Turn 6 of 7

Press Aldous on what he carried out of the Underwood

"What did you carry?" you say. The question fills the shop the way smoke fills a closed room, and Aldous flinches from it as though it has weight. You do not soften it. You have your grandmother's coin and his coin lying side by side, and a dead woman's word turning in your skull, and you are done with half-answers.

Aldous grips the edge of the counter. His knuckles go white, then whiter, and for a long moment you think he is going to refuse. His mouth opens and closes twice. Then the rehearsed steadiness breaks apart entirely, and what comes through the cracks is not the composed stranger who walked in but a tired, frightened man who has been holding a shape in his mouth for longer than he can bear.

"A child's tooth," he says. "A milk tooth, small, wrapped in a leaf. I was told to carry it out of the deep wood and bring it to the river. That was the service. I was not told whose tooth, or why it mattered, only that it needed to leave the Underwood and reach running water."

He swallows. "I carried it. I did as I was asked. But when I unwrapped the leaf at the riverbank — I don't know why I unwrapped it, I was not supposed to — I understood what I was holding. Not whose it was. What it was. What it was part of."

He stops. His breathing is unsteady.

"And I could not put it back. I tried. The path had closed behind me. The trees were just trees again. So I dropped it in the river and I came away, and three nights later the following started."

Iris makes a small sound beside you, not a word but a sharp intake of breath. You glance at her and she is staring at Aldous with a look you cannot entirely read — shock, yes, but something else beneath it, something that looks almost like guilt. Her hand has gone to the pocket of her apron, and her fingers close around something inside it. She catches you looking and pulls her hand away quickly, but not quickly enough.

The shop is very quiet. The lamp gutters in a draft from the door, and the shadows of the jars on the shelves shift and resettle. You think of milk teeth and rivers and the Underwood's patience, and you think of your grandmother walking the treeline alone on evenings when the light was going. You begin to see the shape of something — not the whole shape, but the edges of it — and it is not a comforting shape. The coins on the counter lie where they are, warm and heavy, and you understand now that they are not payment. They are a reckoning. A weight that passes from hand to hand until someone finds a way to set it down.

"Who asked you to carry the tooth?" you say.

Aldous looks at you with those bloodshot grey eyes, and for the first time tonight he holds your gaze without flinching.

"A woman," he says. "At the treeline. She was old, and she knew the wood, and she said she had been waiting for someone who would come when called."

Your stomach drops. You do not know yet what that means, but you know the shape of it, and you know the weight of it, and you are afraid you know whose face he is about to describe.