Chapter 27 The Underbarn

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 27. Written on horseback, badly. Subject's location: unknown. Subject's farm: one day east of me. I have never wanted to be somewhere so much in my life. I do not know what to do with that, so I am writing it down. H.Q.

The chooks were fine.

That was the first thing I saw, coming up the track in the grey of the morning. Marsh Hold looked like a giant had walked over it. The fences were gone, every one, down to the post-holes, as if they'd never been. The vegetable garden was trampled flat. The smokehouse door was hanging off. There were long white scars across the home paddock where something had dragged itself through the grass.

But the chook shed was standing. The door was still propped open with the sack, and the sack was still glowing, faint and gold, forty-odd pretty rocks worth four thousand crowns each holding a door open for thirty-one hens. And when I came round the corner of the house, Bastard came out of the shed, and stood on the step, and looked at me, and crowed.

Whatever had come up out of the barn, it hadn't gone near that sack. I don't know why. I'll have to ask someone, one day.

The house was all right. The door was shut. Mum's apple tree was all right. Dad's grave under it was all right.

I stood at the grave a while. I didn't say anything out loud. I didn't need to. He'd have known.

Then I went to the barn.

* * *

There wasn't much barn left. The roof was on, just, sagging in the middle. The doors were gone, the new hinges and all, torn off and lying in the yard. And inside, where the floor had been, there was a hole.

It was round, as wide as a cart, with edges that were burned black and smooth, like glass. Warm air came up out of it, hot even, like standing at the mouth of a bread oven. And from down below, a long way down, came a red light, slow and dull, pulsing. Like a heartbeat.

The plank I'd nailed over the drain was lying against the back wall in two pieces.

I stood at the lip and looked down.

There were steps. That surprised me. Not steps someone had cut. Roots, great twisted roots as thick as my leg, going down the side of the shaft in a spiral, like the stairs in a tower. Down and down and round, out of sight, towards the red.

The cleaver was humming.

I'd noticed it on the track, coming up. A feeling more than a sound, coming through the harness into my back. Like a cat purring against your chest. It had got stronger as I came into the yard, and now, at the edge of the hole, it was so strong I could feel it in my teeth. The itch between my shoulders had gone. Completely. For the first time since I'd walked off down the track five weeks ago.

I unslung it and held it in my hand and looked at it.

It was the same old cleaver. Dark handle, worn to my grip. Nicks along the back of the blade where Grandad knocked bone out of it. The brass Guild tag still on its string through the hole. CLEAVER, BUTCHER'S, ONE.

It was humming like a hive.

"All right," I said to it. "All right. I'm going."

* * *

It took a long time to get down. I stopped counting after the first thousand steps.

The roots went down and the shaft went down with them, and the air got hotter, and the red light got brighter. The walls of the shaft weren't earth after a while. They were stone, and then they weren't stone either, they were something black and smooth that gave off its own faint warmth. And then there were marks on it.

I stopped and looked at them.

They were carved. Old, very old, worn nearly smooth. But you could make them out, in the red light, if you put your hand on them. Lines and circles, like a pattern for a fence. And in among them, here and there, cut deep, a shape I knew.

A cleaver.

Not this cleaver. Older. Different. But a cleaver, a broad-bladed chopper with a hole in the handle for hanging. Carved into the black stone over and over, all the way down. And beside each one, two short straight lines. Two marks. Like a man stamping twice on a floor.

Somebody had been down here before me. A long time before. More than one somebody.

I thought about Mag on the gate. The Marsh men have held it shut a long time.

I kept going.

* * *

The bottom of the shaft opened out into a cavern so big I couldn't see the far side of it.

It was lit from the middle. That's where the red light came from. In the middle of the cavern, floating about a man's height off the black floor, there was a crack. Not in the floor. Not in the wall. In the air. A long jagged split, taller than a house, as if somebody had taken a knife to the world and cut it open, and the cut had never healed. The edges of it glowed red. Through it, you could see something else. Not dark. Worse than dark. A sort of moving nothing, like the inside of a shut eye, that made your head hurt to look at.

Things were coming through it.

Not many. Not fast. A big rat, half out, scrabbling at the lip of the crack with its front claws. A screamy one, drifting. A swarm of fence-chewers pouring out over the edge like iron filings off a magnet. They were coming through slowly, one at a time, the way water comes through a crack in a dam before the dam goes.

This copy was taken from www. without the author's approval; the chapter on NovelPhoenix supports its creator.

The cleaver hummed so loud I could hear it now. A low, steady note, like a bell that's been rung and never stopped.

I went to work.

* * *

I don't know how long I fought down there. There was no sun, and no time. I killed the big rat, the trick with the seam, the way Dad taught me. I killed the screamy ones and the chewers and other things I didn't have names for, things like cats made of glass, things like eels with too many mouths. They kept coming. I kept killing them. The cleaver didn't get tired and neither did I.

But the crack didn't get smaller. That was the thing. However many I killed, the crack stayed exactly the same size, and things kept coming through, and I couldn't see how to make it stop.

I was standing in front of it with the cleaver up, waiting for the next one, when something knocked.

Three times. Slow. Patient. From the other side of the crack, from inside the moving nothing.

The way you'd knock on a door when you knew somebody was home.

Then a hand came through.

* * *

It was a woman's hand, long and slender, the colour of a coal that's just stopped burning, dark red going to black, with cracks in it where the light showed through. It took hold of the edge of the crack, the way you'd take hold of a door frame, and pulled.

And she stepped out.

She was tall. Taller than me. She had the shape of a woman, a strong one, long legs and wide shoulders, but she wasn't made of anything a woman's made of. She was made of what looked like cooling lava, black on the outside and glowing red in the cracks, and where she moved the cracks shifted and the light ran through them. Her hair was long and pale, white or silver, and it moved round her head as if she were underwater. Her eyes were gold. The same gold as the pretty rocks. The same slow light, moving inside like honey.

She looked at me. She looked at the cleaver in my hand.

And her face split into the biggest grin I've ever seen on anything.

"YOU," she said.

Her voice was deep and bright and rang off the walls of the cavern like a bell.

"It's you. It's YOU. The stamper." She came towards me, fast, and stopped about two paces off, and leaned in and looked at me from about a foot away, up and down, the way Brakka had in the Drowned Man. "Stamp stamp. Every time. Every single time. Stamp stamp, on the floor, after. Seventeen years, stamp stamp." She laughed. It was a huge laugh, a delighted one. "I've been knocking for SEVENTEEN YEARS. Do you know how rude it is, not answering the door for seventeen years?"

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't know it was a door."

She stared at me. Then she laughed again, so hard she bent over.

"Didn't know it was a door," she said, when she could talk. "Oh, I like you. I knew I would. I said, I'll like him, when I finally meet him. Everything I sent up, you sent back down in pieces. Everything. The big ones, the small ones, the screamy ones. Even the tall one, the one with all the angles, the one even I was scared of, and you sent that back in pieces too." She straightened up. "Do you know how long I've wanted a proper fight? A real one? Against something that can actually fight back?"

"You sent the rats up?"

"Some of them. Some of them came on their own. Things are always trying to get through." She waved a hand at the crack behind her. "There's a lot of things on the other side. Big things. Hungry things. I'm the smallest of the big ones." She grinned. "But I'm the only one who ever knocked."

"Who are you?"

"Wrenna," she said. "I think. It's the closest your mouth can get." She tilted her head. "Who are you?"

"Tobin Marsh."

"Tobin Marsh." She said it slowly, tasting it. "And what's that?" She pointed at the cleaver. "That. In your hand. It sings. I've been hearing it sing through the floor since you were small. What's its name?"

I looked down at it.

I hadn't thought about its name in years. Since Grandad, really. He'd named it the night I first picked it up, the night it cut my hand, sitting me down by the fire with my palm wrapped in a rag. He'd looked at it for a long time, lying on the table between us, and then he'd laughed, the way you laugh when something's too big to do anything else with.

"Gristle," I said. "Grandad called it Gristle. It was a joke. Because it's the bit you can't cut through, he said. The bit you have to work round." I turned it in my hand. "I never called it anything. It was just the cleaver."

The humming changed.

It went up, and then deeper, and the whole cavern rang with it, like a bell the size of a church. The red edges of the crack in the air flickered. The things on the other side of it, the moving nothing, drew back.

Wrenna's grin went wider.

"Gristle," she said. "Oh, that's good. That's very good. It likes that. Listen to it."

I listened. It did. It sounded like it had been waiting a long time for someone to say it.

* * *

She wanted to fight me. She said so. She said she'd waited seventeen years and she wasn't waiting a moment longer, and she came at me with both hands, fast as a big rat, faster.

And for a while, down there in the red light, we fought.

It wasn't like the rats. It wasn't like anything. She was strong. She was the strongest thing I'd ever put my hands on, stronger than the walking haystack, stronger than the thing with the angles that broke the barn. She hit me and I went back three steps, and that had never happened. I hit her with the flat of the cleaver and she went back four, laughing, with a long red crack across her shoulder, and came straight back in.

We went round and round in front of the crack. Things tried to come through behind her and she kicked them back without looking, like a cow kicking a dog. Things tried to come through behind me and I put them down without looking either. And she laughed the whole time, and after a while, I found I was laughing too. I don't know why. It was the first time I'd ever fought something that fought back properly. It was like the first time you swim in deep water and find out you float.

Then, in the middle of it, something on the other side of the crack moved.

Something very big.

Wrenna stopped. Her face changed. All the laughter went out of it at once.

"Oh no," she said. "Oh, no, not now. Not when I'm having fun."

The crack in the air began to widen.

Slowly. A finger's width. A hand's width. The red edges pulling apart, and through the gap, in the moving nothing, something vast turning towards us, like a whale turning in deep water.

"What is it?"

"The reason I knock," said Wrenna. "It's been waiting for the seal to go. Now it has. It's coming." She looked at me. "Your cleaver's the key. Gristle. It's made of the same stuff as the door. Your family's been using it to hold the door shut for a very long time. Hung up above it, every night, while you slept." She grabbed my arm. Her hand was hot as a stove. "But the seal's broken now. It broke when you took Gristle away. Holding it isn't enough any more. You've got to lock it again."

"How?"

"Up top," she said. "At the lip. Where it started. You put Gristle in the lock and you turn it." She shoved me towards the root stairs. "I'll hold this end. I can hold it a while. Not forever. Go."

"You'll come up?"

"Oh, I'm coming up." The grin came back, fierce. "You owe me a rematch."

* * *

The climb up was the longest of my life. I don't know how long it took. The root stairs went round and round and up and up, and the air got cooler, and the red light dropped away below, and above me the circle of daylight at the top of the shaft got bigger and bigger.

Only it wasn't daylight.

It was firelight. Torches. A lot of them. All round the lip of the hole.

I came up the last turn of the roots and put my hand on the burned edge of the barn floor and looked over it.

The barn was full of men. Men in grey, with cloths over their faces. Men with crossbows. Two big wagons backed up to the barn doors, with their canvas off, and in the wagons, piled up, iron collars, dozens of them, each with a crystal set in the front glowing dirty yellow.

And standing over the hole, in a long black coat with a silver tower on a chain round his neck, looking down at me with an expression of mild, polite interest, there was a tall thin man with grey hair.

Beside him, in white and gold, was Sir Gareth Vantrell.

"Ah," said the tall man. "Mister Marsh. We've been waiting for you since yesterday. You've been down there four days, did you know?"