Rosie Webb wrote back on the second of November, and Dorothy read the letter standing up in the bakery with her apron still on. It was one page. It had been written in ballpoint, hard enough to dent the paper. Dorothy read it through once, in silence, with her lips moving a little. Then she turned it over to see if there was more on the back, and there wasn’t, and she handed it to me without a word. Dorothy, I have read your letter nine times. I am forty-seven. I have two boys and a husband who snores and a bad hip, and I have not got time for this. You left me with HIM. I was six. I want you to know I remember every day of it. I don’t know what you want from me. I’m still angry. Come at Christmas. I’ll do a ham. Rosie. Dorothy took the letter back. She folded it in half, and then in half again, and put it in her apron pocket. Then she went into the back kitchen and shut the door. We stood in the shop and listened to her crying, and presently, under it, to a short ragged laugh. “She’ll do a ham,” said Fenwick, to nobody, in his shy voice, and blew his nose. That was the morning of the last day. Everyone had been given some small task, to stop them thinking. Marguerite was turning the key on three hundred silent clocks, one by one, for no reason she could explain. Abel Crane was sweeping the library steps. Tomas had gone off with a spade to the glasshouse garden, and Elliot, who had not slept, had spent the whole of the morning sitting at the corner table of the bakery with the green ledger open in front of him, copying out the names on the slate a second time, in case the first copy was wrong. I went and sat across from him. “It isn’t wrong,” I said. “I know.” “You remember every one of them.” “I know that too.” He didn’t look up. “I’m writing them down so that if I fall under a bus tomorrow, someone else can read them to you.” “Elliot.” He put the pen down. His hand was not steady. “I’m frightened,” he said. “I’d rather say so than have you find out from my handwriting.” “So am I.” “Good,” said Elliot. “Then we’re a matched set.” I put my hand over his. We left it there. It was a perfectly ordinary Monday morning, and we both knew what was going to happen at dusk, and there was no more to be said. The guests left before noon. There were fewer than I had expected. Most of the ones who had chosen a gift had already gone, on the red bus, on the twenty-eighth. The ones who had come back, drifting up the road at all hours in the days after, had come for different reasons, and by the second of November, most of them had gone home again with letters in their pockets and a good deal to think about. One of them stayed. She was the woman who had taken the Hush. I had not seen her since the morning of the bus. She came into the square at about one o’clock, thin and grey in a good coat, with her handbag held in front of her in both hands. She stopped a little way off. She looked at the library, and at me, and at the dry fountain with its stone bird. She did not smile. “Mrs Cass,” said Elliot, quietly, behind me. “Helen Cass. Fifty-nine. Hampshire. She chose the Hush on the twenty-seventh.” I went over to her. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Hello.” “I got your letter,” she said. “I read it on the bus. I thought, what a presumptuous girl.” “That’s fair.” “I got off at my own front door. I went in. I said, ‘Gerald, I’m home.’ And he said, ‘Lovely, dear.’ And I said, ‘I’ve had a rather strange week.’ And he said, ‘How nice.’” She stopped. Her mouth was a hard thin line. “I said, ‘I think I may have made a mistake.’ And he said, ‘Whatever you think, Helen.’” I waited. “Thirty-four years,” said Helen Cass. “We have been married thirty-four years. We have argued about every single thing there is. The washing up. His mother. The conservatory. I used to go to bed furious. I used to lie there rehearsing the things I’d say in the morning.” She stared at me. “I came all the way back up a hill in the dark because he said whatever you think, Helen. I would give anything, anything at all, to have him tell me I’m being unreasonable.” “It would cost me,” I said. “I should tell you that. Every time.” “I should hope so,” said Mrs Cass. “It would be odd if it didn’t.” So I did it, there in the sunny square, in front of the dry fountain, with her handbag clasped to her stomach and her chin up. It took about a minute. A light came down, small and brisk and rather cross. She said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” which I took to be a good sign. The price was two small things: the sound of a bus I used to take, and the name of the stop at the end of my road. I don’t mind telling you I was almost relieved. They were such small things. Elliot wrote them down. “Thank you,” said Mrs Cass. “I’m going to go home and be furious.” She hesitated, and then, to my great surprise, she reached out and straightened my collar. “You look dreadful, dear. You want to eat something.” She walked off towards the road. I stood there in the sun watching her go, and I laughed, a real one, out loud. We went up the hill at half past four. It was a clear cold afternoon, with a thin gold light slanting over the ridge. We did not make a procession of it. We went in ones and twos, up the steep rough grass behind the library, carrying nothing. At the top, by the flat grey stone where Cecily had died, the whole town was already waiting. I had not expected so many. It was not seven hundred, as the night of the Reading. Perhaps two hundred. The empty ones who had been returned, the guests who had stayed. Dorothy in her good apron. Fenwick, enormous and shy, in a borrowed tie. Marguerite on her black stick. Abel in his coat. And standing apart from the rest, a little stiff, with his hands in his pockets, Anselm Ward. “I’ve never seen one done properly,” he said, as I came up. “I did mine alone.” “Is there anything I should know?” He thought about it. “Don’t let go,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. When it comes, you’ll want to. Everything in you will say, let go of their hands, they’re in the way. They’re not. They’re the point.” He took his own hands out of his pockets. “I’ll stand at the end of the line, if you’ll have me.” “I’d be glad.” He gave me a short, shy nod. It was, I thought, the nearest thing to a smile I had yet seen on him. The sun was already low. It lay along the western ridge like a coal. The shadows of the grass stretched out to the east, and the whole valley below us, the roofs, the square, the pale thread of the road, was going gold and then rose. A cold little wind got up and moved the dead lantern strings far below. I took off my coat and folded it over the stone. I took my mother’s scarf from my pocket and wound it twice round my neck. I did not know why. I thought she would have wanted me to. Then I stood in front of the grey stone with my back to the west, and Elliot came and stood behind me. “What do I do?” he said, low. “Hold my hand.” “I have the ledger.” “Put it in your pocket.” “I need to read.” “You know it by heart.” “That,” said Elliot, with a small helpless laugh, “is a fair point.” He put it away. He took my right hand. Dorothy took my left. And behind them, down the slope of the hill, link by link, the whole of Ashgrove took hold of one another’s hands in the failing light, until there was a line of us, ragged and crooked and a hundred yards long, running down the grass towards the town. At the very end of it, I saw Anselm Ward take Abel Crane’s hand, and Abel bow. “Right,” I said, to nobody in particular. “Here we go.” I am not going to pretend I was brave. I was holding two people’s hands so hard that my fingers went white, and I could feel my pulse in my ears, and I was thinking, with great clarity, about toast. The sun touched the ridge. It was not dramatic. There was no sound. The light went from gold to copper and the edges of the hills went sharp and the wind dropped. Then the root at the base of my spine, which had been loose and warm and sleepy since the night of the Reading, drew itself tight. It did not hurt, at first. It felt like being woken by a hand. Something took hold at the bottom of my back and settled, pressing in, the way a plant settles into soil, and I felt it lengthen and thicken and run up along my spine bone by bone. I made a sound I’d rather not describe. “Mira,” said Elliot. “I’m here.” “Say what’s happening.” “It’s, I think it’s finding the way in. It’s going up. It’s not, it’s not so bad, it’s just, it’s very, oh.” Then it began to drink. I had been told it would. I thought I knew what it would feel like. A tugging, a draining, a long cold pull on whatever I had left. I braced for that. I thought about my mother, and the green door, and the first day at Dunmore’s. I thought, take them. Take the lot if you must. It did not take any of them. What it took was something else. I felt it reach out, past me, along my arms, down through the hands that were holding mine, and I understood what Anselm had meant. It was not drinking me. It was drinking the line. The hundred yards of people, link by link, down the hill. And as it drank, I felt each of them in me for an instant, as clearly as my own hands. Dorothy’s was flour and burnt sugar and a long thin thread of Rosie’s name. Fenwick’s was a corner table, a quiet pint, a heavy shy sweetness. Marguerite’s was ticking, three hundred clocks and one man’s hand on a rose. Abel’s was cold tea and a grey road. Tomas’s was a long warm bookish ache with my mother’s laugh somewhere in the middle of it. And Elliot’s, the hand in my right, was a voice. It was a girl’s voice, low and breathless, and it was saying his name. He was holding her. The whole time. He had been holding her for eleven years and he had never let go. I could feel the root taking a sip of every one of them. Small. Careful. Not enough to hurt. It was like watching a large, old animal drinking from a river, not because it was thirsty, but because nobody had ever shown it what water was for. Oh, said Thomas, somewhere in my ribs. It was a quiet, startled, delighted sound. Is that what you taste like? All of you? I had no idea. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out of me in a great sob of a bark. “What?” said Dorothy. “What is it?” “He likes it,” I said. “He says you taste nice.” Dorothy gave a shocked little shriek. Down the line, Fenwick began to laugh. Then Marguerite. Then Abel. It ran down the hill like a wave, a long ragged chain of laughter, two hundred people holding hands in the gold last light, and the root went on drinking, and none of it was taken. It was only tasted. The sun went down behind the ridge. It was quite sudden. One moment there was a coal on the hill. The next there was only a sky of deep clear green with one star in it, and the root in my spine gave a final long settling pull, like a sigh, and was still. We stood there a good while without saying anything. I could feel it in me. Not as a root, any more. As a presence. It lay along my spine like a quiet lodger who has just moved in and is trying not to be a nuisance. I could feel it find its place. I felt Thomas shift, slightly, in my ribs, and clear his throat. I do beg your pardon, he said. I had no notion it would be so cramped. “You’ll get used to it,” I said aloud. “Mira?” said Elliot. “He says it’s cramped.” There was a small silence, and then Elliot said, in a voice that shook slightly, “I did think there might be an adjustment period.” I turned round. His face was streaked and white in the green dusk, and he was still holding my hand, and I looked at his face and thought, quite clearly, oh, I know exactly what this is. And I did not say so. There was a whole hill of people. I said, instead, “What did I lose?” He didn’t even have to open the ledger. “Nothing,” he said. “I checked while it was happening. I ran through all of it. I couldn’t find a gap.” “Nothing?” “Well,” said Elliot, “Dorothy’s lost the smell of burnt cinnamon. Fenwick’s lost a pub in Doncaster. Marguerite’s lost the last roses. Abel’s forgotten the name of a horse.” He swallowed. “Everyone lost one small thing. It took a sip from each of us, and it took what we could spare.” “Without being asked?” “It’s not a theft if you’re holding hands,” said Elliot, with a short breathless laugh. “I rather think that’s the entire point.” I looked at the hill. At the line of faces, in the dusk, all of them turned to me, all of them wet, all of them laughing. A hundred strangers who had given up a smell, a horse, a pub, and had not noticed until now that they had done it. Nobody is made to carry everything alone. I thought, for the second time in my life, that I understood what a sentence was for. Down in the valley, as I stood there, the lanterns of Ashgrove began to light themselves. One at a time, in a long slow wave that started at the library and ran out along every street, every wick in every glass woke and flared and settled to a steady gold. From the roof of the library thirty crows lifted at once and wheeled over the hill in a loose black ring, calling, and for the first time all week, I couldn’t make out a count in it. It sounded like a number that was too big to be said. The bus came at seven, with its headlamps on and its windows glowing amber. It stood in the square with its engine ticking over, and its destination blind said, for the first time in my memory, a different word. Not Ashgrove. Not Home. In the neat, clear white letters of an old-fashioned blind, it said HALLOW CROSS. A white hare sat on the kerb by the front wheel, with a thin red thread tied round one ear. It was the same red as the thread on the seal. I’d last seen her running up a white passage with the news that I’d said yes. She’d come back with a message, or an answer, or a collar, and I didn’t know which. She looked at me with one amber eye. Then she looked at the bus. Hollis stood at the foot of the steps with his canvas sack. He looked at the crowd, and the lamps, and at the dry fountain with its stone bird. He did not smile. “Nobody boards,” said Hollis, “who hasn’t a card.” “I have a card,” said Anselm. He had not, an hour ago. But he held up a thick cream-coloured rectangle, with gold lettering so fine it might have been pressed by hand. His hand was shaking. I never saw who gave it to him. “It was on the table,” he said, wonderingly, to nobody. “When I went in to get my coat. Not a mark on it. Not a stamp.” He turned it over. “It says, Anselm Ward. You have been chosen because you were looking.” “It is the first time in nine years,” said Hollis, “that I have been asked to take a Keeper to his own Hollow. There is a first time for everything.” He stepped aside. “Mind the third step.” Anselm stood for a moment on the cobbles. Then he turned to me and held out a hand, and when I took it, he did something I had not expected. He bowed over it, stiffly, from the waist, like a man in an old film. “Keeper,” he said. “Anselm.” “I’ll write. I’ll write to you every week. I have a great deal to tell you about the way it speaks, and the way it lies, and I’d be glad of someone to talk to who understands the difference.” He swallowed. “And I think, Miss Kessler, that next October, if I am to be of any use, I had better be sending you a card.” He got on the bus. Through the glass, as it pulled away, I saw him sit down upright in the front seat with his staff between his knees. He was looking straight ahead. As the bus turned out of the square, I saw him lift one hand, palm out. I lifted mine. We stood there on the cobbles, all of us, till the engine faded into the pines. It was Elliot who noticed that Hollis had not left. The bus had gone. The square was nearly empty. But the driver had stepped back onto the kerb as it went, and now he stood alone in the lamplight with his canvas sack hanging from one hand, looking at me. There was something in his face that I had not seen before. It was almost like embarrassment. “I have one more,” said Hollis. He took an envelope out of his coat. It was thin and soft with age, and the paper was yellow at the edges. He held it out to me with two hands, the way you hand over something that has been in your keeping for a long time. “She paid me in advance,” he said. “Twenty-eight years ago. Thirty pounds and a packet of mints. It was the last night of the Season. She came to the bus. She said, I know you don’t carry post for guests, but I need you to carry this for one. She said, You are to give it to her once the root is set. Not the day before. Not a minute earlier.” He cleared his throat. “I said, whose root? And she said, you’ll know.” The envelope was addressed in my mother’s hand. For Mira. After the setting. I did not open it in the square. I could not. I held it for a very long time with both hands. Elliot did not touch me. He stood a little way off, with his hands in his coat pockets, perfectly still, and when I looked up he gave a small nod, and I knew he would be there. So we went back to the library. We went down the cellar steps, the two of us, Hollis having disappeared the way he always did. At the foot of the stairs I sat down on the bottom step, with my back against the cold brick and the Flat Files going away into the dark, and I broke the seal. It was one page. It was written fast. The hand was my mother’s hand, but different: loose, urgent, the loops all running into one another. Mira-bird, If Hollis has done as I asked, then you’ve got through the setting. I do not know how. I only know you did, because I saw it. I saw you standing on a hill with your hand in somebody’s and a hundred people behind you, and the sun going down. That is as far as I could see, and I am so proud of you that I cannot hold the pen. Now. The thing I could not write. I told you in the first letter that I saw what happened after. I did not tell you that I saw something else. I saw the Oak. I saw it clearly, the way I saw you. I saw what it was, and what it wanted, and what it was afraid of. And I thought, that’s all there is. That’s the bottom of it. I was wrong. On my last night in Ashgrove, I went down to the Hollow. Alone. I stood in front of the Oak and I asked it a question, and it answered, and I do not know why I believed it. It said, There is nothing under me. But I am a Seer, my darling. It was the only thing I was ever good for. And when it said that, I felt the floor under me, and the floor rang. Mira. The Hollow has a floor. The Oak does not know it has one. There is a door below the door. I did not go through it. I could not. I did not have the nerve. But I knew, as I stood there, that whatever is behind it is older than the tree and older than the town and older than any of us, and that it is the thing the roots are growing towards. And I saw one more thing, so briefly I could not tell you what. A hand. Reaching up from under the wood. I ran, Mira. I took you and I ran, and I have been running for twenty-seven years, and I have never once looked back to see whether it was still there. You will have to. I am so sorry. Ask the carpenter. He will say there is nothing. He is wrong. He does not know. Nobody has ever stood on that floor and listened except me. Do it with somebody. Do not go alone. All my love, always, and every single laugh. Mum There was a long silence in the cellar. “What does it say?” said Elliot, softly. I gave it to him. I could not trust my voice. I sat on the bottom step with my hands over my mouth while he read it, once, twice, with his lips moving slightly, and I watched his face go white from the edges inward. “Thomas,” I said, at last. It came out as a croak. I said it again. “Thomas. Are you there?” Here, said Thomas, from somewhere in my ribs. He sounded drowsy and slightly put out, like a man woken from a nap. “Is there anything below the Hollow?” Below? A pause. Why, no. There is only earth. I should know. I have been growing in it for four hundred years. Another pause, and when he spoke again there was something puzzled in his rough voice. I have never been below the heart. I confess I never thought there was a below. “Can you look?” I should not know how. But I can try. I felt him go quiet. It was the oddest sensation. Like a person in the next room who has stopped moving about. The cellar was still. Elliot’s hand had found mine, and I held on to it, hard. The Flat Files stood in their long cold rows. The lantern on the stair hissed a little. Somewhere above us, in the dark of the library, a clock ticked. Then Thomas said, in a small voice: Oh. “What?” I do not like this at all, said Thomas. I should very much like you to stop asking. I felt him pull back, away from whatever he had touched, like a hand from a stove. And in the same instant I felt something else. It came up through the soles of my feet, through the iron legs of the cabinets, through the cold brick of the stair at my back. A pulse. Slow. Deep. It was not the Toll. I knew the Toll. I had lived inside it for nine days. The Toll was patient and sweet and slow. This was slower. It was so slow that I could not tell, at first, where one beat ended and the next began. It was vast, and unhurried, and it was not coming from the Hollow at all. It was coming from beneath it. From below the heart of the tree, and below the roots, and below the cellar floor, from a place where there was no voice, no light, and no one who had ever been asked a question. Elliot said, quietly, “Mira. Do you hear that?” “Yes.” “What is it?” On the third stair above us, Marrow had appeared. I hadn’t heard him come. He stood quite still with his tail down and his candle-flame eyes fixed on the cellar floor, and he didn’t hiss and his fur didn’t rise. He only looked, the way you look at something you’ve been expecting for a very long time and had hoped, rather, would be later. I did not answer. I could not have said. I sat on the cold step with my mother’s last letter in my lap and my hand in Elliot’s and a carpenter in my spine, holding very still, and listened to something older than the town, and older than the tree, and older than the first word of any language, beginning, very slowly, to wake. It had a heartbeat. It had been asleep for a very long time. And for the first time in all the long years of its dreaming, it had heard its own name said aloud. End of Book One Thank you for reading The Night of Names. The Wide Root Cycle will continue. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
Chapter Twenty: The Door Below the Door
The Night of Names
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The End