I shook my head.
“Hope there’s a Fair One and I make it that far. Then I can die outside and not because my belly busts while I’m trying to take a shit in this rotten fucking cell!”
“Did you get sick in here?”
I thought he must have—poisonous mushrooms either would have killed him quick or he would have gotten better eventually. And Deep Maleen wasn’t exactly an antiseptic environment. But Hamey shook his head. “I think on the road from the Citadel. After the gray came. Sometimes I think the gray would have been better.”
“How long ago was that?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. Years. Sometimes I think I can feel that bug buzzing around down here.” He rubbed his flabby belly. “Buzzing around, eating me a little at a time. Taking it slow. Sloo-ow.”
He armed sweat from his face.
“There were only five when they brought me and Jackah here.” He pointed down the corridor toward the cell Jackah shared with Bernd. “Jackah and me made seven. The number goes up… someone dies and it goes down… but it always goes up again. Now it’s thirty-one. Bult was here before me, he might be the longest… who’s still alive… and he said back then Flight Killer wanted sixty-four. More contests that way! More blood and brains on the grass! Kellin… must have been him… convinced him he’d never get that many whole ones, so it’s to be thirty-two. Eye says if there’s no thirty-two soon, Flight Killer’ll bring in Red Molly instead of saving her for the end.”
This I knew. And although I’d never seen Red Molly, I dreaded her because I had seen her ma. But there was something I didn’t know. I leaned close to Hamey. “Elden is Flight Killer.”
“So they call him.”
“Does he have another name? Is he Gogmagog?”
That was when I discovered the great distance—the chasm, the abyss—between fairy-tale magic like sundials that turn back time and the supernatural. Because something heard.
The gas-jets, which had been guttering along as usual and casting only the dimmest light, suddenly shot up in bright blue arrows that turned Deep Maleen flashbulb-bright. There were cries of fear and surprise from some of the cells. I saw Iota at his barred door, one hand shading his eyes. It only lasted for a second or two, but I felt the stone floor beneath me rise and then thud back. Rock dust sifted down from the ceiling. The walls groaned. It was as if our prison had cried out at the sound of that name.
No.
Not as if.
It did cry out.
Then it was over.
Hamey wrapped one of his thin arms around my neck, almost tight enough to choke off my air. Into my ear he whispered, “Don’t ever say that name! Do you want to wake what sleeps in the Dark Well?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Tempus est Umbra in Mente. Hazy History. Cla. A Note. Seedings.
1
When I was a freshman at Hillview, I took Latin I. I did it because learning a dead language seemed like a cool idea, and because my dad told me that my mom took it at the same school, from the same teacher, Miss Young. He said Mom thought she was cool. By the time my turn came around, Miss Young—who taught French as well as Latin—was no longer young, but she was still cool. There were only eight of us in the class, and there was no Latin II when I was a sophomore, because Miss Young retired and that part of the HHS language program was closed down.
On our first day in class, Miss Young asked if we knew any Latin phrases. Carla Johansson raised her hand and said carpe diem, which meant seize the day. No one else was offering, so I raised my hand and gave one I’d heard from my Uncle Bob, usually when he had to get going somewhere: tempus fugit, meaning time flies. Miss Young nodded, and when nobody else offered, she gave us some more, like ad hoc, de facto, and bona fide. When class ended, she called me back, said she remembered my mother well and was sorry I’d lost her so young. I thanked her. No tears, not after six years, but I got a lump in my throat.
“Tempus fugit is a good one,” she said, “but time doesn’t always fly, as everyone who’s ever had to wait around for something knows. I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”
I thought of that often in Deep Maleen. Because we were entombed, the only way to tell night from day was that in daylight—daylight somewhere, not in our durance vile—the night soldiers came less frequently, their blue auras were reduced when they did, and their human faces became more apparent. For the most part they were unhappy faces. Tired. Haggard. I wondered if these creatures had, when still human, made some sort of devil’s bargain which they regretted now that it was too late to cry it off. Maybe not Aaron and a few of the others, certainly not the Lord High, but the rest? Maybe. Or maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see.