11
W e made our way back to the mine entrance, with Not-Oscar walking obediently ahead of us. At the top, he went straight to the foreman’s desk and took out a sheet of paper, then looked at Ingold, possibly for permission. Ingold nodded.
Not-Oscar took a pen in each hand and began to write, and it was immediately obvious why the handwriting on the letters was so peculiar.
One hand wrote from right to left, the other from left to right, writing two lines simultaneously.
When he finished a line, he simply dropped down and went back the other way, wrists crossing and uncrossing as he worked.
It looked like some kind of parlor trick, or the sort of act that you’d pay a coin to see at the fair.
Ingold watched it all with the beatific expression of a small boy who has just been given a puppy.
The most amazing thing, to me, was that apparently Not-Oscar could judge exactly how many words fit on a line, which I’ve never been much good at myself.
A lot of my letters home used to have words crammed up against the edge of the page, to the point where my mother asked if I was trying to write some sort of code.
Denton stood watching Not-Oscar write, the first letter that Not-Oscar had given him seemingly forgotten in his hand.
I tapped his shoulder and gestured to the original letter.
Denton started, then began to read. I looked over his shoulder, which was rude of me, but given the circumstances, I felt it was justified.
The very first line read: PLEASE DO NOT BE AFRAID.
I stifled an incredulous laugh. Not-Oscar, in his miner’s coat and goggles, made an unlikely Old Testament angel, and yet ...
Shame he didn’t appear as a thing made of wings and eyes. We might have gotten off on the right foot if he had .
I glanced over at Denton. There was still hostility lingering in the set of his mouth, but it was being replaced by something else as he scanned the letter. He shook his head at the end, either in bafflement or disbelief, and handed it to me.
PLEASE DO NOT BE AFRAID. WE HAVE NO HOSTILE INTENTIONS TOWARD YOU.
WE WISH ONLY TO BE LEFT ALONE. YOU HAVE STUMBLED ACROSS THE PLACE WHERE WE HAVE SLEPT FOR MANY YEARS.
WE WISH ONLY TO CONTINUE TO SLEEP THERE.
WE DO HARM TO NO ONE AND HAVE NO ILL INTENT TOWARD YOU OR YOUR PEOPLE AS A WHOLE.
WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY ALARM THAT WE HAVE CAUSED.
WE ARE WILLING TO SPEAK WITH YOU AS AN INDIVIDUAL OF YOUR PEOPLE, BUT WE ARE AFRAID OF WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF OUR PRESENCE BECAME WIDELY KNOWN.
THE USE OF MINE EXPLOSIVES HAS ALREADY CAUSED A FRAGMENTATION.
WE DO NOT WISH TO BE FRAGMENTED FURTHER.
WE WISH TO BE WHOLE AGAIN. OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRESENT WORLD IS LIMITED, HOWEVER.
IF WE MUST MOVE OR BE FRAGMENTED, THEN WE WILL MOVE.
WE WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU ABOUT THE WORLD NOW.
PERHAPS YOU CAN TELL US WHAT IS HAPPENING OUTSIDE THE MINE, AND WHETHER WE MUST PREPARE FOR A MOVE.
WE ARE FRAGMENTED NOW BUT WITH ASSISTANCE, WE MAY BE WHOLE.
PLEASE SPEAK WITH US.
“This doesn’t seem like a terribly threatening letter,” I said. “At least, the bits I understood.”
Denton’s lips thinned. “Assuming he’s telling the truth. This doesn’t prove that he didn’t kill Oscar. And why look like him?”
“If he was trying to protect others like him, I can understand trying to convince us to go away,” I said. “Since you were looking for Oscar, maybe he thought it would be easier to pretend to be Oscar.”
Denton met my eyes. “We’ve been down this road before, haven’t we, Easton? A thing that can look like anyone, even the dead.”
I swallowed around a suddenly dry throat.
In the Usher house, my friend Madeline had been taken over by a being that puppeted her like a marionette long after she was dead.
She had referred to it as a child and begged me to protect it.
And it had been childlike in its way: as innocent as any newborn serpent, and far more dangerous.
It could have made puppets out of the entire human race.
“I don’t think it’s quite the same,” I said.
“We had best hope not,” said Denton.
“This is incredible,” Ingold said, waving a sheet of paper in our direction.
I couldn’t tell if he’d heard our conversation or not.
“It’s world-changing.” He laughed, a sound of pure wonder and delight that rang through the cavernous mine entrance.
I wondered if such a sound had ever been heard in Hollow Elk before.
Denton looked at Ingold and a trace of fond resignation broke through the hostility. “Well,” he said, not quite under his breath. “At least someone’s happy.”
Not-Oscar wrote and Ingold fired questions, most of which I didn’t understand.
I sat down and put my back against a crate, feeling the strain from crawling and running and horrible revelation.
I really wanted a nap, and if you think you can’t sleep immediately after something dreadful and life-changing has happened, you probably haven’t been a soldier.
Angus sat down, his gun in his lap. Denton paced back and forth, aggravated, clearly upset but unwilling to leave.
Kent made coffee. All of us, I suspect, were watching Not-Oscar out of the corner of our eyes.
What I pieced together mostly came from listening to Ingold while trying not to doze off.
The creatures were ocean dwellers originally, living on the surface of the water where it met the air, in a thick gelatinous sheet.
(“Some kind of relative of a siphonophore, I think,” said Ingold, “but much wider.” He looked disappointed when none of the rest of us had any idea what that was.) There it drifted for millennia, changing colors to appear like the sky from below and the sea from above, and so it was able to feed on tiny creatures that rose to the surface.
The creatures were all one creature, but sometimes it broke apart, then came together again.
Becoming whole was how Not-Oscar wrote it.
What one part of a wholeness knew, all of it knew.
But if a part broke off and did not come back—because, for example, a whale ate it—it did not make the rest less whole.
And there was more than one wholeness.
LIKE YOUR PEOPLE, Not-Oscar wrote, as Ingold tried to get him to clarify. EACH A WHOLENESS.
“Are you a wholeness?” I asked, curiosity pricking through my exhaustion.
NO. He gestured downward, into the mine. WHOLENESS IS DOWN THERE.
Probably they had all started as one, but had literally drifted apart on the tides.
A wholeness had learned over vast oceans of time how to use the plasticity of their cells to change into different shapes, and when they met up with another one, the two exchanged pieces and learned all the knowledge held in the other.
I wondered if they ever fought or tried to eat one another. Was that possible? Would they even notice?
Ingold dove in with more questions. Where were these other wholenesses? And how had Not-Oscar’s wholeness gotten into a coal mine in West Virginia?
More pages of writing followed. It happened a long time ago.
The oceans became colder, and ice crept from the north.
The creatures lived on the surface of the water and they preferred warmer temperatures.
They could alter themselves a little, adapting to cold and to changes in the saltiness of the sea, and had done so in the past, but actual freezing was fatal to them.
Other wholenesses drifted southward, toward the equator.
But this particular wholeness thought that things would become colder yet.
It feared that the ice sheets would follow them.
So it hatched a different plan. Parts of it had broken off before and explored rivers and undersea caves, then returned to become whole, bringing the knowledge with them.
It knew that in caves underground, the temperatures stayed the same, and did not freeze.
If it could move itself into one of these caves, it could survive the ice.
“He’s talking about the Ice Age!” said Ingold excitedly. “He actually saw it!”
“You mean the one with mammoths and whatnot?” Angus asked, in a tone that indicated he did not approve of mammoths running about loose, regardless of the temperature.
“Exactly! Although it’s been proposed that there have been many geological cycles, so it might not have been the most recent Ice Age. These mountains are very, very old.” Ingold laughed again. “My god, the things that the wholeness must have seen ...”
Actually the wholeness hadn’t seen very much, as it turned out.
It was sensitive to light and dark and could make crude lenses but that was all.
Not-Oscar had spent years on his own refining his ability to see and would still be considered nearsighted by human standards.
The wholeness might have perceived the blob of a mammoth go by in the distance, but what it saw was mostly tiny wiggly things in the water.
It had kept to rivers as it oozed its way onto land, leaving the other wholenesses behind.
(Ingold peppered Not-Oscar with a great many questions about salinity and salt regulation, but it became clear that Not-Oscar lacked the vocabulary to explain, even assuming that there were words for what it had done.
I can’t say I followed any of it, and I was glad when he gave up.)
At last the wholeness had entered a cave system, deep enough that it thought it would survive the ice, and there it had gone to sleep, entering a hibernation period where it needed very little food.
But it had set a sentry that stayed awake, which would watch over it and fetch food as needed, and which would merge back into the wholeness after a time, bringing knowledge of the world outside the cave, then splitting off again.
The sentry would tell the wholeness when it was safe to return to the sea.