CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Wren
I come out onto the porch at two in the morning with the book against my chest and Cassius is standing at the gate exactly where I left him, and there's blood on his shirt that isn't his.
"There were two," he says. "One's alive. She's nineteen and she's in the ditch and she's been paid in cash by a locker at the Greyhound station."
"Cassius—"
"There's a number in her phone with a Massachusetts area code and when I picked it up there was a room on the other end. Not a voice. A room. Somewhere large and underground with a lot of air in it." He's got both hands on the gate. "Wren, tell me what's in the book."
"Come up onto the porch."
"I can't—"
"You can now," I say, "because I'm going to take one of them out."
And I go down the steps with the penknife from my grandmother's kitchen drawer, and I find a board at the corner of the porch where the marks are thinnest, and I put the blade under one of them and lever it out of the wood — a chip the size of a thumbnail, one carved sign, gone.
The whole house shifts.
I feel it in my teeth, in my sternum, in the fillings in the back of my mouth. Something enormous and patient that has been holding its breath for two hundred years lets a little of it out.
Cassius comes through the gate.
Slowly. Testing every step like a man on ice. Up the path, up the step, onto the boards — and he stops in the doorway with his hand on the frame, shaking, but standing, and I sit down hard on the porch swing because my legs have gone.
"How," he says.
So I tell him. All of it. The wardens, the method, the four words on page 112, the thing about given and taken.
And he listens with his hand still on the doorframe, and I watch the exact moment he understands what the Long Hunger actually is — the whole man goes wrong, like a building settling — and I feel it arrive in me a half-second later, and it is the single worst thing I have ever felt in my body.
"Two hundred years," he says.
"Yeah."
"Nine hundred of us. In this hemisphere. Every single one of us has been—" He stops. "There are men in that court who think they've simply grown old. Halloway told me in 1953 that it was normal. That you lose the world the way you lose your hearing."
"You didn't lose it. It was taken off you."
"By him."
"By him," I say. "For all of you. He took her by force and it curdled and it curdled in everybody, because you were all in the room, because you all drank."
Cassius sits down on the top step with his back to the post.
And then I tell him the last part, and he doesn't move at all while I say it, and when I finish he's silent for so long that a bird starts up somewhere out over the lake.
"Under the cellar," he repeats.
"Since 1813."
"Wren, I stood in that cellar." He's looking at his hands. "I've walked past that house nine times in two centuries. There's a nail salon on it."
"Somebody's taking the boards off my grandmother's eaves," I say. "She wrote it four months before she died. Three boards, cut clean, in the night — and this house is made of that cellar's floor, Cassius, the timber came north. Whoever's doing it isn't after the house."
"They're after the wards themselves."
"They're taking them apart," I say, "one piece at a time, from the outside in, exactly like she said it would happen. And somebody in Ashmoor has been going down a list of feeders since March and dressing it up as a family war so that everybody's looking at each other."
Cassius stands up.
"Nesbit said Lucien doesn't run the locker," he says slowly. "He subscribes to it."
We look at each other across my dead grandmother's porch.
"Then who does?" I say.
◆ ◆ ◆
We stay a day. It's a bad decision made for a good reason: the sun comes up at six and the drive is four hours, and there is a cold room under the kitchen with a slate shelf and a door of ward-timber.
At four in the afternoon I go down the cellar stairs with a mug of coffee and sit on the bottom step and say, "Right. Teach me nothing, because you can't, so I'm going to teach myself and you're going to sit there and tell me if it's working."
I take the penknife. I cut my thumb — properly, without ceremony, the way a woman who has cleaned up four hundred worse cuts than that does it — and I wipe the blade, and I put it to the underside of the slate shelf and cut the sign.
Two curves. One line through.
And say the four words.
The room changes. Not dramatically. The air goes tight the way it does before thunder, and Cassius goes very still, and the underside of a shelf in a Rimebrook dairy becomes a place he cannot put his hand.
"Did it work?"
"Try to make me touch it."
I hold my hand under the shelf, palm flat. "Come here then."
He gets within eight inches and stops. "It's a stove."
"Oh my God," I say, and do eleven more.
I do them on the kitchen doorframe and the window sills and the inside of the porch and the frame of the cold room, and by six I'm white as paper and my thumb's a mess and he makes me stop and eat two tins of soup from my grandmother's shelf that are technically eleven years past date.
"How does it feel?" he asks.
"Like giving blood, but sad." I've got my hands wrapped round the mug. "It takes something. It's not the cut. It's — " I gesture. "You know when you've cried for a really long time and then stopped?"
"No."
"Right. Yeah. Sorry." A crooked grin. "Okay, it's like that. It's like the after of that."
I look at the eleven marks in my grandmother's kitchen.
"Cassius. I could ward Ilana Street."
"Yes."
"I could ward the office. I could ward Mrs. Ocampo's whole house so it doesn't matter who she invites in. I could do the launderette. I could go round this entire city with a penknife and make it so that there are forty buildings you people can't walk into—"
"Yes."
"—and nobody would ever have to sit in a room and be negotiated over—"
"Wren."
I stop.
"Yes," he says. "You could. And that is precisely why Anneke Verity's daughters spent a hundred and forty years dead before their time, and why there's a book down there with four generations in it and no fifth, and why your grandmother lived alone in a house at the end of a lake road with her name off the register.
" He sets the mug down. "The moment my kind understand what you are, this stops being about your blood. It becomes about your hands."
I sit with that.
"That's what she meant," I say slowly. "The letter. The only thing that's ever frightened them is one of ours who knew what she was."
"Yes."
"So they killed the ones who knew."
"They killed the ones who knew," he agrees, "and kept the ones who didn't, and told each other a story about food."
◆ ◆ ◆
I spend the rest of that day going through the house properly, room by room, top to bottom, the way I have gone through four hundred other people's.
There's a professional way to do this and I'm doing it, and the professional way is that you don't start with the emotional objects, you start with the boring ones, because the boring ones tell you the truth. Anybody can arrange their photographs. Nobody arranges their airing cupboard.
So: the airing cupboard.
Four sets of sheets, all worn to the same thinness, all mended. A hot water bottle perished into a solid lump. And, on the top shelf, wrapped in a pillowcase, eleven knives.
Not kitchen knives. Craft knives, chisels, two awls, a bradawl with the handle worn to the shape of a hand, and a small curved blade I don't recognise that's been sharpened so many times it's got a waist in the middle like a hollow tooth.
Every single one of them has a brown stain in the join between blade and handle that will never come out.
I sit on the landing with them across my knees for a while.
Then: the small room at the back. Boxes. Curtains up, which is strange in a house where every other curtain's down.
It was my mother's. That's obvious in four seconds — there's a poster still taped to the inside of the wardrobe door and it's a band my mother sang along to in a car in 1996 and shouted at me for not appreciating.
And on the window frame, in the paint, so old it's been painted over twice and is only visible where the sun's done its work, there are marks. Dozens of them. The frame, the sill, the inside of the wardrobe, the skirting behind the bed.
She warded her own daughter's bedroom.
I stand there for a long time.
And here's what I finally understand, at half past two in the afternoon in a cold house at the end of a lake road:
My mother didn't run away from a mad old woman.
My mother grew up in a room with carving under the paint, being told to keep the curtains open and never to open a door after dark, by a mother who came home at four in the morning with brown stains on her tools and wouldn't say where she'd been.
My mother did fourteen years of that. And then, at nineteen, she got in a car and drove south to a city with nine bridges and married a man who left, and she raised me on the fourth floor of a building with no wood in it anywhere and never told me one single thing.
That wasn't a betrayal. That was a woman trying to break a chain.
Keep her out of cities. Keep her north, keep her boring. Ilse wrote that in 1994 and my mother read it and did the exact opposite on purpose, and I have spent eleven years thinking she just didn't like her mother.
I go downstairs and sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the cold room door, where there's a dead man on the other side of two inches of ward-timber, and I cry for about twenty minutes in a way I have not done since the hospice.
And the whole time, through the string, I can feel him on the other side of that door, being absolutely still so as not to interrupt.
Then I wash my face at the kitchen tap and go and clean the front room.
That's not a metaphor. I actually clean it.
There's a dust sheet over the sofa and eleven years of mouse under the sideboard and I find a broom in the scullery and I do the whole room properly, floor to picture rail, because I don't know what else to do with my hands and because a woman who came down that road on a bicycle at four in the morning for forty-one years and never took a cup of tea deserves to have somebody hoover.
At five I go and stand at the top of the cellar stairs and say, to the dark: "You awake?"
"Yes."
"I've been crying about my mother and I've cleaned the front room and I'm going to make an omelette."
A pause.
"Would you like me to come up?"
"Not yet," I say. "In a bit. I'm all right."
"Wren."
"Mm."
"There are eleven knives in the airing cupboard," Cassius says, "and I want you to know that I noticed them last night and I have been trying since three o'clock this morning to think of a way to tell you that wouldn't ruin your day."
I put my forehead against the doorframe and laugh until my ribs hurt.
"You absolute coward," I say.
"Yes," he agrees, from under the floor. "Comprehensively."