Beneath Ceaseless Skies #96 Read online

  On the last warm day of autumn, Dipper wanted to go swimming in the lake. She might have swum in the river; she might have gone alone and not asked me; I might have said no. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. Everyone knows the danger of walking outside during a thunderstorm, but people do it anyway, and how often is anyone struck by lightning? It was common lore that the serk stay near the deepest bottom, that decades go by between sightings.

  Nor did I consult the book. I didn’t ask its permission for every little thing, and anyway, for four days it had had only one message: The day approaches. I could make no sense of that, so I’d stopped looking at it.

  Dipper and I ran down to the lake as if our bodies had unlimited energy, tall grass whipping our legs and the fall sunshine warming our scalps. At the lake’s edge, she told me to turn around while she undressed, something she’d never asked before. It gave me a funny feeling in my stomach and behind my eyes when she asked, but I didn’t understand what it was, not then. After a few minutes I heard her splash into the water, and she called, “Hurry up!”

  I stripped off my clothes and rushed in after her. The water near the shore was sun-warmed, but further away it got colder, and my skin tightened against my bones. We began splashing about in earnest, playing silly games, dunking each other and diving for stones. It was the last morsel of summer, and I felt that it was the last taste of childhood too. Some part of me, the part that swallowed hard when I averted my gaze from Dipper, knew that I would not be coming to the lake with her the same way again. I sensed that, by the time spring warmed the shore and made the lake swimmable again, she and I would stand clothed in a profound change.

  She swam further out in effortless, confident strokes. I didn’t follow, at least not far. I lay on my back and propelled myself with lazy flutters of my arms and feet.

  Then I heard Dipper grunt, a soft little “um,” the way she did when she’d forgotten something she needed and had to go home for it. I looked over the water to her, and for an instant it seemed to me that she’d stopped moving altogether. Did I see a flash of color in the waves? But Dipper started swimming again, slower, more deliberate strokes, and I decided that it was nothing.

  I decided it; I knew what it might be, and I put it out of my mind. Was it love that made me pretend that nothing was wrong, or would it have been love to act?

  Before Dipper got to shore, she asked me to get out first and dress again, looking away from her while she dressed. When I faced her again, her limbs looked smooth and lithe, sun-touched and wind-cooled, the same as she’d ever been. We wandered to our homes, drying in the sun but still smelling of the lake, and did not touch before saying goodbye.

  I heard nothing from Dipper the next day, nor the day after. This was comforting; it made the muffled voices in my head seem silly and fretful. I did my chores and helped my father with the harvesting, a long, hard job that took us until after sunset. I wondered how I’d ever found the time to go swimming the day before, and fell into bed exhausted.

  In the middle of the night I woke, for no reason I could tell. I was suddenly cold, and I felt, with the urgency of a full bladder, the need to open my grandfather’s red-covered book.

  There was a full moon, and I could see the markings clearly from the light pouring through the window:

  She will kill you.

  Take to the rafters.

  Fear squeezed my stomach. I did not let myself understand the full meaning of the warning, but I had come to trust the book enough to believe I was in danger. There were no rafters I could reach in the room where I slept, so I crept from it, taking the book with me, and padded into the big room, from which I could scramble up to the highest part of the house.

  It was dark as earth in the rafters, but the floor below was lit by moonlight from the windows. The rough beams on which I sat were painful, but I stayed still. Perhaps ten minutes later, the outer door opened.

  I would know her silhouette anywhere, even from above, even stretched and distorted by the angle of the moon; I knew Dipper almost as well as I knew myself. But now I knew her not at all.

  She was barefoot and carried in her left hand a long, thin knife, the sort used for boning meat. My terror was sharp, but my grief was sharper, for now there was no question what had happened. Dipper, my Dipper, was a late serker. She was mad, cunning, and vicious, and would kill me if she could catch me—and at that moment I hoped she would kill me, because the days, perhaps the hours remaining to her could be counted on one hand, and I could not bear it.

  With less sound than a cat stalking a mouse, Dipper glided to the door from which I had just come. She vanished within it, and it stayed open for several minutes as she searched the place for me. Had I not wakened, had I not seen the book’s warning, she would have dispatched me easily in my sleep. She reemerged, turning her head from side to side, as if hoping to find me lurking in a corner. She turned toward my parents’ room, then towards my brother Weasel’s, and for a moment I thought she would go there to kill him. But she shook her head, then looked straight up.

  My chest nearly burst with the effort of stilling my breath. Could she somehow penetrate even the shadows above her?

  No, she couldn’t. She passed out of the house the way she had come, closing the door softly behind her. For what seemed a long time I waited, certain that she would surprise me as soon as I climbed down. She didn’t.

  I needed to warn the village, before she killed anyone else. For all I knew, her parents were already dead. Soon, she would be dead herself.

  The book had saved my life; I hoped that it could tell me which way to turn. I opened a page, and a new message confronted me:

  Go north into the mountains.

  Do not wait. Do not stop.

  I stared at the words in the cold light. Leaving Badger Stone without waiting would mean deserting Dipper in her time of crisis, abandoning the village when it was beset by a serker. But the book had never been wrong. I bit my lip to avoid sobbing aloud.

  I knocked on my parents’ door, something I hadn’t done at night for years. After too many heartbeats, my father pulled the door open, squinting at me in confusion.

  It didn’t take long for me to explain what had happened; my father knew that we must wake Marmot immediately. He began to dress but balked when I told him of the book’s instructions to go north.

  “Now wait a moment, Scuffer; not at your age. You can’t just light out—”

  “Father, the book told me! It knew about Dipper. It’s never been wrong. I have to.”

  In the lamplight I could see the whites of his eyes. Finally he said, “At least put on some warm clothes and pack some food.”

  I grabbed a sack and stuffed it with the bread and cheese we had in the larder, then wrapped myself in my wool cloak and my warm boots. My father squeezed my shoulder while I was dressing and then ran out the door. I was only a few minutes behind him, and soon I had left Badger Stone behind me.

  When you travel north in the valley, you don’t meet any rivers or lakes, and for the first several miles it’s all farms and easy hills. Then come the woods, then the foothills, then the mountains. Every step is a challenge, and the trees prevent you from seeing far, even in daylight. At night it’s slow, and it seemed even slower to me.

  What would I do when I got to the mountains? It was three days’ walk. Was the book protecting me from Dipper? Having failed to kill me once, she’d try again, this time more subtly and harder to evade.

  But my gut told me otherwise. There were many places I could have gone; north into the mountains was too specific for mere protection. The book and its long-dead maker had their own reasons for wanting me in the hills, and I had no way to guess what they were. I was a toy on a string. For all I knew, I might be sacrificed as easily by my guide as by my friend. I wondered, was it better to be killed by a friend? Bitterly I thought that Dipper at least had some cause.

  I reached the mountains on the third day. As I sat shivering under a tree with the last of my food
, I opened the book again:

  Upward today

  until the three white stones.

  Then east.

  I was being led to a particular place. Had I been older, maybe I would have balked immediately and gone back to Badger Stone. But I was a boy of thirteen, and already there was Dipper’s madness and soon her death on my conscience. Obeying the book gave me a direction, something I could do without taking responsibility, something to take my mind from the agony of never seeing her again.

  I found the three white stones, lined up like soldiers across my path, and turned east. The book led me along switchbacks, twists and hidden crossings—a path no one could have followed if he did not know it was already there.

  Near sunset on the fourth day, I came to a grassy mound, twice a man’s height and wide as my house, supported on its sides by smooth grey stones the size of cattle. Moss and small trees grew on it, and some of the stones had been split by the roots. It was old.

  Obeying the book, I found a place on the north side where a boy my size might move several smaller rocks and enter. Earth and plants came away as I pulled out the stones, and the slanting light preceded me into the mound.

  I grabbed one of the stones, expecting perhaps to be bowled over by a giant animal with claws. Nothing came, and I passed into darkness.

  First the smell came to me, sour and musty, so thick it was like a warm wave of water. I gagged. Then my eyes learned to see; faintly, the inside of the hollow mound appeared. Smooth stones lined the whole interior, a dome just tall enough to stand in. In the center, on another huge rock, lay the body of a man.

  An old, old man: sunken eyes in a starved skull, white hair spilling onto the earthen floor. His bones stuck out like tumors. His clothes were tatters but had once been fine; I recognized weaving like my mother made for holidays. He was covered in dust.

  Obviously I was in a tomb. But as I stepped toward the slab, the man’s eyes came open—slowly, as if he had forgotten how.

  I gasped, and the head turned toward me. Those eyes went huge and wild, and he screamed.

  I retreated to the doorway, preparing to throw my stone; but the old man had risen and backed away to the far side of his tomb, cowering and shaking, dust falling off him in little cascades.

  “Don’t hurt me!” he whimpered, holding his hands in front of his face. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.” It was a rough, raspy voice, like the voice of a man recovering from an illness in his throat. Or a man who had not used his voice in years.

  For a moment I could not speak. Then I said, “I won’t hurt you.” But this only made him shriek again, and he tried to dig into the walls of the mound to get away, snapping some of his long fingernails. On his clothes I could now see brown stains, stains that looked like old blood.

  Horrified, I backed out into the dusk that was still brighter than the living grave within.

  I opened the book. There was only one word:

  Kill.

  I choked on my own spit. I turned the pages, and on each one I found the same word, over and over:

  Kill.

  Kill.

  Kill.

  Marmot’s words came to me, clear as water: On no account follow an instruction that seems to put anyone in any danger. All the book’s kindness now seemed like bait in a trap. From the start it had wanted to make me into a killer, and that was why it had befriended me.

  I wanted to hurl the book to the ground. I actually raised it into the air, dropping the stone. Then I brought it close to my face, staring at the ugly words. For the first time, I spoke to it aloud.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.”

  The characters on the book blurred, crawling around the page sickeningly. When they stopped, they said:

  Kill the serker

  before it’s too late.

  Dipper flashed before my eyes again, Dipper swimming away from me in the lake, Dipper with the boning knife in her hand.

  Was this terrified wreck a serker? That made no sense. If he were an early serker, he’d have tossed me aside and burst through the mound with one hand; if a late serker, then he’d have tried to kill me already.

  The old man sobbed from inside the mound. “Go away, go away, go away!”

  I spoke again to the book. “There’s no reason to kill him. He’s just some old man.”

  The words moved again:

  When I made me,

  I needed to plan my death.

  I didn’t understand—but for the first time, I felt the “commerce” between me and the book, of which Marmot had spoken. The book reacted to me, seemed to squirm in my hands with the discomfort of my own confusion. Then—there’s no other way to say it—it tried again:

  When he made it,

  He needed to plan his death.

  When the time came, I found you.

  Then I realized something: The book had said “I.” It had referred to itself. The trees seemed to fall away, the desecrated tomb to shrink; thunder was in my ears.

  When I was able to speak again, I asked something I should have asked the first day the book spoke to me: “What are you?”

  The words swirled:

  The sorcerer of Badger Stone.

  Then.

  The sorcerer of Badger Stone? Marmot? No, Marmot knew nothing about the book; he had been trying to decipher it since before I was born.

  I turned the next page. It said:

  The Lord of the Plateaus came.

  There was no other way.

  The sorcerer became a serker.

  Then I did drop the book.

  The Lord of the Plateaus. A serker. No other way. I knew who the old man was.

  Marmot had said that Warrior Serker sought the serk on purpose to save his people. If he was also a sorcerer, he could have made this book. If he was a “genius” sorcerer, as Marmot had said....

  I could see it in my mind: the desperate sorcerer, obliterating the host of the eastern plains but fearing that he would turn on his own kin. While the early strength was still in him, he raised this mound and sealed himself inside. And then....

  He could not have known what would happen, not for sure, as he lay down in his tomb and worked the sleeping spell on himself. This must have been his hope: that time, years, would somehow change him into something less deadly, less murderous, than a late serker.

  But it was only a guess, and so he left the book. To do what?

  I picked up the book again.

  I did what I had to,

  but a late serker could not be allowed to live.

  He might find a way out.

  I needed to find someone. I needed to find hands.

  That was my role: I was his executioner, in case the experiment failed.

  But had it failed? I said, “That’s not a serker. It’s a scared old man.”

  All at once the letters began to compose and recompose themselves into different messages so fast that I could barely read them, as if the book were arguing with itself:

  Not a serker.

  Scared old man.

  Serkers cannot be allowed to live.

  Not a serker.

  Scared old man.

  It went on this way for half a minute. Then the page went blank, and I thought it had finished.

  But:

  It makes no difference.

  Tern is gone, and Hider, and Gull and Minnow.

  All is desolation.

  There is misery and fear.

  For pity’s sake, kill.

  Kill.

  Hider—a child’s name. Tern, Gull, Minow—his family and friends? His sweetheart? If this was the Warrior Serker, everyone he had known was dust long before my grandfather was born. He had lost everything.

  But the book was wrong, I was sure of it. He didn’t need to be killed. I understood wanting to stop himself from wiping out the people he had saved, but this was different. Yes, he was frightened and probably filled with more grief than I could imagine, but he was no longer a danger to ot
hers.

  Then it came to me.

  Dipper didn’t have to die. If she was not dead already, if she could be put to sleep as the Warrior Serker was, then maybe she could live.

  I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t know whether ending like this old man would be worse for Dipper, but maybe Marmot could help him. Or maybe I could help Dipper, care for her, comfort her. If she wasn’t already dead. Hope pounded in my chest.

  I needed to ask Marmot, to show him the Warrior Serker. I hoped that the old man’s survival, and his change, would teach Marmot something that would help Dipper.

  But the Warrior Serker was starved, probably close to dying of thirst. He was petrified of me. Several times I tried to speak to him, but each approach only increased his terror.

  Then I had an inspiration and went in holding the red leather book in front of me. As I hoped, his eyes focused on the book rather than on me. He was still frightened, but this time the fear was mixed with incredulity and confusion.

  “My....” His voice was still harsh, but calmer, less bestial. “My—my enemy.” I thought he was talking about me, but he was staring at the book. “My enemy.”

  I held the book out to him, and he took it, first raising it to this nose and sniffing, then turning it over in his hands, opening the pages, his eyes wide and bright as he looked over the convoluted characters, his mouth open.

  Then he squinted at something. “Potential diameter could be tighter,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “What? Potential?” I blurted.

  “Without a tight helix, it won’t call. Won’t work.” He was still talking to himself. “Won’t persuade. Useless. Pointless.”

  “It worked well enough,” I told him.

  He turned his troubled eyes on me, then on the book, then back on me. “Found one. Found one.” Then he looked back at the pages in horror. “Lies!” He shouted. “Don’t believe it. Lies! Don’t hurt me.” Then he started whimpering again and would have pulled back, but I put my hand out.

  “Please,” I said. “You saved Badger Stone.”

  He squinted at me, confused. One shaking hand came out and poked my shoulder as if testing whether I was real.

  “Badger Stone,” he said.