, trying to make sense of what he sees. Blue light puddles on the floor in the shapes of windowpanes. He can make out the dim forms of tables, chairs, a bed.

  “Eban…” She is already pulling away from him.

  “Don’t go any farther.” He puts his hand over his face, thinking. “We’ll use the matches.”

  “But they’re the only—”

  “We can’t sleep till we know, and we can’t go stumbling into these shadows. It’s too dangerous. Give me twenty minutes.”

  She hesitates.

  “Please, Judy.”

  To his surprise, she follows him out of the house. “I’ll get the matches,” she says.

  He gathers up sheets of birchbark and two green switches from the surrounding trees, and then he tears the hem out of his shirt with his teeth. He makes two small, sticky balls of pine sap and wraps them in layer after layer of bark, binding a cone of birch and sap to each switch with the strip of fabric. When he’s finished, he hands the torches to Judy and she lights them. They catch quickly and he warns her that though birch burns slowly and the sap will sustain the flame for a time, the bark is dry and its fire won’t last long.

  She nods. “I’ll start with this house. You take the one next door. If you hear or see anything, call out, and I’ll find you.” Without waiting for his answer, she disappears inside the house. The door floats closed behind her.

  “Be quick,” he calls and enters the fifth house.

  He pauses, despite his warning to Judy, to stare at the doorknob in his hand. Iron. Rusted, but well-crafted. And some smith has notched a design of radiating lines in the plate against the door. For no purpose. Who are these people?

  A bead of sap flares in the fire, sending up a sudden bright flame, and he briefly beholds the entire interior. Then the light gutters, and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust again. Putting his other hand to the wall to guide him around the space, he raises the dim, fluttering fire to each surface, in turn, to examine it.

  But the momentary glimpse of the illuminated room remains in his mind, radiant and incomprehensible. They are the grandest living quarters he has ever seen. Better even than those Judy described living in with her fathers. He feels his way along the arm of a chair, the posts of a two-level bed. Everywhere are marks of some extravagant, earlier time. A rug of dozens of colours, woven into a winding, wild design. Curtains of delicate white cotton, gathered along the upper frame of every window. The beds are made, draped in heavy, stuffed blankets.

  Everything in the room frightens him.

  Where did they go, the people who built this house? What could have made anyone leave such a place?

  Then his breath stops.

  In the wavering light of the torch, he glimpses a face on the far side of the room.

  “Judy!” he cries, but there is no answer.

  Where did the person come from, where did he hide, and what does he want? Eban approaches him. He stops before a low cabinet of polished wood. A face looks out from the wall above it. His own.

  His hand shakes as he takes the mirror from the wall. The glass is mottled with blue-black streaks, and a rim of dust has collected in the curves of the frame around it. Open-mouthed, he stares into its discoloured surface. It is the first time he has seen his own face in eight years.

  He pulls the torch closer till his cheek complains of its heat, but he can neither return the mirror nor lower the flame. He had forgotten that his white face is as freckled as Judy’s. Months without sun, and yet its marks are all over him, blurring the contour of his full, colourless lips, clustering into gold shadows along his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. His red-gold hair falls below his chin, and is so dirty that when he passes his hand through, it stays where he has smoothed it. He had forgotten how pale his grey eyes are. Full of fog and hesitation. Looking into them frightens him somehow. He does not know anything of the person they contain.

  “Eban.”

  Even at the sound of her voice, he doesn’t want to stop looking. He doesn’t trust what he sees, as if there might yet be something in the mirror he hasn’t understood.

  “Eban.”

  At last, he lowers the mirror to his side and answers.

  “What do you have there?”

  He drops the mirror onto the cabinet so hard it clatters, and he fears he may have broken it. “Nothing. Did you find anything?”

  “Nothing. No one. No food. No water. Did you already go through the cupboards here?”

  He turns to the counter by the window and looks at the drawers and cupboards it contains. He hadn’t even thought of it.

  “I don’t think they left suddenly. Everything is in its place. And I think,” she says, pulling open each empty drawer and cupboard door, “they took whatever food or supplies mattered with them.”

  “How long ago do you think they left?”

  “We can tell better after dawn. But there’s dust on everything. Nothing has been touched, not for months. Maybe years.”

  “The things they have. Had. How did they get them here? Or make them?”

  “Why did they leave?” She stands looking at him, and he thinks about the face she sees. How she has looked at it all these years. “I’m so tired, Eban. I can hardly feel my pulse.”

  “We need water,” he murmurs. The light of her torch flags then and extinguishes. She curses, and he finds her hand by the remaining light of his own. “Sleep in here,” he tells her. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Nodding, she kneels to the ground and curls up there, silently. In her compliance he sees, all at once, how bad their situation is.

  With a tenderness he would keep from his voice if she were well, he says, “Not there. Not there, Judy. Let me help you.” With his arm around her, he guides her to the bed, peeling back the heavy blankets.

  Now she hesitates.

  “There’s no greater risk in sleeping in the bed.”

  She bends over to undo her shoes, and he tries to stop her, but she insists, swatting his hands away. “I don’t want…”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to ruin that beautiful bed.”

  He watches her for a moment, her fingers clumsy as they undo her boots and pull them from her filthy socked feet. “Then let’s get you undressed.” She lifts her arms, and he peels her clothes from her, layer by layer. Then she slides into the clean white sheets of the bed, and lays her cheek on the pillow.

  He lingers too long, watching her, as she slips into sleep. And then, suddenly, he is in darkness. He drops his torch to the floor and goes outside to make another.

  * * *

  —

  He makes four more torches and then sits on the steps outside the door, a lit torch plunged into the ground beside him. He watches the moon cross the sky above him and then sink below the trees. And without meaning to, he sleeps.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, he wakes out of some kind of dream. He can’t recall anything but the sense of having been elsewhere. Ashamed of his carelessness, he pulls open the door behind him, but to his relief, Judy is still asleep in the bed.

  His hands shake and a headache has been scissoring his brain since yesterday. He knows they need to fi
nd water today, and he sets out to explore the camp. If there is water anywhere, he will find it.

  He searches the other houses but finds them just as the first—beautifully furnished, bare cupboards and empty drawers. Dust and cobwebs sealed over everything like a skin.

  Venturing back into the trees, he looks for any sign of a spring, a river, a second well. As the tiny village recedes behind him, he is swallowed up in darkness again, and only by the last flickering light of his torch does he recognize a building, emerging between the trees, so close that, with a few more steps, he might have collided with the wall. It is another house, this one built of stone, its windows painted black.

  He calls out, but there is no answer. He wonders if he should have waited for Judy. He feels sure something is inside this building. Something important. He turns the brass doorknob, expecting it will be locked, but the latch clicks and the door swings open.

  Inside he stumbles forward like a blind man, reaching into the shadows, groping for whatever walls or furniture might be in his path. At the centre of the room, he finds a wooden desk with two drawers and a stool.

  He can’t shed the feeling that he has backed himself into a cage. Facing the door, which creaks and flaps in the light wind, he opens the upper drawer of the desk. His hand, holding the torch, shakes, but not from hunger.

  Inside the drawer is a stack of papers. He raises the top page into the torchlight. And then the next page and the next. Each is the same, a perfect replica of the first. Far off, he can hear a bird singing to the new day.

  He recognizes every picture on the page.

  It was years after the first test that his mother called him and his brother to the kitchen. It was a summer morning. He remembers that he’d been eager to go outside, could see the yellow grass of August waving in the wind, knew everything beyond the door was moving and busy and full of games to play and things to do, and here he was inside, silently watching his mother lay a piece of paper before him and another before his brother.