Latchkey

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “But you have the kit?” Glory asked.

  Isabel’s ghost-destroying kit, a relic of her Archivist days. To draw holding rings around a ghost in water, fire, milk, and blood. And speak the words that would reduce a ghost to nothing, sending it on to Catchkeep’s jurisdiction. Like the harvesting-knife, she hadn’t used the kit in years, but she carried it with her all the same.

  She patted the pocket of the Archivist-coat.

  “Still, we want to be careful,” Sairy said, aiming her voice back over one shoulder at Glory and Bex. “No salt on you. No scratches.”

  “How stupid do you think we are?” Bex asked, affronted.

  “Relax. I’m just saying there’s no room for screwups. We have a job to do.”

  “It won’t be nice down there,” Isabel said.

  Bex snorted. “Nice.”

  “No, I mean it. I brought you because I can trust you. No running off. No backtalk. No heroics. I don’t care what you see down there, or what you think you see. We stick together and we get it done. Yes?”

  They nodded.

  “Which brings me to: we’re going to double-check ourselves for scratches once we get out of these thorns, before we so much as touch that hatch. I brought bandages.”

  They kept clearing ground, making a path just wide enough to walk through single file. After a while Isabel’s heel came down on something that clanged dully, from which the overgrowth was more easily cleared.

  It was a metal circle, roughly four feet across, set into the frame of a slightly wider metal ring, with a raised wheel in the center. Bex reached for the handle, but Sairy stopped her. “First we check for blood, remember?”

  It proved too dark in the deep shade of the brickfall, so they went back out into the light, picking single-file along the path they’d made. Hugging the edge of the brickfall so the garden sentries wouldn’t see them, they checked each other over. Sairy and Glory had some minor scratches, quickly wiped dry, but nothing that Isabel deemed dangerous. Bandaged, they ducked back in.

  Isabel gripped the wheel, braced her feet, and tugged sideways. Pain sizzled up one side of her body from the leg to the back wall of her skull, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. She stuck one foot on the outer ring and tried again. Nothing. Sairy came and grabbed on too and when they tried to turn the wheel together it made a paint-peeling grinding sound, which was better than nothing, so they caught their breath and tried again, and the noise got worse, so they hauled harder on the wheel, and at last it popped loose with a shriek of protesting metal. Six full turns of the wheel and the door was ready to open.

  “Ready?”

  Glory gave a little nod. All worried eyebrows and determined jaw. chewing the inside of her cheek. “How far in?”

  “The passage? A couple hundred paces maybe. There’ll be dried ghostgrass all around it. Bundles and a perimeter. And this whole field of it we planted up here, that’ll be weakening anything that as much as thinks of coming through. Seriously, when the raiders get here, this is going to be the safest place in town.” Isabel raised one finger. “But. You want to turn back, go help the others with training, it stays between us. Same goes for all of you.”

  They weren’t upstarts anymore, and weakness no longer meant death, but their pride in their strength was entrenched, alive and well. Isabel saw no reason not to respect that. It wasn’t like she’d come through her own transition to normalcy unscathed.

  “Turn back?” said Sairy, smiling sweetly. “Sure, why not. You first.”

  Glory laughed, and the clench in her jaw relaxed, and it was settled. They lifted the hatch door and peered into the dark belowground. It was like looking down into the way way back Before. Or it would have been if they could see anything.

  But it was dark, which meant it was empty. The ceiling hadn’t fallen in. For a moment Isabel felt like she might faint with relief.

  “Do this,” said Isabel, and squeezed her eyes shut, buying time while she recovered. “Hold it and count thirty. Then open. It helps.”

  Obediently they shut their eyes and counted. On three Isabel opened hers. On the off chance that there was a ghost wandering around down there, she didn’t want it spilling out onto four slag-for-brains squatting in the trampled thorns with their eyes scrunched shut like little kids playing seek-and-find.

  But she knew that was stupid. A ghost strong enough to even approach this part of the tunnels, so near the ghostgrass barricade, would have a presence they could feel from here. Frostbite and vertigo, unmistakable. A smell like someone had left a window open on an early spring morning. And a ghost that strong—

  Glory was staring down into the dark. “We jump?”

  “There’s a ladder. It’s bolted into the wall.”

  Already Sairy was lowering a lamp as Bex scattered ghostgrass down the hole.

  They climbed down the ladder and stood in the circle of lamplight, casting around half-blind. Not much daylight made it in under the brickfall and through the hatch. Most of what Isabel’s senses reported to her was a smell of ancient damp, the distant rustling of what was probably mice, and an impression of trackless dark receding before her. When the rustling stopped, the silence shouldered in, absolute. Without sound at least to anchor her, the darkness irised open at her feet. She felt like there was a pressure at her back, compelling her forward, and she was one wrong step from falling forever.

  Beside her, she could hear the others’ breathing quicken. They’ve never been underground before, she realized. None of them. She might be the only person alive in all the world who’d ever set foot in these tunnels, and even she was acutely aware of the depth of their descent and the weight of the earth above their heads.

  “Get the lamps lit,” she said, and they began igniting the other wicks off the one that was burning, while Isabel stood by, one hand on the harvesting-knife, on full alert for silver flickering in the deeper dark. But there was none.

  The widening of the light revealed no ghosts, no anything. Wide halls. White walls gone greyblack with lichen and mold. Ceiling topping out a few feet above her head. The floor looked to have been tiled, once, with some kind of synthetic that didn’t rot, just broke apart in shards and lay like that, like chunks of eggshell mortared together with mud.

  Whatever this place was built of, the earthquake apparently hadn’t been strong enough to touch it. More fallen bricks and stuff on the floor than there had been the last time she’d come here, but there was no evidence of further cave-ins. Just hold on a few more days, she asked the tunnels silently. That’s all I need.

  “Now we’re going to fan out a little. Gradually. See what we see, and secure a perimeter. Bring the ghostgrass.”

  “Already got mine,” Sairy said, shouldering a bag. The others each took one and awaited further instruction.

  Isabel raised her lamp. A few long strides from where they stood, the shadow of an opening yawned. The toppled remains of a thick white door, busted off its hinges from either great force or great age. The massive dent in the middle of the fallen door strongly suggested the former.

  Isabel took point, gaining the slope of the fallen door and stepping into the darkness beyond. She’d been down here before, so that part wasn’t new. What was new this time was a tingling in the backs of her hands like she was plunging headlong into a trap. She didn’t know what she was expecting to be different. The half-ton of door to leap back up into its frame, slicing her neatly in half as she stepped through. The floor on the far side to drop away into a sinkhole the moment she put her weight on it.

  Neither of those things happened, but that weird feeling didn’t go away. She’d never felt it down here before, years ago when she’d been down here, but she knew at once where she’d felt it recently. Then she realized that the sensation was more or less localized to her knife-hand, that her knife-hand had unconsciously dropped to the hilt of the harvesting-knife, and that the sensation was buzzing its way up into her hand from there.

  “Careful,” she said, lifting her hand delib
erately away. “Ground’s uneven here.”

  She could hear the ex-upstarts’ caught breath as they passed through that doorway, as they paused to stare as they stepped over the dented place in the door. That door was solid metal, thicker than Isabel’s torso, and probably weighed well more than all four girls combined. Whatever’d made the dent had plowed into that door like a fist into bread dough, and it gave them pause. Recognizing significance, unknowing what it signified.

  Bex’s hushed voice at her back: “What did this?”

  “No idea. Something a long time dead, anycase. This place is older than anywhere you’ve been.”

  “You know what else is a long time dead, though?” Glory said. Glancing around nervously. “Ghosts.”

  “You realize you’re practically more ghostgrass than person right now, yes?” Sairy told her.

  Isabel cleared the rubble on the far side of the doorway and swung the lamp in a slow half-arc, assessing the space beyond. “Clear,” she said. “Come on through.”

  She held the light for them. Glory swatted a grinning Sairy on her way though. Bex followed in silent concentration, visibly assessing and cataloguing everything her calculating gaze fell upon.

  Through the doorway the tunnel branched off, left and right, the lamplit view down each direction dissolving in the grainy dark.

  There was something set into the wall behind them, beside the doorway. A black rectangle made of a different synthetic than the floor, about the size of Isabel’s hand, its purpose indeterminate. Long since smashed, anyway, maybe by whatever had wrecked the door.

  Isabel had seen such rectangles beside doors before, in the ghosts’ memories. Locks that you touched in certain patterns to open.

  On the hatch side there’d been nothing. This door, all however many pounds of it, was only designed to open one way.

  Glory gaped, taking in what the light was showing her. “What is this place?”

  “What you see,” Isabel said, straining her eyes at the middle distance. Not wanting to risk getting snuck up on by something she was too light-blind to notice coming. “A Before-place. Long dead.”

  She wished she could pause to think without raising suspicion. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been here more recently than she actually had. Which made no sense.

  “This place is weird,” Bex said. “Like—” she shook her head— “like it’s watching us.”

  “It smells bad,” Glory added.

  “We’re breathing the Before,” Sairy said.

  They all fell silent.

  No surprise to Isabel. Sweetwater being built on tunnels wasn’t news to them, but the sheer age and size and Before-ness of the place, once you were down in it, was staggering. Even in this little closed-off section, lamplit and full of activity, it felt to Isabel like they’d all been swallowed by something vast and silent, something that was now holding its breath to see what they would do.

  “Come on,” she said. She raised the lamp leftward. Light glanced off those long white walls, furred with lichen. The tunnel didn’t look any less pounded deeper down. “That way’s the ghost-passage. About fifty paces down, like I said.”

  Sairy was squinting down the right-hand hall. “And that way?”

  “Not our concern.” Your guess is as good as mine. “The left dead-ends. Easy to secure.”

  Glory looked dubious. “At a ghost-passage.”

  “At a contained ghost-passage.”

  “We’re good,” said Sairy, elbowing Glory hard in the ribs. “Let’s do this.”

  Isabel led them down the left-hand passage.

  “Said something here once,” Glory was saying, facing a section of wall. A good third of the outward-facing bricks had come out, mostly off to one side. It looked like the mouth of someone who’d eaten the solid right hook that lost them a fistfight. “Under this mossy junk. The bricks are a different color.”

  “Not now,” Sairy said, pulling her away. “Keep up.”

  “What about all this mess on the floor?” Bex asked. Looking down at the rubble and edged shards of busted floor-stuff. “It looks like the Ragpicker threw up in here. Where’re they going to sleep?”

  Isabel stopped. “You three work on that. Be quick but not too quick. Don’t cut yourselves on anything. I’m going to check on that ghost-passage.”

  They set to work immediately.

  “You need a hand?” Sairy asked her.

  “You stay here. Really this is more to scare bored kids away from messing with the ghost-passage than anything. If it was still active, with actual ghosts going in and out of it, we’d know.”

  She held her lamp high. Its glow reached a little way before her field of vision dissolved into a slurry of darkness and what small glints the lamplight picked out on something farther in.

  One of the glints moved.

  Isabel narrowed her eyes down the tunnel. Raised and lowered the lamp and the light slid up and down the length of something silver. Again the slight small movement when the light touched bottom. The hell?

  Closer, she found that she was right. It was no ghost at all.

  At least not anymore.

  What she stood before was a four-foot-long streak of what looked like dull silver paint, if paint were the texture of honey and Isabel didn’t know better.

  The ghost-blood ran down the wall in tacky rivulets, thickest around the height of her chest, and sprayed up from there and outward, as if—

  Seized by a sudden surmise, she glanced down at the thing lying at the bottom, the size of Isabel’s hands put together side-by-side, less silver than the rest. As though the silver had drained from it, leaving a grayish residue.

  She picked it up—it felt not quite like loose skin, but not quite like slightly cool, slightly clammy fabric either—and shoved it in a pocket of her Archivist-coat before Sairy found some excuse to come back and noticed the empty eyeholes and the gaping mouth and the fact that it wasn’t made of fabric at all.

  But first she couldn’t resist giving it one quick glance. The gray of it was tinged faintly orangeish where its hair would’ve been, and there were still a few faint lashes around where the eyes belonged.

  The place where the stump of its neck ended was cleanly severed and—from the look of the spray on the wall—with some force. The rest of its body was gone.

  Quickly, Isabel grabbed a cloth bandage from her pocket and scrubbed the silver from the wall. It didn’t come off so much as smear around. Then she shouldered the bag of ghostgrass and walked the rest of the way down the hall.

  There, as expected, was the waypoint.

  In Isabel’s experience, each ghost-passage looked a little different. Most of the ones that actually resembled doors were the ones she herself had made to look like doors. Left to their own devices, to be formed by whatever forces usually were behind their creation, they might look like anything. Places where the fabric of the world, for whatever reason, ripped. The one up on the ledge at Execution Hill was a crack in the cliffside. The one at the dry well was the well itself. The one under the fallen bridge was a perfect ring of suns-and-moons growing in a field of them, easiest to spot in winter when all the other surrounding flowers died.

  This one was a place in the tunnel where, by all rights, the tunnel should have continued, on and on into the mazy dark. Except that at some point the ceiling had caved in, leaving a fall of broken bricks, all painted white, or white’s remainder, on one side.

  Gray light shone through the cracks from nowhere, pulsing faintly.

  No sign of any ghosts.

  “All clear down here,” she called up. “Keep working up there. I’m going to set up this end of the perimeter, then work my way back up to you. I want to put ghostgrass the whole way across the hall to mark the cleared area on both sides. Ghosts or no, we may as well give people a line to stay behind. It—”

  She froze.

  There’d been more ghostgrass here before. She knew there had. It wouldn’t grow underground, so she’d scattered pl
enty at the waypoint, and hung bundles on the projecting bricks of the cave-in, before planting the barricade above. Most of it was still there, no question, but at least three bundles had walked off somehow, and something prickled down her spine to look at those empty places. Nobody came down here. Not since the ghostgrass barricade had gone up. Years ago.

  Then again, this place was probably crawling with mice. Mice made nests out of grass. She’d have to keep a close eye on their supply and their perimeter once they moved the townspeople in. Couldn’t be too careful.

  “Isabel?”

  “Nothing. Thought I forgot to bring my ghostgrass,” she lied. “Never mind.”

  Hastily she began hanging the ghostgrass bundles over some of the bricks, doubling down on the ones that were already there before. When that was done she’d go back up to the others and mark out the other edge of the perimeter.

  After a few minutes she realized she was still stuffing ghostgrass in amid the rubble of the cave-in. So she stopped. Put the rest of the ghostgrass back in the bag. She was weirdly dizzy, both hands tingling and her stomach in knots.

  On her way back up the tunnel, Isabel glanced over her shoulder despite herself. The waypoint remained empty, dim and gray, shimmering gently like a candle afloat in a bowl of water, throwing shadows off of collapsed little cairns of brick. That sense of waiting watchfulness intensified.

  Suddenly, Isabel didn’t want to have that ghost-passage at her back. At all. She dropped her hand to the hilt of the harvesting-knife—and jerked it away, startled to find the knife practically quivering in its sheath. As always, to look at it, it didn’t seem to be moving. But how else to describe the compulsion it laid on her? It was like when Squirrel would stare at her for table-scraps, drilling his gaze into the back of her head until she turned around. Like that, but a whole lot stronger.

  Under the ghostgrass bracelets, Isabel’s wrists began to itch terribly. Her ankles. Her neck. Her palm, where it was set to the hilt of the harvesting-knife. No—to the ghostgrass wrapped around the hilt of the harvesting-knife.