Elliot did not stop walking until there was a hedge between us and the library windows. He took me down a flight of stone steps worn into shallow dishes by a great many feet and into a narrow garden behind the building. The noise of the party fell away at once, as if a door had shut on it. A single lantern hung from an iron hook, burning small and steady. There was a bench. Elliot sat down on it and put his face in his hands. When he looked up, he seemed older. Not in years. In the way a coat looks older once you see it in daylight. “I’m going to tell you some things,” he said, “and I’m going to leave out others, and I need you not to be angry about the second part. Can you do that?” “I don’t even know who you are.” “Fair. I came in 2015. October, like everyone. I had a card and a reason and a very bad winter behind me. I stayed.” He gave a small, crooked smile. “I keep the records. I chalk the names on the slate, as it happens. It’s a quiet job.” I sat at the far end of the bench. My legs had gone loose, the way they do after a fright that has nowhere to go. “That woman in the photograph,” I said. “Calla.” “Yes.” “In 1962.” “Yes.” “That isn’t possible.” “No,” said Elliot. “But you are sitting in a garden behind a library that never closes, in a town that does not exist on three hundred and fifty-six days of the year. I think you may have to rethink what you mean by possible.” He said it without cruelty. He sounded sorry, like a man handing over something heavy that he had carried a long way. I pulled my mother’s scarf up round my chin. “Is it dangerous? This place?” “I’m not going to tell you it’s anything.” He glanced at the hedge, the lantern, the dark. “That’s the first thing I can’t say. There are rules here, Mira. Not written ones. But the Season has a kind of attention, and when a resident tries to warn a guest outright, the words don’t come. You open your mouth and what comes out is something pleasant instead.” “That’s absurd.” “Watch.” He took a breath. I saw him gather himself. I saw the muscles in his throat tighten, and I thought, he’s going to tell me, and then his whole face went smooth and mild, and a bright, kind voice that was not quite his own said: “The gooseberry tarts in the Tallow Street bakery are the best in the valley. You must try one.” He shut his mouth. His eyes were bright and angry. Not at me. “Eleven years,” he said quietly. “I have never once got past that.” The back of my neck went cold. I looked at him and understood that he was telling the truth, and that the truth was worse than a lie. “So how do you tell anyone anything?” “I point.” He leaned forward. “I can show you where to look. The slate. Do you remember the years beside the names? Count how many in each year have a line through them.” “A line?” “A single line, in white chalk. Faint. You’d have to be looking.” He sat back. “I’m not telling you what it means. I’m telling you to look.” “Who draws them?” “The chalk mice.” He said it so flatly that I thought I had misheard. “They live in the frame. They keep the slate tidy. Whatever you do, don’t offer them biscuits. They take it as a promise.” He walked me back by the long way, through lanes where the lantern light pooled gold on the cobbles, and he talked about small things. Which tavern kept the best fire. The hour when all three hundred clocks in the clock-shop struck together, a sound, he said, like a polite hailstorm. It took me a few streets to understand that this was a kind of speech too. He was giving me what he could, and I was learning the shape of what he left out. “The gifts,” I said, as we passed a window full of candles. “Are they real?” “Oh, yes.” It came out fast and hard. “Utterly. That’s what you have to understand. Nothing here is a trick. If you choose Memory you will never lose a single moment you have ever lived. If you choose Foresight you will see tomorrow as clearly as that lantern. Every word on the invitation is true.” “Then what’s the catch?” He stopped walking. For a few seconds the only sound was the fiddle, drifting across the rooftops from the terrace. When he spoke again he was looking at his hands. “I chose Memory,” he said. “Eleven years ago.” I waited. I watched him decide not to try to say the rest, because he knew what would come out of his mouth instead. “What did you want it for?” “My sister.” He rubbed his thumb along the ink stain on his finger. “Josie. She died when I was twenty-two. And in the weeks afterwards I found that I couldn’t remember her voice. I had the facts of her. Her height, her favourite song. But the voice was gone, and I couldn’t get it back, and it felt like losing her twice.” A short laugh with no air in it. “I’d have given anything. The card said you have been chosen because you were looking. I was looking for her voice.” “And now?” “Now I can hear it perfectly.” He met my eyes, and what was in his made me look away. “Every word. Every breath. Every time she laughed. And every time she was frightened. The last thing she ever said to me, in the hospital, I can hear it as clearly as I hear you.” The lantern swayed over us. “And I always will.” I wanted to say something. I did not understand yet, so I put my hand on his sleeve, the way you do with a stranger who has told you something true. He covered it with his own, briefly, and let go. “That’s the gift,” he said. “It’s a beautiful one. I don’t regret it, exactly. I just wish somebody had told me what always means.” We started walking again. At the corner he said, without looking at me, “Two nights. Look at the slate. Talk to the residents. They’ll tell you what they can. And Mira. Don’t let anyone choose for you.” The terrace was still full. Somebody had hung paper stars from the stone balustrade, and they turned slowly in the warm air rising from the town, and underneath them people danced as if they had all the time in the world. Of course, I thought. They do. I took a gooseberry tart from a passing tray, because Elliot had told me to and I couldn’t think of a reason not to, and I stood at the edge of the crowd and made myself look properly. The residents were easy to pick out once I knew how. They moved a little differently from the guests: smoother, quieter. Their clothes belonged to no single decade, a waistcoat from one era, a shawl from another, boots that might have been made in any century. And every one of them wore the same expression, a settled contentment, like people who had finally put down something heavy. A round-faced woman in a flour-dusted apron caught my eye and waved me over. “Odalys,” she said, pressing a mug of hot spiced something into my hands. “I run the bakery. You’ve had my tarts. I can tell by your face.” I laughed, and it surprised me. “They’re wonderful.” “They are. Forty years and I’ve never burnt one.” She beamed. “You’re new. First time in Ashgrove?” “Yes. I’m still deciding about everything.” “Oh, take your time, love. Nobody rushes you here. I came as a girl, you know. Seventeen. I’d had a dreadful time at home, and I thought, well, I’ll try anything. And here I am.” I kept my voice light. “Do you ever think about going back?” It was a small question. I was watching her face when I asked it, and so I saw. For less than a second, her smile did not move. It did not fade or flicker. It simply stopped, like a recording when somebody presses pause. Her eyes stayed on mine, bright and kind and empty. Then it came back, and she laughed, and said, “Back? Whatever for? I’ve got everything I need right here. Do try the cinnamon one, it’s my best.” I took the cinnamon one. My hand was perfectly steady. My heart was going like a trapped bird. I found Winifred a little before midnight. She was sitting alone on a stone bench at the far end of the terrace with her stick across her knees, watching the dancers with an expression I couldn’t read. She looked so small against all that light and music. An ordinary old woman at the wrong party. I sat down beside her without asking. “You said something on the bus,” I said. “About nothing being only real.” “Did I? I talk a great deal of nonsense at my age.” “I don’t think it was nonsense.” She was quiet for a while. Then she reached inside her coat and drew out something small and flat and put it in my palm. A card. Wine-red. The gold lettering had worn nearly through. Winifred Aldous. In the corner, the date. 1987. My breath caught. “You’ve been here before.” “I was thirty-one. I stayed three weeks, and then I did something nobody does.” “What?” She turned and looked at me at last. Her eyes were clouded with age and sharp as pins. “I left,” said Winifred Aldous. “I walked out of this town on my own two feet. And it took me thirty-nine years to find the way back in.” The fiddle sawed on. Somewhere behind us someone laughed, bright and happy. “Child, I need you to listen to me very carefully. I’m going to tell you what I gave up. And you must promise me that whatever you hear tonight, you will not choose until you’ve heard all of it.” I nodded. My throat was too tight to speak. And Winifred began.
Chapter Three: What Elliot Could Not Say
The Night of Names