Elliot was at my door before dawn, and he didn’t have the ledger. That was how I knew something was wrong. In three days I had never once seen him without it, tucked under his arm like a second heartbeat. Now he stood on the landing of the narrow house on Tallow Street with his hands hanging empty, and the grey light from the stairwell window fell across a face gone the colour of ash. “I have to tell you something,” he said, “and I have to say it before I lose my nerve.” I pulled my coat round me. “Come in.” “No. If I come in I’ll sit down, and if I sit down I’ll start explaining, and I’ll make it sound reasonable.” He took a breath. “It spoke to me last night.” The cold went through me in a clean line. “The Oak.” “In the library. I was in the attic going over Cecily’s letters one more time. And the lamp went out, and the whole room went warm, and it said my name.” He swallowed. “Not the way it says yours. Not dear or Keeper. Just Elliot. Quietly. The way my sister used to when she was trying not to wake me.” I couldn’t speak. “It offered me a trade. It said it knew what the ledger was for. It said it didn’t mind. It said it would take away the always. My gift. All eleven years of it, lifted off like a coat. I’d sleep. I’d forget the hospital. I’d even forget her voice, and it wouldn’t matter, because I wouldn’t know there was anything to miss.” His voice shook. “And it would cost you nothing, Mira. It was careful to say that. All I had to do was burn the book.” The landing was perfectly silent. “What did you say?” I whispered. “I said I’d ask you.” He lifted his eyes to mine. They were wet and bright and terrified, and I understood that it had cost him everything he had to stand there and tell me. “I want you to know how much I wanted it. I stood in that room an hour with my hand on the book and couldn’t breathe. Eleven years. I’ve never had one night off.” A small broken laugh. “And I’ve been so good, Mira. So careful. And I wanted it so badly that I couldn’t tell you it was a trap until it was almost light.” I did the only thing that seemed to fit. I stepped onto the landing and put both arms round him, ledger or no ledger, and held on. “It was a trap,” I said into his shoulder. “And you walked out of it. That’s all that counts.” “I haven’t walked out. I’m standing in the doorway.” “Then stand there a bit longer. I’ll stand with you.” He made a sound, and his arms came up, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all. “It’ll try the others,” he said finally, against my hair. “Tomas. Dorothy. Whatever each of them wants most. One at a time, in the dark, when they’re tired.” “I know.” “Then we should tell them first.” So that was how the thirty-first of October began. Not with a bell or a bang, but with the five of us round a flour-dusted table in the back of the bakery at six in the morning, drinking tea, saying aloud to one another the thing each of us had been quietly offered. Tomas had been offered his freedom. The Oak had said it would loosen the Belonging, and he could walk out of Ashgrove and never feel the pull again. Dorothy had been offered Rosie: a clean address, a phone number, a doorstep, if she’d only stop coming to the Reading. Fenwick, who said little, said that someone had offered him a corner table in a pub in Doncaster in 1995, and a chance to start again. Every one of them had said no. Every one of them had come to the bakery to say so, without being asked. I looked round the table at their tired faces and thought: the Oak has never once tried to buy us all at the same time. It’s only ever had one customer at a time. I thought: it doesn’t understand what a table is. I took the fourth letter out of my coat at seven. I’d been carrying it two days like a stone. The green wax. The inverted tree with the red thread. You are not the only one. Elliot had asked me not to open it and I hadn’t. But the Oak had made its move, and I couldn’t afford to be afraid of paper. I slid my thumbnail under the seal. The wax cracked with a sound like a small bone. The page inside was cream linen, heavy and cold. The handwriting was bold and upright, in black ink with a flourish on the capitals, the hand of a man who’d learned to write with a steel nib and a ruler over his knuckles. I read it aloud in the grey kitchen light, with the others leaning in. To the Keeper at Ashgrove, You will not know my name, and I will not insult you with a courtesy I cannot mean. I am Anselm Ward. I am the Keeper of the Hollow at Hallow Cross, in the north. I have held it for thirty-one years. I am writing because I felt your Oak wake a week early, and I know what that means, and I do not think you do. There are more of us than you have been told. I will not say how many. We are not friends. Your predecessor, I believe, was the nearest thing to one I ever had, and I learned of her death only this week, by the shifting of the roots. I will give you one piece of advice, and then you may do as you like. Do not feed it. I made the mistake you are about to make. In my fourth year I discovered that my Oak, like yours, was lonely. I began to read to it. Stories, mostly. Old ones. Novels, poems, whatever I had. It leaned towards me. It was a lovely sensation. I read to it every night for eighteen years. On the eighteenth, it learned to speak without me. I do not mean it learned to whisper. I mean it learned my voice, and every other voice it had heard, and it began to use them. It opens the doors of Hallow Cross now without a Keeper. Nine years ago, the Season ceased to close. The bus runs all the year. The town does not vanish. The road is always open, and people go in, and they do not come out. I am the last who does. If you read to yours, it will wake. If it wakes, you will be the last Keeper of Ashgrove, because Ashgrove will no longer need one. Refuse every surrender. Return nothing. Let the store grow stale. In a hundred years, it will sleep. That is the only mercy I have found. A. Ward The kitchen was quiet. A kettle ticked on the stove. Outside, the first bird of the morning tried out a note, thought better of it, and stopped. Above the dresser, where I hadn’t noticed it before, a single small bat hung from the beam with its face turned down towards us. “He’s lying,” said Dorothy abruptly. “We don’t know that.” “I do.” Her round face was flushed. “Refuse every surrender. Return nothing. That’s not mercy. That’s leaving everyone down there. A hundred years! I’d be dead.” “He could be telling the truth about the reading,” said Elliot slowly, “and lying about what to do.” “Or telling the truth about both.” Tomas took off his spectacles and polished them on his cardigan. “A man who’s lost everything can come to think caution’s the only virtue left.” I was staring at the lines near the end. If you read to yours, it will wake. I read them again. And again. And on the fourth time, something small and cold and exact turned over in my head, like a key in a lock. “He read it stories,” I said. “What?” “Anselm. Look. Stories, mostly. Old ones. Novels, poems, whatever I had.” I put the page down. “Fiction. Things made up. Things that can be added to. And the Oak did what any starved thing does with a feast. It grew, and learned, and started making its own.” “And?” said Elliot, softly. “And we’re not going to read it stories.” I looked round the table. “We’re going to read it the names. Every single one. Everyone on that slate, and what they gave up, as exactly and truly as you can remember it. Elliot reads. Nobody adds. Nobody invents.” I took a breath. “It isn’t food. It’s a visit.” There was a long silence. “A list can’t be fed upon,” said Tomas wonderingly. “It’s finite. It’s true. It has an end.” “And it’s the exact thing nobody’s ever done for it,” said Elliot, with a catch in his voice. “Not read it a tale. Remembered it.” I folded Anselm Ward’s letter in four and put it in my coat. I couldn’t know whether I was right. I only knew I’d rather be wrong in the open than right in the dark. “Tonight,” I said. “All Hallows. We read the dead.” Dorothy had gone still. Then she put down her mug. “My gran used to go out for soul cakes,” she said. “Soul cakes?” “In Barnsley. Halloween night, you went door to door with a song, and the people gave you a soul cake, a little round spiced one with a cross on top. And for every cake, you said a prayer for someone of theirs who’d died.” Her chin wobbled. “That’s what the cross is for. Nobody’s said a prayer for anyone in this town in four hundred years.” She stood up and tied on her apron. “I’ll want every flour sack in the shop.” They came for the library at noon. I should have expected it. I think, in some corner of me, I did. But I was in the great hall with a ladder, hanging lanterns that were lit now by nothing but oil and good intentions, when Fenwick appeared in the doorway with his big mild face the colour of paste and said, in his new quiet voice, “Mira. I think you’d better come out.” The square was full of them. Not the guests. The guests had all gone. These were the empty ones, who’d stood in blank rows in the cellar and on the cobbles all week, patient as coats on hooks. A hundred and seventeen of them, I would learn later from Elliot’s count. They’d come out of every door in the town, from the shuttered shops and crooked houses and the glasshouse and the tavern, and drawn themselves up in a silent perfect crescent across the width of the square. On their shoulders and sleeves, a pale hundred ash moths sat folded, like a second layer of grey cloth. And they were all looking at the library. “Stay,” said one of them. It was a thin flat toneless voice, quite unlike any voice I’d heard in Ashgrove. It didn’t belong to a person. It belonged to something using a person, the way you use a pen. And as it spoke, every head in the crescent turned slightly, like flowers to a lamp. “Stay,” they said together. A hundred and seventeen mouths in perfect unison. “Stay. Stay. Stay.” They began to walk. It wasn’t a rush. It was a slow even inexorable advance, step after step across the cobbles, arms loose, faces smooth as eggs. They weren’t coming to hurt anyone. I understood that in the first ten seconds. They were only coming to close the doors. To stand shoulder to shoulder across the steps of the library and keep us from ever opening them again. Up under the eaves, the bats had woken, and hung with their faces turned down, watching. “Mira.” Abel Crane had appeared at my elbow, upright and grey in his borrowed coat. He didn’t look afraid. He looked like a man who’d been waiting a long time for something to be asked of him. “If you’ll permit me, madam. I believe I could hold them for a minute or two.” “Abel, no. You can’t fight them. They’re people.” “I’ve no intention of fighting them.” A small dry smile. “I only intend to stand here.” He walked down the steps, a thin stiff hundred-year-old man in a coat that didn’t fit, and planted himself in the middle of the library’s great stone stair with his feet apart and his hands clasped behind him. Fenwick looked at him for a moment. Then he walked down and stood at his shoulder. Then Marguerite, with her black stick. Then Tomas, limping. The crescent kept coming. I stood on the top step with my heart going like a trapped bird, thinking: a name. Think. You have names. They’re all on the slate. “Elliot,” I said, turning. He had come up quietly at my side. “The unlined names. The ones who stayed. Can you give me the first?” He looked at me. For about half a second, I watched him understand. Then he drew himself up and shut his eyes, and the voice that came out of him wasn’t the soft hesitant voice I knew. It was clear and strong and carrying, a reader’s voice, the voice of a man who had spent eleven years remembering the whole world and had at last found a use for it. “Bartholomew Tate,” said Elliot Marsh. “Nineteen hundred and eleven. A schoolmaster, from Shropshire. He surrendered his wife’s face.” A hundred yards away, in the middle of the crescent, a thin man in a waistcoat stopped. It was a small thing. A hesitation. One foot in the air, one on the ground. But the chant faltered, and a single voice fell out of it, like a stitch dropped from a row. Then Dorothy came round the side of the library with a basket on each arm. She’d been up since four. I could see it. She was floury to the elbow, and her hair was coming down, and she’d put on, for reasons of her own, her best apron. She marched straight across the cobbles, between Abel and the advancing line, and walked up to the thin man in the waistcoat, and pressed something small and round and warm into his hand. “A soul cake,” said Dorothy Webb. “For Bartholomew Tate. Go on. It’s still hot.” The thin man’s fingers closed round it. “Edith Larkin,” called Elliot. “Nineteen thirty-six. A seamstress, from Leeds. She surrendered the sound of her own name.” Fenwick had got a basket from somewhere. He was walking the line with it, with his enormous shy hands, and a woman at the far end looked down at what he’d put in her palm and put both hands to her mouth. “Hamish Dunn. Nineteen fifty-one. A fisherman, from Oban. He surrendered the sea.” That was how it began. One name, one cake, one stunned face at a time. Elliot didn’t need the slate. He didn’t need the ledger. He’d stood in front of that black board a thousand times in eleven years, and not once had he forgotten a word. A name. A year. A town. A loss. And as each was spoken and a hot spiced cake put into an empty hand, the figure it belonged to faltered, and stopped, and began, slowly, to shake. The chant came apart like a cloth unravelling. Voice after voice fell out of the rhythm until nothing was left but Elliot reading, and the squeak of Dorothy’s basket handles, and a hundred and seventeen people standing still in the autumn noon with soul cakes in their hands and tears running down their blank faces. The ash moths lifted off them in a grey cloud, resentful, and drifted away over the roofs. I had thought the empty ones were empty because there was nothing in them. I saw now it was only that nobody had spoken to them in so long. Elliot read for forty minutes. By the end his voice had gone to a thread. When he said the last name, a girl called Lucy Pembrook, who had come in 1970 and given up her fear of the dark, there wasn’t one standing figure left. They’d all sat down on the cobbles, quite gently, in the middle of the square, as people sit on a station platform after a long journey, holding their cakes. Nobody spoke. Then, from the middle of the seated crowd, a small thin trembling voice said, “Please. Is that really me?” I came down the steps. My legs weren’t quite steady. “Yes,” I said. “It’s really you. Come tonight. Come to the great hall at dusk. We’re going to read everyone. All of you, and all the ones who came before.” I looked round at the wet faces turned up to me. “You don’t have to ask for anything. You don’t have to decide anything. You only have to come and listen.” There was a long, shaken silence. Then a woman in the third row put up her hand, like a child at school, and said, “I’ll come.” And another. And another. And another. I went to look at the slate at three o’clock, and I almost didn’t see them. I’d gone into the great hall alone. The long room was cool and dim and smelled of paper and polish and spice from the cakes. The lanterns hung unlit on their chains. And on the vast black board, up on the ladder’s top rung, I found Mira Kessler. It was where Elliot had written me, in the lower third, in white chalk. Or it was most of where. The letters had been going. The M was a ghost. The e was half gone. And on the frame beside the board, with their whiskers dusted white, a dozen chalk mice were sitting in a row with their backs to me, working. Not writing. Rubbing out. Each had a stub of chalk held upside down in its paws, using the blunt end like an eraser, going over my name with small diligent strokes. They were neat. They did not look wicked. They looked like clerks. I climbed down two rungs and grabbed one. It went limp in my hand at once, in the way mice do, and stared up at me with black beady guilty eyes. Its whiskers were white with dust. The stub of chalk in its paws was worn down to nothing. “Stop it,” I said. “Please.” The mouse looked at me. Then it looked up, slowly, at the rafters, where a row of pipistrelles hung folded in the dark. Then it looked down, at the floor, as if at something far beneath it. Its small body trembled. They’re the Oak’s clerks, Elliot had said, in his ledger. They keep the slate. I couldn’t stop them. They didn’t belong to me. Whatever they were doing, they were doing on orders from something a great deal bigger than I was, and the mouse in my fingers knew it, and was sorry about it, and was going to go on. I had one of Dorothy’s soul cakes in my coat pocket, warm still. I don’t know why I did it. I broke off a crumb the size of a fingernail and held it out on my palm. The mouse went rigid. Whatever you do, don’t offer them biscuits, Elliot had said, in the garden, on the first night. They take it as a promise. It was too late to take it back. The mouse looked at the crumb for a long time. Then it took it in both paws. It glanced once more at the rafters. And then it did something I’d never have expected. It tucked the crumb into the fur of its chest, like a letter in a breast pocket, wriggled out of my hand, and ran up the slate and out of sight into the dark. The others went on rubbing. But I noticed, after a minute, that they’d all slowed down. I said my own name quietly. Mira Kessler. It sounded like something I’d read once in a book. I went down to the Hollow alone at four. I told no one. They’d have stopped me. Dorothy would have scolded and Elliot would have followed and Tomas would have lit the lantern, and I wanted none of it. I wanted ten minutes in the quiet with the thing I was about to try to change. The roots opened without a word. I walked the glowing passages, past the long gallery of kneeling figures, down into the great vault of the heart, where the trunk went up into the dark like a pillar of pale fire. I stood at its foot with my mother’s scarf round my neck and the root trailing behind me. And I said, in a perfectly level voice: “You heard all of it.” Of course, said the Oak. It didn’t sound angry. It sounded the way a very old, patient person sounds when you tell them something they’ve already guessed. The great warm voice came from everywhere at once, and it was gentle and amused and tired. I have been listening in that library, dear Keeper, for four hundred years. I know every word that’s been spoken in it. I heard the attic. I heard Cecily’s letters read. I heard the man in the north tell you to starve me. A slow exhalation, like wind in a chimney. I find I’m not offended. I’d have done the same in his place. “Then you know what I’m going to do.” You’re going to read me the dead. “Yes.” And you think I’ll lean, and listen, and grow quiet, and be content. “I think nobody has ever once come to see you. Not to take. Not to give up. Only to say you were there.” The Oak was silent a long while. Overhead the lights drifted and murmured. Do you know what I’ve been doing since the Season began? “Tell me.” Counting. The word came out soft and strange. The same as Cecily. A habit, perhaps. Every guest who ever came. Every name on your slate. And I’ve found, Mira Kessler, that there’s one name I cannot find. The hair rose on my arms. Yours. “I know,” I said. My voice was steadier than I felt. “I’ve seen your clerks at it. The mice.” They’re diligent. There was something almost like fondness in it. Every price you pay takes a little more of the chalk. By the dusk of the second, there’ll be no Mira Kessler on any list in the world. And I’ll be the only one who remembers you were here. The floor of the Hollow seemed to tilt. I don’t say it to frighten you. I say it because it’s true. You are paying for the whole of Ashgrove with the whole of yourself, and when you’re all spent I’ll have the pleasure of keeping the last of you. Your name. Your face. The idea of you. And I’ll be so gentle with it. “You’re lying.” I have never told a lie. The voice was mild. I have only ever asked. I stood there at the foot of that enormous trunk with the white root trailing behind me like a tether, and for a long moment I couldn’t think of one thing to say. Let me show you, said the Oak, what I’m offering. Not as a threat. As a kindness. The light changed. It wasn’t a vision. It was more like a window opening onto a day that hadn’t happened. I saw a long street under lanterns, gold and amber and red. I saw a woman walking down it, tall and thin, in a long coat the colour of pine, with a ring of iron keys at her hip. Her hair was white. Her eyes were silver. She was smiling. It was me. I wasn’t old. I wasn’t even tired. I was calm and gracious and serene, and I walked down the street between the happy people with a hand on every shoulder. I had a basket on my arm, and in it lay a row of wine-red envelopes. And at the end of the lane, under a lamp, stood a boy. He was fourteen. He had a thin face and a startled look, and he held a cream-coloured card in both hands, reading it with his lips moving. Danny Mills, said the card, in gold. You have been chosen because you were looking. “No,” I said. “Not him. He’s fourteen.” He has a sister who’s very tired, said the Oak, with infinite pity. He has a mother who is gone. He wants more than anything to be looked after. Somebody must offer it to him. A pause, heavy with sweetness. It might as well be you. The vision melted. I was standing in the Hollow, shaking, with my fists so tight that my nails had cut my palms. That’s what the root does, said the Oak gently. That’s what you’ll do when it’s set. You won’t mean harm. You won’t even remember that you once did. You’ll only be kind. You’ll give every lost child exactly what he asks for, and go on giving it, for as long as the lanterns burn. “I’ll never,” I said. My voice was a scrape. “I’d rather die.” That’s the one thing you can’t do. That’s the one thing no Keeper can. A soft tender sound, not quite a laugh. Go and read your names, dear. I should like to hear them. I’m genuinely curious. And if it works, you’ll have my thanks. The great voice lowered, until it seemed to come from the soles of my feet. And if it doesn’t, you’ll have given me, freely, with open eyes, the whole story of every person who ever lived and died in this town. And the law is clear about what happens to things that are freely given. I turned and walked away. I didn’t run. I walked the whole length of the long white passages with my back straight and my chin up and my face quite still, past every kneeling resident and every drifting light, and I didn’t let my knees go until I was out in the cellar in the dark with the cabinet closed behind me and the cold iron under my palms. Then I was sick, quietly, in the corner between two drawers of maps. When it was over I washed my face in the little stone sink where the librarians rinsed their cups. I looked up into the cracked mirror above it. A pale face looked back. Dark circles. Hollow cheeks. A mouth I didn’t entirely recognise. I said my own name under my breath. “Mira Kessler.” It sounded foreign. I said it again. I said it three times. I said it until it began to sound like something I’d known all my life. Then I went upstairs to get ready for the dead. The doors of the great hall opened at dusk. They opened slowly, on their own, the huge oak leaves swinging in on silent hinges. And in the long blue light of that last evening of October, with the stars coming out over the black hills and the first lanterns lit, the people of Ashgrove came up the library steps in a quiet line. Not a hundred and seventeen. More. The empty ones with their wet faces and stunned eyes, and behind them the returned: Dorothy in her best apron, with a basket still on her arm. Fenwick in a borrowed tie. Marguerite on her black stick. Abel Crane, upright as a rod. Tomas, who’d combed his plait and buttoned his cardigan correctly for the first time in my memory. A few of the guests too, drifted up the road on foot from wherever the bus had left them, drawn by something they couldn’t have named. They filled the hall. They took the chairs. They sat on the floor. And through the vast shadowed room, under the chains of lanterns and the shelves going up into darkness, a hush came down that was unlike any silence I’d ever heard. It wasn’t empty. It was held. I stood on the dais at the head of the room, with my mother’s scarf round my neck and the root trailing behind me down the steps. Elliot stood beside me. He had the ledger in his hands, and under it a long roll of paper covered in his tidy upright writing. A list. A very long one. On the beams over our heads, every bat in the library had unfurled one wing. He looked at me. “All right?” he said, quietly. “No,” I said. “But go on.” He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile like that, entirely unguarded, all the way to the eyes. He opened the roll. He lifted his head. And in the hush of the great hall, with seven hundred faces turned up to him in the lantern light, Elliot Marsh drew a breath and began to read. “The first name,” he said, “is Thomas Ashgrove. Sixteen hundred and four. A carpenter. He built this town, and he gave away his wife.” Beneath our feet, faintly, the Toll stopped. I felt it before I heard it, a vast listening quiet spreading up through the floor like warmth through a cold room. And then, softly and slowly and quite unmistakably, I felt the boards of the Library of Ashgrove begin to tilt. Like a flower turning towards the sun. Like an old, lonely thing bending its whole great weight towards a single human voice. Oh, said something in the walls, in a tiny astonished whisper, like a child on its first morning of snow. Oh. Someone is saying my name. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping dot com.
Chapter Seventeen: All Hallows
The Night of Names