Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 1 of 25

Mr. Echo walked the copse before dawn because that was where the silence was thickest. He carried a brass box the size of a lunch pail, wired to a pair of copper cones. The box measured sound that failed to return. Three years ago someone close to him had called out, and the echo came back wrong, then not at all. He had followed that missing sound ever since. Tonight it was pulling him toward the hill the town would not climb, where he believed a warren of rabbit-shaped people once lived before they were driven out. He meant to lead them home. Half a mile in, the needle on his box dropped to zero. His boots struck the dirt and gave nothing back. No crunch. No soft thud. The sound of his own steps was being eaten before it could leave the ground. He stopped under a cherry tree still holding its blossoms out of season. Petals fell past his face without a sound. Something was behind him. He could tell because the quiet had a shape now, a pocket moving through the trees at his pace. When he walked, it walked. When he stopped, it waited one breath longer than he did. He could not turn and look. If it closed the gap, he would not hear it. He would only feel the door close in the empty house. He set the brass box on the roots and unlatched the lid. Inside was a glass jar sealed with an old rune-band, the last thing his teacher had given him. The jar held a sample of true sound, saved from before the silence started. He had never opened it. He twisted the seal. A single clean note rang out, the pitch of a struck bell. The copse gave it back. Every trunk answered. The pocket of quiet behind him broke open, and for one second he heard what had been following him. Not footsteps. Breathing. Long ears turning. A shape the size of a man, waiting. Then it bolted, and he heard it go, brush snapping, dirt kicking, alive and afraid of him now instead of the other way around. He stood over the empty jar. The seal was spent. He had used his one sample to make the woods speak, and the woods had shown him the thing he came here to find. A Bunnyman. One of them, still out here, still hiding. Ahead of him on the path stood a woman he knew from town, holding salt and a candle and a folded list. Kate Bush had come to climb the hill. She looked at the shaking trees, then at him. "You heard that," he said. "I heard something." "I need you to come with me before it stops running." She put the candle in her pocket. "Then walk."