Kiss Me Deadly Page 26

  She’d like to believe she isn’t terrified. That she doesn’t approach the gate and hesitate. Look through the rusty metal links at the brambles and brush obscuring the path and tremble.

  That the dead along the fence don’t frighten her, their cracked and broken fingers reaching, always reaching and the moans calling for her.

  It’s the sound of them that gets to her, the way they invade every part of her life. She hears them in her sleep, in her daydreams, during chores and services. She hears them when she’s praying to God.

  And on the path there’s no escaping the Unconsecrated. They shuffle along the fences on either side of her, pushing and pulling and grating and needing. She’s never known need like that in her life. Doesn’t understand it.

  But all the same she wants it.

  Tabitha knows there are rules and rules are meant to be followed. Every morning she attends services and every evening she recites her prayers. She gives deference to her parents, cares for her younger siblings and completes chores without complaint. Well, without too much complaint.

  During the winter months she does as she’s asked and smiles and demurs to the eligible young men her age, waiting for a husband to choose her.

  They never do.

  She’s okay with this because it isn’t the young men who call to her at night. It’s the Forest of Hands and Teeth. It’s the whisper of the trees that there’s a bigger life outside the fences. That there’s still a world that’s bigger and braver than any she could ever comprehend and all she has to do is find the strength to go after it.

  At night she writhes in her bed listening to it. Wanting it. Needing it until it causes her cheeks to burn red and tears to run from her eyes. And in the morning she slows her steps as she passes by the gate in the middle of an errand. She promises herself that tomorrow she will sneak through it. Tomorrow the world will be hers.

  ***

  Tomorrow she does pass through the gate. Just enough to know that no siren will wail at her departure. That no one will notice her absence.

  ***

  In her dreams and when she’s awake, again and again she crosses through the gate. She’s timed the Guardian patrol just right so that she knows when to slip away, when to sprint down the path with a lightness of freedom unlike she’s ever known. It consumes her.

  Sometimes she tells herself she won’t ever come home. Yet she always does. Because there are rules and she’s a good girl. But not so “good” that her skin doesn’t start to feel tight and itch as if her body’s shrinking and the only thing that will release the compression of it is to escape to the path.

  So she does, pushing farther and farther into the Forest. She learns to ignore the Unconsecrated who follow her every step, learns to listen instead to the way the wind tickles its way through leaves overhead and to the chirp and whir of birds.

  The sun feels brighter and the shade cooler in the Forest and she starts to wonder why it’s off limits. She likes that she doesn’t have to think what’s next when she’s on the path: it’s just one step and then another and the fences keep her moving straight ahead.

  One day, she walks far enough to find a second gate, and she stands for a long time staring at it, wondering if she should go through or if it’s a sign that she’s wandered too far.

  She sets her hand on the metal latch, feeling a pattern of rusty prickles against her fingers. She still hasn’t decided what to do when a voice calls out to her. “You’re here,” it says.

  Startled, she runs her gaze through the Forest and down the path and finds a pair of eyes looking back at her. A young man approaches the gate from the other side.

  Not expecting anyone else to be on the path, especially a stranger, it takes a moment for her to find her voice. “I am,” she responds because to show her confusion and shock would make her appear weak. Tabitha never likes to appear weak. “Are you expecting me?” she asks because she’s suddenly not sure whether she’s awake or asleep.

  She notices that the young man has his sleeves rolled up and his forearms are exposed. She’s seen forearms before, of course, but there’s something different about his. Something so informal and intimate about the sloppiness of the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as if she could push a finger underneath the fabric and tempt the sensitive skin there.

  The sun glows off the blond hair covering his arms. His fingers look long and tan, curled slightly as he stops on the other side of the gate. “Not especially, but I’m glad you’re here,” he says. She looks up from his arms to his face.

  He’s smiling at her, eyes slightly crinkled because the sun is at her back. “I think,” she tilts her head and ponders for a moment because she doesn’t like to be rash with her words. “I think I am too.” She grins at him.

  She learns that his name it Patrick and that he comes from another village in the Forest.

  “I didn’t know there were other villages in the Forest,” she admits, and he explains the system of the paths and gates, the tangle of their order.

  She tries not to let him see what this knowledge does to her, how it makes her blood pump furiously through her body. Growing up, she’d been told they were all that was left. Her village the only survivors of the Return.

  She was told it was her sole and sacred duty to continue the path of humanity.

  “Quite a few of the villages are gone,” Patrick explains. “But there are enough left that we’ll survive.”

  Neither of them opens the gate between them and, as she walks home in the late afternoon, Tabitha’s head explodes with the newly learned reality of her world. It’s as if she’s spent her life kneeling on the ground, staring at a rock, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at a field full of stones.

  She wonders what it would be like to fly. To see the entire world at once. She runs through the Forest, arms out, with fingers almost—but not quite—brushing the metal links of the old fences. She realizes that the world might be hers to know after all.

  ***

  They agree to meet at the same gate on the second afternoon after the full moon each month. Tabitha spends the between days lost in dreams. Her mother starts to scold her for burning dinner. Her younger brother skins his knee one day when she’s not paying attention. She barely remembers the words to the prayers she’s asked to recite at services.

  But she’s alive. And she wants to grab everyone around her and scream that there’s a world that’s more important than any of these daily toils. Yet she doesn’t say a word because she fears them locking the gates. Locking her from the path, and from Patrick.

  ***

  The first two times they meet again, neither opens the gate. They stay on their respective sides and tell stories. She rolls onto her back on the path and stares up through the canopy of leaves and watches how the sun caresses each one as Patrick tells her about his dreams.

  Sometimes she closes her eyes and wonders what it would be like to walk through the gate and run away with him. And sometimes she imagines bringing him home with her and claiming him as hers.

  At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each others’ pulse fighting.

  He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.

  “It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”

  She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.

  “Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.

  He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a sto
ry,” he says. “It’s just made-up. It’s fiction.”

  She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.

  In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it, and now they tangle together under blankets surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.

  He traces his finger down the spine of her back, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.

  “I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.

  ***

  Her parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood like her friends Ruth and Ami. And where this might have been an effective threat to her in the past, she just swallows back smiles because she knows there is no man or God for her other than Patrick.

  ***

  Patrick’s not at their meeting spot. It’s the first time he’s been missing, and Tabitha wraps her arms around her body and paces little circles in the freezing rain. She walks through the gate and sprints down the path wondering if he’s hurt or lost, but there’s no sign of him.

  She goes home confused and a little empty. Where before she felt too big for her skin when she walked around her village, now she feels too small. Her body doesn’t work the way it should—she’s clumsy, tripping when she walks. Nothing is right anymore.

  The next month she checks the moon, making sure she knows exactly when it’s at its fullest. She’s so anxious to go to Patrick two days later that she’s not as careful as she should be. One of the Guardians sees her placing her hand on the gate to the path.

  He takes her to the Cathedral, and the Sisters whisper in a tight little knot while her parents stand to the side white faced and silent. No one will marry her now, they know. She’s a dreamer, and dreamers need to be broken to the will of the Sisterhood.

  Her parents don’t object when the Sisters proclaim Tabitha as one of theirs. She puts on the black tunic and combs her hair from her face into a severe bun. She stands with the other two newest Sisters, Ruth and Ami, and listens to the enumeration of her duties. She bows her head and recites the prayers but that is not where her mind and heart are. They’re on the path, waiting.

  ***

  She spends the next month planning her escape. Soon, she can’t sleep anymore, and she’s memorized every detail of her room. She’s tired of the stone walls, stone floor, tiny window looking past the graveyard at the dead roaming the fences. She thinks she might understand a little now why they moan.

  She thinks she might understand the pain of such intense desire. It brings tears to her eyes that never seem to go away.

  She starts to wander through the Cathedral in the darkness of the too early morning hours. She counts the number of windows, she counts the number of benches and cushions and even stones in the floor. Anything to stop thinking about pregnant moons and Patrick and the feel of him trailing a hot finger down her spine.

  She’s tracing her finger along a crooked crack in the wall, remembering the feel of his skin against hers, when the crack dips behind a curtain and she follows it. There’s a door there, and she doesn’t hesitate before pushing it open and revealing a long hallway. She wanders down it to another door, this one thick and banded with metal.

  It’s dark and she has no candle and it’s late, and Tabitha spends a long while staring at that door before she turns around and goes back to bed. The moans of the Unconsecrated whisper her into the deepest sleep she’s felt for ages.

  The next night she doesn’t even change into her sleeping gown, but instead waits in her black tunic for the Cathedral to fall silent. She takes the candle and flint from beside her bed and goes straight to the curtain in the sanctuary, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake from the force.

  She sneaks down the hallway, her footsteps disturbing a thin layer of dust, and this time she doesn’t pause before going through the metal-banded door. It leads her down a set of stairs, the air growing dank and thick enough that the light from her candle barely penetrates it.

  She’s in a basement, and it smells like dirt, tastes like the wet rot of fall. Rows of wooden racks march through the large room, some cradling old grimy bottles but most just barely withstanding entropy. There are no other doors and no windows, no escape from the heady mustiness.

  Along one wall hangs a curtain, and Tabitha already knows this trick. She pulls it aside and finds another door, but this one is locked. She tries every way she knows how, but the door won’t open, and eventually she gives up and goes back to bed, but this time she cannot sleep.

  Soon, to Tabitha, the locked door behind the curtain in the basement becomes like the gate blocking the path. She knows she must go through it. And as with the gate, she makes her plan carefully.

  She offers to take on the chores assigned to Ruth and Ami, cleaning rooms and scrubbing walls and floors, using them as an excuse to rifle through drawers and cabinets. She finds dozens of keys and she tries them all, but none of them work.

  This time when the moon is full she thinks about abandoning Patrick in the Forest. It’s been months since she’s seen him and she’s angry and hurt and broken. Sometimes she’ll pull his book out from under a loose stone in the wall, and she’ll flip through the pages, wondering if all men are so cruel; if love is like a spring blossom that builds and bursts in a bright hot color and then wilts and dies, never to return.

  Two days later, she spends the afternoon torn. She finds herself walking toward the gate and then turning back. She doesn’t know what’s right. She doesn’t want to give up the hope of him, but she’s not sure she’s ready to deal with the pain of him either.

  It frustrates her that he occupies so much of her mind. Even when she tries to think of other things during the day, he invades her dreams at night, and she wakes up sweaty and alone. The second night after the fullest moon is no exception. She crawls from her bed and carries her candle to the gate and walks the path through the Forest to their meeting spot.

  The tiny flame of the candle barely penetrates past the fences bordering the path, and it throws cruel shadows across the Unconsecrated who follow her. Their eyes seem more hollow, their cheeks sharper, their teeth and tongues black maws.

  Moans surround her, peel away her flesh until she feels bare and raw. The Unconsecrated bang against the fence, claw for her so hard their fingers snap and bones protrude gleaming and sharp. She can’t sprint because the candle will go out, and so she’s forced to walk slowly, unable to outrun the death on either side of her.

  The gate is as it always is: impassive and sturdy. As she expected, the path on the other side is empty. She stands in the darkness surrounded by the agony of existence and tries to decide what to do next. Go back? Go forward? Curl up on the path and let time take its toll?

  Her shoulders crumble, her fingers going limp and dropping the candle. Just before the flame sputters out against the damp earth, she catches the reflection of something lying on the ground.

  The moon is fat but waning, and she doesn’t bother relighting the candle before opening the gate. In the middle of the path is a small basket covered by a scrap of material.

  She pulls it back to find a spray of wilted flowers, their petals black in the darkness. Nestled amid the limp leaves rests a scrap of paper, and it takes her three strikes of the flint until her candle is bright enough to read the words.

  “My Tabby,” she whispers aloud to the dead around her. “My family has grown sick, and my father is on the verge of death. I couldn’t bear to leave my mother and sister so soon. Forgive my absences. Please forgive me. I have missed you like the shore misses the touch of waves. I promise that nothing will keep me from you after the hare moon. Hopefully you remain mine as I remain yours.
Always, my love, Patrick.”