Chapter 4
Liam moved before he thought.
He got in front of her. He put his back against the steel door and his hands flat on Nell Rook's shoulders and he held her there, and she was so much smaller than she seemed, all bird bones under the oilskin, and she was strong the way panic makes people strong.
"Nell."
"Let go of me."
"Nell. Look at my face."
"Let go of me."
Outside, the girl screamed again. She screamed the old woman's name and then she screamed that she was cold, that she was so cold, that they had left her out here and she could not find the path.
Nell Rook's whole body went rigid under Liam's hands.
"She was fourteen," Nell said.
"I know."
"You don't know anything." Her eyes were fixed on the door, on the steel six inches behind Liam's head, and she was not seeing him at all. "She went out for her brother. She went out because they took Cully and she thought, she thought if she got to the water she could, she could—"
"Nell."
"She was fourteen years old and I let her go out that door and I have never once been able to say why."
The scream came again.
It was the worst thing Liam had ever heard in his life. It was not theatrical. It was not a monster's imitation of grief. It was a fourteen year old girl in a cold swamp in the dark, sobbing, and calling for the only person left in the world who loved her.
And Liam felt his own hands loosen on Nell's shoulders.
He felt it happen. He felt some part of himself, some deep animal part that had nothing to do with reason, begin to lean toward the sound, begin to turn toward the bar.
Because what if.
That was all it was. That was the whole of it. Two words, working at the bottom of him like water at a dam.
What if.
"Isaiah," Liam said. His voice came out strange. "Isaiah, come here and hold her."
"Liam?"
"Come here."
Isaiah came, and got his arms around Nell from behind, and Isaiah was soft and heavy and slow but he was two hundred and forty pounds of him, and Nell Rook could not move.
And Liam turned around and faced the door.
He did it deliberately. He put both palms flat on the cold steel and he stood there with his forehead almost touching it and he listened to a dead girl cry six feet away on the other side.
She's right there.
She's right there and she's cold and you're the man standing between her and the fire.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about the chimes.
Thousands of them, strung on wire, hanging at the height of a man's face all through those trees, hung on every path anyone ever used, and in eight months not one of them had ever moved.
Whatever was standing outside this door was not standing on anything.
It had no feet. It had a voice.
"You're not real," Liam said, to the steel.
The screaming stopped.
The silence that came after it was so complete and so sudden that Liam heard his own blood.
And then, very close to the door, very quietly, the girl's voice said, "Yes I am."
Petyr dropped the garden fork.
It clattered on the concrete and the sound went off in that room like a gunshot, and two people cried out, and the woman with the babies made a low animal noise behind her crates.
"Yes I am," Ada said again, patiently. "Nell, I'm right here. I'm right outside. Why is he saying that?"
Liam did not answer.
He had learned that already. Nell had told him and he had believed her and now he understood it in his bones. You did not give it a word. Every word was a thread and it would take the thread and pull, gently, endlessly, until the whole thing you were came unraveled in its hands.
"Nell, who is that man?"
Silence.
"Nell, don't let him keep me out here."
Silence.
"Nell." The voice broke, and it broke perfectly, exactly the way a child's voice breaks. "Nell, please. It's so cold and I've been walking for so long and my feet are all cut up and I just want to come in. I just want to sit by the fire. Please. Nell, please, please, please—"
"AAAAAAH!"
It was Dawes.
The gray hollow man had come up off the floor by the fire with both hands over his ears and he was screaming, screaming wordlessly at the top of his lungs, screaming to drown it out, his face contorted, and Liam understood at once that this was not a breakdown.
This was a technique.
And then Petyr was doing it too, and then the woman by the fire, and then all of them, twenty-two people in a concrete box, howling at the tops of their voices with their hands clamped over their ears, a wall of raw human noise thrown up against the steel.
Isaiah stared around him in horror.
"Do it!" Nell shouted at him, over the din, still locked in his arms, tears running down her scarred face. "Do it, boy! It's the only thing that works! You can't argue with it and you can't listen to it, so you make it so you CAN'T HEAR IT!"
Isaiah started to yell.
Liam stood with his hands on the door.
He did not yell.
He stood there and he made himself listen, all the way through, to a dead girl begging, because he had understood something in the last thirty seconds and he needed to be sure of it, and being sure of things was the only thing he had ever been good for.
It took eleven minutes.
When it ended, it did not fade. It simply stopped, the way a lamp goes out, mid word, and the screaming in the blockhouse went on for another twenty seconds before people began to understand that they were the only ones making noise anymore.
Then, one by one, they stopped.
And there was nothing.
Nell Rook sagged in Isaiah's arms, and he lowered her onto a crate, and she sat there with her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking, and nobody went to her, and Liam understood that too.
There was no comfort in this room for that.
There was not enough of it to go around and they had all agreed, silently, long ago, not to spend what little there was.
Liam took his hands off the door.
"It heard me," he said.
Nobody answered.
"Nell." He crossed to her and crouched down in front of the crate. "Nell, listen to me. It heard me."
She lifted her face out of her hands. Her eyes were red and empty.
"What?"
"I said three words to it. I said you're not real. And it stopped, and then it answered me." He was speaking fast now, low and fast. "It answered the thing I said. It didn't go on with what it was doing. It argued with me."
"So?"
"So it can hear us through the door."
"Everybody knows that."
"No." Liam shook his head hard. "No, listen. That's not a small thing. That's not nothing. Think about what it means."
He looked up at her. "That thing out there is not a recording. It isn't a memory. It isn't a poison in the fog making me see what's in my own head, because a poison in my head doesn't stop what it's saying to correct me when I contradict it."
Isaiah had gone very still.
"Oh," he said.
"Say it," Liam said.
"It's listening." Isaiah's round face had drained white. "Liam. It's not just talking. It's listening. It's been standing out there for eight months listening."
The room was so quiet Liam could hear the fire eat.
"That's how it knows," Liam said. "Nell, that's how it knows. Everybody in here has been trying to work out how a thing in the trees knows a song Dawes's daughter made up when she was six. And the answer's been standing outside your walls this whole time."
Dawes looked up slowly from the fire.
"I never told anyone that song," he said.
"Did you ever sing it?"
The old man opened his mouth.
And closed it.
And his face did something terrible.
"To myself," he whispered. "In the trailer. At night. When I couldn't sleep." He was staring at nothing. "Only to myself. Only ever to myself, when I thought there was nobody in the world to hear it."
"There was somebody to hear it," Liam said.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Nell Rook sat on her crate and looked at the barred door, and Liam watched eight months of nightmare rearrange itself behind her eyes into a different and much colder shape.
"It's not haunting us," she said at last.
"No."
"It's studying us."
"Yes," Liam said. "And it's been at it a long time, and it's very good at it, and it has all night, every night, for as long as it wants."
He stood up.
"And that means it doesn't know anything it wasn't told," he said. "It's not all-knowing. It's not a spirit and it's not God. It's got exactly as much as it's been able to hear, and not one word more, and that means it has limits, Nell, and a thing with limits is a thing you can beat."
Nell Rook stared at him.
And then she laughed.
It was not a good laugh. It was cracked and exhausted and it had eight months of grief packed into it, but it was a laugh, and Liam saw two or three people around the fire look up in something like astonishment, as if they had forgotten the sound existed.
"Eight months," she said. "Eight months, and nine dead, and this boy walks in off a stolen boat and works it out in one night."
"He does that," Isaiah said quietly.
"Does he."
"You get used to it." Isaiah's voice was thick. "Sort of."
Nell Rook wiped her face with the back of her wrist and stood up, and she was Nell Rook again, more or less.
"All right," she said. "All right. Say you're right. Say it's listening. What does that buy us, tonight, with ten Sawtooth men camped on my beach waiting for the sun to come up?"
Liam did not answer straight away.
He walked back to the firing slit, and put his eye to it, and found the beach through the glass.
The Sawtooth had built a fire.
They had built it right there on the gravel, big and bright and stupid, and they were sitting around it, and one of them was drinking something, and Liam watched them for a full minute and understood exactly what he was seeing.
They were not afraid.
They had rowed into a haunted cove and camped on a haunted beach and they had built a fire the size of a house and they were passing a bottle around, and they were not afraid of the willows or the fog or the dark or anything in it.
"Nell," he said. "Come look."
She came, and he gave her the rifle, and showed her how to hold it, and she put her eye to the scope with the clumsiness of a woman who had never used good glass in her life.