Then it was a faraway whisper.
Then he was no voice at all.
All around her, the dark.
Uncle Jim had given them two lamps, but the two hundred miles since Augusta had taught them to save kerosene for dire necessity. They had checked their matchsticks before blowing out the lamps, and while Lottie’s had gotten wet in her pouch somehow, William had kept his dry. Lottie had fewer possessions now than ever. Before this night, she had never wanted for moonlight or air to breathe.
But Lottie was glad for the dark, since she didn’t want William to see her tears. He was helpless to soothe her, so why should they punish each other? She huddled against the best man she knew, hearing Uncle Jim’s prayer in her mind, rubbing her belly.
Uncle Jim had said that in the morning he would give them a treasure chest in the Irishman’s wagon: dry clothes, a packed traveling bag, food, boxes of matches, a new compass. And money – how much she could only guess, if Uncle Jim’s hired man didn’t steal it first.
Neither of them had a timepiece, but she thought it had to be ten o’clock. At least.
In seven hours, Uncle Jim would come back for them. Seven hours. Seven years, it might as well be. But he would come. He would come, this time.
Seven hours, Lord. Let them last seven hours.
Don’t let her mother’s lashes be for nothing. Don’t let William’s grandmother’s cries in her sickbed when the soldiers came be for nothing. Let it all matter for something.
Unless he means to drown you both here. For your own good.
And didn’t he? Hadn’t she heard his soul’s guilt in his weepy prayer?
Lottie couldn’t swallow away her sob, and William slid his palm against her hot cheek, all tenderness. Did he know it too? Did he know Uncle Jim had sent them into the mine to die?
Loud splashing flew toward them. Gone as soon as they heard it.
They sat closer, their bodies hard as stone. The splashing had come from directly outside the mouth of their enclave. Had Uncle Jim come back so soon? No more than half an hour could have passed.
“Uncle?” she whispered.
William covered her mouth with the palm. His heartbeat pulsed through his skin.
The next splash sounded like two limbs colliding. Then an undulating motion, one spot to the next. And sudden, impossible silence. They could be back out in the forest, jumping at bears and bobcats.
“That ain’t a man,” William said. “Didn’t I say I saw somethin’? He saw it too.”
“What it look like?” Lottie said. “A snake?”
“Too big for a snake,” William said. “Too wide. Can’t say what it looked like, but it wasn’t no fish or snake. It looked ’bout as long as me.”
“It’s a man, then,” Lottie said. “Somebody chasin’ us.”
“No,” William said. “Not a man.”
William calmly struck a match and lit his lamp. In the brightness, colored circles danced across Lottie’s eyes.
Her vision snapped to focus when she heard the splash again. The creature was beyond the poor reach of their lamp, but she could hear its size – the front end slapping the water first, then the back. Like William said, as long as a man. But maybe wider. Beyond reason, she expected a bloodhound to come flying from the water, teeth gnashing.
William sucked in a long breath.
“You see it?” Lottie said.
William shook his head, waving his lamp slowly back and forth across the water.
Lottie’s heart tried to pound free of her. “Maybe it’s a gator!”
“No,” William breathed. He stayed patient with his lamp’s spotlight, which showed only brown flecks floating in the murk.
“What, then?” Lottie said.
“As a boy,” he said quietly, “I heard stories about Walasi. A giant frog. My mother told me, her mother told her, her mother’s mother, through time. To the beginning.”
Ain’t no damned frog that big, Lottie’s mind tried to tell her, but she remembered the bullfrog’s call she’d heard outside. An omen after all.
William pointed left. “Look there,” he said, calm beyond reason.
Ripples fluttered in the lamplight. Then a frothy splashing showered them. Lottie screamed, but did not close her eyes. She wanted to see the thing. A silhouette sharpened in the water, like giant fingers stretching, or a black claw. Her hands flew to cover her eyes, but she forced her fingers open to peek through.
The creature churned the water, tossing its massive body. A shiny, bulging black eye as large as her open palm broke the water’s plane, nestled by brown-green skin.
The creature flipped, its eye gone. Was this its belly? Pale beneath the water, smooth as glass. Too big to be anything she could name. The mine’s thin air seared her lungs.
“Did you see it?” William’s grin made him look fevered. His eyes seemed as wild and wide as the water creature’s. “The frog?”
It can’t be, she tried to say, arguing with her eyes. But her mouth would not move.
Lottie was whimpering, a childish sound she hadn’t made since the day Marse Campbell turned Uncle Jim away. She sat as far back as she could from the water, her arms locked around her knees. Her bones trembled as she rocked.
William whipped off his tattered shirt. His readied knife gleamed.
“Leave it be!” she said.
“Any child knows about Walasi, but no one has seen him. And now… here he is!” William’s excitement unsettled Lottie. “Walasi tries to kill everyone in the village. But a warrior slays him.”
Lottie felt a fear deeper than the mine’s darkness. Maybe Uncle Jim’s mojo had confused his mind. Had that come of touching it?
“Waya…” She called him by his mother’s name, hoping he would hear her.
William clasped her upper arm and squeezed. His face wore an eerie grin. “When the warrior kills Walasi, it turns to little frogs. Harmless. They scatter. The village is saved.”
“All your people is gone far away,” Lottie said. “You ain’t got no village. Ain’t nothin’ you can do!”
“What else should I do, dear Lottie?” he said. “Should I run and hide like a boy?
He laid his head across her belly, and she breathed him up and down. Lottie tried to summon words to bring sense to him, but she had no strength to speak.
Then he slipped from her, holding tight to his knife. He dove into the black water.
Lottie screamed. “Waya!”
Endless silence, except for the dripping water.
Every evil Lottie could dream felt certain: The creature was pulling strips of her husband’s flesh with its teeth, far worse than any dog. And it would come to take her next. It would tear the baby from her and scatter its limbs. Uncle Jim had bargained his freedom with a curse. He had sacrificed them.
The world spun, the mine’s darkness fighting to take her thoughts too. She felt dizzy enough to faint, but she could not. Could not. Lottie kept her mind awake by counting off in her head as she waited for William to pop up from the water. Eleven… twelve… thirteen… fourteen…
William could hold his breath a long time. He swam like a fish in the pond near the road where he drove past Marse Campbell’s farm once a month. Showing off for her.
Thirty-five… thirty-six…. thirty-seven… thirty-eight…
Lottie stood as close to the water’s lapping edge as she dared, using William’s lamp to try to see. She tried calling both of his names. After a time, fingers shaking, she lit the second lamp too. His absence only grew brighter. The water lay still and silent.
Ninety-one… ninety-two… ninety-three…
“No…” Lottie whispered. “No…”
At five hundred, she stopped counting.
She felt too breathless to sob. Even tears shunned her misery.
How could she have let William go? Why hadn’t she let him drag her down with him? How dare he go to freedom without her!
Time passed uncounted. Lottie only realized she had slept when the water woke
her with a start.
Just beyond her haven, something was moving – a steady gliding from one side to the next, back and forth. But even bleary-eyed, confused, and sick with sorrow, Lottie knew the sound was not from William. No man could glide so quickly or make such a sound.
Her lanterns made no impression on the water’s void, showing her nothing.
“Git on away from me!” she shrieked at the dark, as if monsters heeded commands.
The water’s splashing told her that the creature still lurked. Watching her? Preparing to make her and her baby its next meal?
“You give me my husband back!”
She tried to shout again, but her throat’s tatters produced only a whisper, more frightened than angry.
How had she forgotten her knife? She prized the ivory-handled pen knife William had given her as a wedding gift, of sorts, when they decided they would run. Their time in the woods had dulled the blade from too much hacking and cutting, but she still had it. The knife was all that remained of William now.
Lottie grasped her knife and held it out like a sword toward the churning water. Like her, the blade was weak and small, but she wielded it as if they both had greater power.
“You hear me?” she said, and this time her voice was stronger too.
The thing in the water did hear. It swam closer to her, splashing water over the ledge in its huge wake. Lottie had not believed she could feel greater terror, but the advancing creature awakened such a childlike fear in her that she wanted to cover her eyes.
But she did not. Arm outstretched with her knife, she watched. And waited.
The bulbous eye appeared again before the water swallowed the sight of it, much closer than it had been before. Gone before she could lunge at it. Then came a wet slapping on the stone as the creature hoisted itself nearer to her with shiny green-brown skin. It was not a claw, nor a human hand, but a large and sinister blending of the two that fanned across the ledge as if to reach for her.
Lottie had no time to scream. She stabbed at the closest – digit? – and hacked at it, feeling euphoria when a piece of the creature fell separate from the rest. The creature howled, muffled under the water, and the limb retreated to escape her, snatched away. Lottie kicked the cursed tendril away from her, back into the black pool.
Her laughter was not true laughter – just a desperate, gasping cackle – but the sound of it filled the cave. Then Lottie collapsed into sobs that joined the chorus of falling water droplets from above.
Drip-drip. Drip-drip.
A plan came to Lottie. With a plan, she stole shallow breaths. Her sobbing eased.
She would stay away from the water.
Drip-drip.
She would teach their child his father’s Cherokee name. Drip-drip.
She would teach their child that Waya’s family had lived in peace along the Etowah River before soldiers took them away. Drip-drip.
She would feed their child the corn and hickory nuts Waya loved so much, alongside mama’s corn cakes. Drip-drip.
Minutes passed, then hours, while Lottie made her plans for freedom that she would win at such an unfathomable cost.
“Lottie? You still here?”
When a voice came, Lottie shrieked. Hope swelled in her. But, no.
Not William. Not Waya.
Had she slept again? Her body was stiff against the stone.
Hours must have passed. Lamplight swayed in the passageway. The water had receded to a thin sheet. She smelled pipe tobacco. Her uncle’s shadow floated on the wall.
“We got to hurry, girl.”
Uncle Jim did not ask about William. He was not surprised her husband was gone.
“Waya,” she whispered to the ravaged cave.
“Come on, Lottie – my man’s outside waiting.”
As Free Jim reached for her, his two gold rings flared like droplets from the sun.
His pinky finger, a bloodied crust, was freshly sliced away.
Art by Daria Khvostova
Ffydd (Faith)
by S. Lynn
* * *
1919
Swansea, Wales
Always more work than hands willing to turn to it, even in your own bloody kitchen. “Is that the last of the milk, then?”
Chorus of complaint and sighs from my husband’s sisters. Lily and Iris and Violet have been looking after the home front, they’re not used to being ordered about like relief-workers, not to scrub and fetch and stretch a ration proper. Not that it’s not all the same war we’ve been fighting against. But.
I’d thought it would be less blood and worry, to be home again.
We fall silent as my husband edges into the room. Still a wisp, for all they’ve fed him since he’s been home.
Still not even a shadow of him to reflect in the spoons.
Trevor smiles, hesitant as always. Still the same crooked eyeteeth. Still his. Unshaven. Iris shattered all the mirrors in a fit of rage, or pique, I never entirely know with Iris. Though no mirror ever helped his hair before, it’s always been a hayrick. He looks like a naughty schoolboy.
He’s barely met my eyes since I’ve been home, my husband. As hard to bear as how he’s been lying beside me like a stone these last few nights. I’d been holding so fast to the memory of his eyes, the colour of that single word for what other languages slice up into blue and grey and green. But how can you divide the slate, the sky, the sea.
He’ll never see those eyes looking back from a glass again. And there’s not a word at all for what he is.
He’s changed, they’d written. (Not come home, no, they credit me that much, but… but could I stop myself thinking about what they wouldn’t say right out, till I had to tell myself I’d do no one much good working myself into a state. Better to think of it as seeing he’s fit to join me at the relief efforts. Even if the leaving felt like an admission of unseriousness of purpose, just because I’d a husband to go home to.) And it’s true. Not the sort of change one might have expected when a man’s been in gaol over his conscience, neither. That one could understand – sudden starts at nothing, weeping when he’d think no one could hear? Seen my share of that this past while.
But Trevor, Trevor’s is none of that.
How of a sudden he’s the one offering to butcher the hen who’d stopped laying – how he’d come back in with blood round his mouth. He’d not denied it. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, not if it’s simple truth. Just asks us to come clear in our own consciences, whether he’s still the boy they loved, the man they knew.
That there itself should tell us that.
Trevor’s looking round in that terribly polite way of a bloke who’s only dared come in with us cooking because he’s that desperate to see if the kettle’s on. When he clears his throat Iris slams the cheese-grater down in the bowl hard enough I worry for her knuckles. “Put it on your own bloody self, why don’t you? Ned manages.”
Ned doesn’t manage and we all know it, we know that Violet will be acting as her brother’s lost arm for the rest of her days and the worst is she’d rather that than admit there’s barely a lad left to marry proper and live her own life instead. Iris has cut her fingers on the grater. Trevor is watching his sister’s hand as she sucks at her knuckle, teeth dimpling his lower lip till the blood beads. And, ah, the hunger in his eyes, until Iris finally says, abrupt and sharp, “Go see to the chickens then.”
Trevor pushes out the back door into the courtyard without another word. I’m sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful, well, I’m almost sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful. I feel it low in my own stomach, our desperate fear of this uncharted future. Lily and Violet can see to the rest of our tea, or to Iris, whichever they please; I dust the flour from my hands and step out the back door after him.
It’s a bright day, as it goes. Not raining yet at any rate. Trevor’s sat on the step cuddling one of the hens in his lap. The cockerel’s watching him from the wash-line, clearly not on with the notion that this sudden threat to the back-garden flock has
hold of one of its wives or daughters, however gentle the embrace. I wave a hand for the bird to get off the washing and it flaps down to peck at the bricks as if we’re the ones here on its sufferance. “I’ve not seen Iris this cross,” I say.
“She’s missing William.” Trevor looks up, then ducks his head back down as if he’d not meant to meet my eyes for even that instant.
“Suppose I can understand that.” I pause, steel my nerves with as deep a breath as I can draw through the knot of my chest. “I’d have minded it, if I’d lost you.”
I can see it on his face, that thought he’s not so certain I haven’t. I smooth my skirts and tuck myself down onto the step beside him, just enough room not to crowd though he still shifts away. The chicken in his arms gives a small chortle of uncertainty and he pats her soothingly. “Reckon we’re luckier than some,” Trevor says.
Which I suppose is true, he could have been Daisy’s husband, to make it all the way through the war and then die of the ‘flu. Nor the health of his body ruined, quite. It’s a scandal how those who refused to fight have been treated, the misery, the few who’d not come home, though of his own troubles Trevor’s said as little as the men back from the trenches with no words to explain to those who’d not seen.
And of the other, only, Someone took offence.
Lily’s husband comes out of the toilet at the bottom of the garden, nodding at the door with a wry grin beneath his bristling moustache; “I’d not go in there for a bit, aye?”
Dear Herbert. At least he’s not mentioned the chicken. Yet. Instead he pauses in the act of pulling open the back door to squint at his wife’s young brother with a keen eye for a sorry state: “Trying to grow out your whiskers?” Trevor reaches up to brush his dusting of stubble, and Herbert laughs, not unkindly. “Never mind, lad, you’ll get the knack of it someday. Lil? What’s on for tea, then, love–”
Trevor’s not smiling back when I look to him from the closing door. “Ah, ‘nghariad, he didn’t mean anything by it, you know Herbert.” He’s shaking his head, small, but enough to make me shiver from it. “Hm? What is it, what’s the matter?”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 5
