Jacaranda (The Clockwork Century 6)

The other men and women in the lobby were comfortably oblivious; they kept near the front of the large, lovely room, close to the doors and closer to the collection of candles—now burning lower, but augmented by the few Mrs. Alvarez had ultimately scavenged from the dining hall.

If anyone heard what the trio was up to, no one paid attention.

Perhaps no one cared.

The nun, the padre, and the Ranger approached the mosaic on the floor.

They stood at its edges and stared down at the swirled pattern, and now the padre thought that it did not merely spin, when he looked away. It also grew. The day he’d arrived, it’d been a patch between the staircase landings. Now it almost bridged the distance between them.

He did not mention this to his companions. They’d probably noticed it already, and if they hadn’t, there was no sense in pointing it out. So the thing was growing, swelling in strength and size. Why shouldn’t it? The storm above was calling to it at least, and the dead were feeding it, at worst.

One hungry vortex calling to another. One great evil feeding another.

He shook those thoughts away. They weren’t helpful.

Maybe the Jacaranda wouldn’t be helpful either, but it was worth trying. Anything was, when the storm’s eye-wall hammered the exposed east wing—tugging at the floors, picking them apart and whisking them away.

So he stood at the edge as if it were a pool, and he might dip his toes in it.

Looking down into the thing now, seeing it and knowing what it had done, and what it must be capable of…it did not seem like merely a pretty pattern on a lobby floor. It was so much more than a design made out of ceramic squares; it was a hole in the world, and he might fall in—should he lean too close. The vertigo shook him, left him with a dry mouth and a low, thrumming sense of anger that he couldn’t quite place. He didn’t know if the anger was his, or if it belonged to the hotel.

So he asked it: “What do you want?” He cast the question into the hole, sending it all the way down to hell—if that’s where it went.

He steeled himself and he Looked down into the spiral. He Listened for its response.

The world shifted, the floor moved beneath him.

I want what everything wants—to be free, and to be strong. I want to grow.

The directness of the answer startled him, but almost any reply would have. He felt strange—off-kilter, drunk, or sick. It could have been simple proximity, or it could’ve been some change in the air pressure, brought about by the storm. It didn’t matter. He was dizzy, and his face was hot.

“Did you hear that?” he asked the other two.

Sister Eileen said, “I heard…something. But you caught it clearly?”

He nodded, and wished he hadn’t. His head was full of springs, coiled too tightly. So he asked the vortex another question, the only other one he could think of. He asked it in Spanish, because neither of his companions understood the language—and if the hotel wished to speak to him alone, then he would speak alone to the hotel.

“What are you?”

To his surprise, it answered this one, too.

It answered him at length, and with what felt like honesty, but might have been nothing more than a fairy tale.

Like everything else, it began with a tree.

Hundreds of years ago—but you’ve heard that part. A monument planted in sorrow, watered with tears, and it grew, and grew, and grew…its roots went down and its branches went up. While its branches reached only the sky, in time the roots reached someplace much farther away.

Beneath your feet lies something very old, very vast. Something bigger than you can imagine, and more ancient than Christ, but your Bible does mention it, in passing. Your Good Book gave the old thing a name: It called the beast “Leviathan.”

Now it sleeps beneath you—beneath the island, even beneath the ocean. It sleeps and it dreams, the old thing so great that its heart beats only once in a hundred years.

The roots of the jacaranda tree reached all the way down to its resting place, drawn there by the tears and all the small griefs that were brought to it, over the ages. All the lovers ever parted by death came to this tree and told it their stories, and they fed it their tears; every mother who lost a baby; every father who lost a son in war; every orphan alone on the face of the earth, did bring his sadness to this tree. So in time, the roots went very deep indeed.

For like calls t

o like, does it not? One small bit of sorrow finds other sorrow, and comforts itself. Feeds itself. And so it grows.

Now imagine, if you can, the woe of the ages…of an exile coiled beneath the big round Gulf, dreaming of waking and seeing the stars again—watching them spin overhead, and seeing the other great spirals in the sky above, all of them spinning like the whirlpool, these distant places in heaven where everything spins and spins and spins.