Reading the Light

A fence doesn't have to be strong. It only has to mark which side of it the light is on.

My face was still hot from the chairs. Not the wine, though the wine was in me too, a loosened warmth behind the eyes that made the ground feel further from my feet than it was. The hot part was higher than that, sat up under the cheekbones where shame lives, and it had been there since I'd put Adrian's careful stack down into the dirt and watched two men not look at me. I walked with it. There wasn't much else to do with shame except carry it out of sight of the people who'd watched it happen.

Beatrix walked on my left, unhurried, sure-footed on ground I kept misreading. Everyone else had moved through the loading in a half-trot, quick hands, quick feet, eyes going up and out between every lift like men working a beach ahead of a tide. I'd felt the hurry come off them all evening without one word to pin it to, and I'd caught it anyway. She didn't have any of it. She walked like the evening belonged to her and she was deciding how much of it to spend.

"You can stop carrying it," she said. "The chairs. You've gone and folded it up and put it in your pocket and now you're going to walk the whole way home with your hand around it."

I huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "I dropped a man's furniture."

"You dropped a stack of chairs you weren't asked to lift, because you'd had a drink you weren't used to, in front of people who were tired." She said it plainly, like she was reading it off a docket, and somehow the plainness took more out of it than kindness would have. "Adrian's not thinking about it. Adrian's thinking about whether the sheds'll hold the weather and whether his hands'll come good by morning. You're a footnote, Jerome. Be a footnote. It's restful."

It was the first time she'd used my name, and it came out already worn, like a coin too long in a pocket. She'd had it a while before tonight; I was sure of that.

We walked. The land out here didn't roll so much as breathe, long low rises and the troughs between them, and the troughs had started to fill first — the low ground going soft and grey before the high ground did. Down before up. I kept catching it at the edge of my eye and looking away before it became a thought. I'd have known what that meant on any hillside at home and out here I knew nothing, so I let it sit unexamined, a wrongness I couldn't price.

And she did it again.

She looked up. Not at anything. The same flat upward glance I'd watched her give all evening, that I'd watched Adrian give, that the whole camp had been giving between one task and the next like a tic they'd all caught off each other — a quick read of the sky and then back to the work, no comment, as if the sky were a clock only they could tell the time from. She did it walking, barely a tilt of the head, and came back down to the path.

I'd been letting it go all evening. The wine, maybe, or just being too far past my own depth to keep swallowing things — whatever it was, this time I didn't.

"Why does everyone keep doing that?" The words came out with less tact than I wanted. "Looking up. You've all been at it since late afternoon. Like you're waiting on rain. There's not a cloud in it."

She didn't answer straight away. She slowed instead, and then she stopped. Stopped dead on the path with the light going, when every other soul I'd seen that evening had been treating the light like water running out of cupped hands. She stopped like she had time. Like she'd counted it and there was enough and she knew to the minute how much.

"We're not waiting on rain," she said. She studied me for a moment, and I had the feeling of being read the way she'd read the chairs, quick and total, some sum being done behind her eyes with me as the figures. Whatever it came to, she made a decision in front of me — I saw her make it, saw her choose to spend something — and she turned to face me properly.

"How much have they told you? Since this morning."

"That we eat early. That we don't go past the fence after." I heard how little it was as I said it. "Charles asked why and Paul said because that's the rule, and then there was something needed doing."

"That's the rule," she repeated, and there was a dry twist on it that wasn't quite a smile. "Yes. That's the rule." She looked at me a moment longer, deciding how much to hand me. "All right. You asked, so I'm not going to do you the discourtesy of the short version. When the sun's up, this is the safest dull little patch of dirt you could ask for. Nothing out here in the daylight but us and the work and a great deal of nothing. And then the sun goes."

"And then?"

"And then it's properly dark, Jerome. You've not seen it yet, so you don't know what I mean by the word. There's no moon comes up. There are no stars. The light doesn't fade and leave you a grey to find your way in — it's pulled, like a plug out of a bath, and what's left isn't dimness, it's nothing. You put your hand in front of your face and the hand's a rumour." She let that sit. "And the dark isn't empty."

The trough beside the path had gone the colour of ash while she spoke. I was aware of it without looking at it.

"There are things that live in it," she said. "Things that are good in it the way we're good in the light. The dark is theirs the way the day is ours, and the only wall between the two — the only one, there's no fence strong enough and no door thick enough on its own — is light. That's the whole of it. That's the rule under the rule. We eat early and we get behind the fence and we put fire in the middle of us because light is the one thing they won't come through, and out here you spend the back half of every single day making sure you have enough of it before the other thing arrives. That's what we're looking at when we look up. Not weather. We're reading how long we've got."

I should have heard it as a story. Some part of me wanted to — wanted to put it with the other tall things men say to the new arrival to watch his face. But she wasn't watching my face for that. She'd said it the way you say a thing you've stopped being frightened of and started being tired of, and that flatness was worse than any amount of telling.

"You've seen one," I said. It wasn't a question by the time it was out.

For an answer she pushed up the sleeve on her left forearm.

There was a dressing there, clean, wound round twice and tucked, the work of somebody who knew how. She got a thumb under the edge of it and peeled it back without ceremony, just far enough, and even in the going light I could see what was under it. Three lines. Parallel, close-set, drawn the length of the forearm from the inside of the elbow toward the wrist, the skin to either side of them puckered and shining and still angry at the centre though it had closed over. Not a cut. Cuts are one thing doing one thing. This was three things at once, near enough evenly spaced, and only the fourth had skipped — a clean miss where the smallest had run out of arm.

"That's one set," she said, and pressed the dressing back down, smoothing it with two fingers, brisk. "There's another down my leg I'll not be hauling my trousers off on a hillside to show you, but you can take my word it matches. The leg one's worse. The leg one I got leaving."

I thought of the head.

I hadn't let myself think about it properly that morning — there'd been too much of everything, my mother's face and the heat and the wrong colour of the dirt — but I'd walked past it coming in. Mounted on a post at the gap in the fence where you went through, black, dried, the jaw still carrying its teeth. I'd taken it for a warning to somebody, or a trophy, the way you'd nail a fox to a fence at home. I hadn't understood it was an instruction.

"The thing on the gate," I said slowly. "At the front."

"Now you're getting it."

"And Kain." The young one, the one I'd seen propped on the crutches by the fire, his leg bound from the knee down, taking no part in the loading and nobody making him. I'd thought he'd come off a vehicle. "His leg."

"His leg," she agreed. "Same animal. Not the same one — there's no one of them, that's the part you want to get into your head and keep there. They run in a pack. The one on the gate is one that got put down after the camp was attacked, before we had any fences at all, and Kain's leg is from the same night, and there are more of them out there than that, and the head on the post helps to keep the others away. It's taught us. That's who it's for. It’s for all of us." She let her sleeve fall back down over the dressing. "You wanted to know why a barbecue ends before dark out here and nobody argues. That's why. It isn't manners."

The dread that had been going round me all evening without a name had a shape now, and the shape was worse than the not-knowing had been, because the not-knowing I could have walked off. I looked at the trough beside us, full to its lip with grey, and I understood for the first time that the hurry I'd felt off everyone wasn't fussiness. It was arithmetic. They were all of them, all day, every day, doing a sum with their lives as the remainder.

And then she told me the rest.

"Mine wasn't from here," she said.

"What?"

"The one that did this." She lifted the arm an inch, let it drop. "It didn't do it here. Or — it started here. I came through with my hands tied and one shoe and it came at me out of the dark before I'd got my feet, and I ran, and I went back to the Portal and I went through it. Off this world. To Luke’s house." She was watching me very carefully now, and I didn't yet know why. "And it came with me."

I didn't follow it for a second. The wine, the shame, the head on the post — I was full. "Came with you where?"

"Through. Behind me. A living thing, Jerome, off this world, through the Portal and out the other side into a house with a kitchen and a kettle in it. It stood in a room and it was as real there as it had been here. It put those—" she didn't look at her arm this time "—those down my leg on the way through, with half of it on one side and half on the other."

She stopped. She wanted me to arrive at it on my own, and I did, and when I did it went through me cold and clear and sobering, clean through the wine, and it took everything I had to keep it off my face — not the horror of it, the horror was allowed, anyone would wear the horror.

Because we'd been told. In the hours since this morning, between the unloading and the introductions — killing the hope early, before it could put down roots: nothing living goes back. The Portal takes you one way and shuts like a trap behind a living thing. People had tried. People had spent themselves trying. It lets some few through. Guardians — she was one of them, I understood that much already, she came and went like the rule was written for other people — but any non-Guardian with breath in it and no leave to pass does not go home. That was settled. That was the wall we were all behind, the real one, the one the dark was only a part of.

And a panther had walked through it.

"You see it," she said quietly. She'd been waiting for my face to do exactly what it had done. "Good. Then I don't have to spell it out, and I'll tell you you're not the first to land on it and you'll not be the last. Everyone gets there. Everyone who hears it gets to the same place, and they all ask me the same thing, and they all ask it like I've been keeping the answer in my pocket." Her voice didn't rise. If anything it went lower, and harder, and more tired. "If an animal can get through — a dumb thing, a thing that doesn't even know there's two worlds — then why in God's name can't we. Why can it go home and we can't. And I haven't got it. That's the truth of me, so you can put your hope back where you keep it. I don't know how it did what it did. I was too busy not dying to take notes."

I kept my mouth shut. It cost me more than the chairs had — more than anything since I'd arrived — and she'd never have known the cost of it: that I had somewhere to put what she'd just said, that there was a corner of me already cleared and waiting for exactly this, that Charles and I had a name between us for what she thought was just a horror she carried. I let it look like plain fright. I was that as well. It wasn't a lie, only the smaller part of the truth, and I was getting practised at holding the larger part under my breath — I'd been carrying three already, and now there was a fourth, the heaviest yet, and the keeping of it sat in my chest.

"I'm sorry," I said, because it was true and because it was the safe thing. "That it followed you. That you were on your own for it."

Something moved across her face and was gone before I could read it, and she turned and started walking again.

"Come on," she said. "I've stood here longer than I should've."

We came up the last rise together, and the settlement opened below us.

I'd seen it that morning and not seen it at all. Now I saw it the way she'd taught me to in the space of half a mile. The fence first — not much of a fence in itself, and I understood now it had never been meant to be, it was only a line to say inside and out. The fires staked along it and clustered at the heart of it, more of them than a camp that size needed for cooking or for warmth, banked and fed and watched. Every soul I'd met that day gathered in close to the light of them, none straying to the edges, the whole group pulled into the bright middle of itself like filings to a magnet. And at the gap where the path went in, on its post, black against the last of the glow — the head. Facing out. Facing the dark we'd just walked in out of, where the rest of its pack still was.

Behind us the troughs had finished filling and were starting on the rises, and the first of the true dark was coming up out of the low ground to meet the dusk coming down, and the two of them were going to meet soon, and everything she'd just told me walked down that hill at my shoulder and made the fires look less like a welcome and more like a held breath.