He found the botanist lying on the wide granite ledge, face down, one hand still touching the damp rock wall.
“Ah, Christ!” Tom dropped to his knees. He turned Sullivan over and searched his wrist for a pulse.
“He’s breathing,” the frontiersman said. “More or less.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t know. His skin’s cold and he’s ungodly pale. Sullivan! Wake up, you son of a bitch! Work to do!”
Sullivan didn’t wake up. His head lolled to one side, limply. A trickle of blood escaped one nostril. He looks shrunken, Guilford thought dazedly. Like someone let the air out of him.
Tom stripped his pack and bunched it under the botanist’s head. “Stubborn fucker, wouldn’t slow down for love of life…”
“What do we do now?”
“Let me think.”
Despite their best efforts, Sullivan wouldn’t wake up.
Tom Compton rocked on his heels for a time, deep in thought. Then he hitched his pack over his shoulder and shrugged out of the rope harness. “Hell with it. Look, I’ll bring blankets and food from the sledge for both of you. After that you stay with him; I’ll go for help.”
“He’s wet and nearly freezing, Tom.”
“He’ll freeze faster in the open air. Might kill him to move him. Give me a day to reach camp, another day to get here with Keck and Farr. Farr will know what to do. You’ll be all right — I don’t know about Sullivan, poor bastard.” He frowned fiercely. “But you stay with him, Guilford. Don’t leave him alone.”
He might not wake up, Guilford thought. He might die. And then I’ll be alone, in this godforsaken hole in the ground.
“I’ll stay.”
The frontiersman nodded curtly. “If he dies, wait for me. We’re close enough to the top, you ought to be able to tell night from day. You understand? Keep your fucking wits about you.”
Guilford nodded.
“All right.” Tom bent over the unconscious shape of Sullivan with a tenderness Guilford had never seen in him, smoothed a strand of gray hair from the botanist’s dank forehead. “Hang on, you old cock-knocker! You damn stupid explorer.”
Guilford took the blankets Tom brought him and made a rough bed to shield Sullivan from cold air and cold stone. Compared to the atmosphere outside the temperature in the well was nearly balmy — above the freezing point; but the fog cut through clothing and chilled the skin.
When Tom vanished into the mist Guilford felt profoundly alone. No company now but his thoughts and Sullivan’s slow, labored breathing. He felt both bored and near panic. He found himself wishing stupidly for something to read. The only reading matter that had survived the Partisan attack was Digby’s pocket New Testament, and Diggs wouldn’t allow it out of his possession. Diggs thought the onion-leafed book had saved his life: it was his lucky charm. Argosy was long lost.
As if a person could read, in this arsenic-colored dusk.
He knew night had fallen when the light above him faded entirely and the moist air turned a deeper and more poisonous shade of green. Minute particles of dust and ice wafted out of the deeps, like diatoms in an ocean current. He rearranged the blankets around Dr. Sullivan, whose breathing had grown harsh as the rasp of a saw blade in wet pine, and ignited one of the two mosquewood torches Tom Compton had brought him. Without a blanket of his own, Guilford shivered uncontrollably. He stood up whenever his feet grew numb, careful to keep one hand on the rock wall. He propped the torch in a cairn of loose rocks and warmed his hands at the low flame. Mosquewood dipped in snake tallow, it would burn for six or eight hours, though not brightly.
He was afraid to sleep.
In the silence he was able to hear subtle sounds — a distant rumbling, unless that was the pulse of his own blood, amplified in the darkness. He remembered a novel by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, and its subterranean Morlocks, with their glowing eyes and terrible hungers. Not a welcome memory.
He talked to Sullivan to pass the time. Sullivan might be listening, Guilford thought, though his eyes were firmly closed and blood continued to ooze sluggishly from his nose. Periodically Guilford dipped the tail of his shirt into a trickle of meltwater and used it to wipe the blood from Sullivan’s face. He talked fondly about Caroline and Lily. He talked about his father, clubbed to death during the Boston food riots when he had doggedly tried to enter his print shop, as he had done every working day of his adult life. Dumb courage. Guilford wished he had some of that.
He wished Sullivan would wake up. Tell some stories of his own. Make his case for an ancient, evolved Darwinia; hammer the miraculous with the cold steel of reason. Hope you’re right about that, Guilford thought. Hope this continent is not some dream or, worse, a nightmare. Hope old and dead things remain old and dead.
He wished he had a hot meal and a bath to look forward to. And a bed, and Caroline in it, the warm contours of her body under a snowdrift of cotton sheet. He didn’t like these noises from the deeps, or the way the sound rose and ebbed like an impossible tide.
“I hope you don’t die, Dr. Sullivan. I know how you’d hate to give up without understanding any of this. No easy task, though, is it?”
Now Sullivan drew a deep, convulsive breath. Guilford looked down and was startled to see the botanist’s eyes spring open.
Sullivan looked hard at him — or through him — it was hard to tell which. One of his pupils was grotesquely dilated, the white rimmed with blood.
“We don’t die,” Sullivan gasped.
Guilford fought a sudden urge to back away. “Hey!” he said. “Dr. Sullivan, lie still! Don’t excite yourself. You’ll be all right, just relax. Help’s on the way.”
“Didn’t he tell you that? Guilford tell Guilford that Guilford won’t die?”
“Don’t try to talk.” Don’t talk, Guilford thought, because you’re frightening the crap out of me.
Sullivan’s lips curled into a one-sided frown, awful to behold. “You’ve seen them in your dreams…”
“Please don’t, Dr. Sullivan.”
“Green as old copper. Spines on their bellies… They eat dreams. Eat everything!”
In fact the words struck a chord, but Guilford pushed the memory away. The important thing now was not to panic.
“Guilford!” Sullivan’s left hand shot out to grasp Guilford’s wrist, while his right clutched reflexively at empty air. “This is one of the places where the world ends!”
“You’re not making sense, Dr. Sullivan. Please, try to sleep. Tom will be back soon.”
“You died in France. Died fighting the Boche. Of all things.”
“I don’t like to say it, but you’re scaring me, Dr. Sullivan.”
“I cannot die!” Sullivan insisted.
Then he grunted, and all the breath sighed out of him at once.
After a time Guilford closed the corpse’s eyes.
He sat with Dr. Sullivan for several hours more, humming tunelessly, waiting for whatever might climb out of the dark to claim him.
Shortly before dawn, exhausted, he fell asleep.
They want so badly to come out!
Guilford can feel their anger, their frustration.
He has no name for them. They don’t quite exist. They are trapped between idea and creation, incomplete, half-sentient, longing for embodiment. Physical1y they are faint green shapes, larger than a man, armored, thorny, huge muzzles opening and closing in silent anger.
They were bound here after the battle.
The thought is not his own. Guilford turns, weightless. He is floating deep in the well, though not on water. The air itself is radiant around him. Somehow, this uncreated light is both air and rock and self.
The picket floats beside him. A spindly man in a U.S. Army uniform. Light flows through him, from him. He is the soldier from Guilford’s dreams, a man who might be his twin.
Who are you?
Yourself, the picket answers.
That’s not possible.
Seems not. But
it is.
Even the voice is familiar. It’s the voice in which Guilford speaks to himself, the voice of his private thoughts.
And what are these? He means the bound creatures. Demons?
You may call them that. Call them monsters. They have no ambition but to become. Ultimately, to be everything that exists.
Guilford can see them more clearly now. Their scales and claws, their several arms, their snapping teeth.
Animals?
Much more than animals. But that, too, given a chance.
You bound them here?
I did. In part. With the help of others. But the binding is imperfect.
I don’t know what that means.
See how they tremble on the verge of incarnation? Soon, they’ll assume the physical once again. Unless we bind them forever.
Bind them? Guilford asks. He is afraid now. So much of this defies his comprehension. But he can sense the enormous pressure from below, the terrible desire thwarted and stored for eons, waiting to burst forth.
We will bind them, the picket says calmly.
We?
You and I.
The words are shocking. Guilford feels the impossible weight of the task, as immense as the moon. I don’t understand any of this!
Patience, little brother, the picket says, and lifts him up, up through the eerie light, through the fog and heat of almost-incarnation, like an angel in a ragged army uniform, and as he rises his flesh melts into air.
Tom Compton loomed over him, holding a torch.
I would get up, Guilford thought, if I could. If it weren’t so cold here. If his body hadn’t stiffened in a thousand places. If he could order his dizzying thoughts. He had some vital message to impart, a message about Dr. Sullivan.
“He died,” Guilford said. That was it. Sullivan’s body lay beside him, under a blanket. Sullivan’s face was pale and still in the lantern light. “I’m sorry, Tom.”
“I know,” Tom said. “You did a good job staying with him. Can you walk?”
Guilford tried to put his feet under him but only managed to bang his hip on a ridge of stone.
“Lean on me,” the frontiersman said.
Once again, he felt himself lifted.
It was hard to stay awake. His torpid body wanted him to close his eyes and rest. “We’ll build a fire when we’re out of his hole,” the frontiersman told him. “Step lively now.”
“How long has it been?”
“Three days.”
“Three?”
“There was trouble.”
“Who’s with you?”
They had reached the rim of the well. The interior of the dome was suffused with watery daylight. A gaunt figure waited, slouched against a slab of rock, canvas hood pulled over his face. The mist obscured his features.
“Finch,” Tom said. “Finch came with me.”
“Finch? Why Finch? What about Keck, what about Robertson?”
“They’re dead, Guilford. Keck, Robertson, Diggs, Donner, and Farr. All dead. And so will we be, if you don’t keep moving.”
Guilford moaned and shielded his eyes.
Chapter Nineteen
Spring came early to London. The thawing marshes to the east and west gave the air an earthy scent, and Thames Street, freshly paved from the docks to Tower Hill, rattled with commerce. To the west, work had begun again on the dome of the new St. Paul’s.
Caroline dodged a herd of sheep headed for market, feeling as if she were bound for slaughter herself. For weeks she had refused to see Colin Watson, refused to accept his invitations or even read his notes. She was not sure why she had agreed to see him now — to meet him at a coffee shop on Candlewick Street — except for the persistent feeling that she owed him something, if only an explanation, before she left for America.
After all, he was a soldier. He followed orders. He wasn’t Kitchener; he wasn’t even the Royal Navy. Just one man.
She found the place easily enough. The shop was dressed in Tudor woodwork. Its leaded windows dripped with condensation, the interior heated by the steam from a huge silver samovar. The crowd in side was rough, working-class, largely male. She gazed across a sea of woollen caps until she spotted Colin at a table at the rear, his coat collar turned up and his long face apprehensive.
“Well,” he said. “We meet again.” He raised his cup in a sort of mock-toast.
But Caroline didn’t want to spar with him. She sat down and came to the point. “I want you to know, I’m going home.”
“You just got here.”
“I mean to Boston.”
“Boston! Is that why you wouldn’t see me?”
“No.”
“Then won’t you at least tell me why you’re leaving?” He lowered his voice and opened his blue eyes wide. “Caroline, please. I know I must have offended you. I don’t know how, but if it’s an apology you want, you can have it.”
This was harder than she had expected. He was bewildered, genuinely contrite. She bit her lip.
“Your aunt Alice found out about us, is that it?”
Caroline dipped her head. “It wasn’t the best-kept secret.”
“Ah. I suspected as much. I doubt Jered would have put up a fuss, but Alice — well, I assume she was angry.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Then why leave?”
“They won’t have me any longer.”
“Stay with me, then.”
“I can’t!”
“Don’t be shocked, Caroline. We needn’t live in sin, you know.”
Dear God, in a moment he’d be proposing! “You know why I can’t do that! Colin — she told me.”
“Told you what?”
Two seamen at the nearest table were smirking at her. She lowered her voice to match Colin’s. “That you murdered Guilford.”
The Lieutenant sat back in his chair, goggling. “God almighty! Murdered him? She said that?” He blinked. “But, Caroline, it’s absurd!”
“By sending guns across the Channel. Guns to the Partisans.”
He put down his cup. He blinked again. “Guns to the — ah. I see.”
“Then it’s true?”
He looked at her steadily. “That I murdered Guilford? Certainly not. About the weapons?” He hesitated. “Up to a point, it may be. We aren’t supposed to discuss these things even among ourselves.”
“It is true!”
“It may be. Honestly, I don’t know! I’m not a senior officer. I do what I’m told, and I don’t ask questions.”
“But guns are involved?”
“Yes, a number of weapons have passed through London.”
That was nearly an admission. Caroline thought she ought to be angry. She wondered why her anger was suddenly so elusive.
Maybe anger was like grief. It took its own sweet time. It waited in ambush.
Colin was thoughtful, concerned. “I suppose Alice might have heard something through Jered… and he probably knows more about it than I do, come to that. The Navy employs his warehouse and his dray teams from time to time, with his consent. He might well have done other work for the Admiralty. Fancies himself a patriot, after all.”
Alice and Jered arguing in the night, keeping Lily awake: was this what they had been fighting about? Jered admitting that guns had gone through his warehouse on the way to the Partisans, Alice afraid that Guilford would be hurt…
“But even if weapons went across the Channel, you can’t be sure they had anything to do with Guilford. Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to interfere with the Finch party. The Partisans operate along the coast; they need coal and money far more than they need munitions. Anyone could have fired on the Weston — bandits, anarchists! And as for Guilford, who knows what he ran into past the bloody Rheinfelden? The continent is an unexplored wilderness; it’s dangerous by nature.”
She was ashamed to feel her defenses crumbling. The issue had seemed icily clear when Alice explained it. But what if Jered was as guilty as Colin?
/>
She shouldn’t be having this conversation… but there was nothing to stop it now, no moral or practical obstacle. This man, whatever he might have done, was being honest with her.
And she had missed him. She might as well admit it.
The seamen in their striped jerseys grinned lewdly at her.
Colin reached for her hand. “Walk with me,” he said. “Somewhere away from the noise.”
She let him talk all the way along Candlewick and up Fenchurch to the end of the pavement, let herself be soothed by the sound of his voice and the seductive idea of his innocence.
The mosque trees had been a dull green all winter, but sudden sun and melting snow had coaxed new blades from the tree crowns. The air was almost warm.
He was a soldier, she told herself again. Of course he did what he was told; what choice did he have?
Jered was another matter. Jered was a civilian; he didn’t have to cooperate with the Admiralty. And Alice knew that. How the knowledge must have burned! Bitter, her voice had been, arguing with her husband in the dark. Of course she blamed Jered, but she couldn’t leave him; she was chained to him by marriage.
So Alice hated Colin instead. Blind, displaced, unthinking hatred. Because she couldn’t afford the luxury of hating her own husband.
“See me again,” Colin begged. “At least once more. Before you leave.”
Caroline said she would try.
“I hate to think of you at sea. There have been threats to shipping, you know. They say the American fleet is massed in the North Atlantic.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Perhaps you should.”
Mrs. de Koenig passed her a note from Colin later that week. There was a general mobilization, he said; he might be shipped out; he wanted to see her as soon as possible.
War, Caroline thought bitterly. Everyone was talking about war. Only ten years since the world was shaken to its foundations, and now they want to fight over the scraps. Over a wilderness!
The Times, a six-page daily pressed on fibrous mosque-pulp paper, had devoted most of its recent editorials to chastening the Americans: for administering the Continent as if it were an American protectorate, for “imposing boundaries” on the British Isles, for various sins of arrogance or complacency. Caroline’s accent provoked raised eyebrows at the stores and market stalls. Today Lily had asked her why it was so bad to be an American.
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