Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (2 page)

He wonders if perhaps he is in a cell or some sort of jail, if this is his punishment for trespassing. If so, how long will he be trapped underground? Just like before, the thought of the weight of dirt resting between him and the surface causes his chest to tighten and his skin to prickle. He plucks frantically at his shirt and
pants, neither of which are the ones he was wearing when he climbed down the ladder.

As he spins, his eyes scouring one wall after another, all he finds are endless rows and columns of buttons except for one blank expanse, which he takes to be the door. He throws himself against it, but it will not open and the seams along the hinges are too tight for him to wedge his fingers into them. What
he needs is a weapon, so he flings the book to the floor, grabs the table, and heaves it at the door.

It isn’t enough. He tries to lift the chair, but there’s some sort of mechanical motor embedded in its base and it’s too heavy to move easily. As a last resort he reaches for the book and, in a
frenzy, hurls it across the room. When it strikes the wall by the door the covers bend back and the
insides explode. Delicate pages fill the air like the petals from an apple tree on a breezy spring morning.

The door swings open and pages drift free, floating lazily through the opening into whatever lies beyond. The success shocks Tavil and makes him catch his breath in such a way that the blood returns to his hands and his heart ceases its screaming. He rises and steps forward, shoulders hunched
so his hair won’t brush against the ceiling. The spine of the massive book left a mark where it struck the wall, just below a button. He rubs the hem of his shirt between his fingers, drying them of sweat, and after licking his lips he presses the button.

The sides of the door swing together again, sealing him inside. He presses it again and the doors open, the movement creating a soft
swiff
of breeze that unsettles the papers scattered around his feet.

Tavil peers outside. A tunnel stretches out in front of him, curving gently away as it veers into the distance. There is nothing particularly unique about the tunnel. Its walls are the same color as his room (white), though unlike his room they are bereft of buttons. The ceiling is a bit higher, so Tavil can stretch to his full height.
The hum still throbs, and the air tastes old, as though it has been through too many lungs before entering his own.

He crosses the threshold and begins to walk. To where he has no idea. For what purpose is simply the necessity of movement and the desire for escape. He cannot stay here where the walls are too close and there is no room to breathe. The more he thinks about the tightness surrounding
him, the more frantic he becomes.

His heart no longer listens to his command to be calm and it roars inside his chest. Likewise his mind sends out panicked signals:
I am trapped. I am trapped. I am trapped
. Tavil tries to override the message but his body is inconsolable: it sweats, it numbs, it shivers.

There is only one thing for it: Tavil must get back to the surface. Now. He must see the
sky, hear the silence, taste air that hasn’t been stripped apart by some machine. But as he runs, the corridor only continues to curve away, hiding any hope of a destination.

He passes other doors set along the sides and he imagines other people trapped in buttoned-up rooms like his own. The doors are all closed, hiding their occupants, shielding them from even the existence of a world mere feet
away from their own.

Shielding them from him.

Tavil wonders if they can hear the way he screams. The raggedness of his breathing. His fists hammering, hammering, waiting for someone to open their door and help him.

But there is nothing until he rounds the curve and is faced not with the endless monotony of before but with the novelty of an open door. He approaches it carefully and stares across
the threshold. It’s a mirror of his own but without the bed, only a chair in the middle with a table next to it, the massive book perched on top.

It is empty. He turns to move on when something catches his eye: a mark on the wall, just inside the door, beneath a button. The mark is familiar to him. He knows it because he made it, moments ago when he threw the book at the door.

The book that
had exploded spewing paper across the floor and out into the tunnel. All of it is gone now, cleaned away. The
book replaced. Nothing remains of his panicked tantrum except for the mark on the wall and the small tremors in his chest, the remnants of alarm drifting away through his system.

Calmer now, Tavil stoops into his room but leaves the door open to give the impression of space. Of an exit
to this tomb. He sits in the chair, his body almost instantly relaxing as it sinks into a plush softness that seems to wrap and hold his body in a soothing comfort.

There are buttons arrayed along the arms and he presses one, squawking in alarm when the chair jerks forward and rolls across the room. Never in his life has Tavil moved by any means other than his own: first crawling, then walking,
then running and climbing. The sensation of being carried by something that churns with a motor instead of beating with a heart feels wrong, and when he can’t find a way to stop the mechanical chair he’s forced to climb over the back of it to escape being pinned against the wall.

Even though it has met an immovable obstacle, the little motor in the chair continues to whir, adding a new frequency
of humming to the air. It grates against Tavil, causing his teeth to ache as he stands in the middle of the room clenching his jaw.

He turns to the book on the table, flipping open the cover so forcefully the pages flutter. He presses his hand flat against them, not caring that the sweat of his palm dampens the page, running the text together in an almost blur. Then he begins to read.

Tavil
sits in his chair in the middle of his tiny room, the door now closed. Thanks to the Book of the Machine, he has learned how to order food (delivered immediately on its own table that rises from the floor with a touch of a button); how to change the lighting (a toggle switch on the wall); how to turn on music (a
separate toggle switch). He knows how to summon a tub full of hot or cold waterish
liquid, a toilet, a sink, or even his bed—all of which rise from the floor with the push of the proper button.

His chair is set to warm and cradle him as he faces one of the many walls and holds the massive book spread open on his lap. He has been reading about communication through the Machine and has turned off the isolation knob, but still the room is silent. No one knows Tavil in the Underneath.
No one has need to contact him.

And so he traces his finger along the thin pages of the book, mumbling to himself as he reads, and then he presses a button and across the far wall a round blue disk drops from the ceiling and bursts into color.

So much has surprised Tavil in so many ways this day that even this marvel can hardly elicit a gasp of fear. Instead his blood blooms with a sort of curiosity
as he sits forward, the colors resolving into images that give the appearance of looking out a window aboveground. He stands and walks slowly forward until he can trace his fingers across the flat plane, the color from the glass glowing against his flesh but dissipating the moment he removes his hand from contact.

It is a wonder of a world perfectly wrought, and he recognizes it instantly. The
dusty landscape capped by brown-black clumps of dried weeds, stretches of sharp-edged stones meandering along the surface like scars, the gray fog hovering in the distance. The stones are all that is left of a great building that once existed long ago. Tavil knows of it because he’s been told stories: of how this was the last structure to stand against an enemy—before the Underneath, before the
Machine, before men attempted to defeat the sun. He has seen the ruins himself once before, when he journeyed with his sister to view the sea for the first time.

At the images Tavil feels something hard and immovable begin to grow in his chest. It crushes the air from his lungs and presses against his ribs, this feeling that he is
wrong
. Where he is, the air he breathes, the chair by which he
stands, and the buttons over which his fingers hover … all of it wrong.

That place through the screen, that is the truth and he should fear to be parted from it for so long. His legs feel weak, and he sits. The book slips from his numbed fingers to land on the floor with a thud. It touches the ground for only an instant before the floor lifts it again to a height where Tavil merely has to slide
it back onto his lap with no effort exerted on his own part.

And then something moves onto the screen: a wheeled carriage carrying a human-shaped creature unlike any Tavil has laid eyes on before except through the window on the train. This one is mannish, his body round and draped in a tunic that hides most, but not all, of his wobbling white flesh. A respirator masks his face, covering from
his chin to just below his eyes and strapped over his bald head.

He is speaking. Tavil knows this only because the man’s jowls bunch and sway. Tavil touches a button, and the sound soars around him.

“… against an inner rebellion of those who’d once lived within these walls and in other structures surrounding the castle.”

“That’s not even close to correct,” Tavil mumbles to himself, the noise
floating a bit in the air of his room before settling around him. The history of the ruins isn’t one of rebellion, but of protection: a town defending itself against the onslaught of another.

The man on the screen hesitates and adjusts his mask. This squeezes the several layers of skin trapped under his chin even
more, so that his flesh bulges out from his neck. He clears his throat and continues.

“The remnants of which are, of course, still scattered through the Seven Hills of Wessex, which leads to the idea that … ”

Tavil barks with a sort of indignant laughter while the man prattles on. “
Eight
Hills,” he calls to the screen.

Again, the man pauses and fiddles with the straps of the respirator. His breathing is wispy and echoes against the chambers of his mask. Tavil hears someone cough
and then a grumble, the sound filling his room from some unknown source in the same way as his light.

This is how Tavil understands his mistake: that as he hears so also can he be heard. He fumbles for his book, intending to shuffle through the pages to learn which button will silence anything he might say.

But his task is cut short when the lecturer continues, seeming to speak directly to him,
though Tavil feels this must not be possible. “I assure you, that the hills number seven is not a firsthand idea. It is beyond fact at this point.”

Tavil sputters. “That’s absurd! All you have to do is look around and count. It’s not like they’re not obvious!” Someone hisses as others begin to murmur, but he ignores them. He stands before the screen tapping it with his fingers as though the lecturer
can see where he points as he counts out the hills. “There’s one with the crag, two next to it where the top is sheared off to the west.”

He’s forced to talk louder and louder as the chatter emanating from the walls begins to grow overwhelming. They bark against the prospect of using observation to determine any sort of information, arguing that doing so adds an improper color, a
bias skewed
toward any idea that has not come down through intermediaries.

Tavil shouts over them all. “Three is just behind—it can sometimes be hard to see in the mist but right now it’s clear and four—”

And then one voice—a woman’s—breaks through the rest, clearer than the others: “Tell them
nothing
about the surface.”

This stops Tavil, his finger hovering just over the screen. He takes a step back.
“Who said that?”

He’s met with the roar of attendees from the lecture, their words and arguments now grown indistinct.

“Who said that?” he demands again.

Some kind of feeling tickles along the back of his neck and he catches his breath to listen. It is the same instinct he learned to heed on the surface, with the wilds of the remaining world around him. He shakes his head against the humming
in the walls, the voices in the air, but they continue to overwhelm any sense of his surroundings. He pounds the button by the door and it springs open. He stands and listens. Behind him is the chatter from the lecture, and in front is the long, curving tunnel.

He starts to walk, letting his frustrations burn through energy, opening his senses to this dry mechanical world. Ahead of him he hears
a new noise, the whir of a machine different from the one humming in the walls. He speeds up but the sound eludes him and so he begins to run.

It always seems to be just around the next corner. Sometimes he’ll catch a glimpse of something darting, and he pushes himself faster until he comes tearing around the same unending bend and there in front of him a wheeled carriage sits.

A woman steps
from the carriage. She is unlike the man
from the screen or the person Tavil saw on the train. While she is still of a roundish shape, she is tall, able to carry herself on her legs, and her long dark hair swings as she moves. She steps through an open door.

“Wait!” he calls out.

But then as the doors begin to close she turns to almost face him. He knows, without her having to utter a word,
that it is the woman who issued the warning.

Tavil stumbles when he sees that she, like him, is of the surface. Her skin has seen the sun, of that there is no doubt—it is written across her cheeks in the form of freckles. In her hands she carries the massive book. When she sees Tavil running for her, her eyes flare slightly. She does not move or make any effort to stop the doors from closing.

And then she is gone and Tavil is left pounding on the door. There are so many questions he needs to ask her.

He notices a button and he presses it until the door swings open again and he is faced with nothing but an empty white box. He storms inside, looking for any trace of the woman but finding only more buttons—columns of them racing up the wall.