Chapter 8 #2
"If we go up that hill tonight," she said, "we don't come down it. Not tomorrow, not the next day, not ever. We'll sit in that box and tell ourselves we'll go in the morning, and in the morning it'll be raining, and the day after that somebody will be sick,
and in eight more months there'll be fourteen of us."
She was already moving. "We go tonight. We go on the evening tide. Everything we own on four hulls and one stolen sailboat, and we are out of this cove before the fog rises."
"Nell," Dawes said. "It's four hours to the tide."
"Then we've got four hours."
They worked like people who had been waiting eight months to work.
That was the thing Liam would remember about that afternoon. He had expected grief and he had expected panic and he got neither. He got twenty-two people who had spent eight months being slowly eaten, throwing everything they owned into boats with an energy that was almost violent.
Isaiah took the crabber.
He got down in the bilge of that leaking old hull with pitch and rag and a heated iron and he worked for three straight hours on his belly in six inches of freezing water, and he came up gray-faced and shaking and he said, "She'll swim."
"Are you sure?"
"No," Isaiah said. "But she'll swim tonight."
Cully rigged the sailboat.
He was fifteen and he had spent four months diving for hard men in cold water and he did not talk about it, and Nell did not make him, and he went up that mast like a squirrel and had the rigging sorted in ninety minutes flat.
He came down and looked at Liam.
"Nell says you're the one," he said.
"The one what?"
"The one who worked it out. About the trees. About it listening." The boy's face was flat and careful in a way that no fifteen year old's face should ever be. "That true?"
"Some of it."
"Then can I ask you something?"
"Ask."
Cully looked down at his own bare feet on the wet deck.
"Ada was my sister," he said.
Liam's chest closed.
"I know," he said.
"They told me she went out. In October. Nell told me an hour ago." He was not crying. His voice was perfectly level. "And the thing in the trees has been using her since. Nell said it was calling with Ada's voice last night. Right at the door."
"Yes."
"Was it her?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
Liam knelt down in front of him, so their eyes were level, and he did not soften it, because a boy who had survived four months of the Sawtooth did not need it softened.
"It's not her," he said. "It's something that listened to her, and then took her voice, and it uses it to open doors. Your sister isn't in those trees, Cully. Whatever's out there is wearing her like a coat it stole."
Cully nodded slowly.
"Okay," he said.
And then he turned and went back up the mast, and he did not come down for a long time, and Liam did not go up after him.
They pushed off at dusk.
Five hulls. The sailboat, the two rowboats, the skiff, and the old crabber sitting low and evil in the water with Isaiah in her stern watching his pitch with the eyes of a man watching a bandage.
Twenty-five people and everything they had.
Chloe lay in the sailboat's cabin, wrapped in three blankets, tied down with cord across her chest and her wrists, and she was quiet. She had been quiet since she dropped in the grass that morning. Her fever had come down. Her breathing had steadied.
She had not woken up.
Isaiah had checked her every twenty minutes all afternoon and every time he came back up on deck his face was a little worse.
"She's not getting worse," he said. "She's not getting better either. Liam, she's just lying there. Like she's, like she's—"
"Say it."
"Like she's listening to something."
Liam took the tiller.
He took the tiller of a stolen sailboat with twenty-five lives strung out behind him in four boats, and he brought her bow around, and the sail took the evening wind, and Willow Landing began to slide past on the starboard rail.
The sunken trailers. The gravel where the fire had burned. The raw new grave above the tide line.
And the willows.
The fog was rising.
It came up off the water the way it always did, thickening in the roots, spreading between the trunks, and the light was going out of the sky, and the whole silver forest was sinking into gray.
Nobody in any of the five boats spoke.
Twenty-five people watched those trees go by, and every one of them, without being told, put a hand on the thing around their neck.
The chimes began to click.
Just a breath of it. Just the tide moving under the roots and a little wind in the tops, and the bones and the tin and the glass and the old bright spoons all turning slowly in the dark.
And out of the trees, at the last, as the sailboat came level with the north point and the channel opened up ahead of them and the open Sound lay black and enormous beyond, a voice called across the water.
It was not Tom Darcy.
It was not Ada, or Coble, or a little girl with a song.
It was Rennick.
"Liam," he called, pleasant and unhurried, from somewhere in the willows on the point. "Liam. You buried me wrong."
Every head in every boat turned.
"You put my hands folded," Rennick said. "I'd have wanted them at my sides. You couldn't know that. It's not your fault."
Liam did not answer.
He held the tiller and he watched the channel and he did not answer.
"Ask him about the man on the rock," Rennick said.
Liam's hands went tight on the wood.
"Ask him," Rennick called, and now there was something in the voice that had not been there in life, something delighted, something that had been waiting a very long time to be let out.
"Go on. Ask the boy from Minnesota why he thinks a stranger came four hundred yards through fog to put a round in my heart on the morning he came out of the trees. Ask him whose rifle that was. Ask him what he thinks is following him."
Nell Rook's boat was fifty feet off the port quarter.
Liam heard her voice come across the water, low and hard.
"Don't answer it."
"I'm not."
"Liam Perry, do not give it a word."
"I'm not."
The sailboat's bow came out past the point.
And the willows fell behind, and the chimes went quiet, and the black open water of the Sound opened out ahead of them, huge and cold and empty, running north.
Liam let out a breath.
And then, from below, from the cabin, from six feet beneath his boots, a voice said, "He'll be waiting for you at the door, you know."
It was Chloe's voice.
It was not Chloe.
Liam looked down through the open companionway hatch into the dark of the cabin, and in the last of the light he saw her lying there, tied down, wrapped in three blankets, with her eyes wide open and looking straight up at him.
"He's been waiting two years," she said.