“Aye,” agreed the cunning man. “Hit’ll do fine.”
His right index finger traced characters on the table. They were visible only where they disturbed the pile of sodden earth or the wisps of ash which dropped from the hickory. The room began to rotate around the focus of Old Nathan’s vision, but the walls and all the objects within them remained clear.
A driblet of mud and melt water curled from the table like a thread being drawn from a bobbin. The ribbon of flame from the hickory attenuated and slanted sideways, as though the strip were burning in a place where “up” was not the same direction as it was in central Tennessee.
There was a keening sound like that which the wind makes when it drives through a tiny chink in a wall.
Old Nathan spoke in a soft, monotonous voice, mouthing syllables that were not words in a language familiar to his listeners. His eyes became glazed and sightless. His tongue stumbled. It was shaping itself to the sounds not by foreknowledge but the way a hiker crosses a shallow stream: hopping from one high rock to the next, then searching for a further steppingstone.
The elemental strands—earth and air, fire and water—wove together as do fibers in a ropewalk, coiling and interweaving into a single tube. It curved into the box, probing the wooden bottom—
And slid away, broken into its constituent parts, its virtue dissipated.
Old Nathan awoke with a start, jolting backward in his chair. His arms spread with the fingers clawed in readiness to meet a foe. His spasm flung the feather of wood toward the pile of bedding.
Sarah snatched up the burning splinter. In her haste she gripped it too close to the flame, but she carried it without flinching back to the hearth.
Ellie Ransden cried, “Sir!” and grasped Old Nathan’s right arm, both to control it and to prevent the cunning man from tipping over with the violence of his reaction.
He glared at her. His face for a moment was a mask of fury; then he calmed and softened as though all the bones had been drawn from his flesh.
“Tarnation, gal,” the old man gasped, pillowing his head against his left arm on the table. He seemed oblivious to the slime of ash and damp earth left on the surface by his attempt.
Old Nathan lifted himself again. He gave Ellie a squeeze with his left hand before he drew his right from her support. “I figgered with all creation t’ push, I’d hev thet gate open lickity-split . . . but hit warn’t ready t’ open.”
The cunning man smiled wryly at the miscalculation he had barely survived. “I was betwixt the gate en’ the push thet I’d drawed up myse’f.”
“The bottom’s false, thin?” Ellie asked, glancing toward the little box beside Old Nathan’s hand. Her lips curled. “Cain’t we chop hit open?”
“Hain’t like thet, child,” the cunning man said. Sarah Ransden eyed them without expression from beside the fireplace. “Thar’s a gate, so t’ speak, but not . . .”
He gestured, rubbing his fingertips together as if attempting to seize the air. “Not on this world. Not all this world—” his index finger drew a line across the dirt on the tabletop “—has airy bit t’ do with what’s on t’ other side uv thet gate, so I couldn’t force hit.”
Without speaking, Sarah reached into the bosom of her dress. She drew a locket up and over her head. The ornament was suspended on a piece of silk ribbon so faded that its original color was only a pink memory.
Sarah opened the spring catch and held the locket out to Old Nathan. Inside was the miniature portrait of a man, painted on ivory. “Thet’s Chance Ransden,” she said in a distant voice. “Thet was my husband whin I married him.”
Old Nathan set the locket down on the table and examined it. The artist had been skillful, not so much in the depiction of physical features—the face on the miniature was thinner than that of the Chance Ransden the cunning man remembered from ten years past—but rather in the sheen of the spirit glinting through the skin. No single detail in the painting was objectively right, but the result had the feel of Chance Ransden.