Legion's Arc

Chapter 7 of 22

Diana sat in the cellar dirt and watched the hole above her. Night had come. The weak light was gone. Her ankle throbbed. She had waited for the swarm to return, but the barn stayed quiet. Then a shape moved at the edge of the hole. Something dropped through and landed beside her with a heavy thud. She flinched back. Her hands found it in the dark. A book. The cover was rough, like tree bark, damp with moss. It was heavier than any book should be. She did not understand why he had given it to her. A second thing fell. Lighter. It settled across her knees. She pulled it close and felt torn cloth. Checked fabric. A piece of Mark's shirt. She knew the pattern by touch. Her throat tightened. Diana looked up. At the lip of the hole crouched the swarm, pressed into one shape. Rats layered on rats, a wall of small bodies and wet eyes. In the middle a face pushed forward. Mark's face. But it was wrong now. The skin looked stretched and gray. The jaw hung too wide. The black eyes had grown huge and flat. Whatever had spared her twice was becoming something worse. "Mark," she said. Her voice cracked. "What is this?" The face did not speak. It could not. But it dipped toward the book in her lap, then dipped again. A push. He wanted her to open it. Her hands shook. She turned the bark cover back. The pages inside were dark and stiff. She could not read them in the black. She tilted the book toward the faint gray of the hole and squinted. Old marks crawled across the paper. Drawings of animals. Drawings of men who were also animals. She could not read the words. But she understood the shape of the thing. "This is what did it," she whispered. "This turned you." The swarm above her shuddered. The face pressed harder through the mass, straining, as if trying to hold itself together one more moment. Then it broke. The rats poured apart. The face collapsed into a thousand bodies again. The monstrous head was gone. The swarm rushed back from the hole and drained into the walls. Diana was alone. She sat with the shirt on her knees and the bark book in her hands. She finally understood. He had not trapped her to kill her. He had trapped her to reach her. He was losing what was left of Mark, and he had given her the one thing that might undo it. She pressed the torn cloth to her chest. She could not climb out. Her ankle was useless. But she had the book now, and she had a reason to live long enough to read it. She wiped her eyes and turned the first page toward the light.