The Song Without Mouths

The low note sounded again before anyone moved.

This time it came from the direction of the Shepherd’s Bed. The hall windows trembled in their frames, though the air outside had gone still. On the recorder in my hand, the dead display lit for half a second and showed a single line of white across the black screen.

Then it went dark.

Bríd picked up the white cloth from the chair. “We have to go.”

Tadhg stood between us and the door. “The light has not gone.”

“It is going,” she said.

He looked at me. “Once you leave the hall, you must keep to the path. Do not step over any powder. Do not answer if you hear someone calling from the houses.”

“Someone?”

“Anyone.”

“That’s useful.”

His face remained calm, but his fingers had closed around the papers on the table hard enough to crease them. “The forest uses familiar voices.”

“And the stones?”

“The stones do not use voices.”

The note came a third time. Four pulses followed it, low enough to make the bread knives shiver on the tables. Three pulses answered from beneath the floor.

The singers had stopped. One of them began to cry without making a sound. The grey-haired woman reached across and took her hand.

I checked my recorder by touch. No batteries. No indicator. The microphone cable was looped around my wrist. I could have left it there, on the table, and walked out with nothing. That was the sensible decision. The recorder had already proved that it could capture something without power. It had also proved that whatever it captured could recognize me.

I put it in my coat pocket.

“If I go,” I said to Tadhg, “I want the ledger.”

His eyes narrowed. “For what purpose?”

“To compare the names in the song with the names you wrote down.”

“You will not need it.”

“I’m not asking what I need.”

For a moment, the hall seemed to hold its breath with me. Then Bríd took the ledger from beneath the papers on the table. Tadhg’s hand moved as if to stop her, but he let it fall.

She passed it to me.

The cover was warm from his body heat. I tucked it under my arm, beside the recorder.

“That is not yours,” Tadhg said.

“Neither was my name.”

Bríd opened the door.

The village had changed in the few minutes since I had looked through the windows. The last sunlight lay across the square in a narrow yellow band, but the houses had already closed themselves against it. Shutters were drawn. Doors stood sealed. Along every threshold ran the pale line of elderflower and bone ash.

No one watched from the windows. I knew they were there anyway.

Bríd stepped across the hall’s threshold first. She paused until I joined her, then led me along the swept path toward the stones.

The powder had been laid in two lines on either side of us. It smelled faintly sweet when my boot disturbed the edge of it, and beneath that sweetness was the dry mineral smell of old fire. The line looked fragile. It was no wider than a finger.

I stayed between it and the grass.

Behind us, Tadhg followed with the six singers. They had wrapped white cloth around their shoulders. None carried a lantern. The failing daylight was enough for them, though it seemed to thin wherever the stones showed between the houses.

“What happens to the names after?” I asked Bríd.

She kept her eyes on the path. “Which names?”

“The ones the Shepherd takes.”

“They remain in the ledger.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.”

The road curved toward the field. The stones rose beyond it, black against the western sky. From this distance they appeared unevenly spaced, as they had when I first saw them. But as we drew near, the gaps seemed to narrow and widen in sequence, as though the circle were breathing.

I stopped.

Bríd stopped with me.

The shadow of the nearest stone had reached the path. It was much longer than the stone itself, a dark wedge stretching toward my boots. At its edge, the grass was silvered with the same pale powder used at the thresholds.

“You said the shadow was the last boundary that belonged to us,” I said.

“It is.”

“Which side of it is ours?”

She looked at me then. “The side you are standing on.”

The recorder clicked inside my pocket.

Not a mechanical click. A tiny dry sound, like a fingernail touching glass. I pulled it out. The display remained black, but the microphone’s red cable had begun to pulse against my palm.

Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

The song started beneath us.

There were no singers. Tadhg and the others stood several yards behind, silent and rigid. Yet the field filled with voices. They came from the ground, from the stones, from the space inside my ears. Thousands of small sounds layered into a single mass: wet consonants, breath, the flutter of syllables too quick to separate.

The four-three pattern moved through them like a spine.

Four pulses.

Three.

Pause.

The nearest stone gave a soft grinding sound.

I raised the recorder and pressed the power button. Nothing happened. I pressed it again. The dead screen showed numbers for a fraction of a second.

00:00:01.

The time counter began advancing.

I held the microphone toward the stones. The signal in my headphones was so loud that I had to remove one earpiece. Through the other, beneath the chant, I heard a series of familiar sounds: my mother calling me in from the garden; the pneumatic hiss of the workshop where my father had worked; rain ticking against my childhood bedroom window.

None of those sounds existed in the field.

I stumbled backward. My heel touched the powder at the edge of the shadow.

The voices stopped.

For one clean second, there was only the wind.

Then my own voice came from the recorder.

“Mark Alder.”

It was not a recording I recognized. The voice was mine, but it had the flattened cadence of someone reading a line from a script.

“Born in—”

I dropped the recorder into the grass.

The display remained lit. The counter ran backward.

00:00:03.

00:00:02.

00:00:01.

Bríd caught my arm before I could reach for it. Her grip was painful and surprisingly strong.

“Do not touch it,” she said.

“It has my voice.”

“It has what it can find.”

The stones shifted.

Not much. A hairline opening appeared at the base of the nearest one, black and wet. The stone’s lower edge pressed into the soil, then withdrew. Grass bent toward the opening. I watched the movement through the viewfinder of my own fear, searching for a mechanism, a trick of perspective, anything that would let me name it.

The field answered with another four pulses.

This time, the names inside the murmur were clearer.

Mara. Donal. Eithne. Seamus.

Then Alder.

The surname rose through the others and held itself apart. The voices did not speak it. They worried it, passed it from mouth to mouth until it became less a word than a shape being recognized.

Tadhg began to sing behind us.

The other villagers joined him, but their human voices were thin against what came from below. Bríd did not sing. She kept hold of my arm and watched the opening in the stone.

“You can still go back,” she whispered.

I looked toward the village. Every door was shut. Beyond it lay my useless car, the road that had returned me, and the forest that could take a straight line and fold it into a circle. Going back meant choosing the hall, the ledger, and the waiting. It did not mean escape.

I bent and picked up the recorder.

The screen showed a waveform. Beneath the counter, a new line of text had appeared.

HEAD RECEIVED.

I turned the microphone toward myself and spoke as clearly as I could.

“My name is Mark Alder. I am standing west of the Shepherd’s Bed. There are seven people behind me. The sun has not fully set. The recorder has no batteries.”

The chant faltered.

I continued, listing what I could see: the nearest stone, the white cloth, the powder line, Bríd’s hand around my sleeve. I described the smell of elderflower and ash. I gave the time by my watch. I said my mother’s name. I said the street where I had lived before moving for university. I said the first song I had ever recorded.

The recorder accepted every word.

The stones leaned inward.

The last strip of sunlight vanished from the field. Darkness filled the circle, but the shadow at my feet remained sharply defined, a boundary cut into the grass.

Bríd released my arm.

“Now,” she said, “you must decide whether to step into it.”

Inside the circle, something moved without making a sound.

I kept the recorder pointed at the opening in the stone and understood that the village had not brought me here to witness the receiving.

It had brought me here to enter it.