The Hollow Saints: Lennas Footsteps

The library door resisted her first two attempts, the warped oak swelling against its frame with the petulance of old buildings that have learned to fear drafts. On the third try, Maren Ashcroft put her shoulder into it, felt the latch give with a click that echoed too loudly into the silence beyond, and stepped into a room that smelled of paper rot and lamp oil and something faintly chemical, like the ghost of a medicine cabinet left open for a century.

She stood very still on the threshold, letting her eyes adjust.

Hollow Marsh had no proper civic building, not really. The town possessed a single stone chapel, a post office that doubled as the undertaker's parlor on Tuesdays, and this: a converted granary with shelves that climbed to the rafters, the kind of structure that had been many things to many people and resented all of them. A painted sign above the door, half-eaten by damp, read ASHCROFT MEMORIAL ARCHIVE in letters that her great-grandfather had surely hoped would outlast him. They had not outlasted her family. They would outlast the family name.

Inside, the air hung heavy and cold, touched with the particular chill of rooms that see little sun. A coal stove squatted in one corner, its iron belly faintly warm, radiating nothing useful. Rain ticked against a high window of warped glass. Somewhere deeper in the stacks, a clock ticked too, though she could not see it.

The archivist had not emerged to greet her.

Maren unwound the wool scarf from her throat and laid it across the nearest chair. The gesture felt ceremonial in a way she could not name. She had last stood in a room like this seven years ago, in the reading room of the Cartographers' Guild in the northern city, when she was nineteen and believed that maps were a kind of truth. Her sister Lenna had been studying there then, three years further along in her apprenticeship, working on the cataloguing of parish records and the small obediences of paper. They had not spoken since. The silence between them had grown into a kind of architecture, load-bearing, and Maren had been careful never to test its joints.

She cleared her throat. "Mr. Grimani?"

Nothing. Only the rain, and the clock.

She moved between the shelves. The granary's old grain bins had been repurposed as catalog drawers, each one labeled in a careful italic hand she did not recognize. SHEEP ROT, 1803-1872. SUBSIDENCE CLAIMS, NORTH FIELD. THE GREAT INUNDATION OF 1889. She let her fingers drift across the labels without opening the drawers. There was a system here, and it was not the system she had been trained to expect.

In the center of the room, beneath the high window, stood a long table scarred with ink and what appeared to be candle wax in seventeen colors. A single candle burned at its near end, guttering in a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. Beside the candle lay a pair of gloves, a magnifying lens on a brass stand, and a small leather folder, closed.

The folder was addressed, in that same italic hand, to a name she had not expected to find here: Lenna Ashcroft.

Her sister had stood in this room. Her sister had been given a folder with her name on it. Maren reached for it, and stopped herself. She did not yet know what she was willing to take from a dead woman's belongings.

She sat on the edge of the table instead, and waited.

Five minutes passed. The candle burned down by a finger's width. The clock ticked its indifferent tick.

Then footsteps, soft and deliberate, from a doorway at the back of the stacks that she had not noticed, concealed by a hanging curtain of dark green baize. The curtain stirred. A hand drew it aside. A man emerged, and smiled at her as though she had been expected for years.

"Forgive me," said Quill Grimani. "I was in the cellar. The damp, you understand. It requires attention, or the older documents simply... dissolve. We cannot have that."

He was perhaps fifty, perhaps older, with the sort of face that had been handsome in its way and had decided to become something else instead. His hair was black and silver, swept back from a high forehead. His clothes were a scholar's compromise: a velvet waistcoat of deep green over a shirt that had been white once, cuffs spotted with ink. His eyes were very dark and moved too quickly, cataloguing her the way she had been cataloguing the room.

"I am Quill Grimani. You must be the younger sister."

"I am Maren Ashcroft."

"Yes." He crossed to the stove, lifted its lid with a small iron hook, and fed it two lumps of coal from a scuttle beside it. The coals cracked and spat. "I had begun to think you would not come. Lenna spoke of you often, in the abstract, as one speaks of weather. I formed an impression. Let us see if impressions can be trusted." He turned back to her, his smile widened, and he gestured to a chair that had not been there a moment ago, or that she had failed to notice. "Please. Sit. I will show you what she was looking at, when she looked at it. And I will tell you, if you wish, what I think she found."

Maren did not sit. "Where is her body?"

The question landed in the room like a stone in still water.

Grimani considered it. "In the belfry, as you have perhaps been told. I did not place her there. I would not have placed her there. I found her, in the early morning of the day you arrived, at the foot of the bell. The position was, you might say, devotional. I have seen photographs of such positions, in old books. I do not recommend them."

"You found her."

"I am the archivist of this archive, Miss Ashcroft, such as it is. The town has no constable. The town has, in fact, very little of what one might call municipal apparatus. They have me. They have Mrs. Grae, who keeps the inn and hears everything. They have Dr. Vesta Marrow, who is a fine physician but a poor correspondent, and who dislikes questions." He paused, with the theatrical sense of a man who had spent many years delivering lectures to half-empty halls. "They have a bell. That is the sum of their apparatus."

Maren let the silence answer for her.

Grimani inclined his head, acknowledging it. "You have questions. I respect this. Lenna had questions too, at first. She was, I think, surprised to find me here at all. She had come to this town to manage an inheritance and to close up a house, and she had expected the archive to be a small, sad room of land deeds and nothing more. Instead she found me." A small flourish of one ink-stained hand. "Instead she found me, and the holdings, and the holdings are, I confess, somewhat more extensive than the town deserves."

He moved to the table, drew the leather folder toward him, and opened it. Inside lay a single photograph, sepia-toned, the surface pitted in places where the emulsion had been touched by something wet and then dried again. He laid it out flat beneath the lamp.

"Come. Look. You will want to see this, I think."

Maren stepped closer. The photograph showed fourteen men arranged in two rows before a plain wooden building, the kind of structure common to every English village in the middle of the last century. They wore dark coats and severe expressions. Behind them, at the apex of the roof, a small bell hung visible in a wooden frame. The image was sharp. The faces of the men were not.

The faces had been obliterated. Not cut, not scratched, not blotted out with ink. Each oval of the photograph, where a face should have been, bore the unmistakable pattern of human bite marks. Teeth marks, layered one over another, as though the photograph had been held in a mouth and chewed, by many mouths, over many hours. The emulsion was scraped away to the paper beneath. One face, in the back row, had been bitten so thoroughly that only a smear of brown remained where the features should have been.

Maren looked at it for a long time.

"This is the founding choir," said Grimani. He spoke as though narrating a lecture he had given many times. "Fourteen men. The photograph was taken in 1849, the year the bell was cast and hung. They were the first singers, you understand. The first voices trained to the instrument. Their names are recorded in the town ledger, which I will show you, but their names were not, perhaps, what mattered about them. What mattered about them was that they could sing in a particular way. A way that the bell required."

"Required."

"The bell has requirements, Miss Ashcroft. Every bell does. Every instrument does. You were trained as a cartographer. You know that a map is not the territory. The bell is not the town, but the town is, in a way, the bell. The bell remembers what the town forgets. The singers were trained to remind the bell of what it remembered. They were not, in the modern sense, a choir. They were a kind of key."

Maren sat down. The chair had been there all along, she realized; she had simply refused to see it.

"Who did this to the photograph?"

"That," said Grimani, "is a question I have not been able to resolve. The photograph was stored in a sealed envelope in the locked drawer you see there, in the third cabinet from the window. The envelope was not opened. The photograph was bitten through the envelope. The paper of the envelope is intact. The teeth marks pass through it as though it were not there, or as though whatever did the biting was not, in the relevant sense, biting the envelope at all."

He paused, watching her.

"I considered, at first, that some rodent had been at it. A rat, perhaps, with a taste for old photographs. But rats do not leave human dental impressions, Miss Ashcroft. Rats leave their own. And these are human. I have compared them to the dental charts in the parish register, of those whose charts survive. I will not tell you which names matched. I will only tell you that they matched, and that this gave me pause, as a man of natural philosophy, and as a man who prefers his phenomena to behave."

He drew another photograph from the folder and laid it beside the first. This one was newer, perhaps sixty years old, black-and-white rather than sepia. It showed a similar group of men before the same building, similarly arranged, similarly attired. These faces were not bitten. They were simply gone, scraped away with a sharp blade, in a single clean stroke across each oval.

"1962," said Grimani. "The second recorded choir. Six of the original families sent sons. None of those sons survived to old age. None of them, in fact, survived the decade. The photograph was defaced by the town clerk, in the ordinary way of human grief, and filed away. There is no mystery in this one. Only sorrow."

He laid out a third. This photograph was not paper at all but tin, a daguerreotype in a small leather case. The image was difficult to read, tarnished at the edges, but the faces of its fourteen men were perfectly preserved, and perfectly ordinary: farmers, mostly, with weathered skin and careful haircuts.

"This is the 1889 choir," he said. "After the Inundation. None of their faces have been touched. None of their faces will be, I suspect. They are safe. They are not the ones the bell requires."

Maren looked up from the tin. "Why these? Why the 1849 and the 1962? What did they have that the others did not?"

Grimani drew his fingers together and steepled them beneath his chin, a gesture she suspected he had practiced in a mirror until it felt natural.

"That, Miss Ashcroft, is the question your sister spent the last three months trying to answer. She was, I will say, very thorough. She was also, I will say, very frightened. Toward the end, she asked me to hide certain documents. She asked me to hide them in a place where the town would not think to look, which is to say, anywhere at all, because the town, in my experience, thinks to look in very few. I hid them in the cellar. I have since retrieved them. I will show them to you, if you wish. But first, I will tell you what I believe, because you should know what sort of man is making the offer."

He paused, and the candle guttered, and the rain ticked against the warped glass, and the clock in the stacks ticked its indifferent tick.

Maren set the daguerreotype face-down on the table. The leather case made a small dry sound against the wood, like a moth landing.

"What do you believe?" she asked.

Grimani rose from his stool with the deliberate grace of a man who had once lectured from a podium and missed the applause afterward. He crossed to the narrow door that led, she knew, to a flight of stone steps descending beneath the chapel. He did not open it. He placed his palm flat against the wood and stood listening, as though the cellar might whisper to him first.

"I believe," he said, his back to her, "that the bell was never a bell. That is to say, it was never intended to be rung by human hands for human purposes. The shape we cast it in, the iron we poured, the tongue we hung inside it, these were concessions. A translation of something older into a form a parish council could approve. I believe there have always been voices in this marsh. I believe the Inundation did not drown them. It gave them a new home."

The candle shuddered. Maren smelled tallow smoke and the green, vegetable rot of damp plaster, and beneath that, something older and colder, the smell of a well that has gone very deep and forgotten the sky.

"You believe the bell is haunted," she said carefully.

"I believe," he answered, turning back to her with a small smile that did not reach his eyes, "that hauntings require the dead to be finished with their living. The voices I have recorded, Miss Ashcroft, are not finished with anything. They are only just beginning."

He took a small key from his waistcoat pocket and unlocked the cellar door. The hinges protested softly, the sound swallowed at once by the stone throat below. He descended first. She followed, holding her skirts with one hand and the candle with the other, counting the steps as she had been taught to count them in childhood. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. The floor was uneven flagstone, slick with moisture, and the air grew dense and tasted of metal and peat.

The cellar was larger than she had expected, a low vaulted chamber that must once have served as a charnel house or a place for storing the dead through the long winter when the ground refused to give them up. Now it held only a deal table, three wooden chairs, and a number of cardboard boxes and leather satchels marked in Lenna's cramped hand. Maren's breath caught when she saw the writing. She had not realized, until that moment, how much she had been bracing herself against the possibility that Grimani had lied. The handwriting was Lenna's. The loops of the L, the bitten tail of the A, the way the numerals leaned forward as though hurrying toward something they did not wish to miss.

"She worked down here," Maren said.

"Most nights," Grimani answered. "After the chapel was locked. After the town was asleep. She said the records spoke more clearly when there was no one above her pretending to listen."

He lifted a satchel onto the table and opened the brass clasp. Inside were sheaves of paper, some yellowed and brittle, some fresh, and a number of smaller items wrapped in muslin. He unwrapped one and held it up. It was a wax cylinder, the kind used in early phonographs, dark with age and slightly cracked along one edge.

"She was digitizing the chapel's records," he said. "I do not use that word lightly, because your sister would have objected to it. She preferred to say she was preserving them in a medium that could not rot. She borrowed a telegraph apparatus from Mr. Pell in the post office and modified it, over my mild objections, into something that could transmit sound onto paper as a series of marks. She called it her graphophone, though that is not what it was. She kept a great deal of what she recorded. She kept some of it in the chapel. She kept the rest here, with me, because she said, and I quote, the chapel has ears."

Maren's hand hovered over the cylinder. "May I?"

"Please."

The cylinder was cool and lighter than she expected. She could smell the wax, faintly sweet, and beneath it the ghost of a chemical tang she could not name. She held it to the candlelight and saw, etched faintly into its surface, a series of fine grooves.

"This one is dated," Grimani said, leaning close. "The nineteenth of March, this year. It is the last recording she made in the chapel itself. The others were made here. But this one, she insisted, had to be made at the source."

"She recorded the bell."

"She recorded what the bell said back."

Maren set the cylinder down carefully. Her fingers had begun to tremble, and she did not want to drop it.

"Is there a machine?" she asked.

"There is a machine," Grimani said. "But I would prefer, before we listen, that you understand what you are about to hear. Your sister was, by the end, very methodical. She labeled everything. She dated everything. She left instructions for me in the event of her death, which she anticipated with a specificity that I found, at the time, excessive. She asked me to give you, and only you, the contents of a particular envelope on the night of the equinox, should you come to ask. I have carried that envelope for six months, Miss Ashcroft. It is in my breast pocket as we speak. I have read it. I will not pretend I have not. But it is yours by her request, and I will not open the cylinder with you until you have read it, because she asked me not to, and because I find, as I grow older, that the requests of the dead begin to carry a weight I am no longer willing to shrug off."

He reached into his coat and produced a small envelope of cream paper, sealed with a drop of red wax pressed with the Ashcroft signet, a marsh bird in flight. Maren recognized the seal. She had watched Lenna make it, years ago, over a candle in their father's parlour, laughing at the way the wax curled.

She took the envelope. She did not open it immediately. She held it in both hands and felt how light it was, how a life could be folded into such a small space.

"Give me a moment," she said.

"Take what you need."

She turned her back to him. She did not know why. It was not modesty. It was the animal need, older than speech, to hide the shape of one's grief from any witness, even a kind one. She pressed her thumb under the seal and broke it. The wax cracked with a sound like a small bone. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded twice, written on both sides in Lenna's hand. The ink was brown. The letters did not lean forward this time. They were small and upright and very careful, the letters of a woman who had stopped hurrying.

She read.

Dear Maren,

If you are reading this, I am dead and you have come to Hollow Marsh to find out why. I am sorry for both. I am sorry you had to come here, and I am sorry you will find out why.

I do not have much room on this paper, so I will be plain. The chapel is not haunted. The bell is not haunted. What lives in the bell is not a ghost, because a ghost is a thing that has finished with its life and gone away. This has not gone away. It has only just arrived, and it is very old, and it is very hungry, and it is not alone.

I have been recording it for three months. I have nineteen cylinders. The last one is the worst. I am going to play it for myself tonight, one more time, because I want to be sure. If I am right, I will go up to the bell chamber and I will do what I should have done six weeks ago, which is to bring the tongue down. I have a rope and a wrench and a great deal of resolve. I do not have any more of the other thing, which is hope, so I will not waste what is left.

If I am wrong, I will come home in the morning and we will discuss the cost of replacing the vestry roof and you will scold me for not eating enough and I will pretend to be cross with you for meddling in town affairs, and we will both know, without saying so, that we are glad to be sisters.

I think I am right. I think the bell is a mouth. I think the chapel is a throat. I think the marsh is the stomach. I think we have been feeding it for one hundred and seventy years and we did not know it was hungry.

Do not let them ring it again. Do not let them sing. If you love me, Maren, do not let them sing.

Yours, in this world or out of it, L.

Maren folded the letter. She did not put it back in the envelope. She held it against her chest with one hand and pressed the other over her mouth, because the sound that wanted to come out of her was not a word and she did not intend to give it one.

Behind her, Grimani waited. The candle burned. The cellar breathed its slow green breath.

When she turned back to him, her face was dry. She had made it dry. She was very good at making her face dry.

"The cylinder," she said. "Play the cylinder."

He nodded. He did not ask if she was certain. He went to the table and lifted a small wooden box from beneath the cloth, a box she had taken for a writing case. Inside, cradled in velvet, was a mechanism of brass and vulcanite, a cylinder phonograph of the older kind, with a hand crank and a heavy brass horn folded down like the proboscis of a sleeping insect. He fitted the wax cylinder onto the spindle with the care of a man handling a relic. He turned the crank once, twice, to seat the gears. He set the needle at the beginning of the grooves.

He looked at her. She nodded.

He let the needle drop.

For a moment there was only the soft hiss of the mechanism, the sound of wax being read by a steel point, the sound of any old recording before it begins. Then, beneath the noise, came breathing. Not Lenna's breathing. Lenna was not on the cylinder. Lenna had set the machine to listen and had left it listening. What came back was not her.

The breath was slow. It was the breath of something that did not need to breathe but had remembered how. It drew in through what might have been a nose or might have been a crack in stone, and it let the air out through what might have been a mouth or might have been the gap between two iron bells. Maren smelled the tallow of the candle and the metal in the air and, beneath both, the ghost of a marsh smell, green and sulfurous, rising from somewhere deeper than the cellar floor.

The breathing went on for longer than she expected. It went on for what felt like a full minute, though her sense of time had already begun to slide. She counted the breaths because counting was the only way she knew to keep herself in her body. Seven. Eight. Nine. The ninth breath was longer than the others. The ninth breath seemed to go on after it should have stopped.

Then the breathing stopped.

The silence that followed was not silence. It was a held note, the way a singer holds a note just before the consonant that will break it. The phonograph needle traveled its slow spiral. Maren waited.

The melody began.

It was a tune she knew. She knew it before she could have named it, knew it in her teeth, in the roots of her hair, in the small bones behind her ears. Her fillings ached. Her fillings had never ached before. The ache was specific. It was the ache of metal remembering a hand that had cast it, the ache of a thing being called home. The melody was simple, four notes repeated and varied, a tune that any child in the marsh could hum. It was the tune the choir sang on the night of the equinox. It was the tune that had been sung for one hundred and seventy years.

It was not being sung now.

It was being answered.

Maren closed her eyes. The melody went on, and beneath it, almost inaudible, came the second voice. It did not have words. It did not have a throat in any sense she could have explained to a magistrate. It was the sound the air makes in a pipe when the water has gone out of it, a hollow, sucked-in sound, the sound of a vacuum drawing at the centre of a note. It followed the human melody by a fraction of a second, as though it were learning the tune one phrase behind, as though it had been listening for a very long time and had only now found a mouth that could speak.

Grimani lifted the needle.

The cellar was very quiet. The candle had burned down a quarter inch while they listened, though she would have sworn only a moment had passed. She could hear the rain above them, and her own pulse in her ears, and the faint creak of the phonograph as the cylinder slowed to a stop.

"She was right," Maren said. Her voice sounded far away. "She was right about all of it."

Grimani set the cylinder down on the table beside the phonograph with the care of a man laying a child to bed. He did not look at Maren. He looked at the small iron key in his other hand, turning it slowly between his fingers, and when he spoke his voice was stripped of its usual flourishes, almost conversational, almost kind.

"It is not a confession she was right about, Miss Ashcroft. It is not even a discovery. It is a rehearsal. The town has been rehearsing this for one hundred and seventy years. Every equinox they sing, and every equinox the soil opens a little wider, and every equinox the answering voice learns the tune a little better. What you heard tonight was not the first verse. It was the hundred and seventy-first."

The candle on the table gave a small shudder of its own, the flame leaning hard to the left as though pressed by an invisible thumb. The wick sputtered. The wax pooled in a shape that Maren, watching, could not stop herself from seeing as an open mouth.

She stood up. Her knees were unsteady but she stood.

"Then we stop it."

Grimani laughed. It was a short, soft sound, the laugh of a man who has been asked to empty the sea with a teaspoon and finds the request charming. "With what? A hymnbook? A magistrate's warrant? A reasoned objection filed in triplicate with the parish clerk? The thing beneath Hollow Marsh is not a tenant you can evict, Miss Ashcroft. It is the original leaseholder. We are the squatters. We have always been the squatters."

"I don't care what it is."

He looked at her then. Really looked, the way he had not looked at her since the night he arrived at the Green and gave his demonstration on the lodestone and the brass filings, the night the whole town had come out to marvel at his drawing of sparks from the dead wood of an ancient alder. That night he had looked through her. He had looked past her, at the audience, at the effect, at the way her father's face had tightened when Grimani said the word boundary. Now he looked at her the way a man looks at a horse he has just realized can throw him.

"You should care," he said. "You should care very much. Your sister has spent ten years trying to stop it. Your sister has done everything a careful, educated, morally certain woman can do, and the soil has opened on schedule every season, and the choir has sung on schedule every season, and the answering voice has grown on schedule every season. Your sister has not stopped a single rehearsal, Miss Ashcroft. She has merely kept the programme."

Maren did not answer. She climbed the stairs out of the dark, and she did not look back, and Grimani did not follow her, and the cellar door closed behind her with a sound like a held breath being released.

The upstairs of the Green was darker than it had been when she went down. The lamps along the passage had been trimmed, or had trimmed themselves, and the shadows they cast lay in long tongues along the floorboards. The rain had stopped. The silence it left behind had a wet, heavy quality, the silence of a held lung, the silence of a town waiting to see what would happen next.

She climbed to the second floor. She stood outside Room 7. The door was ajar. She had closed it. She had closed it, and she had checked the latch, and she had pressed her thumb against the wood until the grain had bitten into her skin. The wood of the door was warm to her touch now. Warmer than the passage. Warmer than her own hand.

She pushed the door open.

Her bed had been slept in.

The sheets were not merely rumpled. They were not merely tossed aside by a restless sleeper. They were drawn up from the mattress in a perfect chrysalis shape, the cotton gathered at the foot and twisted into a tapering point, the pillow lifted and laid against the headboard as though the sleeper had risen with great care and replaced it precisely, the way a housekeeper replaces a cushion after a guest has gone. The shape was anatomically exact. It was the shape a body makes when it folds itself lengthwise and pulls the bedclothes over its head. It was the shape of the effigies on the tombs in the churchyard of St. Cuthbert's Marsh, the stone crusaders with their hands folded and their feet resting on stone lions, the stone mourners with their stone dogs at their stone feet.

Maren did not move.

In the wardrobe mirror, her own reflection was moving.

It was standing at the foot of the bed, where the chrysalis pointed, its hands folded across its stomach in the attitude of the stone mourners, its face turned toward her, its lips working. The candle on the washstand was lit. She had not lit it. The flame was steady, and by its light the reflection was sharp, and Maren could see the small movements of its mouth as clearly as she could see her own mouth still, closed, the lips pressed together, the jaw set.

The reflection was mouthing words.

It was mouthing them slowly, the way a child mouths a new word, shaping each syllable with exaggerated care. It was mouthing them, she realized, the way a thing that has just learned a mouth would mouth them.

She could not hear them. She could not tell what they were. But she could read the shape of them on the lips of the woman in the glass, the same woman, her own face, her own eyes, her own stubborn mouth, and the words the woman was shaping were three words long, and the first word began with her lips pressed together, and the second word opened at the middle, and the third word ended with her lips drawn back from her teeth.

The reflection stopped. The woman in the glass lifted one hand, slowly, and laid it against the surface of the mirror from the inside, the palm flat against the silver, the fingers spread. The hand left no print. The hand left a faint mist on the glass, the mist a body leaves on a cold window when it presses close.

Maren lifted her own hand.

She did not mean to. She did not choose to. The hand rose as though a thread ran from her wrist to the wrist in the glass, and she watched it rise, and she watched the reflection's hand rise, and the two palms came to rest against each other through the silver, and the glass between them was warm.

The words the woman had been mouthing repeated themselves. Once. A fourth time. A fifth. The same three words, over and over, the same three shapes of the mouth, the same three breaths drawn into the same three shapes. And on the sixth repetition Maren understood them.

Do not sleep.

She pulled her hand back. The reflection kept its palm flat against the glass for one heartbeat, two, then withdrew it slowly, then stood, then turned, then walked backward into the dark of the wardrobe behind her, the way a thing walks into water, the way a thing walks into fog, the feet moving, the shoulders moving, the eyes never leaving hers, until the dark of the wardrobe had taken her whole and the only thing left in the mirror was the room and the bed and the chrysalis of sheets and the steady flame of a candle she had not lit.

Maren sat on the floor.

She sat on the floor of Room 7 at the inn at Hollow Marsh and she breathed, and the candle burned, and the bed waited, and the wardrobe held its silence like a mouth holding a secret.

Somewhere below her, very far below her, in the cellar where Grimani sat with his phonograph and his iron key, a melody began again, the four notes repeated and varied, the tune the choir sang on the night of the equinox, the tune that had been sung for one hundred and seventy years, the tune the soil was now humming on its own, having learned it, having rehearsed it, having at last found the mouth to sing it back.

Maren did not sleep. She sat on the floor with her back against the door and her knees drawn up to her chest and she watched the mirror and the candle and the bed, and when dawn came grey through the window of Room 7, the sheets of her bed were still twisted into the shape of the effigies of St. Cuthbert's Marsh, and the wardrobe stood open in its corner, and the mirror held nothing but the room.

In the glass, very faintly, as though traced in the last film of frost before a window thaws, three words remained. They faded as the sun touched them, but Maren, who had been awake to watch them fade, read them once, clearly, before they went.

Do not sleep.

She rose. She folded her cloak. She packed her notebook into her satchel and her pen into her notebook and her compass into her satchel, and she went down the stairs of the Green, and she crossed the parlour where the chairs still stood in their ring, and she stepped out into the morning of Hollow Marsh.

The fog was thick. The mud was soft. The clock in the tower of St. Cuthbert's was striking five. Across the square, a light burned in the window above the printshop, and a shadow moved behind it, the shadow of a woman bent over a desk, writing.

Maren crossed the square. She knocked on the printshop door, three even knocks, the way a cartographer's apprentice knocks when she has come to deliver a finished plate.

The door opened. Lenna Ashcroft stood in the doorway with ink on her fingers and her hair pinned up and her mouth set in the line that meant she had been waiting all night, and her eyes, when they met her sister's, did not waver.

"You heard it," Lenna said.

"I heard it."

"Then you know."

"Yes."

Lenna stepped back. She left the door open. Behind her, the small press stood cold, and the forme was set, and the sheet that lay upon the marble was already inked, and the words on it were not the words of the broadside she had showed Maren yesterday.

They were the words the choir would sing on the night of the equinox, set in the old notation, the square notes on the four-line stave, the words the soil had learned, the words the answering voice had been rehearsing for one hundred and seventy years.

Lenna had printed them in advance so she could cross them out, one by one, on the night.

"Will it be enough?" Maren said.

"No," Lenna said. "It has never been enough."

"Then why do you do it?"

Lenna looked at her sister. The ink on her fingers was the ink of the broadside, the ink of the hymn, the ink of the hundred and seventy-one rehearsals, and her eyes were the eyes of the woman in the mirror, and her mouth was the mouth of the stone mourner, and when she answered, it was with the measured precision of a woman who has kept the line for ten years and will keep it for ten more.

"Because every verse we cross out is a verse the soil has to learn again," she said. "Because every season we delay the answering voice is a season we keep the door from being opened all the way. Because someone has to do it, and Father is gone, and Mother is gone, and there is no one left to do it but me."

She looked at Maren.

"There was no one but me," she said. "Until now."

The fog shifted in the square. The clock struck the quarter. Somewhere beneath their feet, very far beneath their feet, the soil of Hollow Marsh hummed a four-note melody to itself, patient, persistent, almost fond, the melody of a thing that has rehearsed a long time and knows at last that the chorus is coming.

Maren stepped into the printshop. She took the apron Lenna held out to her. She tied the strings behind her back. She set her shoulder to the press beside her sister, and the two of them, in the grey morning of Hollow Marsh, began to ink the forme for the next rehearsal, and the next, and the next, and the next after that, for as long as the door could be held, for as long as the verses could be crossed out, for as long as two sisters with ink on their fingers and the marsh at their heels could stand between the living and the dead and not sleep, not sleep, not sleep.