Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 2 of 25

They followed the broken brush uphill. Kate walked a step behind him, salt in one fist, candle in the other. Mr. Echo held the brass box out in front of them like a lantern. The needle jerked toward the Bunnyman's trail, then jerked again toward the peak above. Two hungers pulling on the same wire. He kept them on the trail. Ahead, between two trunks, he saw it once, clear as ink on paper. A tall shape with long ears, standing sideways, watching them come. Then it was gone. "It stopped to look," he said. "It wants us to keep up," Kate said. The silence from the peak began to slide down the slope. He felt it before the needle showed it. His own breath thinned in his ears. The copper cones on his box stopped humming. When Kate's boot cracked a branch, the crack came to him late and soft, as if heard through a wall. The device's needle drifted toward zero. He shook the box. The needle stayed dead. Without it he could not tell the Bunnyman's silence from the hill's silence. He would lose the trail inside a minute. He stopped under a peach tree in strange bloom. Pink petals hung still in the dead air. He set the box on a root and thought. The hill was eating sound from above. His device measured what was eaten. If everything went quiet at once, the device could not point. He needed one small sound the hill was not yet eating. A sound close to the ground, close to them. "Pour the salt," he said. "In a line across the path. Now." Kate did not ask why. She knelt and poured. The grains struck the dirt, and each grain made a tiny tap he could still hear. He turned the cones down toward the salt line and reset the needle against that small living noise. Now the box had a floor to stand on. He swung the cones slowly. The needle twitched left, toward a gap in the brush. Faint, but there. The Bunnyman's quiet, cut against the salt's small speaking. Above them, between two branches, a pale face showed for one breath. A woman's face, moon-round, hair moving in no wind. Her eyes found Kate. Kate did not look up. Kate kept pouring salt. The face drew back into the leaves. Mr. Echo felt the pull from the peak sharpen and knew what climbed the hill did not want them to have this trail. "Left," he said. "He went left. Move before she comes down." Kate pocketed what salt was left. They stepped over the white line and into the gap. Behind them the peach tree stood in its wrong bloom. Ahead the needle held steady on the Bunnyman, and Mr. Echo followed, tuned now to the smallest sound the hill had not yet taken.