Tide of Stone

by Kaaron Warren

  They felt similar, each of them. One more knobbly than the others, one more pliable.

  Even more, I could see the damage the years had wrought. Not only the years. The keepers. I could see here and there the marks of the people who went before me. I wasn’t tempted to add to it. Not really. Inflicting physical pain…although I’d lie if I said I didn’t enjoy the emotional pain I could dredge out of them.

  I worked the Grandfather next. He was the easiest to manipulate. It was his family and his desire to know about them I could play with.

  I picked him up.

  “We don’t need a bath. Nothing to wash.”

  And yet his skin was greasy to the touch, as if he’d been slathered with lanolin a long time ago. I looked around the basement a little more while he was under, but the corners of the place were far away and the whole thing gave me chills.

  They fussed at me, begged.

  It was too late, though. I had the feeling I had the information they were trying to stop me having.

  The note detailed a hiding spot upstairs, “to your advantage,” it said.

  I climbed the stairs to the top of the Time Ball Tower. There was a small bookcase there, filled with crime novels I hadn’t bothered to read. I really didn’t like to touch most of the books left behind.

  I pulled the books out and felt around until I found a knothole. I inserted a pinky finger and tugged.

  Nothing at first but a bit of give, so I tried again.

  The back came off, revealing a metal box set into an alcove.

  It had a heart on it and I was concerned it was Keeper Erotica. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read that.

  Inside, was a thick wad of paper folded and held together with a piece of leather strap.

  Was it really that simple? This is it?

  No wonder they talked about the easy way.

  I made myself comfortable at the top, sitting in the tiny bit of sunlight. I could see the shore, which comforted me. I could look out and see the ordinary and the normal.

  If you are reading this, congratulations! Not only are you bright enough to become a keeper, but you have shown ingenuity and courage to find this note. You will not be disappointed if you can hold your nerve. Hold your tongue, regardless. No one can know of this, bar those who follow in your footsteps. You know there are consequences; you will have seen evidence of such. This is for your eyes only.

  1912 discovered the heartstone quite by accident. I am certain Burnett Barton intended to keep the secret to himself, because he wants the power, doesn’t he?

  None of them had even hinted at this secret.

  The Priest had been begging me for days to cut him open. Kill him.

  “It’ll only take a minute. Cut my throat, cut my gut and join the two. I’ll barely bleed. You know that. It won’t be disgusting.”

  He scratched his arm with a small, sharp piece of metal he’d found. Once upon a time, they’d do all they could to inflict damage on us. Now they want to hurt themselves.

  I tired of it. He finally yanked my nerves so hard I snapped. I didn’t cut him, but. I wasn’t going to give that priest what he wanted, but this shut him up. He watched as if he was at the movies.

  I cut the fella next to him, no loss at all. No loss. He was the one who murdered every black fella he could find, strung them up along the main street as if it was meant to be.

  Inside him, it was not what you’d expect. There was little blood, and nothing pulsed at me.

  And he was still alive, even with his guts out.

  What I saw was this grey lump and I thought, that can’t be good, so I plucked it out and sewed him back up.

  The bastard lived.

  In their chests, lies this heartstone. It grows and grows over the years. Take it out, it’ll grow back. Take it out, you’ll be lucky for the rest of your life. Even if you don’t deserve it, you’ll be lucky. You’ll have it all. They’ll be weaker for a while, but that stone will grow back. It won’t kill them. This secret you must keep. And share it grudgingly. Part of the secret is selfishness.

  If there are any witnesses to the reading of this, or to the process itself, they will die within five days. That is certain. If you ever tell anyone what you have read, the wrath of the Time Ball Tower keepers will come down on you. And we are a powerful lot. You know that. The heartstone is for us and for us alone.

  The secret was almost lost when a long-lived, turtle-transforming man died in Little Cormoran. But the person who stole his heartstone knew what to do with it.

  You’ve taken them naked to the water. You know how they feel. The touch of them.

  Tap their chest to see who’s got the biggest one. And take it. Place it in a jar and let it sit. It’ll go to liquid. That’s what you want. A single spoonful is all you need. Any more and you’ll become like them.

  I felt stiff. I hadn’t moved in half an hour. Cut them open? Seriously? And find…what sounded disgusting.

  Things fell into place, though. Comments made and withdrawn. That foul jar in Burnett’s bedside table, that I always thought had lung oysters in it and therefore wiped from my memory.

  Keepers had noted whose heartstone they took. They left messages.

  Some years, no heartstone was taken.

  I realized that this was why the man I called weakest man was so weak. He’d lost his heartstone often.

  My father hadn’t taken it.

  Had he been too blind drunk, all the time?

  Pathetic. It didn’t make him a better man, did it?

  As for my mother, she had a lot of classical literature on the shelves. I read them all. Amrita is the nectar of immortality in Swarga. Made by the churning of the milk sea. She made us drink milk a lot. Does that mean anything?

  But she had four of us. No wonder she seemed scared of us sometimes. No wonder we had such a childhood. She thought we were ghosts from the Time Ball Tower. She hated most men. She thought they were base. She had passed this on to me. “So long as you know that, it’s okay. Don’t have any expectations beyond that.”

  I didn’t want to think about my father that way, but the attitude explained a lot.

  My mother was irreparably damaged by being in here. Agoraphobic, barely leaving the house.

  No world travel.

  My mother was absent most of the time, going about the daily business with her conscious mind not there but elsewhere. I stopped telling her about school or boyfriends because there is nothing worse than pouring your heart out to someone and have her say, “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.” Infuriating that they don’t care or understand.

  Now I understood that my mother never wanted to think or speak of the Time Ball Tower.

  We could talk once I got back, maybe. I doubted it would be a good conversation, though. I’d have to forgive a lot and I wasn’t ready for that.

  My art teacher said he’d bathed them, but according to his summary he didn’t. Not sure what that was about. Because he did have a lack in him, something that stopped him from great success, even though there were sparks of genius in his early work.

  I felt dusty. Dirty. I washed my hair and brushed it dry down on the rocks, loving the sun. The wind.

  When I returned, they were silent, quieter than I’d ever heard them. Watching me, not calling out.

  It was lucky for them that they were quiet. I felt more irritable than I ever had. Ready to snap at the slightest thing.

  They’d tried all along to stop me finding the heartstone notebook. To avoid their baths so I wouldn’t read the instructions. I didn’t blame them. This was horrendous. I could barely accept it, make sense of it.

  This was the secret, though. I’d figured it out, which gave me a palpable sense of relief and pride. I knew the secret Nate, 2009, had hinted at; I was truly one of them. I wouldn’t write the secret in the report. No one did. We wrote, “Prisoners bathed successfully,” and we knew what it meant.

  My head ached. I felt snarled. Blocked.

  Exhausted from the physic
al effort of getting them all washed, and the rest of it too, I collapsed into a chair. I dreamed that the Time Ball Tower was covered with slowly creeping rocks, and I was trapped inside. I was slow. I couldn’t run, and I realized I had been preserved.

  I asked Burnett once if he still dreamed.

  He sighed. “Not in color. And only of the driest things. Flowers pressed in a book. Autumn leaves. Nothing more.”

  The notes sat on my bedside table until the smell (dank, sweaty) had me put them back in the hiding place.

  Then I went to the prisoners. They didn’t know I knew.

  I stood looking at them all.

  “Look at you, all flushed and sexy,” Grayson said. “Are you all right?” He almost seemed to care.

  I stared at them.

  “Stop it,” they said.

  “I thought you liked being watched.”

  But they knew what I was thinking.

  I slept

  then, and dreamed of a little boy, paddling over. Lost.

  It was time to wake the prisoners. Sleepy or not, happy or not. I woke them.

  “No! I was having a good dream.” They often said this to me. I had vivid dreams too, full of detail and easily remembered.

  “I was dreaming about a little boy in a boat,” I said.

  Grayson said, “I was dreaming I was a child, and I paddled and paddled and paddled until I reached an island. It was deserted.”

  I didn’t believe he’d dreamed anything of the sort.

  “He reminded me of myself, when I was a boy, before all hell broke loose,” one of the prisoners said and I nodded. My mother had written about him: he kept a daughter in his cellar for thirty years. Never taught her how to speak or read. All she knew about was oral sex and silent fucking. He brought men back for her and then he’d kill them. He was unrepentant. And there were the grandchildren, too.

  “Thank you. For listening. All we have is our voices. That’s all that’s left. All we have is storytelling.”

  “You’re pretty bloody slow at it. Shocking bad,” I said, although I was used to the speech by now. I thought of what he’d done, this man. How many lives he’d destroyed.

  “We’ve had a lot of visitors. Some ladies, wasn’t there? Come out to service us all.”

  I had to laugh at that. I said, “One of them drowned going home. The other tried to get you lot released before she forgot about you and pissed off. Everyone blames her for the school fire.”

  “You know who made that school burn down? Your Burnett. He’s the one ordered it done. Send a message, he reckoned. Make sure no other bitch comes out. The man whose father did the burning told us. Not the only fire he ever caused, was it? Keep listening. You’ll get to the truth eventually. He can’t help himself.”

  They were agitated, moving about, so I turned them all face down for a bit.

  All old people must have this forming in them. Those ancient husks, wasted and drugged, lined up like sardines in front of flickering TVs. All of them with this precious stone inside.

  Burnett must have one.

  I thought of those rare keepers who were not huge successes. Did they refuse to take a heartstone? The boatman, with his egg-producing chickens. His monotonous trips to the Time Ball Tower. His failure to thrive. I re-read their reports, and all of them, all the failures, did not bathe the prisoners. They didn’t get the message. Missed the cue or allowed themselves to be manipulated. Distracted.

  I didn’t want failure. I wanted a future. Many successful people had a keeper in their background. Somewhere amongst the ancestors.

  I walked along the gallery examining the portraits of the keepers. Who did it and who didn’t?

  Here were the successes, the hugely talented, the famous.

  Here I wanted to be.

  I was wiser, now.

  I knew much more than I ever thought I would.

  I could help my mother, if I did this. Help my father. Help them recover.

  If that’s what I chose to do.

  I don’t want to die anonymous. Like the unnamed corpses used for medical research in Victorian England. Having achieved nothing. Nothing memorable about me, nothing to remember. I had family, so I probably wouldn’t be buried in an anonymous grave. But I wanted people to care. I wanted a funeral full of grieving mourners.

  I was skilled, but not that talented. As my father said, I was no genius. I would never be the world’s greatest photographer; I had neither the vision nor the originality for that. The same went for all of them. I’d heard some of Peter Mosse’s pieces before he went into the Time Ball Tower. Before he took the heartstone, I guess. Sure, he was young, unpractised, but beforehand there was a lack of soul there. Nothing special. After? After he wrote some of the greatest music I knew. His “Time and Tide and Stone and Rust” went,

  As we approached,

  I could see that the walls were caked with sea creatures,

  sea plants,

  the splattered bodies of a million insects, the shit of ten thousand birds.

  It was craggy. Untended.

  Bleeding rust around the bolts.

  Beautiful. I had the whole sequence downloaded and I listened to it often. It was relaxing, calming, and while it was more my parents’ speed than mine I could see it was a work of genius. It’s been said he was even more distant on his return, that he never connected with people, not really, losing himself entirely in his music. He was shit before, they’d say, and he came back a genius. No one argues with that.

  Was my art worth it?

  My head hurt, and aspirin barely made a dent.

  I had been chosen for reasons other than I thought. I’d been chosen because they thought I was cruel enough, ambitious enough, and capable of taking the heartstone. I must have suspected this and perhaps been warned. But I realized that it was true.

  I was no better than any of them.

  I looked at my wish list, the photographers who were famous, who traveled the world for their art.

  And there were the other lists, the sad, long lists. Of graduating photographers, all of them wanting fame and fortune, most of them hopeless.

  I wanted to rise above them.

  The prisoners said, “It’s a trap, a test, a trick.” Too many options, I realized. They were lying. Manipulating. “This will kill you. It will destroy you. You’ll never have children.” I also realized that all Burnett’s talk of methods of preservation were a smoke screen. That when he clutched at his heart, when he spoke of a stone, he was talking about his very own heartstone, and he didn’t want me to know it.

  The Ball dropped.

  The Ball dropped.

  They hoped I’d forgotten, or didn’t believe it. But every night I dreamed of the photographs I could take if I had intensified vision. Because it wasn’t that the keepers got lucky, not that alone, at least. It was that they grew skills and insights ordinary people didn’t have.

  I wanted that. But I had a sick twist in my gut about it. I knew it would hurt one of them. And it seemed to me that if I took it, I was making a decision about the sort of person I was. The sort of person who would take something, take the heart of a person, for their own gain.

  Still.

  These were no longer people. Not really.

  And I wanted that success. I’d always wanted it.

  In the end, the decision wasn’t so difficult.

  But who? They wouldn’t be unaffected by it; it was as bad as they could feel in their position.

  I walked past them pretending not to be deciding who but; “Which one did I call you again?”

  “Hitler. I’m Hitler.”

  “Are you?” I was bored with the game.

  “I am Hitler. Please let me be.”

  I joked with them, and they didn’t know I was assessing them.

  “You can be Hercules. He killed his children, did you know that? Of course they blamed it on Hera. She bewitched him. They always blame the woman.”

  “That’s because it’s always the woman’s f
ault,” one of them called out, and they all found that hilarious, as much as they were capable.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I went for a job interview at a Canteen? Serving five hundred miners three meals a day, plus morning and afternoon tea.”

  I always waited for the question. Sometimes they wanted food porn. Sometimes something violent, blood and guts and fists. Sometimes it was pure sex.

  “What did you cook?”

  Food. As I assessed them, I talked food. “I cooked thirty roast chickens in one day. The men said they could smell it from deep underground, the skin roasting, the juices forming, the gravy. The onions. The potatoes, crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside.” I walked the aisle, looking them up and down.

  “She’s getting ready to leave,” one said.

  “Leaving us.”

  “Don’t go. We like you.”

  “We love you.”

  “No one will ever love you like we do.”

  Sadly, this was probably true. I sat at the very center of their universe, providing all.

  Even a child has more than its mother. Even a tiny baby has other stimulants.

  I’m joking with them, I’m telling them porn, I’m tapping on their chests as if I’m flirting.

  They tried to pull away from me and I felt great sense of power; I was so much stronger than them.

  “Not me,” they said one by one. “Choose him.”

  “Don’t choose me,” Grayson said. “Don’t choose me and I’ll tell you secrets. I can tell you things you should know. I’ll tell you about the secret prisoner, if you allow me to sit in your room and watch you sleep. I will tell you all.”

  I didn’t trust him. Crazy stuff he wanted, and he’d ask for more, no doubt at all. Push push push until I’d want to cut his throat.