Sawyer N.

“I knew I’d find you down here.”

Anselm pauses, his hands trembling around the handle of his leather sattlebag. It’s the cold, he tells himself. It’s the dead of night, and the stone beneath his knees is damp. Slowly, he stands and turns to face the girl, slinging the bag over his shoulder.

“Princess,” he says with a bare nod, keeping his eyes low.

“‘Princess,’” the girl repeats. “I’d have thought we were a long way past that.”

Anselm swallows, reaching up to finger the bag’s frayed stitching. A single torch lights the deserted barracks, casting long shadows across the girl’s face. The weapons lining the walls sit in darkness, rows of bows and spears and shields, but her eyes catch the light easily. It’s drawn to her, Anselm thinks. He understands the pull innately. She stands with her arms crossed, a fluffy white dressing gown pulled tight around her shoulders, the silk slippers on her feet pristine despite the grungy damp that seeps up from the floor. It’s a challenge not to run to her, to drop his bag and forget why he’d come down here.

Anselm opens his mouth, closes it. He tries again: “Lyra, I—”

Lyra cocks her head, waiting. Dark brown curls fall over her shoulder with the motion, and whatever Anselm had been about to say dries up on his tongue.

“Your company ships out tomorrow. Early, as I understand it,” she says, filling the silence.

“I know,” Anselm says. His fingers tighten around the strap.

“Well, you should be asleep, not…” She throws her hands up in a vague gesture before they fall to her sides. “I know you must be nervous, but wandering in circles down here won’t fix that.”

She steps forward as she speaks, and Anselm takes a step back, the worn soles of his travelling shoes scuffing loudly against the floor. In the corner of his vision, he sees Lyra duck her head, trying to catch his eyes. There’s a crease between her brows, and her lips are pulled down in a frown so slight that only Anselm would notice it. God, how he’s noticed it again and again over the years, all the time he’s spent at her side. It’s the look he catches when he’s knelt beside her throne, the one that sits a level lower than the king’s. Lyra will cast it up at her father as he drones, carefully schooled, but knowing that Anselm will see. It’s the look she gets when she knows something is wrong, but can’t—or won’t—speak it.

“What are you doing, love?” Her voice goes soft. Anselm’s knees suddenly feel weak.

“I’m leaving,” he says, fighting to get the words out.

“You’re…” she stammers around the word, footsteps quick and light as she steps towards him, reaching to take his hands in hers. “No, you’re not. Don’t be ridiculous.” Her hands are warm and soft, the glide of her skin against his palms all-consuming. His fingers are lax in hers, even as her grip tightens. “I know you must be scared, I would be too, but you’re a fine knight. You’ll come home without a scratch, like you always do.”

Anselm finally forces his head up, pulling his hands away from Lyra’s. “Your father,” he spits the word out like a curse, “Is sending us south.”

She blinks, a small sigh slipping out as she gives an incredulous shake of her head. “Well, yes, he—”

“To Port Quall, Lyra.”

“Not this again, please,” she says, reaching for Anselm again. “It’s just to scare the insurgents off, it’s not like you’ll be massacring the population of your hometown.”

“Not the whole population, but enough of them,” Anselm retorts, pulling away. His face twists in barely-disguised disgust as he continues, “Do you really think we’re just going to put up some signs and patrol the streets?”

“I’m not stupid, Anselm!” Lyra shouts, her voice echoing around the empty chamber. She composes herself quickly, the way Anselm has watched her do again and again and again in throne rooms and war chambers. Quiet, poised, that slight disapproving frown. “If you don’t want to go, fine. I can pull some strings with my father and get you reassigned, you don’t have to elope in the middle of the night!”

Anselm drags his hands down his face as she speaks, taking two stumbling steps backwards and meeting the wall with a grunt. He flattens a hand to the stone and pushes himself back up, pacing forward and stopping just short of Lyra. She stands her ground, her stare unrelenting. “Please, Lyra,” he says, his voice shaking. His hands hover uselessly at his sides, itching to reach for her. But he can’t, he can’t, or he knows his resolve will crumble. “Go back to bed.”

“And wake up without you?” Lyra shakes her head. “I won’t. Anselm, you know I won’t.”

“Even if I’m reassigned, I’ll still be following his orders,” Anselm argues, desperation leaking into every word. He should just go, walk past her and up the stairs and out the doors. His bag slips from his shoulder, hitting the floor with a dull thump. “You know what he’s doing is wrong. My people are terrified. Everyone is terrified!”

“Be that as it may, you can’t abandon your post!” Lyra’s voice is growing desperate, the hard shadows pressing in around her. The torchlight jumps and flickers, the quiet cracks and pops as it burns down amplified a hundred times by the bare stone. “You can’t—”

“Lyra, please—”

“You can’t abandon me.”

She sways like a ghost in the dimming torchlight, a hand pressed to her chest. There’s barely two feet separating them. It would be so easy to reach for her, Anselm thinks, to pull her into his arms and hold her until morning. Anything to ease the pain in her eyes, to smooth the lines of her face and quell the trembling of her lip.

“I can’t stand complacent while your father sends us off to war,” he tries to explain. He thinks again of her subtle frown, the only discontent she’s ever shown. “I—I…Lyra, please, you know that he’s a tyrant. The people he calls insurgents have only been pushed so far by years and years of starvation and brutality at the hands of people like me, acting on his orders. I can’t—” his voice breaks and he tries desperately to swallow the lump in his throat. “I have to go home. I have to protect them.”

“So, what,” she says, pressing her lips into a hard line even as tears begin to clump her eyelashes together. “You love rebels and rioters more than you love me?”

The words hang, her tone too soft and pained for the violence that underlies them. Anselm feels a heat behind his eyes and he digs the heels of his hands into them, clenching his jaw so tightly that his teeth grind loudly against each other. Why hasn’t he left already, he wonders, despite knowing the answer with such surety it scares him.

“My mother lives in that town,” he chokes out. “My father, my sister.”

“They won’t be hurt if they’ve done nothing wrong,” Lyra says, her hands coming up slowly to pull Anselm’s hands from his face. Her eyes are there, waiting, brows drawn up as she leans close to him. She smells of the hard honey candies she favors, the ones she palms him when they can steal a rare moment alone. There’s a note of pleading when she continues, “I’ll make sure you don’t have to go. We can stay here.”

Her forehead touches his, her hands smooth and warm against his cheeks.

“This is why I wasn’t going to say goodbye,” Anselm says. His voice is so quiet he can’t be sure if he spoke the words out loud, or just thought them.

“So you wouldn’t hurt me?” Lyra says, a challenge, and Anselm flinches.

“I knew that…” He hesitates, a single tear cutting a path down his cheek and dripping from his chin. “If you asked me to stay, I wouldn’t be able to say no.”

He should go. Pick up his bag, up the stairs, out the door, to the stables, swing his legs over the back of his horse and start southward.

He hears her lips part. The quiet let of her breath as they fold around two words. “Then stay.”

Anselm shakes his head, reaching up to seize her wrists but not strong enough to pull them off. “That’s not fair, Lyra.”

“Isn’t it?” She argues, the heady weight of her against his forehead disappearing as she pulls his face up to meet her gaze. “Stay.”

“Stop it,” he begs, his hands shaking around her wrists. “I have to go. You know I have to go.”

“You must have known I’d find you,” she persists, her fingernails digging into Anselm’s skin. “I always find you. Isn’t there a part of you that hoped I would?”

Yes. A shameful, cowardly part of him, but a part all the same. He looks into her eyes now, held there by the white-knuckle grip she has him in. He couldn’t look away even if he wanted to.

“Come with me,” he blurts out, shocking even himself. Lyra’s face goes slack, her grip loosening. Before he can think, he’s rambling, stumbling over his words and fighting the onslaught of fat, ugly tears that thicken his voice. “I know you have your doubts, I always have. We could go together, we could warn the town, we—I could keep you safe. Think of it, Lyra, we could be together away from this place. You always find me, yes, so don’t chase me. You won’t have to sit up in that throne anymore. You—that look on your face, love, I see it every time. You don’t want this any more than I do. We can fix it together, we can—”

“Anselm!” Her interruption is sharp, the sudden withdrawal of her hands as she takes a step back leaving him cold and fragile. “What are you talking about? You know I can’t do that.”

“You…but, Lyra, you have to understand…” Anselm stammers, his voice weak.

“I’m not leaving, and neither are you,” she says. “I can’t abandon my family, and you would never abandon me. Come on, enough of this.” Her hand is around his bicep now, rougher than her touch has ever been. “We’re going back to bed.”

There’s a sharp tug on Anselm’s arm and he stumbles forward as Lyra starts to drag him towards the stairs. The torch on the wall has all but burnt out, the last dregs of fuel sputtering and spitting. The cut of her jaw seems so severe, suddenly, her eyes set even as the dying red light clings to the unshed tears in her waterline. Anselm’s own face is wet, he realizes, sticky with salt. When he darts his tongue out to wet his lips, the taste of it burns his throat.

“Do you love me, Lyra?”

She stops before the stairs, head tilted up towards the passageway. She does not turn to face him. “Of course I do,” she says. The incline of her head then is so slight that Anselm can only make out the corner of one eye, set deep above the soft slope of her cheekbone. A look he can’t return. “And you love me.”

Anselm’s free hand rises between them, hovering over Lyra’s hand on his arm. When it comes to rest, he can feel the flutter of her pulse beneath the pads of his fingers. It’s so cold down here. Was it always? Surely not, not in those days so long ago when Anselm and Lyra would sneak down after sunset, Lyra with candy in her pockets and Anselm with a blanket in his arms to spread out over the stones. Not during picnics they swore they’d one day hold in the sunlight, in the lush fields ringing the castle. Not when she’d kiss him here, his back pressed against the floor, her thumb tracing lazy circles over his collarbone. Not then.

“I have to go,” he whispers, his final appeal. “I’d take you with me. To the end of the world, I would.”

She still won’t turn. “You won’t leave me.”

Anselm thinks of Lyra as he’s always known her, her hair laid out like a halo as she lays back in the hidden corners where they’d lounge together, away from everything for moments that live like pieces of forever in his mind. He thinks then of Lyra sitting beside her father, back straight in her carved stone throne, inset with gems, never giving more than a frown while Anselm kneels silently beside her.

Lyra holds tight as Anselm moves to pull his arm away, her fingers leaving white marks in his ruddy, sun-leathered skin. With a final pull, he wrenches away from her, backtracking to pick up his saddlebag. The torch snuffs itself with little fanfare, what little light was left surrendering to the pressing darkness.

His footsteps are heavy as he walks towards the stairs. He makes it up three before he hears Lyra’s voice behind him.

“You’re a coward, Anselm.”

Anselm steadies himself with a breath, long and slow, and drags the back of his hand across his eyes.

There’s a light on in the barn. It falls in a single stream through rotting, gap-toothed slats of wood, cast red against the chipping paint of the second floor. The first must have been painted red once, too, but whether by wind and snow, the clawing mud that swells around the foundation like a river in the rain, or sun-bleach, the wood is more gum-pink at its base now. In the dark, with its wide sliding doors sealed tight and the bare glow of the single incandescent bulb a thready wash over the top of the doorframe, Beth can squint her eyes and almost imagine the second floor as a lonely, floating thing.

She turns to her husband in the driver’s seat, raises her voice over the grind of the wheels on the long gravel driveway, and says, “I thought your dad said the barn was a feature.”

Christian laughs, his face cast in the dim orange of the dashboard. “It’s been like, 40 years. It was probably pretty cool back then.”

“‘Back then,’” Beth mocks him light-heartedly. “He’s not that old.”

“Yeah, well,” Christian shrugs. “I think he’s just glad someone’s willing to take care of it. The last of the old neighbors moved out three months ago, or something like that. No one else is gonna be around until all the demolition is done.”

Beth narrows her eyes. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“That they’re tearing down the rest of the houses?” Christian casts a sideways glance at her. “Yeah, I did. The whole reason my dad sold it to us was so that he didn’t have to sell it to the contractors.”

“No, jackass,” Beth smacks him lightly on the shoulder. “That there’s no neighbors.”

“I thought it was implied,” Christian says.

Beth lets out a huff, eyes finding the rearview mirror. The trunk is packed with laundry baskets and the few stray boxes that didn't fit in the rented U-Haul, and there’s a stray fast food bag from that afternoon leaking a slow-spreading grease stain over the backseat. Beside it, strapped tight into a secondhand car seat, Pearl is still sleeping.

“Creeps me out,” Beth says absently, watching the slow rise and fall of Pearl’s chest. She’s been fast asleep for the last hour, like the perfect little thing she is. Always sleeping through the night, even when the night comes at the tail end of an exhausting six-hour road trip. She’s so still. So quiet.

Rise, and fall. Rise, and fall.

“Careful, she might stop breathing if you take your eyes off her,” Christian says.

Beth purses her lips, tapping her index finger three times against the jut of her collarbone. “Don’t say shit like that, Chris.”

“I’m joking,” he retorts. Beth can’t make out his face too well in the dingy darkness of the car, but she would bet money he’s rolling his eyes. Tap, tap, tap.

The car stops with a gentle rock forward and Christian shifts it into park, reaching up to drag his hands down his face. Something in Beth’s chest loosens, slightly. It’s been a long day for everyone.

Beyond the windshield, the house looms tall against the sky, hazy with the distant light of the half-built new subdivisions just barely visible beyond the craggy hill it sits on. Beth leans forward in her seat, finally dragging her eyes from Pearl to get a proper look.

The gravel driveway curves sharply just beyond where the car is stopped, opening into an unkempt front stoop paved in overgrown tiles. Onion grass and bent dandelion stems stretch up feebly between, reaching towards the headlights that throw their long shadows over the porch like it’s the first light they’ve seen in years.

And then, the house. A narrow, two-story affair that disappears at the sharp point of the roof into the starless navy above. The tall windows look into nothing, black cutouts in the peeling blue paneling that clings to the original brick below, spots of dusky red bleeding through where the headlights can reach them. The front door is a matching red, the screen in front of it blown open by some invisible wind. It rocks steadily against the outer wall, loose on its hinges. Bang. Bang. Bang. The mesh curls up at the corners, away from the frame. When Beth pushes the car door open, she can hear it rattling with every impact.

Her feet sink into the gravel as she skirts around the car to lift Pearl from her car seat, gingerly undoing the belts and cradling the baby to her chest. Still fast asleep. There’s a wash of relief that floods Beth when she can feel Pearl’s little breaths against her skin again, and she glances up at Christian, climbing the front steps with the single bronze key his father had handed them before they’d left.

She might stop breathing if you take your eyes off her.

Beth takes a measured breath, drumming her fingers against the soft fleece of Pearl’s sleeve. Tap, tap, tap.

It’s a simple matter of throwing down the air mattress on the first bit of floor they find and falling face-first onto it once they’re inside, leaving all the exploring for tomorrow. There’s a moment when Christian decides it’s worth half-heartedly fumbling around for a lightswitch, but he gives up quickly enough. The cavernous black inside is exactly as Beth saw it from the windows. Her eyes make no move to adjust, and she’s almost sure that whatever ancient, half-burned bulbs bulge from the ceiling would balk before it. Best just to sleep, they agree by shuffling under the blankets in silence, Pearl cradled between them.

For the first time, Pearl wakes at three.

She screams and the house shudders around her, throwing her cries from empty room to empty room as Beth wakes in a panic. A hand to Pearl’s chest, first, where her little heart flutters like a mouse’s, impossibly fast. Into Beth’s arms, then, where she curls her body around her little girl and shushes her softly. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Christian stirs briefly, Beth feels a pat on her shoulder and hears a mumbled thank you.

Pearl always sleeps through the night. Tap, tap, tap on the air mattress, Chris’s groggy complaints be damned. Tap, tap, tap, until she calms, cries stuttering and stilling in the empty air.

It’s oppressively silent, then.

Rise, and fall. Rise, and fall. Beth sits cross-legged on the bed until dawn, counting Pearl’s fitful breaths in patterns of three.

Unpacking is a slog. The house is a mess of hallways clothed in faded floral wallpaper (it may have once been multicolored, Beth muses—it’s yellowed now, flat like a game level that hasn’t rendered itself right), each so narrow that Beth can reach from one side to the other with bent arms. The doors bulge in their frames like they’ve grown out of them, swollen by humidity and the quick melts and freezes of early winter. Each opens outward into the hallways, fitting end-to-end in a way that cuts the hallway off completely until she can close it behind her. Sharp corners collect the dark, undeterred by the flimsy hanging lamps that speckle the plaster ceilings, and the windows do little to help, clouded and unwilling to open as they are. Beth makes a comment about replacing the lightbulbs. Christian doesn’t seem to hear in his single-minded focus to have the bedframes built before nightfall.

For the second time, Pearl wakes at three.

Her bedroom is at the far end of the second floor, where the roof slopes down so low that the outer wall rises maybe two feet. There’s a cedar cabinet set into the slope that they hadn’t been given the key for, so it sits empty. Beth can see the faded carvings on the door in her periphery as she reaches into the crib, dips and curls that make up nothing intelligible. Maybe it made sense once.

Pearl all but convulses as she sobs, and Beth slips a hand behind the baby’s head to hold her upright against her chest. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she recites, floorboards creaking with every bounce.

Chris is still dead asleep, despite the tinny cries through the baby monitor and Beth’s loud shuffling out of their bed. Beth holds Pearl out in front of her, head aching in pulsing time with each wail, and whispers,

“We don’t need daddy, do we, baby? No, no, just mommy and Pearl. Mommy and Pearl in our big old house, yeah?”

Tap, tap, tap, her heel on the moaning floor. Her fingers on Pearl’s back. Tap, tap, tap.

There’s a creak that Beth hears distantly, like a sound that only makes sense in a dream. The heavy clunk of a lock drawn out slow, the way someone does when they’re the first awake or the last to bed, loathe to be heard. It’s something in the light that closes that distance. Something that flits past the dim nightlight glowing from the outlet beside the crib, casting a long shadow over Pearl’s face. The still air shivers around Beth’s bare ankles, an intake of breath that the room blows out with a rattle. Something drops from the cracked door of the cedar cabinet, the soft impact of elbows and knees spit from its womb.

Tall as the wall that meets the fallen-in slope of the ceiling, bone-thin and five-fingered, colored like the room had pushed it from its walls too early, wet and wailing. It creeps forward silently on back-jointed legs, and the floor does not chastise it like it does Beth’s every step. The house holds its breath. The something belongs to it.

Beth turns her head. The cedar cabinet is closed, locked.

Pearl shrieks and Beth jumps, catching her own fingers white-knuckled around the soft fat of the baby’s arm. Each joint pops as she tears her hand away to pat gently on Pearl’s back.

“Just mommy and Pearl,” Beth whispers, and there is no echo. “Just mommy and Pearl.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Chris insists on exploring the barn. Beth follows out of marital obligation, perhaps, but she has no real interest in finding out what’s been left to rot behind those story-tall sliding doors. In the daylight, dim as it is through cloud cover, the thing looks taller than Beth thinks it should. Pearl is a firm weight on her chest, secured by a sling, when Chris yanks open the door with a grunt, the heady screech of the long-neglected tracks an ice pick to her skull.

It’s cold inside, despite the heavy mid-July humidity. The two-story look from the outside is a white lie, the walls stretching up unbidden to the sloped ceiling, cut halfway by a crumbling loft and the rickety pillars that bear it. What little light beams through the gaps in the wood pools in ruddy gray puddles on the ground, spearing motes of dust and long-dried hay kicked up by the door. Under the loft are stalls, wanting for horses or cattle, but met only by Beth’s wary eyes.

“It’s not safe to be out here, Chris,” Beth insists, her voice laden with exhaustion.

“You don’t have to come in,” Chris says. Mocking, mocking, mocking. His fingers run the length of the wall beside the door, curling around a low-set lightswitch. “I’m just gonna look around for a minute.” The buzz of the lights lags a moment too long after the metallic click of the switch, the grime-caked bulbs protesting the sudden arousal with a fitful, shivering flicker before flooding the barn.

It feels wrong to Beth, to put her back towards the house. The barn gapes like a creature gutted, the house standing above it. A creeping silence worms its way up her spine, even as Chris roots around in the hay, pulling up nails, a bottle cap, a pail with a rusted-out bite through its rim. Treasures. Spoils. Beth eyes him carefully, holding Pearl tighter to her skin.

The sharp crack of feedback knocks a gasp from her and Pearl starts, throwing her small hands into Beth’s breastbone once, twice, three times. A voice rings through the barn, warbling and cut through by static, like it can’t take in a full breath.

My girl, my girl, don’t you lie to me

Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines where the sun don’t ever shine

I would shiver the whole night through.

Pearl fusses and wriggles restlessly in her sling, swinging her fists with renewed fervor. Once, twice, three times. Thunk, thunk, thunk.

My husband was a hard workin’ man

Killed a mile and a half from here, what happened to him?

His head was found in a drivin’ wheel

And his body e’r never be found.

Beth takes a step back. Another. Another.

Chris turns to face her, face gashed halfway by a cutting shadow that wrestles itself between two rays of light. He trudges through the barn to the second in the line of stalls, disappearing behind the door.

The voice is abruptly silenced.

He reemerges a moment later with a small radio in his hands. The old kind, with antennae and a dial. This one, brown and rusted, with its threadbare cord swinging like a noose at Chris’s knee, is missing its dial. He laughs. He laughs. He laughs.

“Some asshole left this plugged in over there,” he says breezily. “Fuck, that got me.”

That got me.

Chris walked into the stall. The man walked out, looking like Chris, laughing like Chris. His lips stretch long over white teeth, the line of his gums showing. The same bled-out pink as the barn’s faded paint.

His head was found in a drivin’ wheel

And his body e’r never be found.

Beth stands just outside the barn, staring. Pearl whines in her sling. The man’s face shimmers and melts with the dust. The barn sits, gutted. The house stands above.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

For the third time, Pearl wakes at three.

Beth remembers walking through the silent house, down the hall, listening for footfalls that do not belong to her. She remembers the floors and their cries, hardwood like ice at her soles. She remembers watching, counting the rise and fall of Pearl’s chest in threes.

The hour changes, Pearl’s eyes peeling back with the click of the short hand, her howl in time with the barely-there lag of the long hand. Beth’s arms are around her before her first fitful inhale, pressing her silk-soft skin into her cheek. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Pearl kicks with all her might, little legs knocking wet hiccups from Beth’s lungs. She breathes, a trembling thing that the house copies in creaks and moans. Mocking, mocking, mocking. Tap, tap, tap.

The man is not awake, not yet. The house never sleeps. The scraping clunk of the cedar cabinet’s lock, the turning of a key nobody has, sends a paralyzing chill down her spine. The house thrums at her feet, a second heartbeat that buries itself in the gaps of her ribs. It pushes, a ripple through its wooden sinew with the strain, and something falls from the cedar cabinet. It is born seeing. Beth feels its breath on her legs. Pearl screams. Screams. Screams.

The man waits behind the door. Beth can hear his fingernails scraping against the tarnished bronze doorknob. She won’t look at the cedar cabinet. She looks to the door, and presses her back to the rail of the crib. The house will not lock him out. He was gutted with the barn. He stands in the stomach that she roils in. Mocking, mocking, mocking.

Her baby daughter does not belong to the House. She will not be gutted with the barn. The something reaches for her, fingers with too many joints at the round plane of her stomach. It is not tall enough to reach her. It is tall enough to try.

Tap, tap, tap.

The man stands in the doorway, his face dark where the nightlight will not go. He is tall enough to reach. He is not afraid to try.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

He steps into the light, gutted. The solid weight of her daughter in her arms lightens, lifts. It is reaching, He is reaching. Her cries melt and bleed with her daughter’s, fingernails digging for purchase. Her arms are empty. The house moans beneath her knees.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”