by David Mellon
Coal put his hand on the front gate latch, without a glance in her direction.
“I warned you!” she cried as she swung with all her might, striking the man across the shoulder; the hook at the end of the poker ripped a hole in his coat.
Coal pulled the iron from Adi’s hands and pitched it into the fire. He touched the gash in his coat and looked in wonder at the blood upon his fingertips, black in the firelight.
The girl struck at him with her fists and then her nails, trying to reach his face.
“Enough!” cried Coal.
He grabbed her wrists behind her and pulled till she was bent backward. His face loomed over hers.
“Don’t you EVER do that again!” he cried.
The ground beneath their feet started to tremble, with a groaning of wood and stone, as if the house was rising up on its foundation and then falling back with a grinding thud. The windows exploded, showering the ground with glass.
His arms tight around her, Coal squeezed the girl’s ribcage. Adi looked up at the man. Unable to breathe, she managed, “Give me back my brothers.”
Staring into the girl’s eyes, he shook his head.
“Too late.”
Chapter 5
Adi woke up where she had fallen, in the tall grass next to the front gate. She’d been dreaming about . . . something. She couldn’t remember now. She opened her eyes. There were larks circling in the sky high above her. The gray clouds were just beginning to blush crimson.
She sat bolt upright.
“Xander. Xavier!” She looked around her.
The man was gone.
So was the house.
In its place were a few charred timbers on a dark square. A slab of the foundation protruded from the ground; the air was stale with the stench of damp cinders.
She caught sight of her nightgown, hanging upon her, torn and filthy. She remembered the finger in the box.
Adi cried hard, heaving and sobbing, until the gold pocket watch in her hand reminded her that she had no time to be frightened or amazed.
She fumbled the thing open—but it was cold and still.
“But what if I wind it?”
She did. It made no difference. The thing sat in her hand like a stone.
She looked up again at the sky, trying to gauge the hour. If it had been an Indian sky she would have been able to tell to the minute what time it was, but this European light was still strange to her. “Don’t think it’s much after five, though.”
Rubbing her arms against the morning chill, she tried to think what to do.
Riddles.
“He said there were riddles!”
Four clicks on the stem opened up the panel behind the portrait. There were the two thin disks.
Holding it close in the pale light, she could make out lines of tiny engraved letters. She read the first riddle out loud:
“Men with no fingers have no time to linger,
when the devil with four knees,
to be free of its own fleas,
must like a witch with no broom,
fall to its doom.”
“What in the world?” muttered Adi. She glanced at the other three riddles. Madness. With every line they grew more incomprehensible.
Below the last one, she saw one single line of very small type. It read:
“Clues you can’t ignore, you may find the fifth if you plot the four.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “That makes it all clear.”
Much of what she remembered the man saying had to do with how much time she would have to search for the boys. She closed the portrait and remembered how to hold the stem in and turn the clock face around.
Beneath the little crystal squares, there was now a row of numbers—137980800. Like the watch face, the numbers weren’t moving either.
“What did he say? That it would . . . count down to the last second. So if these are seconds, how many days does that add up to?” She blew out her cheeks. “I may be good at language. I can’t say the same for numbers.”
She took up a burned twig from the ground, dropped to her knees, and began doing figures on a paving stone.
She did the whole thing twice. She began to do it again, but stopped herself. She stared at the numbers. Unless she was mistaken, the watch was telling her she had four years, four months, and thirteen days.
She clicked the disks back in place and shut the lid.
“At six, I’m not allowed to speak. That’s what he said.” She put her head in her hands. “Oh, God! Please let that not be one of their fingers.” She felt awful for saying it, though. It was someone’s finger in that box. A child’s, from the look of it. “But how could he expect me not to speak? Or write? It’s mad!” she said, louder, as if to protest the dictate.
She looked around at the wreckage of Tillie’s house. “It’s not the only mad thing that’s happened.” She kicked at the ashes.
“Oh, Tillie. I’m so sorry.” She looped the watch chain over her head and hung the infernal thing around her neck.
She looked out toward the road. To the right, maybe a quarter-mile distant, she could make out the dark silhouette of the city of Saint Clouet. She had no idea what was in the other direction.
“Where else to start, if not in town?”
There was a crow standing on what remained of the garden fence. He cawed loudly and flew across the road to the roof of an abandoned house. Right beside the gate, Adi saw, there was the birdcage. The little yellow bird began chirping inside.
If that was not confusing enough, neatly folded over the fence was the dress she’d been embroidering. She held it up by the arms and let it unfold. There were no buttons on the sleeves, but other than a few unfinished blossoms, it was presentable.
“Better than what I have,” she said, looking down at the disaster that was her nightgown.
With the last bit of water in the trough around back, Adi bathed herself as quick as she could.
She put on the dress, thankful to have some clothes. Though, truly, this was as baffling as anything that had happened to her. This man, Coal. He kidnaps the boys, and burns down the house.
“And then he leaves me a dress.”
Back at the front gate, Adi opened the birdcage. The little yellow bird just sat on his perch looking out.
“I know, sweetie. But I think we have to.”
Lifting up the hem of her dress, Adi looked down at her bare feet. “Too bad you didn’t leave me shoes, monsieur.”
The bird hopped to the ledge, tweeted once, and flew away.
Closing the gate behind her, Adi ran.
• • •
Under the very same sky, to the east of the city, someone else was waking up.
George was lying in a field on his back, his ash brown locks laureled with thistle. He was still wearing the fine linen suit he’d had on in the restaurant the day before, but it was soiled with grass and covered in morning dew. The yellow liqueur was still staining the front of his shirt. An empty bottle of it was close at hand.
A few feet away, a cow mooed and swished its tail. The huge tulip-shaped bell around its neck clonked as it turned away.
“Yes, you too,” George mumbled as he slowly pulled himself up into a sitting position. He groaned and removed his glasses, rubbing his face with his hands, waiting for the spinning to stop.
After a moment, he took a deep breath and climbed unsteadily to his feet.
He patted his pockets.
“Oh, wonderful.” His wallet was missing. He didn’t seem any more surprised by that than by waking up next to cows.
Across the field, the town was visible through the morning fog. He started walking.
• • •
There was a time, when she was young, that Adi’s feet were so tough she could have walked on broken glass.
In Uttar Pradesh in northeast India, where her mother’s people lived, paved roads were rare as hens’ teeth, as was the wearing of shoes by children. She would spend from spring until well
after the monsoon without ever putting on a pair.
After her mother died, however, and she began attending the British Raj school in Lucknow, shoes became mandatory.
She shuddered to think what her mother would say if she could see her running barefoot into a European city.
• • •
Adi dashed up the boulevard toward the center of town, trying to get a clear look at the clock tower. People had begun to appear, opening up shops, heading to work. The motorcars were making their way through the horse manure. As she rushed into the town square, the trolly stopped and discharged more people.
But what good would it do to approach them? What would she say?
Though there might be some sense in asking about twin boys. But who to ask? What had this man done with the boys? Where would he hide them? He said they were safe. God only knows what that meant. But it wasn’t likely they would be getting off the trolly.
She could finally see the clock tower, the crown of it, catching the morning light. It was only minutes before six.
She spun around, scanning the square, with only a vague notion of what might be in this part of town.
“The restaurant is, I think—up that way?”
On a side street she spotted a round green sign with white letters: Police.
Charging through the traffic of carriages and autos, she dashed up the block, ran up the steps, and banged through the doors into a quaint station house.
“Is there anyone here! Hello!”
No one was at the desk. She slammed the bell.
“What is it?” said a voice from the back. Adi heard the creaking of a chair.
A plump, sleepy officer pushed through the door from a back room, trying not to spill his coffee. “How can anyone be in such a hurry, so early in the—”
“Please . . . help me? I—”
Trying to catch her breath, Adi thought, How can I put this? That won’t make me sound mad?
“Monsieur, a man came into our house . . . he took my . . . he set the house on fire and—”
“What?” said the officer. “What are you saying?”
But the only thing Adi could hear was Coal, whispering, “Wherever you are. In a boat in the middle of the ocean. Standing alone in a field. I will hear.” Her head filled with images of fingers in boxes and terrible dark things writhing in jars.
The bell in the tower started to toll. “No, no! Not yet!” A sound behind her—Adi looked over her shoulder.
When she turned back, the officer was leaning over the counter staring at her feet.
“What is it? What are you on about, girl?”
She opened her mouth to speak; she tried, but she couldn’t get a word out. It was as if her tongue had turned to wood.
The bell sounded: four, five, six.
The officer stared at the dark-skinned girl with no shoes and no voice. “Get out of here, girl. Before I put you in a cell for vagrancy.”
Coal’s Tale
Beneath the signpost on the road to Regensburg, Germany, Coal stood staring down at the old thief lying in the road amidst shards of broken glass. Though he was dead as a stone, the man’s eyes were wide in astonishment. After most of a lifetime preying upon travelers on deserted byways, he had finally picked the wrong man to rob.
A dark drop splashed down into the dust between pieces of glass. Reaching up, Coal found a cut on his forehead where the thief had struck him with his pistol. His fingers came away black and shiny.
As he did every few years, Coal had come to the town of Frauenau, deep in the forest in eastern Bavaria, to visit the glassworks there.
For ages, he’d kept what he called his “bug collection” in little wooden boxes. But he’d never been satisfied with the containers. Eventually, the hinges rusted. And even a hardwood, like an Indian Ebony or African Blackwood, over time, could be clawed through—if the thing inside wanted out badly enough.
But glass, with a good solid stopper or a hinged lid, might last, if not forever, for at least a very long time.
That was what Coal had been carrying under his arm that day. Little jars, a whole crate full, with a brand new design for the seal. He thought them wonderful. The man who’d been waiting at the crossroads all day was not so enamored of them. When he found that Coal—in his fine suit and bespoke shoes—was carrying no gold or wallet, just empty bottles, he struck him across the brow. The box slipped from Coal’s arm and crashed to the ground.
• • •
“Damn it.”
Wooden hangers clattered as Coal shoved them aside to peer into the back of his wardrobe.
Not one suit remained. He could’ve sworn at least one was left.
When Coal found a suit he liked he usually ordered a half dozen or so. Going through them all was one of the ways he reminded himself of the passing of time. Though running out of them always seemed to happen at the wrong time.
He pulled off his coat.
“Ow!”
He stuck a finger through the rip in the cloth where the girl had struck him the night before. He’d thought his shoulder merely scraped. But as he removed his shirt he felt cotton threads tear out of a deep gouge. Looking around at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, he poked at the spot with a finger. “Ow,” he said again. The hook of the poker had sliced into the top part of his back. He stared at it for a moment, disconcerted when he saw that it wasn’t healing.
Kneeling down, he pulled out the bottom drawer of the cabinet. “At least there are shirts.” Taking one, he stood up, and found himself leaning against the cabinet as the room spun around. He pushed his thumb up under his eyebrow.
Teetering around a pile of shoes and stacks of dirty dishes, Coal maneuvered toward his makeshift desk spread on top of a concert grand shoved into the corner of the room. He sat down on his high stool and leaned his head on the piano, waiting for it all to stop spinning.
Recovering, he began to rifle through stacks of documents searching for the name of that tailor in . . . Paris? Luxembourg, maybe? A shoe, serving as a paperweight, fell off the edge, scattering papers and correspondence across the rug. Picking through the remaining pile, he flicked them away across the room one after another, until he spotted a letter with a Zurich return address.
“I should open my mail more often,” he said, tearing the end off the envelope. He pulled out the letter.
“August 1911. I reckon Dr. Bleuler thinks I need to open my mail more often, too.”
He skimmed the first few lines and then skipped to the end. Dr. Bleuler was suggesting he return to the clinic.
“I like Bleuler.” Coal slipped the letter back into the envelope. “He’s the only one who ever understood the notion that if you don’t have a lot of little wars, you end up with an unmanageably large one. Not to mention, the turtle doves outside my window every morning. So soothing.”
Trying to stow the letter somewhere, he looked around, as if only now noticing the clutter. The piano was covered with dishes and ashtrays, piled on top of papers and history textbooks. There was a bucket on the piano bench; a leak in the ceiling had filled it near to overflowing. The rest of the room was no better—random furniture and boxes, fused together with dust and cobwebs. In a birdcage perched on the edge of the piano, Coal saw the remains of two tiny birds nestled together on yellowed newspaper.
Coal reached for his watch, but found it missing, reminding him, again, that this digression was the girl’s fault.
He ran the back of his fingers down the keyboard and then played a little melody from something. “Why didn’t you drop her dead? Like that thief on the forest road, all those years ago. When was that? On the way to Leipzig, when Napoleon’s Grande Armée had been getting itself blown up on the bridges.”
He stopped playing and banged shut the fallboard. He couldn’t imagine why he’d thought he had enough time for this foolishness. Feeling a bit steadier, he got up.
“Doesn’t matter. She—and this idiotic game—will be over and done in a day or two.”
Chapter 6
When Adi was a child her family lived for a time near the city of Mathura, where Lord Krishna was said to have resided. Her favorite holiday was Holi, wherein everyone would throw the most wonderful colors of powdered pigments at one another. The tradition was said to have begun when Krishna worried to his mother that he was darker-skinned than Radha, his beauteous goatherd soul mate. Krishna’s mother rectified this by painting Radha’s face with pigments.
It was the one day of the year when Adi didn’t feel as if she stood out so much, darker than the British but lighter than the Indians. At sunset, after all the powder had been thrown, the rainbow-colored children would run screaming into the Yamuna River. Adi liked to walk in slowly to watch the color swirl off of her and fade into the dark water.
• • •
The front door of the house slammed hard in Adi’s face. Through it she heard, “I don’t know. Some mute girl, peddling a watch.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but again, her pulse raced. Her breath caught in her throat. The color drained from her sight as if she might faint.
She had knocked on several doors with the same result. What else could she do? Her head ached with fatigue, but she kept moving.
As soon as the bell tower had struck six, the watch started to whir almost imperceptibly on the chain around her neck. Opening it, she saw the tiny blood red second hand tracing its course. On the other side, the numbers in the little squares across the face, at least the rightmost of them, began ticking off the seconds and the minutes. “What is it, girl?” the desk officer had barked. “I don’t have all morning for your nonsense.” Unable to contrive the simplest response, she had fled.
• • •
The bell tinkled above the door as Adi entered a bakery. She nearly swooned from the smell of fresh bread.
The shop girl looked up. “Morning, miss. May I help you?”
Adi tore her eyes away from the warm loaves stacked before her and held her watch out.
The shop girl took one look at Adi’s bare feet. “Oh, miss!” she cried. “The owner is very strict about beggars. You’ll have to leave.”
