Engines of the Broken World (22 page)

He frowned. “It wasn’t there when we came back in,” he said.

“Maybe not. But it prayed with me.”

“Well. That’s good, I suppose. It did something of some use. But we could’ve used it outside. Me and Mama and the Widow and her son, we all clustered round. Or they all did, the grown-ups, and I hovered, but nobody wanted me there. If they hadn’t been taking care of Papa, I’m pretty sure they would’ve sent me away with a fearsome paddling, but … well, that thing in Mama told you the truth. There wasn’t no stranger. There was only Papa, and a gun.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Mama said I couldn’t tell you. Not ever. She said it wasn’t fair, a girl growing up without her papa, and it would’ve been worse to have you know.”

“But you knew. You knew it all.” I wasn’t yelling, because the Minister and Auntie and the Widow were all so close, but I was doing a whisper that was halfway to a hiss, and boy was I getting mad.

“Do you think I wanted to, Merce? You think I wanted to know our papa killed himself? Hell, no, I didn’t. And the last earthly thing I wanted was for you to have to know it too.”

My mouth slowly dropped open, my hand raising to cover it. “That’s why you went away.”

Gospel sighed. “I didn’t mean to. Not at first. But I knew you’d bring it up, and I knew if you brought it up enough, I’d tell you. So I ran into the woods, and I stayed far away as long as I could.”

“But why didn’t you come back more often? Even when Mama got sick? I was taking care of that. You could’ve come back, you could’ve told me. I’m strong enough to take it.”

He turned his face from me and stepped a few feet away, kicking at a bit of broken wood. “Oh, Merce. I could’ve, sure. But by then … by then I kind of hated you. Because you didn’t have to know. You got to be innocent still and think your papa protected you. And there I was freezing to death in the woods, without a soul to speak to, and with that secret burning a hole in my heart. No, I wasn’t going to come back at all. But then the damned fog showed up, and I didn’t have no place I could go any further.”

I took a step toward him through the broken wood. My hand lifted up, but I didn’t quite touch his back. I couldn’t imagine what it had been like to hold in a secret like that.

“Do you remember when we came to get you? When Mama and I came back into the house? You were under the bed, and you were playing with that little wooden man there, telling it crazy stories.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Mama told you Papa’d been shot. You started to cry, and you kicked and hit her and told her she was lying. You said you wanted to see him, if he was dead, and when we wouldn’t let you, you said we were both lying: that Papa was alive and we were just keeping you away from him. And Mama just held you close, lying on the bed. I was on mine, under a blanket, peeking out. I was crying so hard, but so quiet. I hadn’t said a word since we came in: I didn’t trust myself to tell the lie, not yet. And then Mama started to sing.”

My skin popped up in goose flesh. “What did she sing?”

“You know,” he said. “That song.
‘Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby.’
” Gospel’s voice was rough and awkward, but he sang the words as best he could. “Good Lord, I hated that song ever since, that lying, cheating song. But you stopped crying eventually, and you fell asleep.”

“Papa was gone in the morning,” I said, remembering.

“The Callys took care of burying him. And we went to see the grave, and you were crying. So she sang that damn song again,” Gospel said.

I froze as a noise came from the cellar. “
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna tell you why you’ll die
.” The horrible voice so close to Mama’s but not quite, a little gurgly and wet and very faint, was singing again as we came to the open cellar door. Gospel looked back at me, a touch nervous, I supposed, and I sure as Heaven was feeling the same. He licked his lips, and his fist got tight on his knife.

“Are you ready to talk to her?” he asked.

I didn’t trust my voice to speak, so I only nodded. But I reached out and took his hand for a moment, and I pressed it hard. He tried to smile, with his black-blistered nose and cheeks and his bruised face, and then he started down the steps.

If I hadn’t been holding his hand, I don’t know if I could’ve followed. But I didn’t have any choice. Down into the dark we went, with my mama’s old song of comfort twisting in the air around us.

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

The stairs creaked under Gospel
’
s feet, and the voice fell suddenly silent. Halfway down, I slipped on frost that was thick on the lowest steps. I caught myself on a frigid wall. “Lord, it’s cold down here,” I said, my breath misting up.

“Shouldn’t be this cold,” Gospel said, helping me back up.

“I don’t like it.”

“Let’s go quick, before it gets any worse.” We went real careful down the last few stairs, and I held the lamp up high at the bottom. Resting next to the pile of wood, barely visible in the flickering light, was Mama’s body.

There was a pool of something white around it, that same stuff that had poured out of the hole in her chest where I shot her. It wasn’t frozen, and it must’ve been pretty warm still because it was giving off steam, or perhaps that was just how cold it’d got. Mama’s head turned up to look at us, the eyes bloody and white at the same time, milked over but with angry red lines all through.

“I was wondering if you’d get here in time,” she said, sounding almost like Mama.

“In time for what?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Before I go, of course,” she said, and it made me shiver because Mama
had
gone, only two or three days ago. I’d lost track. I wished that I’d had a chance to talk to her like I was about to talk to Auntie, but Mama’s end came on too sudden. “I don’t think I’ll last much longer.” A horrid wet chuckle came out of her. “I came to your world because I thought it would be a way to keep living. And here I am, still dying.”

“You’re really dying?”

“Oh, yes. All over again. I was dying in my world too, dying of cancer and weariness and boredom. It sounds so banal now. Cancer, that’s something people die of. But weariness? Boredom? How ridiculous.”

“What’s cancer?” Gospel asked.

“It’s an old disease people used to get,” I answered, because I had read it in one of the books Mama had on her shelves, on one of the long nights when I watched over her while Gospel was off somewhere being the Devil’s creature.

“No cancer here, even? Well … a doomed bit of paradise. Or maybe we got the worst of it, where I’m from. Two worlds: this one where the souls were being saved, a place for the good girl. That one, mine, like a twisted reflection, an accident. The horrible brother who hunts in the woods.”

“Hey!” Gospel said, but she just talked over him: “The mad mother who screams at things she can’t see. Every terrible thing that wasn’t here, though, we got. War and hatred, too many people and too much disease, aches and misery and horror. You talk about the Last War. We had it too. My father fought in it, before I was born.”

“Mama’s father did too,” I said.

“Of course he did. They were the same person. Until a few years after the Last War, we were all the same people. Until just about when I was born—when your mama was born. Then it all changed.”

“God changed it,” Gospel said, right as I was thinking the same.

“Yes. Only I don’t believe in God. Even now, I don’t believe in God, and I should. I really should.” Other than her lips, I realized she hadn’t moved at all since she tilted up her head. The eyes hadn’t blinked, there hadn’t been a twitch of the hands, nothing at all. “When I first started dreaming of your mama, I thought I was mad. But the dreams were so real. I didn’t do anything about it for a very long time, but eventually I entered into sleep studies, went to labs … oh, you don’t understand me. You can’t. There’s nothing like that left here, and hasn’t been for years, I’m sure.”

“I know what a lab is,” I said, and Gospel said he did too, though I didn’t believe he knew any such thing.

“Not the sort I mean, I’m sure, but good enough. The doctors couldn’t figure out how I had these dreams, how I knew things I shouldn’t. I think it’s because your mama and me were born so close to when things changed. We were, more than most, the same person. I found a way to contact your mama, from my dreams to hers. But not well, not often, not reliably. And I don’t think she ever really understood what was happening.”

“You made her go crazy,” I said, remembering all the times Mama had talked to something that wasn’t there, had gotten mad and angry and frustrated at things she couldn’t control. And I remembered what the thing up in the rocker had said too, that this Rebekkah had done it, made my mama mad.

“I never intended that.” She paused after she said it, paused for long enough that I wondered if she had expired. “I just wanted to know what was happening to me. And then the world—my world—went out of control. The air was poison, the land was dying, disease was everywhere. But even with all that, hardly a single person cared. We just didn’t mind a thing but ourselves any longer. I wasn’t much different. I sank into my work with your mama and let the rest of the world pass me by.”

“You should’ve helped,” I said, because I couldn’t stand her talking about how selfish she was anymore. “Your world needed you.”

“You don’t understand. It wasn’t just me.
Nobody
cared. None of us did anything. It’s all over now. We faded away to nearly nothing. Shallow and meaningless. And I was dying anyway, and then there was a way to try to fix things, I thought, to come here when your mama died.”

“But you were the one who killed her. The other thing told us,” Gospel said, real hate in his voice for a moment. I got a grip on his shoulders, at the frosty bottom of the steps, but he didn’t make to move forward.

“Did James tell you that? It’s not true. Did he tell you he was a murderer, and that he was about to die for it when I saw him last? I don’t know that I’d trust him.”

“He told us about dying, that he was killed as punishment for doing bad things.”

“Well. More truth than I thought he had in him. But I didn’t kill your mama. Not really. I probably didn’t help her live any longer, but I didn’t kill her. I think maybe she got some of my apathy, the same way I got some of her madness. And one day she just gave up, gave up and died.”

“Mama wouldn’t do that,” I said, but I didn’t really believe it. I never thought there’d be so many secrets, so many lies, in my little family, but there were, and I didn’t think I could ever know the truth of it anymore. I had to try, though. It mattered, the truth; even if the world was ending, the truth still had to mean something.

“Maybe not. But that’s what it seemed like to me. I woke up from a dream in a sweat, tired and aching, and I knew she was dead. I just knew. So I went to my machines, and I went back to sleep with them running, and I dreamed of her, only she was gone. I managed to cross the bridge. I came here, into her, by bits and pieces. It was like a door had been left open for me, and I could creep in when I slept. In my dreams, I saw you, I spoke with you. And then … then
I
died, and at last I arrived.”

“But why’d you come here?”

“To kill the Minister. Just as I said.” She coughed, white fluid spitting out of her mouth. The puddle around her was bigger, still steaming in the wintry air. “The Minister was the means by which God split the worlds, it and all the other Ministers, though the rest were just helpers to this one, and all of them are gone now. If we kill the Minister, I believe everything will be undone. The first shall be the last. It’s the alpha and the omega.” Talk from the Good Book, that was, but Auntie didn’t even believe in the Lord.

“How can you kill it?” Gospel said.

“I can’t. But
you
can. As easy as using your knife. Your hands. Anything.”

“What’ll happen?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper.

“I don’t know what it’ll mean, I don’t know what world will be made, but it’s got to be better than the one I lived in and died in. And it’s got to be better than this place, with the world falling in around us and about to stop altogether. Doesn’t it have to be better?”

I thought about Jenny Gone being eaten by the nothing of the fog. I thought about wanting to grow up and about meeting a boy. I never would now, even if the fog just stopped, which I didn’t expect could happen. I thought about how I was going to die before I was a day older.

“Yeah,” Gospel said, his voice firm. “It would have to be better than this damned place. It would.”

I didn’t want to, but I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything worse than our present situation, dying cold and lonely in a hard place like this. And, oh, how I hated that maybe she was right, horrible creature that she was. But, after all, it was why we had come down: to try to find out what we might do.

“Good. I think it’s too late for me, in the new world you’ll make, but maybe not. Maybe your mama and I will get another chance.

“Go now. Go and find the Minister. I don’t think it can stop you except with words. I don’t think it can ever hurt humans.” The voice was growing weaker, quieter, like now that she’d said her piece she was done with talking.

“It almost killed Miz Cally,” I said.

“She wouldn’t have died. The Minister was protecting its secret. That’s spoiled now. Too late in the game for it to even be able to do that much. I think all the strength it has is taken up in closing down the world.”

“It might run away again.” I kind of hoped it would, even though I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t think I wanted to kill the Minister either.

“Not far. Not now. It has to be in the center when the world ends, I’m betting.”

The Minister had kept talking about how it couldn’t get close to the fog, and now the fog was closing in. She was right. It couldn’t run very far. “This house is the center?”

Her voice was so quiet, I could barely hear her at all now. “The last place on Earth I would expect to be the last place on Earth. But there it is. And here we all are. And you two have a task to see to. Go on, and come see me when it’s over, if you can. I’ll try to hold on. Or maybe I’ll come see you, huh?” Her head dropped down to her chest. I thought for a minute she was dead, but then I heard, faint and seeming far away, that same old song again.