August 6 — Harvest Rose Festival
The Folk did not frighten me as much as I frightened myself. I paused at the fork in the first tunnel, enjoying the luxury of not fretting about my candles, lingering over that first C I’d scratched to mark my first turn. It was a luxury, too, to have turned from Corin to Corinna, to bathe in soft hair to my knees.
It was then I heard it, a dull hammering that made me catch my breath and clutch my tinderbox. A quick spurt, which slowed as I listened, and as I breathed deep, grew slower still. There is an expression about being startled by your own shadow. But what of being startled by your heart, clanging in the silent fortress of your chest? I doubt if anyone’s ever laughed in the Caverns before.
Each day it has taken longer to reach unexplored territory. Rarely have I found tunnels that rise toward the surface. Those that do, run into stony blind ends. Today’s tunnel led down, not up. My footsteps stuck close beside me as I pattered downward, always downward, then skittered off into an echoing cavern with a deep pit in the floor. At the far end was an interruption in the air, a bulge where no bulge should be. I swung my hair, wrapping invisible streamers round the bulge, divining its shape and texture.
Four limbs and a head — human and not human, all at once. It was not even as tall as I, but made up for it with its thick body and short, powerful limbs. The Folk are mostly mouth, Old Francis had said, and he was right. The mouth gaped into its forehead. It had no eyes, not even sightless pearls like the ghost-fish. Perhaps there was a nose, but as it turned toward me, it seemed all wet mouth and square teeth.
It made no sign that I could tell, but another joined it, then another still; and the flint from my tinderbox was barely in my hand before they’d gathered themselves into a mass of hungry darkness. Their energy boiled through my hair, set it almost aflame; and there I was naked, turned inside out, all the soft parts showing.
Sparks, I needed sparks. I raised my flint to strike, when another sort of light burst upon me, an interior illumination. A picture of a silver-haired lady came to me, and words to describe her, too, which wrapped themselves around the image, wove themselves into a net of rhythm and rhyme.
Why weep you in the Manor, Lady?
The Manor, proud and high.
Why scrawl your name in whitewashed
walls,
When’er your Lord comes neigh?
Why walk about without a word?
Why choose, at last, to die?
That boiling energy, it drained away to nothing. I could paralyze the Folk just as they could paralyze me. Hurt them, too. How they screamed — big babies! I closed my ears against their cries.
I cannot cease my weeping, Sire,
I’m chilled unto the bone.
I’ve lost my lass, my tiny babe,
I’ve lost my ancient home.
The singing sea is far, yet near;
I’m locked in solid stone.
It was lovely to see their confusion, knocking against one another and running about. One hurled itself into the pit, and as though they shared one mind, the rest jumped in, too. I hope it was a long way down. Even before I opened my ears, I could tell by the vibration of loose stone that they were still shrieking.
It was only when I was alone with my own friendly heartbeat that I understood. With my hair long and loose, I can carve words from air and float them on a sea of rhyme.
I can always have The Last Word.
August 9
I am still mapping out the Caverns, carving my C into each new fork, returning each night to my Twilight Cavern. Today I found two tunnels that rise toward the surface. I call one Hope, the other Anticipation.
The Folk are afraid of me! I string together fluid ropes of verse and beat them off. I’ve always had the words, I know that now. I had the words, but I didn’t have the medium. Just as water dissolves walnuts into dye, my hair dissolves images into rhythm and stirs it all together with rhyme. When I cut my hair to become a Folk Keeper, I took that all away from myself.
There is a price you pay for power.
August 12
Really, what pigs they are, the Folk. The tunnel I call Anticipation is littered with bones and reeks of decay.
It was difficult going today. The passage spiraled sharply upward, and I scrabbled through swirling petals of rock that drew in on themselves, and on me, too! It’s lunacy to return to my Twilight Cavern each night and unwind all my hard-won progress. I don’t need light, and I shan’t want for food and drink. Freshwater streams run everywhere, and even a pearl-eyed fish may be caught and devoured.
August 18
For five days I lived in the dark.
For five days I kept company with the voice of my heart.
For five days I lived in a tunnel called Anticipation, pushing through growing piles of bones.
At half past four on the morning of the sixth day, Anticipation burst open into a vast chamber. Across it curled a small arched door.
I was a long while crossing the chamber, wading through bones at high tide. But then — oh, how well my fingers remembered the Folk Door, the rough wood of it, banded by crosswise strips of iron. But from this side of the Caverns it swung outward, and a whiff of the human world wafted through. There was the familiar smell of mice and damp whitewash, and an old-cheese smell, too.
“Taffy!”
Never have I had such a welcome. He tried to leap on me, but his hindquarters gave. I sank to the floor with him, stroked his sticky fur.
“Taffy!” I said it again and again. “Taffy!” My throat swelled with something irrepressible. How long had it been since I’d wept? I’d forgotten how you can never hold back water. It is accommodating, yet relentless, changing its shape to follow its true path.
It was a long time before I could speak. Even then I didn’t say all I understood. That I now knew why Taffy had attached himself to me. He was an older generation of Hill Hound, more closely allied with the Otherfolk — the Sealfolk, and me.
Everything was old but new. The Folk Door, opening in a new direction. Me, feeling a new wetness on my cheek. Me again, seeing old Taffy in a new way. My hair caught the shallow tide of his breath, the thin pulse that keeps him this side of death.
The familiar strangeness didn’t end there. The Cellar door was ajar, which was unusual, as everybody was afraid of the Cellar. But why then did no light shine from the landing? The candle was always lit. And where was the smell of baking bread? Cook always baked at dawn.
The Manor was empty. I realized that at once, but I stood at the bottom of the Cellar stairs for many minutes before puzzling out the why of it. Today was August 18, the first day of the Harvest Fair, when all the world was away to celebrate. A day when a Sealmaiden might roam the corridors wearing only her hair and nothing else.
The door between the landing and the Kitchens had been left open, too, and through the long windows onto the vegetable gardens I caught my first glimpse of the out-of-doors. Six weeks of candlelight and darkness, and what did I now see? Wild rains lashing the Manor, bridges of lightning spanning sea and sky.
I broke the silence then. “There is only one other living thing in the Manor, and that is my Sealskin.”
I ran now, far faster than old Taffy, pounding down marble corridors, dark rooms flickering past. Into the Trophy Room, past the dead glass eyes. My sleek, shiny Sealskin shimmered out to my hair before I touched it in the ordinary way. It was heavy, tensile, just as a living thing must be.
I wrapped it around me first, paused, wondering if it would take me over at once, turn me into one of the Sealfolk, there on the figured carpet. But nothing happened; it must take salt water to stir human flesh and Sealskin into one.
The Sealskin fit me exactly, falling just to my fingertips, just to my toes. How marvelous that when I pulled it round my face, each side followed the curve of jaw to meet exactly at my chin. There was nothing wasted, not a single gap. But I had to be closer still. I sank to the floor, pressed it to every part of me. To my naked spine, to my belly and breast, how alive I was to it, or maybe it to me. We drank each other in through every pore.
Taffy whined from the doorway. You have your own fur, Taffy; do not be jealous of mine.
I have the Sealskin wrapped around me like a cloak as I write in the Trophy Room. Poor Taffy doesn’t know what to make of this new version of me. He thumps his tail but does not lie too near. Yes, Taffy, it may be that I am becoming a different creature and that soon you will not recognize me at all.
Soon, but not yet. I cannot turn myself into a Sealmaiden without warning Finian and Lady Alicia about Sir Edward. I cannot leave without saying good-bye. Soon I will restock my Folk Bag and walk the three miles along the cliffs to Firth Landing.
Everyone is away at the Harvest Fair, every servant, even the other dogs (for whom Sir Edward has doubtless bespoken the best rooms). It is unlikely that anyone will return before I do, but just in case, I will hide my Sealskin in the Cellar. It is too heavy to carry with me. No one would think to look there, and anyway, they’re all too afraid.
I am very happy now, watching the rain fall in fat, hard strands. Have I ever been so happy?
The world is a magical place and I’m lucky to be alive in it. Did my mother watch the rain driving against these windows and think it beautiful?
Have I ever been so happy?