She’s singing, they’re all singing, her kindred gathering around, glowing all fairylike, dancing, too. And it’s a sound sweet as it is terrifying. It’s a hook that can land you, lance you so deep.
She touches me once and hesitates. ‘Your agreement is sound, my sweet little boy. But we can still play.’
I blink and there’s Thom, and there’s Dougie. And they’re looking at me eyes so wide it’d be funny if we weren’t piss-ourselves scared.
‘Run,’ a little voice whispers.
‘Run,’ I say. And the others are already running, and things are coming out of the dark: all teeth and claw and leering grin.
And that forest seems awful big, all at once, and we’re awful small and racing. Snot and tears frozen to our faces, lungs as raw as the winter-hard earth. Trees slapping us, branches snapping and grabbing. Wind a screaming pressure at our backs only to flip—light as the wind and as swift to turning—and whip our faces like we’re the ones running in circles and maybe we are to that sound of children that aren’t children singing.
We run, and we run.
I don’t know when I fall, but I do and something grabs me, and lifts me as though I’m feather light, and I struggle. Like a tiny bird might struggle in the hands of a giant. Cold hands. Hands colder than you could imagine grip me.
‘My, you’re all grown up, aren’t you?’
And she laughs and it’s the sweetest, most terrible sound.
I wake in my bed, my chin bloody, my body a length of bruise given arms and legs and a voice to squeak. Out of the sheets I jump, and they’re tight around me. I struggle free, there’s a boot still on one foot and muddy footprints leading to my bed. The room’s cold, the window’s open and first light is shining through.
I check on Thom. He’s all right too. Sleeping, thumb in his mouth. Doesn’t even stir, but he’s breathing. There’s specks of blood on his pillow, I know we lost a little blood. But that’s all right.
I’ve half-convinced myself it’s a dream when I go downstairs. Dain’s left me a note.
You should know better than to play with children.
CHAPTER 37
THOM’S LESSONS ARE going well. He’s settled in, knows the people who like their lawn mown just how, and who will be surly, and who is lazy, and just how much nonsense Mary can stand in her shop—and it’s always more from him. And I’m trusting him to doing things by himself. Why, I’m almost a man of leisure with time to amble.
Leisure can be a dangerous thing.
I’m near Main Street when I get hit round the ankles. I almost tumble, but as tackles go it’s weak. I’m yanking my leg free and he’s shushing me with an urgent hiss.
‘You,’ I say, and feel like a halfwit.
Grainer looks at me. Wild-eyed, desperate, but still with teeth to his grin. Even this far from home, he’s the old Day Boy let loose. He’s still my unwelcome future come to meet me.
‘Me,’ he says. ‘All the way from the city.’
‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘No, I shouldn’t, but after you was caught they got us all. Broke in and chased us out and worse. I was lucky to get away. Skill too, a’course, on the roof and off; but luck mostly. Now I’m here.’
‘You been travelling all this time?’
He nods, gestures out towards the main road. ‘It ain’t good out there but the train line’s easy enough to follow, even it’s dangerous.’ Another hint of the old swagger. ‘Things wait along that line that even fire don’t scare none too much. Creatures all tooth and cruel-eyed. Some of them men.’ He wipes at his brow, he’s half a finger missing, the little one, its end an angry raw stump. ‘I need you to put me up.’
‘I can’t,’ I say, but it don’t sound all that convincing to me. ‘I can’t.’
‘But you’re home and still got your Master. You’re someone of consequence and matter.’ He looks so down, fumbles with his hat—where he got it out there or who he got it from, I don’t know—there’s a bit of act to the clumsy and the humble. This isn’t Grainer, not as I remember him. It is as well, though.
Must be too quiet for too long, because he looks up at me.
‘My time’s almost up, our house is too full,’ I say, ‘and my Master would know, soon as he opened his eyes. He’d smell you. He’d smell the red dirt on you. He’d gobble you up.’ I know he most probably wouldn’t, but I like a little drama, and I don’t want him too cocky.
His head dips lower.
And I take a deep breath. Don’t like what’s coming, but I say it anyway. ‘I know where you might be able to stay.’
‘You do?’
Certain looks him up and down. Shakes his head, but I can tell it’s for show.
‘You done much yard work?’ he asks. ‘Speak truthful now.’
Grainer shakes his head. ‘Been a Day Boy, been a scrambler, don’t know much about yards.’
‘You’ll learn quick enough. There’s chooks that need feeding over yonder.’ Certain points to the pen. ‘Fill that bucket hanging from the fence with the seed you’ll find in the box in the pen. Then scatter it across the pen, handfuls. The birds ain’t fussy. Do you think you can do that?’
Grainer nods. Certain frowns, grabs Grainer’s hand, studies that bloody stump of a finger. ‘We’ll see to the proper cleaning of this, first.’
‘I’m right with it,’ Grainer says.
Certain shakes his head. ‘You’ll be right with it until your hand drops right off.’
He treats the boy and cleans the wound and it’s a painful business. But when it’s done and Grainer’s got his colour back he says his thanks and gets to work.
‘What you doing putting this on me?’ Certain says, but he don’t sound too angry.
‘He’s a good boy,’ I say. ‘Got me out of trouble in the Red City.’ Got me into trouble more like, but I don’t say it. Me being caught ended up far worse for him and his boys. I owe him a debt, as I see it. I pay them when I can.
Certain considers him, working his way clumsily in the yard, but working nonetheless. ‘You know I ain’t an orphanage.’
‘He takes me as a boy who knows how to work,’ I say.
‘What about you?’ Certain studies my face, and I try to look like it’s nothing. ‘You know what you’re giving up. Only one spare room in this house. Think what you’re doing here. Even if I’d consider it, they won’t let that many of our kind work together.’
I know it, and I don’t need him to say it. ‘Some choices you just have to make because they’re right. Not because they’re right for you.’
Certain squints at me. Measures my words like I’m a man, not a boy; like I’ve earned that.
‘He can stay then,’ Certain says. ‘You go and tell him the good news.’
Certain don’t look at me after that as he walks inside.
‘You’re staying here,’ I tell Grainer, and the old boy nods.
‘Certain will work you hard, but it’s good work.’
‘This your place?’ Grainer says. ‘This your out?’
‘You going to work harder than you eve
r worked.’
‘Good,’ Grainer says.
I nod. ‘You better go in.’
And he does, and I look at that house like it’s the last time I’ll ever see it. And, in a way, it is.
Dain wakes me in the middle of the night, no gentleness, cold hands to slap the dreams from you. I hear him sniffing at the air. ‘You’ve dust on you boy. You smell of the Red City.’
‘Had a visitor today,’ I tell him, yawn, get to roll back on my side, all slumbrous.
‘Out with it,’ he says, pulling me up. ‘Make yourself some tea, you look ill.’
‘A fella does when he’s snatched from sleep.’
‘Enough complaints. Tea, then talk.’
I’m drinking that tea and telling him about Grainer. When he’s done I can see he is at once angry and proud.
‘Sometimes you please me well,’ he says. ‘But this is no good for you.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
Dain’s brows furrow a bit. ‘Him showing up now, I don’t like it; the time’s all wrong. Or too right.’
‘Nah, he’s just showed up. Like them cold children.’ I say it casual, but I’m still embarrassed at them. ‘Like the winter winds. Some things happen because they happen.’
‘Winter winds don’t just come and snatch away your hopes.’
‘They do at that,’ I say. And whose hopes is he talking about, his or mine?
‘I could talk to him. Draw out the truth.’ He could, too, just like drawing out blood. I don’t know what truth it would be that he might find, and I don’t know just how deep he would need to go, but I sense that there might be death in it, accidental or deliberate. And I won’t have that.
I shake my head. ‘Draw what out of him? The long miles, the dark things what he saw? I could see all that in his eyes. I could see the truth. He found me out, because he knew I would help him, like he helped me in that city. I’m not going to fail someone that’s made the effort of all that road.’
Dain laughs. ‘What are you going to be, boy? What are you going to become?’
‘What everyone that lives long enough becomes. Have to grow up sometime.’
Dain rests his chin upon a hand, looks down at me. ‘Perhaps I’ve judged you wrong. Your flight in the city turned my head against it…but still, perhaps, you might rise to Mastery.’
I feel my eyes grow wide. ‘You think?’
‘I’m not one to speak lightly of such things.’
There’s all sorts of light and heaviness vying for supremacy in my guts. I never thought this might be a path to which I walked. And now it’s laid up ahead, grey stones bedded, stretched to a horizon beneath the Sun.
But do I want it? Do I want that cage? Do I want that hunger?
‘Think on it,’ Dain says.
Think on it! It’s all I can think on. A pup spinning after its tail. Yes and no. To feed…or to feed?
A few days later I visit Certain. Just a social thing, Certain don’t need me, and we don’t play at it. We’re both straight-up kind of men.
Sit in the shade of his verandah, spring’s settling in. Winter’s slipping away, there’s already a bit of heat to the Sun. Just the suggestion of summer, but that’s the weight of the land now, it’s where we’re heading no doubt at all. I’m wondering where I’ll be come summer. Seemed so long away, and now it isn’t.
We’re sitting there. Not as man and boy, but two men. Well, that’s how I’m feeling it. Not much need to talk, I’ve a cider in one hand, just drinking it, enjoying the cold against the pale heat.
‘He working out?’ Grainer’s in the yard seeing to a fence that I’d meant to fix a week ago, and he looks like he knows what he’s doing. I can tell he knows we’re watching, that he’s not quite as relaxed as he could be, or ought to be. But who’s to blame him?
‘Yeah. You weren’t wrong.’
‘Fella that can walk here from the Red City all on his own has depths,’ I say.
Certain laughs. ‘Like you don’t?’
Nah, if I had depths I’d know what I was becoming. I’d know how to choose between monster and man.
CHAPTER 38
‘SO WHO ARE you inviting to the dance?’ Grove asks.
Now I look at him I can see he’s had a growth spurt: there’s more than a sprinkling of stubble on his chin and he’s awful proud of it. He’s rubbing that hair like it’s some sort of lucky charm. Me, I’m a long ways off beards and I can feel it. I never liked him looking down on me, and now it’s from higher up. But Grove don’t have a cruel bone in his body and I’m not going to punish him for nature’s endowments. Hard work being so magnanimous, though.
‘Didn’t know I had to invite anyone,’ I say. And to be honest, my mind is still too full of that dance with the cold children to ponder long on the subject.
‘I’m gonna ask Anne,’ says Grove.
And all of a sudden I’m interested. Thom’s cocking his eye.
‘You don’t want to do that,’ I say.
Grove frowns, and I can’t quite believe that we’ve ever been friends, not close ones, anyway. ‘Too late,’ he says, the knot of wrinkles still fair in the middle of his forehead. ‘I’ve already asked her and she said yes.’
Don’t know if I’ve ever felt so cold in my guts. ‘She said yes?’
Grove nods his head.
‘Good fer you,’ I say. ‘I don’t intend on asking anyone.’
And I don’t. Doesn’t mean that the week before isn’t a misery. Days getting longer means more time for worry. What’s Anne doing saying yes to the likes of Grove? I know what she’s doing. I rub at my smooth chin. Doesn’t help that the town’s all at fretting too, getting ready for the dance and the visitors that it brings. The central cellars are cleared out, the great safe sleeping places for visiting Masters are set up. There’s banners and bunting, and all that get-up for a festival that lasts but a night.
And Dain works us hard. We’re scrubbing floors, cleaning windows and walls, hunting out dust, and it’s a fine thing for hiding. Not a spiderweb in the house, not a drop of dust. Our hands are raw with our labours, cracked as the ground in a big dry.
The night before, the Night Train stops at the station, and the Masters come out. The big ones, the lords of greater towns, and even some from the city itself, tall and small, shuffling and stepping proud, dressed as fine as the night, suits and canes and the latest fashions. Madigan’s there, he gives me a look with a bit of judgment to it, but I ignore him.
Dain and all the others are there to greet them. Mayor Aldridge makes a speech short enough to get through without too much mumbling.
Me and Thom are dressed in our best, better than our best, for Dain received a package a few days before. Two suits and hats, proper fedoras, in big round boxes. We’re looking right dapper and even though mine’s a bit big, Dain says I’ll grow into it. Even Thom seems satisfied.
Dain don’t say much, looks at me, and says something about this being my last dance as a Day Boy, and that a man needs a suit.
One thing I don’t do is visit Anne. Don’t go to li
sten to her music, don’t hear her laughter. And there’s an ache to that stubbornness that goes right down to my toes. But I’m not bending.
They’re all there: none in the town would miss this. Certain’s in a jacket an inch short at the arms, his pants fresh pressed. He picks at the collar of his shirt like he’s still a boy. I’m picking at mine, feeling too hot in this damn thing, it’s a glove that never fit and has decided, all of a sudden to tighten. Grainer’s absent though, and I can understand why. Cast-outs don’t always want to be found.
Anne’s arm in arm with Grove, in a dress I’ve not seen before. It makes her look…something I can’t describe except if someone was to bump me, I’d burst. She’s with him, but my face is burning.
But she’s not there for dancing. Grove leads her to the piano, and there, in front of dignitaries and Masters, she plays.
She starts off casual and simple, something for toe-tapping, there’s a beat, a tension, a sort of low melody almost like a growl of thunder that is never really small, because it has intentions. It swells, makes the skin prickle, and there’s nothing in that hall but her and her music.
She never sounded like this before. Not in all the times I’ve sneaked a listen, all these years. Even that time at the dinner where she played for us, or the time before during the storm—now it seems like she was only practising. Like all this crowd lifts her, like she’s found some place beyond her skill—even hers—and the right time to use it. It’s like she’s grabbed my heart and squeezed it hard.
Music has that. Good music, good song, and this is the best. This is the choir in the City in the Shadow of the Mountain. This is pure and wild all at once.
And then she is done. There is applause, loud and long, and every Master is looking at her. Madigan is writing something in his notebook. Sobel’s nodding his head slowly, and then he turns and looks at me, and smiles, and it is the sort of smile that makes you question just how many hours you might have left of your life. And I get a sense of something terrible coming.
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