Chime (32 page)

“Ironic that after all you did to destroy me, you should call me from my grave. That now I may scream out to the world the name of the person who murdered me, that then at last, I may depart this world.”

Murdered.
I’d known Stepmother wouldn’t kill herself.

“Even we Old Ones—yes, even we are unable to depart this world with our business unfinished.”

“Old Ones?” said my faraway voice.

She took a step forward. “Aren’t you afraid, Briony? Afraid of what I might say?” Her jaw dropped, and she was once again a black squall, howling into the crowd.

“You are fools, all of you. I didn’t take my own life.”

Stepmother’s cheek slipped from her bones, splatted onto the gallows floor. “My murderer stands before you. Her name, Briony Larkin.”

Briony Larkin?
My mind could not react to
Briony Larkin
. But my body could. I felt the shock of it, cathedral bells clanging at my neck and wrists.

“Peace at last,” said Stepmother, and it happened all at once. Stepmother’s skin wilted from her bones. She turned to a pile of petals.

A regular girl would feel something. She’d feel something as the petals crumbled into dust. But a witch merely looks away. Father’s face was a crumpled page. The rest of the faces were a blur. The ghost-children had vanished. They’d set themselves free. They too might now leave this world.

The wind whipped across the gallows floor, snatched at the dust that had once been Stepmother.

“Murderess!” shouted someone from the crowd.

Stepmother eddied about my feet.

“Witch!” shouted another.

Stepmother dissolved into the wind. She was gone.

Now a chorus: “Hang the witch!”

The chorus’s eyes were slitted windows.

“No!” Cecil blasted through the crowd, but a clot of men grabbed his arm.

“Leave me be!” Cecil struggled, but the men held tight.

“Easy, lad. It be us grown folks as doesn’t be fooled by no witch.”

Cecil. Cecil, who did a mysterious favor for Briony. Cecil, who’s addicted to arsenic.

Stepmother died of arsenic.

I jumped back as a figure leapt the gallows steps. But only one person could make that lion’s leap. “Stand back!” The memory of Eldric’s hand shone on the back of my neck.

The crowd surged forward, growling and clawing.

“Hang her!”

“I always suspicioned her for a witch.”

Eldric raised the pistol. Silence crackled through the crowd. “I’ll shoot the first person to move.”

“She don’t need no trial,” said the constable. “Us all seen she be a witch.”

“No!” shouted Father.

The constable looked about from under his inside-out eyelids. “Us seen what us seen, hey?”

The crowd growled and pushed closer.

“Look at them eyes she got,” said the Reeve. “Black as Hisself they be.”

The crowd turned into one great beast with a single mind.

“I always did mislike them eyes.”

The crowd tossed its horns and pawed the ground. Its jowls shook.

It ran at the stairs, but Eldric’s lightning hand struck. The pistol leapt. The night went white and blank. Reality shattered. I kept picking up bits and putting them together in the wrong order.

The constable reeling back, hand to shoulder.

But that must have happened last.

The constable climbing the gallows steps—

That must have happened first.

The pistol cracking—

That must have happened in the middle.

And over everything, the smell, the tongue-curling tang of gunpowder. That, at least, was as it should be.

“Next I’ll shoot the Reeve,” said Eldric. His gaze roamed the crowd. “Then I’ll have to decide.”

“He don’t got no more than five shots,” said the crowd. It licked its lips. It carried torches that blazed with yellow tulips.

The crowd crashed forward.

Yellow tulips with crimson hearts.

“Go!” Eldric bumped me with his shoulder. I staggered. White nothingness blasted the night.

The tulips paused, their hearts pulsed.

The wind whistled beneath its breath; the first raindrops fell. Eldric shouted, “Run fast as ever you can!”

I ran across the platform. White nothingness blasted a hole in the crowd.

“Run, wolfgirl!” shouted Eldric.

I leapt into the hole. The air shattered. I ran.

The sky wrung itself out like a sponge. Rain fell like daggers; I shielded my eyes. The sky flashed white, silhouetting twisted trees. Lightning played darts on the Flats, with wolfgirl as bull’s-eye.

Despite the trees, the Slough provided no shelter. The wind tore at the treetops, tossed about handfuls of oozy leafsplats. I’d never known such dark. It leaned in all about me. It pressed at my eyes with great, hard thumbs.

The memory came to me in bits.

I’d never tried to kill an eel. I could not have imagined it would be so hard, that it would wriggle and writhe and slam itself about. I had to skewer it to the table to cut off its head. I skewered it through the middle, but still, it thrashed and writhed. It writhed when you cut off its head; it writhed when you gutted it; it writhed when you skinned it.

How can you skin an eel when the skin is tough as leather? When even after it’s dead, it thrashes about? Here’s how I did it.

I fetched Father’s pliers. The eel flung itself about, but I grabbed its skin with the pliers, tore it off in strips. The pot was already on the fire. I tossed in the eel. Oh, how it jumped!

I’d sung “Lord Randal” dozens of times, never once thinking about Lord Randal’s sweetheart making that eel broth. I’d sung it before I knew the writhe and grit of eels. Before I knew their stink sinks into your skin, that you scrub and scrub but can’t get it out. Before I grew afraid of my own hands, afraid I’d carry the eel-stink forever. Before I discovered the lemon juice that washed it away.

Remember when you asked yourself why you hadn’t turned into Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Why you hadn’t tracked Stepmother’s murderer down?

That’s poetical irony for you.

“Mistress!”

I whipped round, into the smell of algae and dead fish, into the foam and roar of Mucky Face. “Mistress, tha’ lad be busking the swamp for thee, an’ the Dead Hand, it be draggling behind.”

“Behind Eldric?”

“Aye, mistress.”

“The Dead Hand, following him!”

“Aye, mistress. It draws ever nigh.”

I made a sound like peeling paint. The Wykes sparked up, laughing, teasing, trying to lead me astray. The wind screamed and boxed my ears, but it couldn’t hide the other scream.

“Briony!”

The Wykes skittered and sneered.

“Briony!” Eldric’s voice was a rusty nail. My teeth cringed.

Thunder gnashed its teeth.

“Eldric!”

I followed his voice through the rabid underbrush. “Briony!”

Only thunder now.

“Eldric!”

Yellow flames skittered ahead of me. “Briony!” Eldric’s voice, raw and tattered. The Dead Hand glowed beside his writhing shadow, beside a long darkness of screams. I dove upon the bloated flesh of the Dead Hand, releasing the sweet, rank smell of death.

I pried at its fingers. My nails sank into its flesh. Eldric had brought no Bible Ball—the fool! I wrung out yellow ooze, like curdled cream.

The Wykes watched the witch girl. They saw she couldn’t budge the dead fingers. They crackled and cackled.

“Briony!”

I stabbed my fingers into the fleshy web between the Dead Hand’s forefinger and thumb. I stabbed at the join between the oozing web and Eldric’s warm, living wrist. But they might have been fused together. Not even a shadow could have slipped between.

“Briony!”

I tasted my own sick, I swallowed it down. I let go the hand, tore at my frock. It resisted. I set my teeth upon it. On my feet now, yanking at the placket. Buttons exploded. Off with the frock, tearing at the shoulder seam. Damn you, Pearl, for those strong, tiny stitches. Tearing again, tearing. Curling my finger through a tiny hole, ripping. Tearing and swearing.

I couldn’t save the hand, I could only save Eldric.

The Wykes sparked up again, yellow, blue, glinting, laughing. I flung myself to my knees, fell into a slippery wetness. The Wykes, yellow, sparking, glinting, lighting the wetness to crimson. A fountain of Eldric blood. Don’t look! You’ll be sick if you see his non-hand. You’ve no time to be sick.

I twisted the sleeve round Eldric’s forearm.

The Wykes ebbed and vanished. Dawn sifted through the trees like ashes. The Dead Hand melted away. Did it carry away its prize—don’t look!

My petticoat was a crimson stain. Eldric’s lips were pale worms. His face raged with bruises. “Help me up,” said the worm lips.

He held out his left hand. His eyes were empty rooms.

I took his hand in both my own. I pulled; I pulled again. Finally, I stooped and slipped my shoulder under his left arm.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

He did a great deal of the getting up himself. But he staggered at the end, crashing onto my shoulder. I waited, swallowed the pain, before I said, “We’ll get you to Dr. Rannigan.”

Eldric stepped, stumbled, clutched. His fingers bit into my bones.

“That’s right,” I said. “Wrap your arm around my shoulder.”

He wrapped, he leaned. “Talk to me,” he said.

Talk? There was only one thing to talk about.
Murderess.
The word hung in the air between us.

Only one thing to talk about, but nothing to say. If only I had some excuse, something to explain it. Even witchy jealousy would be better than nothing. I remembered the how of it, the eel and the pliers, but I couldn’t remember why. It must be in there, someplace, but you can’t get at a memory as you might get at a splinter. You can’t poke about in your mind with a sterilized needle.

Eldric’s forearm, his good forearm, dangled past my shoulder. I held it in a crisscross of my own forearms—as though that would help anything. That wasn’t the arm that needed Dr. Rannigan.

But there it was, pressed against my middle, bulging with bad-boy veins. He’d offered his own red blood from those veins, offered it even though I wouldn’t tell him anything, not about the Boggy Mun, not about the pumping station. I might tell him that, at least, tell him about Rose and the Boggy Mun.

I meant to start at the beginning with the ghost-children and go straight through to the end. But I ended up jumping into the middle and splashing about in both directions, talking about the swamp cough and the draining and Rose.

My shoulders screamed under Eldric’s weight. But if he could keep going, I could keep going.

“Talk some more.”

My memory of those days is always of the time after Mucky Face roared through, leaving the Parsonage smelling of paper bloat and cellar scum. Of sitting on the library carpet, in a patch of sunlight, finding myself staring at a scatter of mouse droppings.

Storybook characters are always praised for keeping their houses neat as pins. But no one writes about characters who are too weary to clean, characters who can’t be bothered to care. No one writes about a character who sits on the floor and looks at mouse droppings. Who looks and looks and leaves them be.

“Where are you going?” Eldric’s voice was flat and slow, an elastic band, stretched lengthwise.

The character doesn’t decide to leave them be. She simply does. She does anything that requires no decision and no action.

“The village.”

“You can’t go to the village,” said the gray, elastic voice. “They’ll hang you.”

If I were an author, I’d write about people who sit on the floor. About people who look at mouse droppings and don’t care. About people who can only feel a black hole inside.

“Turn around,” said Eldric. “Run.”

“You need to get to Dr. Rannigan.”

My memory grabbed at the doctor’s face, at his high forehead, his patient cow eyes. If only he were here now, he’d know what to do. My chest slammed shut. My breath went silent; I heard the drumming of my heart.

Dr. Rannigan!

What should I do, Dr. Rannigan?

I couldn’t breathe, my heart beat faster. But I couldn’t die, not yet. That was for later, on the gallows. I had to get Eldric to Dr. Rannigan.

Breathe, Briony! Breathe so Eldric can keep breathing. I willed my heart to slow, I willed myself to breathe. The door to my chest creaked open. I drew a breath.

“I’ll walk myself to the village.” Eldric already sounded dead. “You run.”

I was used to the idea of dying but not of Eldric dying. The thought hurt my chest. When a person hurts, she cries. But a witch can’t cry, she has to go on hurting.

“Run!” said Eldric.

Run? Run and leave Eldric to die? Run into a lifetime of loneliness and guilt? He must be mad.

Memory shards now, falling like rain. I watched my hands dip a ladle into a cauldron of eel broth. I watched them pour the broth into a bowl. My fingers now, tugging at a twist of white powder.

How lucky we twentieth-century witches were. Macbeth’s witches had to find poisoned entrails for their cauldron, generally not available at the local apothecary. Briony Larkin had only to measure out four grains of the powder, add a pinch more for good luck, and stir it into the broth.

At first, Stepmother said she was not hungry, but I urged her to eat, saying she’d never otherwise regain her health. If she ate, I said, I’d write her a story.