Chapter 2 #3
He could not help it. He was a man and he had been told not to look and his head turned before any part of him agreed to it, and he looked off to the left, off the path, into the gray fog and the black willow trunks and the hanging bones.
And there was a man standing in the trees.
Forty feet away. Not moving.
He was small and stooped and old, and he wore a wool coat that had seen forty winters, and a hat with earflaps, and he stood leaning on a walking stick that he had carved himself, and even at forty feet in the fog and the failing light Liam could see the shape of the pistol on his hip.
The world went completely silent.
Not quiet. Silent. The chimes stopped. The footsteps stopped.
Liam's own heart stopped, or seemed to, and he stood there on the path with the corner of a door in his hands and the fog around his knees, and he looked at Tom Darcy standing among the willows two thousand miles from Minnesota, and Tom Darcy looked back at him.
The old man lifted one thin hand.
Not a wave. Just a lifting. The way a man raises his hand when he wants your attention and does not want to shout.
And Liam's mouth opened and the word was already coming out of it.
Somebody hit him.
Hard, in the shoulder, an open hand slamming into him, and it broke the thing, and the sound of the world came crashing back in, chimes and boots and the wind in the tops of the trees, and Liam staggered and nearly dropped his corner of the door.
Nell Rook had him by the front of the coat.
Her face was two inches from his, and for the first time since he had met her, there was nothing calm in it at all.
"Do not," she said, "say a name."
"I saw—"
"I know what you saw." She was shaking him, actually shaking him, a woman half his size with her fist twisted in his collar. "Everybody sees. Every single one of us sees. And the ones who called back are the reason there's twenty-two of us and not thirty-one."
Liam looked past her, into the trees.
There was nothing there.
There was fog, and there were black willow trunks going away into the gray, and there were bones hanging on wire, turning slowly, and there was nobody. No old man. No hat. No stick.
Nothing.
"Move," Nell said, letting go of him. "Move. Now. All of you. We're eight minutes from the door and we have got maybe six."
They moved.
Liam moved with them, his hands locked on the door, his legs carrying him, and his mind roaring and roaring, and he did not look left again the whole way, and it took everything he had.
Because Tom Darcy was in Minnesota.
Tom Darcy was eighty-eight years old and he was in a cabin on a frozen lake two thousand miles east of here, and he had a stove and a shelf of books, and he did not own a boat, and he could not walk a mile without his stick,
and there was no possible way on God's earth that he was standing in a willow forest in Washington in the fog.
There were only two ways to explain it, and Liam turned them both over as he ran, and he hated both of them.
Either he had seen a thing that could not exist.
Or he was starting to come apart, out here, in the cold and the grief and the exhaustion, the way people did.
"Liam." Isaiah's voice was almost a sob. "Liam, you saw something. What did you see. I saw you look and I saw your face and you saw something out there."
"Not now."
"Liam—"
"Not now, Isaiah."
The trees ended.
They came out of the willows onto a bare stony rise, the ground climbing hard and fast out of the swamp, and on top of it, black against the last gray of the sky, stood a building.
Not a trailer. Something older and heavier. A blockhouse of poured concrete, squat and windowless, half sunk into the hill, with a rusted steel door standing open and firelight spilling out of it and people standing in the doorway holding lanterns and waving them in.
"Move!" somebody was shouting. "Move, move, get in, get in!"
They ran the last hundred feet.
They ran, carrying Chloe on her door, and the willows behind them were nothing but a black wall now, and the chimes in them had all begun to click at once, hard and fast and wrong.
They got through the door.
Hands took the door from Liam's hands. Bodies pressed past him. And then two men threw their shoulders into the great rusted steel door and it swung, groaning, and boomed shut, and a bar the thickness of Liam's arm dropped into its brackets, and another below it, and another above.
And the sound of the willows was cut off.
Complete silence, except for the fire, and the breathing, and Chloe muttering on her door.
Liam turned around.
Twenty-two people stood in that concrete room, packed in among stacked crates and bedrolls and a firepit under a hole punched in the roof, and every one of them was looking at him.
Nell Rook was leaning against the wall with her eyes shut, catching her breath.
"Nell," Liam said. "What is out there."
Nell Rook opened her eyes.
She was about to answer. Liam saw her decide to answer, saw her open her mouth to say it.
And out in the dark, from somewhere in the willows, close, very close, right up against the concrete, a voice that Liam knew better than any voice on earth called out through the steel door.
"Liam," said Tom Darcy. "Liam, son, it's cold out here. Let me in."