Engines of the Broken World (3 page)

“The Minister wants in,” I said softly. In the dim light, I could barely see Gospel, could barely tell he was pacing over to my bedside. His shoulders and head were above the level of my body, and he rested one hand on the frame that held my mattress.

“I know it does. That’s why I kept it out. It wants to hear everything we say, Merce. And maybe I don’t want it to hear every word I’ve got to say to you.”

“You already said you want to run away while it was there, right in front of us. What’s worse?”

He breathed out slowly, completely. “There is worse, Merciful. And I got to tell you, because I can’t tell anybody else. And I don’t want that made thing to hear, because who knows why it was made?”

“It was made to keep us on the righteous path, the path of goodness, and to tend to us, body and soul.” It was what we were taught, and it was what I was supposed to say, and I even think I believed it, most often.

The scratching was almost frantic now, but the door was sturdy wood, and there was no way the Minister was going to get in.

“Come and sit on the bed, away from the door, and we’ll talk. I got a lot to tell you. You’re clever, Merciful, and I want to hear what you think.” He stepped back and flopped onto the big bed, crawling over and away toward the headboard, and then settled down where the light was a tiny bit better, sitting cross-legged, with his hair falling into his face like it always did.

I didn’t want to move, finally getting a little warm, and not wanting to hear whatever cockamamie nonsense Gospel was about to spew out. But he was my brother, and my mother had just died. I had no one else, so I went to listen to him speak, quilts wrapped around my shoulders, on the bed that was almost still warm from the dead woman.

T
HREE

I dragged the tails of quilts over the wooden floor to the head of the bed. Gospel had set himself on the fire side of things so he would be a little warmer, but I had my pile of covers, which meant that would even out. I wished it were switched, though: him all used to spending nights up trees and whatnot, and me a girl who went to milk the goats in the summer mornings and shivered for the chill of it. The Minister scratched something awful as the quilts hissed along the ground, like maybe it thought I was coming to open the door and let it in, or maybe it just realized what we were doing, talking about things it wouldn’t like. The Minister heard very well, I knew that much from times when I’d tried to sass it under my breath. I hadn’t got anywhere with that, for it would turn its head right quick and tell me what was what.

“We have to be quiet,” I said as I sat down on a pillow, leaning against the headboard that my father had carved before he asked my mother to marry him.

“I know,” Gospel breathed. “The Minister’s got a lot of problems, but hearing isn’t one of them. Whatever they did when they made it, the ears got a lot of it.”

“So what do you have to tell me?”

I couldn’t see his face at all, could only see the wings of his hair in silhouette from the embers in the hearth, and I couldn’t tell what his face was doing, what emotions he was running through in the silence that followed, but I could almost feel that he was suffering through something just then. I didn’t reach out to him, because he didn’t like me, and didn’t like to be touched, and maybe I didn’t want to touch him anyway. Not that kind of family, I suppose. It hadn’t been for years and years.

“You know how I said that I had gone here and there, seen this and that? Just now, I mean; not all the time, but what I told you out in the sitting room?” It came in slow bits and bobs, tiny gasps of words that forced themselves out past some trouble within him.

“Yeah, I remember. The Hollows, and Windblown Ridge, and up and down the river.”

“Uh-huh. I done that, it’s true. I went every which way. And I saw just what I said. Only something else, too.…” And he fell totally still and silent, and turned to look at the door, so that I could see his profile, the hooked nose and the strong chin, sharp against the light. He sighed out a full breath. “There’s an end to things, Merciful. Not like when you die or when a storybook stops. I mean an end.”

“What sort of end?” I didn’t know what he meant that was different from dying, but he was scaring me a little.

“The first time I went all the far way down the river was two years past, and I went just as far as I said, three days down into the dry country, where the trees don’t grow no more. But there used to be farms—you can see the fences still, though it’s nothing but weeds. Or, you could see the fences. You can’t see anything anymore, now.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not there anymore, least as far as I can reckon. There’s something, maybe, but you can’t tell.”

“What nonsense are you trying to scare me with, Gospel?” I hissed, and drew up the quilt around me not for the warmth, though I wanted that, too, but because the shivery feeling that I got thinking of Mama lying there dead was only getting worse from my brother’s tales.

“It’s not nonsense!” he said, only as loud as real talking, but it seemed terrible as thunder after all the whisper and quiet of the night, and there came a single slow scratch from the door that made both me and him stare at it. “It’s not,” he said, whispering again. There’s nothing there anymore, just mist. Mist and cold and a feeling like you’ve died, and I couldn’t dare to walk into it. And last year, in the summer, when I went down the river, I could barely go a day and a half. I walk faster, and my legs are longer, so maybe two days it would’ve been, the first time. But still, nothing.”

“So it was foggy,” I said. “Fogs come up sometimes, and then they go away. Did you wait?”

“Did I wait? Yeah, I waited. And the next morning, the fog was over me, and it was cold, and the ground didn’t seem like much, like the rocks were worn down and the grass was faded and brittle. There weren’t no sun at all, not even through the mist like you’d think you might see, only a glow like moonlight on snow, and I got out of there right away. And this summer … this summer, Merciful, not three months gone, I went down the river and there was fog a few hours away, the same damned cold fog.” I gasped because he’d sworn. Oh, I knew he did it, and I’d heard it a time or two before, but it was always to make me blush. This was different: just a swear like it was a way to talk. I’d only heard the words used that way by Mama, and only when she was at her worst. “And there was that same feeling like death,” Gospel continued, “and that’s all that’s out there, every direction. I’ve checked, Merciful, and there’s not a damned thing in
any
direction.”

“But … I don’t understand.”

“Hell, I don’t understand it either. Don’t matter if we do. There’s just the fog, and by now I don’t know how close or how far away it is. Probably it’s right over the hills, so we can’t see it, or maybe even closer. With the snow falling would we notice at all, do you think?” He sighed and leaned back against the headboard, his face close to mine. “I think it’s the end, Merce. I think it’s the end of everything, that fog, and we’re really all that’s left, for however long until it gets here.”

“It can’t be everywhere in the world, Gospel. It just can’t.”

“Yeah, well. They say the world’s a big place, so you may be right, but it sure as heck is everywhere around
us
.”

“Maybe we can walk through it and get to the other side,” I said, though I didn’t really much care for the idea.

“I thought you didn’t want to leave?”

“I don’t. But we got to, right? There’s no staying here, if this fog is coming.”

He was quiet for a while, and it was warm and almost totally dark and the only real sound was the hissing of snow outside, faint and soft. My mind wandered a minute, half into dreams and memories, mostly about Mama. I think I drifted off then for a bit. Probably Gospel did as well, because both of us shot up full of startlement when the next scratch came, this one long and loud and rattling.

I had put my hand to my mouth to keep from crying out. Gospel fumbled to take my other hand in the darkness that had grown more intense since I’d closed my eyes a moment before.

“That wasn’t the Minister, was it?” he asked.

“It sounded like it ran down almost the whole door. I don’t think it was the Minister, no.”

“Then what was it?”

I didn’t say it, but I could only think of one thing, which was Mama’s painted nails, and how we should’ve buried her even if it took all night and got the both of us sick to death. I thought of that, but I didn’t say it, because it seemed silly and childish to believe in ghosts, and I didn’t want Gospel to laugh at me. “Do you think something got into the house?” was what I did say.

“Like a bear or something? They wouldn’t scratch like that, I don’t believe. And we’d hear it moving about, I bet. Do you hear anything moving around out there?”

I listened hard for a moment, but I could only hear my own breaths, quiet but sharp as birds’ beaks. I was scared, very nearly out of my wits, and I supposed Gospel wasn’t much better but had to play it off because he was older and a boy, while I was just a girl and could work myself into a fit for terror if I wanted.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said after a moment.

“Me neither. So what do you think it was?”

But I still didn’t say. I didn’t say in case saying made it so. I just held his hand in mine and sat in the dark and hoped whatever it was would go away.

A couple minutes passed, or at least I thought it was a couple minutes. Gospel took his hand away and slid off the bed, quietly but not silent. I guess he wasn’t trying to be all that quiet because he tossed a couple of logs onto the embers and stirred them up. I kept my eyes on the door, waiting for something to come through—a deer or a bear or something more horrible—and all I could think was that I’d see her toe first, the one that stuck out of the hole in her sock, but nothing opened the door. The wood flared up almost at once, dry as a bone and ready to burn, and the room got lighter and less scary right away. Gospel took the poker in his hand and walked around to the door, while I just sat still on the bed, useless in my pile of quilts. I was that scared, though. I couldn’t move, couldn’t barely even speak, though I tried when he touched the handle, tried to call out to him not to open it and let in whatever horror might be on the other side, but all that came out was a little squeak that he didn’t pay any mind to.

He pushed open the door. It was dark out there, dark and quiet, and then I screamed when I saw something rush to him and past him, into the room, but it was only the Minister, tail puffed out and eyes wide with what I could have sworn was fear, for just a moment. But then, settled right before me, it looked normal again.

Gospel had swung the poker down at the Minister, though I didn’t know if he knew what he was swinging at, and it didn’t much matter because he had missed, so fast was the thing at getting up onto the bed.

“Did you do that scratching?” Gospel asked, not even looking at us, still peering out into the room beyond.

“You shouldn’t have closed the door,” the Minister said, looking up at me as if I was the one who had done it.

“It was Gospel’s idea.”

“Why did you close the door, Gospel?”

“It’s cold, Minister. I’m just trying to keep all the heat in here instead of losing it out into the house.”

“You should have let me in.”

Gospel turned back finally. “You don’t need any heat, Minister. I know that for certain sure. So you were fine out there, doing whatever it was you were doing while I was sleeping earlier.”

“It’s not right to shut me out, children.” And then the thing wouldn’t say anything more at all. It closed its eyes and rested its head down on soft gray paws and for all the world looked like a sleeping cat—though, just as it didn’t feel the cold, it didn’t need to sleep. Not that I’d ever seen. It was listening still, with those clever ears, and it would hear everything we said now. I was starting to think that somehow it had gotten up higher to scratch the door the way we heard, just to get us to open it for curiosity’s sake. And we did just what it wanted, I expected.

Gospel looked mad at himself in a way that told me he was thinking about the same thing, but we both knew there was nothing for it. The Minister was right there, and while we could shut the door on it, we neither of us would dare to lay hands on the thing and put it out. Some things just weren’t done.

My brother reached out to the handle and started to pull the door closed, this time really to keep in the heat, I suppose. He almost paused when he heard me gasp, a sudden sharp intake, but I gestured for him to hurry and tried to make it look like I was shivering from the cold.

But it wasn’t the cold, and the gasp had a reason. Or maybe not. I was almost worked up to a fit, so maybe I was just seeing things. But I almost would’ve sworn on the Good Book that I saw something, something like a shadow of a person, dim and uncertain, at the far side of the sitting room where the kitchen doorway was, and I remembered that the Minister had seemed afraid. Probably I was just imagining things, but maybe I wasn’t. And since there wasn’t anything we could do about it at night anyway, and since the door seemed good enough to keep out anything that was scratching at it, I didn’t say anything.

But I should have, with all the trouble that later came.

F
OUR

The light through the window wasn’t sun, so I guessed it had gotten to be daytime but was still storming outside. Gospel was asleep in the big bed. I climbed out of my own bed and went to look, pushing back the curtains of the window and wiping condensation off the pane. I could see almost nothing but white outside. The snow was still falling at a steady pace, and I guessed there was close on two feet of it piled up. The trees across the garden were bent under the masses that covered them, so that just a few needles stuck out, green and lonely, and some parts of the trunks, which looked like muddy stripes on a clean sheet.

It was morning, and I didn’t see any better how we were going to bury Mama. Even under the trees there was snow; not as much, maybe, but it had been falling too long and hard for there to be none. And it felt colder, or at least my fingers pressed to the panes were chilled through at once, and my breath made the world outside vanish.