Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

ironwork—was turned and the chains slowly grew taut, she did not cry out. When at last Beryl’s naked, shivering body was lifted from the squelching mud, she did not scream, though the pain was more than anything that she’d ever anticipated. The pain was never in her dreams of them, but she can now believe it nothing more than some splinter of the reward for her perseverance. This , she thinks, is no more and no less than what was always meant to be.
    They crouch directly beneath her, gazing up with famished, thankful eyes, eyes black as inkwells. There is already blood, drawn by the hooks piercing the skin of her calves and buttocks, back and shoulders, and it dribbles across their upturned faces like rain upon the parched faces of men and women who have survived a drought of ages. It is only the first, teasing drops before the storm, however, and they sit together in the mud with mouths open wide and their long tongues lolling to capture every drop spilled. Later, there can be waste, when the deluge begins in earnest. Later, the blood can pool, congealing in the ooze and spattered wantonly across the fungal walls.
    Aside from the winch and chains and hooks, they have little in the way of tools. Their claws are sufficient to their modest needs. But there is one item, and if their memories were less undone by time and the slow madness that has come upon them across the centuries, they would recall how this one thing came to them, washed up on a rocky Massachusetts beach and discovered by a man whose name was once Zebidiah If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Wilmarth. All their names have long since been forgotten, for what need have they of names? The artefact found lying among sand and whelks, kelp and wave-polished bits of pink Cape Ann granite, is kept on a high ledge in the burrow, wrapped in a mildewed bit of burlap sackcloth. It bears some resemblance to a surgeon’s scalpel, but no more than it resembles a buttonhook or the high whorl of a snail’s shell. In 1789, Wilmarth showed the peculiar object to a scholar of archaeological studies at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, but the man was unable to determine it’s age or origin or even the material from which it had been crafted. For, at times, it seemed most certainly made from hammered bronze, while at others, and under certain wavelengths of light, it took on the characteristics of cobalt-stained glass of a sort known from excavations in Egypt and Eastern Asia dating back to the mid second millennium BC.
    Suspended above them, Beryl hovers somewhere between the thresholds of ecstasy and shock, feeling almost as weightless as though her body were buoyed up by water. Her breath has become strenuous and uneven,and she is sweating now despite the chill air. Her long hair, an indifferent and unremarkable shade of blonde, dangles lank about her face and shoulders, and she keeps her eyes shut, because it seems impolite to watch them, when they have accorded her such an honour. Even when she finally feels their strange seeking hands upon her, even then, out of respect, she does not open her eyes.
    They might yet reject me, she thinks, though the thought is dimmed and made indistinct by the swelling, throbbing pain and by exhaustion and the bright sizzle of the adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her bloodstream and brain. They may still see fit to pull me down and turn me out to either find my way back or die alone in the darkness. She cannot know that this isn’t true, that though they are patient creatures accustomed to interminable waits, they have never once rejected a soul who has successfully navigated the labyrinth and so found the long, winding path down to them.
    Wilmarth’s beach-found treasure has been taken from its place of pride, and the one among them who found it, but who is no longer Wilmarth, removes the oddly mercurial object from its filthy shroud and holds it up for all of them to see. The instrument glints dully in the