Danica told them to wait until late night, early morning, when everyone slept soundly. That would be safest. Some of the ladders lead to manholes and some to grates, but in the full dark, it is difficult to tell if they are cemented over unless Simon climbs up to them. He loses track of how many he tries until he finds what he believes to be the correct entry, a grate that opens into a dark room.
“I think this is it.”
“You think?” Ella says. “What do you mean, you think?”
He cracked his cast off that day. It fell away like a shell and he did not recognize the arm within, the stick thinness of it. The skin was yellowish and scraped away beneath his fingernail. His tendons and muscles ache from lack of use and he finds it difficult to hold the lantern now while pushing up the grate with the other arm. The metal scuds across cement. He climbs up and knobs out a longer wick and a room solidifies around him.
“Hmm,” he says.
From below, her voice, “Hmm? What does that mean?”
“I don’t think we’re where we’re supposed to be.”
There is a chair — that is the first thing he notices — a metal chair with straps dangling from each of its arms. He swings the lantern around him and knocks a chain that jangles and sways. A hook curls the bottom of it. There is a table along the wall and above it a wall of knives and barbed metal instruments he does not recognize.
Then there are the mannequins. With hair and jewelry and whatever else glued to them, they appear like some demented child’s attempt to cobble together a person.
He feels breath against his neck and flinches. Ella comes up behind him with her lantern burning in her hand. “Where are we?” she says at a whisper.
“Not the Dome.”
They circle the room, working their way through the dummies but not touching them, as if they were strangers asleep. There is a bed against the wall. The blanket is thrown back and Simon puts a hand to the pillow and finds it cold. “Whoever lives here hasn’t been home tonight.”
“Why wouldn’t he be home? With the curfew, where else could he be?”
“Doing something creepy is my guess.”
Ella stands before a two-doored closet that takes up most of a wall. They each grab a knob. He steadies his breath and his eyes drop momentarily to his lantern. Because of this, he cannot see as well as he could, his vision smeared with light, so that when they swing open the doors, he believes in the monster. The monster in the closet is real.
It swings out at them, a dark shape, a twisting bunch of shadows. He sees then the hanger that holds it in place, the hollowed arms and legs with leather straps and metal buckles. A deputy’s uniform. As massive as a tent.
He runs his fingers along the fabric, and something pricks the pad of his finger. A drop of blood swells and he brings it to his mouth to suck. It tastes like the air of this room, like the air of the morgue. He remembers the pallid face of his mother laid out on a slab. He remembers his father there, too. He remembers the breath of Ella when she sobbed and he clutched her after the tooth ripped from her mouth. He remembers the rage he felt then, and now, when he says, “Slade.”
Chapter 48
THE DOCTOR HAS a new name now. Mother. That’s what the girls call her.
She doesn’t know what to think at first. They ask if it’s all right, if she minds, and she licks her lips and blows out a breath full of emotion. “If that’s what you’d like, I think mother will suit me perfectly.”
“It would mean a lot to us,” they say. “It really would.”
“That settles it, then. Mother.”
She rather likes the sound of it. And she, after all, calls them her girls, this den of young women she considers a kind of family. They helped her heal, and now she helps them build a life in Bismarck. They construct a greenhouse on the roof. From cellars they harvest mushrooms and lichens and mosses. They dig up roots. They shovel through grain bins and discover preserved cores of corn and soybean to plant and to eat. They mash medicines, vitamins to ruddy their skin and harden their bones and battle the scurvy weakening them. She teaches them everything she knows about anything she knows. For some of them, that means simple reading. For others, basic surgery.
Her injured arm — now scarred over — hangs useless at her side, good only for gripping the walking stick she uses to get about. She lost enough blood to permanently weary her heart. Her body feels shrunken, bent. But she gets by. Her girls keep her busy.
Every morning, they auger fresh holes in the river and bait their hooks with hunks of liver and drop their lines. By the time they snowshoe the banks and woods and fallen neighborhoods to check their traps — collecting into the back of their sleds the rabbits and beaver and otter and mink and porcupine — the tip-ups on the river have flared their fire-bright ribbons. There is no shortage of fish. The river surges with them, mostly carp, but plenty of catfish and bluegill and trout and smallmouth. Sometimes, on the coldest days, in an effort to stay warm, the fish swirl together beneath the water, coalescing like dark planets, and when this happens the auger holes splutter and the ice begins to thin and crack, and the girls move their tip-ups and find another stretch of river, because they have fallen through before, pulled away by the black current, lost.
They don’t see much of Clark. She ranges the outer reaches of Bismarck, the woods, sometimes hunting the plains, where she has shot elk and antelope, once a bison whose herd departed in a thunder that shook the ground.
The doctor is more grandmother than mother to them. They are by and large teenagers, except for Marie. No one knows how old she is, but she has gray in her hair and her blind eye is as white and bulging as a boiled egg. She carries a phone everywhere she goes and mutters into it. The girls treat her kindly, but Clark seems to hate her. “It’s that eye. It seems to probe you, see inside you.”
One time Marie removed the phone from her ear and held it out to Clark. The cord dangled like a vein. “It’s for you,” she said.
“Yeah. Who is it?”
“Lewis,” she said. “It’s Lewis.”
Clark knocked the phone from her hand and it went skittering across the floor.
Sometimes the doctor sees Clark staring at the horizon. She doesn’t ask, but she knows. She is thinking about Lewis. Something happened between them the doctor does not understand. And something has changed in Clark, turned over inside her like a big black dog, and if the doctor reaches out a hand she knows it will come away bloody. So she waits, hoping Clark will announce her problems when ready.
But she doesn’t. The optimism that once brightened her voice — the authority that once straightened her spine — is gone. The Clark she knows is gone. She disappears for days, returning with meat. Or she drinks herself into unconsciousness, seeking that numbing burn that expands inside her, spreading to her toes and fingers, the tips of her ears, fuzzing over any thoughts that might bother her.
Today the doctor finds her kneeling beside the fountain. Here the girls dump buckets of snow that island and melt into gray water for them to drink or wash their dishes and clothes. She splashes her face clean, rubs away what dirties her. She cups handfuls and handfuls to her face. Water was sacred in the Sanctuary, and the old women were always talking about how it cleaned more than your skin, and even wetting your hands, your face, could chase away something that spoiled you. The doctor hopes so. “Do you miss him?” she says.