Fathom (21 page)

“This is nuts,” he said to himself. “I’m nuts,” he clarified.

He lifted one of his legs and extended it as far as he could, drawing himself across a tangled patch of thorns and settling down as close to her as he could get.

From this nearer vantage point, he examined her: the way she
was sitting, and the way she was posed. He’d been afraid that she might have been built into the wall, but this was not the case; she was a separate piece sitting on a ledge. He could move her without a chisel and hammer.

If he could lift her.

Sam wriggled one arm behind her, wedging it between her body and the wall. He wormed the other arm underneath her legs and gave a tentative shove. Then he leaned harder and gave a hearty heave. It was only after his firmest, sternest effort that she shifted a fraction of an inch.

She must’ve weighed hundreds of pounds.

He had no idea how he could transport her without a truck.

But there
was
a truck on the island. There was a wagon, anyway, the old fire wagon that had been stranded by the storm when the ferry wasn’t sturdy enough to return it to the mainland.

He could get the wagon. He’d need help, but he could get Dave, if he had to.

Again he pulled at the stone girl and tried to calculate how much strength he’d need to transport her. “I can’t do this,” he concluded. “Not by myself.”

He retrieved his arms from beneath and behind the statue. He hopped down off the wall and dusted his hands against his pants, then started for the archway that would lead him out into the open lot.

“Where are you going?”

Sam froze. He whirled around and looked back into the courtyard, but it was empty except for the statue. The open lot around the house was cluttered with trees—big magnolias and a pair of enormous banyans with roots that interlinked like long-fingered hands.

“Who said that?” he demanded.

“You can’t leave her there.”

“Who said that?”
Sam was almost shrill, almost hysterical.

“If I show you, it will only upset you more.”

Sam wheezed rhythmically and adjusted his glasses, trying hard to trace the voice. It must be coming from one of the trees. It originated over at the biggest banyan, a monster of a tree the size of a small house. The tall, stiltlike roots were dense and stringy. Someone could reasonably be hiding within them.

“Who are you?”

“You can’t leave her there,” the voice repeated. “The minister and his horrible underlings will destroy her.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. He faced the speaking tree. “You know about that?”

“Of course I do. And I’m the reason you know about it, too. I wanted you to know. She needs your help.”

“Why do you keep calling it ‘she’ like it’s a person?”

A rustling noise behind the tree shifted, and settled, and crackled. “For the same reason you do in your own mind, and when no one is watching. You know as well as I do that she’s inside there, fetal and fragile.”

Sam was on the verge of losing his breath again, even though he was standing still.

“What . . . what
is
she?” he finally asked.

The speaker did not answer immediately. Another round of rustles and leafy twitches indicated that someone was stirring, and maybe considering what to say. “She is,” the voice said slowly, “a work in progress.”

“I don’t get it,” Sam complained.

“I am not surprised.”

“Look.” Sam threw his hands up. “Would you just come out here? I feel stupid talking to this goddamned tree. If you want me to do something—if you want me to move her, or help her, or save her, then you’re going to have to help me out.”

After a beat of silence, something brown and only barely more than shapeless stepped sideways, away from the shelter of the banyan’s cluttered roots. It limped and shrugged as it walked, huge and hindered by some crippling hurt.

It was bigger than a man and rougher around the edges, flaking and shedding its borrowed skin and crunching bones. Sam’s brain fought to describe it and process it.

It’s not a person. It’s not an animal. It’s . . . something else, as if a child were asked to mold an ape out of things it found on the ground
.

He tried very hard to muster some rational response to it.

So he fainted.

When he opened his eyes a few seconds later, he was face-to-face with the thing—for it was holding him up to its own eye level.

Strings of ants trooped in a spiral column down its neck, and the chewed-looking pulp of leaves, twigs, and dirt were arranged unartfully to approximate facial features. Gravel cheekbones flaked as the big thing spoke, a hole opening and closing where the mouth ought to be.

“No,” it said. It shook him, and it set him back down.

Sam’s knees buckled and he sat down hard on the sandy dirt.

“No?” he echoed.

“No. Pull yourself together, fool. She hasn’t got much time.”

It swung a small kick at Sam’s leg. Sam didn’t think to dodge, so it clipped him. The creature’s foot crumbled, almost came apart, and then mostly held itself together.

Sam curled into a defensive position and tried to roll away.

“I tried to tell you,” the creature complained. “But you insisted on seeing me, so now you’ve gotten your wish, you wretched little beast. I need your assistance.
She
needs your assistance. You can lie there and whimper like a dog, or you can behave like a civilized man, for whatever value such a performance might have.”

Sam stopped retreating, but did not uncurl. “What are you?” he asked, the words not nearly so steady as he wanted them to be. He peeked up from over his arm, not even realizing he was roughly imitating the stone girl’s pose.

The creature shrugged. “Get up,” it said. “You have to help me move her. I cannot do it myself, and they’ll destroy her at dusk.”

Sam scrunched his eyes and shook his head. “No, we have until eight.”

“I know what you heard,” it argued. “But I also know what they’re doing. They’re running early, and so must we if we’re to save her.”

“What do you care if she’s saved or destroyed?” Sam asked. “What is she to you?” The more he talked, the calmer he became. In an hour more, he might be merely frantic.

The creature crouched beside him, leaning down and looming over him. “Because I made her. And soon, she’ll be properly born. But for the moment she’s helpless, and I am not at my strongest. I cannot protect her here.”

Sam sat up. He did a slow scramble backwards, trying not to appear like he was fleeing. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You know what I heard? How do you know what I heard?” he asked, but even as the question escaped him, he was looking at the thing’s brown, rotting feet and thinking of the almost-footprints he’d seen outside the church. “You were there. You heard it, too. You locked me in there! You pushed against the door so it wouldn’t open!”

“You needed to know, and he wasn’t going to tell you. Now listen, time is short. We’ll need a vehicle of some kind. Something mechanical and strong, to carry her away.”

“You want a car?”

“I want anything that will move her.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t have anything like that.”

The creature frowned very well despite its lack of eyebrows. “You can get something like that, can’t you?”

“N-no. I don’t think so. And even if I
could
”—he was sitting upright and no longer retreating—“we couldn’t very well get it off the island. There’s a fire truck here in town, in storage behind the courthouse, but I couldn’t get it any closer than the road over there. I could never drive it through this dirt. It’d bog down.”

The creature’s frown loosened. “So you
could
get such a vehicle. And you
could
bring it close enough for us to bring her to it.”

“What? No. I mean, it’s theoretically
possible
, that’s all. It’s not something that I can make happen just now, on a whim. And even if we got her into the truck, we couldn’t get it off the island. It’s too heavy for the ferry.”

“Then how did it get here in the first place?”

“There used to be a bridge,” Sam said, but he wasn’t thinking about the bridge. In the pause that followed, he was considering how difficult it might be to actually take the truck and bring it to the edge of the house’s lot. He wondered if it had gas in it, and if he could figure out how to drive it, and if he could—

“Do it, then.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Get up,” the creature commanded. When Sam didn’t react quickly enough, the thing reached down and lifted him, hoisting him by his underarm until he was back on his feet. “Now go get it. I’ll worry about the rest.”

“I just told you, I
can’t
.”

“And I just told you, you
will
.”

The creature moved fast—faster than Sam would’ve thought something that size could move—and it seized him again by an arm and pulled him close.

Sam struggled and kicked, knocking bark, sticks, and leaves loose but doing no real damage. It was only when he was so near
that he couldn’t help but look that he noticed the creature wasn’t breathing, and that its eyes could not possibly see. They were fashioned from the sheddings of a magnolia pod, with the bright red seeds for pupils.

The concrete knowledge of this did not prevent Sam from knowing, in the bottom of his stomach, that the thing
did
see. And it disapproved.

And despite the creature’s claims that it could not move the statue by itself, Sam had his doubts. The creature was powerful enough to lift a man by one arm with no visible effort; it was strong enough to shake him back and forth like a dog worrying a stick.

“There is much at stake here,” the creature said. And although its mouth twisted and moved, and pretended to have lips, the sound came from somewhere else—not within its body. “That girl, in that cocoon, I am giving her the tools to save your entire world—everything you know, and everything you love. Everywhere you’ve ever been, and every place you might one day go.”

“I didn’t realize any of that was threatened,” Sam said. He tried to make it sound flippant, but failed.

“All of it, and then some. Now go get the vehicle and bring it back here. I can carry her myself, but I can’t carry her far.”

It dropped Sam and turned its back, and stomped back into the courtyard—leaving Sam stunned, confused, frightened, and thoroughly motivated.

He scuttled to his feet and glanced wildly around the lot. The creature was gone, but Sam could hear it. There were crunchings, scrapings, and draggings, and none of it sounded easy. Powerful though the big monster was, it wasn’t moving her quickly or without effort.

One after the other, Sam straightened his legs and forced his knees to lock him into a standing position.

Could he do it? Really?

He knew where the old engine was, closed up in the storage garage behind the courthouse. He’d seen it through the window, covered with junk and dust. But it might be empty, and it might be broken. There was no way to know if it would run—or if he could successfully drive it if it
did
.

From over the courtyard wall, the creature bellowed. “Don’t stand there trying to talk yourself out of it!”

But Sam was afraid of stepping so far outside the rules. He was afraid that he’d lose his job, or cause trouble, or contribute to the chaos he saw in the world around him. He was a man who’d made a mission of order and routine, and now he was being asked to break and enter, abscond with city property, and then steal something from a private citizen for whom he was supposed to be working.

“Go!”
the creature bellowed.

Then again, there was a monster on the other side of the wall.

He picked himself up and broke into a run without dusting himself off. Fueled by terror, and something lighter, something stranger, Sam tore across the lot and slowed down only when his shoes sank into the sandy ruts that passed for a road at the edge of the property.

Ten minutes later he arrived at the deserted courthouse, exhausted and sweat-soaked and gasping for breath even as he felt around the side of the building to the storage garage.

The garage was unlocked.

Found Objects and
Stolen Machines

T
he courthouse’s garage annex was more like a big shack than a proper building, and it housed city gear like lawn shears, police tools, and—as Sam noted with only a passing glint of amusement—homemade alcohol-distilling equipment, which had no doubt been seized at Prohibition and not returned, though the law had been repealed.

Most of the room’s contents were covered with a fine layer of dust, but there were indications that the place was sometimes visited. A pair of large saws had been wiped clean and had fresh flecks of wood stuck in the teeth; one of the big dust cloths that covered the truck had been recently pulled back, perhaps to retrieve the gardening supplies that were occupying the passenger’s seat.

He climbed up the side and into the driver’s seat, smearing himself with dust and shoving the spades, gloves, and buckets out of the passenger’s side as he fumbled for the keys.