The Last Page (76 page)

Like a scarecrow, he towered over her, emanating an unsettling darkness from his pores.

“I been here once before,” he said. “Boneyard’s uver ther, ain’t it?” He pointed with his spade, shouting hard above the wind.

Another sudden gust ravished the trees and a storm of plundered leaves flapped crazily into his lantern light.

Sena nodded. She led the way, picking a route through the old forest.

As they went, voices floated up from the crofts below. Faraway shouts about closing barn doors and getting livestock inside. Disembodied and broken up over the distance, they sounded like the shades of men and women mumbling near fields they once farmed.

When Sena came to the place marked with white stones the sexton
stopped and lifted the spade off his shoulders. He swung it down into both hands.

“Wait,” said Sena.

A huge leathery leaf slapped her in the face. She batted it away. “I need the doors opened.” She pointed up the hill.

The sexton scowled but shrugged. He plodded off through the burial grounds. Sena followed.

Strandy saplings had conquered most of the cemetery. The mausoleum doors glared from a disturbingly dark recess in the hillside where crisp beveled letters had been chiseled into an arch.

Oblivious to omens, the sexton put the haft of his spade through the chains that ran between the handles and cranked down. Though the spade gave a pained crack, the well-corroded links burst apart, falling with a dull clatter to the slab.

The slab was covered with leaves and maple seeds. The sexton sorted out the chains and tossed them heavily to one side like a man who had just killed a snake.

Hunched over, Sena thought the sexton might pass as the creature the farmers were talking about.

“Hab to dig curful now,” the sexton muttered to himself, “spade’s craked.” His lantern beamed fitfully. It cast a yellow circle across the slab and up the stone doors, making him look monstrous as he examined the damaged tool. He pulled one of the doors open but didn’t bother looking inside.

“Want a tikyular one?” He picked up his lantern and walked back out among the graves.

“Any one will do.” She thought her voice sounded idiotically chipper. “Make it a man. Try one that’s not so old.”

When she heard the chink of the spade biting into ground she walked up to the mausoleum. Fallen crab apples on the hillside permeated the air with cider. Sena poked her head inside.

The fusty silent darkness seemed palpably chancy. She crouched in the doorway to light her candle lantern. Even the flame was frightened. It fluttered down as though trying to hide in the tallow.

Once she got it going and slammed the glass, Sena saw that the vault had been constructed in crisp simplicity. An empty stone shelf for lights and flowers rested on claw-like corbels. She raised her candle box. Some roots had forced their way through the tiles overhead. They looked like pale wooden worms.

Not too windy, relatively tidy, the vault would do just fine.

She began to unpack her things, setting them out in a neat circle. An earthen bowl, a wooden pestle, several small bags of herbs, a stoppered silver vial, a skin of water, a box of charcoal, several black tapers, a pouch of powdered chalk, a bit of coiled string and the
C
srym T
.

For a while she waited, straining to hear the shovel. The wind was too strong and the mausoleum door groaned, threatening to close.

An irrational fear, that the sexton might lock her in, made Sena rise. She left her things on the floor and went back outside.

The sexton’s light already rested below ground. Its glow bled over the edge of a hole, illuminating pebbly sprays of flung dirt. As Sena approached, she saw him plunge the spade and violently hammer it down with the heel of his boot.

He was a Naneman and she could hear him humming and singing quietly in an old dialect of Hinter that she could not understand, a sort of chant that accompanied the rhythm of his spade.

When he noticed her, he stopped.

“There soon.” His breathing came hard. “They been pushed up. Mubee frost or shifts in the grund. Ain’t deep no more.”

Sena could see where he had brutally hacked through roots, his long stringy arms swinging heedless of anything below. He had removed his wool shirt and his sharp shoulder blades looked dangerously close to cutting their way out every time he threw the spade. His strength and energy were horrific.

She moved away, listening to the endless cascade of leaves. She had mixed Caliph’s blood with fermented creepberry juice to sweeten it and prevent it from thickening.

She leaned back against an ugly statue of a serpent and rested her hips on its brow.

At last she heard the dull thud she had been waiting for.

“Just tha hed, right?” the sexton shouted.

He had dug a hole roughly four feet square near the top of the grave, leaving the lower half of the coffin locked in the clay. The last few shovelfuls had been particularly difficult as the cracked spade finally broke.

The sexton had been forced to his knees to finish the excavation.

“Just break it open,” she called.

He hauled himself out and picked up the other tool he had brought, a hooked metal bar too short to have been useful in leveraging the mausoleum chains. Returning to the hole, he set about the boards, prying them away from the face. They broke with soft mealy noises, exposing a grisly form to his lamplight.

“That all?” he asked. His tiny black eyes looked around as if making certain there were no more holes to dig.

Sena thanked him unceremoniously and gave him the extra silver she knew he wanted.

As he pulled his shirt back over his head he said, “You be all right . . . up here alone? Nuthin down there fer me but a sleepin’ mule.”

Sena flinched at the suggestion.

“I’ll be fine.”

Although he soared over her in his baggy clay-stained overalls and huge mud-clumped boots, the sexton recoiled. Maybe he found her smile unpleasant.

He bent down sheepishly to retrieve his lantern and the other half of the spade. Then he turned into the trees, following the statues out, raising a giant hand in parting.

Quickly, Sena lowered herself into the hole and with her sickle knife sliced a lock from the corpse’s head. She walked back to the mausoleum with lengthened, willful strides.

On the mausoleum floor she scratched with charcoal, stepping on one end of the string and pivoting, winding the charcoal at the other end to get a perfect circle. She covered the faint line with powdered chalk, making sure the ring remained unbroken.

Swiftly now, her fingers scribbled symbols all around. Going for new charcoal when hers broke or wore down to an unavailing stub.

Her breathing grew rapid with the haste of her work. She lit the candles with a box of matches she had purchased on the street.

One blew out.

She pricked her finger and with a terse holomorphic word ignited it again.

Into a bowl went the dark contents of the silver vial along with the lock of hair and several fibrous roots and furry leaves. The pestle ground everything into a repulsive bituminous mush. She touched the stringy paste to her tongue and felt the muscles in her jaw tighten.

She set her teeth and closed her eyes and slit her arm just above the wrist. She let her part of the bizarre recipe drain into the bowl before adding a smidge of water. The paste thinned.

A few drops she dribbled into the book’s grisly lock.

Sena stopped to bind her arm and double-check the directions in her journal.

Like a child dreading medicine, she raised the horrific brew. Half a teaspoonful she tried to drink but had to chew. The hairs clung in the back of her throat. She gagged, fought for control, and set the bowl on the ground.

I’m not going to puke. I’m not going to puke.
She clutched her stomach. She battled to reign in the rebellion going on behind her teeth.

Finally she won. Her tongue traveled, searching for the remaining threads of hair, which (prescribed by the recipe or not) she fished out with her middle finger.

Petulant from the ordeal, she swirled the rest of the bowl’s thickening contents until it broke over the lip and splashed the powdered ring.

Lastly, she deposited the
C
srym T
.

Sena stood back, holding her wrist gingerly, looking at the flickering sight before her. All the ridiculous trappings of superstition . . . but she had done it as prescribed. One way or another, this was the end of a journey, the end of an affair.

Soon, her eyes would be opened to the mysteries of the world, the final blocks in raising her fortress of truth, or not.

Sena composed her thoughts and tried to breathe normally. She closed her eyes until the words that were also numbers came like familiar friends into her mind.

For half a minute, the abhorrent modulating delicacy of the Unknown Tongue filled the crypt’s withered air.

When she finished, Sena’s eyes opened to the stirring of wind. The silent howl of the ancient book, her constant torture for the past eight months, ceased suddenly, lulled by the words into dreadful slumber.

A clicking noise rose. All the candles save the one in her box sent long streamers of smoke from their glowing wicks.

The book shuddered, the latch popped and the heavy crimson hide thumped itself open.

A frenzy of crackling pages tried to take flight from the spine, rising in a fan of rage. For a moment, Sena imagined an old man’s whisper as the pages shivered. Then a few leaves blew in from outside and Sena’s head spun at a distant sound.