There’s a clearing in the center of the Salt Towers where the red ash settles. The pointed remains of stalagmites, exposed to the sky after the caves split and collapsed a thousand years ago, shield it from the whipping winds of the coast. Instead of scattering and sticking to the heavy clouds above, the ash from neighboring Mount Timothy blankets crumbling terrain that howls with the violence of windstorms that seem to worsen each year. Meryl likes to carve the rocks on the cliffside that overlooks it.
She figures a few thousand more years will wear away anything she cuts into the soft slate slabs dotting the clearing anyway. They jut out at odd angles, forced to the surface by the fault line that curves along the coast, dark against the stark white of the Salt Towers. Hardly anyone comes out this way. There is something freeing about carving in a place no one will ever see.
Meryl places her makeshift chisel over the slab she’s been working on for a few months now. She’s trying to carve a jackal’s face into its eastward corner, but she can’t quite get the head shape right. It’s always just a little off if she looks at it a certain way. She’s moved on to other projects a handful of times since starting it, but never been able to let it go unfinished.
Her contemplation is interrupted by a familiar voice. “The jackal again?”
Meryl huffs, dropping her arms in her lap. The chisel leaves fresh dust on her pants. “I’ll never let it go,” she mutters. She glances up at Wire, who is grinning at her with his usual cheekiness.
Wire is the only other person who knows about Meryl’s secret hiding place. She held her chisel out like a weapon the first time he came out of hiding, startling her from the meditative state she falls into while she carves. He’d held up his hands and insisted he was just curious about where she went in the afternoon. They’d hardly known each other then, only acquaintances through their shared classroom at the time.
“Maybe you could turn it into a wolf? Jackals are weird animals anyway,” Wire says, a departure from his usual snark. “Their ears look funny.”
“I know,” she says. “I don’t know why I picked it.”
That’s a lie. She knows exactly why she picked it, and so does Wire; it’s an homage to the little statue that sits on the mantle of her family’s fireplace, carved from wood and polished with a shiny lacquer. Its head is turned so that it looks outward, watching over the house like a tiny guardian. Her grandmother’s ashes rest inside it, but she usually forgets about that part.
Thankfully, Wire doesn’t comment on it. “You going to the Steel Festival?” he asks. He leans against the slate slab, crossing his arms.
Meryl snorts. “The Steel Festival is a waste of time,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Who cares about a little parade around the square?”
The Steel Festival is a sham anyway. The only reason they do it is because their town became famous for The Stealing. They’d changed the name to “Steel,” some strange form of reclamation through a misunderstanding from outsiders. She likes looking at the floats, at least.
“Lots of people, I assume,” Wire says with a shrug. “There’ll be fried cakes there though. I know you love those.”
She does love those.
Meryl sighs. “Will you come with me at least?” she asks.
“Yeah, for sure. In fact, I’ll do you one better and buy the cakes.” Wire pulls out his wallet to count his money, just to be sure he has enough. He’s one of the only people Meryl knows who still carries coins. Transferring credits is much easier.
A silence settles between them. Meryl considers her next point of attack on her carving, and the wind whips the ash in the center of the Salt Towers into an unstable cyclone. Red ash splits and breaks at the top of it in ribbons, as though the cone of wind becomes too fatigued to hold its shape and unravels. Meryl holds her chisel up to the jackal, her hammer just behind it, pauses for ten full seconds, then gives up.
“How long until the parade?” she asks.
“Not long. We’d be fashionably late if we left now,” Wire says.
Meryl stands. “Let’s be fashionably late then,” she concedes, and Wire smiles at her, pushing off from her canvas with his shoulder and heading for the town square.
They crawl through brambles and winding paths interrupted by roots and errant stones to get there. Meryl wouldn’t feel safe hiding back there if it wasn’t hard to get to, after all. It was part of why Wire’s following initially impressed her.
They reach the edge of town and break from the bushes, just beside one of the Wandering fountains. The statue of a man at the center spouts water from his extended pointer finger. There are six identical statues scattered across town, and only one fountain is active at a time, taking turns in a clockwise circle every few hours or so. It’s part of an art installation meant to represent the Stealing; it represents the theory that the Stolen are merely transported, not dead, or something like that. Tourists seem to like its concept. The parade follows the circular path they make around the town’s heart.
Meryl and Wire hop into the crowd snaking around the street to watch the parade. She can see the tops of the floats from here, wild dragons and insects and a gigantic tree shaped from sheets of steel peeking out above the heads of strangers. Traditional puppets made of furs and cloth weave in and out of curving metal, held up on sticks by performers in all-black. If she doesn’t think too hard, she’s not bothered by the dissonance involved in joyfully parading through town on a day half the population vanished a few hundred years ago. She even enjoys the artwork.
The crowd cheers as pyrotechnics shoot from the maw of a huge steel lion, its eyes glowing a menacing red. The people on the float wave and cheer, throwing cheap beads into the crowd. Meryl thinks she heard once that humans did this on Earth for decades. Sometimes, it’s the fun things that endure through space and time.
Wire points at the next float—a depiction of an angel, its many wings curled effortlessly around a dark and foreboding pillar. Metalworking is so fascinating. She can’t imagine a craft where you can’t chisel something off if you don’t like it.
“James!” a harsh voice snaps. Wire freezes. It takes a moment for Meryl to remember that’s his real name, so used to calling him by the nickname he acquired after a mishap in shop class years ago.
He turns casually toward his mother, who has managed to find him. “Hey, Mom,” he says, playing off his apparent disobedience.
“Your sisters looked for you everywhere this morning!” she says, her brow furrowed as she yells over the noise of the crowd. “You know they still like to come to things like this,” she adds. The ‘with you’ is implied. They’re ten and twelve years old, at the cusp of thinking it’s uncool to hang out with their brother, and Wire’s mom never lets him forget it.
“I know,” Wire says sheepishly.
“You apologize to them when this is over. Hello, Meryl,” she says, finally acknowledging her standing next to him as an afterthought.
“Nice to see you, Mrs. Jaycroft,” Meryl says. It’s always a little embarrassing to watch your friend get scolded by their parents. She tunes out the argument between Wire and his mom, instead focusing on the parade as it passes slowly by them. A majestic peacock puppet comes into view next, its technicolor feathers swaying in the breeze.
As the last few floats start to turn the corner, an odd sound starts to come from behind her. In her peripheral vision, she watches Wire turn to it at the same time she does. It’s a yawning sound, low and unnatural, like the echoing toll of a giant bell, and it’s getting louder. “Do you hear that?” she asks Wire.
“Yeah,” he says, tilting his head to try to find the source of the noise. A handful of the other people around them turn to look too, pulled away from the excitement of the parade.
“What? Hear what?”
They both ignore Wire’s mother. Wire steps toward the bushes behind them and Meryl follows, her curiosity dragging her forward. The sound pulses once in a while like a heartbeat, causing palpitations in her own chest.
“It’s coming from the coast,” Wire says, pointing forward. “By the Salt Towers.”
That’s all Meryl needs to hear before she takes off running into the woods. “Wait!” Wire cries, reaching for her hand, but he’s too slow. He keeps a few paces behind her as they crash through weeds and bushes. “Mer, it might be dangerous!”
She doesn’t listen to him. She can’t. All she can hear is the horrible droning noise, overpowering everything else. The closer they get, the louder it is, until it’s vibrating in her bones and ripping apart her ears. Then they reach the clearing, and out in the middle of the Salt Towers below, her jackal’s snout pointing directly at its pulsing heart, they find—
Nothing.
The sound crescendos, and even with her hands over her ears, it leaks into her skull like a concussive migraine. She thinks she’s yelling, but she can’t hear it. Meryl falls to her knees, drops her forehead to the dirt, and just when she thinks her eardrums might burst, it stops.
She keeps her head to the ground for a few seconds still, her eyes scrunched closed, before she slowly removes her hands from her ears and rises from the ground. There’s blood on her palms where they covered her ears, and everything is muffled like she’s underwater. She turns, and Wire is speaking to her, but she can’t understand him. “What?” she asks, barely recognizing her own voice.
He looks terrified, and there’s blood smeared on his cheek too, dyeing the warm brown of his skin maroon. Her hearing is slowly returning, the sound of the wind and the waves crashing on the coast soothing the tears in her ears. “Meryl, we gotta go back,” Wire says, desperation and fear in his voice.
She stands on shaky legs, reaching for his hand to help him up. They then stumble, much slower this time, back to town. Meryl fears the return of the noise, but it’s gone, a phantom echoing still in her ears with each clumsy step. They finally reach the edge of the woods, breaking the branches as they fall into the clearing at the town’s edge.
The floats are empty.
They idle in place, engines sputtering while they wait for direction, but no one is there to drive them. There is only an empty street, covered in beads and candy and confetti. Puppets lie abandoned in the dirt.
Meryl and Wire glance at each other, then start walking blindly forward. They search for someone else, anyone else. Finally, they spot someone; a man, sitting on the edge of the Wandering fountain. The water is turned off.
They jog toward him. His head is in his hands, and telltale blood is drying in a stream from his ear down to his neck.
“Hey,” Wire says quietly. The man flinches, looking up from his hands with a haunted look in his eyes. “Sorry, it’s just—where is everyone?”
The man stares, like he’s forgotten how to speak. Then he looks up at the fountain, avoiding their gazes. “Gone,” he says, his voice hoarse.
Meryl’s blood runs cold. “Gone..?”
“They just…left,” he says. Then he adds, with a new crazed look in his eyes, “Did you hear it? The sound?”
She scans the street again. Beneath the parade’s detritus are dark footprints, seared into the cobblestone. There were people standing there, all around them. It’s as though they floated straight into the sky.
Meryl knows what this is, all at once.
“The Stealing,” she gasps, her breath stopped and throat constricting. “It’s back.”
She stares at the face of the statue, the Wandering Man, waiting his turn again for the water to turn on. His finger points to the sky, where the water will spout, and she follows it up, and up, and up.
V.T. Mikolajczyk is a writer based in Rochester, NY. Though her AAS is in Biotechnology, she recently graduated from SUNY Brockport with a BS in Creative Writing. She has a special interest in writing speculative fiction. She intends to pursue an MFA in the future.