Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (4 page)

Beneath the hot summer sun, the low, rolling hills seemed to go on forever. The gulls and a pair of red-tailed hawks screamed at him like harpies warning him away, screeching threats or alarum from the endless cornflower sky. But he found it, finally, the “hole in the world,” right where the Miwok guide had said that he would, maybe fifty yards from the cliffs.

From what he’d taught himself of geology, Machen guessed it to be the collapsed roof of a cavern, an opening no more than five or six feet across, granting access to an almost vertical chimney eroded through tilted beds of limestone and shale and probably connecting to the sea somewhere in the darkness below. He dropped a large pebble into the hole and listened and counted as it fell, ticking off the seconds until it splashed faintly, confirming his belief that the cavern was connected to the sea. A musty, briny smell wafted up from the hole, uninviting, sickly, and though there was climbing equipment in his pack, and he was competent with ropes and knots and had, more than once, descended treacherous, crumbling shafts into ancient tombs and wells, Machen Dandridge only stood there at the entrance, dropping stones and listening to the eventual splashes. He stared into the hole and, after a while, could discern a faint but unmistakable light, not the fading sunlight getting in from some cleft in the cliff face, but light like a glass of absinthe, the sort of light he’d imagined abyssal creatures that never saw the sun might make to shine their way through the murk.

It wasn’t what he’d expected, from what was written in the black book, no towering gate of horn and ivory, no arch of gold and silver guarded by angels or demons or beings men had never fashioned names for, just this unassuming hole in the ground. He sat in the grass, watching the sunset burning day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest had been a fool’s errand from the very start, and he’d wasted so many years of his life, and so much of his inheritance, chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like the chartreuse glare through the grate of an unearthly furnace, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.

“What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find
you
?”

Not a question he could answer then and not one he could answer sitting there with the roar of the surf in his ears and the stars speckling the sky overhead. The question that Ellen had asked him again and again, and always he’d found some way to deflect her asking. But he
knew
the answer, sewn up somewhere deep within his soul, even if he’d never been able to find the words. Proof that the world did not end at his fingertips or with the unreliable data of his eyes and ears or the lies and half-truths men had written down in science and history books, that everything he’d ever seen was merely a tattered curtain waiting to be drawn back so that some more indisputable light might, at last, shine through.

“Is that what you were seeking, Mr. Dandridge?” and Machen had turned quickly, his heart pounding as he reached for the pistol at his hip, only to find the old Indian watching him from the tall, rustling grass a few feet away. “Is
this
the end of your journey?” and the guide pointed at the hole.

“I thought you were afraid to come here?” Machen asked, annoyed at the interruption, sitting back down beside the hole, looking again into the unsteady yellow-green light spilling out of the earth.

“I was,” the Miwok replied. “But the ghost of my grandfather came to me and told me he was ashamed of me, that I was a coward for allowing you to come to this evil place alone. He has promised to protect me from the demons.”

“The ghost of your grandfather?” Machen laughed and shook his head, then dropped another pebble into the hole.

“Yes. He is watching us both now, but he also wishes we would leave soon. I can show you the way back to the trail.”

The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.

“You’re a brave man,” Machen said. “Or another lunatic.”

“All brave men are lunatics,” the Indian said and glanced nervously at the hole, the starry indigo sky, the cliff and the invisible ocean, each in its turn. “Sane men do not go looking for their deaths.”

“Is that all I’ve found here? My death?”

There was a long moment of anxious silence from the guide, broken only by the ceaseless interwoven roar of the waves and the wind, and then he took a step back away from the hole, deeper into the sheltering pampas grass.

“I cannot say what you have found in this place, Mr. Dandridge. My grandfather says I should not speak its name.”

“Is that so? Well, then,” and Machen stood, rubbing his aching eyes and brushed the dust from his pants. “You show me the way back and forget you ever brought me out here. Tell your grandfather’s poor ghost that I will not hold you responsible for whatever it is I’m meant to find at the bottom of that pit.”

“My grandfather hears you,” the Miwok said. “He says you are a brave man and a lunatic, and that I should kill you now, before you do the things you will do in the days to come. Before you set the world against itself.”

Machen drew his Colt, cocked the hammer with his thumb, and stood staring into the gloom at the Indian.

“But I will not kill you,” the Miwok said. “That is
my
choice, and I have chosen not to take your life. But I will pray it is not a decision I will regret later. We should go now.”

“After you,” Machen said, smiling through the quaver in his voice that he hoped the guide couldn’t hear, his heart racing and cold sweat starting to drip from his face despite the night air. And, without another word, the Indian turned and disappeared into the arms of the whispering grass and the August night.

July 1914

When she was very sure that her father had shut the double doors to his study and that her mother was asleep, when the only sounds were the sea and the wind, the inconstant, shifting noises that all houses make after dark, the mice in the walls, Meredith slipped out of bed and into her flannel dressing gown. The floor was cool against her bare feet, cool but not cold. She lit a candle, and then eased the heavy bedroom door shut behind her and went as quickly and quietly as she could to the cramped stairwell leading from the second story to the attic door. At the top, she sat down on the landing and held her breath, listening, praying that no one had heard her, that neither her father nor mother, nor the both of them together, were already trying to find her.

There were no sounds at all from the other side of the narrow attic door. She set the candlestick down and leaned close to it, pressing her lips against the wood, feeling the rough grain through the varnish.

“Avery?” she whispered. “Avery, can you hear me?”

At first there was no reply from the attic, and she took a deep breath and waited a while, waiting for her parents’ angry or worried footsteps, waiting for one of them to begin shouting her name from the house below.

But there were no footsteps, and no one called her name.

“
Avery
? Can you hear me? It’s
me
, Merry.”

That time there was a sudden thumping and a heavy dragging sort of a sound from the other side of the attic door. A body pulling itself roughly, painfully across the pine-board floor towards her, and she closed her eyes and waited for it. Finally, there was a loud thud against the door, and she opened her eyes again. Avery was trying to talk, trying to answer her, but there was nothing familiar or coherent in his ruined voice.

“Hold on,” she whispered to him. “I brought a writing pad.” She took it out of a pocket of her gown, the pad and a pencil. “Don’t try to talk any more. I’ll pass this beneath the door to you, and you can write what you want to say. Knock once if you understand what I’m telling you, Avery.”

Nothing for almost a full minute and then a single knock so violent that the door shivered on its hinges, so loudly she was sure it would bring her parents running to investigate.

“You must be quieter, Avery,” she whispered. “They’ll hear us,” and now Meredith had begun to notice the odor on the landing, the odor leaking from the attic. Either she’d been much too nervous to notice it at first or her brother had brought it with him when he’d crawled over to the door. Dead fish and boiling cabbage, soured milk and strawberry jam, the time she’d come across the carcass of a grey whale calf, half buried in the sand and decomposing beneath the sun. She swallowed, took another deep breath, and tried not to think about the awful smell.

“I’m going to pass the pencil and a page from the pad to you now. I’m going to slide it under the door to you.”

Avery made a wet, strangling sound, and she told him again not to try to talk, just write if he could, write the answers to her questions and anything else that he needed to say.

“Are you in pain? Is there any way I can help?” she asked, and in a moment the tip of the pencil began scritching loudly across the sheet of writing paper. “Not so hard, Avery. If the lead breaks, I’ll have to try to find another.”

He slid the piece of paper back to her, and it was damp and something dark and sticky was smudged across the bottom. She held it close to her face, never mind the smell so strong it made her gag, made her want to retch, so that she could read what he’d scrawled there. It was nothing like Avery’s careful hand, his tight, precise cursive she’d always admired and had tried to imitate, but sweeping, crooked letters, blocky print, and seeing that made her want to cry so badly that she almost forgot about the dead-whale-and-cabbages smell.

HURTSS ME MERY MORE THAN CAN NO

NO HELP NO HELLP ME

She laid down the sheet of paper and tore another from her pad, the pad she used for her afternoon lessons, spelling and arithmetic, and she slid it beneath the door to Avery.

“Avery, you
knew
you couldn’t bear the key. You knew it had to be me or mother,
didn’t
you? That it had to be a woman?”

Again the scritching, and the paper came back to her even stickier than before.

HAD TO TRY MOTER WOULD NOT LISSEN SO

I HAD TOO TRIE

“Oh, Avery,” Meredith said. “I’m sorry,” speaking so quietly that she prayed he would not hear, and there were tears in her eyes, hot and bitter. A kind of anger and a kind of sorrow in her heart that she’d never known before, anger and sorrow blooming in her to be fused through some alchemy of the soul, and by that fusion be transformed into a pure and golden hate.

She tore another page from the pad and slipped it through the crack between the floor and the attic door.

“I need to know what to
do
, Avery. I’m reading the newspapers, but I don’t understand it all. Everyone seems think war is coming soon, because of the assassination in Sarajevo, because of the Kaiser, but I don’t
understand
it all.”

It was a long time before the paper came back to her, smeared with slime and stinking of corruption, maybe five minutes of Avery’s scritching and his silent pauses between the scritching. This time the page was covered from top to bottom with his clumsy scrawl.

TO LATE
IF
TO STOP WAR TOO LATE NOW

WAR IS COMING NOW CANT STP THAT MERRY

ALL
SET IN MOTION NINTH WAVE REMEMBER?

BUT MERY YOU CAN DONT LISSEN TO FADER

YOU
CAN
HOLD
NINE
THEE LINE STILL TYME

YOU OR MOTHER KIN HOLD THEE LIN STILL

IT DOEZ NOT HALF TO BE THE
LADST
WAR

When she finished reading and then re-reading twice again everything Avery had written, Meredith lay the sheet of paper down on top of the other two and wiped her hand on the floor until it didn’t feel quite so slimy anymore. By the yellow-white light of the candle, her hand shimmered as though she’d been carrying around one of the big banana slugs that lived in the forest. She quickly ripped another page from the writing pad and passed it under the door. This time she felt it snatched from her fingers, and the scritching began immediately. It came back to her only a few seconds later and the pencil with it, the tip ground away to nothing.

DUNT
EVER
COME BAK HERE AGIN MERRY

I LOVE YOU ALWAYTS AND WONT FERGET YOU

PROMISS
ME YOU WILL KNOT COME BACK

HOLD THEE LINE HOLD THE LINE

“I can’t promise you that, Avery,” she replied, sobbing and leaning close to the door, despite the smell so strong that it had begun to burn her nose and the back of her throat. “You’re my brother, and I can’t ever promise you that.”

There was another violent thud against the door then, so hard that her father was sure to have heard, so sudden that it scared her, and Meredith jumped back and reached for the candlestick.

“I remember the ninth wave, Avery. I remember what you said—the ninth wave, greater than the last, all in flame. I
do
remember.”

And because she thought that perhaps she heard footsteps from somewhere below, and because she couldn’t stand to hear the frantic strangling sounds that Avery had begun making again, Meredith hastily gathered up the sticky, scribbled-on pages from the pad and then crept down the attic stairs and back to her bedroom. She fell asleep just before dawn and dreamt of flames among the breakers, an inferno crashing against the rocks.

March 1915

“This is where it ends,” Merry, her mother’s ghost said. “But this is where it begins, as well. You need to understand that if you understand nothing else.”

Meredith knew that this time she was not dreaming, no matter how much it might
feel
like a dream, this dazzling, tumbling nightmare wide-awake that began when she reached the foot of the rickety spiraling staircase leading her down into the deep place beneath the house. Following her mother’s ghost, the dim glow of a spectre to be her Virgil, her Beatrice, her guiding lantern until the light from the pool was so bright it outshone Ellen Dandridge’s flickering radiance. Meredith stood on the pier, holding her dead mother’s barnacle-and algae-encrusted hand, and stared in fear and wonder towards the island in the pool.