The Reader (3 page)

T
here were a few hours every morning when the house on the hill became a round island, cut off from the village below, floating in cold fog with views of nothing but birds, air, and an endless ocean of insubstantial white.

Hours before he was killed, Sefia's father walked her down the misty slope to the blacksmith's shop, as he had done every morning for four years, since her mother died. They'd go hand-in-hand through the grass, her father turning his head like a stag watching over his tiny herd, and when he said good-bye he always tapped her once, lightly, on the chin. Then he'd go back to the house on the hill to tend the animals or repair the fences or study the ocean through the telescope.

Sefia loved the workshop. It wasn't a shop, really, just a shed in the back of the blacksmith's house, with a dirt floor and blackened walls hung with hooks and tongs and hundreds of locks and keys.

Sometimes she brushed her fingers against the keys, making them clatter and clank until the small room was a cacophony of noise. Other times, like today, she simply watched the blacksmith's strong hands bend to their craft.

“Aunt Nin,” she said, tapping the woman's round shoulder. “Will you teach me to do that?”

“Do what,” Nin said, her voice like gravel.

Sefia put her hands on the tall counter. “Pick locks.”

“I'm fixing a lock, not picking one.”

“But will you?”

“Will I what.”

“
Teach
me.” She had perfected the whine of a nine-year-old.

Nin didn't pause in her work. “When you're older.”

Sefia laughed. Nin's gruffness never bothered her; she'd known the woman all her life. When her parents had built the house on the hill, Nin had helped them. She'd fitted all the doors and windows with locks, and at their request, installed three additional, secret doors.

The first was hidden in the stones beside the hearth. You used the end of the fire poker to unlock it, and it opened onto a secret stairway that led to Sefia's basement room, just a small place for her bed and belongings. Her parents never let her keep anything in the house proper, though they never had visitors to notice. To anyone peering through the windows, it used to look as if there were only two occupants in the house on the hill.

Now it looked as if only a widower lived there.

They kept to themselves as much as possible, gardening, raising chickens and pigs and goats and even some sheep, only going down the slope to the village out of necessity.

Besides the small family, there was only one person allowed in the house, and that person was Nin.

Sefia had guessed a long time ago there was something different about her family—their secrecy, their isolation. Someone was after her parents. She didn't know why, but she imagined it was some shadowy figure with red eyes and sharp teeth, a monstrous villain come out of her nightmares with metal hounds to hunt them down.

Sometimes she pictured her mother and father as heroes. Keepers of some arcane knowledge. Her mother proud and small, her black hair twisted into a bun at the base of her neck, a silver star glinting at her chest like a sheriff. Her father with a shock of hair like a bristle brush stiff with shoe polish, rolling his large sleeves up to his elbows while the scar at his temple gleamed white.

Sometimes she woke screaming in her basement bedroom, knowing with absolute certainty that someone was coming for them.

“When you teach me, will I be able to pick any lock in the world?” Sefia asked.

“Only if you're very good.”

“Are you very good?”

Nin didn't look up. “Don't be stupid,” she said.

Sefia squinted. Her eyes turned to slits above the soft bump of her nose. “That's what I thought. Daddy said that's how he and Mama met you. Because you were the best.”

“Is that what he said.”

“Yep. He said you helped them. He said he wouldn't be here if not for you.”

“Well . . . I wouldn't be here if not for them either.”

Sefia nodded. Her parents must have been captured, once, held in iron cages above seething fire pits while their enemies gibbered around them. Nin must have freed them, with her slender tools and miraculous hands, and they'd all gone running into the sunset together.

Smiling, Sefia laid her head on her folded arms, watching silently as Nin's fingers worked and the little room filled with the clicking and jerking of teeth.

• • •

U
nder ordinary circumstances, Nin would break for lunch at noon and walk Sefia back up the hill to the house, but on that day there were horses to be shod, axles to be fixed, and all manner of locks and hinges and bolts to be repaired, so Nin sent Sefia scooting out through the back door with warnings to be aware of her surroundings and not to make too much noise.

“And go straight home, or your father will have my head,” she added, giving Sefia one last shove.

Delighted with her temporary independence, Sefia skipped out into the fog. At first she cackled softly and ran at the indistinct shadows of barrels and wheelbarrows, pretending they were monsters rearing out of the mist, but she was too accustomed to caution to dally for long.

As she left the village and began climbing the hill to her house, the fog crept closer. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied swirls of golden light appearing here and there on the dewy slope, but when she looked closer, they melted into wisps of gray. Sefia's pace grew slower and more subdued. Moisture
from the tall grasses clung to her shins and shoes, making her toes uncomfortably damp.

A breeze stirred the mist, and the faint scent of copper stung her nose. Sefia stifled a cough and shivered in the fog. It wound around her like a living thing.

After a moment the smell dissipated—so quickly she wondered if she'd imagined it. But as she inhaled the sweet scent of grass, she tasted metal at the back of her throat and knew it had been real.

In the mist, climbing the hill seemed to take hours, but finally she reached the top, rising out of the fog that lapped at the foundations of the lonely stone house, and stepped up to her front door. Above her, the sky was an empty unnerving blue.

Sefia took out her key—her father always locked the house—but the heavy wooden door on its well-oiled hinges swung silently open at her touch.

They say that fear is a pit in your stomach, but what she felt was a
dissolving
, as if the fog was burning off and frittering away, leaving behind only Sefia, bare and defenseless with nothing before or behind her but emptiness.

As she tiptoed into the house, even the walls themselves seemed to chip away. One by one went the boards and the beams, falling to pieces with tinny clattering sounds, littering the wooden floors, the broken chairs, the smashed vases and shattered lanterns. It looked as if a hurricane had torn the house apart. Nothing was in its place. Paintings slashed from their frames, her father's telescope missing from the east window. As she tiptoed through the debris, with every step realizing how silent the house was, how still, it was like the furniture
began to crumble, the strands of silk in the rugs fraying and turning to dust, until everything in the house—the copper pots on the floor of the kitchen, the quilt on her parents' shredded mattress, the overturned dining table—had disintegrated, so by the time she reached the back room, it seemed as if all that remained on the top of the hill were Sefia . . . and her father's corpse.

She knew it was him without even having to look closely. She could not look closely. She knew it was him by the sheepskin slippers, by the shape of his trousers, by the oversize threadbare sweater. She knew it without having to see his face, because

Her father.

She staggered back, her insides like slush. It was so dizzyingly cold she couldn't breathe. She gasped, but no sound came out, and no air came in.

Her
father
.

She stumbled to the fireplace to unlock the secret door. There was a soft
click
, and a panel of stones slid back into the wall. She entered, pulling the door shut behind her, and descended the steep stairs to her bedroom, which, as her parents had planned, had gone unnoticed and untouched. There were no windows in the basement, so she groped her way among the chairs and toys that had once seemed so familiar—now riddled with the potential for bruised toes and dinged shins.

But she had been preparing for an event like this—just like
this—for years. When her mother was still alive, they had rehearsed the steps together; and when her mother died, her father had made her practice, and practice, and practice. Some days, Sefia ran through the steps so often that she dreamed of them when she slept. She had been drilled so many times that, as she was meant to, she had begun to implement the steps already.

Blindly, she fumbled for the knob of her bedpost and began to unscrew it from its wooden leg. Inside was a key—a shiny silver thing shaped like a flower, something that might be overlooked, mistaken for a child's plaything—that unlocked the second secret door in the north wall.

Sefia opened it and crawled inside, closing the door behind her, shutting herself into a room barely bigger than a travel trunk. And then she cried. She cried until her head ached and bright spots burst across her eyes. She cried loudly, hoping someone would hear, and quietly, fearing the same thing. She cried until she had almost forgotten about the mutilated body sprawled on the floor above her. And she cried again when she remembered.

Eventually she must have blacked out, because she awoke what seemed like hours later, with her eyes swollen nearly shut and her nose stuffy with snot. Gulping back a few dry sobs, Sefia uncurled, aching, from the floor and put her palms to the stone walls.

There was no key to the third door. Nin had designed it to open when the cobblestones in the wall were pressed in a certain order, and though Sefia's parents had rehearsed the series with her, they had always done it in the warm lamplight of her bedroom. Get to the tiny room, then wait for her parents to
arrive. That had always been the plan. They had always known someone would hunt them down, eventually, but they had always thought one of them would survive.

Sefia remembered the sequence; her hands found the right river rocks by their contours—the first one in the upper left-hand corner, the second shaped like an owl, the third like a cabin, then a half-moon, two mice in a row, and the last a shaggy buffalo with a single stubby horn. As she touched them, they clicked into place. But what happened next was something her parents had never mentioned, had not warned her about or prepared her for, and it was perhaps the most important thing of all.

As the small door unlatched, something—some heavy rectangular
thing
wrapped in soft leather—fell out of the crack in the door. It must have been wedged there, stuck fast in the threshold.

Sefia ran her fingers over it and clasped it to her chest. She hadn't seen it once in all the years she'd been practicing for her escape.

She considered leaving it. The thing was so heavy and awkward in her skinny arms. She wished she'd thought to take something from the house before she left. Her mother's silver ring with the secret compartment inside, a painted hand mirror, one of her father's old sweaters—anything would have done. But they'd never taught her that. They never told her she might want a keepsake, a memento. And now all she had was this thing.

She gripped it tighter, until its edges dug into her palms and the flesh of her cheek, and then she took it with her.

She had to go on her hands and knees. The tunnel was a burrow of crumbling dirt walls, with some places so narrow she couldn't even crawl—she had to lie on her belly and
worm
, pulling herself along with her fingers, pushing with her elbows, the tips of her toes. She slithered for hundreds of feet in the unimaginable dark, an almost tangible darkness, blacker than night, blacker than closets with closed doors, blacker than closed eyes under bedsheets.