Hare Moon Read Free Page B

Ruth looks from Ami to Tabitha, and Tabitha knows the moment she makes up hermind, because her shoulders droop a little. She places a hand over Ami’s.
    “We’ll pray for you,” Ruth says to Tabitha. Ami sags with relief. “And we’ll make sure no one asks about your absence.”
    Tabitha nods. “Thank you,” she says, thankful to be left alone but more grateful to know that her friends will be looking out for her.
    Ruth tugs Ami toward the rail and together they kneel. Alone, Tabitha slips through the door, and before the curtain falls back into place, she sees Ami’s head bowed low and Ruth’s glittering eyes following Tabitha’s movements with both lust and resignation.

    The basement is the same as before: dark and damp. She slides back the curtain and pulls out the key. The lock on the door doesn’t even protest, just slips to the right, and the door cracks open, revealing a long low tunnel.
    There’s a flutter in her chest like the first time she opened the secret gate between her and Patrick. On a small table just past the door she finds a stash of old candles, but she ignores them, cupping her hand around the flame on the taper she brought with her and pushing into the darkness.
    She can tell she’s underground: the walls are slick with moss and sweating with moisture, the floor is a hard-packed dirt. Her steps are slow and hesitant not because she’s afraid, which she is a little, but because, until recently, with her forays into the Forest, it is so rare for there to be something new in her life, rare for her to have a feeling she’s never experienced or a thought she’s never shared, and she still isn’t used to such a novelty. She always assumed she knew this village and this life and everything about them, and now she’s foundsomething new and she wants to make it last.
    Down the low tunnel she finds a series of doors, most of them with locks that her key won’t budge. But one door opens easily after she twists away metal bars that hold it closed in the stone wall. In the room beyond, the glow of her candle illuminates a low bed piled with mildewed blankets, and a rotted mat on the floor.
    Against the far wall sits a rickety table with a thick book resting on top. She knows even in the dimness that the book is a copy of the Scripture, and she’s about to return to the hallway and her explorations when something about it calls to her.
    She wonders if this is what it was like for the prophets she’s learned so much about, this pull toward some offering of a truth. She places a hand on the book, thick dust sliding smoothly under her fingers.
    With a reverence she’s never before felt, she opens the cover. The printed text is as she expects. What she doesn’t expect is the cramped handwriting covering the margins. She sets down her candle and leans closer to the page, reading the first line: In the beginning, we did not know the extent of it .
    She immediately recognizes the writing for what it is: a history of the village, beginning with the Return. She carries the book to the bed and begins to read. When her candle burns too low, she gets another from the table by the door.
    Time ceases to exist for Tabitha in that room. All that matters is the words, the memories. The horrifying facts of her world. Stories she has never heard, about the brutality of the pre-Return existence, about the sacrifices those who came before her made to keep her village safe.
    It feels as though the words crawl from the page and eat their way under her skin, infecting her with a fever that causes her head to pound and her blood to burn.
    She begins to understand the precariousness of their existence. The delicate balance of knowledge and ignorance, of what to pass down to the general populace of the village and what to keep locked up safe in the Cathedral.
    And she learns the reason the paths are forbidden. She reads about the bandits who attacked the village in the early years. About the men who would leave and