Hello, my loves.”
It was her voice, but it sounded wrong: slowed down, deepened, as though it were being stretched like taffy.
“I’m going to miss you both so much and I…”
Her voice was coming from Peabody. The suit rippled with the sudden furious activity of the moths, tapping against the faceplate, flitting through the tears in the fabric, crawling over the tipped skull inside. He was painted gold by the light from the lamps.
Father took a tentative step closer to him. His body shuddered with emotion.
“… wish I could take you both with me…”
“Alice?”
The voice dipped into another register. “Who are you?”
Father looked dismayed. “Alice, it’s me. It’s Sam.”
I remembered that the cylinder had been split, exposed to the Strange in the cavern. Silas had warned me: whatever had been contained there before would be changed. I glanced at him now, still standing away from everyone else, holding the gun at his side. He watched us with an expression I couldn’t read.
“… I want to understand…”
Her voice was full of confusion, of loneliness. It broke my heart to hear it. I knew something else was in there, too, some splinter of Mars, but it was still my mother’s voice. It was her, talking to me. I needed it. I’d been pushing so hard. I’d lost so much.
“… I’m sorry you can’t come, Anabelle. You have to stay here…”
The suit extended its arm to me.
“… but I’ll be back very soon… I must go back…”
Her fingers beckoned. I stepped closer, and she embraced me. My muscles felt loose. Exhaustion overtook me. I curled into her.
“… I know this will be hard for you, Sam… we’ve never been apart… this long…” She extended her arm to Father, and her message changed. It was no longer the recording we heard, but new thoughts. “Come with me…”
The pitch of the engines increased, and the Lamplighter jostled gently into the air. I looked up into my mother’s face. She stared back at me. Mushrooms crowded one of her eye sockets.
A chorus of sound filled the air, a strange undercurrent to the engines: whispers; weeping; splintering rock, like the language of stone. The garden of ghosts, packed neatly in their crates, awakened by something—the Lamplighter, perhaps, but most likely by the swelling presence of the dark aspect, the thing that was Mars, so heavy in the air that it slicked the back of my throat. It was like a holy visitation.
Silas stepped forward, putting his hand on her shoulder. “No. No! We can’t take them! There’s not enough fuel! Not enough air!”
She looked at him. This intruder into our reunion. This crawling mite on her body. An invader. “Filth,” she said. “Get away from me.”
“What?” Desperately, he put his hands on Mother’s arm, tried to force her around to face him. “No. You said you’d take me. This isn’t even you, it’s that goddamn cylinder she put in—”
“Never touch me,” she said, turning on him. “Never look at me.”
Turning away from him, she faced my father instead. My father stepped into her embrace.
Silas’s expression went flat. To be rebuked by God. To be rejected by the very ground you stood on. I watched something dim in Silas’s green eyes, some essential energy exit his body. He stepped away from us. Through the viewport behind him I could see the landscape of Mars scrolling slowly by, at little more than a walking pace. He honored her wish: he did not look at her again. Instead he looked at me.
“I told you,” he said. “We’re a disease.”
He put the gun to his temple and fired.
“… I’M AFRAID…” she said. “… I’m afraid…”
I didn’t know how much of that was Mother, how much was Mars. I guessed mostly the latter. Silas’s death snapped me out of my dream. We sat on the floor, arms around each other. Father was lost to me. He stared in wondering adoration at the thing that held him, that held me, too. I knew it wasn’t her, but it felt good to pretend, even for a few minutes.
I knew, too, that Silas had not been lying. There was only enough air for one person to make the trip. And somebody had to. Somebody had to speak into the Silence.
But I could pretend for a little while longer. At least until we drifted over Dig Town.
Silas’s blood streamed around us. I took my father’s hand, felt it clasp onto my own. I leaned into Mother one more time. I looked into her face: the bare skull, the moths streaming in and out of the cracked faceplate, a black, shivering halo against the light. I told them both that I loved them, and that I was sorry to see them go.
I JUMPED OUT at Dig Town. The Lamplighter was moving low enough, and slowly enough, that it wasn’t any risk at all. Mother’s presence, what there was of it, was already receding into the dark aspect, which cared about no one at all. Father—the man I knew, anyway—was gone. What remained of him was in the only place he wanted to be: with the woman he loved, the one who gave him the strength he never had himself. Neither made any effort to stop me. There was no place for me there anymore.
The cold was ferocious. I had to get to shelter quickly or it would kill me. The Shanks’ place was close by. I didn’t know what had happened to Sally, and I thought—without much hope—that maybe she’d gone there afterward.
But first, I wanted to watch the Lamplighter. I hadn’t understood why it had traveled to Dig Town—I didn’t think my mother’s cylinder had that much influence on the intelligence that controlled it—but once here, it became clear. It roamed slowly toward the center of town. To the Throat.
Sound began to flow from those great depths. It rose in volume, slowly at first, and then with gathering speed. Screams, wails, long sonorous notes, the glad noise of a woken devil… I know of no way to accurately describe it. It was the sound of a desolate world, the bodies it had claimed and broken, the voice it had taken for itself. The Strange geysered from the Throat in tiny green particles, little ice chips rising into the night sky and falling around it in a gentle snow.
I let it cover me.
The Lamplighter hovered briefly over the mine shaft. The Strange floated over and around it, sliding from its sides in glittering trails. Was the entity in the Throat different in any way from the one inhabiting that ship? Was it the same mind peering at itself? Or had Mars fractured, as Silas had believed, melding with explorers, soldiers, Engines of war? And with lost mothers, too?
What monster was going back to Earth, to sow its ghosts in an alien soil, my father curled at its feet?
The Lamplighter radiated light like a chandelier, throwing heat below, stirring the cloud of green dust into eddies and whirlwinds. I looked for the window, hoping to catch a last glimpse of my father. But it was too high, the window too dark. It continued to rise until its light was little more than a candle flame, then a pinprick, and then it was gone, swallowed by the darkness between the moons.