Chapter 81: The Old Tunnel

Rourke and his two men went up the stairs with their hands tied and the Kessler wolves took them across the field to the pack house. Erik Renn went up too, with June on one side of him and Arthur Renn on the other, and he did not say a word and he did not look back.

I stayed in the round room with the two stones.

They were both lit. It was a pale light and it came out of the marks and it filled the room and it did not go out and it did not flicker. I put my hand on the heart and it was warm and I put my hand on the piece and it was warm and the mark on my shoulder was warm and the three of them were the same warmth.

Elias came and stood beside me.

“Two days,” he said.

“Two days.”

“And then the new moon and the circle and the three Lunas.” He looked at the stones. “And then what?”

“And then the land is claimed and the curse is finished and the Council falls.” I took my hand off the stone. “And I have to decide what to do with the whole of it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“Not tonight.” I picked up the lantern. “But there is a tunnel we have not walked.”

“Wren.”

“Erik said it goes east under the field and comes out in the trees on the north road. He said there is a thing at the end of it.” I looked at him. “Elias, the Council has been keeping paper in this territory for eighty-five years. The vault is one place. There may be another.”

He looked at the map on the floor.

“Then we walk it,” he said.

We went down the second stair and into the tunnel.

It was lower than the one that went to the mill and narrower and the walls were rough stone and the floor was packed earth. It went east and it went down and it went under the east field and it was cold and it smelled of wet and old.

I went first with the lantern. Elias came behind me with the map.

We walked for a quarter of an hour and the tunnel did not change. It was stone and earth and roots and it went on.

And then it stopped being a tunnel.

It opened into a room.

It was not a vault. It was a room cut out of the earth with a floor of boards and a ceiling of boards and a stove in the corner with a pipe going up into the dark. There was a table and a chair and a bed with a blanket on it and a shelf along the wall with a lamp and a tin cup and a book. There was a coat on a peg by the door.

Somebody lived there.

I put my hand on the stove.

It was warm.

“Wren,” Elias said.

He was standing at the table with the lantern in his hand and there was a paper on the table and he was looking at it.

It was a map of the territory. It was the same map that had been in the vault and on the wall of the mill loft and it had the circle and the mill and the pack house and the east field marked on it. But it had more. It had the north line and the co-op road and the ridge and the mill road and it had lines drawn on it in red pencil and the lines were the patrols.

“Somebody has been mapping the patrols,” I said.

“Somebody has been mapping the patrols for a long time.” Elias turned the paper over. There was a list on the back. It was in a small neat hand and it went down the page.

It was a list of dates.

The fourteenth of June. The fifteenth. The twenty-second. The twelfth of July. The ninth of August. The third of September. The twenty-ninth of September.

“Those are the dates,” I said. “Those are the dates of the attacks.”

“Those are the dates of the attacks,” Elias said. “Every calf and every fence and every night the hunters went out. Somebody has been keeping a list of every attack in this territory and they have been keeping it in a tunnel under the east field where nobody would ever find it.”

I sat down in the chair.

There was a book on the shelf. I took it down and opened it.

It was a diary. It was in the same small neat hand and it went back years. It started in 1968 and it went to 1979 and every entry was short and every entry was about the territory.

The fourteenth of June. A calf at the Hendersons. The wolf was in the trees by the wall and he did not come out.

The twenty-second of June. Owen is dead. The wolf was in the field and he did not come out. I am sorry.

I put the book down.

“Elias,” I said. “This is Clara Renn’s diary.”

He came and looked.

“It is not Clara’s hand,” he said.

“It is not Clara’s hand.” I turned the page. “It is a hand I have seen. It is the same hand that wrote the list of years in the mill room and the same hand that wrote the second examination request and the same hand that wrote the note in my mother’s ledger.”

I turned to the back of the book.

There was one more entry and it was dated the twenty-third of June, 1975, and it was longer than the rest.

It said: I was in the field last night. I saw the Beta put the knife in the boy and I saw the old one come out of the trees and finish it. I did not stop them. I have been hiding in this tunnel for sixty years and I did not come out of the trees. I am the second wolf. I am the one who watched. And I am going to write it down and put it in the wall where the girl will find it, and then I am going to go up the ridge and tell the healer what I saw.

The next page was blank.

“She did not tell the healer,” Elias said.

“She did not tell the healer.” I closed the book. “She wrote it down and she put it in the wall and she went back to her house and she sat in her chair and she did not tell anybody for four months.”

And then the stove went out.

It did not go out the way a fire goes out. It went out the way a candle goes out when a hand closes over it, and the room was dark and the tunnel behind us was dark and the lantern in Elias’s hand was the only light.

“Somebody is in the tunnel,” he said.

I stood up.

There was a sound from the dark at the far end of the room. It was a footstep and then another.

And then a voice that was old and tired and very quiet said, “Put the book down, Wren. It is not finished.”