The whole town went up the hill at dusk, and we went with it. Nobody called a meeting. Nobody rang a bell, apart from the one that had been ringing all afternoon under our feet. Doors simply opened along Tallow Street, and guests and residents came out of them, men and women and children, and the lanterns over their heads swayed all one way like grass in a wind. In every lantern the wick had turned to watch the library. I walked in the middle of the crowd with my hands in my pockets and my mother’s letter against my ribs, and I felt like a stone being carried along by a river. The pull was stronger than I had ever known it. It was no longer a hand against my back. It was a tide. Every step towards the library felt easier than the last, as if the street itself had been tilted to help me. I understood now what Elliot had said. By the third night they’ve all stopped noticing. It was so reasonable. It asked nothing, nothing at all, except that you let yourself be carried. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. It helped. Elliot walked on my left and Tomas on my right, close enough that our elbows touched. Somewhere along the way Tomas slipped something into my hand, and I looked down and saw a small battered brass torch, the kind a night watchman carries. “You’ll want light,” he murmured. “And the lanterns don’t always burn down there.” On the library roof, thirty crows had lined themselves along the ridge like a row of black buttons. As the first of the crowd reached the steps, one of them cawed. Then another. They had begun to count. The great hall had been transformed. The long reading tables were gone. In their place stood a wide circle of white candles on the stone floor, hundreds upon hundreds, so many that the air shimmered over them. In the middle of the circle, on the long dark table, lay the four envelopes. MEMORY. THE HUSH. FORESIGHT. BELONGING. Behind the table, on a low dais, in her pine-green coat, stood Calla Rue. She didn’t look at me. She raised her hand, and the room went still. “Friends.” Her voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It filled the high vaulted room the way warmth fills a house when someone opens the door on a fire. “Two nights ago you were strangers. Some of you were frightened. Some of you were tired. Some of you had carried a thing so long you’d forgotten what it felt like to put it down.” A pause. “I won’t tell you tonight that Ashgrove is perfect. It’s a place like any other, with its own weather and its own grief. But I’ll tell you what I’ve told every guest who has come through those doors for four hundred years.” She stopped. And for a moment I saw her look, briefly, at the lantern above her head. “Nobody is made to carry everything alone.” A murmur ran through the room. I felt it tug at me. It was so true. In the lantern over Calla’s head, the wick burned a steady, unwavering gold. Not a flicker of blue. She meant every word. That was what made it so terrible. “Come forward, then. One by one. Choose, and be free.” The guests began to move. A man in a tweed jacket stepped over the candles like a sleepwalker and took the envelope marked MEMORY. A woman in her fifties, who had been weeping quietly through the whole speech, laid her hand on THE HUSH, took it away, and then helplessly took it up again. Calla smiled at each of them, and each stood a little straighter when she did. Outside, through the high windows, I heard the crows. Caw. Caw. Caw. One for every envelope taken. Pip was in the line. I saw her three places back, hands twisted in the hem of her jumper, staring at the BELONGING envelope like a lit window on a cold night. Jonah was beside her, perfectly calm, with a faint indulgent smile and one hand on her shoulder. He knew what she was going to do. I could see it in his face. I couldn’t reach her. There were forty people between us. So I did the only thing I could. I stood on tiptoe and caught her eye over their heads, and I didn’t shake my head and I didn’t wave. I only moved my lips, so slowly that nobody else could have seen. Danny. Pip’s face went through a series of changes I could hardly follow. Longing. Weariness. A flash of resentment. And then something rising from a long way down, slowly, like a bubble through deep water. She looked at the envelope. She looked at the hem of her jumper. She looked at Jonah, who smiled at her with infinite gentle sadness. And then Pippa from Leeds stepped quietly out of the line. It was a small thing. Nobody made a sound. A few of the guests glanced round, uncomprehending, and turned back. But on the dais Calla Rue’s head turned, just slightly, as though she had felt a draught. And outside, on the roof, the counting stopped for a moment, and then started again from a number lower than it should have been. Pip came and stood beside me. She was shaking. “I don’t want to,” she whispered. “I thought I’d want to. I do want to. I don’t want to.” “I know,” I said, and took her hand. That was when Calla looked at me, over all the candles and all the bowed and waiting heads. It was a level, unreadable look. There was no anger in it. If anything there was a kind of terrible approval. Then she turned back to the line. And under cover of the murmuring and the candlelight and the long slow business of choosing, Elliot caught my sleeve. “Now,” he breathed. We went down, the three of us, and Pip came too. I tried to send her back. She said, with a fierceness I hadn’t known she had, “You don’t get to tell me I can’t see what I nearly signed up for,” and I had no answer. The third stair was loose. This time I knew. The cellar was dark. The Flat Files stood in their long cold rows. At the very back, in the angle of the walls, the cabinet marked UNCATALOGUED stood open, its drawer pulled wide, and where the map had lain there was no longer a drawer at all. There was a doorway. It was low and round, shaped like the mouth of a hollow tree, and its edges were thick with something pale and fibrous, and from within came a warm damp sweet-smelling breath that stirred my hair. The Toll was no longer a sound. It was a pulse in the earth, slow and enormous, and with each beat the white fibres swelled a little and sank. The doorway was breathing. “Oh my God,” said Pip, quietly. Marrow was sitting in front of it. I hadn’t seen him come. He sat dead centre in front of the round door, bolt upright, with his tail wrapped round his paws and his candle-flame eyes fixed not on the doorway but on the bricks at its foot. He didn’t look at us. He did not move. And I understood, with a small cold drop in my stomach, that he was not guarding the door. He was waiting for something to come up through the floor. “Marrow,” said Elliot, softly. “Come on, old man.” The cat turned his head. For one second he looked straight at me, and I would have sworn there was apology in it. Then he rose, stalked past the door, and padded back towards the stairs without once looking down it. “Cats,” muttered Tomas, in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. He had put a hand over his mouth. Elliot, beside me, had gone the colour of paper. “I can’t,” said Tomas suddenly. “Mira, I’m sorry. I thought I could. I can’t make my feet go.” He looked down at them as if they belonged to somebody else. “It’s the Belonging. It won’t let me cross. It’s the one thing it keeps for itself.” “Then stay. Keep the door.” “Mira.” “You’ve kept a promise for twenty-eight years. That’s enough. Stay.” He made a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and sat down heavily on the cellar floor with his back to the iron cabinets and took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Elliot went first. He didn’t look back. He ducked under the fibrous arch with his storm-lantern held high, and I heard the light change as he passed through, from yellow to something paler. A moment later his voice floated back, small and amazed. “Mira. Come and see. I don’t think it will hurt you.” I took Pip’s hand, and together we stepped into the Hollow. I had expected a cave. Darkness, damp stone, the cold smell of the underground. I’d braced myself for fear. What I wasn’t ready for was the light. It lay all around us, soft and shifting and blue-white, like moonlight seen through water. For a moment I couldn’t tell where it came from. Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw it came from the roots. They were everywhere. They arched over our heads in great pale vaults, thick as the trunks of young trees, each furred with a fine white down, each slick and gleaming and warm to the touch. They rose in columns and wove in nets and coiled and parted and coiled again, forming passages and galleries that stretched away into the dark in every direction. The floor was springy, like moss. The air hummed. And through the roots, caught in the white tangle like fireflies in a hedge, drifted lights. Thousands of them. Tiny glowing motes, gold and green and pale blue, rising and sinking in slow patient shoals. At first I took them for dust. Then one drifted close to my face, and I heard it. No, Mum, said a small furious voice. A girl’s voice, thirteen, ringing with outrage. I won’t. You can’t make me. I hate this skirt. I stopped breathing. The light drifted on, a little gold spark, grumbling to itself. Another followed. You never listen, you NEVER listen. And another. That’s not FAIR, Mum. A whole constellation of quarrels, bright and noisy and alive. “Winifred,” I whispered. “They’re what she gave up,” said Elliot. His face was white. “Every argument her daughter would have had with her. They’re here. The Hollow kept them.” I watched the little gold sparks drift through the white dark. They weren’t dead. That was the thing. They weren’t stored or lost or burnt up. They were as small and fierce and unfinished as the day they were spoken, held in the dark by something, for something, like seeds in a cold store waiting for a spring that might never come. “Elliot,” said Pip. Her voice was thin. “What’s that?” She was pointing left. I turned my torch. In a low alcove between two roots, a man knelt. A broad fair man of about sixty in the worn tweed of a country doctor, perfectly still, head bowed over his hands. A single white thread ran from the middle of his back into the wall, and it pulsed gently in time with the Toll. He was not dead. His chest rose and fell. His eyes were open, and on his face was a look of such complete untroubled peace that I took a step back. The alcove next to his held another figure. And the one beyond it, another. They stretched away down the passage into the dark, a long row of kneeling people, each with a pale thread running into the tree, each smiling the calm empty smile of Odalys at the bakery. And clustered over them like blankets, dozens upon dozens, so many that they hid the shoulders and hair of the kneeling, rested the ash moths. They did not stir. They were sleeping. “The residents,” said Elliot, in a strangled voice. “The ones who stayed. They’re not in the town. They’re not anywhere. They’re down here. What walks up in the lantern light and hands you a tart, it’s…” He stopped. “A puppet,” I said. “A reflection. It sends them up. It wears them.” A wave of sickness rolled through me. I thought of Odalys pressing a cinnamon bun into my hand. Fenwick laughing. The clockmaker with her little lens. Every kind face I had met. And all of them kneeling here in the dark with a root in their spine. “No,” said Pip. She had both hands over her mouth. “No. No. Danny.” “Pip.” I turned her to face me. “Look at me. You didn’t take it. You stepped out of the line. You’re not one of them.” “I nearly was.” She was crying openly. “I wanted to so much.” “I know. That’s how it works.” I held her by the shoulders and made my voice steady. “Stay by Elliot. Don’t touch the roots. Don’t touch the lights. Don’t, whatever you hear, agree to anything.” She nodded, wild-eyed. I let go of her. And at that moment, deep in the heart of the Hollow, somewhere far past the reach of my torch, something drew breath. The Toll stopped. In the silence that followed I heard every small sound of the chamber: the hiss of Pip’s breathing, the creak of root against root, the far-off chime of a thousand drifting lights. And under it, a voice. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t frightening. It was a woman’s voice, low and warm, sweet as the first day of spring, and it came from everywhere at once. It said my name. Mira. I did not move. Elliot’s fingers closed hard round my arm. Mira Kessler, said the Hollow, with infinite tenderness. Ilse’s girl. Oh, my dear. You’ve come such a long way. You must be so tired. The white roots overhead stirred and parted. Ahead of me, where there had been only a dark tangle, a passage opened, wide and soft and glimmering, leading down. Come, said the voice. Come and sit with me. There’s no need to be afraid. There is only one thing I want to ask you. And as I stood there, with my mother’s letter against my heart and the whole slow-breathing weight of the earth above me, it asked it. Gently. Lovingly. As you ask a child at the end of a long day if she would like to come in from the cold. Will you stay? Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
Chapter Nine: The Turning
The Night of Names