“Right. That’s good. If he didn’t know you were coming, then the greenhouse is safe.”
“What’s the big deal with the greenhouse? You got tomatoes out there or something?”
This girl. I swear. Is she slow? Is she crazy? Is she naïve?
She is just cute.
“The herbs. We need them to restock the apothecary. We’ll have to go through it and get rid of all the plants he harvested. It’s gonna be a mess, but it’s gotta be done. The magic is important. We can look at that tomorrow. Tonight”—I point at her—“I’m gonna prove that the Book of Debt is real and you are in control of it.”
Pie shrugs, flips the door handle, and gets out. “OK. Prove that I can work this debt off just by making you happy.”
I get out too and wave her forward towards the gate, smiling to myself. Because this is gonna be fun, I think. We walk through and I head towards the path instead of turning towards the cottage. Pie balks, stopping in place. “What’s wrong now?” I sigh.
She looks up the hill towards the cathedral, then back at me. “I don’t want to walk past those tombs. Can’t we do it down here?”
I nod in the other direction. “All the stuff is up there. The tombs can’t hurt you.”
She tsks her tongue and shakes her head. “I don’t believe that for a second. There are monsters inside them. And I’m pretty sure that those statues outside are just a glimpse of what’s waiting inside the tombs. I can’t really see them in there, but I feel them moving around. They make shadows. And they could just slide out and take me as I’m walking.”
“They can’t, Pie. That door you see, it’s not really there. It’s just an illusion.”
She is shaking her head now before I’m even done talking. “Oh, no, it’s not. I can feel them.” She gazes up the hill where the tombs pack the lawn shoulder to shoulder. “And there are so many of them.” Pie looks up at me, eyes wide and questioning. “Why are there so many of them?”
“It’s continuously being populated. Like the upstairs of the cathedral.”
She looks around, trying this explanation on for size. “But where do they come from? I mean, if it’s continuous, then where do these monsters start? Like… if this is their end, where is the beginning?”
“Huh. I guess I never thought about that.”
“How could you not think about that?”
“In my defense, Pie, I’ve been here for a long fucking time. When I first got here, it was just me and Tarq. And Tomas, of course. He was already here though. And he doesn’t live in a tomb, he’s… never mind. My point is, these tombs all came later. Little bits at a time. One here, two there. And then, before I knew it, the place was full.”
“And you never bothered to wonder where they were coming from?”
“Well.” I let out a long exhale. “I just figured the curse was making the rounds.”
“Making the rounds?”
“Yeah. Like… um. You know. There’s a lot of fucking monsters out there, all over the earth, and it just takes time to find them all to pack them up in tombs.” She actually stops walking to look at me. “What?” I ask.
She just shakes her head. “I don’t know what I think about that.”
“About what?”
“Are you clueless, ignorant, or just… Zen?”
I laugh, point at her. “Not sure what the Zen thing is, but I choose that one. The others are most certainly undesirable. Anyway,” I add, before she can think up more questions about that line of thinking, “you can’t get in the tomb, this is my point. Only I can enter the tombs. But here’s the catch on my side, I can’t see the doors.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It’s a paradox. I can enter, but can’t see the doors. You can see the doors, but you can’t enter. And none of them can come out. Trust me. I’ve been here two thousand years and not a single monster has found their way out of those tombs. So when you walk alongside me up this path, you can’t even see the doors. No shadows at all.”
She looks up the path again and her shoulders relax. “Oh. OK, then. But”—she turns back to me—“how do you get inside your tomb?”
“Well, that one’s mine and I can see the opening.”
“So I can’t ever go into your tomb?”
“Why the hell would you want to go in there?”
“I dunno. To see where you live.”
I spread my arms wide to encompass the entire sanctuary. “I live here. You can see all of it.”
“So your tomb though.” She is not letting this go. “It’s like your bedroom? Your private chambers or whatever?”
“Sure. It’s like my bedroom, I guess. But it’s not a bedroom. It’s the woods.”
“What? How is that possible?”