Chapter 3 #2
"He was eighty-eight," Liam said. His voice came out strange and level and far away. "He told me himself. Said he might not see the end of the winter. Said his chest sounded bad some mornings."
"Then it may be that simple," Nell said gently. "Old men die in cold winters. It's the oldest story there is."
But Liam was thinking about a camp two thousand miles east with a sickness in it that Sarah Vance could not stop, and about sixteen people in a cabin and then thirty and then everyone, and about how many graves Duncan Rain would have needed to dig in ground that would not thaw until April.
He was thinking about Merja, and her cold carved face, and the way she had looked at him across the fire and filed him away.
He was thinking that if the thing in the willows had come to him wearing Tom Darcy, then Tom Darcy was in the ground, and if Tom Darcy was in the ground, then the sickness had reached the old cabins on the west shore, and that meant Sarah, and Quentin, and the woman with the child, and all of them,
all of them, all of them.
He put his head in his hands.
"How does it know," he said, into his palms.
"That's the part. How does it know a thing my old man said to me in a cabin in Minnesota. He carved that stick himself. He carved it out of ash and he had a bad joint in the third knuckle of his right hand and the grip's worn to fit it and I saw that stick tonight, Nell, I saw the grip on it."
"I don't know."
"How does it know the note. I wrote a note. I wrote it in charcoal in the dark and I folded it and I put it in a door two thousand miles from here and there is no one alive who knows what was in that note except Tom Darcy."
"I don't know."
"Then guess!"
The word came out of him like a rifle shot and it bounced off the concrete and the whole room went still and Liam heard himself and was ashamed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't be." Nell Rook did not look offended. She looked, if anything, a little relieved. "It's about time you shouted. You've been holding yourself together like a man carrying water in his hands since you walked in here and it isn't natural."
She picked up a stick and turned it over in her fingers.
"You want a guess. All right. You'll get several, because everybody in this room has one, and we've had eight months of long nights to work on them, and I'll tell you now that not one of them is worth a damn."
She raised her voice slightly, without looking away from Liam.
"Petyr. Tell the man your theory."
The boy with the garden fork, sitting cross legged near the fire, went red.
"Nell."
"Go on. You're proud enough of it at midnight."
Petyr swallowed. He was seventeen, maybe eighteen, all elbows, and he did not look at Liam when he spoke.
"It's the ground," he said. "That's what I think. The willows grew up out of a graveyard. There was a cemetery on this ground before, my mum said there was, a little one, and when the water came up it drowned it, and the willow roots went down into it, and, and the trees took it up. Took them up.
Roots take up whatever's in the ground, everybody knows that. So the trees have got the dead in them, and that's why it only ever wears the dead, and that's why it can't leave the willows."
He glanced up, defiant, expecting to be laughed at.
Liam did not laugh.
"Was there a cemetery," he said.
"There was not," Nell said.
"Nell, my mum said—"
"Your mum said a lot of things and I loved her but she was wrong about most of them."
Nell said it without heat, and the boy subsided, and Liam saw the affection under it.
"There was no cemetery. There was a bait shop and a boat launch and sixty trailers full of people who came here to fish. I know because I lived in one of them for nineteen years."
She turned the stick over again.
"Dawes."
An older man on the far side of the fire, gray and hollow, did not look up.
"Leave me out of it," he said.
"Dawes thinks it's chemical," Nell said, as if he had spoken enthusiastically.
"There was a mill up the river. Pulp mill. Been leaking into that swamp for eighty years and nobody ever cleaned it up, and after the pulse the ponds went over, all of them, straight into the water table. He thinks it's in the fog.
Thinks we're breathing something that makes us see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear."
"That's not the worst idea I've heard," Isaiah said slowly.
"No," Nell agreed. "It's not. It's the one I liked best, for a while. It explains a lot. It explains why it only comes at dusk, when the fog rises. It explains why it doesn't come in here, because these walls are two feet of concrete and the fog doesn't get in.
It explains why the ones who go out don't come back, because they wander off into a swamp in the dark out of their heads, and a swamp in the dark will kill you all by itself with no help from anything."
"But," Liam said.
"But," Nell agreed.
She leaned forward.
"But it does not explain how it knew the words to a song that Dawes's daughter made up herself when she was six years old, and sang only to him, and which he had not sung or spoken or thought about in eleven years until he heard it coming out of the fog in her voice."
Nell's face was hard. "Poison in the air makes a man see things that are in his own head. It does not stand thirty feet away in the trees and tell him something he'd forgotten."
Liam nodded slowly.
He was working the read.
It was the first time since the path that the cold clear thing had come to him, and he grabbed onto it with both hands, because it was the only floor there was in the whole place.
"Say it out loud," Nell said, watching him. "Whatever it is. This room's heard everything."
"Two questions," Liam said. "That's what I've got. Two questions, and they're different questions, and everybody keeps trying to answer them with one answer."
"Go on."
"The first question is what the thing is." He held up a finger. "Ghost. Poison. Something that came through when the sky went green. I don't know, and I don't think you know, and I'm not sure knowing would help us tonight."
"And the second?"
"The second question is what it wants." Liam looked up.
"And that one I think we can actually work on. Because it's doing something specific. It isn't just standing out there being frightening. It's calling. Every single time. It stands where you can see it and it uses a voice you'll answer to and it asks you to come out."
He set the rifle across his knees.
"It doesn't come in," he said. "Nell. In eight months. Has it ever come in?"
Nell Rook was very still.
"No," she said.
"It's been thirty feet from an open trailer door. It's stood outside this blockhouse for eleven minutes tonight, up against the steel, close enough that I heard the stick on the stone. It knows we're in here. It knows our names, it knows our dead, it knows things about us we never told anyone."
Liam's voice was picking up now, the pieces sliding into their places, cold and clear.
"And it does not come in. Not once. Not in eight months. Not through a door, not through a window, not through that hole in the roof where the smoke goes."
Isaiah sat up straight.
"Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, that's, Liam, that's—"
"It can't," Liam said. "Or it isn't allowed to. Or it doesn't work that way. I don't care which. The point is the same."
He looked around the room, at the gray tired faces watching him, and he said the thing that none of them, in eight months, seemed to have let themselves say.
"It can't take you. It can only ask you."
The blockhouse was completely silent.
"That's why it uses your dead," Liam said.
"Not because it's cruel, though maybe it is. Because it has to. It needs you to open the door yourself, and there's only one voice in the world that any of us would open a door in the dark for, and that's the voice of somebody we've already lost."
He looked at Nell. "It doesn't have hands. It's got a voice and it's got a face and it's got everything it could learn about you, and that's all it's got, and it has been using it for eight months to get nine people to walk out of a locked room of their own free will."
Nobody spoke.
Nell Rook looked at him for a long moment, and something moved behind her scarred face, something Liam could not name.
"Nine people," she said at last. "And every one of them walked out on their own legs."
"Yes."
"Not one was taken. Not one was dragged. We've never once found a mark of a struggle." She was staring past him now, at the wall. "Coble's wife unbarred her own door and walked out into the fog and pulled it shut behind her. She shut it. So the cold wouldn't get in on the children."
"Nell," Liam said, and he said it as gently as he knew how. "How long have you known that?"
"I've known it since December," Nell Rook said. "I have known it since December and I have not said it out loud one time, because the day I say it out loud, it stops being a monster and it starts being our fault."
She looked up, and her eyes were wet, and furious.
"Do you understand what you're asking these people to carry? Petyr's mother didn't take him. He nearly went. He got the bar off the door before Marla tackled him. Dawes stood at that steel for two hours with his hand on the latch, listening to his little girl sing, and he did not open it,
and he has hated himself every day since, because some part of him has spent eight months wondering if it was really her out there and he left her in the cold."
"It wasn't her," Isaiah said.
"I know it wasn't her!" Nell's voice cracked and she put a hand over her mouth and got it back under control, and when she took the hand away her face was flat again.
"I know. But knowing it and believing it at three in the morning with her voice ten feet away are two different things, and I have watched this room lose that argument nine times."
She stood up.
"You want to know why we hang bones in the trees," she said. "You asked, on the path, and I didn't answer."
"I remember."
"It's not a charm. It's not a ward. It's not superstition, whatever it looks like."