Nightfall (14 page)

As they left Deep Well House, Kana drew Marin's attention to its ornate cupola, which was built into the ceiling of the banquet hall. One of its four windows had come unlocked, and the wind pushed it back and forth on its hinges.

After noticing the open window, they walked to the wall closest to the cupola. Kana examined the ornate carvings on the wood paneling, which—in this particular spot—was a rendering of a flowing river. There were also a great many small divots—deep and perfectly circular, uniformly distributed across the wall.

A tingle ran up Marin's spine. She had seen these divots before—beneath the carpets in her parents' house.
Somehow, this is important—it means something—but what?

Together they left Deep Well House and headed down the narrow path to town. The last time Marin and Kana had walked this way, they'd been rolling an empty wheelbarrow home. Although the path was the same, everything else was different: the moon rising in the darkness, the thin layer of frost that had appeared on the grass, and a faint smell of dust and cold mud.
To keep from tripping as they walked, Marin held Kana's arm. They paused frequently to listen. There was only the sound of their own feet as they moved quickly along the path.

Marin shivered. “When you go home, see if there are any blankets,” she whispered. “It's so cold—and I'm guessing it's going to get worse.”

“Okay,” Kana whispered back. He stopped a minute later when they reached a fork in the road. He listened and looked but sensed nothing unusual.

“You really want to go by yourself?” he asked. “It's so dark, and—speaking from experience—it can be terrifying to be blind.”

Marin nodded and squeezed his hands. She smiled. “Thank you, but I'll be fine. I have the candle—and the signal lamp.”

Kana turned and eyed Deep Well House. The signal lamp was shining bright as a beacon. He turned back to Marin. “Okay, then,” said Kana. “Take the fork on the right. You should reach the grocer's stand in less than five minutes. Watch where you're going.” As he watched her walk away, Kana fought the temptation to chase after her.
She'll be okay. Marin is always okay.

He turned to the task at hand. It was simple enough.
Get the map,
he told himself.
Get the map and get back to the mayor's house.
As he pressed on, the path skirted close to the woods, and his thoughts drifted to the woman from his dream. It was as if she hid in the darkened corners of his brain, appearing only when he was alone. He repeated all his usual mantras.
It's just a dream. Don't obsess. Stay focused. Dreams aren't real.

In truth, it wasn't just the dream that bothered him.

In the last few months, as the sky had grown darker, he had sometimes felt as if he was being shadowed. When he ran by the woods, he swore he could hear the faintest sound of footsteps running alongside him. Whenever this happened, he thought of his great-aunt Malony. But he also considered the alternative:
What if he wasn't going mad?

Kana crested a small hill that offered a panoramic view of the distant sea. The tide had rolled out a mile or so—maybe more. Moonlight glinted off the exposed sand. He was shocked to see how quickly it had happened. Indeed, it felt as if everything was happening faster than expected—the sun setting, the tide going out, the dark falling, and Bliss being abandoned.

He began to run, which helped focus his thoughts. Soon his house came into view. It lay vacant, still, and cold—like a corpse. As he drew nearer, he saw that it was just as his family had left it. Lights were out, curtains were drawn, the front door was open just a crack. For a moment, he was seized by the desire to turn and retreat.
This is ridiculous,
he thought. He pushed open the front door, which issued a long creak that echoed through the house.

“Hello!” The moment he spoke, he felt stupid.
Who am I expecting?
Still, he couldn't help calling out again, “Hello!” His voice bounced harshly off the walls. It sounded different in the empty house. Kana walked through the entryway and down the main hallway into the parlor. There were no carpets to muffle the sound of his footsteps. It was very dark. He entered the parlor and was walking across the room when dimly—as if via a sixth sense—he perceived that something was off about the room.

He craned his neck upward. Splayed across the ceiling in blue, faintly glowing ink were thousands of symbols. The writing covered the ceiling and the rafters. In the middle of it all was a circular object resting on clouds—the moon.

Just then, a floorboard groaned overhead. Kana suppressed a childlike impulse to yell for his parents. Then he heard a slightly different sound. It was the strain of old wood torquing under pressure, creaking rhythmically—as if someone was in his room, rocking back and forth on the old chair. Then a barely audible whispering started—just like in his dream.

“
Hello
?” he said in a near whisper.

The only reply was the steady creak of the rocking chair.

Kana barely contained the urge to run. He needed the map of the island and the map was in his room.
I'm imagining those sounds,
he told himself. He needed the map. He needed to go upstairs. So he walked to the main stairs and began climbing. The floorboards groaned under the weight of each step that he took.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he could still hear the creaking of the old rocking chair. Down the long, darkened hallway, the door to Kana's room was cracked open slightly, just as he'd left it. He walked deliberately toward it. When he reached the door itself, the whispering stopped. He had just moved his hand toward the doorknob when a soft whisper of a voice scratched its way through the darkness.

“You shouldn't be here.” It was a woman's voice. The woman from his dream.

Kana froze. For a second it felt like his knees were too weak to hold him up.

“Who are you?” asked Kana, voice trembling.

“I'm all you have.”

Kana placed his hand upon the doorknob and opened the door. He scanned the room. It was empty, but the window that had been bolted shut was open and the rocking chair was still moving, ever so slightly.
Or am I just imagining this?

He raced to the far wall and pulled down the wooden frame that was hanging there. He extracted the map, rolled it up, and put the empty frame back on the wall. As he turned to go, he saw the dim image of his own reflection in a mirror that was affixed to his closet door. He didn't recognize himself. His shoulders were enlarged, as if he had suddenly put on several pounds of muscle. He touched his cheekbones and chin, trying to remember whether they had always been this prominent. Seconds later, he realized he was trembling violently. It seemed to confirm his worst fears.

It's happening. It's happening to me—just like Great-Aunt Malony.

“I have to get out of here,” Kana whispered aloud.

“
Yes
,” said the voice.

Kana spun around. Nothing. An instant later, he was pounding down the stairs and out the door. If he ran hard enough, the sound of his breathing would drown out all the other sounds, effectively muting the world around him and making him feel as if he were in a dream.

He was halfway back to the mayor's house when the outside world intruded. Something was about to happen. A rich and fetid smell rose from the woods, accompanied by rustling noises that quickly grew louder. Soon the entire woods seemed
to be alive with movement. Branches snapped and the ground shook.

Kana glanced around—the woods were on one side and a grassy field was on the other. Running into the field seemed colossally stupid. It was wide open with nowhere to hide. Going into the forest was unthinkable. Suddenly, he knew what he had to do. Kana tucked the map into his pants. He darted to the nearest tree, right at the edge of the woods, grabbed a low-hanging limb, and pulled himself up. He moved quickly, shimmying upward, going as high as he could. Kana marveled at his own speed and strength. Never before had he been so agile.

Moments later, a group of wild boars stampeded out of the woods and into the open grass of the field. They charged forward, pushing and gouging each other madly with their curling tusks. Several headed straight for the tree where Kana hid, then swerved around it at the last second.

Kana was entranced. He had never seen a boar. Most people believed them to be extinct. After their charge, the boars milled around, confused and snapping at each other. One of them lay motionless in the grass, blood spilling from a gouge in its shoulder. Soon the herd disappeared into an area of thick bushes, and Kana breathed again. His body was rigid as he stared at the dead boar on the ground. Why had the boars done this? Only one explanation made sense: something had panicked them enough to drive them from the woods.

Marin walked quickly but deliberately. Although she told herself she was in complete control, the candle betrayed her fear, because her arms refused to stop shaking. Beyond the small circle of light around her, it was too dark to see clearly, so Marin kept her eyes on the ground. Out of nowhere, her mind conjured the image of Line entering the water at the mayor's house. She saw the curves of his shoulders and the way the candlelight both obscured and framed the tendons in his neck.

Marin sped up.
Food,
she thought.
I just need to focus on getting food right now. Carrots would be nice.
She tried to visualize bright orange knobby carrots, and as she did, she felt calmer. Food. That was the main reason for leaving the relative safety of the mayor's house.

First, she would get the food. Then she would get the other thing—if she could find it. In truth, this is why she had insisted on getting the food by herself.
I have to go back to the cliffs,
she told herself.
It will be there—it has to be.

As she entered town and walked past houses that she knew
so well, Marin felt herself growing angry. It was a slow but steadily rising feeling. There was no doubt she had been lied to. Her father, the okrana, the mayor. Especially the mayor.
What a farce.
She and Kana had found a vicious battle-ax in the mayor's house on the way to light the signal lamp. The mayor had obviously seen what was on those shelves—they were in
his
house.
He knew far more than he had let on.

Most of all, Marin was angry at herself. She should have demanded that her father, or the mayor, tell what they knew about the years of Night, even if they didn't know a lot. Instead, she had backed down and accepted some half-witted explanation about what people say when they sneeze. Marin thought back to the mayor's condescension—he obviously considered her to be a child. It may have proved difficult to get more information from him, but still . . . She smiled to herself, imagining a reenactment in which she'd grabbed the mayor by his sweater and shook him until he told her the truth.

Marin looked at the houses as she went through town. She had played in them, eaten dinner in them, and gone to them on her mother's behest, to borrow sugar or a pot. Soon she came upon a modest one-room house with a low-slung roof. This was the house where she and Kana had found—and untied—the old dog on the previous day. What really caught Marin's eye, however, was the house's front door. The moon illuminated a single hash mark carved into the wood, identical to the ones that the creature had carved at the mayor's house. This one had a line across the middle. Marin walked onto the front porch, listened at the door, and then pushed inside.

She lifted the candle, revealing a cramped room with a table
and several rickety chairs. Marin looked down and saw a dark puddle of liquid at her feet. She squatted, candle in hand, to get a better look. She gasped and turned away. Her feet brushed something heavy. It was the lifeless body of the dog they'd freed, its brown fur matted with sticky, dark blood.

Marin recoiled. And then it clicked.
The hash marks.
On this particular door, they meant that there was something inside the house—in this case, a dog—and the cross through the mark meant that it had been taken care of.
Killed.

Marin spun around, bolted from the house, and dashed back into the street. She moved so quickly that her candle went out. Not that she cared. There was enough moonlight in the sky to see, and she was too scared to fumble for matches. Marin looked around frantically.
Am I being watched?
Nothing stirred. The abandoned town of Bliss was silent. Marin shook her head. Focus. She had to focus.

Carrots. Just get the stupid carrots.

She ran to the grocer's stand two blocks away and, with trembling fingers, relit her candle. The stand itself was just an open-air shed with discarded food lying on the ground nearby. A frayed cloth sack with a broken handle was ground into the mud next to the shed.

Marin knelt to look at the food. Most of what she found was brown and half rotten. It had been drizzling, so everything was wet. As she filled the sack, the wind gusted, and Marin felt grateful to be wearing the oilskin. The sack was almost full when she noticed a series of holes scattered across the soft, muddy earth. The holes were small, round, and fairly deep—just like the ones on the walls of the mayor's house and the
floors of her own house. The holes appeared in clusters of five. Roughly ten inches behind each cluster was a large indentation the size of a man's fist.

She realized with a start that these markings were
footprints
. The large oval indentation was the mark of a heel and the five holes were from toes—only they must have been more like talons than toes.

Marin grabbed the sack of food and hurried away from the grocer's shed. She still had one more thing to do before she could return to Deep Well House. She walked quickly—toward the cliffs.
Almost there,
she told herself.
Get it and run back.

Soon she was at the cliffs, at the loading area. The wind was fierce and bitterly cold. Suitcases were everywhere, many of them half opened and hemorrhaging wisps of clothing. In the dark they looked like slabs of rock. Marin stepped gingerly through this wasteland, afraid of what she might come across. She thought of looking through the suitcases for more food, but the image of the blood-covered dog overpowered this idea. She shouldn't be here, anyway—she had come for just one thing.

Where is Night Fire? I need to find Night Fire—the blue flag with the two swirling red lines.

She passed half a dozen flags, none of them hers. Then, just as she was about to turn around, she saw it. The flag was drooping off its pole, but the pattern was unmistakable. She went to it and began searching the ground. She saw her mother's bag first (the crimson cloth was a giveaway) and then her own—an old leather-bound trunk—which lay next to it. She fidgeted with the clasp. Her heart pounded in her ears, making it hard to think.

Marin knelt beside the trunk and buried her free hand in the mess of clothes, papers, and keepsakes that she had carefully chosen for the trip to the desert. She came across a long muslin scarf and a thick sweater. She took off the oilskin, put on the sweater and scarf, then slipped the jacket back on. It was a tight fit, but it felt wonderful to be warm.

Marin kept looking and soon found her mother's copper box peeking out from under a pair of sandals. The marking scalpels. Marin remembered her mother's pained face and thought of that lost moment—she'd hoped to make up for it on the boats. She grabbed the copper box and shoved it into her pants pocket.
I'll see my mother again,
Marin vowed.
And when I do, I'll be damned if I don't show up with her family heirloom.

At last, she discovered what she was looking for—the thing she had truly come to find. It was a tiny bag made of black velvet. She sat back on her heels and sighed in relief. As she traced her finger across the bag, she wondered how to tell Line and Kana. She'd have to reveal the contents to them sometime, and she understood—implicitly—that they might never forgive her.