Chapter 23 #2
“We all agreed to it. Strong had many kinds of strength, not least the swiftness and power in his arms, but where none could equal him was how he talked, how he made you see a great future, however impossible that might seem, a future where everything had changed and one that had a place for you within it. When he spoke, it seemed that anything was possible. He lit a fire inside all of us and called it hope.”
“I don’t remember any of this,” Milk-Eye whispered, her need for it to be true clear in her voice and warring with the facts as she knew them.
“Father poisons us. He found something—the Ingredient—years ago. In a mine, I think. I can’t remember properly.
But I’m sure I was told or I overheard or I spied on them, him and Mother.
He was digging somewhere very, very deep.
Somewhere he was put. The Ingredient gave both him and Mother power, enough for him to leave that place and claim this one.
But it changed them both. Too much to live among other people—I don’t believe them about the outside, this place is not all there is.
It changed them because they couldn’t grow around it and instead the Ingredient twisted them around itself.
“Mother was the one to understand first. It was her idea to feed it to children. They’ve been experimenting on us.
Finding out just how much we can take. They gave Pierce too much and the world forgot her.
Maybe there were others before Pierce too, erased from everyone’s thinking.
Each time they tried a lower dose, but though Strong was strong and had promised to keep us safe, he couldn’t keep himself safe.
“I almost remember his face. I remember the feeling of his arms when I was hurt. Like a brother. Like a father should be. But they took him from us. He fell out of memory. Out of mine at least, out of ours. And he’s gone.
Just his name scratched on an attic rafter to say he was ever here—and now on me, etched with his memory, lost in the blackness but returned by the hunger.
“They gave me less than they gave Strong, and if I had failed, they would have chosen another of you and reduced the amount again. They’re breeding us, changing us, trying to make us into a weapon, but I don’t know who they want to use us against. I think it’s whoever put Father in that mine in the first place.
Whoever chained him in the dark. Only he’s changed now and whatever his vengeance was back then, now it’s worse, darker, more cruel, and all of us are caught up in it. ”
Tune’s wavering voice spoke into the pause. Eldest would think her the last to speak up, but when a tale has its teeth in us it can draw out questions past all of our inhibitions. “You won’t ever leave us, though? Not like Strong did?”
Guilt tightened the already tight knot of Eldest’s stomach. “Would you forget me?”
“No!” Tune gasped at the idea. Her “No” found echoes in others among the gathered siblings.
“If you remember me then I will always be here.” Eldest hated herself for her dissembling, but she offered more. “If you are ever able to escape, though, sister, run.” And with that she set them to various tasks to stall any further questions.
On the tenth day something in Eldest’s foundations began to shift. Whether it was the collapse of her body announcing itself or something becoming unhinged in her mind she couldn’t tell.
Another meal, another regurgitation. But this time, holding there on all fours, trembling, too weak to attempt to stand, she saw flashes of something more colourful than her life.
There at the back of her mind, a tiny garden, glimpsed through shutters.
Sunlight burning on flowers too vivid to be believed.
With a gasp she fell to her side, hands clutching at her heart, mind grasping for the warmth of that fading memory.
“Memory…” When she hid from Night-Father she erased herself, not from her own mind but from his while she clung to the memory that she existed. The poison’s gift, if you survived it, wasn’t forgetting but remembering.
Even with the poison precipitating into the back of each child’s mind the process of erasing themselves was still nearly impossible.
It was as if the hiding place lay beyond a doorway too small to pass through, and like Alice in that ancient story, they were reaching an arm through towards salvation, unable to squeeze any smaller.
And perhaps, Eldest thought, that was why Night-Father put such effort into breaking them all.
Only in pieces could a person fit through the portal and reach that place forbidden to mortals.
He broke them with pain and fear, and in the darkness of forgetting they were intended to reconstruct themselves into something new.
Gathering all her strength, Eldest stood and returned to the others on faltering feet.
Only the power of her voice compelled obedience now.
Her siblings were a pack that would soon turn.
With harsh words and dark threats she set them to their labours.
In the blindness of the mansion she couldn’t see the rebellion on their faces, but she knew it was there.
When the others left, Lip-Scar lingered.
She could smell him. Shrill was there too, the slight rasp each time she inhaled giving her away.
“Scar! Shrill! Come on.” Milk-Eye had returned. “Now. Or I’ll be doing the cutting next time he gives us knives.”
They went with her, their reluctance silent but heard.
In the hours that followed, while the others laboured on the traps and barricades that they hoped would keep them safe, Eldest sat by the great hearth in the main hall, holding out her trembling hands to catch the faintest strains of the day’s light in the place where fire once danced.
There had been a before. She had experienced years that were now lost to her.
She wanted them back. There had been a before and she sought to sift it from the nothing just as the spread of her fingers sought to catch each particle of the light that dared its way down the chimney.
And as the soft light slowly and faintly began to trace the width of her palms, hard-angled somethings started to rise from the blackness of her misplaced past.
Slowly, slowly she began to piece together the outlines of her life.
There was a puzzle in the mansion’s parlour, a faded picture of a tree and a house and a stream, cut into hundreds of interlocking pieces.
Some toy of the wealthy children who had once lived very different lives under the same roof as Eldest. To put the puzzle together you started at the edges.
Eldest had learned that lesson well. She started at the edges.
Later, when Night-Father began his hunt, Eldest and the older children concealed themselves in the kitchen, having left clues that led away from the younger ones in the West Lounge. Tune she kept with her. The girl was too likely to give herself away and, by extension, all the younger siblings.
Eldest slept in one of the tall cupboards, beneath collapsed shelving and an arrangement of pans.
Or rather she lay there, drunk on lack of dreaming, plagued by a bladed hunger, turning bright new memories over and over in her mind.
The kitchen didn’t seem to have been used in decades, and yet its association with food somehow lingered.
It was here that Eldest’s self-imposed famine gnawed hardest at her bones.
“I had a family.” She whispered it into the mansion’s night, quiet so that her siblings wouldn’t hear, but loud enough for the darkness to challenge. Some truths must be spoken or else they are not properly true. “Father is not my father. That thing in the basement is not my mother.”
“Eldest?” A voice from the next cupboard. Milk-Eye—the sister who was not her sister. “I think he’s coming.”
“Quiet then. Make yourself nothing. All of you.” Eldest wasn’t sure why she still cared.
They weren’t her family. She could run and Father would waste the night hurting them while she found sanctuary.
But she did care. Something, some annoying band around her heart, wouldn’t let her desert them.
“Look into the blackness. The dark inside. Let it unwrap and cover you.” She felt their struggles, and the slow release of a fraction of the power that had been put into them.
“Tune!” She woke the girl with a careful kick, displacing none of her own cover.
“Tune, you should run. The barrels by the trapdoor to the West Wing cellars. That’s the best place.
He looked there last night.” Tune had often tried to erase herself too, but she’d got nowhere.
Night-Father would find her in a heartbeat if he came close.
Eldest sank into her own void, deeper and faster than she had before.
“A family. I had a family.” This time nobody heard her, though she spoke without whispering.
The words entered the ears of her false siblings, only to erase themselves before comprehension settled across them.
Eldest could almost see their faces, her true mother, her true father, and…
one other…a true sister, older than her.
She must have been stolen from them. Taken by force.
The details of that, she could still not remember.
Was her older sister one of the names on the rafters?
Had she been overwhelmed by Megaera’s dark gifts and scrubbed from history like a stain washed from a smock?
The morning bell’s discordant clangs jolted Eldest into the waking world, gummy-eyed and with a hollow belly.
The children scrambled from their hiding places, hastening to the parlour, where after another broken night the day’s lessons would proceed in the semi-delirium that prolonged sleep deprivation brings.