Ollie tembers's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The mist thinned after the hare-eared thing slid away. Ollie kept the jar tight to his ribs. The girl in the green hood knelt beside her broken lantern and gathered the tin pieces. The woman in red still sat in the moss. The man in the dark coat wound something inside his brass box. Then the air changed. A cold pressed in from the north slope, slow and wide, and Ollie felt the word inside his jar go quiet. He knew that quiet. It was her. "She heard me," Ollie said. "When I shouted before. She's coming." He turned in place. The trees stood still. No wind. That was the sign. "The pale one. She's pulling the hush down on me." The man in the coat looked up. "How long?" "Minutes," Ollie said. His own voice sounded thinner already. He felt the edges of his name loosen inside the glass, like a fish going soft in a net. If the silence reached him, he would forget again. He would be back to nothing. Three winters undone in an hour. He ran. He knew a place. Past the alders, on a rise, a sagging house with broken windows stood in a patch of wild daisies. He had hidden under its porch before. Sound stuck to its walls somehow; the boards creaked even when nothing moved. Behind him the girl in the green hood shouted at him to wait. Her dog came with her. The others followed. Inside the front room, dust and a smell of wet paper. On a warped table sat a rune-carved turntable and one black record, its label showing pale shapes of children under a lamp. Ollie did not know who had left it. He did not care. He set the needle down. The record turned. Voices came out of it, thin at first, then layered, a chorus of children calling names that were not his. The silence hit the porch and stopped. Ollie watched the daisies in the yard bend flat, then lift again as the sound pushed back. He saw her at the tree line for one breath, tall, white, mouth open, and then a small figure stepped out of the wall beside him. A little ghost girl in a white dress. She put her hand over his on the jar. She did not speak. She looked at him steady, and he understood. She had done this before. She had lost hers. The record ended. The needle scratched. The cold pulled back through the daisies and the trees swallowed it. Ollie's jar was still cold, but the word inside had not thinned. He had kept it. The little girl was still there, standing beside him, waiting. He did not know her name. He was not sure she had one left. He said, "Stay with me," and she nodded, and the porch boards creaked under nothing at all.