Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (18 page)

CHAPTER 19

I should have understood that. We didn’t wander aimless through the empty city; Dane knew where he was going. Now he is eager to show me inside.

“Trust me.”

I nod and follow him up the steps, marveling at their solidness even after three centuries of neglect. The fact that any of these buildings is still standing amazes me. Dane seems unmoved by the grandness of this sight, the sheer size of the structure. The hubris its design embodies. As I walk up to it, I think that this structure was built with one of two ideas in mind: Either it was meant to make its occupants feel superior, or it was built to intimidate all who came to its doors. Perhaps both.

As we pass the pillars, I stroke one with my fingertips. Its stone surface is smooth but skinned in a thin layer of grime. “This place could use a cleansing,” I joke, but Dane does not look amused. I show him my fingertips. “Dirty,” I say, and he fakes a little smile before pushing through one of the doors, which is broken and twisted in its frame.

Even though it’s midday outside, we enter into a gloomy dimness, not unlike the abrupt darkness of that building in the mountains. The memory makes my whole body shiver. I wonder if we will find other skulls here, other demons lurking in the darkness.

“Dane,” I whisper. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s safe,” he replies. “Don’t worry. The darkness only lasts a little bit.”

“No,” I say, “we shouldn’t be here at all. Really. We should—”

“You’ve been listening to that friend of yours too much,” he growls.

“No, that’s not it,” I squeak. How do I tell him that this place feels full of the ghosts of the condemned, the ghosts of those not chosen for survival. How can they welcome us into their tombs? “I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be.” He sounds angry, but he slows and gropes for my hand in the dimness. His warm touch helps but not quite enough.

Before we step into the darkness ahead, I give one glance back through the doors. The sky is blackening, but the horses graze lazily as if they don’t care. Dane pulls me inward, and as I turn away from the door I think I glimpse a movement behind one of the pillars outside. I look back, but we’re already too far inside and I need all my attention on where I’m placing my feet.

“A lot of rubble on the ground,” Dane says. “Don’t turn your ankle. I don’t want to have to carry you out.” There’s no more anger under his words. I can tell he wouldn’t really complain about carrying me out if it came to that.

“Don’t you turn an ankle,” I reply. “I don’t want to have to carry you out.”

He laughs, and it’s only another few seconds before we pass through a doorway into a hall. The ceiling above has collapsed, so it’s still difficult walking, but we can see due to the light pouring in from high windows. We balance and tiptoe through the rubble on unstable chunks of concrete spiked with metal sticks.

“What was this place?” I ask after a minute.

“I don’t know. But wait until—there.” He points ahead to a dark wood door that hangs open on one stubborn hinge. “Tom and I came here a few days ago. We didn’t stay long. I knew I had to bring you here to see what you make of it.”

I think back a few days. The rest of us—that long, slow river of people—were still coming down through the foothills. Dane and the others must have been off exploring, looking ahead. I shouldn’t have been angry with him for not coming back to find me during the past week. He was far out ahead, making the way safe for us. It’s what a leader does. It’s what a Semper does.

“Here we are,” he says as we reach the door. “What was this place? You tell me.”

He squeezes through the gap between the ancient, oaken door and the remarkably unblemished doorframe, and I allow myself to be guided through by his gentle pull.

The bright, cavernous room inside takes my breath away. It’s even wider across than Jingham’s barn is long, maybe twice as wide, with a high ceiling three stories up or more. Balconies ring the upper floors all the way up, overlooking the room’s wide center. Above, the ceiling seems like it used to be a latticework of wood and glass. Parts of that ceiling remain although most now lies in pieces on the floor. The afternoon light shines bright and unrelenting through the open roof, illuminating the amazing scene before me.

I can’t see the far wall because from the floor to about ten feet high the room is a labyrinth created from stacks and stacks of books.

“You thought Micktuk had a lot of books?” Dane grins at me, the sunshine brightening his hair and sparkling the dust specks floating behind him.

It hardly matters that the walls are stained and streaked with centuries of mold and decay. This place echoes an enduring majesty of purpose. Important things happened here before the war. Important people came here.

“Was this a place of learning?”

I am in awe despite myself. Learning—the pursuit of worldly knowledge—is one of the mortal sins decried in Truths.

“I don’t know,” Dane says. “Sure are a lot of books, though, huh?”

“Millions,” I whisper.

“Unfortunately,” Dane says, “most are rotten.” He steps backwards into the labyrinth, drawing me forward behind him. Pointing to the ceiling, he continues. “Imagine what centuries of rain will do to all this paper.”

I run my fingers along the partition made of books. It seems that over the decades they’ve been soaked and dried out a thousand times, compressing into each other to become more like a dried mud wall than a stack of books.

I want to go all through the room and see if we can find any that have survived. Suddenly I stop and grab Dane. “Has Micktuk seen this?”

“I haven’t told him,” Dane replies. “I don’t know whether he’d be excited to see all these books or devastated to see their condition. Tom and I decided to keep it secret for now.”

We meander among the stacks and stacks and stacks, wending our way toward the center of the room, then out again toward the wall on the far side.

Suddenly, the room opens up before us, just twenty yards to the wall we’d been heading for. The ceiling here has mostly survived, so there’s little rubble on the floor. Leaves and debris have blown in and filled the corners and tight spaces. But two things in particular capture my attention:

First, the floor is lined with a small, orderly regiment of strange, low structures, metal pipes bent together into rectangles. They look like metal frames of coffins without sides or top or bottom. Phantom images of dead people lying inside these frames jump into my head, but the floor is clear. No bones, no skulls to leer at me.

Second, a raised area like a stage or a dais fills half the hall just beyond this array of metal casket frames. It stretches half the length of this broad wall, with a wide pulpit in the center. On either side of this pulpit stand several tables, each sheltering a heavy looking metal storage trunk underneath.

“Come on,” Dane says and starts to pull me across the room, between and among the coffin-like frames.

I pull back. and shake my head. “No,” I say. “This doesn’t feel right, Dane.” I can’t take my eyes off the coffin shapes. I don’t know what they are of why someone put them here, but all I can think of is an invisible ghost lying within each, staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” Dane looks around to see what I’m staring at. “These things?” he asks. “Nothing to worry about.” He steps forward and kicks one. It clatters away from him and bounces against another one.

“Dane!” I yelp, startling him.

“What’s wrong?” He starts laughing at me.

“Don’t be disrespectful.”

“What are you talking about?”

“These... things. You don’t know what they are or why they’re here. They... look like coffins to me. Don’t you think?”

“What? No.”

He stifles his laugh and eyes the scene, thinking. He tilts his head, then nods slowly. “I see why you might say that,” he says finally. “They’re the right size for sure. But imagine,” he says as he retrieves the one he kicked and moves it back to its original place, “a cloth spread across the top.”

“Like a shroud?”

“No, no. Forget the cloth. Imagine a mattress.”

“These were beds?” I allow myself another look, trying to wipe the phantom corpses from my imagination and think of living people on top of the frames. In an instant, I can see he’s right.

Dane spreads his arms and turns slowly, looking up at the high ceiling, the round balconies, the grand walls. “This place was all about life,” he says, “not death. Can’t you feel it?”

I’ve been so afraid, I’ve been looking for ghosts in every corner. But there are no corpses here. No piles of ash. No leering skulls. I open my imagination and think of this place filled with people, and I can see he’s right.

“That friend of yours has you so wound up, Freda. Not all the old places are filled with evil.”

I take a deep breath and one step forward. I understand he’s right, and I can even feel it, but that doesn’t take away the fear. Dane smiles and takes my hand, and together we head to the left end of the dais and climb up half-rotted steps, careful not to go crashing down through the old wood.

When we’re on the dais, we both turn to look out over the maze of books, once again astonished by how many were placed here. Millions, maybe. No clear geometry maps out the wandering pathways through that labyrinth, unlike the tidy rows of cots. It reminds me of the concrete canyons we rode through to get here. Like a miniature city made of books instead of bricks.

I’m about to share my clever observation with Dane when he holds up one hand.

“Shh. Did you see that?”

“What?”

He doesn’t answer but just peers at the light streaming through the swirls of dust hovering above the labyrinth. I try to follow his gaze, but I’m just a seamstress, not a trained hunter. He stares hard and listens for several seconds, like a cat who senses prey nearby, but after a bit he shrugs and relaxes.

“Just my imagination,” he mumbles. “Places like this make you jumpy, don’t they?”

So he feels it, too. That gives me a little relief. Maybe I’m not just a simpering coward after all.

Dane looks up at the gaps in the roof. “The storm’s coming in, so we’d better hurry. We can always come back later.”

We stand at one end of this long dais lined with tables and their trunks. Both the tables and the boxes are made of metal, faded to pale green. Leaves and twigs clog the cobwebs left behind by countless generations of spiders. Other than these natural shrouds, the boxes seem remarkably undisturbed and undamaged by the centuries.

We approach the first, and Dane stoops to examine it.

“No lock,” he says, and he sweeps his boot across the front to wipe away the webs. Another swipe reveals writing on the front. The black letters are uneven, done carefully but by an inexpert hand. “Native American,” Dane reads. “I wonder what it means.”

“What do the others say?” I ask.

Dane steps to the next box. The same hand has painted the word
Hindu
. On the next,
Buddhist,
followed by
Muslim
on the fourth box.

“I wonder what they mean,” I say as Dane uncovers the fifth box, the one closest to the center of the dais.

Christian.

Dane looks at me with questions and excitement in his eyes. It’s a word we’ve known since we were little. Christianity. We know it as the ancient worship of God before the War, before God spoke to new prophets and guided the Founders to the safety of Southshaw. The people of Christianity had their own books, as we have Truths and Laws and Prophecies. But the people hadn’t gotten it quite right; over the centuries they rewrote and reinterpreted the books until God’s word was indistinguishable among the human lies and mistakes. Finally, God needed the War to make a clean start.

These are the lessons I learned at Judith’s feet on Sunday mornings, in the chapel in Southshaw. These are the lessons Dane learned as his father read Truths to him on Saturday nights, helping him understand what it would mean to be Semper.

Dane speaks into the silence around us. “What do you think is inside?”

“I...”

I know what I hope is inside. The ancient books. The lessons from before the War. Enlightenment.

“... don’t know.”

Dane stands back and looks at the five boxes we’ve uncovered. Four more stretch across the remainder of the dais.

We turn and look out at the labyrinth of books, gaze up at the high, broken ceiling and the balconies ringing the outer wall, like a place where people could look down on this stage. I suddenly feel like I’m in a pulpit, ready to address the biggest congregation ever assembled. But rather than sensing the presence of a horde of ghosts all around us, I sense only a deep, eternal emptiness. It’s a more profound loneliness than ever I felt in the pitch darkness of the corridors of Subterra.

“Do you think this was a church?” Dane asks.

A congregation could be gathered here. Sermons could be given from this spot. It would make a grand monument to God’s greatness. But that feels wrong.

“No,” I answer. “Look at the pillars.” I point to the posts holding up the balconies, rising to the ceiling. “They’re so plain. Ours were carved into the shapes of Adam and Eve. Do you remember?”