The Knife of Never Letting Go

by Patrick Ness

  “Just smell quiet, Todd,” he barks, then he starts barking louder, “Quiet! Quiet!”

  And then, somewhere around the spack buildings, the quiet moves.

  My blood-charge leaps so hard it about knocks me over. Manchee yelps in a circle around me, barking and barking, making me double-spooked, and so I smack him on the rump again (“Ow, Todd?”) to make myself calm down.

  “There’s no such thing as holes,” I say. “No such thing as nothing. So it’s gotta be a something, don’t it?”

  “Something, Todd,” Manchee barks.

  “Can you hear where it went?”

  “It’s quiet, Todd.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Manchee sniffs the air and takes one step, two, then more towards the Spackle buildings. I guess we’re looking for it, then. I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway. Manchee’s sniffing at the door frame but he’s not growling so I take a deep breath and I look inside.

  It’s dead empty. The ceiling rises up to a point about another length of me above my head. Floor’s dirt, swamp plants growing in it now, vines and suchlike, but nothing else. Which is to say no real nothing, no hole, and no telling what mighta been here before.

  It’s stupid but I gotta say it.

  I’m wondering if the Spackle are back.

  But that’s impossible.

  But a hole in the Noise is impossible.

  So something impossible has to be true.

  I can hear Manchee snuffling around again outside so I creep out and I go to the second scoop. There’s writing on the outside of this one, the only written words anyone’s ever seen in the spack language. The only words they ever saw fit to write down, I guess. The letters are spack letters, but Ben says they make the sound es’Paqili or suchlike, es’Paqili, the Spackle, “spacks” if you wanna spit it, which since what happened happened is what everyone does. Means “The People”.

  There’s nothing in the second scoop neither. I step back out into the swamp and I listen again. I put my head down and I listen and I reach with the hearing parts of my brain and I listen there, too, and I listen and listen.

  I listen.

  “Quiet! Quiet!” Manchee barks, twice real fast and peels off running again, towards the last scoop. I take off after him, running myself, my blood charging, cuz that’s where it is, that’s where the hole in the Noise is.

  I can hear it.

  Well, I can’t hear it, that’s the whole point, but when I run towards it the emptiness of it is touching my chest and the stillness of it pulls at me and there’s so much quiet in it, no, not quiet, silence, so much unbelievable silence that I start to feel really torn up, like I’m about to lose the most valuable thing ever, like there it is, a death, and I’m running and my eyes are watering and my chest is just crushing and there’s no one to see but I still mind and my eyes start crying, they start crying, they start effing crying, and I stop for a minute and I bend over and Jesus H Dammit, you can just shut up right now, but I waste a whole stupid minute, just a whole stinking, stupid minute bent over there, by which time, of course, the hole is moving away, it’s moved away, it’s gone.

  Manchee’s torn twixt racing after it and coming back to me but he finally comes back to me.

  “Crying, Todd?”

  “Shut up,” I say and aim a kick at him. It misses on purpose.

  We get ourselves outta the swamp and head back towards town and the world feels all black and grey no matter what the sun is saying. Even Manchee barely says nothing as we make our way back up thru the fields. My Noise churns and bubbles like a stew on the boil till finally I have to stop for a minute to calm myself down a little.

  There’s just no such thing as silence. Not here, not nowhere. Not when yer asleep, not when yer by yerself, never.

  I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month’s time exactly.

  It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.

  I am Todd Hewitt.

  “Todd Hewitt,” Manchee murmurs to himself beside me.

  I take a deep breath and open my eyes.

  That’s who I am. I’m Todd Hewitt.

  We walk on up away from the swamp and the river, up the slope of the wild fields to the small ridge at the south of town where the school used to be for the brief and useless time it existed. Before I was born, boys were taught by their ma at home and then when there were only boys and men left, we just got sat down in front of vids and learning modules till Mayor Prentiss outlawed such things as “detrimental to the discipline of our minds”.

  Mayor Prentiss, see, has a Point of View.

  And so for almost half a stupid year, all the boys were gathered up by sad-faced Mr Royal and plonked out here in an out-building away from the main Noise of the town. Not that it helped. It’s nearly impossible to teach anything in a classroom full of boys’ Noise and completely impossible to give out any sort of test. You cheat even if you don’t mean to and everybody means to.

  And then one day Mayor Prentiss decided to burn all the books, every single one of them, even the ones in men’s homes, cuz apparently books were detrimental as well and Mr Royal, a soft man who made himself a hard man by drinking whisky in the classroom, gave up and took a gun and put an end to himself and that was it for my classroom teaching.

  Ben taught me the rest at home. Mechanics and food prep and clothes repair and farming basics and things like that. Also a lot of survival stuff like hunting and which fruits you can eat and how to follow the moons for direkshuns and how to use a knife and a gun and snakebite remedies and how to calm yer Noise as best you can.

  He tried to teach me reading and writing, too, but Mayor Prentiss caught wind of it in my Noise one morning and locked Ben up for a week and that was the end of my book-learning and what with all that other stuff to learn and all the working on the farm that still has to be done every day and all the just plain surviving, I never ended up reading too good.

  Don’t matter. Ain’t nobody in Prentisstown ever gonna write a book.

  Manchee and me get past the school building and up on the little ridge and look north and there’s the town in question. Not that there’s all that much left of it no more. One shop, used to be two. One pub, used to be two. One clinic, one jail, one non-working petrol stayshun, one big house for the Mayor, one police stayshun. The Church. One short bit of road running thru the centre, paved back in the day, never upkept since, goes to gravel right quick. All the houses and such are out and about, outskirts like, farms, meant to be farms, some still are, some stand empty, some stand worse than empty.

  And that’s all there is of Prentisstown. Populayshun 147 and falling, falling, falling. 146 men and one almost-man.

  Ben says there used to be other settlements scattered around New World, that all the ships landed about the same time, ten years or so before I was born, but that when the war started with the spacks, when the spacks released the germs and all the other settlements were wiped out, that Prentisstown was nearly wiped out, too, that it only survived cuz of Mayor Prentiss’s army skills and that even tho Mayor Prentiss is a nightmare coming and going, we at least owe him that, that cuz of him we survive alone on a whole big empty womanless world that ain’t got nothing good to say for itself, in a town of 146 men that dies a little more with every day that passes.

  Cuz some men can’t take it, can they? They off themselves like Mr Royal or some of them just plain disappear, like Mr Gault, our old neighbour who used to do the other sheep farm, or Mr Michael, our second best carpenter, or Mr Van Wijk, who vanished the same day his son became a man. It’s not so uncommon. If yer whole world is one Noisy town with no future, sometimes you
just have to leave even if there ain’t nowhere else to go.

  Cuz as me the almost-man looks up into that town, I can hear the 146 men who remain. I can hear every ruddy last one of them. Their Noise washes down the hill like a flood let loose right at me, like a fire, like a monster the size of the sky come to get you cuz there’s nowhere to run.

  Here’s what it’s like. Here’s what every minute of every day of my stupid, stinking life in this stupid, stinking town is like. Never mind plugging yer ears, it don’t help at all:

  And them’s just the words, the voices talking and moaning and singing and crying. There’s pictures, too, pictures that come to yer mind in a rush, no matter how much you don’t want ’em, pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies, lies. Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don’t think it clearly or you convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who’s going to be able to pick out from the flood what’s real water and what’s not going to get you wet?

  Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.

  In a for instance, I’ve never seen a woman nor a Spackle in the flesh, obviously. I’ve seen ’em both in vids, of course, before they were outlawed, and I see them all the time in the Noise of men cuz what else do men think about except sex and enemies? But the spacks are bigger and meaner looking in the Noise than in the vids, ain’t they? And Noise women have lighter hair and bigger chests and wear less clothes and are a lot freer with their affecshuns than in the vids, too. So the thing to remember, the thing that’s most important of all that I might say in this here telling of things is that Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out.

  “Home, Todd?” Manchee barks a bit louder down by my leg cuz that’s how you gotta talk in the Noise.

  “Yeah, we’re going,” I say. We live on the other side, to the north-east, and we’re going to have to go thru the town to get there so here it comes, as fast as I can get thru it.

  First up is Mr Phelps’s store. It’s dying, the store is, like the rest of the town and Mr Phelps spends all his time despairing. Even when yer buying stuff from him and he’s polite as can be, the despair of him seeps at you like pus from a cut. Ending, says his Noise, Ending, it’s all ending and Rags and rags and rags and My Julie, my dear, dear Julie who was his wife and who don’t wear no clothes at all in Mr Phelps’s Noise.

  “Hiya, Todd,” he calls as Manchee and I hurry by.

  “Hiya, Mr Phelps.”

  “Beautiful day, ain’t she?”

  “She sure is that, Mr Phelps.”

  “Beaut!” barks Manchee and Mr Phelps laughs but his Noise just keeps saying Ending and Julie and rags and pictures of what he misses about his wife and what she used to do as if it’s sposed to be unique or something.

  I don’t think anything particular in my Noise for Mr Phelps, just my usual stuff you can’t help. Tho I must admit I find myself thinking it all a little bit louder to cover up thoughts about the hole I found in the swamp, to block it out behind louder Noise.

  Don’t know why I should do this, don’t know why I should hide it.

  But I’m hiding it.

  Manchee and me carry on walking pretty fast cuz next is the petrol stayshun and Mr Hammar. The petrol stayshun don’t work no more cuz the fission generator that made the petrol went kerflooey last year and just sits there beside the petrol stayshun like a hulking ugly hurt toe and no one’d live next to it except Mr Hammar and Mr Hammar’s much worse than Mr Phelps cuz he’ll aim his Noise right at you.

  And it’s ugly Noise, angry Noise, pictures of yerself in ways that you don’t want pictures of yerself, violent pictures and bloody pictures and all you can do is make yer own Noise as loud as you can and try to sweep up Mr Phelps’s Noise in it, too, and send it right back to Mr Hammar. Apples and Ending and fist over hand and Ben and Julie and Beaut, Todd? and the generator is flickering and rags and shut up, just shut up and Look at me, boy.

  And I turn my head anyway even tho I don’t want to but sometimes you get caught off guard and so I turn my head and there’s Mr Hammar in his window, looking right at me and One month, he thinks, and there’s a picture from his Noise and it involves me standing on my own but somehow even more alone than that and I don’t know what it means or if it’s real or if it’s a purposeful lie and so I think about a hammer going into Mr Hammar’s head over and over and he just smiles from his window.

  The road curves round the petrol stayshun past the clinic, which is Dr Baldwin and all the crying and moaning men do to doctors when nothing’s really wrong with ’em. Today it’s Mr Fox complaining about how he can’t breathe which would be a pitiable thing if he didn’t smoke so much. And then, as you pass the clinic, God Almighty, you get the bloody bloody pub which even at this hour of the day is just a howl of Noise because what they do there is turn the music up so loud it’s meant to drown out Noise but that only works partway and so you get loud music and loud Noise and worse, drunk Noise, which comes at you like a mallet. Shouts and howls and weeping from men whose faces never change and just horrorpilashuns of the past and all the women that used to be. A whole lot about the women that used to be but nothing that makes any sense, cuz drunk Noise is like a drunk man: blurry and boring and dangerous.

  It gets hard to walk around the centre of town, hard to think about the next step cuz so much Noise is weighing on yer shoulders. I honestly don’t know how men do it, I don’t know how I’m going to do it when I become a man ’less something changes on the day that I don’t know about.

  The road bears up past the pub and to the right, going by the police stayshun and the jail, all one place and in use more than you might think for a town so small. The sheriff is Mr Prentiss Jr who’s barely two years older than me and only been a man for a short while but who took to his job right well and quick and in his cell is whoever Mayor Prentiss has told Mr Prentiss Jr to make an example of this week. Right now it’s Mr Turner who didn’t hand over enough of his corn yield to “the good use of the whole town”, which just means he didn’t give no free corn to Mr Prentiss and his men.

  So you’ve gone thru the town with yer dog and you got all this Noise behind you, Mr Phelps and Mr Hammar and Dr Baldwin and Mr Fox and the extra extra Noise from the pub and Mr Prentiss Jr’s Noise and Mr Turner’s moaning Noise and yer still not done with the Noise of the town cuz here comes the Church.

  The Church is why we’re all here on New World in the first place, of course, and pretty much every Sunday you can hear Aaron preaching about why we left behind the corrupshun and sin of Old World and about how we’d aimed to start a new life of purity and brotherhood in a whole new Eden.

  That worked out well, huh?

  People still go to church tho, mainly cuz they have to, even tho the Mayor hisself hardly ever bothers, leaving the rest of us to listen to Aaron preach about how we’re the only thing each of us have out here, us men together, and how all of us have gotta bind ourselves in a single community.

  How if one of us falls, we all fall.

  He says that one a lot.

  Manchee and me are quiet as possible going past the front door of the Church. Praying Noise comes from inside, it’s got a special feel to it, a special purply sick feel like men are bleeding it out, even tho it’s always the same stuff but the purply blood just keeps on coming. Help us, save us, forgive us, help us, save us, forgive us, get us outta here, please, God, please, God, please, God, tho as far as I know no one’s never heard no Noise back from this God fella.

  Aaron’s in there, too, back from his walk and preaching over the prayers. I can hear his voice, not just his Noise, and it’s all sacrifice this and scripture that and blessings here and sainthood there and he’s going on at such a rattle his Noise is like grey fire behind him and you can’t
pick out anything in it and he might be up to something, mightn’t he? The sermon might be covering for something and I’m beginning to wonder if I know what that something is.

  And then I hear Young Todd? in his Noise and I say, “Hurry up, Manchee,” and we scoot our way along right quick.

  The last thing you pass as you crest the hill of Prentisstown is the Mayor’s House which is the weirdest and hardest Noise of all cuz Mayor Prentiss–

  Well, Mayor Prentiss is different.

  His Noise is awful clear and I mean awful in the awful way. He believes, see, that order can be brought to Noise. He believes that Noise can be sorted out, that if you could harness it somehow, you could put it to use. And when you walk by the Mayor’s House, you can hear him, hear him and the men closest to him, his deputies and things, and they’re always doing these thought exercises, these counting things and imagining perfect shapes and saying orderly chants like I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME whatever that’s sposed to mean and it’s like he’s moulding a little army into shape, like he’s preparing himself for something, like he’s forging some kind of Noise weapon.

  It feels like a threat. It feels like the world changing and leaving you behind.

  1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1 I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME 1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1 IF ONE OF US FALLS WE ALL FALL

  I will be a man soon and men do not run in fear but I give Manchee a little push and we walk even a little faster than before, giving the Mayor’s House as wide a curve as possible till we’re past it and on the gravel path that heads on towards our house.

  After a while, the town disappears behind us and the Noise starts to get a little bit quieter (tho it never never stops) and we can both breathe a bit easier.

  Manchee barks, “Noise, Todd.”

  “Yesiree,” I say.

  “Quiet in the swamp, Todd,” Manchee says. “Quiet, quiet, quiet.”

  “Yes,” I say and then I think and I hurry and say, “Shut up, Manchee,” and I smack him on his rump and he says, “Ow, Todd?” but I’m looking back towards the town but there’s no stopping Noise once it’s out, is there? And if it was something you could see, moving thru the air, I wonder if you could see the hole in the Noise floating right outta me, right outta my thoughts from where I was protecting it and it’s such a small bit of Noise and it’d be easy to miss in the great roar of everything else but there it goes, there it goes, there it goes, heading right back towards the world of men.