Page 51

“It’s fucking gold, is what it is, Miss Cairns.”

“Uh huh,” I agreed, and we grinned at each other.

Beneath my thumb, more words, spooling out unbroken. I read them out loud, as Malin and Safie worked: Women near their time must beware being caught short in the fields, for the Lady is known to take unbaptized babies as her tithe, swapping them for changelings with goggling heads, thin limbs, and swollen bellies, forever crying. These must be taken back and buried alive where they dropped, to keep the crops fertile. . . .

“Pretty big into burying people in fields in Dzéngast, huh?” Safie commented, clicking her mouse around. “Guess her dad wanted to import the custom.”

I shook my head. “Daddy Wròbl was a Christian fanatic, remember? This is pagan stuff, held over from prehistory. Earlier than that by a long time.”

“How much, exactly?”

“Well . . . they found this headless stone fertility statue in a Cyprian cave that was made around 3500 BCE, I seem to recall—unearthed it in 1878. The Woman from Lemb, they call her, or the Goddess of Death, ’cause bad stuff supposedly happens to everyone who touches her.” I flipped the page. “Then there’s the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, carbon-dated to forty thousand years old, probably one of the first anthropomorphic images ever made. They’re both what your Dédé would’ve called little gods, cult-objects . . . worshipped in their time, just like Lady Midday.”

“‘Those old heathens.’ The ones with the pots.”

“That’s right.”

“Mmm.” She clicked something, dragged it somewhere, saved. Beside her, Malin was nodding along to the almost-subliminal sound of my recorded voice through her heavy headphones, recognizable from where I sat by tone if not exact words. “How is it you know all this shit, anyhow, Miss Cairns?”

I thought about that for a moment. “I’ve always been interested in mythology, archaeology . . . history,” I said, finally. “This is all three. An obsessional convergence. That must be why it seems so familiar.”

“But you—my turn to ask this, I guess—you don’t believe any of it, right?”

“I don’t have to believe it myself to assume Mrs. Whitcomb must’ve.” I turned another page. “Hell, even Mr. Whitcomb did, by the end. Enough that he wound up leaving her to it.”

“Only after Hyatt disappeared.”

I nodded. “That’s true, too.”

It was She I saw, in that field, in my fever, Mrs. Whitcomb wrote, just as before—Her voice I knew at once, when She spoke to me. The only difference this time being that I looked instead of hiding my eyes, and She looked back.

“This is weird,” Malin observed, suddenly. She waved us over; Safie simply shifted her chair, while I rose and stood next to them as Malin indicated something onscreen. “There,” she said. “In the mix, at the bottom—you see that?”

I didn’t see anything, but was well aware that didn’t mean much. Safie narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. What . . . is that part of the original track?”

“I fed in a bunch of different stuff to create a kind of generalized room tone—that place was noisy, man. Almost like it was outside, not inside.”

“Might as well have been,” Safie agreed. “So . . . which file did you take this part from?”

“Um, gimme a sec.” She checked the log. “That’d be ten-fifteen, point two.”

“Ten-fifteen was from your iPhone,” Safie told me. “You know, what you were shooting right before—that thing happened.”

“You can say ‘seizure.’”

“Thought you said they weren’t sure.”

“They’re not, it’s just . . .” I sighed, “. . . easier than calling it anything else, I guess. Can I see that clip?”

“Sure,” said Malin, who’d been listening in with interest—maybe Safie hadn’t told her about that part, though I suppose there was no real reason why she should have. She found the clip in question without any trouble, opened it in a new window, started playing. And: Fade to grey, I could hear myself muttering through the speakers, as Val Moraine nattered on about cleaning up, tourist-proofing the glass house, making sure it was all nice and safe. Grey with white highlights, she’s working out her palette, that’s really OW, oh. Ow, oh shit, fuck meeee . . .

“Huh,” Malin said, pausing it. “Right there. You hear that?”

Safie frowned. “You mean me, or—?”

“Either of you.”

I shook my head, still staring at the screen, my own blurred face caught mid-grab, motion-smeary. “I don’t hear anything,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean much; I’ve been blasting music straight into my eardrums since I was fourteen. What’s it sound like?”