Fathom (45 page)

Then, from behind her, something soft but insistent said,
“Shhh!”

Nia froze. She stood there dripping and tender, her skin blistering but healing. She was still barefoot, and her hair was wetly fetid. She imagined she must look otherworldly, and ghastly, and she was horrified to think that someone might be watching her.

She turned slowly to look over her shoulder.

With her back braced against the wheel of a fat black sedan, a little girl held a finger up to her lips. “You have to shush,” she said in half a whisper. “You have to let the dirt man sing.”

“The dirt man?” Nia asked, though she didn’t need to. She only needed something to say.

The child nodded, and her hair bobbed in a rabbit-brown halo. “Sit down. It’ll be fine. The rocking will stop in a minute,” she said. Nia could hear the worry in her words, though. The rocking didn’t usually last this long, or run so rough, Nia could guess that much.

But, yes, as she listened she could hear something like words rumbling alongside the pounding cacophony of the bells. As they roared and mumbled, the swelling and cresting of the Iron Mountain began to slow, steady, and dim itself down to a gurgle of motion instead of a coughing fit.

“See?” said the girl. She pushed her shoulders against the car’s wheel and used it to push herself upright. “See, lady? See? It’s fine. You don’t have to be scared,” she said, and Nia suspected the
girl was parroting some assurance she’d once been given. “The dirt man knows what to do.”

“I don’t understand,” Nia replied, and it was the only true thing she could say.

What’s to understand?

“Edward?”

He was facing away from them, the small stone woman and the little girl. He was staring up at the tower, its lavender, pink, and cream facing casting a shadow that swallowed them all. In another moment, the ground was still. But the unearthly voice continued its song for another moment more, finishing its verse and holding the last note as long as the bell above cast an echoed ring.

He said,
It’s a lullaby.

After Dreaming

U
pstairs, the bell player was restoring the carillon. He tightened the cables that had stretched in the terrible quake, and he made note of which ones had snapped altogether and would need replacing. His daughter stayed out of the way for the most part; and while her father worked, she chattered at him about the big dirt man and the stone-skinned lady down by the car.

Ever since the child had first begun to mention the big dirt man, the bell player had assumed she was telling tales. The Iron Mountain was isolated, and there were few other children anywhere nearby. The girl must be lonely. She must have invented friends for herself.

But time and experience had taught him that perhaps there was
more going on than he claimed. He’d seen footsteps as broad as dinner plates, nearly black with mulch and rot. He’d heard movement and rustlings, and the dim, faint echoes of something, somewhere, singing or speaking.

It worried him. But the little girl said she wasn’t afraid of the big dirt man, or of the ghosts, either.

But ever since she’d mentioned the ghosts, the bell player had taken care to avoid the grave down by the front door. Just in case.

Edward noticed the bell player’s caution, and he approved of it—even as he was amused by it. The spirit felt no shock or tickle from mortal feet when they tiptoed across his resting spot.

He felt no discomfort or displeasure. But he appreciated the respect.

He watched the bell player clean, straighten, and do his best to make what restorations he could. Workmen would need to be called this time. Carpenters would need to shore up the frames that held the big bells. Things had cracked. Things had rocked free, and dropped, and broken.

But it could all be fixed.

Edward drifted down and around the angular, circular stairwell.

He skimmed past the closed and debris-littered doorways of the library, the workshop, the office, and the study. He dipped down into the main atrium, and then back around to his own grave and the spot beside it that was freshly disturbed. He stopped, but only for a moment. He slipped down past the gleaming stone with a tiny hidden latch marked by a figure of the sun. He passed his own coffin on the way down, farther, lower, deeper.

The next set of stairs was the mirror of those above—angular, circular, spiraling jerkily down into the earth instead of to some high point above it.

The stairs went down through the column of stone and earth
that held the tower up on the Iron Mountain; they were not carved by human hands and they were rough, barely recognizable as stepping places. As far as the tower extended into the clouds, these reflecting notches went down into the earth.

Edward navigated the coiling passage until he reached its bottom, a place where there were no bricks and no seams—just a smooth, slick patch of blank floor surrounded by a ledge.

The ghost knew about the floor. It was damp and muddy, and if he stared at it long enough . . . if he waited and watched it for hours at a time, he could almost convince himself that some strange blood flowed beneath it, as vast and hard as a river’s current.

Once every hundred years,
the creature had told him,
you can hear his heart throb one great beat.

The creature itself sat on the ledge, its broad, rough back to the dead man, its face toward the living ground at the bottom of the earth.

“You understand why I had to send Arahab away. You understand why she must not trouble you, end your dreamless sleep . . . ,” it said. The words trailed off as if some other thought had interrupted them. “She’ll come no closer.”

It stepped down from the ledge, very gently and with all the softness it could wring from its ponderous bulk. The creature knelt, then placed its head lower, resting against the sleeping form.

“I do wonder,” it whispered. “What would happen if you were to awaken, after all? Would you know me? Would you remember me? Would it matter that I’ve kept steward over your peace? The dreamless sleep was your own choice. This stewardship is mine.”

Mossfeaster let its knees fold up and laid itself down.

“To you alone I make my confessions, and promises, and bargains. To you alone I swear. Sometimes I wish to wake you and shout, only to know that I’ve been heard. But . . .”

It reached out one hand-shaped palm and rubbed it gently against the floor.

“Did I tell you? I’ve made something new. I was not even sure it was possible, but she is smart and hard. I made her out of a mortal girl. They are stronger than they look, these spindly creatures of salt and skin.”

It curled itself tighter, nearly into a ball. “But I do not think she will stay with me.”

Even Edward could hear it, how the anger was only a coating for the monster’s grief, smoothing and hiding it like the layers of a pearl.

“You alone abide. But if you rise, this wretched world falls, and I have nothing—not even this miserable half life farmed from the cleft between the living and the dead. And that . . . I will not let go of it. It is all that I have.

“
You
are all that I have.”

Edward felt like an intruder, watching the creature whisper its secrets to a deaf and slumbering god. He knew, as surely as the creature knew, that the Leviathan must never wake to listen.

Edward closed his eyes, a leftover mortal habit that spoke of sadness, or sympathy. He returned to the rough spiral and rose up through it, back into the brighter shadows of the tower proper.

Inside, the tower was damaged but not desperately so. Books had fallen, paintings had dropped, shelves had collapsed—but the walls were built to stand, and they had held. Edward noted that the floors were ruined in parts and would need to be restored or replaced.

Several stairs were likewise broken, and he was staring down at one of the worst when he realized he was being watched. He raised his eyes and saw that the bell player’s daughter had come quite close.

Usually, she kept a little distance.

Hello,
he said to her. “Hello,” she said back. “Is the dirt man safe?”

He hesitated.
The dirt man is always safe.

“Always?”

Edward did not say, “As long as we are safe, he will be safe,” because she was so little. Instead he said,
Always.
And then he added,
Child, I must ask you a small favor. Will you do something for me, please?

She nodded.

You must not enter the library on the second floor.
He remembered his own grandchildren, and then he changed his approach, lest he make the library look too attractive.
Child,
he tried again,
Do you trust me to tell you the truth? Do you trust that I mean you no harm?

She nodded again, more vigorously.

A little too trusting, Edward thought. But she was so small; it was to be expected.
I’m going to tell you a terrible truth, and it is one that your father will not believe. But it is very, very important all the same. You must not, under any circumstances, enter the second-floor library. There is a monster inside that room—an awful creature who will hurt you very badly if she catches you. She is ruined and bad, not like the dirt man.
Something else occurred to Edward, and he added it for good measure, even though the creature downstairs might have objected to it.
If you ever see the monster in the library, you should cry out for the dirt man. He might protect you.

Or, then again, the creature might not. But the ghost believed it was worth saying, if only to give the child some comfort. He could not tell her stories of monsters without assuring her that they could be conquered.

“The monster can’t hurt the dirt man?”

No, I don’t think so.

“Okay,” she said, as if his word was good enough for her.

Satisfied, he left her. He faded from her sight and returned to his study.

And in the second-floor library, Bernice huddled, and hated.

Twice a day, at one and three o’clock, the great bells above rang, playing their ponderous lullabies for thirty minutes even though the tower itself was in tattered shape. At first, the song was a little bit broken, missing a note from a chord here or there—because up in the tower’s crown, a handful of bells had not yet been replaced. But workmen came every day, and the bells were lifted up and hung in their trapeze framework, and within a few weeks, the songs were smooth again.

For one hour every day, Bernice wished she were dead.

Hell could be no worse than the banging, beating, and clanging of the big bronze bells, casting their weird magic across the Iron Mountain. No fire could burn worse than the breeze that carried bits of iron dust through the open windows.

And . . . she was so thirsty. But there was nothing to drink except for the sulfur-and-rust water that spilled through the moat. There was nothing to swim in except for water that was wholly unswimmable.

And for all Bernice knew, Arahab lurked outside in the swampy depression.

But up in the dry, hot, miserable tower with its awful bells that rang for an hour each day, Bernice was safe from her Mother. Or, at least, Mother had not yet come for her. Perhaps Arahab was biding her time; she’d said it a thousand times before, that she was patient, and that time meant little to her.

Bernice believed that the water witch was patient; but Bernice was stubborn, too. And not the bells, not the choking ash and earth that billowed through the bars—none of it could convince her to descend the tower stairs and take her chances in the garden.

So she stayed, and she withered.

She closed the windows in the library and she barricaded the door. Workmen assumed that something had fallen during the earthquake, but no one forced the issue and the door was never broken open. She suspected that Mossfeaster might have had something to do with that.

Mossfeaster never visited her, so she had no occasion to ask about it.

She remained alone behind her barricade, inside the musty library clogged from floor to ceiling with books. Before, she’d never cared for reading. But boredom drove her to strange new behaviors, or there would be lethargy like none she’d ever known before.

Her limbs grew stiff, and her skin dried until it was crumpled and thick like old leather left too long on the floor of a closet. Her skull did not regain its original shape.

Dented, shriveled, and dry, she became a living mummy.

She hollowed out a spot beneath one far-back shelf. She pushed the books aside and entombed herself there, where she could crush her head against the thick old volumes and, every day for an hour, pretend that the bells were not ringing.

Epilogue