Chapter 19
They put in at the mouth of a river three days south.
They had no choice. The wind had gone around to the north and come up hard, and five overloaded hulls on open water in a north wind was a way to drown twenty-six people, and Cully said so in a voice that did not invite discussion.
"There's a river," he said. "Two hours south. It's deep at the mouth and there's a bar that breaks the sea and we can lie behind it till this blows through."
"How long," Liam said.
"A day. Two."
"Cully—"
"You want to argue with the wind, be my guest," the boy said.
They went in on the last of the light.
It was a wide brown river coming down out of the hills, sluggish and swollen with two years of unmanaged rain, and it had spread out at its mouth into a flat country of mudbanks and channels and standing water where the land could not decide whether it was land.
And growing out of all of it, everywhere, in the water, on the banks, in the shallows, were trees.
Liam saw them from a mile out.
He saw them and his hands went cold on the tiller and he did not say anything, because there was nothing to say, and because he could see Isaiah's back at the mast and he could see Isaiah's shoulders go up.
Willows.
Thousands of them.
Long crooked trunks and drooping silver wands trailing down into the brown water, and the wind moved through them, and they swayed and shifted and the whole delta seemed to be breathing.
"No," Isaiah said.
"Isaiah—"
"No." He turned around and his face was gray. "Liam, no. Absolutely not. Take her out. Take her back out."
"There's a thirty-knot northerly out there."
"I don't care."
"You will care when the crabber rolls with six people in her—"
"I AM NOT GOING IN THERE."
The whole flotilla heard it.
Twenty-six people on five boats, and every head came up, and Isaiah Macklemore stood at the mast of a stolen sailboat with his fists closed and his chest heaving and tears standing in his eyes.
"Look at it," he said. "Liam. Look at it."
Liam looked.
The light was going. The fog was coming up off the water in the way it did in this country, low and white, filling in between the roots, and the willows were sinking into gray.
It was the cove.
It was not the cove. It was three hundred miles from the cove and it was a river delta and not a saltwater bay, and it did not matter at all, because it was the same trees and the same fog and the same silver wands trailing in the same still water and Liam's own hands were shaking on the tiller.
"There's no chimes," he said.
"What?"
"There's no chimes, Isaiah."
Isaiah stared at him.
"Look," Liam said. "Look at the branches. There's nothing hanging in them. No bones, no tin, no glass, no spoons. Nobody's ever strung a warning line in these trees because nobody's ever needed one."
Isaiah looked.
He looked for a long time.
"That doesn't mean anything," he whispered.
"No," Liam admitted. "It doesn't."
They went in.
They tied up in a side channel behind a mudbank, five boats in a row, with the willows standing over them on both sides and the fog coming down, and by full dark you could not see the far bank at all.
Nobody spoke.
That was the thing. Twenty-six people made camp in absolute silence, and Liam realized after an hour that not one of them had said a word above a whisper since they came in past the bar.
They had all learned the same lesson in the same swamp.
He went to Chloe.
She was in the bow where she had been for three days, tied at the wrists and ankles, wrapped in blankets, and Isaiah had not let her out of arm's reach for one minute.
"Chloe."
She did not answer.
"Chloe, it's Liam."
"I know who it is," she said.
Her voice was small.
Liam knelt down.
She was lying on her side facing the willows, and her eyes were open, and she was looking at the trees the way a person looks at a snake in a room.
"Chloe. Look at me."
She looked at him.
And they were her eyes, they were absolutely and unmistakably her eyes, and they were full of a fear so enormous and so childlike that Liam felt something in his chest tear straight across.
"It's awake," she whispered.
"I know."
"Liam, it woke up when we came in." Her whole body was shaking under the blankets. "It's been asleep for three days and I could almost, I could almost pretend, and then we came around that bar and I felt it sit up."
"Chloe—"
"It's happy," she said.
Liam took her face in both hands.
"Listen to me," he said. "Listen. There is nothing in these trees."
"You don't know that."
"There is nothing in these trees, and I'm going to tell you how I know."
He held her eyes. "It's got no chimes, Chloe. Nobody's hung a warning line. And more than that, there's nobody here. There's no village. There's no blockhouse. There's no twenty-two starving people living in a concrete box because they daren't sleep in their own beds."
Her breathing hitched.
"That thing in the cove needed people," Liam said. "It needed somebody to stand outside and listen to. It sat outside a wall for eight months learning twenty-two lives by heart, because that was the only way it could get what it wanted."
He looked out at the black willows.
"There's nobody in these trees," he said. "There's nothing to learn. There's nothing to stand outside of. It's just a swamp, Chloe. It's just a bad, ugly, frightening swamp full of trees that happen to look like the worst place either of us has ever been."
Chloe Buck closed her eyes.
"Say it again," she said.
"It's just trees."
"Again."
"It's just trees, Chloe."
She was crying now, and she could not wipe her face because her hands were tied behind her, and Liam did it for her with his sleeve.
"I'm so tired," she said.
"I know."
"Liam, I am so tired. I have been holding it away from my hands for nine days and it never sleeps and it never stops and it just talks, and talks, and talks, and it never gets tired."
"I know."
"And I keep thinking," she whispered, "that if I could just, if you just let me go into the water, if you just—"
"No," Liam said.
"Liam—"
"No."
"It would stop."
"And then it would be standing on this boat," Liam said, "talking to Isaiah."
Chloe went absolutely still.
"That's the whole thing," Liam said. "That's what it's been working on you with for nine days, and it's very good, and I want you to hear me say the answer out loud so that it has to hear me say it too."
He leaned down close.
"If you go in the water," he said, "it does not go with you. It stays. And then it is loose in a boat with twenty-six people and no hands at all, and it starts asking, and it has all night, every night, forever."
Chloe stared at him.
"You are not the problem," Liam said. "You're the lid."
And Chloe Buck put her face against his shoulder and sobbed, and Liam Perry held his best friend's tied-up body on the bow of a boat in a black swamp and did not let go for a very long time.
Isaiah broke at midnight.
Liam had known it was coming. He had watched it building for three days and he had watched it accelerate the moment they came in past that bar, and when it happened he was already halfway across the deck.
Isaiah was standing at the mast.
He was standing at the mast with the Desert Eagle in his hand, and he was pointing it out at the willows, and he was turning, slowly, in a circle, and his whole body was shaking.
"Isaiah."
"There's something out there."
"Isaiah, put it down."
"There's something out there, Liam!" His voice cracked open like a shot. "I've been listening for an hour. There's something walking. In the water. Out past the second bank, something's been walking in the water for an hour."
Liam listened.
There was nothing.
There was the fog, and the slow brown river, and somewhere a branch dripping.
"There's nothing," he said.
"You're not listening—"
"Isaiah, there's nothing out there and you're pointing a .50 at a tree."
"THEN WHY CAN I HEAR IT?"
The whole camp was awake.
Twenty-six people, sitting up in five boats in the dark, watching a heavy young man with a pistol turn in circles at a mast, and nobody said anything, and Cully had his hand on the shotgun and was looking at Liam with terror on his face.
Liam walked up to him.
He walked right up to the muzzle of that gun and put his hand flat on the top of the slide and pushed it down until it was pointing at the deck.
"Give it to me," he said.
"Liam—"
"Give it to me, Isaiah."
Isaiah gave it to him.
And then his knees went, and he sat down hard on the deck with his back against the mast, and he put his hands over his face and began, at last, to come apart.
Liam sat down beside him.
"I killed him," Isaiah said.
"I know."
"I keep seeing his arm."
"I know."
"It came off, Liam." Isaiah's whole body was shuddering. "It came off at the elbow and it went into the shelves and I did that, I did that with my hands, and he was an old man, he was a frightened old man who'd been alone for two years—"
"He was about to kill you."
"That's not—" Isaiah's face twisted. "That's not the part. That's not the part that's wrong with me."
"Then say the part."
Isaiah looked up.
And his face was so full of shame that Liam had to make himself not look away.
"I liked it," Isaiah whispered.
Nobody moved.
"For about a second," he said. "When it went off. When the whole room lit up and I felt it in my chest and I saw him fold."
His voice was almost nothing. "For about one second I was not the fat kid. I was not the passenger's friend. I was not the one they were going to cut first when the food ran short. I was the biggest thing in the room and I liked it and then it was over and I have been sick about it for four days."
Liam sat with that.
He sat with it for a long moment, in the fog, in the dark, in a swamp full of willows, and he understood that this was the most important thing he would ever say to anybody in his life.
"Yeah," he said.
Isaiah looked up.
"What?"
"I said yeah." Liam turned and looked at him.
"Isaiah. Look at me. When I shot those men at the marina, and when I shot them in the trees at the cove, and when I stood up on that beach and I was hitting them, every single time. There is a part of it that feels like the best thing that has ever happened to you."
Isaiah stared at him.
"You never said that."
"Of course I never said it." Liam's throat was tight. "You don't say it. Nobody says it. Uebert Murray would say it, that's the whole point, that's the difference between him and us, he'd have said it and laughed."
He put his hand on Isaiah's shoulder.
"You didn't laugh," he said. "You threw up. You put your head in your hands and you cried, and you have been sick about it for four days, and Isaiah, that is not a symptom. That is the proof."
Isaiah's face crumpled.
"Wynnie told you," Liam said. "In a cabin in Wisconsin, with a dog on the floor and a fire in the stove, and you'd just put a knife in a trapper's back and you were crying at her table. Do you remember what she said?"
"Don't."
"She said the fact that it hurts is the whole entire proof that you're not one of them," Liam said. "And you have spent four months forgetting it, and I am reminding you, and I am going to keep reminding you every single day for two thousand miles if I have to."
Isaiah Macklemore put his forehead on his knees.
And he wept, silently, and Liam sat beside him with a Desert Eagle in his lap and did not move.
The willows dripped.
The fog moved.
And at some point in the smallest hour of that night, Liam looked up, out past the second bank, into the trees.
And there was nothing there.
There was nothing there at all, and there had never been anything there, and he made himself look at it until his eyes hurt and he was sure.
"Isaiah," he said.
"Yeah."
"There's nothing out there."
"I know," Isaiah whispered.
"There never was."
"I know."
"Say it out loud."
Isaiah lifted his head and looked out at the black swamp, and his face was ruined and wet and his voice was almost nothing.
"There's nothing out there," he said.
And Chloe Buck, from the bow, tied at the wrists and ankles, wrapped in blankets, said quietly:
"That's right."
Every head turned.
"There's nothing out there," Chloe said.
Her voice was perfectly steady.
"There's nothing in those trees and there never was and there isn't going to be." She lay on her side in the dark and looked at them across the deck. "There's no chimes and there's no village and there's nobody to listen to."
Liam's blood turned to ice.
"Chloe," he said. "Is that you?"
"Yes," Chloe said.
"Chloe—"
"It's me, Liam. It's been me for an hour."
She sounded so tired.
"I want you to know that I heard everything you said to him," she said. "About Wynnie. And about the proof. And I want you both to know that it was the best thing I have ever heard anybody say."
Liam got up.
He crossed the deck and knelt down in the bow and looked at her, and her eyes were hers, and they were clear, and they were absolutely full of a terrible and enormous calm.
"Chloe," he said. "Why are you telling me there's nothing in the trees?"
Chloe Buck looked up at him.
"Because it isn't in the trees," she said. "It's in the boat, Liam. It's been in the boat since the cove. It's never been anywhere else."
She smiled, and it was hers, and it was the saddest thing he had ever seen.
"And it's got Cully," she said.
Liam turned around.
The tiller was empty.
The shotgun was lying on the stern bench where the boy had been sitting, and the dinghy line was slack in the water, and out in the fog, off toward the black willows on the far bank, somewhere out in the dark, they could all hear the slow, steady, patient sound of a pair of oars.