David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment - A Novel

Without thinking, she grabbed one of Mr. Olson’s arms, but he shook her off as though she were an ill-behaved dog. The absent cruelty of that gesture helped her to clear her thoughts.

One of the other laborers, a little girl, also turned her head. “You must gather the leaves.” She spoke the words, and the shadow creatures writhed and shifted and leapt from rafter to rafter, like clouds of darkness that passed over Lucy’s head.

More mill workers now spoke. Gather the leaves. You must gather the leaves . Their sound was a cacophony, each speaking over the other, but all fifty of them said it again and again. An entire mill full of workers had ceased their labors to tell her something desperately important, and she had no idea what it meant. And while they spoke, the shadowy forms circled above them, all moving clockwise, as though forming a vortex that would suck them all upward, flying into oblivion.

“This is utter rubbish,” Mr. Olson told her, “but it is Luddite rubbish, and therefore dangerous. You must go.” He took her arm with an impatient grip and opened the outer door to his private room. Lucy cast one more glance at the mill workers, calling out as though mad, as though lost in religious ecstasy. She took in one more peripheral glance of the frenzied creatures, and then helplessly and gratefully let Mr. Olson lead her away. The cold air rushed into her lungs, the safety of the woods invited her. Lucy wondered if he had a private door for convenience or to allow for an escape should he ever face such an uprising.

“Have no fear,” Mr. Olson said. “The mill will continue to produce.”

He spared a brief look in her direction and then closed the door without further ceremony. Lucy stood in the cold, unable to determine what to do. The sudden silence, the stillness in the air, the absence of the host of insubstantial creatures now seemed odd and inexplicable. The quiet felt unnatural, like an accusation. How could it be that all those people spoke the exact words Lord Byron had said? How could those creatures be real? Was this truly—and she hardly wished to use the word, even to her herself—magic? It was like that moment, in the inn in Dartford when she’d seen her father standing by the fire, tears running down his face, and she’d understood, all at once, that the world was far different from what she had always supposed. Then, she had discovered the world’s sadness, and today, she had discovered its darkness.

Lucy forgot to breathe, and then, against her will, she sucked in a thirsty gulp of air.

With nothing else to do, Lucy began to walk from the mill. She was afraid, but also curious, and so she swallowed her fear and circled around to the still-open front door. As she grew closer, once more she could hear the mumbled chanting, the rustling non-sound of the creatures’ frenzied circling.

Frightened, but too curious to turn away, Lucy approached the front of the mill. The dirt and dead leaves and twigs crunched under her feet. She heard the distant hooting of an owl. The overlapping voices repeated their refrain until she was no more than twenty feet from the open door, and then, all at once, the chant stopped. For a moment there was only silence, and then came the clacking of a single loom, joined by another, and then a loud cough, and the busy thrum of a fully functioning mill. Lucy had the strange idea that if she were to step only a little closer the work would cease once more, the chanting would resume, and the shadows would again quicken. She believed it as much as she believed anything, yet she dared not put this notion to test lest she discover that she was right.

A hundred feet up the path, with the declining sun now in her eyes, Lucy saw a figure—still and straight and tall with wide shoulders. She could not see his face, so glaring was the sun, but she had the distinct impression that he stared at her, that he waited for her.

Lucy thought of retreating to the mill, but she could not go back there, not with those workers, with their dead eyes and their monotonous chants. And this man had not threatened her. He might only be a farmer or a laborer on his way, wanting nothing more from her than to tip his hat and wish her a good afternoon.

The figure did not move. She could see almost nothing of him, and put a hand to her forehead in an effort to shield her eyes from the sun’s glare, but it did little good.

“Good afternoon,” she said cautiously.

He stepped closer. His movements were stiff and lumbering, and yet unnaturally quick. The whole effect of him presented a convoluted image, as though his limbs were attached in some wrong way and as though he, like the creatures from the mill, were made of shadows. He did not seem vile like those scattering, pulsating things, but he was somehow similar. And yet, unlike too, for despite all the shimmering obscurity, he was a lumbering figure of a man, dressed in rough clothes, and he held in one hand a massive hammer—the sort used for … for breaking things. He was, she now understood, a machine breaker. This man was a Luddite.

“Miss Derrick,” he said in a voice deep and resonant and low, like the mournful note of a brass horn. She felt her bones vibrate. “Miss Derrick, you must gather the leaves.”

Partly out of terror, and partly out of exasperation, she squatted down and clutched a handful of limp winter-worn leaves that remained upon the ground, holding them out toward the silhouette. “Will this do?”

The man laughed, and the sound was rich and throaty. “That is not what is meant.”

“Then perhaps you will tell me what is meant,” said Lucy. She dropped the leaves and slapped her hands together to knock away the dirt. She was beginning to find her confidence, and liked it. Whoever, whatever this man was, he was not like the black thing she’d seen last night; he was not a creature of void and darkness. “Who are you? And where are these leaves I must gather, and why and what must I do with them once they are in a nice little pile?”

His face was still hidden, but Lucy had the distinct impression that he smiled. “You will know when it is time. You have seen that there are those who do not wish you to succeed, and so you must wait until you are ready. You are not yet ready.”

“Then why do you tell me to do what I am not yet ready to do?”

The hidden man cocked his head slightly, giving the impression that he smiled, though she could not know for certain. “So you will make yourself ready. Those who are to be your allies prepare themselves. You have seen the mill and the horror it brings. With what shall you counter something like that?”

Lucy said nothing. Fear and confusion and even a hint of excitement rendered her tongue inert. The man bowed deep and low before stepping out of view, not into the woods, but seemingly into the shadows, as though he pulled the shadows to himself, the way she might pull a cloak around her own shoulders. Lucy did not believe it while she watched, and she doubted her own recollection afterwards, but it seemed that the shadows around him were somehow physical—layered like the steps of a stairway or folds in a piece of fabric. Into these shadows the strange man vanished, leaving Lucy alone with the sounds of wind and birds and her own panting breath.

8

D URING HER WALK HOME, A RESOLUTION GREW WITHIN HER, and though that strange man was right to fear a bleak future of mills and oppressed workers living as little better than slaves, Lucy could think only of her own bleak future. The workers telling her to gather the leaves was odd—there could be no doubt of that—but perhaps it meant nothing. And the dark creatures she’d seen were likely bats or other animals that congregated in mills for the warmth and shelter. There had been nothing fantastical in her experience, and she would not let her imagination or her fear of marrying Mr. Olson convince her that the world was a place out of a story for children. But Lucy did understand something new. While she was hardly ready to join with the Luddites and their campaign of destruction, she could not build her own life upon the foundation of a mill such as she had seen. She could not be the wife of a man who beat children to make them work harder and longer and for less money. She could not establish her own domestic security upon a kind of slavery. However much she wished she could forget or discount what she had seen, she could not.