We’ve been sitting here talking, and I never thought that there might be others trapped like Spingate was, like I was. All these coffins…maybe one of them holds a person who knows what this place is and how we got here.
I walk across the aisle and jam the heavy bar’s forked end into the small crack, the lid closest to me under the bar, the forked end under the lid farthest away. I push down.
The lid doesn’t budge.
I rise to my toes, put all my weight on the bar.
“Em, I can help with—”
“I’ve got it,” I say, my effort turning the words into grunts. I hear a slow creaking coming from the lid. I rise up a little more, then push down as hard as I can, all at once—there is a loud bang from the coffin as something gives way.
The lid halves suddenly tilt up, hum as they slide to the sides. Sheets of gray spill off their smooth, carved surfaces.
We look inside: a wave of fear pushes my body a step backward.
Spingate reacts differently—instead of stepping away, she leans forward.
“Maybe you were right,” she says. “If that’s B. Brewer, I guess in his case it really is a coffin.”
FIVE
Brewer is a dead little boy.
A thin line of dust runs up his tiny, shriveled body, dust that fell through the crack between the lids.
The coffin is the same size as mine and Spingate’s, but it looks huge surrounding such a small corpse. The skin of his face is dried so tightly to his skull that it’s cracked in some places, showing the bone beneath. His eyes are empty sockets. His lips have shrunken back, showing two rows of discolored teeth; it looks like he’s smiling.
I feel sick to my stomach.
Brewer is wearing a white shirt and an embroidered red tie. Black pants and a black belt instead of a plaid skirt. Even if he wasn’t all dried up, the outfit would have been too big for his little body. Pitted, crimson-spotted bars hold down his hips, ankles and wrists, even though his feet and hands are hidden inside his pants and sleeves.
Spingate points to his tiny forehead, to a symbol—just as black as ours—embedded in his dried skin. It is a circle with one line down the middle and one running from side to side.
“A cross,” she says.
“Or a T.”
She shrugs. “Maybe a plus sign?”
“Maybe.”
A tooth-girl, a circle-girl, a cross-boy…and we have no idea what any of it means.
I’m staring at a corpse. That could have been me. These are coffins after all, so why is he dead while I am alive? Looking at him makes me cold in a different way than the temperature and my scant excuse for clothing.
I’d be so much warmer with pants. Did he get to wear pants because he’s a boy? If so, that’s not fair.
Spingate slowly extends a finger toward Brewer. She pokes his cheek. Dried flesh crumbles and falls away. It’s awful, but it doesn’t seem to bother Spingate at all.
She grabs the sleeve of his shirt, starts to tug.
My hand locks on her forearm.
“Stop that,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“Making a bandage.”
“For what?”
She points to my wrists. “You’re still bleeding.”
I look at them and see she’s right. The bars rubbed my skin raw. Small spots of red well up from a dozen tiny tears. Dust packs the wounds, making the blood more sludge than liquid, but it’s still slowly oozing out.
“I’m fine,” I say. “We shouldn’t disturb the dead.”
Spingate huffs. “The dead don’t care.”
She tears two long strips from his shirt, jerking his tiny body in the process. A thick, dry piece of his face falls away, exposing the cheekbone below.
Spingate wraps the strips around my wrists and ties them off.
“That’s better,” she says. “Should we open the other coffins?”
Nine remain closed. Spingate and I wasted time sitting with each other. We wasted more staring at Brewer.
“Yes,” I say. “And quickly.”
She holds out her hand toward my weapon. “Can I try?”
That strikes me as funny. She wasn’t strong enough to get out of her own coffin, but she thinks she’s strong enough to break one open from the outside?
I hand her the jeweled rod.
Spingate takes it, and when she does, that soul-melting smile peeks out again. She’s excited, moving quickly, her fear suddenly forgotten.
She moves to the next coffin and brushes dust off the nameplate. The jewels sparkle bright yellow.
“K. O’Malley,” she says.
Spingate’s fingers trace the yellow jewels. She puts a fingertip on one and pushes: it slides inward until it clicks. When she pulls her finger away, the jewel stays depressed. She pushes it again and it clicks again, then returns to its original height. She moves to the next one, pinches it between finger and thumb and twists: the jewel rotates in place.
Somewhere inside the coffin, we hear a series of small whirs and clinks.