by Kali Wallace
I found the third key on the ring and slid it into the lock.
A soft, wet noise filled the mine, distant and quiet.
She was laughing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
SHE KNEW I WAS coming, and she was laughing.
As soon as I recognized the sound for what it was, there was nothing else in my universe. No surface. No gates. No peaceful forest of vanilla-scented trees beneath a clear night sky. The world shrunk down to that throat of stone, the yellow light before me and oppressive darkness at my back, old corpses and old blood, and the mocking laughter. I could lie down at the gate and let that cruel, distant laughter wrap around me, fill me, suffocate me, and I wouldn’t even fight it.
This must be what they feel like when I kill them.
The thought was like a slap to the face, and the flash of anger cleared my mind.
I wasn’t a screaming captive being dragged into the darkness. I wasn’t pleading and begging. If that’s what she expected, she was going to be disappointed. I was here to meet her, one monster to another.
The laughter faded, but I could feel it on the cusp of bursting forward again. My hands were sweaty; the broken skin stung where I had scraped my palms. Every muscle in my body was tense, every nerve sparking. I turned the key and stepped through the gate, made sure I could get out again before letting it swing closed. I kept the key ring out and the last key between my fingers, like they teach you to do in parking lots late at night.
The flashlight barely penetrated beyond the gate. I approached the stack of jars against the wall, choosing each step with care. The stone was rougher here, the walls more jagged, the floor treacherous with loose sand and gravel. It looked as though something had scooped great gouges out of the rock. I pressed the toe of my shoe into one depression, studied the parallel lines.
Almost like claw marks, I thought, with hollow disbelief.
I lifted my hand to measure the span of one trench on the wall. Small hands, whoever wielded those claws, no bigger than mine. The grooves were stained dark in places. I touched the stone lightly, curled my fingers away. If it was blood, it was long dry.
I inched forward, slowly passed the first stack of jars. Six large mason jars, the kind Melanie’s mother used for making pickles and preserves every fall, each sealed with a rusted metal lid. I pointed the flashlight down the tunnel, and something in the darkness rasped and shifted.
I froze. Took a step to the side, away from the jars.
There was a flutter of motion at the corner of my eye.
It was the sand. My heart jumped, beating wildly without my permission. The sand in the jars was moving, rasping and scraping behind the glass.
But when I looked at it directly, it settled with a whisper.
I turned my head, forced myself to look down the tunnel. The sand moved in a nervous dance at the edge of my vision. When I stared at it, it was still again.
A minute or two passed before I could make myself move forward.
The hiss of shifting sand followed me. The jars were all shapes and sizes, some new enough to have labels still clinging to them, others so old the glass was tinted green. I counted at first, numbers ticking nervously through my mind, but gave up when I got to fifty.
I squeezed myself gingerly through a gap between two precarious stacks, and the tunnel opened up. The flashlight didn’t reach very far, but I could see the walls had been scraped out in odd alcoves and hollows, the floor so uneven I had trouble choosing my steps. The stone took on a lumpy, diseased look, as though the mountain’s insides had erupted into boils and wounds, giving it a queasy fun house feeling. Every motion of the light caught another glint of glass, another shy shiver of sand, another jagged gap of rock.
I closed my eyes to steady myself, but the rustling of sand rose to an unbearable roar, so I snapped them open again. And I moved forward.
This is where they had found her.
The knowledge rose in a memory stolen from Edward Willow. His father had explained it to him as they had carried the wooden box between the first gate and the second. The elder Mr. Willow had come here with fellow hunters—cruel and violent men, he told his son, not to be trusted—because they had heard of a terrible creature hidden away in the mountain. She had been imprisoned here for nearly a hundred years, but she was unfathomably ancient, unlike any monster they had encountered before. The elder Mr. Willow and the others had come to kill her. She would make a magnificent prize for their collection, so unique and so vile, a foul withered head to hang in a place of honor.
When I glanced back I couldn’t see the gate anymore. I turned and the flashlight caught a bright glittering spot in the darkness, but lost it again.
A trophy, that was what they wanted. The elder Mr. Willow had wanted it too. He had wanted it until they found her cavern, and she spoke to him, and she told him there was a better way.
The cavern bristled with the susurrus of restless sand, and something else, a gentle clink like a wind chime. Metal on glass.
She had said to him: There is so much blood on your hands already, and still there are families in danger as yours once was, and still there are children whose mothers will betray them. There is a better way. That was why he took her out of the mine; he brought her back when he realized he could never control her. That brief taste of freedom had only made her angrier.
I shook my head to clear it. Willow’s memories were distracting and disjointed, a jigsaw of childish guilt and teenage rage, two dead parents and the monster who had taken their place.
The light caught a golden glint again.
A single yellow eye shone in the darkness.
I stopped. My shoe scuffed on stone. I drew in a long, shaky breath, the first I had taken in several minutes. My mouth was dry.
“Hi,” I said.
Her laughter was like thunder, rolling and strong. I felt it in the air, in my teeth, in the ripples of my sluggish blood.
“Most of them don’t make it this far down,” she said.
The sand in the jars fell still when she spoke. I was expecting an animal growl, ancient, wild, as wretched as the stench that filled the mine. But her voice was human. Ugly, phlegmatic, chain-smoker rough, but human. I had no trouble understanding her. She turned, and there were two yellow eyes before me, round and wide with rectangular black pupils.
Those yellow eyes, and the hump of a single shoulder, that was all I could see of her. I couldn’t see how large she was. Couldn’t see her feet, her hands, her mouth. She was cloaked in the shadows and I was very, very small.
“Where’s my boy?” she said.
“He couldn’t make it,” I said. Unconscious in a hospital bed, never to wake again. Limp and dead on the forest floor. I didn’t know if she was asking about Brian Kerr or Mr. Willow. I didn’t want to tell her what I had done.
“Come closer. Let me look at you.”
“I’m fine right here.”
She coughed and spat. “I want to see you. You are a pretty thing.”
She moved with lurching, unsteady steps, vanishing behind a stack of jars and reappearing on the other side, and there I could see more of her body. Her back was so bent her torso was nearly parallel to the floor. She wore filthy rags and a blanket stiff with grime. Gray hair hung in a dirty mat around her face. There was a sound like a sniff, the smacking of lips, but her face was hidden by a fold of cloth. She stepped behind a tower of jars again.
“Yes,” she said, her voice floating in the darkness. “I have not seen such a pretty thing in a very long time.”
I watched the spot where I had last seen her, but I couldn’t hear her footsteps. There was more space down the tunnel than I had realized. I couldn’t see how deep the cavern went.
“But you have before?” I said. “You’ve seen something like me?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and she laughed again, loud and hearty, ringing through the cavern. “Oh, yes, my dear. Did you think you were the only one? Did you think you were so very alone?”
&
nbsp; Yes, I thought, but I kept my mouth closed. The sand trembled. I took a step back, bumped my elbow into a precarious stack of jam jars sealed with wax.
“Oh, oh, my dear, it must be so very frightening.” Her voice was as rough as a fall of rocks, but there was a softness to it, a gentleness that crept under my skin and soothed my jittery nerves. She wasn’t a wild animal. She wasn’t a ravenous monster raging out of control with her own anger and spite. She was intelligent, and calm, and she knew about me.
“And you are so young. You have been alive barely a heartbeat.”
A little bit longer than that, by our standards, but I couldn’t say it out loud. The way she said so young made me feel like I was a child again, so small I had to reach up to grab my mother’s hand in the grocery store, when comfort had been looking up from the bewildering maze of legs and carts and shelves to see her smile and her eyes, to hear her say my name and tug me along. I swallowed down the sting at the back of my throat.
“By their standards,” she corrected gently. “But too short even by that measure. You are far too young to have suffered so cruel a fate.”
My vision blurred and I raised my hand, still gripping the keys, to scrub away tears before they fell. In her voice was all the pity I had been pretending wasn’t eating me from the inside, the childish wail of unfairness gathering in my chest like a summer storm.
“And why shouldn’t you rage? Why should you choke down this anger you so deserve?”
She was moving again, and that time I did hear the soft tap-tap of her footsteps, uneven, every step a slow pause and lurch, pause and lurch. She moved with a limp so pronounced it twisted her entire body. She stepped around a stack of jars, turning to fit through the narrow gap. I heard a long scrape—a rasp that set my teeth on edge—metal grinding on rock with slow, slow patience.
“You are too brief and too small to suffer so,” she said.
When she turned again, she was holding a large jar under one arm. With the other hand she tipped a handful of sand into it. Stray grains fell from the wall behind her, cascading softly from thin parallel scrapes in the wall. Her fingers—claws—clinked on the jar’s mouth. They were crooked and mismatched, oddly twisted, not smooth like Lyle’s.
“How it must hurt, my dear, my poor dear.”
Another step closer to the light and I had a better view of her hand. Her claws didn’t look like claws because they weren’t, not in the usual sense. The long blade twisting from her thumb was fashioned from a piece of rusted metal, and curving from her forefinger around the top of the jar was a yellow bone sharpened to a point.
“Oh my dear, my dear,” she said, the words like a chant. “Tell me how it hurts.”
I tore my gaze from her makeshift claws. “It doesn’t,” I said, a ragged whisper.
And how I wanted it to be true, but in my mind a different answer screamed: Yes, yes, it hurts. I hate it. I hate this alien body that bleeds and breathes only when I make it. I hate that everything I had before is now out of my reach, however little I had collected in seventeen short years of an unremarkable life.
“You are not alone, dear child, my dear. You do not have to feel this pain alone.”
The scream in my head became the screams of a dozen strangers led into darkness and trapped behind iron gates, then the strangers’ voices faded and there was only the scream of one girl surprised on a quiet street, face distorted in a windshield, streetlamp like a full moon overhead.
“You know there is a way to make it better.” She spoke with infinite patience, the kind of patience that came from being mother to a thousand recalcitrant children, not one of whom wanted to go to bed on time.
“I don’t,” I said.
“My child,” she said, “you do. Mother knows you do.”
There was her laughter again, gentle and fond. The sand quivered around me, dizzying and unsteady, the entire cavern coming to life. I squeezed my eyes shut. She did know. She knew what I needed to hear, knew what I had come to learn. She knew what I wanted, and she was laughing because it was such a simple thing, such a simple little thing for something so ancient and as fearsome as her. I only had to ask, and she would laugh again, and I would laugh with her, and everything would be better.
When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see her. My heart thumped—had it been still until that moment? I was losing track of my own pulse, losing the feel of blood in my veins. Every heartbeat, conscious or not, trembled in my throat and through my skin to sink into the stone. I couldn’t see her. Not her eyes, not the crooked hump of her shoulder, not her mismatched claws. The cavern was dark but not very wide. She couldn’t have slipped away.
I held my breath and listened. There was no tap-tap of feet—shoes? Bare feet wouldn’t make that sound. It was too solid, a click.
“I don’t know what I can do about it,” I said again. “That’s why I came to you.”
I aimed the flashlight into the shadows, looked forward and back. Took a couple of steps farther into the mine and stopped. With every movement I was too aware of the tight space growing tighter, as though the jars were shuffling behind me to close off my escape.
“I really don’t,” I said. I cleared my throat, hoped my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Know anything. I don’t know anything.”
“Oh, my child,” she said.
I spun around. The words slithered over my shoulder, teased the cup of my ear, but she wasn’t there. There were only the jars full of sand, shuddering at the corners of my eyes.
“How lonely it must be,” she said.
Her voice bounced and carried unpredictably. I turned again—my back to the gate now. I had to remember that, remember where the gate was. Down was in. Up was out.
“And if it is lonely now, how lonely it will be as years and years and years go by.”
“We’re supposed to be talking about me,” I said, “not you.”
Her laughter rippled through the sand. The more I cast the light around, looking for her, the more confused I became, every scraped alcove, every stack of jars taking the shape of a stooped old woman.
“Yes,” she said. “It was a human thing not too long ago, was it not? I can smell its blood. I can taste its breath. Mother knows. It cannot lie to Mother.”
A scrape, a scattering fall of sand on glass. Filling the jar. I edged forward and searched along the walls, in the dark spaces behind the stacks and piles. She had to be hiding somewhere.
I stepped sideways between the jars, back toward the gate. I had come too far in. I shouldn’t have put that much space between myself and the way out. That was stupid. Careless. I could hear the dying screams of Brian Kerr’s victims in my memories. I had brought them in here with me, but I was so used to the memories of strangers dying I had forgotten to listen.
“Yes,” I said. “I was human not that long ago.”
“I know, little lamb. Mother knows.”
Her breath was hot and rancid on the back of my neck.
I turned slowly, slowly, my heart jumping uncontrollably. I hadn’t heard her approach. I hadn’t see any flicker of motion from the corner of my eyes, hadn’t heard the tap-tap of her feet on the floor. But she was there, barely two feet away, stinking and crooked and grinning. She had a fat round jar under one arm, and from the other hand she was dribbling a trickle of sand through its mouth. Her fingers were long and filthy, stained dark deep in the creases, each one ending in a knot of scar tissue and a fashioned claw. Twists of metal, sharpened bones, curving dirty and bloody from her fingertips. Fresh red blood welled from one knuckle.
“Did you bring me a gift?” she asked.
I stepped back, kicked a jar behind me. It rocked but didn’t fall. “What kind of gift?”
“Gifts of stupid girls who ask questions they already know the answers to,” she said.
“Yeah, that was kind of a stupid question.” My voice was shaking; I pretended not to notice. “But I have another one that’s not as stupid.”
“Look at you,” she s
aid, laughing. How could I have thought she sounded like my mother? There was no kindness in her voice, no gentleness. “The dead thing with all the questions. Three keys and three locks and it thinks it can ask me questions.”
She stepped closer.
“Go on, then,” she said. “I like a present that talks with words.”
I spoke quickly, before I could change my mind, “Why do you let some of them go? The ones who don’t die or go insane. You let them walk away. Why?”
“Why?” She was laughing again. “Why? Why? It wants to know why?”
“Yes. I want to know why.”
The sand in the jars hissed around me. I flinched one way, then the other, but there was no space for me to shrink away. When I stepped back, she stepped forward. I didn’t want her near me. I didn’t want her close enough to touch. Her feet, hidden behind her cloak of rags, clicked on the stone. There was something wrong with her legs.
“That is not what it wants. Nobody comes to Mother to ask questions.”
The jars quieted.
I stepped back, and again. I couldn’t remember which way was out. I didn’t know if I was moving uphill or down. My foot crunched on a broken jar. She caught me with those yellow eyes, and I stopped.
“Ask me what it wants, dead thing. Even a dead thing can ask what it wants.”
I swallowed.
“Oh, my dear, dearie dear,” she said. “Let Mother take its pain away. You know what it will become if it keeps it for itself, greedy little creature.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t make myself speak.
“It knows, it does. I can taste its fear. I can taste how much it wants. All the wicked, wicked things in the world and now it can see them. Now it can hunt them. Stalk them through the night and they won’t even know it’s there. They won’t ever see the nasty black thing behind the pretty child’s mask until they’re already dying. I can taste how much it wants that.”
“No,” I said, and I was shaking my head, and I was remembering what I had seen in Ingrid’s house, that vision of myself powerful and strong, moving over the landscape like a shade that left no trace except the bodies of fallen killers. “No, stop, that’s not what—”
