Daniel was on his fourth pass down Main Street and he had eleven faces.
Eleven he could match.
The woman at the library desk.
The man behind the drugstore counter.
The couple eating in the window of the bed and breakfast with the white trim.
He had watched this town twice through with a notebook on his lap, stopping on backgrounds, counting extras, wondering whether the curse handed them whole lives or only enough life to fill a frame.
Eleven of them were out here in November light, walking around inside those lives, and he wanted the twelfth.
The twelfth was going to be the problem.
He could feel it coming.
His shift had ended an hour ago.
He didn’t remember starting it and didn’t remember working it, but his hands were sore in the right places and his back ached in the right places and the foreman had called him Dan twice with no hesitation in it at all.
That identity was wet paper laid over him, and the paper was drying, and when it dried it would be permanent.
He had until then.
The hum under his sternum ran lower in daylight.
Or he was getting used to it.
He hadn’t decided which of those was worse.
He passed the pawnshop and the hum sharpened.
One note.
Attention.
He kept his eyes forward and his pace even and gave the window nothing.
Mr.
Gold.
The pawnbroker.
Rumpelstiltskin.
The name came up his throat and he swallowed it and walked on, and the note held behind him until he was past the door.
The diner bell was too loud, built for a bigger door or a quieter town.
Every head came up.
Every head went back down except one.
Graham.
Sheriff.
Coffee and eggs at the counter, and his eyes stayed on Daniel a beat too long.
Two beats.
A man reaching for a file that wasn’t in the drawer.
Daniel took a stool three down and ordered coffee.
It came.
It was wrong.
Sweet in the wrong direction, brewed out of beans somebody had invented without ever tasting the original, and that wrongness was the most honest thing in the building.
He drank it slow.
Ruby came around the counter with the pot and topped him up without asking.
“You’re the cannery guy.
Dan.” “That’s right.” “Granny says cannery guys never tip.” She put a hip against the counter and looked at him straight on, and the look had a dare underneath it, twenty-eight years of small-town boredom out hunting for anything with an edge.
“You breaking the streak?” “Depends.
Does the coffee improve?” “The coffee has never improved.” “Ever?” “Not one day.” She laughed, short and unguarded, somebody who hadn’t planned on finding anything funny at noon on a Tuesday.
“It’s been the same pot since longer than I remember and shorter than Granny remembers.
Nothing improves here.
That’s sort of the whole arrangement.” “I’m starting to notice that.” “You notice things, Dan?” She leaned in.
Casual lean.
The question wasn’t casual at all.
“Most people don’t notice anything in this town.
It’s easier.” The hum went very low, interested, and unwilling to be caught at it.
“I notice things,” Daniel said.
“It’s not easier.” Ruby stayed on him a second past comfortable.
“Huh,” she said.
Then the waitress came back down over her face like a shutter.
“Well.
Tips or no tips, you beat the last guy who had that stool.
He complained about the eggs for a year and a half.” “What happened to him?” “Nothing happened to him.
Nothing happens to anybody.” She said it, and then she stopped, and she frowned down at the coffee pot like the pot had spoken instead of her.
Then she carried it off to fill Graham’s cup.
“You’re new,” Graham said.
Not a question.
“Dan.
Cannery.” “Right.” The word closed on a file that didn’t fit.
“I’ve seen you around.” “You’ve seen everyone around,” Ruby said, from down the counter.
“You’re the sheriff.
That’s the job.” “Some people I see more than others.” “Dan’s not new.” Ruby set the pot back on its plate.
“He’s been over the laundromat four years.
He’s just quiet.” Four years.
Daniel’s stomach went down through the floor of the diner, because the borrowed memory was supposed to hand him a fact like that and it hadn’t, and Ruby had handed it to him instead, out loud, in front of the sheriff.
“Four years,” Graham said.
“About that.” “About that, or four?” “Four.” Graham turned on his stool to face him.
“Where were you before?” “Here.” “Before here.” “There isn’t a before here.” Daniel heard it come out of his own mouth and couldn’t tell which half of him had said it, and that frightened him more than the question had.
Graham was silent a beat.
“No,” he said.
“There isn’t.” He ran his thumb around the rim of his cup.
“I still don’t remember you.” “Maybe I’m forgettable.” “Nobody’s forgettable in a town this size.
That’s the one thing this place is good at.” He pushed the plate away and stood.
The badge caught the window light, thin yellow November light on silver, a huntsman’s silver on a man who had never once been told what he was.
“I’ll see you around, Dan.” “Sheriff.” It wasn’t a threat.
It was what a sheriff says on his way out of a diner with his eggs finished, before he drives around all afternoon looking for things that don’t fit.
Dan did not fit.
Graham could feel it through the paperwork of four years of shifts and rent and a name everybody in town already had in their mouths, and paper is paper, and some hands find a seam through it.
The bell went again.
Mary Margaret Blanchard came in with a book under her arm, a blue bird on the cover, and Graham’s attention swung off Daniel and onto her, and Daniel was grateful to the schoolteacher in a fashion she would never be told about.
“Tea, please,” she said to Ruby.
“Just tea.
I have twenty minutes and eleven book reports.” “Eleven’s not so bad.” “They’re seven years old.
They write short and they write in crayon.” She took the stool two down from Daniel and gave him a smile with no weight on it.
“You look tired.” “Long shift.” “Everybody here says that.” She turned her cup around on its saucer.
“Have you noticed?
Ask anyone in this town how they are, and it’s long shift, or same as always, or can’t complain.
Nobody ever says anything else.” “What do you say?” Mary Margaret thought about it, and the thinking took her somewhere she didn’t care for.
“Same as always,” she said, and laughed at herself, and drank her tea.
“What’s the book?” “Field guide.
Birds.” She turned it so he could see the blue one on the cover.
“I carry it everywhere and I couldn’t tell you why.
I have never once gone out looking at birds.” “Maybe you meant to.” “Maybe I did.” She held on the cover a second longer than the cover deserved, then closed the book face down on the counter and went back to her tea.
Daniel sat with his wrong coffee and thought about the wish he hadn’t made yet.
He thought about what he’d hand over to know what Graham was carrying around under that badge.
The instinct.
The wolf in the back of the man.
A heart in a vault somewhere in this town, still beating for somebody else’s convenience.
He could build that sentence.
The hum was waiting for him to build it, patient, already aware of what he wanted, content to sit there until he said it out loud where it counted.
He didn’t say it.
Whatever a sentence like that cost, the bill would be drawn on him, and he had not been shown the bill.
He finished the coffee.
It was still wrong.
He paid with money he didn’t remember earning, and left more than the cannery guys ever left, and went back out into the noon light.
He walked the three blocks twice more and counted faces.
Mary Margaret through the diner glass.
Granny in the window.
Graham’s cruiser going by at eleven miles an hour.
The man at the drugstore whose name he couldn’t dig out of the show but whose face he knew cold, a background face in a fairy tale, given a register and an apron and twenty-eight years of Tuesdays.
The pawnshop curtain stirred again.
He didn’t stop to check.
The hum sharpened and this time it held the note, drawn out, long as a sentence being written down about him somewhere he couldn’t read it.
At the end of the third block a woman he couldn’t place slowed down beside him.
“Cold one today, Dan.” “Yes.” “You want a hat.
You’ll catch something walking around like that.” “I’ll get a hat.” “That’s what you said last year.” She went on up the sidewalk, satisfied.
The yes had been the wrong yes.
It had come out of the part of his mouth that belonged to Dan-of-the-cannery, and not out of the part that was still Daniel Ashford, paralegal, Brooklyn, fourth-floor walk-up, cat named Rumpel.
He climbed the stairs beside the laundromat and sat down on his own floor with his back against his own door and said the rest of it out loud, because out loud made it evidence.
“Storybrooke, Maine.” His voice was flat in the empty room.
“The sheriff is Graham.
He’s the Huntsman.
His heart is in a vault I haven’t seen yet.” The hum listened.
“The schoolteacher is Mary Margaret Blanchard.
She’s Snow White and she doesn’t know it, and she orders tea and grades book reports written in crayon.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“The pawnbroker is Mr.
Gold.
He’s Rumpelstiltskin, and he knows every word of it, and he’s the only one who does.” He stopped.
He had been walking around the next one all day.
“The curse is real,” he said.
Nothing in the room disagreed with him.
“The curse is real, and I’m inside it, and I’m not in it.
I got written in without a name, so it issued me one.
Dan.
Second shift at the cannery.
Rent due Friday.” He laughed once, and there was nothing in the laugh.
“That’s the part that gets me.
Rent.
The end of the world has a rent day.” The hum came back with a low thrum.
Not approval.
Not the other thing.
Attention, and a record being kept, and Daniel had read enough contracts in a Brooklyn back office to know that anything being written down that carefully is being written down for the day somebody collects.
He believed it.
He didn’t want to believe it.
He believed it anyway.
Then he got off the floor and went to the window.
Down the block the clock tower held at eight-fifteen, the same as it had held all day, the same as it had held for twenty-eight years, and Daniel pulled his coat back on and went down the stairs to see how close to it he could stand.