The stairway was narrow, and she needed to place one hand on the wall to keep her balance. If she slowed down at all, she felt Ruth’s stick in her back. After a minute or so, she reached a door at the top. It, too, had a bolt. Ruth reached roughly around Josephine, sliding the bolt to the right and pushing open the door.
Josephine was hit by the smell of something sharp and rank. The room was pitch dark, and although she couldn’t see anything, she could tell it pulsated with life.
“Get going.” Ruth shoved her forward and Josephine fell and landed on the floor, her hands skidding in a sticky, unknown substance. “Happy dreams!” Ruth screeched as she shut the door and bolted Josephine inside.
Josephine sat there a moment, perfectly still, as she assessed the space around her. The smell was so strong and horrible that she cupped her hands around her nose, only to find that her hands smelled even worse. She was shaky and her mind was spinning, but she had the terrifying sensation that the walls around her were breathing.
“Hello?” she asked. “Is someone here?”
Suddenly, sounds bombarded her—a mad rustling, and then, twit twit, echoing over and over. They were familiar sounds, not particularly frightening, but she couldn’t place them. Her fear was blocking her senses, and she felt that if only her heart could stop beating so intensely, she would be able to hear better.
The noise dissipated somewhere above her, so she knew the ceiling was high. The sound reminded her a bit of passing the tearoom near the schoolhouse, where all the ladies gathered to gossip. Yes, it was like a group of old ladies tittering at the latest scandal. Josephine clenched her fists and willed her eyes to adjust to the darkness.
She began to make out a small square opening on one wall. She walked toward it and found a deep window, more than a foot thick, with no glass. She stood on tiptoes, hoping to see something, anything, but could make out nothing except black night. A small amount of fresh air blew in, and she greedily gulped at it, trying to relieve herself from the drowning odor.
She was still thinking of the old women back home and how they would end up gossiping about her strange disappearance, standing at their picket fences, nattering away like chickens. Chickens! she thought. That’s it! That’s the sound. No, not quite . . . More like . . . She turned around and focused on the shapes in the dark. “Pigeons!”
As her eyes adjusted, she saw that pigeons were sitting in hundreds of individual nooks carved out of the stone wall, and they continued up for at least two stories. Josephine was filled with relief and then embarrassment at having been so scared. Of course it was pigeons. Now the sound could be nothing else. There were feathers everywhere, and pigeon dung was the smell violating her nose. She looked at her hands in disgust and found some feathers to wipe them on.
Now that her fear had lessened a bit, she wanted to understand what Ruth had meant by “meat room.” Back home, a meat room was a cold, dry place where one used salt to dry out different game. Her father bought their meat from a shop in town, so they didn’t have that kind of room. And why would anyone want to eat pigeons? “Blllech,” she said aloud, sick at the thought of the meat pies she’d just eaten in the kitchen. Had they been made of minced pigeons?
She looked back at the strange open window and realized that the opening was just large enough for a pigeon to fly through. Ah, Josephine thought, beginning to understand. She’d once read that pigeons always returned to their roost.
“So these pigeons will leave to find their own food, and they’ll always return to this room to roost. So . . . if you think it’s okay to eat pigeons, then you have a constant food source that doesn’t need to be fed. And you never have to exit the building!” She had to admit it was very clever.
She looked up at the rows and rows of nooks. But there were so many birds! Hundreds and hundreds. Whoever had designed this room had created a supply of food that allowed one to never leave the Institute.
Josephine shuddered and sat down in her new prison. This room was loud and it stank and she felt quite miserable. Fargus was supposed to show her how to get home tomorrow, and now she had ruined it by getting caught. She could kick herself for being so stupid. Hadn’t Ida told her to stay in the cellar?
She didn’t think it would be possible to sleep. But as the meat pies digested, her eyes became heavy and her anxiety and fear finally took their toll. She fell asleep sitting up, surrounded by feathers.
EIGHT
The alarm bell woke Fargus. He hoped it had nothing to do with Josephine. He wanted to go check on her in the cellar, but he dared not go without Ida, and she was in the girls’ room down the hall. So he could only lie there, the loud clanging of the bell rattling his skull.
Most of the time, Fargus didn’t mind living in the Institute. Not really. It meant he got to spend time with Ida. He always felt safe with her. And for some reason, she always knew what he wanted to say, even when he couldn’t say it. He had liked visiting Josephine, too, but the desire to communicate with her had been too overwhelming. He had returned to the shed to fetch Ida and bring her back with him to act as his voice, but then Josephine showed up at the Institute.
It had all been so frustrating. He could convey to Ida some of the things he had seen at Josephine’s house using the secret, silent language they had developed over the years, with hands and facial expressions, but he’d been unable to share all the vivid details of his visit. He could tell that Ida hadn’t really believed he’d gone anywhere. But now Josephine was here and Ida knew he was telling the truth, so it was all okay. Except . . . now they were all stuck here and not in Josephine’s big clean house that was full of lovely food.
Fargus tried not to think much about his life before the Institute, although he still had the occasional dream. Usually in the dream, he and his parents, Margaret and Jasper Dudson, were in a giant lighthouse, which was where Fargus had been born. He saw his mother laughing and chasing him up the stairs, up and up and up, and when he reached the top, there was a blinding light and his father would grab him and shield his eyes. Fargus would erupt into a fit of giggles, and it was here the dream would end.
In Fargus’s memory, playing games with his parents had always been interrupted. Meals had rarely been finished. One of them, his mother or his father, had always been running up to stoke the beacon. The light had been to guide the sailors out at sea into a safe harbor so they wouldn’t hit rocky shores. His parents had kept a huge box of coal outside and had been forever fearful of running out, because the coal fueled the fire that created the big light.
When Fargus turned five, it became his job to get the coal. “Ship coming! Run and fetch the coal, Fargus!” was what he heard all day long. But he found collecting coal terribly dull. He just wanted to go to school like normal children.
One day Fargus was playing outside and he began to follow a trail of ants. Fargus was fascinated by ants and the way they could carry food that was twice as big as their teeny frames. He liked to picture himself carrying an enormous banana twice as big as his own body. This day, he really wanted to see where the ants were headed. So he followed them from the edge of the lighthouse across the lawn and into the nearby trees. Fargus was always supposed to be within hearing distance of home, but he was having such a marvelous time that he completely disregarded his parents’ rule about leaving the lawn. Lost in his harmless diversion, he didn’t hear his father shout down from the lighthouse, “Ship coming! Run and fetch the coal, Fargus!”
But Fargus was in the trees.
His father yelled down again. “Hurry, Fargus!”
This time, Fargus lifted his head, thinking that perhaps he had heard something.
“Fargus, hurry! The ship is coming!” his father pleaded.
This time Fargus was sure. His father was calling for coal. He leaped up and ran out of the trees, across the lawn to the coal box. He shoved lumps into a bucket as quickly as he could and ran back to the house as fast as his feet would take him. He ran inside and up the stairs—up and up and up. He reached the top, where his father grabbed the bucket and shoved him backward.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?!”
Fargus’s heart sank. His father had never raised his voice at him before.
His father fed the fire, which had died to a sad sputter. The fire started to spark and grow but Fargus’s father didn’t stop. He kept shoveling in panic. From outside along the coast Fargus heard an earth-shattering collision, as if a giant had stepped on an enormous egg. The lighthouse rumbled and swayed and he was thrown to the floor.
When he stood back up, his father was weeping. Fargus had never seen a man cry before, and he was frightened. He knew that his mother always made him feel better when he cried, so he ran downstairs to find her, but she wasn’t in the house.
She was standing out on the cliffs, staring down at the ocean. Fargus ran to her and was about to ask her to go upstairs when he saw what she was looking at. A large ship—six sails at least—was smashed against the rocks. A fire blazed and men were jumping into the water, swimming for the safety of the shore, only to be pulled under by the current. Fargus heard screaming, smelled smoke, and felt the explosion of gunpowder.
“Can we help them?” Fargus asked.
“No,” his mother said in a grave voice. “They are finished. As are we.” She turned and walked back to the lighthouse.
That night, as Fargus lay in bed, he heard his parents fighting downstairs. He heard his name uttered several times, and he awaited his punishment. The fight didn’t end, though, until early in the morning. His mother entered his room, eyes red from crying, carrying a small sack. As she knelt by him, she explained in a soft voice that he needed to leave the house immediately. At first Fargus thought this was his punishment, but she told him that they were all in danger. The Master’s servants would be arriving soon to interrogate them about the shipwreck. She made him get dressed and handed him the sack of bread and meat. Fargus wished she would yell at him or spank him. Nothing was worse, he thought, than her sad smile.
He walked numbly downstairs to the front door. His father instructed him to hide behind the coal box until the interrogation was over. His parents walked him outside, and his father said that if anything should happen to him and his mother, Fargus should follow the rising sun. His father shook his hand, as Fargus had seen him do with adults, and his mother bent over him and whispered into his ear, “We love you.” Then she tucked a family picture into his pocket.
Fargus crouched behind the coal box as he was told, afraid that his trembling was audible. Soon he heard the sound of men on horseback approaching the lighthouse. Although he could see nothing, he guessed there were around a dozen of them, and before Fargus’s parents could say a word, the men dismounted their horses and accused Fargus’s father of negligence. He was responsible, they said, for repaying a debt to the Master equal to the price of a vessel, a hundred men, livestock, and rare spices found only on the Isle of Sharlen. When his father said he didn’t have the money, the men seized both him and Fargus’s mother. Fargus could hear her crying as they tied her up and forced her onto one of the horses. His father, a tall, robust man, did not struggle, and Fargus knew it was because he was afraid of the men discovering his son.
All the while Fargus listened, wanting to cry out, wanting to help. But when he opened his mouth, ready to protest, to scream, he found, to his horror and surprise, that nothing came out. His voice had abandoned him.
