Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 9 of 25

Past the ridge the trail ran straight and open. Thin grass on both sides. No trees, no rocks, no ditch. Kate walked ahead of Mr. Echo with the salt bag on her hip. The glade lay maybe a quarter mile north, a dark line of oaks he could just see. Above the pines behind them, the moon's face had turned. Mr. Echo felt the pressure in his ears drop, the way it did when sound began to go missing. She was coming down. He stopped Kate with a hand on her sleeve. "She's on the ridge," he said. "If we run, she takes you before the trees." Kate looked at the open ground. "Then I don't run." "You don't stay either." The two Bunnymen guides crouched low in the grass, ears flat. They could vanish into it. Kate could not. Mr. Echo knelt and opened the box. Inside were the two dead Bunnymen voices he had recorded at the warren. His only weapon. He had planned to save them for the glade itself. He looked at Kate's white face and changed his plan. He called the ghost rabbits back down the trail. They came at a run, the little girl behind them with the paper swallow still in her hand. "I need a shape that walks," he said to the rabbit woman. "Something living, on the trail, moving north. Not Kate." The rabbit man tapped his chest. Three light, one heavy. Then he pointed off into the grass, and a black cat stepped out, thin and sleek, green eyes on Mr. Echo. A dead thing the rabbits knew. It sat by the box and waited. Mr. Echo pressed the box against the cat's side and played one dead Bunnyman voice, low, at walking pace. To the pale woman above, it would read as a living throat moving up the trail. He pointed the cat north. It went, tail up, the voice going with it. Then he took Kate's wrist and pulled her sideways into the grass, flat, with the guides. The little girl and the ghost rabbits lay across them like a blanket of cold air. The silence came down fast. He felt it pass over the grass in a long slow wave, the way a door closes in an empty house. It followed the cat. It followed the voice. Up the trail, a hundred yards on, the recorded voice cut off mid-word. Eaten. The cat did not come back. The pressure in his ears eased. She had taken the bait and gone up the trail after it, north, past the glade's mouth. Mr. Echo lifted Kate to her feet. The box was lighter now by one dead voice. The oaks were close. "Move," he said, and they ran the open ground while the moon's face still looked the wrong way, and reached the first trees of the glade before she turned back.