Unbury Carol(6)

Falling, Carol tried to remain calm. She must have heard Dwight wrong. Must have. Must.

Maybe it’s the space we all long for, John said. Everyone wants to get away. You actually get the chance to do it.

Dwight spoke. “It’s a terrible thing. But Carol has—”

“She was just about to tell me something,” Farrah said, her voice shaking.

Because both were breathing heavier (and in the coma their breathing sounded like gusts of dark wind), Carol believed they were carrying her now. They were most likely halfway up the stairs. Rising. And yet Carol continued to fall, deeper down.

“What did she tell you?” Dwight’s words were sharp. Harsh. As if he was trying to read the maid’s mind.

Have you read much about telekinesis? John once asked her. And his voice traveled through the gradations of darkness inside. An old question echoed. Because the rules don’t seem to apply in your coma. For starters, you appear dead when you’re not. Perhaps inside you can do things you can’t do out here? Like…for example…move objects with your mind.

Desperately, still denying the truth of what she was hearing beyond the winds of falling, Carol wanted to prove John’s theory true. If only she could move something. Anything. Let Dwight know she still lived.

“She hadn’t…told me yet…” Farrah said, and now Carol was close to certain that the girl and Dwight stood on opposite sides of the bed Carol must lie upon. Their voices came to Carol in such a way as to give the bedroom dimensions, and the blankets and pillows muted the harsher echoes that thundered through Howltown.

Falling.

Falling.

Falling.

“But how much did she say?”

It was the way Dwight said this more than the words he chose. The way he sounded frightened that Farrah might know more than he wanted her to know.

If she could have moved, Carol would have shaken her head no. If she could have spoken, she would have cried, Tell her, Dwight! TELL HER I’M ALIVE!

But there was no parting of her lips, no cry for help.

“She said…she said…”

“Out with it!”

Carol felt as if she were falling through a cold patch, an area within the coma she had never been.

Fear was no stranger to Howltown, no traveler from the Trail, but the fear she felt now was shattering.

“She said she was feeling odd, Mister Evers!” Farrah blurted out. The horror in her voice, amplified in the coma, was deafening. “She said something about a…a…ripple coming. She—”

“She called it that?”

“Called what that?”

“A ripple, girl. She used that word?”

Carol tried hard to hear through the winds of the coma, through the papers Hattie used to crinkle by her ears.

“She used that word, yes. She told me she wanted to talk to me. Mister Evers…is she really dead?”

The hoarse breathing inhaled.

“Yes. She’s dead.”

Exhaled.

Then the wind grew louder, as if Carol were falling faster.

“It’s very important that you tell me all you know, Farrah.”

Dwight’s voice was deeper and quieter than it was moments ago. Carol could imagine the expression he wore as he adopted this tone. It was the face Dwight made when he believed he could squeeze information out of someone he thought was less intelligent than himself.

But Farrah didn’t respond.

Silence from the bedroom.

Carol listened close.

“Farrah?” Dwight said.

A thud. Something heavy falling to the floor.

Then, as it sometimes, mercifully, occurred within the coma, the next words that were spoken told Carol exactly what had happened in the world she’d fallen from.

“She’s fainted,” Dwight said aloud, disbelieving. “The maid has fainted.”

Dwight’s breathing came loud, near, and Carol wondered if perhaps he was going to cry. But the steadiness of his exhalations told Carol that he was exerting energy instead.

He was carrying her again.

Every few steps she heard the clack of his dress shoes against solid ground. The first floor again. In the kitchen, the echo was unmistakable.

Dwight grunted, and Carol heard a door opening, and she tried to deny what she was hearing. What she knew to be true.

Dwight was carrying her to the cellar.

She could smell it now, too, the stuffiness that entombed her halfway down the stairs, the bitter stench of stored root vegetables. The dust of a cellar used primarily for stowing, with suitcases from past travels upon the Trail, dresses that had lost some of their appeal, and suits Dwight no longer fit into.

Help.

There was an urgency to the sudden word. But Carol could not speak it.

He’s hiding me, Carol thought, recalling their argument earlier this day. Could it be he was overreacting to her plea for further safety?

I don’t think he’s hiding you for your sake, angel. John’s voice in Howltown. I think he’s doing it for his own.

The sound of Dwight’s steps changed. He’d crossed from the solid concrete of the cellar to the gravelly floor of the storm room.

There, Carol knew, stood the morguelike slab she’d had installed herself, if ever she and Dwight had to dine below as a tornado tore through the Trail.

Dwight’s breathing changed pace. No longer the grunts of hard work; now the long exhalations of having completed a task. Carol knew she was on the slab.