Chapter 7: Seven | The Keystone

The far marker was not weeping. It was hemorrhaging. He knew it a quarter-mile out, by the colour of the puddles on the road, black as ink and smoking faintly in the rain, and by the smell, which was no longer cold iron but something older and less patient, the smell of stone that has been asked to hold more than stone was made for. He stopped walking. She stopped beside him. "Stay here," he said. "You said that at the constable's." "I said that at the constable's because the constable had a door. I am saying it now because what is ahead does not have a door, and if it did, you would walk through it, and I am not in the mood to explain to the rain why I allowed a child to follow me into something that predates her species." "You're angry." "I am focused. The two are easily confused. Stay here." He left her on the road and went down the slope toward the marker, and the ground under his boots changed from mud to something that was mud on the surface and wrong underneath, a soft resistance, the feel of earth that had opinions about being walked on. The marker stone stood at the edge of a drop where the shelf of broken rock fell away into the deep cut, the last stone in the line, the one that stood where the old road had once continued east before the land beneath it decided to stop being land. A rusted iron post marked where the road had been. Nothing marked where it had gone. The cord he had laid on his last visit was black and curled and the wax had run like tallow in heat, and the grooves in the stone were streaming with…