by Kara Timmins
“They slept out in the open that night. My mom showed me.” He tapped on his head again. “The stars were brighter there, almost too bright to sleep. Some flickered green or red. They didn’t build a fire because the ground was warm and soft, like sleeping on a big white belly. My mom finally slept. Exhausted, probably. But there was a break in the whisper. Maybe because it knew she was coming. Who knows? But it stopped.
“They slept late into the next day and woke to a bright sun. Too bright, maybe, especially compared to the gray it had been going over the mountains. They rested later than they wanted to.”
“What did Cero and Rayner think of the place?” Eloy asked.
“They trusted Aerelion in every decision, without question. They didn’t take anything seriously, no matter how dangerous. Which proved to give them some difficulties, but that’s a different story. They were worried about my mom and how sick she seemed to be getting, but other than that, they were just curious about what they were going to find. I think they were itching for some kind of fight.”
“Did they find it?” Eloy asked.
“Now you’re jumping ahead. Cero eventually roused the others, with probably a little too much excitement. He wanted to know what was in the middle of the clearing, like a treasure hunter waiting to bust the lock on an unearthed chest. So they went on.
“They saw a dark spot ahead of them, as if it had always been there. But they hadn’t seen it the day before, they were all sure. And the more they walked, the bigger this thing seemed to get, until they got so close they could see the details.
“My mom gasped and stopped. Aerelion didn’t understand at first, but then he saw. And then Cero and Rayner saw too. The house was my mother’s childhood home. There was no doubt about it: in the middle of a mess of mountains in a clearing at the bottom sat the house my mom grew up in before Aerelion, Cero, and Rayner came through and took her with them.”
“And her family?” Eloy asked.
“Well, that’s the thing. They moved in closer, expecting, probably more than a little worried, that they would find her family. But there wasn’t anyone else there. There wasn’t any sign that anyone ever had been. There was no food, or animals, or mess. Nothing. Every cut of wood, bench, ladder, and bed was the same. Even cuts and dings she’d made with her brothers and sisters were there. But there were no people. No sign that anyone had ever been there.
“My mom’s a tough woman, always has been, even then, as I’ve said, but this was a little too much for her.
“Then the whispering started up again. She rushed into the house.
“‘I hear you,’ she said, ‘Where are you?’
“She started to worry that the whispering she had been hearing was her family. The four men ran in after her.
“‘There’s no one here,’ Aerelion said.
“But my mom was convinced there was. They walked around, climbed into the loft, moved things around, but there was nothing. Until my father noticed something. He was walking across the main floor and stopped dead in his tracks. He took a step forward, then he took a step backward.
“‘We have to pull the floor up,’ my dad said.
“They hacked and pulled until they had the wood broken and pulled back. There was nothing but more of the same white stone, from the outside. My dad crouched down and ran his hands over the ground.
“The others didn’t see anything in the stone, but he did. He told the others to back up. He closed his eyes and focused and the stone floor in the middle of the house crumbled down in a perfect circle. When the rocks fell, they really fell, deep and far. They all looked down into the hole. What they saw over the edge was a spiral of stone steps, and they looked old. Really old.
“‘Is the voice coming from down there?’ Aerelion asked my mom.
“But she said she wasn’t sure. The whispering was gone.
“‘Where else could it be coming from?’ she asked.
“They all agreed.
“‘Who’s first down the dark mystery staircase of obviously not murderous whispers?’ Cero asked.
“Which meant Cero went first.”
Eloy laughed, but the thought of Malatic and how much the quip sounded like something he would say cut the humor off with a quick chop.
“You okay?” Timyr asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Go on. I want to know what they find at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Sure.” Timyr looked pleased. “Well, they wanted to know too. Enough so that they kept going down even though it kept going deeper and deeper and got warmer and warmer. The heat was all around them. My mom said she wanted to turn around, but there was something in her, some urge she didn’t yet understand, pulling her on. The pull wasn’t the voice. It was something else. So they kept moving, until they eventually reached the bottom. They looked up to the top, and the light above looked no bigger than a coin.”
“And what was at the bottom?” Eloy asked.
“I’m getting there, keep your bottoms cinched. They all lit their lanterns. There was almost no light at the bottom, and just the lantern that Cero was using wasn’t enough anymore. The space was a tight fit, but there was a tunnel. Only one way to go.
“One after another, they went on, and then the space opened up. The room was huge under there. Bigger than they thought it could be. Too big even for their lanterns to light the edges. And they could breathe. It didn’t feel hot anymore, and there even seemed to be a clean breeze. Little lights hung in the darkness, just like there had been the night before. Little red ones and little green ones, dotting the dark, stretching all around them like they were in the middle of the sky. The path they were on cut right through the center to the middle of the great room. The space was beautiful. The memory was so clear in my mom’s mind that seeing it through her was enough to feel like my own memory. A mass of glittering crystal spun in the middle, without pull to the ground, the little lights glittering off of its surface.
“Cero started for it first, of course. He wanted to get closer. He said he wanted to touch it. They all wanted to. But Aerelion looked at my mother, and she wasn’t doing well. Even in the glitter and lantern light, she looked ill. She had her arms pulled into herself with her hands balled up into fists under her chin.
“‘Wait,’ Aerelion said. ‘Don’t walk down that path.’
“Cero groaned, but he stopped. They all stopped. They all waited.
“‘What do you want to do?’ Aerelion asked my mother.
“‘I don’t know. Just give me a minute,’ my mom said, and she was shivering.
“‘We’ll wait until you tell us to go,’ Aerelion said. ‘We’ll go back if you say so.’
“But she shook her head. ‘No. I just have to think. It’ll start to make sense. It has to.’
“My dad wasn’t so understanding. He wanted to go back, and he said so.
“But Aerelion was firm: they were going to wait until my mom gave them direction. My dad said he was just about to pick my mom up, throw her over his shoulder, and take her all the way back up the stairs, he was so afraid of the distant look in her eyes. He almost did, he swears, but before he got the chance the whole room started to change. Just like the ground above, everything started to crumble. Only instead of rock, the pieces that fell were the parts of what they were seeing. The breeze fell away, like someone stopped swishing a fan.
“Then they saw the truth. Behind the illusion was the opposite of something glittering or beautiful. The space wasn’t even big. The room was small, stone, and humid. The air was hard to breathe, like something was already taking in most of the good air. Which I guess is what was happening. Once the illusion was gone, their lanterns revealed the creature clinging to the ceiling above them. The room was much smaller than it had appeared to be, but it was still big enough to house its girth. It was soft and pale as the white stone. Movement rolled through it like twitching
muscle under soft skin. Thin tentacle arms, maybe about ten of them, ran over its strange form, one after another.
“The five just stood frozen, gaping up at it.
“‘Look there,’ Rayner said, and he pointed his lantern toward where they would have started walking.
“And there was the thing’s mouth. As big as a man and lined with rows of teeth.
“My dad pulled out his sword. ‘We’re leaving,’ he said.
“But my mom didn’t move. She just stood there staring up at the thing and its arms running over itself. And then she gasped. ‘I hear her,’ she said. ‘It’s still just a whisper. She says she’s just so hungry. It’s been so long since she’s eaten. She says she just needs a little more time.’
“‘Well I’m not feeding her,’ Cero said.
“‘Kella, we have to get out of here,’ Aerelion said.
“But she just seemed to get more upset. ‘She’s worried. She’s sick and dying. She needs our help,’ my mom said.
“‘Then she shouldn’t have tried to lure us here to eat us,’ Cero said. And he went back up the stairs.
“My mom looked up at the pale thing and pleaded, ‘What do you want? I hear you. I came when you called. What do you want?’
“The thing quivered. And then three of the long arms reached up and pulled something out from the folds of its sickly skin and set it on the ground underneath it. My mom walked forward, though Aerelion and my dad tried to pull her back. My mom pushed them away in the way only she could, and she did it hard. They didn’t try to touch her again, but they tried to reason with her.
“‘Don’t walk to it,’ they said. ‘It’s another trap.’
“But she didn’t listen. She walked right up to the three writhing sacs the creature had laid on the ground. My dad and Aerelion followed her. If she was going to face it, trap or not, they were going to do it with her.
“My mom crouched down and pulled at the soft layer of membrane off one of the lumps.
“‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be careful.’
“The layer covering the thing tore like a corn husk, and runny fluid poured out of it around their feet. And there, in the middle of the mess, was a little creature. Very human like, but its legs were longer, and thinner.
“‘This isn’t real,’ my dad said.
“‘It is,’ said my mom. And she picked the strange creature up and cleared its nose and mouth, just like she had seen done when her mother gave birth to her younger siblings. She repeated the process two more times, until she had all three cleaned and wrapped in pelts. All three were cooing and writhing around by the time she looked back up at their mother.
“‘I’ll take them,’ she said. ‘I’ll take care of them.’
“My mom put one of the baby creatures in my dad’s arms, and another in Aerelion’s, before picking up the last one herself. Their mother sighed, and its arms dropped down to the ground, and everything in it relaxed. The mouth closed, and it sagged from the ceiling. And it was dead.
“My mom stood there looking up at her for a long time, holding the newborn creature, and she cried. I never saw my mother cry with my own eyes. But she cried for that mother, who died for her children. My mom looked at the thing writhing in her arms, a thing very much alive. She had no way to understand how the child looked so different from its mother, with his long human-like limbs and human face. But they had her teeth, little barbs poking out of their pink gums.
“‘They have their mother’s smile,’ my dad said.
“Their eyes were black from corner to corner. When my mom looked closer, she saw little lights in them, like the lights in the sky in the illusion.
“So they made their careful way back up the spiral stairs. And when they got back to the top, the house that looked exactly like the one my mother had grown up in was gone. In fact, everything above ground was different. The clearing really wasn’t that big after all, not so different from the base of any of the other mountains, and the air was cold again.
“My dad and Aerelion explained to Cero and Rayner what had happened.
“‘What are we going to do with them?’ Cero asked.
“My mom said, ‘She showed me where to take them. There are people back over the mountains, from where we came and to the north. There’s a temple there. She showed me where to go, and what it looks like. She said that the people there will know what to do.’
“So they made their way back over the mountains. And along the way, they learned about these babies. The three all looked the same: white skin, black eyes, long limbs. But they had their differences too. One was like his mother in that he could make things look and feel real that weren’t there, and he used the ability to show my mom what to feed them: meat and water, mostly. One of the others had a ‘chasm of space,’ my mom called it, in his mind. He said the space was open for all kinds of information, no telling to what he could know. The last made his feelings your feelings. If he was sad, they were sad. If he was hungry, they were hungry. They were special, these three.
“But my mom couldn’t stop what was bound to happen. They took care of the little ones for weeks while they made the difficult journey back to the other side of the mountains. They got attached. But my mom was the worst. She had heard the mother, maybe even gotten to know her in a way, and she had a connection with the little ones, who were already starting to grow so much. By the time they crossed over the last mountain, my mom didn’t want to go north anymore.
“It took my dad to convince her, and they fought about it. ‘They’re not yours to keep,’ he said. ‘She told you what she wanted for them, and you have to respect that.’
“There were chunks of this part that I didn’t get to see in the story. My mom blocked it from me, but I suspect the fight was long and difficult. In the end, though, she agreed with him, and they went north. They found a settlement there, more people than they thought there would be. They found a town of stone buildings and rocky roads. Everything was tall, including the entryways and archways—which made sense, because the people were tall.
“The people who lived there were hesitant at first. They weren’t used to strangers coming through. Then they saw the three children, and everything about the encounter changed. The five got everything they needed, they got everything they asked for, and even some things they didn’t.
“But Aerelion asked right away to point them to the temple. It wasn’t far from the town entrance, but it took my mom twice as long as it should have to get there. The whole time she stared down at whichever little one was in her arms. She would switch off, making sure to get equal time with all three.
“But even small steps gets you to your destination. The temple was long and stretched, just like the people who manned it. The owners poured down the front stone steps with their arms outstretched, like they knew. Which they did.
“The people of the temple told them that the three brothers were always meant to come there. For generations, the people of the temple had been waiting. There were festivities for days. When it was time for Aerelion, my mom and dad, Cero, and Rayner to move on, the people of the temple let them say their goodbyes. My mom was the last, and she lingered with each one. The first made the temple look like the forest of the mountains where my mom had held him, the second filled the area with so much sadness the men of the temple started crying, and the third opened the eye in my mother’s mind and showed her pieces of her future. She kissed each one in the middle of their forehead and left.”
Eloy was mesmerized by the story. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know what happened to the three strange children and the people who raised them. “What happened then?”
“I don’t know what happened to them or their people,” Timyr said. “And I have no doubt those three were regularly on my mother’s mind. But those three children changed things for the group of five forever. It wasn’t just the pieces my mom
saw of her own future. Even if she hadn’t, she already knew what she wanted. My dad saw her differently after that too. It’s hard to see the woman you love hold a child and not think of your own legacy, I imagine. So that was the beginning of the end for the group. The five traveled for a long while back toward where my mom was from, and my parents said their goodbyes to Aerelion. You know the rest of that story.”
“And Cero and Rayner?” Eloy asked.
“That’s a different story. And I’ve already talked too much into the night. One of us has to get to sleep. Do you want to take first watch, or me?”
“Do you have a preference?”
“I wouldn’t mind a rest now,” Timyr said.
“Then it’s the least I could do after a story like that. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
“I never would’ve guessed you had such a way with a story,” Eloy said.
“I don’t. I don’t really know where it came from, to be honest. I barely remembered it, but once I started, everything came back. Strange, almost. Like someone was telling it through me.”
“Memory is a funny thing,” Eloy said.
“I guess it’s good there’s someone else to remember that one now. Not sure how many people have heard it.”
Eloy threw some dry moss on the embers and added a few more pieces of wood as Timyr lay back and looked up at the branches and leaves high above. Little bursts of movement rustled the leaves—Vivene exploring her new surroundings.
The story was exactly the kind of reprieve Eloy had been hoping for, but now that the tale was done, he felt the pinch of it against his new reality. Neasa and Malatic should have gone off the way Timyr’s parents had, not in sickness and fear.
And there was still his own fear.
The creature lurking in the forest wouldn’t wait forever, and Eloy knew now that had to be what it was doing. Eloy was waiting for it. The creature was waiting for something of its own.
He had a feeling they wouldn’t be waiting much longer.
