Chapter 336 --336
The ground in the final section had been treated with something that made it luminescent in patches — faint, greenish, the color of things that glow in the dark in ways that things are not supposed to glow. The patches were arranged to look like handprints. She counted fourteen of them across the path leading to the central tomb, each one clearly pressed by an actual hand, each one now giving off enough cold light to be visible and wrong.
She walked over every single one.
At the ninth handprint, from somewhere very close — inside the nearest tomb, she estimated, based on the resonance — a sound started. Not the previous ambient sound. This was specific. This was a voice, or something close enough to a voice that the distinction became academic, speaking in a register that sat exactly at the threshold of comprehensibility. You could almost make out words. You could almost understand what it was saying. The almost was doing a great deal of work, and the work it was doing was not comfortable.
From the wall — distant now, she had come a long way from the gate — she heard a sound that she identified after a moment as someone having fallen over. Then a different sound, lower and more urgent, that took her another moment to categorize.
Someone had lost control of their bladder.
She knew this because the person in question made the specific sound of someone realizing what had happened and then making a second sound about the first sound, both of which carried clearly in the cemetery’s unnatural quiet.
She kept walking.
The voice from the tomb increased in volume as she passed it, peaked as she moved beyond it, and then cut off with an abrupt completeness that was somehow worse than a gradual fade. The silence that followed it was absolute.
She was at the central tomb.
She bowed five times.
First bow: the sound of the crowd, distantly, registering that she had arrived.
Second bow: nothing. Complete silence.