Though most homes were empty, occasional windows shed little blooms of light; we passed them quickly. I could still hear the footsteps behind us, and now I heard one of the men call out, but they sounded farther away than before. I sensed people stirring around me; a curtain was pulled aside and a face appeared in the window. I kept my gaze to the ground, following the widow’s dirt-scuffed shoes. Fear clutched my bones. I could sense it in her, too.
“In here, child.”
A door opened, from darkness into darkness, and we stepped through it. She shut it behind us. After a brief rustling, a match flared, and the smell of sulfur filled my nose. The Widow Kessler touched the match to a lantern and light flourished, revealing a small, cozy home hung with draperies and decorated with a mixture of the standard-issue furniture that came along with the habs and personal items of polished Earth-wood, the kind only the rich could afford. I was reminded that she was the nominal manager of the mine, and had once been considered part of the rising Martian aristocracy.
I wondered why she chose to live here, in Dig Town, shunning the comforts she could surely afford in New Galveston. My mother once observed that following her husband’s death, Widow Kessler had chosen to move into her own grave, and to live there until she was ready to lie in it permanently.
There was only one room here, but a large curtain was bunched in the corner to section off a place for privacy. A simple cot was propped there, along with a small chest, opened to reveal folded clothes of humble design. Although there was less space here than in the habs in New Galveston, it felt larger and less cluttered. More like a home.
She stood there for a moment, looking at me with stern bewilderment, as if I had intruded into her home unannounced and unwelcome, and she had not dragged me here herself.
“What shall I do with her,” she said. She was clearly speaking to herself, or perhaps to the dead husband she chained to herself like a dragged weight; an answer was not expected of me. I thought of my father’s lonely conversations with my mother and wondered if this was something that happened to all adults who found themselves suddenly bereft of love. It did not seem such a terrible thing: if all one had was a ghost to talk to, one might as well embrace it.
She turned away from me and went to a small range. “Do you like tea?”
I nodded, but her back was to me. “Yes, ma’am,” I said after a moment.
“I’ll make you some tea.”
There was a small table nearby, with two chairs. I thought, perhaps cruelly, that two chairs were an extravagance for a widow. I took one of them.
“What are you doing in Dig Town?” she said.
“I’m getting treads for Watson.”
She poured a measure of water from a large clay jug into a kettle and set it on to the range, which I noticed was already glowing with heat. It took the range in our own hab a good five minutes to get that hot—another reminder that she had not surrendered all the privileges of her station. I recalled the searching questions of the miner that night—how much longer until all this runs out?—and wondered if she’d known all along that something like this might happen. A dangerous luxury, perhaps, to keep these items in Dig Town.
“Do you realize coming here might get you killed?”
“That’s because everyone in Dig Town is crazy.”
She turned to face me, finally. “Is that what you think?”
“That’s what everyone thinks.”
She gave me her back again and busied herself with preparing the tea. I became preoccupied with the lantern, and the light it spilled through the curtains. Would those men come here?
“Mr. Wickham said most folks have gone into the mine. Is that true?”
“It is,” she said. “Though not everyone just yet. You still need to be wary.”
This migration into the dark disturbed me. It was cold enough up here; how much worse in the places sunlight had never touched?
“Why?” I asked.
She poured boiling water into mugs and brought them to the table. She took the other chair, and for a moment we might have looked like a sort of family. “The gardens are calling them down,” she said at last. “Sooner or later the whole town will be gone. Best thing you can do is go back home and wait it out. Won’t be anyone left here to hold a grudge, eventually.”
A whole community moving prematurely into their own graves, just like Widow Kessler.
“What gardens?” I recalled the mushroom farm she was said to have growing in her cellar. It occurred to me that isolation and grief might have deranged her thinking in ways not immediately obvious.
When she didn’t answer, I said, “Are you going into the mine, too?”
“Not yet. I have business here, first. All in due time.” She watched me while I sipped my tea. It was wonderfully hot, with notes of lemon and ginger. I closed my eyes and felt it fill my chest with heat. I felt suddenly exhausted; my life had been thoroughly dismantled over the past couple of days, and right now all I wanted to do was sleep in this safe, warm place.
Widow Kessler seemed to sense it. “Stay the night, Belle. Don’t go outside until morning. And when you do, go straight home.”
“I can’t go home. I have business, too.”
“Here?”
“Yes. And then more out there. With Silas Mundt and whoever runs with him.”
She didn’t receive the information gladly, but at least she didn’t try to argue with me anymore. She only seemed sad, as though she realized whatever fate was closing in on us all could not be avoided, despite her every wish and effort. It made me sad, too, and I wondered if I was just like her, only so much younger, and if all my energies were being wasted.
A voice carried in through the window: the injured miner—Charlie—still hunting for me. I was chilled by it; his persistence indicated a derangement stronger than I’d suspected.
Widow Kessler rose from the table and went into the curtained alcove. She pulled the cot away from the wall; its legs made a dull noise against the packed earth. A small rug was laid beneath where the cot had been. She bent slowly to her knees and rolled it up. A trapdoor was there, with a small recess on one side, so you could lift it open.
“What are you doing?”
“They might come here,” she said. “You should hide.”
I felt cold. “Does that lead to the mines?” Was she giving me over to them after all?
“It’s just my cellar. You’ll be safe. Just stay in the main chamber. There are two smaller rooms, and you should stay out of them.”
Fear welled up inside me, almost overwhelming me completely. “I don’t understand! Why are they chasing me? I didn’t do anything! They attacked us!” I heard my voice crack. I put my hands over my face because I couldn’t bear for her see to how stupid and scared I felt. “They robbed our diner! Why did they do that? Why does everyone hate us?”
The widow sat opposite me again. “Because you have things, Anabelle. That man was asking you about coffee that night, do you remember?”
I took my hands from my face. “This is about coffee? That’s insane!”
“It’s not just coffee. It’s food. It’s eggs and bread and cigarettes and water. It’s orange juice. It’s milk that comes from cows raised on Earth-grown grass. It’s spare cylinders for the Engines. It’s oil. It’s gasoline.”
“We don’t even have all those things! And what we do have, we have to buy! It isn’t free for us! It’s not fair!”
“No. But we’re Martians now, Anabelle. ‘Fair’ isn’t a word we use anymore. The people in Dig Town have been abandoned by New Galveston. The miners are left to breathe in more and more of the mineral, and they’re treated like something less than human. Don’t let them hear you use the word ‘fair.’ ” She went back to the trapdoor and pulled it open in a silent yawn. Trails of loose dirt spilled into the opening. “It’s time.”
I stared at the hole in the earth. It seemed to breathe cold air, blowing silence into the room. Going down there seemed impossible. Every cell in my body recoiled from it. I considered going outside, trying once again to find my way back to Joe Reilly and Sally, but that seemed impossible, too.
Widow Kessler stood beside the hole, one half of her face cast in the wild light of the lantern, the other a dark mystery. She was a creature of dignity and threat, heavy with supernatural judgment. “Go on,” she said. Her voice had an edge to it.
I approached the cellar with reluctance. As I came to its lip, I saw a ladder built into the wall. I could not see the bottom. I looked at the widow’s face, but she was already looking behind me, at the door. I turned, a quick pulse of fear surging through me. But the door was still closed. The lantern sent shadows flickering across it.
I descended the ladder into darkness, and the widow closed it over my head. I heard the sound of the rug and the cot being dragged back into place.
I was entombed.
I DON’T KNOW how long I stood there in the cold and dark. I suppose it couldn’t have been long at all, but it seemed as though I’d slipped into a place measured in time on a different scale. I thought of the observation window in the Eurydice, as I waited for some indication that I still belonged to a world defined by heat and light. I thought of what it must have been like for the passengers—for my own parents—to stare through that window into the abyss between the worlds, where time was measured by the lifetimes of suns.
I felt a terror of that darkness. Martian nights are spangled with stars, draped in the sky like necklaces of light, and our twin moons burned like phosphorus. We only knew real darkness when the sandstorms came, and even then we had our own lights to flower into it.
This darkness was absolute.
I extended my hand in front of me and walked until it pressed into the packed dirt of a wall. I ran my palm across it, dislodging granules of sand. It felt cool. I considered pacing around to get the bearings of the cellar, but I remembered the widow’s caution about the other rooms, and that stopped me. How big was this room? And how big were the others? It occurred to me that her cellar might extend far beyond the bottom of the widow’s small home, might extend into the bowels of Mars itself, like the Throat. This was Dig Town, after all.
The thought paralyzed me and I crouched in place, my breath coming hard and fast.
Widow Kessler’s voice drifted from above. I thought she was talking to herself or to her husband’s ghost again, until I heard heavy footsteps, and then more voices. I climbed halfway up the ladder so I could hear.
“Thank you, ma’am.” A male voice.
“Careful, it’s hot.”
“Hot is most welcome.”
Another man’s voice: “You seen the girl, Mrs. Kessler?”
“What girl?”
“The one from the diner in the city. She’s running around here.”
“So?”
“Thought she might of been drawn to the light in your window.”
“No one comes here. You know that.” A silence stretched. “You sure you won’t take some tea yourself, Charlie?”
“Yeah,” said the second man. “I guess I might.”
As I strained to listen, something touched my face. My whole body convulsed with fear and disgust, and I nearly fell off the ladder. And then I heard a noise coming from somewhere behind me. Scraping against the dirt. It was a small sound, a tiny sound, but in this black chamber it might as well have been a rat scratching against the interior of my own skull. I gripped the rungs of the ladder more tightly, prepared to launch myself through the trapdoor. To my astonishment, my teeth were grinding in rage. I did not like to be afraid, and my body reacted with fury, as if I was somehow entitled not to be scared, as if the machineries of fate had no business figuring me into their calculations. My clenched muscles started to hurt.
My thoughts fled to my pulp stories. I imagined the wicked princesses of Rider Haggard and wished to be one of them. I would transfigure myself into a devouring flame, a princess of hell, expanding until I took this cellar and the widow and all of Dig Town into my burning belly, and then I would grow further still until all of Mars was a lifeless cinder.
More touches landed on my face, brushing it like tiny fingers. Something landed in my hair, and I heard the vibration of an insect’s wings. I shuddered, feeling revulsion, but at least this was something mundane, something of the known world. And then I heard a noise—small, barely there at all. I nearly convinced myself that I’d imagined it until I heard it again. It sounded like a scraping footstep.
A voice whispered, “Agatha?”
I whimpered. It was a man’s voice. Gravelly, grave-colored. This was not Haggard; this was Hoffmann or Poe.
It said, “Who’s there?”
Still I stayed quiet.
“Is this heaven?”
The question frightened me even more than the circumstance. Anyone who would ask it must be mad. Madness unsettled me more than anything else; Mars seemed to draw it out of people, setting fire to some lonely region of the brain and filling their heads with its acrid smoke. I could almost smell it.
I didn’t respond. The cellar was filled with an unearthly silence. I couldn’t even hear the people above speaking anymore. Had they heard the voice, too? Were they crouched above me, ears pressed to the floor, eyes wide like green lamps?
After an extended silence I crept down from the ladder and stepped quietly onto the dirt floor. I moved forward a couple of steps, arms extended in front of me so I wouldn’t walk into anything—or anyone.
“Hello?” I whispered.
No response. I trailed my fingers along the wall and walked farther, terrified yet unwilling to stay passive for whatever was down here.
The wall came to an abrupt end, and I felt a subtle drop in the air temperature. I was at the threshold to one of the rooms Widow Kessler had told me to avoid. Cautiously, heart beating, I stepped into the archway.
I had been in absolute darkness long enough that an illumination I would have been blind to in any other context stood out like moonlight. Far from where I stood—too far to be part of the cellar—was a faint green luminescence; the same light shade found in the eyes of the Dig Towners. It backlit what looked like a large pile of black stones strewn over the floor between it and where I stood.
I stepped inside, moving closer to it. I attempted to step softly over the nearest rock, about as big around as a cooking pot; the bottom of my shoe brushed against it, and it collapsed in a puff of dust.
It was a mushroom. I remembered immediately the mushroom farm I’d heard that she grew, and felt a mixture of wonder and relief. I’d always imagined it contained in a series of trays, or pots at least; these seemed to grow wild, covering the floor of the small room like a vast carpet.
They led to a gaping tunnel at the far end of the room, going deeper into the ground.
I stepped closer to it and peered inside. There wasn’t enough illumination to make out much detail, but it was clear that the tunnel extended for some distance in a steady decline. A chill rippled across my skin. This was where the man had gone. I imagined the tunnel wending deep into the rock, into some deeper Mars, a colder Mars, where the mad lived.
Frightened, I turned away and hurried across the mushroom-covered floor, headed for the cellar’s main room. I tripped over something hard and went sprawling into the fungus, releasing a gamey cloud; each torn fungus spilled that pastel green bioluminescence. I yanked my foot away from whatever I’d stumbled over and turned to see what it was.
A skull stared back at me in the weak green light, its jaw yawning open, the mushrooms growing out of it in a thick, choking tide. The rumors came rushing back to me. Zachary Kessler’s broken skeleton lay before me like a ruined city.