Ollie tembers's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Ollie ran after the collie through the reeds, north, the way it had bolted when the silence broke. The mist thickened between the cherry trees. He kept the dog's white flank in sight until a low bank of fog rolled across the path, and when it thinned, the dog was gone. He stood in the wet grass and listened. No barking. No paws in the mud. The trail that had led him toward the person who dropped the china bird was gone with it. He tried to think of what the dog had done before it vanished. It had looked back at him three times. It had turned east at the split log, then north again at a stump. He walked to the stump and crouched. The ground there held no prints he could read. The Fen shifted its own tracks. He knew that. Without the dog, he had no way to follow living feet through it. He almost sat down in the moss and let the next silence take him. Then he saw her. She stood between two birch trunks, small, barefoot, in a pale dress that did not touch the ground. A child. Dead, like him. She was looking at something in her cupped hands. When Ollie stepped closer, she opened her fingers. Inside was a little painted swallow, wings spread, a crescent moon inked on its back. Not china. Paper, folded tight. A keepsake someone had given her, once. "I dropped mine," Ollie said. His voice came back to him, thin but working. "A bird like that. Did you see who I was following?" The girl did not answer with words. She turned and pointed through the trees, past a stand of alders, toward a place where the mist glowed faintly, as if a lantern moved behind it. Then she looked at his mouth and shook her head slowly. He understood. She had forgotten how to speak. She had been here longer than he had. He followed her pointing finger. The alders opened onto a narrow track pressed into the mud, and there, fresh, was a bootprint. Small. A woman's, maybe, or a young scout's. Beside it, a second set, and a smear where a satchel had dragged. Living feet. Two of them, moving deeper into the Fen. The tracks led toward the lantern light in the mist. Ollie looked back for the girl. She was gone. Only the paper swallow remained, set on the moss where she had stood. He picked it up and tucked it inside his shirt. He had lost the dog, but he had a trail again, and he had a voice again, however small. He started walking. Somewhere ahead, a hooded scout was pinning her notices to trees no living person would ever read, and she was about to find that one of the dead had come looking for her.