Chapter 6: Nine Steps

The drumhead was still moving.

Not the sound. The sound had gone out through the doorway and had not come back, and the quiet it left behind was the kind that made Theo hear his own pulse in his jaw. It was the skin of the drum, going in small waves where his elbow had hit it, lifting the white dust and letting it settle, lifting it again.

Voss took the lamp out of his hand, thumb on the switch, and turned it down.

“Say something,” Voss said.

“My elbow hurts.”

“That’s not —“ She stopped. She had the light low, turned down, and she moved it from the drum to the wall and back. “Talk to me about the drum.”

Theo kept his hand flat on the frame of the stand. “It’s full size.”

“What does that mean.”

“It means everything else in here is a copy.” He nodded at the table, at the copper and the green glass and the little tools laid out like a man’s workbench after he died at it. Voss put the light on the table and left it there. “Grave goods get made small. You take a doll’s version of the thing you loved down with you, so it fits in the box. A doll’s house. A doll’s jar. A doll’s guard with a doll’s face on it.”

The light came back to the drum.

“Nobody puts in a copy of a drum the size of a drum,” Theo said. “And it’s worn where the hands go.”

Voss was quiet a moment. Then she said, “So it’s a tool.”

“It’s the tool.”

“Then why are you the one it worked for?”

Theo did not answer, because he did not have an answer, and because the thing against the far wall had stopped its short loops along the base of the stone and had lifted its head again, and the movement took the whole room the way a hand takes a coin.

Its eye came around. It looked at the drum, and then at him, and Theo had the strong and unwelcome sense of being priced.

“There’s a hole in the ceiling above us,” he said. “I came down through it and I didn’t make it. If it’s afraid of the drum, I don’t know why, and I don’t know that it’s afraid. It might just be polite.”

“It’s not being polite. It wants out.”

“It wants out and it’s not coming past the drum. That’s all I’ve got.”

Voss came past him, near enough that he could smell the mud on her sleeve, and put her palm flat on the drumhead. The dust rose. She hit it once, hard, and the note went out into the passage and came back changed, and she said, in a voice pitched for a room and for a report, “Get out.”

The snake swayed. Its head came down a few inches and came back up.

“It’s not afraid of me,” Voss said. She took her hand off the drum and wiped her palm on her trousers. “Right. On reflection, that’s an artifact. If I put a crack in it, my department answers to a conservator, and my department does not have a line for that.”

“You could try again.”

“I could file the paperwork to try again, and I’d be filing it after.” She turned her back on the snake, which Theo thought was either very brave or a decision made in the part of the brain that handles ladders. “It isn’t the drum by itself. Find me the rest of it.”

Theo looked at his own hand on the drum stand, and the dirt in the creases of it, and he thought about the last year of telling people who paid eleven dollars apiece that the old ways were mostly theater. Then the dark behind them cracked open.

The gunshot was so loud in the stone that it stopped being a sound and became a pressure, a shove against the ears, and it had come from up the passage, from the direction they had all come in by. Voss’s head came around. Theo’s hand closed on the frame.

Then something dragged. A long, wet, fast sound of a heavy body pulled over stone, and it came closer and then it did not come closer, and Theo’s mouth was already open before he decided to say it.

“There’s another one.”

“Don’t,” Voss said. “Don’t say that.”

“Something’s dragging.”

“That’s a rope. That’s a hose. That’s —“

And then there were feet, a lot of feet, running badly, with the particular rhythm of people carrying weight and other people.

“Into the room,” someone shouted. “The room with the table. It’s the only place down here that’s a room. Move, move —“

Theo did not place the voice at first. It had gone down to gravel, and there was a wet catch in it, the way a man talks when he has been breathing through his mouth for a while. Then it bit the front off a word the way it always did, and he had it: Hollis.

They came in through the doorway like water finding a crack in a boat. Six of them, two lamps, one of the lamps half dead and throwing a hoarse yellow, and the light swept across Theo and Voss and stopped, and so did five of the six.

Everybody had blood on them. Theo counted six men and could not have told one of them from another. He knew Hollis by the voice and by the hand pressed to the side of his own head. He knew Quarles because Quarles was upside down over a man’s shoulder, his face the color of a fish, one arm hanging. He knew the man in front because the man in front had a shotgun and had brought it up and put it on Voss.

“It’s one of them,” the man said. “I saw it. It smiled at me.”

“Fox,” said one of the others. “Fox, wait —“

“Put it down,” Voss said. Her hands were up and open, and her voice had gone flat and ordinary, the voice of a woman at a counter. “I signed the chain-of-custody sheet at six-forty tonight in front of two of your men, and then I signed the back of it because the carbon didn’t take. I brought you coffee at seven, and you said it tasted like pennies, and I said that’s the water, and you drank it anyway. The ceiling came down behind us. You heard it on the radio or you didn’t, but it came down, and we came down with it. My name is Delia Voss and my badge is in my coat and my coat is in the truck, and if you shoot me you’re going to have to explain to a room full of people why you shot the woman who brought the coffee.”

The shotgun did not move.

“Fox,” said the man behind him, quieter.

“It tasted like pennies,” Fox said.

“It did.”

Fox lowered the gun about three inches. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at what came off, and said, “All right. Where’s the rest of my team.”

“Upstairs, last I heard. Where’s yours?”

“Here.” Fox jerked his head at the men behind him. “That’s it. That’s what’s left of the line.”

“Set me down,” said the upside-down man.

“Gerald.” Voss’s voice did something then, went up a little and came back down. “Gerald, your head.”

“I’m aware of my head.” They set him against the wall, and Quarles was gray and streaked and one eye was swelling shut, and he was patting at his coat with both hands, looking for a pen. “Where are my glasses.”

“Gone,” said the man who had carried him.

“Then somebody photograph that table.” Quarles found the wall, found his balance against it, and pointed with a whole hand. “Before anyone touches it. Every object, exactly as it sits, in relationship to every other object. I want to be able to say where the fan was. If I can’t say where the fan was, I can’t publish, and if I can’t publish I don’t know what any of this was for.”

“Gerald,” Voss said.

“Don’t manage me. I have been managing me since nineteen seventy-nine.”

And then the second one came.

Theo saw the shadow first. It came up the wall behind the group, thrown long and unsteady by their own lamps, tall as the ceiling and wavering, and before he could find words for it, it came down off the wall and into the room.

The men turned. One of them shouted. The snake in the doorway was shorter than the one against the wall and thicker through the middle, and it came in without hurrying, and the sound Theo had heard over the radio — the dragging — was simply its body, moving.

The first one lifted its head. The two of them belonged in the same frame, and the frame was a stone box with one door and two snakes in it, and Theo’s back was against the drum and the door was behind him and there was no longer any part of the wall that was not a long animal.

“We’re done,” said one of the contractors, in a perfectly reasonable voice. “That’s it, we’re done, I’ve been at this since Tuesday.”

“Nobody move,” Fox said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Nobody move, and nobody —“ Fox turned his head, looking for the table, for the rows of cold things laid out and the fan laid out and the little hooks and the little blades. “Which of these is strongest.”

Nobody answered him.

“You’re all professionals,” Fox said. “You’ve got a table full of — I’ve got a dead lamp and four men and a rock that fell on us. Which one works?”

“My kit’s in pieces,” Hollis said. He had not taken his hand off the side of his head. “Everything on that table came out of this ground. I don’t know what half of it does.”

“The ones with the marks are placebo,” one of the men said, “they’re for the tourists —“ and then he stopped talking, because Voss had turned around.

Voss looked at Theo.

“Absolutely not,” Theo said.

“You’ve done it before.”

“I’ve done it once and I wasn’t trying.”

“Theo.” She said it the way she had said the coffee, plain and to the point. “There are two of them and one door. Every person who came through that door is bleeding. You have one cut on your cheek and a limp and you’re standing up straighter than any of them. I’m not being mystical. I’m counting.”

“His mother’s the one,” said the man with the dead lamp. “The festival lady. She does the demonstrations. He’s the kid who carries the folding chairs.”

“I’ve been to that place,” somebody else said. “They’ve got a parking sign made out of a wagon wheel.”

“He sells the tickets,” Theo said. “I do the whole thing, actually. I just also sell the tickets.”

“Take it back,” Voss said. “The ticket selling. This is the last time it comes up tonight.”

Then Quarles, against the wall, in a voice that had gone quiet and clear: “Do you know the sequence.”

“I know a sequence.” Theo’s mouth was dry. “I don’t know that it does anything. I could do all of it perfectly and the two of them could keep doing exactly what they’re doing.”

“They’re not doing anything,” Quarles said. “That’s the trouble. Now would be the time to do something to something that isn’t doing anything.”

Theo thought, distinctly and without drama, that he would very much like to be upstairs, in his own garage, in the smell of cold concrete and the base coat of his mother’s drum.

He took up the fan.

It was light in his hand and wrong in his hand, too old to be handled and too well made to break, ribs of dark wood and a face of something that had once been cream and was now the color of old teeth. The eye-spots were painted in pairs down the length of it, ring on ring of blue and brown and gold, and they looked back at him, which was not a thought he intended to keep.

He put his palm on the drumhead where Voss had put hers.

The dust jumped and hung. The note went into the floor through his arm and up through his ribs and into his back teeth. He hit it again and it went out along the walls, and the second snake turned its head a quarter of a degree and did not lift it, and Theo felt something flare that was either hope or the certainty that he was going to die in a hole in the ground in front of witnesses.

Nine steps. His mother had chalked them on the driveway when he was six, and again when he was nine, and again at fourteen, the year he first said out loud that he didn’t want to do this, and she had said nothing at all and gone on chalking. The neighbors’ porch light had come on. The point was not to look good. The point was that the ninth step landed with the drumbeat, and if it didn’t, you started again, and if you had to start again in front of an audience, you started again slowly.

His body knew the intervals. His face was not sure about any of it.

He hit the drum and stepped, and hit it and stepped, and the old song came up through the soles of his boots. Around the drum, in a space not much wider than a card table, he turned, and the fan went around with him, and he felt his coat settle on his back, and the dust in the light went round him as though he had made it.

Third step, fourth. The hand came up. The fingers folded.

It was the shape from the photographs. Third pair of figures, the ones with the fan, their hands hooked through themselves like a knot, and he had told Voss on the way down what the shape had to be for. His mother had one name for it and never used another: the Collar. And it was not hard at all. It was the easiest thing in the room.

He said the words the way she had made him say them into the drumhead in the driveway, three lines, one to each beat, and he said them to the dark and not to anyone in it:

“Five lights even.”
“Hold the old harm down.”
“Down, and stay down.”

The drumbeat went on down the walls and got into the passage and kept going.

Something looked at him.

The eyes were long and turned up at the outer corners, and they were looking at him with the attention of an adult who has found a child playing in a room where the child should not be, and everything stopped, including the drum, including his blood.

He blinked.

Vertical pupils. A head the width of his chest, up out of the coils, dust on it. The eye of a snake that had been hit in the jaw, that had a gray wet gap in its mouth, that had been told to lie down and had not.

The head did not move. Nothing in the room moved. In the jaw, where the paper had gone in, the wet gray place did not bleed.

He took a breath that hurt and put his palm back on the drum, and it made no sound at all, because his hand was shaking too much to hit it.

Both snakes went down.

It was not graceful and it was not quick. The one by the wall came off its coils and laid its length flat on the stone with a long soft series of impacts that went through the floor and up into Theo’s knees, and the one in the doorway folded, its head still up, its head coming down last as though it were heavy. Neither of them was dead. Nothing about them looked dead. They looked like something that had been collared and let go.

Theo’s ears were ringing. He could not hear the drum anymore, but the note was still in his teeth and in the floor under his boots.

“Theo,” Voss said. “Theo.”

“I can’t guarantee anything,” he said, and his voice came out flat and too loud. “I want that on the record. I don’t know that it holds. I don’t know that it’s me. It could be the drum, it could be the room, it could be that they decided to stop for their own reasons and I’m about to be embarrassed in front of everybody.”

Somebody behind him said, “Lady, I take it back. He’s a kid.”

“He’s a kid who did it,” Voss said.

Then the snakes moved again.

The one behind them crossed the doorway. The one by the wall came after it, and the two of them went past the men standing there, close enough that the nearest contractor went up on his toes and stayed there with one hand on another man’s arm and his eyes shut, and they went out through the door into the passage and kept going, and the dragging sound came back, long and unhurried, the sound of a heavy thing being moved by a body too big to have any business moving in a hallway dug by hand.

“Nobody fire,” Fox said. “Nobody — don’t you do it. Don’t you do it. Hold the light.”

The lamp swung after them. The tail of the second one passed out of the light, and then the shadow left the wall, and the room was a room again: the table, the drum, the dust coming down out of the air, six men in bad condition and one boy holding a fan he absolutely should not have been holding.

Voss lowered her hands. Then she said, “Where’s it going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew a minute ago.”

“I didn’t know a minute ago. I did a thing.” Theo looked at the fan in his hand, and then at the doorway, and then at Voss, and he heard his mother’s voice, clear and unwelcome, from some summer eight years back: if you do a thing and it works, you follow it, because the second half of the job is the half where you find out what you did.

“They’re not hunting anymore,” he said slowly. “That’s the part I don’t have a word for. When they came in they were hunting. Now they’re going home.”

“Home,” Voss said.

“That’s what it looks like.”

He wanted to know what they ate. He wanted to know whether there was a room down here for that.

“Well.” Quarles pushed himself off the wall. He had found a pen somewhere and he had no paper, and he was holding the pen anyway, the way an old man holds a cigarette he is not currently allowed to smoke. “Shall we?”

“I don’t think we should,” Theo said.

“Boy, I have been in the ground long enough that I’ve stopped being able to say how long, and I have six hundred dollars of somebody else’s grant money laid out on that table in the shape of other people’s pottery, and I signed for every piece of it, and a snake took my notebook. I am not going up that ladder in an hour to tell the state that something happened down here and not be able to say what.”

“Then say it happened and don’t say where.”

“That is not how a life in this field works.”

“Somebody’s got to be first,” said Fox.

Theo looked at him. Fox shrugged, one shoulder, the shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm like something he was too tired to put down and too well trained to drop.

“Kid, I’ve got a state ID and a dental plan,” he said. “That’s the whole of what I’ve got. If a snake takes me somewhere, I go there and file a statement afterwards.”

“Nobody follows a snake,” Theo said.

“Nobody sits in this room either.” Fox nodded at the lamp. “You want to wait on the prayer? I’ve got a lamp that’s going to die.”

Theo did not have an answer for that one either.

Voss had already gone to the doorway. She put the light into the passage and held it there, and she looked back over her shoulder, and the look was not encouragement. It was an inventory. Then she went through.

The others went, one by one, the lamp swinging ahead and Fox keeping his body between the passage and Quarles, and Quarles going under his own power and very slowly, and the sound out there coming back to meet them, long and slow over stone.

Theo stood in the middle of the room with a fan in his hand and the dust coming down and his heart still going too fast, and he thought that if he stayed he would be alone in a room with a drum that had done exactly what he asked of it, and if he went he would find out what he had done.

He put the fan against his chest, ducked the lintel, and went after the light. Behind him the drumhead ticked once, cooling, and then again.