by Patrick Ness
There’s no television, of course. No computer. No electronic games. For lack of anything better, he takes a book from the bookcase. It’s one of his father’s, one Seth has already read part of years ago, sneaking it from the shelf in America when his father wasn’t looking. It was far too old for him at the time and, he smiles wryly, is probably too old for him now. There’s large quantities of good-spirited sex, metaphors that run on just for the hell of it, and plenty of philosophical musing about immortality. There’s also a satyr who features heavily, which Seth remembers was the thing that got him caught. He’d asked his father about “satire,” having heard that word said out loud and assuming it was the one he was reading. After a lengthy, baffled explanation, his father had said, “Why on earth are you asking?” and that had been the end of that reading adventure. He remembers now that he’d never actually been able to sneak it off the shelf again to find out what happened in the end.
So he reads on the settee, letting the rain continue and the day pass outside. At some point in the afternoon, he grows too hungry not to notice and heats up a can of hot dogs, eating half and leaving the rest beside the cold can of potato soup. When dusk comes, he lights one of the lanterns he took from the outdoor store, sending stark shadows around the room but illuminating enough to see the pages.
He forgets about dinner.
A book, he thinks at one point, rubbing his eyes, tired from so much focused reading. It’s a world all on its own, too. He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking than what it got up to in the story. A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.
“And then it’s over,” he says. He’s only got about fifty pages left; he can finally find out what happens in the end.
And then he’ll leave that world forever.
He folds down a corner to mark his place and sets the book on the coffee table.
It’s fully dark now, and he realizes he’s never seen this place at night. He picks up the lantern and stands in the front doorway again, keeping out of the rain, which seems lighter now but still steady.
He’s amazed at the unyielding blackness. Not a single other light is shining back at him, not a streetlight or porchlight or even that glow that’s always on the horizon from the gathered lights of a city.
Here, there’s nothing. Nothing but darkness.
He flicks off the lantern, and for a moment, the world disappears completely. He stands there, breathing into it, listening to the rain. Slowly, slowly, his eyes begin to adjust to a dim light, which can only be the moon behind the clouds. The neighborhood starts to resolve itself into house fronts and gardens, the mud now swirled in rivers and deltas on the sidewalk and street.
Nothing stirring, nothing moving.
And then, suddenly, a break in the clouds, shining starlight that’s faint but like the blowing of a trumpet compared to the darkness. Because it’s so dark, Seth can see more stars in the small rip in the sky than he thinks he’s ever seen in the whole expanse of it. The break widens, shining more, and Seth can’t quite figure out the strange streak of faint white he’s seeing across it, as if someone’s spilled –
Milk.
The Milky Way.
“Holy shit,” he whispers.
He’s seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.
So much more that he’ll never see. So much more that he’ll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it’s forever beyond his reach.
The clouds close up again. The Milky Way vanishes.
It’s late, later than he’s ever stayed up here. He’s feeling tired, but he doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t think he can take another memory or dream or whatever. They’ve grown increasingly painful, and he knows, without wanting to think about it too closely, that there’s worse to come.
He flicks the lantern on again as he goes back inside. He pauses for a moment, wondering what to do, then, on a whim, heads up the staircase. He’s not interested in the attic – the thought of the coffin up there, in the blackness of the unlit night, freaks him out more than a little – but there’s the office, isn’t there? His mum’s, mainly – his dad had one at the college – but with all the family files.
He sets the lantern on the desk and, without much hope, tries the computer. Of course nothing happens. The huge tower unit and the hilariously non-flat monitor – he can’t remember the last time he saw one of those – stay as inert and dark as they were before.
He looks through some of the papers scattered on the desktop, coughing a little at the raised dust. It’s mostly old bills, but there are a few scraps of paper, some with what he instantly, almost shockingly, recognizes as his mother’s handwriting.
DCI Rashadi? he reads on one. He remembers the name, though he hasn’t heard it in eight years. The policewoman who stayed with them during the hunt for Owen, the one who was so kind when she gently repeated questions of Seth. Below her name, there’s a phone number with Masons Hill and police dogs written under it, which is less familiar. There weren’t any searches in that part of town, Seth doesn’t think. Owen was found in an abandoned warehouse. An anonymous tip had come in, the source of which was never traced, but the police had found Owen and the prisoner –
The prisoner –
The prisoner.
Seth can’t remember the prisoner’s name.
He reads the notes again. DCI Rashadi makes sense, as does another page with the names of PC Hightower and PC Ellis, who were the first officers to arrive after his mother’s frantic phone call.
And they were hunting for –
Seth frowns. How could he possibly have forgotten the name of the man who took Owen? The name of the man from whom Owen had barely escaped with his life? The name of the man now rotting forever in England’s highest security prison because of a multitude of crimes, not just breaking out of jail and kidnapping Owen?
“What the hell?” Seth whispers.
He can’t remember it. At all. It’s like there’s a pure blank spot in his memory. Everything around it is still there. He’ll never forget the man’s face, for one thing, or the prison jumpsuit.
Or the things he said.
But his name.
His name, his name, his name.
Forgetting it is impossible. He’d heard it over and over and over again as the manhunt went on. He’d even said it in that dream with Gudmund –
Hadn’t he?
But it’s not there. It’s just not there, no matter how much he pursues it.
He reaches for the top drawer of the filing cabinet. There has to be something in there, clippings of the man’s arrest or official police statements or –
He stops with his hand on the drawer handle. There’s a picture frame face down on top of the filing cabinet. Dust has gathered on the back of it, but even as Seth lifts it up into the lantern light, he knows what it is.
There they all are. Him, his mother and father, and Owen, with – of all people – Mickey freaking Mouse. Seth smiles at it. He can’t help himself. They’d taken the train to Disneyland Paris. The sixteen-year-old part of him would like to scoff and say that the trip was stupid and that the park was only for little kids and the rides were lame and nothing at all like the roller coasters he ended up going on in America –
But that wasn’t how it had been. It had been bloody brilliant. And that was it exactly, bloody brilliant. From their lives before anything changed. From their lives when anything had seemed possible.
From their lives before Owen had disappeared for three and a half days with the convicted killer whose name refuses to surface
in Seth’s head. Three and a half days of policemen and policewomen – though it was usually policewomen, like Officer Rashadi – sitting in their house every hour that Owen was gone, trying to reassure his parents even when such a thing was clearly impossible. His mother was alternately rageful and scarily calm. His father spoke in a slur brought on by the medication he’d been given after he’d been unable to stop crying on the first day.
Neither of them spoke to Seth much. In fact – he tries to remember – they might not have spoken to him at all.
He’d spoken far more to Officer Rashadi. She was small, with her hair pulled back behind a cloth, but something in her manner had immediately silenced his mum’s demands and his father’s anguished crying within five minutes of her walking through the door. Seth had liked the way she didn’t talk to him in a funny adults-for-kids type voice, liked how it sounded as if every word she said was true.
With the lightest of touches, she’d questioned him again and again about what had happened, saying that if he could remember anything more, no matter how small or stupid, he should tell her because who knew what might help his brother?
“The man had a scar on his hand,” Seth had said the fourth or fifth time they talked. He’d made a circle with his thumb and forefinger to show her how big the scar was.
“Yes,” Officer Rashadi said, not writing it down in her notebook. “He had a tattoo removed.”
“Is that important?” Seth asked. “Or is it stupid?”
She’d just smiled at him, her front two teeth slightly crooked but bright as moonlight.
He remembers all of that now but can’t remember the name of the man they were talking about, as if that information has somehow been erased from his memory altogether.
He looks down at the photo again. Owen and Mickey are in the middle, Owen smiling so wide it looks physically painful, and his mum and dad on either side, grinning with slight embarrassment but also, he can see, having a great time in spite of themselves.
And there’s Seth, smiling, too, looking at Mickey a little more shyly and keeping his distance – he remembers being freaked way the hell out by the giant brightness of the suit and the grin that never changed and the weird silence of Mickey in person, though he supposes it would have been even weirder if Mickey spoke French.
In the photo, there’s a little gap between him and his family, but he’s not going to put too much emphasis on that. Just an accident of photography, where he’d probably stepped back from Mickey just as it was taken.
Because he’s still smiling. He still is.
He doesn’t know what’s to come, Seth thinks, putting the picture back on top of the filing cabinet.
He doesn’t look back at it as he leaves the office and shuts the door behind him.
He spends the time until dawn keeping himself active so he doesn’t fall asleep. He digs himself deep into a new book – the one about the satyr still sitting there unfinished on the coffee table – and when he’s in danger of nodding off, he gets up and paces the room. He fixes himself a can of spaghetti, but again eats only half before setting it beside the unfinished soup and hot dogs from earlier.
Dawn comes with a slight let up in the rain. It’s now more mist than anything, but still coming down, muddy water swirling everywhere outside.
Seth starts to feel weirdly hyper from the lack of sleep, and he thinks that what he’d most like to do is go for a run. Cross-country season was long over when he drowned, and he’d only been able to get in a few runs in the bad weather they’d had over the winter.
His mum had kept up her running, though, almost out of spite. The worse the weather, the better she liked it. She’d come back soaking wet, her breath making clouds in the air. “Jesus, that’s good,” she’d growl, panting heavily just inside the doorway, swigging her bottle of water.
It had been years since she’d asked Seth to join her.
Not that he would have said yes.
Well, maybe. Probably not. But maybe.
But he misses it, the running. Trapped in this house, he misses it more than ever. Misses the rhythm of it, the way his breathing eventually just slotted into place, the way the world kind of fell toward him, like he was standing still and the whole planet was turning underneath him instead.
It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn’t lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn’t had that in ages.
No wonder everything had gotten so screwed up by the end of that winter.
He looks again out the front window. The mist is still there, the world still gray.
“Next time the sun’s out,” he says, “I’m running.”
He’s stuck inside through the day and into the evening. The clocks in the house, of course, are all stopped, so he can only guess how quickly time is passing.
More than anything, he doesn’t want to sleep. He tries stupid things to keep himself awake. Singing at the top of his lungs. Attempting to perfect a handstand. Trying to remember all fifty states (he gets up to forty-seven, goes absolutely crazy trying to remember Vermont, gives up).
He gets colder as the night draws in again. He lights every lantern and makes his way upstairs to his parents’ bedroom to steal more blankets. He wraps them around himself and paces up and down the main room, trying to think of something, anything, to keep his mind occupied, to stave off both sleep and boredom.
And loneliness.
He stops in the middle of the main room, the blankets wrapped around him like robes.
The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.
No one here. No one at all besides him. No one.
Forever.
“Shit,” he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
He feels like he’s underwater again, fighting for breath. His throat chokes shut, just like it did as he was forced under yet another freezing wave. Fight it, he thinks, panicking. Fight it. Oh shit, oh shit –
He stops in the middle of the floor, only dimly aware that he’s letting out a slight moan. He even raises his head, like he’s reaching for air that’s getting farther and farther away.
“I can’t take this,” he whispers into the shadowy darkness above him. “I can’t take this. Not forever. Please –”
He flexes and unflexes his hands, pulling at the blankets that suddenly feel like they’re suffocating him, dragging him farther down. He lets them drop to the floor.
I can’t hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can’t hold it back –
And then he sees in the lantern lights that the blankets have swept the dust away in a pattern on the floor as he paced. The polished floorboards are actually glinting back at him slightly.
He nudges a bunched-up blanket with his foot, leaving a stripe of clean floor beneath it. He pushes it farther along the floor to the wall, wiping away more dust. He picks up the blanket. The underside is filthy, so he folds it to a cleaner side and pushes it along the wall to the hearth.
He looks back. A big stripe of the floor is now relatively clean.
He folds the blanket again and follows the wall around the room, then the floor around the settees, folding and refolding as necessary until he cleans almost the entire floor. He tosses the dirty blanket into the middle of the kitchen and picks up another, folding it into a square and wiping down the dining-room table, coughing some at the dust he churns up, but once again, the surface mostly shines back at him.
He wets the corner of a smaller blanket in the sink and scrubs away the heavier dirt on the dining table before moving to the inert television. Every time a blanket gets too dirty, he piles it in the kitchen and gets another. Soon enough, he’s upstairs in the linen cupboard, taking out painfully stiff towels and sheets and using them to wipe down the hearth and windowsills.
A kind of ecstatic trance overtakes him, his mind on nothing but his actions, which are manic, focused, seemingly unstoppabl
e now that he’s set them in motion. He cleans off the bookcase shelves, the slats in the doors to the cubbyhole, the chairs around the dining-room table. He accidentally breaks a bulb in the overhead light as he tries to rid them of cobwebs, but he just wraps the glass in a blanket and adds it to the pile.
He wipes away the remaining dust from the mirror hanging over the settee. Dirt still clings to the glass, so he picks up one of his wetted rags and presses harder on the mirror, scrubbing away in repeated motions, trying to get it clean.
“Come on,” he says, hardly aware that he’s speaking aloud. “Come on.”
He steps back for a second from the effort and stands there panting. He raises his arm to go back to it –
And in the lantern light, he sees himself.
Sees his too-skinny face, his short cropped hair, sees the dark whiskers sprouting below his nose and under his chin, though not so much on his cheeks, where he’s despaired of ever being able to grow a beard.
Sees his eyes. Sees how they’re the eyes of someone being hunted. Or haunted.
And in the mirror, he sees the room behind him. A hundred times more livable than it was before he started on this frenzy, a frenzy he can’t really explain to himself.
But there it is. A clean or at least cleaner room. He’s even cleared the dust from the terrible, terrible painting of the dying horse. He looks at it now in reflection, its eyes wild, its tongue like a spike of terror.
And he remembers.
This cleaning. This straightening out of things. This frenzy of order.
He’s done it before. To his own bedroom back in America.
“No,” he says. “Oh, no.”
It was the last thing he did before he left his house.
The last thing he did before he went down to the beach.
The last thing he did before he died.
“Don’t you think I hate it, too?” Gudmund whispered fiercely. “Don’t you think it’s the last thing I want?”
“But you can’t,” Seth said. “You can’t just . . .”