River Runs Deep (2 page)

No halves about it.

Tossing the book aside, he took the coiled rope off the bedpost and set to work on a monkey's fist, twisting the ropes and tucking the end through, over and over until he had a tight ball of a knot stopping up the end of the rope. Perfect for throwing. It was such a good knot, he hated to see it go to waste. Nedra across the way knit, and when she finished, she had something to show for it. But Elias could only undo his work and start anew. It was nearly enough to drive him to take up knitting. Nearly.

“What's that 'posed to be for?” a voice whispered.

“Who's there?” Elias jerked his head up and looked to the window. Empty. “I said, ‘Who's there?' ” Elias repeated. He had heard a voice, hadn't he? Or had his fever climbed again? Sometimes when it rose, he worried that he saw things . . . heard things.

“I ain't nobody,” the whisper came again, even softer. “Jus' wondered about that tying you do.”

Nobody?
Elias thought. Had to be somebody. But it didn't sound like anybody he could name. Living in the dark taught a body to listen. He could tell the doctor coming just by his walk, and a voice was even easier to recognize. But he couldn't place it on account of the whispering. He reached for the lamp, began to pull it closer—“Far 'nough,” the voice whispered.

Who on earth was it?
he wondered. Not the doctor, of course. Not one of the other patients who wouldn't have reason or the energy to spy on Elias anyhow. That left only the slaves.

But this voice wasn't Stephen's. Stephen Bishop wouldn't have lurked at a window for anything in the world. The man was squat and strong, with glossy black hair that curled out from underneath the edges of his slouch cap. When he'd brought Elias down from the entrance the first day, he'd proudly pointed out all the wonders of the cave, his voice carrying as smoothly as that of an actor aiming to be heard up in the cheap seats. He took too much care with his appearance to hide in the dark and liked the sound of his own voice too much to whisper. He'd been bossy to boot, telling Elias not to go wandering, no matter what.

And it wasn't Nick's voice either. Nick, who often brought his meals and more fuel for the stove, wore an old felt parson's hat, shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck. His voice, when he cared to use it, rolled deep and rich, punctuated by pauses so he could spit short streams of tobacco off into the shadows. He was kind to Elias in both his few words and his manner, and was far too forthright to sneak around.

And though the voice was high and quiet, it wasn't Lillian or Hannah or any of the other young women who served as nurses in the ward.

No, the voice was young, and it was certainly one Elias had not heard before.

But the eyes—he'd seen those eyes before.

He'd noticed them his second day, staring in as he read, but they disappeared before he could even call out. And he'd seen them twice since, both times appearing in his darkened window, far enough out of the circle of light thrown by his lamp. And there were countless times Elias had
felt
someone watching, but when he checked, saw nothing in the window.

They were back now, looming a few inches above the sill.

“Who are you?” Elias asked, clenching the knot in his fist.

The eyes blinked, hovered, like they had no face to belong to. “What you do all that tying on those ropes for?”

Elias swallowed once. “This one's for throwing.”

The eyes blinked again as the voice made a sort of
hmph
sound.

“Who are you?” Elias asked again.

“Don't matter.”

Elias nearly asked the voice if it were really there at all, or if he were only imagining it, his bored brain inventing a strange visitor. Maybe his fever had spiked after all. But if the presence at the window were the product of his imagination, he couldn't very well expect it to confess. Elias chose his next words with care. “Are you a—” He cut himself off, tried again. “Nick said this place has haints.”

The voice laughed quietly. “You askin' if I'm a ghost?”

“Are you?” Elias persisted. He'd pushed himself all the way up against the head of the bed, his spine pressing hard into the frame.

“Maybe I am,” the voice said. “What about you?”

“Well, naw, I ain't a ghost.”

“You sure?” the voice asked. “You just like the rest of 'em. All y'all do is sit around and do nothing all day. Cain't leave. And you're so peaked, you might as well be one.”

“I'm sick,” Elias protested. “I ain't dead. Not yet, anyhow.”

At that moment Nedra set to coughing, a fit that came on as sudden as a squall. Elias heard Lillian rush across from where she sat by the fire. And when he looked back at the window, the eyes had vanished. In a flash of courage, Elias leaped to his knees and poked his head out the window.

No one there.

But he listened closely, and in the ebb between Nedra's racket, he heard feet running—bare, he reckoned by the soft slapping sounds—moving off down the slope, heading away from the huts.

He knew precious little about ghosts or haints, but he figured they floated more than walked. And in the light cast by the fire on the far wall, he could make out a shadow of movement, the faintest outline of a pair of arms extending for balance.

Ghosts wouldn't make shadows, would they?

E
lias fetched up the lamp and took off in the direction he'd seen the shadow fleeing.

He was lucky the nurse was busy. He was unlucky, however, in that his lamp didn't want to stay lit. He had to slow himself several times, cupping a hand in front of the flame to keep it from snuffing out, watching anxiously as it pulled dangerously thin.

The flame wasn't the only thing gasping. Elias's lungs protested the quick walk, that familiar feeling of iron bands wrapping around his chest returning. He heard his own breath whistle in and out. But he would not cough, he promised himself.
Just breathe shallow,
he thought,
you can cough when you've caught him up. . . .

He was in a new part of the cave, an area just past the ward, down the path from the way he had been brought in. And then he realized that whoever—or
whatever
—he was following wasn't carrying any light. How could he not be carrying a light?

Elias heard movement far off at the end of the passage, then footsteps once again. He walked on, sure he'd found his ghost-who-was-not-a-ghost. “Go back!” came the voice, the same voice that he'd heard at his window, but this time harsher, a whisper-shout like the cry of some banshee.

In all the stories Elias had heard about faeries or spirits that led knights astray to trap them, he never once heard of those spirits telling the knights to go back. He reckoned maybe, somehow, that might be a good sign.

So he continued picking his way through the chamber and down to the tunnel he'd heard the voice shouting from. At last, he saw light ahead of him. His heart thudded, and he worried he might commence to wheezing or coughing, but he had to keep up. To his surprise, the light ahead wasn't moving. It was fixed in one spot, just beyond a bend to the right. He slowed as he drew closer, craning his neck around the corner to see his ghost for the first time.

But it wasn't a ghost at all. It was Stephen Bishop. Stephen wasn't wearing the fancy getup he'd been in that first day when he guided Elias in: just a pair of ragged old pants, cotton shirt, and thin wool coat. He appeared younger out of his finer clothes, and Elias guessed he couldn't be much past twenty, the mustache over his lip still filling in.

Stephen sat cross-legged, writing in a little book with a nub of a pencil, the lamp perched up high on a rock. Elias noticed his printing was as neat as a pin, square and even as he wrote on a page already half filled up.

“Stephen?” Elias said, looking around the low tunnel.

“You should be in bed, Elias.” Stephen didn't even look up.

“But—” Elias began before his cough finally caught up to him. He braced his hands on his knees, rode out his bucking lungs, and searched the tunnel ahead and behind him to make sure that he hadn't passed his ghost by mistake. Finally his cough died and he could finish. “But I was following . . .”

Stephen tilted his head. “What?”

Elias shrugged. “There was something at my window the morning after I got here. I could only see the eyes, and then just now they were back, and he talked to me. . . . Said he weren't a ghost—”

“Ghost?” Stephen was incredulous.

Elias felt foolish now. “He was there!” he insisted, “I followed him. Whoever it was, he was running ahead of me without a light.”

Stephen blew out his breath quick and sharp. “Only ones who know the cave well enough to go without a light for any length are me and Nick and Mat, and we do that only up by the entrance. And it sure wasn't Nick or Mat, and it wasn't me, was it?”

“Which one's Mat?”

Stephen almost laughed. “You'd have known if it were Mat. Trust me.”

“But—”

“I think you maybe just got a touch of cabin fever.”

This was true ten ways from Sunday, but to Elias's ear, it sounded as if maybe Stephen was trying a little too hard. He stayed quiet. “You figure on finding yourself a ghost, is that it?” Stephen asked. “Mercy. All you're going to do is make yourself into one, running off in the cave alone.”

“I—”

“Never you mind about chasing haints.” Stephen patted the cave floor. “Now sit down and catch your breath.”

Elias sat, shamed and annoyed, certain none of the Knights of the Round Table ever got such a scolding. From the likes of a slave, no less.

Yet the truth of it was, Elias was more worn out from the chase than he liked to admit. He began fiddling with the end of a rope he found dangling from Stephen's pack.

“You can read?” Elias asked. “And write?” To hear Granny tell it, Kentucky was hard on its slaves, worse than Virginia even, on account of they didn't have so many and what they did have kept running off North to get free. Plus, it was against the law anywhere to teach a slave or a colored person to read.

Stephen's lip became a hard line. “I read,” he said evenly. “That all right with you?”

Elias understood he'd offended him. He felt at once sorry for having done so and troubled for caring. Back home they owned a house girl and an outside man, and his mother and granny were nothing but kind to them. His own daddy had hired freedmen to work the docks and even to sail for him at times. Daddy'd said a man who didn't look after his property didn't deserve to have it in the first place; whether that property were a boat or a Negro, he didn't see the difference.

So Elias didn't see any cause for Stephen Bishop to bristle at the question of his reading or not.

Stephen flipped forward in his book, to a drawing with a series of notes next to it. “See that hole?” he asked, pointing at a trickle of water in the wall in front of him at eye level. Elias did. “That one opened up about three years back, or at least that's when we noticed it first. So I've been watching it. Along with others.”

“Others?”

Stephen gestured around him, at the cave beyond. “Little places where the water starts to weep through. This one's grown nearly a quarter inch since I started keeping track of it.”

A measly quarter of an inch after three years. Then again, caves were patient things after all. Too bad Elias couldn't be.

“Where's the water come from?”

Stephen pointed. “Up there. Dropping from somewhere else.”

“From the river, maybe?” Elias asked, starting over on a water knot. He missed the sound and smell of water almost as much as he missed his family. He'd lived by the ocean his entire twelve and a half years; the marshy area where the James met the sea was his whole world. And he'd seen no rivers to rival the James as they came inland following the Wilderness Road. The last one they'd passed had been slow and skinny and muddy green, flat-bottomed barges squeezing up it like eggs passing through a chicken snake.

He'd not mind seeing a river down here.

Stephen bent back over his work. “Rivers are both farther in and below where we are now.” He flipped briefly to the beginning of the book, the first drawing looking like nothing if it wasn't a map. It reminded Elias of the nautical charts his father used, various lines showing shipping routes or navigable rivers.

“Hey!” Stephen said, noticing at last the knot Elias was working in the cord. He snatched it from him. “A piece of rope isn't a thing to tangle up for fun. Not down here. You got no notion how many times I've been glad to have a rope—”

“I didn't tangle it,” Elias protested, adding, “yank on them ends.” Stephen did, and the knot came out clean and simple. “Water knot's a sort of trick knot, but serves useful on ship.” Stephen looked at him curiously. “My daddy had ships,” Elias offered.

Stephen coiled the rope slowly. “You know all kind of knots then, do you?”

“Reckon I do.”

Stephen's eyes flicked from the rope to Elias to the rope again. He was clearly considering something. “What would you say to helping me and the boys one night? Out here?”

Elias sat up tall. Bother the ghost. A chance to do something, and with Stephen no less. Though he was prouder than a slave maybe ought to be, Elias liked him well enough. And now that he'd finally left his room, he thought he'd like to get out again. “When? Now?”

“Not tonight. Later. Only you don't go telling about it. Or about chasing haints off in the cave, you hear?” Stephen stood, tucked the book and pencil into his bag, and flung one end of the rope at Elias. “Hold on to this. I'll keep the other end. Last thing we need is you wandering off again.”