Count the Corn

The morning bell rang once, and the village went to sleep.

She felt it before she heard it. The humming that had threaded under the door all night thinned to a murmur, and then to a single dry rattle, like a seed in a gourd, and then it stopped. The orange light in the cracks of the shutters turned from brown to amber to a pale stale gold. Isolde sat with her back against the wall and her notebook shut on her knee, and listened to the quiet come down over the house like a lid.

She had not slept. Neither had the sisters. They sat side by side beside the cold hearth in the half-dark, with the older one's arm around the younger and the younger's face pressed into her neck, and they stared at Isolde as if she were something that might go off.

"It's morning," said Isolde. Her own voice sounded strange to her. "Or whatever they call it here."

"How do you know?"

"The dolls stopped."

The older sister swallowed. She was perhaps twenty, with a long plain face and chapped hands, and she had not let go of her sibling since the door was barred. "Nell," she said abruptly. "I'm Nell Harker. This is Posy. She's fourteen."

"Isolde."

"We were at the Hospice," said Nell, as if it were a confession. "For our mother. The Bloom took her at midnight, and Posy and I were on the stair, holding her—" She stopped. "It was the lamp on the wall. It went white, and then we were here."

The wards, thought Isolde. Every bed has one. They go off when someone dies.

She did not say it. It was only a hypothesis, and it was not a kind one. She got to her feet instead, stiff and aching, and went to the shutters and put her eye to the slit.

The green was empty. The dolls sat in their rows on every sill, in their aprons and caps, with their painted mouths curved up and their bead eyes fixed on the road. Beneath them, on the cobbles, lay a scattering of shoes and a quilted jacket. Nothing else. No blood. No bodies. Whatever the dolls had taken, they had taken entirely.

"We can't stay in here," Isolde said.

"They'll come back."

"Yes. At the end of the day. At the last bell." She turned from the window. "That gives us until then to learn what the rule is. And I need you both to help me."

Posy lifted her head. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, but they were sharp. "What do you want us to do?"

"Look at things," said Isolde. "Everything. Every wall, every plate, every scrap of paper. Anything with words on it."

…

They found it in the fourth cottage.

It was a small house at the end of the lane, a widow's house by the look of it, with a clean-swept floor and a spinning wheel in the corner and a rocking chair that still held the dent of a body. A sampler hung over the hearth in a plain wooden frame. The linen was yellow with smoke. The stitches had been done in a child's laborious cross-stitch, in red and green and dark blue thread, and Isolde stopped dead in the doorway the moment she saw it, with her heart giving a thump so hard that it hurt.

Count the corn, it said, in letters an inch high.

Under the words was a border of wheat sheaves, and under the border, in four rough stanzas, was the rhyme.

She stood on the hearth stone and read it aloud. She read it twice, in a whisper, to be sure of the scansion. Behind her, Nell and Posy crowded in to look.

When the last bell tolls the day,

Count the corn and look away.

Wooden children, straw-stuffed, thin,

Wake to hunt the ones who grin.

Hush your laughter, hush your cheer,

Painted lips stand watch out here.

Every doll was given one,

One smile only, and it's gone.

All who smile when dusk is deep

Wake the dolls who do not sleep.

Pay them in the coin they crave:

Teeth and tongue and all you gave.

Till the morning bell is rung,

Keep a straight face, still the tongue.

Count the corn till night is done,

Then you'll walk out, every one.

"Oh," whispered Posy. "That's—"

"Don't smile," said Nell. "It says don't smile."

"After the last bell." Isolde heard her own voice go quick. "Look. 'When the last bell tolls the day, count the corn and look away.' That's the signal. That's the bell we heard last night. It rang nine times, and the dolls woke on the ninth. And 'wake to hunt the ones who grin.' The ones who grin. They didn't take the broad man because he was loud. They took him because he laughed."

"And the woman," Nell said. "She smiled."

"She smiled, and she couldn't stop." Isolde pressed her knuckles to her mouth. "That's the cruelty of it. It's not enough to know the rule. You have to be able to keep your face still when you're terrified. Most people can't."

"But the clerk," said Posy. "The clerk didn't laugh."

"No. He said 'thank God.' He said it with relief." She thought of the clerk's face in the doorway of the chapel, the slackening of it, the beginning of an exhausted smile. "He started to smile. That's all it takes. They don't need teeth showing. They need the shape."

She took out her notebook and wrote it down: Rule, Door 1. Do not smile after the ninth bell until the morning bell. Her hand did not shake. It surprised her. It was the first useful thing she had done in twelve hours, and the part of her that was a scholar, which had been crouched somewhere at the back of her skull, uncurled and took a long cold breath.

Then she looked at the sampler again.

It was the lettering. That was what snagged. Each of the four stanzas began with a large capital in red thread, two inches high, ornamented with a little curl of green. A child's flourish; the girl who had stitched it had liked her capitals. But the flourishes had a rhythm to them, a pattern, and Isolde had spent six years learning to hear a pattern that someone did not want heard.

W. H. A. T.

She stared at it.

"What is it?" said Nell.

"Nothing." She shook her head. "A coincidence. It's a trick of the eye." She wrote the four letters in her notebook anyway, in a line, under the rule, and underlined them once. "Four stanzas, four initial letters. It spells a word. It would, wouldn't it? Any sampler would, if you were looking."

But she did not rub it out.

…

They found the chapel unlocked and the bell loft occupied.

She heard the voice first. It came down the ladder, light and rapid and unmistakably Aethelgardian, the rolling drawl of the lower town. "If you're a doll, I'll thank you to go away. If you're not a doll, I've got a pot lid and I'm not afraid to use it."

"We're not dolls," said Isolde.

"That's exactly what a doll'd say."

"A doll would have knocked the ladder down."

A pause. A scrabbling. A round pink face with a freckled nose appeared over the edge of the trapdoor, a pot lid held in front of it like a shield, and regarded the three of them with open suspicion. The owner of the face was perhaps seventeen. She had flour in her hair. She wore a kitchen apron over a nightgown, and one sleeve was torn off at the shoulder, and she looked, Isolde thought, remarkably cheerful for a person who had spent a night in a bell tower.

"Odile," said the girl. "Odile Pruett. I'm the second scullion at the Sanctum, or I was, till I fell down the pantry stairs with a kettle. I cracked my head open like a plum. They carried me to the Hospice and said they'd see me right. Next thing I know I'm up a tree with a pot lid." She considered. "Not a tree. A tower. I was in the tower. That's better. Do you have anything to eat?"

Nell stared. "You were up here the whole night?"

"I heard what they did to the others." The cheer slipped for an instant, and came back. "Mr. Dunning's boy went up the hay cart. I told him not to. I said nobody who's got sense climbs a thing with no way down. He said I was a girl. I'm still alive." She patted the pot lid. "So there."

Isolde, in spite of everything, laughed.

It was a short sharp breath, no louder than a cough. She clamped her mouth shut so fast that she bit her tongue. The three of them froze. It was morning; the dolls were sleeping. But the bell had rung only a little while ago, and she did not know how deep that sleep ran, and she stood in the nave of a stone chapel with her heart going like a rabbit's.

Nothing moved.

"Don't do that," Posy hissed.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She wiped her face. "I'm not used to being the one who gets it right."

"Gets what right?" said Odile.

She told her. She told it quickly and plainly, on the stairs of the bell tower, with the other two crowding behind, and she watched the girl's round face change as she listened. First doubt. Then dismay. Then a growing, wondering, almost indecent delight. By the end, Odile had set down her pot lid and was gripping the rail with both hands.

"It's a rhyme," she said. "It's a nursery rhyme! My nan used to say that one. 'Count the corn.' We skipped to it in the yard. We had a different last line, but I'd know the beat anywhere." She grinned, wide and delighted, and then the grin went out as if it had been snuffed. "Oh. Oh, no. I just smiled."

"It's morning," said Isolde. "It's allowed."

"I'd better practice not."

"Yes," said Isolde. "I think we all should."

…

"How long do you expect to live with a head like that?"

It was the voice from the door.

She would have known it anywhere. It was low and dry and level, a little roughened by disuse, and it carried to the far end of the nave without being raised. She turned slowly on the stair.

He was standing in the open doorway with the gold light behind him. He wore a long black coat of a cut so old that she could not date it, buttoned to the throat, with a worn leather glove on each hand. His hair was black. His face was in shadow. She could see the line of his jaw and the scar through his left eyebrow, and the stillness of him, which was complete, like a held breath.

Nell made a small frightened noise. Odile stepped in front of Posy.

"I beg your pardon?" said Isolde.

"Your head." He came a pace into the chapel. His boots made no sound on the flagstones. "It has been running since dusk. I have been listening to it through a door and a wall, and a quantity of crying. It is a remarkable noise." His eyes moved over her face, and the notebook, and the charcoal stub, with the courtesy of a man examining a curio. "How long do you expect it to last?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You solved a sampler in six minutes."

"You were watching."

"I am always watching." He said it as another man might have said, I am left-handed. "It is what I do."

"And what are you?" Her voice shook only a little. "Besides an unusually good liar. You said I wouldn't need you last night. I didn't. But I'd like to know why."

He regarded her.

It was not a long look, but it was an odd one. She had the impression of a very tall door opening a crack in a very large house, and a pale draft coming through. Then it closed again.

"I am the Overseer of the Doors," said the man. "I keep the Threshold. I do not interfere with those who pass through it. I do not help them, or hinder them, or take sides in their struggles." He paused. "It is not a matter of cruelty. It is a rule."

"A rule."

"Of mine. Yes."

"You make the rules?"

"I follow them." Something moved at the edge of his mouth that was not a smile. "That is the whole of my position, Isolde. I follow the rules, and I watch what happens to the people who do not."

He knew her name.

She did not let it show. She had been caught out once already, by a pleasant voice in the sky, and she had learned from it. She folded her hands over her notebook, and lifted her chin, and said in her coldest lecture-hall voice, "Everyone here seems to."

"Yes," he said. "That is interesting, is it not?"

He turned. His long coat swung. At the door, he paused with one gloved hand on the frame, and said, without looking back, "The key is in the field behind the chapel. Count the corn. The lock is a mouth." And then, as if the words had slipped out of him against his will: "Be inside by the ninth bell. You will want to be."

He was gone.

She stood on the stair with her notebook against her chest and her pulse thudding in her ears. Nobody moved. Then Odile said, in a small awed voice, "Did he just help us?"

"No," said Isolde slowly. "I don't think he did."

"But he told us where—"

"He told us where to look. He didn't say how." She opened the notebook. "He's an Overseer. He can't interfere. Which means that anything he said has a loophole, and I'd very much like to find it."

…

It was the longest afternoon of her life.

They found the field behind the chapel, a square of gold corn ten rows by ten, unharvested, so still that not a single ear stirred. They walked it in a line. They counted aloud, in whispers, beginning at the left, ear by ear, stalk by stalk, with Isolde writing the sums in the margin of her notebook and Odile following behind with the pot lid, in case. The sky deepened above them. The orange turned to rust.

"You're going to run out of paper," said Posy.

"I'm going to run out of daylight."

At the ninth stalk of the ninth row, hidden deep in the husk, Isolde's fingers closed round something hard and cold. She drew it out. It was an ear of corn made of brass, long as her hand, with every kernel stamped and gleaming, and a little loop at the stem like the bow of a key.

She heard the girls draw breath. She held it up in the failing light, and it winked.

"Is that it?" said Nell.

"I think so."

"Then we're done," said Odile. "That's the key. We find the lock, and—"

The bell rang.

It came from the chapel roof, a single flat iron clang, and the shadow of the tower fell across the field like a hand. The light was going. It was going fast, and brown, and with it came a sound she was beginning to know: the soft knocking of a hundred small wooden heels on a hundred sills.

One.

"Inside!" Isolde said. "The chapel, now. All of you, move!"

They ran. They went up the nave in a tangle, and she shot the bolt on the great doors and swung round to find the others already crouched in the pews, with Odile at the end and the two sisters wrapped round each other. And not only them. There were shapes in the shadows she had not noticed. Five or six people, dim and huddled, sitting in ones and twos along the rear benches: survivors of the night, with gray faces and enormous eyes. A man in a printer's apron. A woman clutching a baby's shawl. She had not expected anyone.

Two. Three.

"Listen to me," said Isolde, in a voice that was very quiet and very clear. "All of you. This is the rule. When the bell stops, we don't smile. No matter what we hear. We don't laugh, we don't grin, we don't so much as turn up the corners of our mouths. We keep our faces still. Do you understand?"

A ragged murmur.

Four. Five. Six.

"Think of something awful. Think of whatever you like. Hold it in your face and do not let it go."

Seven. Eight.

She sat down at the end of the pew with the brass key in her fist, and shut her eyes, and thought of a black flower opening on a thin white wrist. It was easy. It was the easiest thing she had ever done.

Nine.

The bell fell silent. The dark came down.

All through the chapel she could hear them breathing, a ragged, careful, terrified sound, like the sea in a shell. The knocking outside had begun. It came from the walls, and from the roof, and from the door. Tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap-tap. The skipping rhyme crept in under the planks in a hundred small voices, soft, dry, delighted.

She did not move. Nobody did. A minute passed, or ten. She began to believe they might live.

Then, from the back of the chapel, from the bench where the printer's apprentice sat with his hands over his face, there came a small, shaky, gasping sound.

It was a sound she knew. She had heard it from a broad man behind a well.

It was the beginning of a laugh.