The Bend

Chapter 16

I didn't go to the tower.

I went to the store room.

The dry store was off the kitchen, down three steps and through a door that was supposed to be locked and wasn't. Flour sacks stacked eight high against the wall. Barrels of salt. A ledger on a nail with a pencil on a string.

I took the ledger down and opened it.

D. Ash was on every Thursday for six months. Every Thursday, in pencil, in the same neat hand that was on the list Mrs. Crane had handed me.

I knew that hand. I'd been looking at it all day.

---

Doreen was on the east stair at seven, carrying a basket of sheets.

"Hey," I said.

She stopped. Shifted the basket to her hip.

"You're not supposed to be up here."

"Neither are you. It's not Thursday."

She looked at me.

"What?"

"The flour list. Thursdays. It's not Thursday and you're not on the kitchen roster today and you're carrying sheets up the east stair where the guard goes off for a smoke at midnight and comes back at twelve-twenty."

She didn't move. Her face didn't change.

"Say that again slower," she said. "Because I want to make sure I heard it right before I hit you with this basket."

"Where were you at four o'clock?"

"Folding sheets in the linen room. With Mrs. Crane. Ask her."

"Mrs. Crane was in the kitchen with me."

"No," Doreen said. "She was in the linen room with me at four and she came down to you at four-twenty. I know because she complained the whole way down about the way I fold fitted sheets."

I stood there.

"Who else carries the flour up?" I said.

"Whoever's on the list. There's three of us." She shifted the basket again. "Me, Greta, and the archivist's nephew on Tuesdays."

"The archivist's nephew."

"Jamie. Skinny kid. Nineteen. Doesn't talk." She looked at me sideways. "You going somewhere with this or are you just gonna stand there looking suspicious?"

"Somebody walked into a painted-shut room off the west corridor this afternoon and took something out of it and left flour on the floor."

Doreen's face changed.

Not guilt. Something else. Something colder and older.

"One-oh-four," she said.

"Yeah."

"God." She set the basket down on the step. "That's the old mail room. That's been painted shut since the last housekeeper got fired."

"The one four years ago."

"Mm." She wiped her hands on her apron. "You know what she did? She ran the mail. Not just the castle mail. The whole valley. Every letter that came up that ridge road went through her hands before it went to anybody else."

"And she got fired."

"She got fired because the King's mother's things kept turning up in places they shouldn't." Doreen looked at me. "And because a letter went out of this castle that shouldn't have. A letter from the King. To a man he'd exiled. There was a name in it that wasn't supposed to be in it."

The letter from Lucifer's story. The woman who died.

"That's what I heard, anyway," Doreen said. "I was in the laundry then. I hear things in the laundry."

"Where is she now?"

"Nobody knows. Left the valley. That's all anybody says."

"And Jamie?" I said. "The archivist's nephew. Where's he tonight?"

Doreen picked the basket back up.

"Store room," she said. "He sleeps in the store room sometimes when the ridge road's bad."

---

I went outside.

I don't know what I was thinking. I want to be honest about this part because it was the stupidest thing I did all week.

I was thinking about that bend in the road. Three miles out, past the mill, where the trees come right up to the shoulder. I'd walked it eleven years. I knew it better than I knew my own face. And I'd spent a whole day being told things by people who weren't going to tell me the rest of it, and I was sick of it.

So I put on my coat and I walked out the kitchen door and I went down the drive and through the gate because the gate was still open, and I started walking.

Nobody stopped me.

The road was a pale line in the dark. My shoes were wrong for it — thin-soled, meant for stone floors — but I'd walked worse. The wall ran along the left side and the trees ran along the right and the moon came out from behind the ridge and made everything gray.

Two miles. Then three.

Then the trees came right up to the shoulder.

The bend.

I stopped in the middle of the road.

It was exactly how I remembered it, except in my memory it was daylight and I was eleven and I was late for school. Now it was night and the trees closed in on both sides and the moon was gone behind the ridge and I couldn't see fifteen feet in front of me.

It has to look like she ran.

I heard a boot on gravel behind me.

I turned around.

There were three of them in the road. Not rogues. Men. Castle men — I could see the cut of the coats even in that light, the black wool, the silver pins.

The one in front was holding a length of rope.

He didn't say anything. He just looked at me and then he looked past me down the road and then he started walking.

I backed up.

"You're making a mistake," I said. My voice came out steady. I don't know how.

The man kept walking.

I turned and ran.

I got maybe twenty feet.

Something hit me in the back and I went down on the road and the gravel took the skin off both my palms and my chin, and I rolled over, and there were hands on my coat, and then there was a sound.

It came out of the trees.

The men stopped.

The sound came again, and it wasn't a howl. It was lower. It was the sound the ground makes right before it opens up.

The man with the rope let go of me and reached for his belt.

The trees were wrong. That's the only way I can say it. The trees were wrong, and then they weren't trees.

It came out of the dark on four legs and it didn't slow down.

I have thought about this part so many times and I still can't get it right. It was fast. It was too big to be that fast. One man went into the ditch like a thrown coat. The rope came off and landed in the road next to my hand and I grabbed it and I don't know why.

The second man screamed.

The third man got his knife up. The Beast took the arm with the knife in it and the man went down and the sound he made was not a scream anymore.

Then it was quiet.

I was on my back on the road and the moon came out and the Beast was standing over me with its head down and its breath fogging in the cold, and there was blood on its mouth and it was close enough that I could have counted its teeth.

It didn't move.

I couldn't feel my hands.

Then it put its nose against my shoulder.

And I don't know what happened after that, because the road went sideways and the moon slid off the sky and I was somewhere dark.

---

I woke up in bed.

Blue door. Fire going. Blanket over me, up to my chin.

My hands were clean. My chin was clean. There was a bandage wrapped around my right palm, neat and tight and the knot on the outside like a nurse would do it.

My shoes were on the floor by the bed, side by side, facing the same way. My coat was on the back of the chair with the mud brushed off it.

I sat up.

There was a hair on the pillow next to my head.

Long. Black. Not mine.

I picked it up and held it in the firelight and I sat there for a long time.

Chapter 16 Ends