18. Paid By the Grave
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PAID BY THE GRAVE
Everything smells like summertime in the darkness I wake up in. It is like a child’s hair when they first come inside from running amuck and warm rocks steaming after a sudden summer thunderstorm. It is the scent of wet earth, salty sweat, and crushed grass. I cannot see anything, but it does not frighten me. Wherever I have come to, I am warm and comforted. I cannot remember the last time I felt so safe, but I remember so little now.
I have no idea when or where I was last awake, but I remember Roil is the one who sent me.
Then, like a hammock made of warm afternoons has collapsed beneath me, it ends. I am sweaty, sticky, and guilt builds in my lungs until there is no room for air. Claustrophobia claws at my mind.
In all my life, tight spaces have never frightened me, nor have I ever expected being wrapped in too many blankets to feel so much like being doomed. With a ferocity I have never felt before, panic seeps from my bones to infect every part of my body and out of my skin like sweat. I kick and tear at the fabric that is wrapped around me like a cocoon. A scream burns its way up my throat,but I cannot remember how to make a sound.
An unfamiliar voice whispers from a dark so black my eyes will never adjust. I cannot make out any of the words, but the voice sounds male and human.
Freeing myself, I throw the blankets into the pitch. When they land on the ground with a thump, the air they displaced rushes across my bare shins. I now stand naked somewhere in the darkness like I have come to be inside some terrible pit that I will never find my way out of. For all I know of The Thicket, I could be inside the belly of a beast.Perhaps I have been swallowed whole by Skelt, whoever that is.
“Fallow?” Perhaps, beneath the earth like I am now, he sounds different than when he is a wisp in The Thicket.
It seems like wishful thinking, perhaps a product of that vial of hope Roil gave me.
My question hangs unanswered in the air, and it is just as well. Once again, I’ve woken under strange circumstances and cannot be certain of exactly how long it has been. I have become reliant on Fallow. He spoke true when he said no one should be trusted in this place. I should strive to trust him less.
Hoping to find the bed I woke up on, I slide my foot back in the direction I think I came from and find nothing, only the earthen floor beneath my feet. Trying not to imagine what sort of beast might have voices that whisper to one another and dirt floors for me to trod on, I try again. Sliding one foot back and then another, I find nothing.
There could be a hole in the floor to fall through and I would not know it until I fell through the air. Terrified by the thought, I stand totally still, struggling to allow myself to breathe for fear of alerting some creature or evil beast in the dark. A feeling buzzes in the back of my mind telling me Fallow is close if not already here. My ability to sense him is growing stronger, even in the short time I have been in The Thicket.
Not knowing whether or not I should, I ask the dark again, “Fallow? Are you here?”
I am answered by the ceiling as it alights with what appears to be colorful stars, casting my skin and the earth around me in a rainbow of light like prisms that hang from a fancy lampshade.
Over the course of a few rapid heartbeats, they grow brighter until the room is lit well enough to see. I am a few scant inches from a small bed in a room carved from the earth. The walls are not stone, but packed clay like I am inside the burrow of a colossal rabbit. The blankets that had felt like a coffin moments ago are in a pile beside my bare feet. The only furniture in the room is the cot.
“You are awake.”
The voice is kind, friendly even. It reminds me of old men who tend shop fronts, and grandfather’s eager to tell the children on their laps stories. Still, hearing any voice at all sets me on edge and, like the man with button eyes, it could besweetness used as a mask.
Wrapping one of the blankets around my too warm, naked body, I search about myself in the sparse room. In the colorful light emanating from the crystals in the ceiling, there is no one other than me. Taking another step back, I nearly fall from how the room spins.
Firm fingers catch my arm and steady me before I hit the floor. “Careful. You have been through an ordeal.”A man with short brown hair who appears entirely ordinary, save his eyes, blinks into existence. I jerk from his grasp on instinct. Though I cannot place exactly what is wrong about his gaze, it disturbs me enough to make my skin crawl. Something in his pupils. His entire presence is eerie, human and yet not, like being faced with a life size doll. An imitation.
I stare for a long time before the realization dawns on me. The pupils are too small, and not once does he blink. He is as inhuman as everything else I’ve met in The Thicket. It may not always have been so, but it is certainly true now.
“I am Blight.”
My jaw is shut so tight that my head aches and it takes several deep breaths before I remember how to unclench it. He remains poised to catch me again if I faint, which might warm me to him in any other circumstance.
“Have I died?” Holding my pounding head, I remember why death could not be my fate. I am bound for The Keeper.
His expression is sympathetic even if his strange eyes cannot quite show the emotion the way a human might. “You are not dead.”
“And what are you?” It seems a rude thing to ask, but the words have already been said and, if Blight is offended, he gives nothing away. Even as I ask, I am already beginning to guess I am in the presence of another digger. One like Fallow, if changed in a different way by The Thicket.
“I am a digger, just as Fallow is a digger.”
“Why is Fallow not here?”
“Is that who you came here to find?”
“No.” Sifting through my clogged and heavy memories, I know the answer to his question but not why I seek something called Skelt. My mission feels just out of reach. I am sinking in deep mud and my salvation, a rope or branch, any means of escape, can only be brushed with the very tips of my fingers. “Will you lead me to Skelt?”
Asking for such a thing feels like a bad move deep in my marrow, but I have made my choice.
“It is rare that we see mothers here in The Beneath. You keep popping up time and again.” Blight tracks across the space, his eyes never leaving mine. His hands are held behind his back, reminding me of a preacher or judge as he paces in thought. He appears uneasy, which sets insects loose inside my body, making me itch. “Fallow and the witch are right enough in where you may find help in your plight. Right and wise are not the same thing.”
More evasions. It was ignorance on my part to believe there was a chance of anything else. Bitter thoughts seep into my next query. “You and everyone will drive me mad! How do I find Skelt? His name bears hope of what I seek. I need to find my husband and save my child.” I had not remembered that I had a child to save until I said it aloud. Even the word mother is becoming a strange and distant thing, its definition growing grey and vague. He watches me struggle for memory in silence, his pupils growing wide then too small all over again, distracting me in their strangeness. “Right or wise, I will see Skelt. If you will not lead the way, where is Fallow, so he might?”
“Fallow cannot come to The Beneath while you roam in it. He has asked me to lead you where you wish. A favor from a friend who has already failed in his task.”
A failed digger. This man was meant to lead a mother to The Keeper, and she was lost to The Thicket and one of the many monsters that dwell in it. A surge of pity drives through me alongside horror. I knew there must be other diggers, that for each mother I’ve seen tormented and trapped in this place, there is a digger who has suffered the same fate Fallow seeks to avoid. To see one here in the dark, trapped forever, is far heavier than the knowledge alone had been.
“I’m sorry to hear of your… loss?” He shrugs like all of this is a distant and faraway grief. Perhaps it is. I can only hope that if I become so lost in this place, I can find some measure of peace with my lot. “Will you lead the way, then?” Searching the room, I spot the door to this space in the gloom and motion toward it like I am a hostess showing him out.
He drops his head, freeing his arms from behind his back to cross them over his chest, clucking his tongue with disapproval. “You trust him when you should not.”
My trust in Fallow is a truth made all the clearer by how little I trust this creature. Still, he is the second in a row to give warnings of this course toward Skelt.
“Perhaps he is the cougar to my limping deer, but he is also my friend. Two things can be true at once.” Searching about myself, I cannot find my clothes or my boots. “Where are my things so you might lead me to Skelt right now?”
“You may regret your rush.” Despite his ominous warnings, his strange eyes flick to the far side of the room to where my clothes lie in a sopping pile. That answers the question of why I am now without them at the same time as adding a new question as to how I was soaked in the first place. Waiting for some magic to come dry and press them for me would be a massive waste of time, so I set to wringing out my shift, followed by my dress. To put on sopping stockings and wet boots doesn’t appeal to me, but there is nothing to be done about it. They’re the only clothing I have.
He doesn’t turn away as I slide the shift over my head, dropping the blanket from my body only once I am covered. I don my dress and pull my skirt down over it all, tying it in the back. My stockings and boots are in such a state of disrepair now that I might be better off without them.
The digger watches me with a studious gaze, eyes following my every step. I now know how the ladybugs feel when a child crawls on her hands and knees behind it. The memory feels fresh and is laced with clear detail, but I cannot place who the child is, though it is an itch in my mind that I should.
Twisting the water from my apron, I tie it on and, from the pocket, I pull out the handkerchief I once embroidered for Henry. As I run my hand on the fabric, a glimmer of color catches my attention. My wedding ring is back on my left hand, put there once more by someone while I was unconscious. It reflects the many colorful lights on the ceiling in its imperfect surface, no longer polished or pristine after the years of wear, but matte with many fine scratches that add to its appeal in my eyes.
Who put it there and why is a mystery to me, but it feels right that I should wear it now that the path beneath my feet has turned toward Henry, for so long as there is hope.
Tears sting my eyes. Hope, a precious and dwindling resource in these woods.
Blight averts his strange eyes at the sight of my tears, and his dark pupils shift around the edges, making them appear blurred and irregular in size.
His hesitation to open the door and lead me from here grates on my nerves enough to keep me from falling apart for now. “I would like to be brought to Skelt. I have no stake in whatever game this is other than to find my husband and return home to?—”
To someone. Something.
Shaking the confusion away, I decide to not allow the details I have forgotten to draw me from my chosen task. “Lead on.”