The hounds don’t even know about this, do they? she asked him, playing a hunch, a queasy feeling in her stomach, and he raised his eyebrows and patted the pocket where he’d put the soiled handkerchief.
You’re not a child any longer, he told her. You’re quite old enough, I suspect, to know something of the way of things. To be trusted, even, I suppose.
They don’t know, she said.
The Bailiff sat up straighter and tugged vigorously at his knotted beard. I manage the affairs of those who manage the affairs of the hounds, he said. And the hounds don’t want to know when there are problems. Most of the time it is sufficient that the problems are solved. The hounds don’t want to know any more than they have to know. To their way of thinking, they have more pressing matters to attend.
“I asked Madam Terpsichore to tell me what it is,” Odd Willie says, “way the hell back when I was just a kid. I asked her twice to tell me. She said I was better off not knowing. She said I’d sleep better that way.”
“But it will come?” Soldier asks. “If you call it, it’ll come? And you can control it?”
“Yeah. I mean, you know, it always has before. But it’s gonna make me sick as shit, Soldier. I might need your help after the—”
“Just fucking do it,” she says, daring to raise her voice just enough to get Odd Willie moving. “Say the goddamn magick word or whatever. Do it now, before they come back for us. I already told you I’m not going to leave you down here.”
“Yeah, you did,” Odd Willie replies, and he sounds tired and ill and frightened. “You told me that. Good thing you’re better at killing than you are at lying, Soldier, or the Bailiff would have run out of uses for you a long time ago.”
“No shit,” she says, slowly getting to her feet, leaning against the tunnel wall because she isn’t sure how much longer her legs can support her. And then Odd Willie tries to clear his throat, coughs and suggests that she might want to cover her eyes and turn away until he says otherwise, and Soldier does as she’s told.
“You’re not a child any longer,” the Bailiff said, when the trapdoor had been pulled down to reveal a rickety ladder leading up into the dark attic of the yellow house. The upper end of the ladder was attached somewhere overhead, and it had unfolded as the Bailiff had opened the trapdoor, seeming to Soldier almost like some small bit of magic. “We do not show children our secrets,” he said, “as they cannot yet be trusted with the keeping of them.”
“You can trust me,” Soldier said, and she’d almost forgotten about the dream and the black woman with the long white dreadlocks, the warning that she shouldn’t ever enter the attic. “I’m very good at keeping secrets.”
“As well I know,” the Bailiff said. “Elsewise, you would not be here today. You first, my dear,” and he motioned towards the ladder.
“What is it?” she asked him, peering up into the gloom. The warm air drifting down from the attic smelled like cobwebs and dust, neglect and brittle, old paper, all familiar, welcoming smells, smells that Soldier had always known. But there was something else there beneath it all, something spicy and sour that made her wrinkle her nose. “What do they keep hidden up there?”
“You have merely to climb those nine rungs to find out for yourself.”
“And you’re coming up after me,” she said.
“Of course I am,” the Bailiff replied, and he smiled reassuringly and gave her an encouraging pat on the back. “As far as I can follow.”
Soldier said a short, silent prayer to Mother Hydra, and then she climbed the ladder, though it seemed like many more rungs than nine. She started counting halfway up, and when she’d finally reached the top, she’d counted all the way to twenty-four.
“Go on,” the Bailiff shouted up at her. “I can’t start up until you’re inside. This ladder’s seen better days and won’t hold us both at once.”
So Soldier scrambled over the last rung and stood inside the attic at the edge of the trapdoor, gazing back down at the Bailiff and the floor of the upstairs hallway, a rectangle of light cut into the darkness.
“What do you see up there, Soldier girl?” the Bailiff asked, and she laughed and told him he’d have to come up and find out for himself, just the same as her. The Bailiff started up the ladder, the old wood complaining at the burden of him, and Soldier looked up, squinting into the colorless half-light of the attic. She could make out a few old packing crates and a steamer trunk, stacks of newspapers bundled with twine, and there was the sense that the attic was a very large place, perhaps even somehow larger than the house below, stretching away from her on all sides. But there were no ghosts, at least, not that she could see, and Soldier decided that whatever was in the attic probably wasn’t all that interesting, after all. She looked down again, to tell the Bailiff to hurry, and saw that he was no longer coming up the ladder; the Bailiff was raising the trapdoor again, shutting her in. The rusty hinges squealed and screamed, and Soldier opened her mouth, because it seemed that she should scream, too. But there was no scream anywhere inside her, only the fruitless knowledge that there probably should have been, that some other child would have screamed at the thought of being closed up in the attic alone.
“Why?” she asked him, and the Bailiff paused and glanced up at her. He winked once, and, “All is mystery, wonderful mystery,” he said, “and life is the revelation.” And then he finished closing the trapdoor.
Soldier sat down on the dusty floorboards, waiting for her eyes to adjust so she could walk without tripping over some piece of junk and breaking her neck.
“Then I’m alone,” she said, and a small voice—the voice of another girl, but someone who sounded quite a bit older than Soldier—answered her.
“No,” the older girl said, “you’re not alone, but you should have brought a lantern. They always bring lanterns when they come. It was silly of you to have forgotten.”
“I suppose so,” Soldier said, and then the brown girl stood up from the milking stool where she’d been sitting, unnoticed, waiting for whoever would come next, her father’s gold pocket watch lying open on her lap, the hands frozen at precisely nine twenty-three and thirteen seconds.
“Are you a ghost?” Soldier asked her.
The brown girl, the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles, looked surprised or offended or both at once. “No,” she said. “Certainly not. Are you?”
“Not yet,” Soldier replied, and the girl took her hand and led her away into the murky depths of the attic.
The crackling, thrumming thing that Odd Willie has called up or down or simply into this world brings light with it, a soft, warm yellow-white light, like morning or butter, that pulses and ripples lazily along the tunnel. Soldier stands with her back to it and stares, transfixed by the miracle of her own shadow, her silhouette an eclipse thrown across rough-hewn rock walls and the paving stones and the sagging timbers barely holding up the low ceiling. She never truly expected to live long enough to see light again, and now she only wants to lie down and let it wash over her bruised, bleeding body, washing away the cold and the pain, the fear and dread knotted deep in her gut. She wants to turn around and let this light stream across her face and fill her eyes, fill her soul, if she has such a thing; she would gladly drown in this light, if it would ever have such a wretched creature as herself.
“Oh,” Odd Willie moans. “Oh, Jesus…”
“What next?” she asks, because it’s the only thing she can think to say to him, her mind clouded by the light and electric crackle. “What next, Odd Willie?”
“Oh,” he says again, and then he begins coughing and the light flickers and dims, and for a moment Soldier’s afraid he’s going to let it slip away. But the coughing passes, and immediately the light grows brighter.
“Can you talk to it?” she asks him.
“You…you can turn around now if you want to,” he tells her and makes an ugly hacking noise.
Do I? Soldier thinks. Do I really want to see it? Do I really want to face all that light?
You’ve seen a whole lot worse, Soldier girl, and, more than likely, you’ll see a lot worse again.
“She won’t bite,” Odd Willie wheezes, “not unless I ask her to.”
Soldier turns her head, and there’s Odd Willie on his knees, pale as a corpse and a dark smear of blood and vomit down his chin, his throat, his chest. His eyes are shut, and he looks dead already.
“She doesn’t like it here,” he says. “That’s going to make her hard to hold.”
The thing reminds Soldier of a jellyfish, and then it reminds her of something else entirely, and she gives up trying to comprehend it. Her eyes water and burn when she looks directly at it, so she keeps them on Odd Willie instead.
“Tell her to get us the fuck out of here,” Soldier says. “The faster she does that, the sooner—”
“She’s afraid. Shit, Soldier. I’ve never seen her afraid before.”
“Come on, Willie. What happens next? Show me what this bitch can do for us.”
The crackling dynamo hum gets louder and rises an octave or two, and now the heat from the light is becoming uncomfortable. “She’s scared,” Odd Willie says. “She’s asking me to release her.”
“No,” Soldier yells at him, having to shout to be heard above all the noise the thing is making. “That’s not going to fucking happen; you hear me? Not until we’re out of here.”
“She says it’s Monday morning already. Six fifteen on Monday morning. Soldier, we’ve been down here—”
“It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been down here,” Soldier says, and never mind what the Bailiff said about the cleanup crew from Boston, whether they’ve come and gone, whether they ever even showed up, whether Ballou got them, too. “It only matters that we get out of here now.”
“She also says Patience Bacon was right.”
“Fuck Patience Bacon. We’re not going to die in this stinking sump hole because your astral playmate here has the fucking heebie-jeebies.”
Odd Willie takes a deep, hitching breath, and his eyelids flutter. “I’m sorry. Just do it,” he tells the thing. “Just do it fast. I won’t ever ask you for anything else, not ever again.” His eyes roll back to show the whites, and the thing that isn’t a jellyfish bobs and sways and begins making a sickly, mewling sort of racket.
There’s a trickle of blood from Odd Willie’s nostrils, and Soldier turns away again.
“Just kill them,” Odd Willie mutters. “Kill them all. Every last goddamn one of them.”
And then the thing is gone, a furious stream of fire rolling away down the tunnel, leaving behind steam and a sticky phosphorescent sheen on the floor and walls; at least they won’t be in the dark again. The crackling sound is gone, too, but the air smells like ozone and hot metal.
“Can you walk?” Soldier asks Odd Willie, and his eyelids flutter again, and he sways a little, first to one side and then the other. “Hey, come on. Can you fucking hear me? I need to know if you can walk.”
Odd Willie opens his eyes and stares up at her, but his expression is blank, distant, almost empty, and Soldier resists the urge to slap him hard. She wants to, but it might break whatever tenuous connection he has with the thing. And the way he looks, it might break him, as well.
“I’m gonna help you up, okay?” she says and stoops down, getting her right arm around him, and Soldier drops the broken femur and lifts Odd Willie Lothrop slowly to his feet. He’s heavier than she expected, or she’s weaker, and it doesn’t help that they’re both so slick with sweat and blood and the filth from the ossuary and the tunnel. She’s afraid he’s going to slide free of her grip. “I wouldn’t mind if you helped out a little,” she grunts and tries not to lose her balance.
“We should probably follow her,” Odd Willie mumbles.
“That’s sort of what I had in mind.”
“She has a name,” he says. “I can’t fucking say it, not in words, right, but she has a beautiful name. She was born in the heart of a dying star. She’s made of fire, hydrogen, helium, plasma, you know.”
“Then George Ballou and his spaniels ought to be a stroll in the fucking park, yeah?”
“She even knows what killed the dinosaurs. I can’t tell you, but she fucking knows, I swear.”
Soldier shifts her weight, getting a better hold on Odd Willie, and she thinks maybe he’s starting to support himself a little. But when she takes a step forward, he stumbles and almost pulls them both down.
“I can’t carry you out of here. You’re going to have to fucking walk.”
“You said you wouldn’t leave me,” he moans and looks down at his feet. “You promised.”
“But I’m a shitty liar, remember? That’s what you said. Now, just fucking walk. That’s all you got to do.” And Odd Willie nods his head, the slow, measured nod of reluctant comprehension, and takes a step on his own, and then another, and another after that. Soldier’s still holding him up, but at least she isn’t having to try and drag him along an inch at a time.
“Hey, Willie, it ain’t no goddamn foot race. Slow the fuck down,” she says, and he coughs when he tries to laugh, and more blood leaks from the corners of his mouth.
“No way. You best keep up, bitch,” he wheezes.
Good thing you’re better at killing than you are at lying, or the Bailiff would have run out of uses for you a long time ago. And Soldier tries not to think about having to leave Odd Willie to die alone in the tunnel. I wouldn’t have done that, she thinks. I’m not that big an asshole. I’d take care of him myself before I’d leave him alive down here alone.
“She knows what killed the dinosaurs,” he says again. “Hell, she knows what happened to Atlantis. She saw it all. She’s seen everything.”
“Right now, you just keep moving,” Soldier tells him. “You can tell me all about it later, when this shit’s over and done with.” She glances back at the discarded femur, lying behind them on the cobbles, and wonders if dropping it there was a mistake, if maybe she’ll still need it later on. And then Odd Willie’s body shudders, and he stops, and his eyelids begin to flutter again.
“Shit on me,” he says, and his bladder lets go, spattering the tunnel floor and her feet and legs with hot urine. “She’s found them, Soldier. I think she’s found them all.”
Soldier followed the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles through the attic of the yellow house, beneath great crossbeams carved from pines felled almost two hundred and fifty years before, past sagging shelves crammed with books and manuscripts and scrolls sealed inside baked clay tubes, past broken furniture and dozens more packing crates, an empty iron cage big enough to hold a lion, a bronze bust of Triton balanced on a stone pedestal. Perhaps, she thought, this is the memory of the house. Perhaps this is where it keeps everything that the rest of the house has forgotten or wants to forget. She knew some places were like that. Cemeteries were always like that.
“You knew I was coming?” she asked the girl, who shrugged and paused to blow some of the dust off an elaborate wooden Noah’s ark laid out on the floor. The ark was at least ten feet long, and there were hundreds of animals, two by two, carved with an exquisite attention to detail. Soldier stooped for a better look, and the older girl sat down on the floor next to her.
“They told me. They always tell me when someone’s coming up. Of course, you’re different. Usually they’re only bringing me gifts, candy or fruit or a length of red silk ribbon. But you’re different.”
“This has something to do with my dreams, doesn’t it?” Soldier asked her, but the girl didn’t reply. She smiled and carefully wiped a spiderweb off the shingled roof of the ark. Soldier sighed and glanced back the way they’d come. She was thirsty and wondered how long they’d been walking, how far they’d gone. This must be the biggest attic in the world, she thought and then tried to remember a word she’d learned from the Bailiff or one of the ghouls (she couldn’t recall which), a word for things that are larger on the inside than on the outside.
“This was a gift,” the girl said
and pointed at the wooden Noah’s ark.
“Is it yours? Was it a gift to you?” Soldier asked.
“No, I don’t think so. I’m just taking care of it. I take care of almost everything up here.”
Soldier leaned closer to the ark, trying to see all the animals more clearly, the brightly painted menagerie filing across the floor and up a long gangplank into the ship. She wished that there were more light. But she could make out two elephants and two giraffes, a pair of hippopotamuses and a pair of moose, ostriches and alligators, horses and a couple of enormous brontosaurs, unicorns and leopards and bison.
“It was made in Italy,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles said. “There’s a signature on the bottom of the ark, and a date—Signior Anastagio Baldassario Moratti, 1888. All of the animals were made in Italy, too.”
“They sent me up here just to see a damned toy?” Soldier asked.
“But it’s not a toy,” the girl said, righting a camel that had fallen over. “It’s something else. It’s sort of a metaphor, I think.”
“What’s your name?” Soldier asked the brown-skinned girl. She was growing bored with the Noah’s ark and stood up, brushing the dust off her clothes.
“My name is Pearl,” the girl said.
“You’re the alchemist’s daughter, aren’t you? The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles?”
“Yes,” replied the girl.
“They told me your name was Hester. Everyone down there thinks your name is Hester.”
“People often believe silly, mistaken things,” the girl said and shook her head. “Did you know that people used to believe that eating tomatoes would kill you, and that the whole Earth was created in only six days?”
“They said that your name was Hester. That’s what they all seem to believe, down there.”
“We should keep moving,” the girl said. “It’s never a good idea to tarry here very long. And we’ve still got a ways to go.”
Daughter of Hounds Page 26
