Engines of the Broken World (8 page)

Gospel took aside the chair, setting it back in the corner where it normally rested, and looked to me. I wasn’t sure how I’d ended up running things, but I supposed that was because I heard the sounds. Since I’d noticed Mama up and moving, I was the one with experience, same as Gospel’d be in charge and no questions if it were a hunt. So I nodded to him, and he took a moment to start up a lamp, his hands steady like I didn’t reckon mine would have been. Then he gripped the hatch and flipped it against the wall. He started down with me following and Jenny bringing up the rear. The Minister didn’t even come close, like I thought it wouldn’t. It only paced and padded next to the far edge of the table with its head down, whining faintly in the back of its throat. I didn’t think to ever see the Minister so obviously afraid, but I guess with the end of the world approaching all things were possible.

The light didn’t seem so very bright in the cellar, but it was enough to make out the piles of wood and the barrels for keeping potatoes and apples in and the onions hanging from the rafters, now joined by the chickens head down and two goats strung up by their feet. It was a sight to give me the shudders. Still on the floor was Mama’s body wrapped up in the good sheet, only now it seemed like we’d laid her out as a piece of meat just like the animals hanging down above her. The body seemed not to have stirred at all. Gospel went to stand by it, and I came to hover next to him. Jenny kept on the bottom step, not moving into the cellar proper at all, and I didn’t blame her a bit. If I’d been through half what she had I’d be upstairs crying and holding onto the Minister and wouldn’t let a soul lay any blame on me for it.

“Well … it’s still right here,” Gospel said in barely more than a whisper. “Wrapped up, even. I don’t think anything was climbing on the stairs.”

“But I heard the steps creak,” I said. It sounded stupid and childish even to me when I said it.

“Yeah. It’s an old house, and the weather changed so fast I’m not surprised some things are creaking. But it’s not Mama, Merciful.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” I said, and poked him in the side. Inside his words I could tell he meant maybe I was going a little crazy, just like Mama had, and I didn’t like that at all. “You’re mean and hateful, Gospel Truth, and I don’t know why I even put up with you.”

“You won’t have to for much longer,” Jenny said from the steps, and Gospel said pretty much the same at the same time, and that was a sad thing to think on, so we were all quiet for a minute.

“The Minister’s scared of coming down here,” I said. “You noticed that, right?”

“I noticed it didn’t come down. But maybe it just doesn’t like to disrespect the dead.”

“I tell you it’s scared, Gospel. Jenny, did you notice?”

“My girl, you’re the one living with the danged thing all the time, and you’d know better than me, I should think.” She was breathing really shallow breaths, like she didn’t like the smell down here or something. “I’m going back up. You two can figure out what to do with your mama there on your own time.” She turned and took one step, but then paused. “Do you hear that?”

I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, and I looked and saw Gospel was as confused as me.

“Must be the missing ear. Thought I heard a song.
Hush little baby
 … that one. You know it?”

I gasped and felt faint, leaning into Gospel.

“Our mama used to sing it,” he said.

“I don’t hear it anymore. Just one moment, I guess. Probably I used to have it sung to me, too, when I was a sprout. I’m hearing all sorts of things I used to hear, now that my ear is gone. Or else I’m going crazy like…” And she didn’t say it, but we both knew who she meant: our mama, and it was so awkward that she hurried up the stairs.

“I heard Mama sing that song while you were gone,” I said to Gospel. I hadn’t told him—I’d been afraid of what he’d think.

His mouth ticked up sideways, and I knew he wasn’t happy with me. “You did? Did you see her?”

I shook my head, even though maybe I had seen her in Papa’s chair, but I didn’t know for sure. “She’s about, though, all the same. Maybe a ghost, because we ain’t got her in the ground.”

Gospel shook his head. “There’s no ghosts, Merciful. That’s only kids’ stories. You’re probably just missing her something fierce.”

“I want to unwrap her.”

“Well I don’t. So let’s just go upstairs and have some supper and figure out what to do about this damned fog.”

“You watch your mouth, Gospel, and cut out that cursing. There’s no one to care if you’re trying to act like a man, let me tell you. And I’m going to unwrap Mama and take a look, whether you believe me or not.”

“Fine. Here’s the lamp. Come up when you’re done.” He set down the lamp and almost jumped onto the steps, climbing them two at a time though his legs weren’t really quite long enough. I didn’t care none that he was gone, anyhow, because he didn’t believe me and he wouldn’t help me. I didn’t know how, but I knew it was important that Mama was singing, that she was moving about, whatever she was doing. Purely terrifying, but important. I knew there would be some kind of sign that she had gone about, if only I could find it. And if I didn’t faint dead away, I thought as I leaned in real close to where her feet were wrapped up.

With just the tip of my thumb and pointer I reached for the fold of the cloth there. I was breathing fast and shallow and thinking that the body would move, that she would move even before I touched her, but it didn’t happen. I got the edge of the sheet in my hand, and I pulled it down and then flipped it away from her legs.

And there it was, clear as day. There it was. Dirt on the bottom of her socks, both of them: the freshly darned one that I knew was clean or the Widow wouldn’t have put it back on, and the other; both of them dirty from the floor of the cellar.

My mama had been walking around.

But it didn’t make me feel good to be right. It made me feel terribly alone and afraid because I was down here by myself, and there was a body that maybe didn’t want to stay put not a foot away from where I crouched down. The lantern that was throwing light over me and the little puddle of glow from upstairs were the only two things making me not just scream and run off or fall down dead.

The light flickered something wild, as if there was a wind. The sheet was billowing, and the body began moving, and I meant to scream, only a hand clamped down over my mouth, a hand cold and growing too soft, and a voice whispered in my ear, “
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, you know your mama was born to die
.”

N
INE

I could hear Gospel and Jenny talking upstairs, knew they were so close they could rescue me, but it was too late. She had me, maybe had always wanted me from the first time she stirred. I could feel tears on my cheeks, could hear my own faint sobbing, but she just drew the sheet up and around us. I smelled her and only her, the smell of the dead woman going a little bad now, and in the dimness she hummed the lullaby on and on while I wept silently.

Gospel would come down eventually, I knew he would. He would come down and he would see and he’d rescue me. He had to. But he didn’t.

The humming continued, and after a while I found that I wasn’t as scared anymore, that it was almost like being held in Mama’s lap as a little child. Back then it had been me quiet and her humming while she braided my hair or knitted, or later, her just humming and nothing else, because it was something she could still do with her eyes closed to shut out the worst of the world. Now I stopped crying, and though I was still stiff with fear, it wasn’t as bad as it had been.

“Are you ready to listen to me, Merciful?” Mama whispered inside the stuffy tent of the sheet. I could tell my own breath was making it that way, because it wasn’t her. She was a wrapping of cold all about me, even her hand on my mouth still chilly to touch.

I nodded, and she moved her hand just a little away from my mouth so I could take a deep breath. I coughed from the stench, for sure as sin she smelled a bit.

“I don’t know how exactly to begin. I don’t know how well you’ll understand.” It was Mama’s voice but not Mama’s words, not the way she said things. “Do you know yet that the world is dying?”

“Yes, Mama.”

I felt cold air exhaled on my neck, and I guessed the body had sighed. “I’m not actually your mama. I suppose I’m close enough, but not quite. Your mama, she died, just like you thought she did. But I
could
be her, nearly.”

“Are you Mama or not?” And I felt like crying again when I said it, since I had only stopped because it was my mama right here, even if she was dead.

“I’m not doing very well, am I?” And that sounded like Mama, if not in the way she said it, then in
what
she said. She used to most times think she was messing things up, even when, as usual, she was doing well. But this Mama, she wasn’t making any sense. Upstairs the floorboards creaked a little as Gospel and Jenny moved around, and I was torn between wishing they’d come down and save me and praying they’d leave me be just a little longer. I don’t expect it happened very often that a girl got to be with her mama after she’d given up all hope of it.

“Let me try a different way. I’m Rebekkah Truth, just like your mama, only I’m Rebekkah from a different place—like a storybook Rebekkah. I knew your mama, because I could’ve been her. And when she died, I … I found out I could put my mind into her body.”

“Are you an angel?” It sounded a little silly to say, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any other way a person could not be the person they were, except to be an angel. The Minister said more than once that angels could come down to us from Heaven and do all sorts of wondrous things, but I never had been too clear on what such a thing was supposed to look like.

She laughed a strange kind of choking laugh and then hugged me tight. “Oh, Merciful, I wish. I really do wish I was an angel. If it helps, think of me that way and think of me as your mother, but I’m not really either. I know a lot about your mother, though. I’m like her twin sister, I guess.”

“So you’re … my auntie?”

“If you like.” She hugged me tight for a moment longer, the cool softness of her arms a little unpleasant, but I could pretend it was really my mama for a minute. “You’re going to have to be a brave girl, because I need you to do a very important thing. I know why things are going wrong here.”

“Do you mean the fog? And the cold and snow?”

“If that’s what it seems to be, then yes, the fog. My mind is here, as I said, but this body, it’s not mine. Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m in it, and not just dreaming all of this. But I think I’m really here, really holding on to you.”

“Of course you are,” I said.

Another cool sigh. “Yes. I must be. I don’t see everything the way you do, so I can’t be very clear, maybe. But I know what’s making it happen. And if you can shut off the thing that’s making it go bad, it’ll stop, and your world will … well, I think it’ll get better.”

“Shut off what? What’s making the fog?” Eagerly, I turned my head back a bit so my ear was right by her mouth, wanting her to tell me what to do. Gospel would be so surprised and so jealous, only I realized I couldn’t even tell him because he wouldn’t believe me. I’d just fix it all myself and smile at him afterward because I took care of everything and he didn’t do anything.

“A machine. I don’t know what exactly it is, but there’s a device that’s calling the fog to you, causing it to encircle your home. Whatever it is, the machine is going to run right until that fog devours the world if you can’t stop it.”

And that was when I got confused all over again. I knew that word,
machine
, but I didn’t really know what it meant. All I knew about machines was that they were for towns and cities, far away and gone now anyhow. “We don’t have any machines here, Auntie.”

“There is one, somewhere. It might be small, something you just haven’t noticed. But your mother knew it was there and knew it was causing all the problems. Can you look around and check?”

At least that was something I
could
do: look around. Maybe there was something out in the barn, something that looked old that I never paid attention to. Or in one of Mama’s trunks that I hadn’t looked completely through? I didn’t even know what a machine might look like, other than a few old pictures in some of Mama’s books. “I can try.”

“Good girl.” The arms that were wrapped around me began to slip loose. “I can’t stay any longer. It’s hard for me to be here—it makes me so tired. Where I’m from, we don’t have much strength. We’re dying there, too, but differently.”

“You’re dying?”

“We all are,” she said, so soft I could hardly hear it. Upstairs, I heard a great, huge thump on the kitchen floor like something heavy falling over, and then the creak of floorboards. “Go on upstairs now. There’s trouble. Gospel needs you.”

And the body slid back to the ground, carrying me in its limp arms still wound in the cold drape of the sheet, so that I was lying on Mama’s chest. There wasn’t anything left in the body. I could feel that much, and now I knew I was just lying down with a corpse, and I felt like I would be sick. I shrugged the heavy limbs away from me, only they didn’t really want to go now. They were all tied up with me in the sheet, and I was whimpering and working at it when Gospel called out my name. I took a deep, foul breath and tried to think—the sheet was really the problem, tying me up, and I twisted to push out from the cloth that seemed to hold me like a net. It was a terrible long moment, but I finally came up for a gasp of air to hear Gospel yelling for me from up in the kitchen.

“Merciful, come quick. Jenny’s dying!”

Without even wrapping Mama in her shroud, I heaved to my feet and ran up the stairs, snatching at the lamp as I dashed past. I was in such a rush that I caught the tip of my boot under a step and slammed my shin and my face down onto the wooden slats. The lamp flickered and went out. I lay there for a moment, stunned, then pushed up gasping and climbed the rest on all fours like a dog, as best I could with the blasted light gone out. I winced when my right leg, the one with the smacked shin, set down.