The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  On the paper were simple line drawings of faces. It was not possible to tell if the faces belonged to men or women. If they were young or old. They were minimal, a handful of lines to suggest a smile, a frown, eyes wide with terror. Each face was slightly different, but only slightly. He looked from the drawings to his mother.

  “Write there,” she said, handing each of them a pencil. “On the lines beside each face. Tell me what they feel.”

  He looked, confused, at the crude drawings. How could he know what they felt. They were only drawings, not people. He turned to his brother, but he was absorbed in the page, bent over it, his brow stitched together in concentration.

  The mouth of the first face was turned up at the corners. A smile. He looked to his mother again for guidance, but she had turned her back to him. HAPPY, he wrote hesitantly.

  The next face had wide eyes and raised eyebrows. The mouth was open. It was frightened, he thought, all at once understanding the game. AFRAID.

  The others came more quickly. ANGRY. CONFUSED. One gave him trouble—WORRIED, he wrote and then crossed it out. THOUGHTFUL.

  Just as he finished the last word, his mother snatched the page out of his hand and looked at it. Then she took the one from his brother. He made a little cry but said nothing as she pulled it from him. She looked from one to the other, and Eban waited. Then she folded them up, several times over, and slipped them into a pocket in her apron. He looked at her face. Her eyes, not looking at him or his brother, but not at anything else either. The line of her mouth. WORRIED, he thought, but wasn’t sure. ANGRY? RELIEVED? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.

  “Go outside,” she ordered, and both boys went quickly.

  “What did you write?” he asked his brother when the door had closed behind them.

  The boy’s eyes were wide. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Did you write something wrong?”

  His brother tilted his head to the side, as he often did when he was thinking. “Yeah,” he said. “Might have written something wrong.”

  “You don’t remember what words you wrote next to the pictures?”

  His brother shrugged. “Your name.”

  “My name?”

  “I thought maybe one of them was a picture of you. His hair stuck up like yours. On top.”

  Eban remembered, vaguely, that the wide-eyed face he’d marked AFRAID had a few vertical lines of hair. “It didn’t look like me. Not even a little.”

  The boy shrugged again. “I thought maybe it wasn’t the right thing. I did numbers on the other ones.”

  “Numbers?”

  “I wrote down the runs I did and all the weights you lifted this week. I did how many times you lifted up the weights and how much weight that was. And how far I went and how many times, and how much faster than the time before.”

  Eban frowned. “Why?”

  “She wanted us to write things down.”

  “But nothing about the pictures?”

  “I didn’t really like them.”

  “But you were supposed to write what they were feeling. The people in the pictures?”

  “How can I know that, Eban? How would I know?”

  Eban didn’t answer. Through the window, he could see his mother’s back. She stood unmoved from the spot where they’d left her, her hand still resting in the pocket where the drawings had gone.

  * * *

  —

  In his hand, now, he holds another copy of the same drawings. He flips through the stack of pages. It includes several copies of a second test, and that, too, he recognizes. And one completed copy of the first. He reads the words the test-taker chose. Different from whatever he wrote as a child. Grateful. Pensive. Disappointed. Hungry.

  He throws the drawings to the ground.

  He understands nothing. Not this place. Not what happened to his brother. Not what he and Judy have done, whether there was any point to their stupidity or if they would have been any better, any safer, if they had stayed forever where they were. His head roaring, he seizes the stool and flings it against one of the blacked-out windows. And then he freezes.

  Lit by the rising sun through the broken window, the room looks different. Now he can see something he couldn’t before. A line in the floorboards. A narrow crack that traces a square on the ground.

  A door.

  Dropping to his knees, he runs his hand along the crack, searching for a hinge.

  Perspiration stings his eyes as he scratches at the floor, until his fingernails slide into a notched edge and he pulls. With an ease that astonishes him, the door lifts.

  It opens to a hole and a ladder rising out of the dark. Before he can stop himself, he reaches his hand inside, but hits a grate of some sort. A filthy, rusted grate.

  And then a face appears behind it, and he understands.

  A cage, he thinks or whispers. A jail beneath the floor.

  The second thought arrives, almost simultaneous with the first. She is contained there, captive while he is free. He is safe.

  But he is wrong.

  IX

  “There is someone here.”

  The words slide into her dream, a dream that she is warm. A child again. Safe. At home.

  “Eban?” She opens her eyes and sees nonsense. His face—no nonsense there, only an anxious, tight expression on his anxious, pale face that is more same than strange—surrounded by a nonsense room. Sunlit, beautiful. Herself, enveloped in white, nonsense sheets, and heavy blankets. Her head cradled in a nonsense pillow stuffed with nonsense feathers of nonsense birds.

  “You have to get up.”

  “Did you say—”

  “There’s someone here. I saw her.”

  Judy remembers, all at once, and shoves back the beautiful blankets, throws herself out of the bed and dresses as quickly as she can. “Where? Did you talk to her? Is she the only one?”

  He has turned away while she pulls on her clothes, like he means to respect her modesty. He has always done this when she dresses and it has always irritated her.

  Fastening her coat, she asks again. “Where?”

  “There’s another house. Set back in the wood.” He pulls the blankets over the pillows and smooths out the wrinkles.

  “Leave it, Eban. We have to hurry, in case she hides again or runs.”

  He stares at her. “We have to run. We have to go—leave this place.”

  “Because we found someone? Because after all these days and miles, looking for someone who can answer our questions, finally we found them?”

  He shakes his head. “You don’t understand. There’s something very wrong. She wasn’t in the house, she was under it.”

  “Under it?”

  “Someone had locked her there. It was a cage.”

  She hesitates. But it’s the reason that they came here. If safe was all that mattered, what they had would have been enough, and it wasn’t. She is about to tell him she is going whether he comes along or not, but his expression shifts, watching her.

  “Yeah,” he says bitterly. “I know.”

  For a moment, she recalls Eban as she first saw him, crouched in the woods, watching the tent where her father waited for her to return. She caught him there and was proud of herself. She thought she’d caught a man, maybe even someone dangerous. But then he turned and he had a boy’s wide eyes. Eyes with the trick of making you think they saw you more completely than anyone else. And he would have walked away and left her and Alphonse there, but she called out to him. In the years since that day, he has repeatedly asked her to stay. But she doesn’t think he remembers she was the one who first called him back to her.

  She doesn’t coax now, or even invite him. She never wanted the responsibility of making decisions for him, but he is always giving it to her. Shoving himself into her hands. She is at the door before she re
alizes she needs him to show her. “Where—” she begins.

  But he is right behind her. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  —

  The windows are painted black. A threat, she thinks. Why hide what’s inside?

  Or what’s outside?

  The door is unbolted but closed and she needs to open it. She doesn’t know if there will be anyone waiting inside or what they’ll want or do. She longs to be brave, but isn’t. Not just now. She has to put her hand on the doorknob before she can hesitate to turn it. She has to open the door before Eban can see her think about leaving it closed.

  Only a single, broken window admits light to the dark, bare room. Unlike the other houses—impossibly abundant, crowded with beauty and things—it’s empty but for a single desk and stool.

  “There,” says Eban, pointing at the floor.

  She finds the outline of the door between the floorboards and slips her fingers underneath. Drawing her breath in, she throws back the door and stares into the dark hole it reveals.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing emerges from the darkness.

  “We have to get out of here,” Eban whispers from behind her, where he kneels on the ground. “If she got out, someone let her out…”

  “Hello?” She can make out a grid of rusted steel and what looks like the top rung of a ladder beneath it. How deep into the ground might it lead? Could the girl be hiding there?

  “Judy, please!”

  “Maybe you scared her,” she says, almost to herself. “How old did you say she was? Maybe she is down there, frightened.”

  “Let’s go back,” Eban urges. “We can check the other houses. Maybe there are other buildings like this, tucked deeper in the wood.”

  “I’m coming down!” she calls softly into the hole, as she slips her fingers into the grate and lifts it out.

  “Judy!”

  “If you’re down there, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We only want to talk to you.” She swings her legs around and drops one foot onto the ladder below.

  “Judy, plea—”

  Eban suddenly falls quiet as she descends the ladder. She is several rungs down when, despite herself, she wonders at his silence and glances up at him through the hole.

  He stares back miserably, his eyes wide, as the woman behind him lowers her rifle and drags him to his feet.

  * * *

  —

  At the bottom of the hole, they find a small room. Feeling with their hands against the dirt floor and walls, they learn its limits. They find a stinking tin bucket in the corner. They find a bed, not big enough for two, with a thin woollen blanket folded over top. The bed creaks when they sit at its edge.

  They have no water and no food. She can’t count how many days they have been without either.

  Her pack, with their few remaining belongings, was left at the fourth house. No longer theirs, then.

  The woman who led them down the ladder at the point of her rifle didn’t speak a word. They don’t know if there are any others. They don’t know how long she means to keep them here, or why.

  Beside Judy, Eban’s head keeps dropping to his chest, and then he startles awake. “How long?” he asks her each time. “How long have we been here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The third time he asks, he crawls to the bucket and retches into it before she can answer. The stench of bile fills the room.

  “The French had a word for an underground prison like this,” she says, as he retches again. “A little dungeon like this, hidden away beneath. Oubliette, that’s what they called it.” She remembers her father Alphonse telling her. He liked to frighten her when she was small. She liked it as well. She’d ask about the most awful things she could think of. Of prisoners from his stories and their horrible deaths. Buried alive, stretched from limb to limb until their bodies shattered or they confessed. “From the word oublier. To forget.”

  Once he lifts his head so suddenly he startles her, his eyes wide and anxious. “Where is he?” he asks her.

  “Who? Who?”

  He looks at her like he doesn’t completely trust her, his eyes sleep-vague and not his own. He is peering out at her from within his parched dreams.

  “Who, Eban?”

  “My brother,” he murmurs as his head drops again.

  It makes her nervous that he sleeps. Already, waiting in the dark like this is unfastening her mind. She thinks of the blind son of a peddler who once visited her house by the allotment. His eyes were clear and he would turn his face towards whoever spoke to him. He moved with grace, and except for the vague misplacement of his gaze—never quite meeting her eyes or anyone’s—you might not have known he lived in darkness. But here, in this still, silent dark, it is hard to tell when they sleep and when they wake. And whether this hole is a prison or a grave.

  And so she talks.

  * * *

  —

  After a time has passed—impossible to count what number of hours or days might contain it—he stops waking. Instead, his sleep is interrupted by fits of convulsion or of long, rasping gasps for air. He pisses himself, and she removes the soiled clothing and wraps him in the blanket. It is the last drop of fluid his body spares—after that, nothing more is produced when he retches, and his fever-hot skin is dry as a bone.

  Her brain aches like it is being devoured inside her skull, and she is losing the battle for consciousness. Each time she finds she has nodded off, she shakes him as hard as she can; it’s easier than checking his pulse or breathing, which are now scarcely detectable. Once she tried and failed to find his pulse and felt her own heart burst apart, when suddenly he shifted in the bed.

  To keep herself awake, she circles the room, over and over, first feeling her way across the walls, with her arms raised above her head to touch the earthen ceiling, and then on her hands and knees. She finds that in one corner of the room the dirt floor is damp—maybe some vein of water passes nearby.

  “Eban,” she says, peeling the name from her dry throat. She drags him from the bed. Miracle, he stirs. He crawls with her across the floor, and when she tells him to, he puts his mouth to the ground and tongues at whatever moisture he can suck from the dirt. Then she leads him back to bed and lets him sleep again. Puts her own mouth to the mud.

  She wakes with her cheek to the cold ground, her mouth and throat thickened with dirt.

  She dreamed of her child.

  For weeks the child has moved in her. First, a dreamlike flutter, scarcely detectable. Then, the child—a girl, she has long known with certainty, a girl—became her own. A life within Judy but belonging entirely to itself. She felt the girl’s autonomy, her insistent exploration of her host, her moods. When she slept and when she woke. Judy wondered if her child returned the love she now felt deepening in her. Maybe to her child Judy was only the walls around her, her containment. An oubliette.

  But she hasn’t felt her child since they entered the hole. Not the flickering movements of earlier in her pregnancy. Not the insolence of more recent weeks, the thrusting feet and elbows—her child’s brazen claim of territory.

  In the dark, she is consumed by the black, clamorous question of her daughter’s stillness.

  She doesn’t know how far along she is in her pregnancy—she has never been able to tell, because her bleeding has never been regular. It is useless to count weeks or cycles of the moon.

  Her menstruation, and everything it augured, made her fathers uncomfortable, and embarrassed of their discomfort. The morning she woke, as a child, to find a deep red stain on the bedsheets, she cried silently until her fathers found her, lying stiffly under the covers, afraid to move. And then they were furious with themselves for not having told her sooner.

  But still they didn’t explain enough, even then. So that when, the night after her father died, she lay down in Eban’
s bed and took off her clothes for the first time, only he knew what to do. She let him show her, and she was, at first, miserable with shame for her ignorance. It was not her nature ever to hesitate or yield, but under his weight, limbs threaded with his, she hesitated and she yielded.

  Naked and unsure and then certain, they were together, and when they stopped and it was over, she went on feeling like it hadn’t been him showing her but something they had found out on their own, here in the middle of nothing, at the farthest edge of nowhere, like they had lit something in the dark.

  But it troubled her.

  And when, weeks later, Eban asked in the gentle, careful way he always spoke to her if she had bled that month, she felt her skin burn as she told him no and waited to know what it meant. When he told her a baby grew inside her, she was astonished. And then she began to worry.

  * * *

  —

  When the door opens, Judy is asleep. Restless between dreams of food, of feasting on lavish meals at beautiful tables, of stuffing her mouth with fistfuls of dirt, she hears the wooden door slam to the ground and then the scrape of metal as the grate is removed.

  She crawls to the ladder and stares up, squinting at the dim, square light above. The word hello? catches in her throat and she doubles over in a fit of coughing.

  When she looks up again, a box is being lowered through the hole on a length of rope. When she has unfastened it, her fingers clumsy on the knots, an invisible agent above snatches the rope back to the surface. A moment later the rope returns, tied to a bucket. Having failed to undo the string around the box, Judy seizes the bucket, but finds it empty. Confused, she unties it and waits for the rope to be drawn back up but it doesn’t budge. She looks at the rope and up into the hole in wonder, and then understands.

  The bucket in the corner is only half-full, because there is nothing left in their bodies to be expelled. She collects it and ties it to the rope, and watches it rise to the top of the ladder, and then two hands appear to take it away. And then the grate is set in place and the door closed, and she is in darkness again.