Children of the Silent Season (Heartbeat of the World Book 1)

by T. Wyse

  “I get it, but help out there. We’ll do the indoor stuff. It’s all good. Honest.”

  The conversation ceased, and the others rose in an almost practiced concert. Donna snatched the plates up crisply from Meldice and disappeared beyond the swinging doors.

  “C’mon.” Roger pulled out Amelie’s chair as Meldice slunk in behind her mother. “I don’t suppose you’ll be doing the heavy lifting?” He gave a pointed wink and motioned for her to follow out into the garden.

  “Oh, I no, sorry.” The free air tickled her face again, and she caught the blurred motion of Kokopelli slipping out behind them as the door clacked shut.

  “Ah, I guess this is all me again then.” He grinned, and motioned to a rusty handled wheelbarrow. “I think you’ll be helping Ka…Randal then.” The couple had followed behind them, but Karen had continued walking, not bothering to spare the girl a glance. Randal had stopped however, his breathing tired but punctuated with frustration.

  “Don’t mind her, it’s not you. She’s just taking some time to…adjust.” He offered an attempted smile that fell flat. “Don’t worry. It’s not that hard, no matter what he tells you. Nobody’s going to be cracking a whip or anything. We’re out there.” He motioned vaguely into the squared field beyond.

  They passed the cobbled white wall, and flowed through the arteries of the fields beyond. “Don’t step on the mounds if you can help it.”

  “I..right.” Amelie realized she had done just that, and focused on her foolish footsteps.

  “Is it okay for him to be out there?” The man muttered, glancing at Kokopelli, who had trotted alongside them balanced upon the fence. “I mean he’s not going to get lost or something?

  “I don’t think he will. He’s smart enough not to I think.” She shrugged, sparing a glance at her companion before returning attention to her steps.

  They turned, and she bumped into the wooden fence, causing it to rattle precariously before resting again. A puff of silted earth sighed up from her clumsiness, kissing her across the cheek and invading her nose.

  “Gluh.” The sneeze didn’t end up coming, but lingered in the back of her nose for a moment, the air building up to strike out.

  “All good?” Randal smiled, offering her a hand and hoisting her up over the fence. “We’re over here.”

  “I assume you can handle this?” He produced a small sack of seeds, and handed it to her.

  It was about as heavy as a bag with a pair of textbooks. “Yes.” Not only can I carry it, I could fly with it. She reached back to touch the absent hair tie, her hair still undulating with the wind.

  “Okay so, basically, this is how I think we’re supposed to be doing this. I think if I’d been messing up Donna would let me know, so it seems fine.” He began, and she listened, hugging her sack of seeds. “We use this to measure out ten metres.” He produced a piece of long and filthy string with a splintered wooden stake on each end. He planted one stake in the soil, and dragged the other along the dirt in an approximation of a straight line. “This, uh, sort of makes a box.” He framed it with his hands and scowled in frustration. “We’re all pretty new to this anyways.” He sighed. “Anyways we do this three times with about one stride, one of my strides, between each line, like so.

  “Okay, so now that marks our path, and we walk on this four times over to stomp it down. No, don’t want to go fast, want to go slow, sideways, big steps. Step solid and slow so that the dust doesn’t kick up.” He directed. “There, there we go, no dust, perfect.

  “Now, we put seeds down on the soil, one by one. Pack the soil down into a triangular hill, with a little divot at the top to trap the water. About three inches apart. After that we give it a decent watering. Someone should be by with water at some point.”

  Despite the mundane instructions, she felt her breath shaking nervously with each word. Her feet had stumbled more than a few times in their rotating trek, but she recovered her balance each time before the man had noticed. Her hands marked the seed packet with a clawed grip, her fingers still trembling when they had finished the lesson.

  “So, we do that…and then…” He motioned widely into the nothingness beyond. “And then repeat. And then repeat.” He smiled, but his face fell a little.

  “You’ll do fine. Seriously. Just make sure to try, okay?” He knelt down, and Amelie simply avoided his gaze, finding interest in how dirty her shoes were. His breath was sincere though, if a little sad.

  “Come on, let’s get started.”

  And with unsure hands she began. Filthy fingers and oblong mountains were her only reward it seemed, but the relative precision of the man working with her was inspiring at least. The entire operation moved with the precision of an anthill, but it was at least as easygoing as promised. Roger’s wheelbarrow served as the housing for water canisters, and he visited them on a pair of occasions throughout the morning. He also brought drinking water with him, each time Amelie being almost unaware of her thirst until being told to drink.

  “You’re doing fine.” Randal smiled somewhere into the morning. Two sets of the mounds had been completed, and her sack had lightened slightly, but it had picked up a hefty layer of dirt from her laying it down so frequently. Each time seeds spilled out cold horror filled her gut, and she had desperately tried to gather the fallen cargo. When the midday sun peaked in the sky the sack seemed to have gained weight in her arms, and the accidents more common, though a slow exhaustion had numbed her fear into frustration and she had begun to simply cover up the fallen seeds in tired desperation.

  Randal had begun leaning on the fence, his lungs glowing and his face dripping with sweat. Not wanting to be seen wasting the seeds, she took up a position beside him, and sat upon the lower rung of the fence.

  “I…” She began, tired enough to be numbed to the idea. “What happened to that…”

  Before she could finish, she froze up completely, the seed packet landing in a silted puff on the soil. There was a shape on the wind that she hadn’t noticed, and perhaps twenty feet away or so perched atop one of the posts, was the black shape of a crow.

  “Are you alright? Are you dizzy?” The man grabbed her wrist. “I, uh…” He felt her forehead, only managing to smear dirt over it.

  She pointed, hand shaking weakly. Did she run, run for one of those old huts? They were across the field, but they seemed to have doors, shelter of some kind.

  "Wow, that's the second animal I've seen, bug or beast, in the last three days." He relaxed his grip on her arms. "There's nothing wrong, he certainly is a big one though!" Randal moved away from her and towards the black intruder. The crow ignored the man, its piercing gaze locked on her.

  "But...the overpass." She tried to choke out the words, tried to get him to understand. "It was them, don't you remember?" She pleaded with him, wanting him to step away from the thing instead of towards it.

  "You just got hit by a dust storm, you don't remember? Maybe you can't." He asked with surprise, looking back at her, still moving to investigate the bird.

  The bird sat there, and then shuffled. It stretched its wings out, and entered the air. Amelie realized with horror, that it was going to tell the rest of them somehow, was going to get them to come here.

  The solution reared itself in a grey blur of motion. Kokopelli launched out from a prowling position on the ground, dust from the still earth kicked up in a puffed ball. He launched himself twenty feet into the air, catching the crow with a supernatural accuracy. They landed on the ground, the little cat creature on top of the squirming, protesting crow.

  Then, like a wildcat, he sunk his sharp fangs into its neck. The bird's head twisted with a cruel, echoing crack, splitting the silence of the world.

  Rather than gore, and blood, the strange bird simply melted away into a puddle of quicksilver beneath the little guardian, not even a single coal feather remained.

  "What the..." Randal knelt down touching the strange puddle of slime. Amelie winced, surely it was something foul, something
best not touched with bare hands, yet Kokopelli retreated accommodatingly to allow the man his investigation.

  With a silly malevolence Kokopelli shook off the quick silvered blood, getting Randal with a sprinkler like spray of the stuff on his clothes.

  "Hey, stop that you little bugger!" Randal cursed the cat who retreated onto the fence.

  Randal, in the midst of a rather colourful bout of swearing, stormed off. “I need a cloth. I’ll be back!”

  Amelie peered at the little burbling puddle. It reflected a tired little girl with a raggedly soiled face, and then disappeared into the earth with an eerie silence. Not even a wet spot remained on the soil. No trace of the silver had painted itself on the spot.

  Kokopelli leapt off of the fencepost, kicking up more dust into a cloud, then trotted over studiously to the centre of the crop set Amelie had planted earlier in the day. He sat there meditatively, closing his eyes. An odd sound, so faint that surely it would have been inaudible if the world was not utterly silent around them, emitted from no discernable source. The sound seemed to be coming from the ground itself, everywhere around them, the dirt seemed to hum the strange and subtle tune.

  Amelie strained against her senses, closing her eyes, and in her mind she had the faintest perception of the music's familiarity. It was a flute, but more guttural, and yet subtler than any she could recall. She strained further, trying to place that familiarity, and then the sound was abruptly gone.

  "What..." Amelie asked, reasserting briefly the absence of anyone around to hear her words.

  "Ahh that felt good." The little creature's gaze was far off into the still world. "Been quite a while." He smiled, his expression content for a brief moment.

  "This is probably a bad happening." Kokopelli shuddered gently, the moment of bliss passing. "The whole will note the absence of the part, and might be able to perceive that this is where the part had stood watching."

  "What do you mean? It was just a bird right?" She asked, meeting his glowing red eyes.

  "No, not just a bird. You might be in danger here, or might not be. I haven't quite been able to pinpoint their nature." His shoulders hunched further in apparent frustration.

  "On a positive note..." He trailed off, indicating the crops around him nebulously.

  "What?" She demanded. There was an odd feeling, like she was watching squirming worms, the sense of movement despite being unable to properly see the movement. She realized what it was, the crops, the little seeds they had planted earlier that day, had now sprouted. They grew so quickly she could almost see them moving in front of her eyes. The change was more apparent when she looked away, to the cat creature, and then back again.

  "Wow, did you do that?" She asked Kokopelli, who gave no answer, returning to his patrol of the fence's length.

  She turned, about to shout an annoyance at him, but saw that Randal had come back within earshot. He had brought Karen with him for a reason Amelie couldn't immediately discern.

  "So, what?" Karen demanded with annoyance. "I don't see anything here, just this kid!" Her arms were crossed, her face scowling.

  "Nothing..." Randal touched the spot where the quicksilver blood had fallen, then repeated, "Nothing." His face bore a defeated darkness. Karen left with a huff, disappearing past the fence.

  Randal looked at Amelie, she felt his frustration.

  "It's not nothing." She smiled wryly at him, motioning to the strangely growing seeds.

  "Wow, that's...that's impossible." He exclaimed breathlessly. He investigated the crop they had been in the middle of planting and the small green sprouts reaching upwards. He then crossed over the fence again to the interior area, and was surprised to find that those seeds had sprouted as well.

  "Not nothing, then." Randal muttered to himself. "Not something I think I want to share right now though." He stood there, regarding the sprouting vegetables with a silent wonderment.

  The day went on without further incident. The work was repetitive and exhausting, but satisfying and offering a growing feeling of security to fears Amelie hadn't been truly aware of previously. They had a lunch similar in composition to the breakfast, a break for her body and stomach which she welcomed fully. Then the work continued through the evening, until the light began to fade. For the duration of the afternoon Amelie fought with imaginary black specters inside of her peripheral vision, dissipating when her wary eye was turned on them.

  Amelie saw Kokopelli a number of times throughout the day as they worked, he had evidently formed a kind of patrol route, and had paced the perimeter for the larger part of the day. Seeing the little creature act in such a way afforded her a measure of comfort, and allowed herself to lose her troubled mind into the work. Three rows, ten meters long, one foot across. Pad them down into ruts, shape them, and plant the seeds. The mantra had become much more fluid and comfortable.

  Upon some hidden number, Randal had declared that they were done for the day, rolling the measuring string up decidedly. He lead her back to the house, and into the room which lacked its vibrancy from earlier in the day. There was a subtle hint of red upon the dimming light that flooded the room gently.

  Eating the dinner, which was essentially identical to every meal she had eaten in the house, she gazed out of the windowed room and came to understand the reason the chairs were set up as they were. The satisfaction of gazing onto the results of the day's work was a substantial reward, one that would become all that more real when they were gazing out over a sea of green.

  Karen seemed to retain the simmering irritation Amelie had come to associate with her, Randal had a more relaxed aura to him though. He was chipping away at her resistance, her desire to stay angry at him for whatever reason.

  Donna and Roger chatted energetically, mostly with each other. Donna had cleaned the day's toil off and had donned the fancier dress of the hostess. Meldice, too, had transformed from worker to hostess and chatted with the two college girls at length.

  Amelie felt somewhat dirty when compared to the two better, cleaner dressed women there. Her sentiment seemed to be something only she felt however. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the falsehood, seemed to embrace the illusion of normalcy.

  Kokopelli had been allotted some more of the canned fish in addition to his unappetizing selection of preserved meat. It seemed like Mrs. Woolley had warmed to his presence somewhat and had begun to be more generous with his portions. The presence of an animal was certainly a strangely reassuring thing, another closed drape against a changed world.

  The energetic words burst her in and out of her exhaustion, a chiming of laughter here, and a muffled snort there, but the meaning was lost to her entirely.

  She was awoken one last time by gentle scraping next to her face. It was Meldice pulling the final plate away, the others having abandoned the room in the waning light of the evening.

  “C’mon, let’s get you into a bed. Mother wouldn’t want you sleeping in here,” Meldice said softly, helping Amelie up. She shambled with Meldice at her side, making a wobbly path towards the stairwell upstairs. She would stumble every few steps and Meldice would catch her and straighten her out, then let her free once more. One of the doors to the right yawned open, alight with wind and speech but dark upon her blurred sight.

  There were some words directed at them, muffled on Amelie’s ears, and Meldice answered sweetly: “No, don’t think she is. You remember how hard the first day is. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The challenge of the stairs in front of them, Amelie faltered. “C’mon, can’t have you falling down.” Meldice locked arms and helped her up, slowly.

  “Look, uh...You’re welcome to sleep in my room.” Meldice trailed off. “I know it’s a bit weird, but it must get lonely in there. You didn’t sleep very well last night, did you?”

  “It’s, okay.” The words escaped from her with the force of a sigh. “I don’t mind.”

  “But it’s so dark, and to be alone like that… I really should insist.”

  “Da
rk doesn’t bother me.” Amelie turned her face to Meldice, her eyes closed from exhaustion as they walked. “Don’t really need light to see.” A stumbling trip on the top stair disagreed with her, but Meldice didn’t point it out.

  The older girl paused there, unconvinced. “Look, if it’s mother or whatever, don’t worry about it. She’s happy, well, as happy as she ever is, that you put in your time. You’re okay, you’re good.”

  “I’m okay. I have Kokopelli with me. It’s hard to sleep with someone breathing near me, you know?” She forced open her eyes, and tried to look sincere. In truth, it would be nice to have the movement of breath to sing her to sleep, but she needed to be alone with the creature.

  “Maybe tomorrow.” Amelie smiled. “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “Okay, okay.” Meldice sighed, and they made their way down the hall.

  “I’ll be okay from here.” Amelie smiled, forcing her eyes open again, but the pooling shadows of the hallway made it a useless gesture.

  “There was one other thing.” Meldice opened the door, and closed it softly after Amelie. She paused before the dresser and took a great glowing breath. Her hand paused on the handle of the drawer, the coffin for Amelie’s ragged life, but it remained there. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to say: I think…I bet we can fix it.” She offered with a subdued enthusiasm.

  The admiration Amelie sensed in Meldice's voice helped quash the feelings of dread, replacing them with a happier pride. She remembered the day her mother had presented it to her. Not that dress itself of course, she had long since outgrown that one, but that moment of freedom it had entailed.

  "I don't think we can." Amelie slumped down onto the bed, gathering the pajamas and hugging them. "It was special...really special. I couldn't even tell you the fabric it's made from, or how it was sewn. My mother wouldn't share that with me, I guess she thought I'd try to make my own, and do it wrong. Or maybe she thought I'd wreck all my 'real' clothes if I knew." Amelie finished, with a chuckle. She probably would have, too.

  "Oh, I know it's special. Anyone could see that, or feel it in the fabric." Meldice’s smile warmed the darkness. "It's soft, and silken, but it's thicker and tougher at the same time than linen. She must have woven the materials herself."