Prologue: Number Nine

POV: Nate Aldridge, age nine

Nate ran with his mother's lullaby in his mouth and a wooden snake in his fist.

The tunnel was black and it was wet and it went down. He knew it went down because his feet knew, because every step landed harder than the last, and because the air was getting thick and warm, like the breath of a big animal. Coal dust stuck in his throat. Somewhere behind him water dripped, and somewhere behind that, farther back, there was a sound he did not want to hear again.

Tic.

He ran.

Tic. Tic.

Not a clock like the one in the front hall at home. That clock went tock, tock, tock, slow and fat and sure of itself, and Papa wound it every Sunday after church. This was a small clock, a pocket clock, the kind with a gold lid. It ticked quick and clean. And it was wrong. It ticked and then it paused, a hair too long, and then it ticked again, as if somebody inside it was holding his breath between every second.

Tic... tic... tic.

Half a beat late. Every time.

Nate ran harder. His lantern was gone. He had dropped it somewhere back there, at the place where the dark had a smell like pennies. He did not think about the place. He thought about the thing in his hand. It was a rattlesnake, carved out of walnut, as long as his palm, with a coiled body and a tail you could shake if you flicked your wrist. Papa had made it for his birthday. Warn first, then strike, Papa had said, and had winked, and Mama had said, Thomas, he's nine, he doesn't need mottoes, and had kissed the top of his head.

Mama.

She had been singing. She had been singing in the kitchen when the knocking started, low and half under her breath, the way she did when she thought no one was listening. Hush now, little rattler, put your warning by. The next line was the dark is wide and gentle. He knew it was. He knew every word. He held the words tight, one after another, like beads on a string, and ran down into the mountain with them.

The dark is wide and gentle and the dark won't ask you why.

The floor leveled out. The tunnel opened. He felt it open, the walls going away on either side, the roof rising, and he stopped because his chest would not let him go on. He stood in the middle of the big black room with his hands on his knees and sobbed for air.

A light came up behind him.

…

It was a small light, a lamp with a hood on it, and it made a circle on the floor no wider than a dinner plate. A man stood behind it. Nate could see his boots, black and very clean, and the hem of a gray cloak that fell to the ankle. He could not see the face. The lamp was held low and the hood of the cloak was deep, and where a face should have been there was only dark with a faint shine in it.

Tic... tic... tic.

"There you are," said the man. "Nathaniel."

His voice was soft. That was the terrible thing. It was the softest voice Nate had ever heard, softer than the doctor's, softer than the voice Mama used when he had a fever. It did not shout. It did not chase. It sounded like a man who had come to tuck a child in.

"I'm not Nathaniel," said Nate. His voice shook. "I'm Nate."

"Nate, then." The man came forward, slowly, and knelt. The gray cloak pooled on the stones. The lamp swung and the circle of light slid across Nate's shoes, and across the snake in his fist, and stopped. "That's a fine rattler. Did your father carve it?"

Nate said nothing. He held the snake against his chest.

"It's all right. I'm not going to take it." A small rustle, and a glint. The man had taken something from inside his cloak: a vial of glass the size of a thumb, stoppered with wax, and in it a thread of pale gold light that moved by itself, like smoke in water. "I'm going to take something else. It won't hurt. I promise you it won't hurt. That is the whole point of it."

"Where's my mama?"

"Hush now," said the man.

…

The stopper came out with a small wet sound.

The gold thread rose out of the vial like a living thing and hung in the air between them, glowing, and Nate could not look away. It turned. It reached out one thin bright finger and touched him between the eyes.

It did not hurt. The man was right about that. It was only cold, and then not even cold, only quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone shuts a door.

He opened his mouth to say Mama and the word was not where he had left it.

He knew he had a word for the woman who sang. He knew she had hair the color of... of... of something, and a hand that smelled of... He reached for it and his mind closed on empty air. The kitchen. There had been a kitchen. There was a window in it, and a table, and a thing that sat on the table, a blue... a blue...

Hush now, little rattler, put your warning...

Put your warning...

...put your warning...

The song came apart. It broke in the middle, as a thread breaks, and the two ends drifted away from each other into the dark. He had the tune. He could still feel the shape of it in his throat, the rise and fall, the long soft turn at the end. But the words were gone, every one, and he stood there humming a thing with no name, with tears running down his face and no idea why.

"Good boy," said the man. "That's very good."

Nate looked down at his hand. There was something in it. Brown, and hard, and curled. He did not know what it was or who had given it to him. But he held on. Some part of him that was deeper than the part that could be taken knew to hold on, and he did, with both fists, so hard that the carved scales bit his palm.

"Who," he said. He did not know the rest of the question. "Who am..."

The man rose. His boots made no sound on the stones. Above him, in the dark, the little clock went on.

Tic... tic... tic.

"Bury it," he said, to someone Nate had not known was there, "with whatever it's carrying."

…

The ceiling came down.

There was a sound first, a long deep groan from somewhere above, like a giant clearing his throat. Then a crack. Then dust, a great roaring cloud of it, pouring down out of the black, and the lamp went out, and the floor jumped under his feet. Something struck his left leg. He did not feel the blow. He heard it, a wet bright snap, and then the world was full of weight.

He lay under it.

He lay in a dark so complete it had a texture. It pressed on his eyes. It pressed on his chest. His leg was somewhere far away, and a hot red sound was coming from it, and he understood slowly that the sound was him. Stones shifted. Coal dust sifted down into his open mouth. He thought: I should be afraid. But he could not find the reason. He could not find anything. He had a snake, and he had a tune, and that was all there was in the whole wide dark.

He hummed. It was the only thing he had.

It was a long time. It might have been a night, or a day, or a year. He hummed until the tune wore thin and then he hummed it again. He hummed it into the stones. Once he thought he heard something, far off, a scrape and a clink, and he stopped humming to listen, and heard nothing, and began again.

Then there was a light.

It was a yellow light, a little dirty flame in a kerosene lamp, and it came wavering through a crack that had not been there before. It smelled of oil and smoke. A hand came after it, a big square hand with split nails, black to the wrist, digging in the rubble as a dog digs. Stones rolled. A voice said something in a language of grunts and curses and, under them, a low mutter that might have been a prayer.

Then there was a face, enormous and round and gray with dust, with a kerchief tied over the hair, and eyes in it as blue and hard as marbles.

"Well, now," said the woman. "Look at you. Alive in a hole that ate forty men."

She worked the rock off his chest. She worked more off his leg, and said a word that made even the dust blush. She slid her arms underneath him and lifted, and he cried out, and she said, "I know, lamb. I know. Hush. I've got you."

Hush. The word went through him like a bell. He did not know why.

She carried him up and out through a hundred yards of broken dark and into a cold gray morning that smelled of coal smoke and fish. Lanterns bobbed. People were shouting. A bell was ringing somewhere. She set him down on a plank on the ground in front of a black gaping mouth in a hillside, with the words NUMBER NINE painted over it in flaking white, and wiped his face with the corner of her apron.

"What's your name, boy?"

He opened his mouth.

There was nothing in it. He searched for it the way you search for a dropped coin in the dark, with both hands, sweeping. He found a tune. He found a pain that went up from his left leg to the top of his skull. He found a small hard shape in his fist that he would not let go of.

"I don't know," he said.

The woman looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in her broad dirty face, something that looked, for a second, like a sorrow far too old for it. She looked at the black mouth of the mine. She looked at his hand.

"Well," she said. "That's a pity." And then, firmly, as one who has made a decision and does not mean to be argued out of it: "I had a nephew once, a bit younger than you. Dex Hallam. The cough took him in the spring. He won't be needing it now." She tucked the corner of the apron into her belt. "From now on you're Dex. Dex Hallam. D'ye hear me?"

"Dex," said the boy.

It was a name. It was somebody else's. It fit him like a dead boy's coat.

She picked him up again. He put his head on her shoulder and shut his eyes, and the last thing he knew before the pain took him was the tune, still running in his head, round and round, with no words to hold it, and the dry rough little rattle of the wooden snake against his ribs.

He had no name. He had no past. He had a stranger's face, a crushed leg, and a song that no one had ever taught him.

It would be eleven years before he heard a clock tick half a beat late and understood that he was not afraid of the sound. He was afraid of whoever was holding it.