Pieces, Part 11 - Eyes

We stared at the tower for a moment.

"You think she's in there?" I asked once the bells fell silent.

"I don't know. Was she very high up when you saw her? Could she be in some other building around here?"

I looked around me. The buildings in this town weren't very high. Some of them had two floors, and an attic above them, but that was the highest any of them got.

"I think she was higher than the attics here," I said, uncertainty clearly in my voice I could hear it myself.

"Then she's in the tower," she shook her head, "I don't know how long she's been there, but it must be exhausting, the bells ringing so often right by your ear."

I nodded. For a moment I was going to call out Meera's name to see if she could hear us, but almost the same moment I knew that was one of the stupidest ideas I could remember having. Someone was looking for her, and in the silence of the night our voices would carry. If whoever was looking for her didn't hear it, we would draw someone's attention, and the more people knew she was here the more she was in danger.

I stared at the tower for a moment longer, feeling uneasy. Then I took a deep breath and stepped forwards towards the tower, beginning to look for an entrance. Rosa followed in my footsteps. I tried to look to see if Meera's footprints would be visible in the snow, but it was impossible to tell. The place was clearly a popular area in town, so there wasn't much untouched snow left. There were some footprints that could be separated from the others here and there, but it was impossible to tell if they were hers or someone else's. I also guessed she could have intentionally avoided leaving any prints, so it would be harder to find her.

We circled around the tower and found a door. Carefully I pushed on it, assuming it to be locked. It wasn't. Then again, why would anyone need to lock a bell tower? What's the worst that anyone could do in there? Steal a huge metal bell? We peered inside carefully.

It was a high room, almost pitch black but from the dim light from lanterns and moons coming through the door and a small window on the wall. There was a narrow staircase leading up on the opposite wall from the door. It disappeared to a higher floor at the right hand upper corner of the room. Aside from the stairs there wasn't much inside. I could only see a little in the dark, but it seemed like this place was used as a storage of some kind.

We waited for a couple of minutes, letting our eyes adjust even a little, and crossed the room quietly to the stairs. They were old, and made of wood, and looked exactly like they would creak. Surprisingly, they didn't. At least not many of them, and not loudly. I wondered if Meera could hear we were coming. I wondered if that scared her.

The upper room was just even higher than the lower one had been, and it was empty except for the ropes hanging from a hole in the ceiling. I guessed they were attached to the bells, and who ever was the one, or the ones, more likely, whose job it was to make them ring them came here to do that. There was a door on one wall I supposed led to the building next to this one and was probably the one used when usually coming here.

There was another staircase here, leading up to the bells. There was a hatch on the ceiling, not only a hole leading up the stairs. It didn't look like it had a lot of use. Which made it exactly the kind of place where one would hide. I was about to start climbing the stairs, but Rosa grabbed my arm. I turned to look at her, partly surprised, partly annoyed.

"I should go first," she whispered. I frowned at her. "She doesn't know who you are. You might scare her. She knows me and trusts me."

She was right, of course. I let her pass and she began to climb the stairs. I followed a couple of steps behind her. She pushed the hatch on the ceiling up just a little bit, enough so she could peer through. I don't know what she saw, but she quickly pushed the hatch completely open and continued up the stairs with her hands up.

"Meera, it's me, Rosa," she said as she went through the hatch. "I'm with someone..."

For a moment I was unable to move. My mind froze. My heart was beating fast in my ears and my vision seemed to go a little blurry. I hadn't even noticed how nervous I was, or maybe it was fear, or something completely different. I tried to search inside me to calm myself down, but there was nothing to grab a hold. I was about to meet the girl I'd been looking for for the entire of my life I remembered. It didn't matter it had only been two days. I felt meeting her would have to make something make sense, and I was terrified it wouldn't. I was terrified if this didn't help everything make sense, nothing would. The voice at the back at my head told me to stop being an idiot and I forced myself to move.

Rosa was talking to the girl as I rose through the hatch. I couldn't hear what she was saying. Or maybe my mind wasn't making much sense of it. I stepped into the room quietly.

That's when Meera's eyes locked into mine, looking over Rosa's shoulder. The charcoal picture from the house hadn't prepared me for this in the least. Her eyes, they were... It was hard to explain. I almost forgot to breath. I felt like I was drowning. It was dark, but her I could still see her eyes perfectly clearly. They were like the night sky, like the deepest ocean. They were blue, and clear and so dark they were almost black. They were eyes you dropped into, and there was no way of getting out, it was too deep, too wide, too...

I found my back hitting a wall, Meera's one arm across my chest, the other on my arm, pinning me down, her dangerous, wild, deep eyes holding mine.

"Who are you?" she hissed through her teeth. I blinked.

"I don't know," I said. She looked my face over, trying to decide how to feel about my answer. Her eyes lingered on the lines under my eye.

"Let her go, Meera. He doesn't want to hurt you," Rosa said behind her. I tried to turn to look at her, but Meera's eyes held mine too tightly, even now she wasn't looking directly into them.

"You don't know who you are?" Meera asked, still suspicious.

"No," I said. I wanted to smile, but failed.

"Is he like me?" Meera asked, and it took me a moment to realise she was talking to Rosa now.

"He showed up at our door two nights ago. He said he woke up in the forest. He doesn't remember anything."

Rosa let me go, now eyeing me with some regret. There was pain in her eyes, and fear, and the same feeling being lost and hollow I felt. I wondered if other people could see those too, or was it just me, knowing them and looking for them.

Meera slumped to the ground, next to one of the walls, and pulled her jacket tight around her. I took off my pack and began to dig out a blanket I was sure Rosa had packed for me.

"How did you find me?" Meera asked quietly.

"Granny did a spell," Rosa said, sitting down next to her, "Nemo saw you, and heard the bells, so we knew you must be at the only place around here with more than one bell in the tower."

I found the blanket and handed it down to Meera. She looked at me surprised, then took it from me and smiled. She spread it over her and pulled it tightly around her. I sat on her other side from Rosa.

"Nemo, huh?"

"Rosa gave it to me," I said quietly, "I still can't quite decide if it feels like me or not."

Meera smiled at me shyly.

"You wouldn't happen to have any spare food in that bag too?" she asked hopeful. I nodded. She dug enthusiastically into everything I handed her. I guessed she hadn't eaten in a while. After a few mouthfuls her face turned serious.

"We can't stay here," she said, her voice hard.

"Why?" Rosa asked. I felt like I should say something too, but I didn't know if I made Meera uncomfortable, so I stayed silent. It was better someone she knew did the talking, at least for now.

"If you found me, they can find me," she said, with a hint of panic in her voice.

"Meera, what happened to you?" Rosa asked, her voice filled with worry, "We went to your place after Nemo showed up, and saw the whole place was trashed."

Meera was quiet for a moment, her eyes closed. She took a small bite of the fruit in her hand. Then she opened them and looked at me. I drowned again.

"What do you know?" she asked me quietly.

"About what?" I asked back. "Actually either way the answer is either nothing or not much."

"About what happened to m... us, I guess," she said.

"Nothing," I said, "I woke up in the forest, not knowing anything about anything, and followed these lanterns to Ulula and Rosa's cottage. We tried to find you the next day, but your place was a mess, so we went to the town and heard you'd been in a fight there that morning. That was yesterday. We've spent the couple of days trying to figure out what happened to you."

"You woke up at the clearing two nights ago?" Meera asked, clearly thinking. I nodded. "That was about the same time they came for me," she said, more to herself than us. "Might be a coincidence, though."

"Meera, who are they?" Rose asked. Meera was quiet for a moment.

"I don't know," she said. I could hear something in her voice, but couldn't quite figure out what. "But they clearly knew who I am. Or at least they know something about me. That I don't know anything. They know more about me than I do. I think."

"What happened?" I asked quietly. I felt a lot inside that moment. Too much to make out all the separate feelings. All the things inside me swell and formed a ball, pushing tighter together, making me feel overwhelmed.


Meera took a deep breath and began.
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I'm sorry, I was going to write more, but the beginning came out surprisingly long, and I'm in Helsinki really soon, which means the train ride and my time to write today is almost done, so I didn't have the time to begin as long a story as that one probably ends up to be (especially since I don't have any of the details figured out yet), so you're going to have to do that instead. I don't know how it happened, I just wrote and wrote and the story didn't really go anywhere much.

Anyway, I gotta go now.

Your topic for tomorrow is Unknown.

~matu

PS. Yes, I agree. Nemo is exactly the kind of character who knows how to treat wounds, even though no one knows right now why he would know how to do that. My point is we clearly agree on the kinds of things he knows and the kinds on things he doesn't even though he doesn't know at all what he knows. Ok, I really do have to go now.