Pip was crying on my doorstep when I woke. She was sitting on the top stair with her knees drawn up and her red hair coming out of its clip, and she did not look up when I opened the door. She said, thickly, “He told me last night I’d cry about my brother today. And I thought, that’s mad, I don’t even have a brother in my head right now. And then I woke up and I did.” I sat down beside her. The stairwell smelled of wood smoke and wet stone. “What’s his name?” “Danny.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “He’s fourteen. He’s the reason I’m here, really. Mum’s gone and it’s just the two of us and I look after him, and I’m so tired, Mira. I thought, if I could just have somewhere that was mine, where somebody looked after me for once.” She laughed, a wet broken sound. “Belonging. It sounded like the answer to everything.” “And now?” “Now Jonah’s said I’ll cry about Danny, and I am crying about Danny, and I keep thinking, if I stay here and never go back, who’s going to make his tea?” It was the first time anyone in Ashgrove had asked that question out loud. I held on to her shoulder and said nothing clever. There was nothing clever to say. “You don’t have to decide yet,” I said, which was what Calla would have said, and I hated myself a little for it. I found Jonah in the square at noon, sitting on the rim of the dry fountain under the stone bird. He was alone, turning a bread roll round and round in one hand without eating it, like a man doing a sum. He looked up as I came over, and before I could speak, he said mildly, “I know. You want to ask if I’m all right.” “Are you?” “I’m fine. I’ll be a bit tired later. Nothing awful.” I sat. The stone was cold through my skirt. In daylight he looked different from the boy on the bus, and it took me a minute to see why. It wasn’t that he looked older. It was that nothing on his face happened. A pigeon landed near us and he didn’t flinch. A child shrieked with laughter across the square and his eyes didn’t move. He watched all of it with the faint polite patience of a man at a play he has already seen. “It’s strange,” he said, to the bread roll. “I thought it would feel like an extra day. A bonus. It doesn’t. It feels like I’ve already had every day. I ate this lunch yesterday, in my head. I know you’re going to ask if I’m scared, and I know I’m going to say no.” “Are you scared?” “No.” He turned and for the first time met my eyes, and they were so calm that my stomach dropped. “That’s the thing. I can’t be. Nothing surprises me. Do you know how long it’s been since I was surprised?” I shook my head. “Since yesterday morning.” A small soft laugh. “And I don’t think I’ll be surprised again for a long time.” I thought of Elliot in the lane: I just wish someone had told me what always means. I thought of Winifred and Ruth. It was the same thing wearing a different coat. The thing you wanted so badly you’d pay anything for it, and the thing you paid with was always the very thing that makes a person a person. To be surprised. To be argued with. To forget. “Jonah. Do you want to give it back?” He considered it, with that unnerving, gentle patience. “I don’t think I can. And I don’t think I want to. My dad’s going to die on Thursday, and I’ll be holding his hand, and I’ll know what to say.” He looked down at the roll. “I’d rather know what to say.” I couldn’t argue. God help me, I couldn’t. He took one small neat bite, chewed, swallowed, and said without any particular expression, “You’re going to the library in about ten minutes. Elliot will be waiting. Be careful on the stairs. The third one’s loose.” Above us, on the library roof, a line of black birds shifted on the ridge. Crows, perhaps thirty of them, sitting shoulder to shoulder and perfectly still, every head turned towards the square. One of them cawed, once. A second answered. A third. They went down the line like a count. “They do that when someone new comes,” said Jonah, without looking up. “They’re counting. I don’t know who for.” The third stair was loose. I caught myself on the rail, swore under my breath, and went on down into the cellar of the Library of Ashgrove, with Elliot two steps ahead of me carrying a storm-lantern and Tomas two steps behind carrying a ring of keys nearly as heavy as Calla’s. We had settled it at the bakery that morning, in a whispered huddle over the crumbs. The Hollow was under the library. Ilse had said so. The plans of the building showed no door, and the floor of the cellar was solid, and Elliot had searched it for eleven years. “But you’ve been looking with your eyes,” Tomas had said. “And a lantern, and a tape measure, and your remarkable memory. You haven’t been looking with someone who’s only just arrived and hasn’t yet stopped noticing.” So I was the instrument. At the bottom of the stairs a black cat was sitting in the middle of the floor. He was a big cat, lean and sleek, with one white whisker, and he regarded us the way a bouncer regards a queue. When Elliot’s lantern swung over him, his eyes flashed, and they weren’t the green of any cat I’d known. They were the colour of candle flame. “The ball,” I said. “I saw him at the buffet.” “He gets about,” said Elliot, rather carefully. “His name’s Marrow. Nobody feeds him. Nobody’s ever seen him eat. I once tried to find out whose he was, and I got three days of the cold shoulder and a dead mouse on my pillow.” “Whose is he?” “I have no idea.” Elliot held up the lantern and, in the light of it, for the first time, I saw him look slightly afraid. “I keep a list. Of what lives here. I’ll show you later. There are a few on it with a question mark by them, and he’s the first.” Marrow stood, stretched, turned his back on us with enormous dignity, and led the way into the cellar with his tail up like a flag. It was a plain low vaulted room, a long cold cave of brick lined with iron cabinets in the dark. Tomas called them the Flat Files. They held maps by the thousand, rolled and pressed in shallow drawers, and the air smelled of dust and linseed oil and something faintly sweet, like the inside of a tree. “Close your eyes,” said Elliot. I did. “Don’t try to find it. Just feel. You said there’s a hand against your back. Where does it push you?” I stood in the dark of my own eyelids and listened. The Toll was faint down here, a low pulse almost below hearing, like a heart in the next room. I felt it in my feet. I felt it in my teeth. And I felt the hand, warm and patient and flat against my spine, urging me gently forward. I took a step. And another. “Left,” I said, not opening my eyes. “Past the long cabinets. There’s a corner. It’s warm there.” I walked. My fingers brushed iron and drew back. The pull grew, deeper and sweeter, until it hummed in my bones like a struck glass, and then it stopped all at once. I opened my eyes. I was standing in front of a single narrow cabinet at the very back of the cellar, in the angle of two walls. A brass plate on the front said, in faded copperplate, UNCATALOGUED. The iron was as warm as skin under my palm. Elliot drew in a breath. Tomas muttered something in a language I didn’t know. “It was not here,” said Elliot, in a strange strangled voice. “Mira, I have perfect memory. I can tell you where every cabinet in this cellar stood to the quarter inch on the fourth of March, 2019. This one is new. It’s been put here in the last day or two.” “Someone wanted it found,” said Tomas quietly. Behind us, Marrow made a sound I had not heard a cat make. A low, flat, shaken growl. We turned. He was not looking at the cabinet. He was standing perfectly still with every hair on his body on end and his candle-flame eyes fixed on the floor, on the bare brick directly under the cabinet’s feet. His tail had fluffed to the size of a bottle brush. He stayed that way for a count of five. Then he turned and walked out of the cellar, stiff-legged, without looking back. “He’s never done that,” said Elliot softly. “He doesn’t do that.” I pulled the drawer. It held a single map, laid flat on thick yellow vellum so old the edges had gone soft as cloth. Across the top, in spidery copperplate: The Town of Ashgrove, and what lies beneath it. Surveyed in the year 1743. It was beautiful. A town in miniature in sepia ink: the square, the fountain with its stone bird, the winding lanes, the hill with its library. I could pick out Tallow Street. I could pick out the glasshouse. Then Tomas tilted the lantern, and I saw the second layer. Beneath the town, drawn in a pale silvery-white ink that only showed when the light struck it from the side, was a tree. Not a tree as you would draw one. A tree upside down. Its great trunk lay directly under the library, a column of white that sank down and down through the paper, and from it, in every direction, spread the roots. They ran under every street and house. They reached out through the hills, past the edge of the map and into the valley beyond. And at each place where one rose towards the surface, in every cellar and well and garden, the mapmaker had marked a tiny black cross. A place made of roots, I thought. I heard Jonah’s flat voice: Thousands of them, thick as my arm, white and wet. Under the drawing, in a smaller and more hurried hand, someone had written four lines. The ink was darker. Almost fresh. The Hollow Oak. Planted by no hand. Fed by no rain. It grows upon what is surrendered. “Surrendered,” Elliot breathed. “Not given. Surrendered.” It was the first moment that the whole thing arranged itself in my head, not as a feeling but as a shape. The gifts. The prices. The memory a man would pay for and couldn’t stop paying for. The voice a woman would pay for and couldn’t stop obeying. Every single thing a person gave up in Ashgrove had to go somewhere. And I was standing at the top of the place it went. “There’s more,” said Tomas. He had bent close over the bottom corner, his spectacles nearly touching the vellum. “In the margin. Somebody’s written something small.” I leaned in, and every hair on my arms rose. It was pencil, faint and fast and smudged, the scrawl of someone who has run out of time. Not in the copperplate of 1743. In a hand I would have known in the dark. It will ask if you will stay. Do not answer the question it asks. Answer the one underneath. —I.K., 31 Oct 98 I put my fist against my mouth. “She was here. She came down here and found it. And she left this for me.” I had to stop. “But how did it get in the drawer? The cabinet’s new, you said. It only came yesterday.” “The cabinet is new,” said Elliot slowly. “The map is not.” His face was grey in the lamplight. “Someone found this somewhere else, Mira. Someone took it out of wherever it was hidden and brought it here and put it where you’d find it. Someone who knew you were coming.” “Calla,” said Tomas. “Why would she?” I said. “It warns me.” Nobody answered. In the long cold silence we looked at one another, three people with the same awful thought arriving at the same moment. Because I could think of only one reason someone might want you to find a warning. If the warning were the road. If a woman who had spent centuries luring people into a tree wanted one particular girl to come willingly, to walk down into the dark on her own feet, with her eyes open, believing herself brave and clever and free, what better way than to let her find her dead mother’s secret message? To let her feel that she had chosen? A true gift, Calla had said. Freely given. I thought: They never take anything you don’t hand over yourself. And far above our heads, through the stone, a single note rang out across the roofs. Low and slow and patient. The first stroke of a bell I had not heard before. Up on the library roof, I knew without seeing it, thirty crows had all stopped counting at once. “Dusk,” said Elliot, quietly. “It’s the Turning, Mira. It’s tonight.” I folded the map with shaking hands and slid it into my coat, next to my mother’s letter and my mother’s face. He showed me his list before we went up. It was in the back of the green ledger, written in a small tidy hand, under the heading Field Notes: Persons Not Persons. Wicks. Live in the lanterns. Cannot lie. The Oak’s, I think. Chalk mice. Keep the slate. The Oak’s clerks. Pipistrelles. Hang in the rafters. Hear everything. The Oak’s ears? Ash moths. Gather where there’s sorrow. Whose? Bees. Tomas’s. Know every death. Whose? The hare. Appears at crossroads. Whose? Marrow. Whose? Below that, in the same tidy hand, one more line with no heading, and no question mark, because I think he had not been able to bring himself to put one. The bus. “There are too many with a whose,” he said. “If the Oak keeps a household, those are the ones that aren’t on its staff.” He closed the book. “I’ve never found out who does the hiring.” I looked at the line. I looked at the other line, under the map, in pencil. And I said the only thing I was sure of. “Whatever it asks me tonight,” I said, “I’m going to find out what the real question is.” This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
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