The Ferryman - Book 1

Chapter 68:

Hope Chest

Moth busied herself in the kitchen, preparing a dinner for everyone in the house, though it would be several hours before Lt. Grotte was finished with work and she couldn’t be sure when Feldar would return from the errand she had sent him on.

She made some bread dough and set it to rise in a warm corner, and scrounged through the cupboards. Finding jarred salmon and a bag of potatoes, Moth began to prepare salmon soup.

Outside, Nehem was tending to Lt. Grotte’s potager, and Moth could hear the snow melting and dripping off the eaves, and as the day went on and a spring sun glared persistently, the sound of the droplets became a steady stream.

It was strange to use her fogged hand again. She flexed and curled her hand, gripping a knife and peeling potatoes, something she had not done since she was fourteen – she had to, through the last decade of her life, figure out ways around her hand, to use it as a blunt instrument, but now it was hers again. It did not belong to the fog anymore.

She was unpracticed using two hands, and kept defaulting back into old habits, but would suddenly remember she could use it again and feel a massive wave of hope for Hiren, for herself, and would start crying onto the potatoes again.

Recovering herself, Moth set a pot of water onto the stove and bent to stoke the fire, adding some sticks of wood. When she stood up, she found water dripping into her pot.

Moth stared at it, and followed the stream towards the ceiling. Water gathered and dripped, dripped, dripped through a crack in the ceiling planks, where there were paintings of children with ammonite heads.

“Nehem?” Moth called out the window, and within a few minutes Nehem was standing next to her, also staring at the leaking ceiling.

“Let’s look,” said Nehem, not at all excited about the work he was going to have to do.

They climbed the steps to the hallway outside of Moth’s room.

The hallway had already become warped with neglect, age, and invasive weather, but now a trickle was flowing down the buckling hallway from a large, twisted ceiling plank. Behind the ceiling was the attic.

Attics in old houses like Poor Loom were crawl spaces a few feet tall, stuffed to the graining with sawdust for insolation. The water that drizzled down was dirty with sawdust – you could smell the soggy pine.

Nehem scratched his beard, the muscle around his eye twitching. “I saw a weak spot on the roof – it must’ve finally caved. You clean up the water, I’m going to get a ladder and rig something for the roof.”

Moth gathered buckets and pans for the leak, intermittently throwing a full bucket of water out the window. As she mopped up the water, she heard Nehem get a ladder and slowly climb onto the roof.

The thump of his massive footsteps Moth could track along until he stood above her.

“Can you hear me?” he called, his voice muffled behind sod and sawdust, but Moth could hear his baritone.

She climbed onto a chair and shouted through the dripping crack, “Yes. How is it?”

“Not as bad as I worried. An oilskin tarp will cover it until its dry enough to work on. I’ll shovel the snow away. A lot of the sawdust got soaked and is leaked out, I–”

Nehem’s voice trailed away. Moth listened intently. She heard him poke around in the attic space, a dull scraping noise.

“Nehem?” she gasped out.

“I found something,” he said. “A hope chest.”

*

It took Nehem some time, balancing the hope chest while climbing down the ladder, but he managed it without injury, and placed it in the kitchen.

It was a beautiful hope chest. A deep green with brass hardware, painted over with the Barrowly family reindeers. Hidden away in the dark of the attic, the paint looked as bright and fresh as if it had been painted yesterday, and it gleamed proudly in the center of the dull, broken, and tarnished kitchen.

Nehem wasn’t curious about it in the slightest, he kept looking back up at the roof. “I need to find a tarp and fix what I can.”

Moth nodded, barely hearing him as she examined the hope chest. It had a shining lock on it, but when Moth tugged on the lid, it was open – but so unused with time, it took a moment for the lid to separate.

Inside was a mass of canvas carefully folded around something.

Hesitantly, in case of spiders or anything else, Moth peeled back the canvas.

She did not understand what she was looking at, it seemed like yards of wrinkled, brown, wax paper.

The smell that wafted from it, faint with age, was familiar to Moth – a smell that was hard to identify, but she realized gradually it smelled like the first time she had walked through the House of Spring. A smell like an old, deep cave.

Worriedly, she pulled the ‘paper’ from the hope chest and realized it was much more like shed skin. It kept unfolding. Whatever it was had shed from something enormous; six feet at least.

A lizard? She wondered. No wonder the Barrowly’s had kept it, it’d be such a novelty. She got on her knees to unroll it. She unfolded a section that was an arm, then a leg, and when she had finished and stood to look at it, she realized the skin was shaped like a human.

Moth glanced dizzily back at the hope chest. At the bottom of it, now that the skin and the canvas was gone, was a ring of blue drawn in helra.

Moth wrapped the skin back up in the canvas and ran to her room.

What is this, she thought to herself, over and over, sweat forming on her neck. She got to her room, dropping the skin in the corner and stared at it from a safe distance.

It smelled like the house of springs. The touch of it felt gossamer and weightless. Light even played off it wrong, as if it was used to a different sun – it had a deep red glint to it.

Whatever it was, Moth knew it was what Quin was asking her to return.

Moth rubbed her sweaty neck, tapping her foot nervously. She wished she could ask Clem what it was, but this seemed beyond even his realm of knowledge. Either way, she felt it was bad and did not belong on this side of the water any more than that wrong-horse who had followed her and Aggo.

How did Quin know I’d find it? Moth thought, sickly, feeling the hair on her arm stand up. If she knows I have it, won’t she come to take it?

Moth knew she could never hand it over to Quin.

There was a small tile fireplace in the corner of the garret. Moth started a fire in it, her eyes repeatedly glancing towards the skin to make sure it was still there, worried it might evaporate out of this world altogether.

Once the fire was hot, she pulled the skin over and knelt next to the firebox. She took out her sharp tin knife and stabbed the skin, but the blade wouldn’t pierce it.

Holding it down with a knee, Moth stretched it taut and tried to wriggle her knifepoint through, but it might as well have been chainmail – the skin would not break.

Frustrated – and increasingly alarmed – Moth folded the human-shaped skin and pushed it into the firebox with a poker.

The fire lapped at it hungrily, but only for a moment. Then, the fire began to burn green. Crackling sparks shot off. Moth scrambled backwards, pulling her hem away from the stove, the sparks landed dangerously close to her and the carpet.

She waited with clenched teeth for the fire to consume the papery skin, but the fire couldn’t swallow it. The flames thrashed wildly, greener and greener.

An explosion of sparks landed on the braided carpet. Moth gasped and stomped it out, then grabbed a pitcher of water and flung it at the green inferno – smoke foamed from the mouth of the firebox, and Moth wheezed and opened the window, fanning the smoke with her apron.

The smoke dissipated. Moth squinted and examined the fireplace, and lifted the sooty, dribbling skin from the ash.

It had not burned or suffered from the experience.

Her stomach churning, Moth flung the skin onto the canvas and rolled it up as tightly as she could. Uneasily she secured it with two belts and stuffed it into a corner cabinet, then tied the two knobs together so the doors couldn’t open.

She didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t want to risk it crawling away.