White Hallway

There was no pain.

That was the first thing he noticed, and for a long time it was the only one. He stood, or seemed to stand, in a place without temperature, without weight, without smell. He did not cough. He did not ache. There was no tightness under the ribs where the tumor had been, no heaviness in the legs, no thin sour tiredness at the back of the eyes. He put a hand to his chest and felt nothing at all.

Oh, he thought. That's what it's like.

It was a hallway.

It stretched away from him to the left and the right, as far as he could see, and it was white. Not the white of paint, or paper, or snow. It was the white of a thing with the color taken out: a flat shadowless matte, lit from nowhere, with no seam where the floor met the wall and the wall met the ceiling. It was perhaps ten feet wide. It was perfectly straight. It went on, and on, and at the end of it, in both directions, there was only more of the same.

There were no doors.

He walked a little way, to test it. His footsteps made no sound. He walked for what might have been an hour, and the hallway did not change; it did not turn, or narrow, or end. He stopped. He walked back the way he had come. There was no mark to say he had returned to the same place, and no mark to say he hadn't.

He sat down against the wall.

"All right," he said aloud.

His voice did not echo. It simply stopped, a foot from his mouth, as though the air had no room for it.

…

Far away, on the other side of a thousand mirrors, a boy in a blue coat sat down on the rim of a dry fountain.

He did it every morning now. He was eleven, and his name was Eli, and he had taken to bringing a stool and a slice of bread. He sat in the gray square from the first light, with his chin in his hands, and watched the tall black mirror at the edge of the stones. Nobody had asked him to. He sat very still, as a child sits who has been told to wait for someone and has decided to take it seriously.

Sometimes the baker came by and sat with him. Sometimes the old man with the stick. Sometimes a girl with a fox's face and a long dark plait, who had once been faceless and now could not stop touching her own cheek. They did not talk much. They only looked at the mirror, and at the thread of silver that hung in the air beside it, brilliant and thin as a hair.

"Do you think he can hear?" said the girl one morning.

"I don't know."

"Do you think he'll come?"

"I think," said the boy, after a long time, "he's very tired."

The girl nodded.

"I think he thinks it's nice in there." He frowned. "But it isn't, is it? It's just empty."

"Yes."

"Somebody should tell him."

"Who?" said the girl.

The boy did not answer. He only shifted on his stool, and drew his knees up inside the too-large coat, and went on watching the glass. In the pale air, the silver thread hung. It flickered, very faintly, when the wind moved. It did not go out.

…

Archie took the sketchbook from his pocket without surprise.

It had been there all along. It always was. A black cloth cover, a red spine, the edges soft with handling. A pencil was clipped into the spiral. He turned it over in his hands, absurdly, as one examines a coin found in an old coat, and then opened it on his knee.

The first page was white.

He sat looking at it for a long moment. Then he lifted the pencil, and it began, without effort, to move.

It drew a girl.

She had short dark hair, brushed back behind her ears, and a wide mouth caught in the middle of a laugh. She had a tilt of the head. She had a way, he found, of lifting her chin when she was about to say something sharp. He drew the curve of her shoulder, and the line of her throat, and the pendant that lay in the hollow of it, and the brightness at the corner of the eye. It took a long time. It took no time at all.

He turned the page.

He drew a small neat man with round spectacles, bent over a book. He drew the line between the brows. He drew the pen behind the ear, and the way one shoulder rode higher than the other, and the lamp that lit his hair from behind.

He drew a young man with a shock of black hair, standing in a long grass slope with wind in his clothes. He drew him grinning. He drew him with a hammer, with his arm flung out, with the rainbow-colored light of the Great Tree on his skin. He drew the scar in his eyebrow. He drew the open palm.

Hey, Architect, said a voice, somewhere in the back of his head.

He did not stop.

…

He drew Elena.

She stood in her scarred armor in the great hall at Thornkeep, with her hand on her sword and the sorrow of ten thousand nights in her face, and a small pale light shone in her eyes, as though she had just remembered something. He drew her, and he drew the old Guardian beside her, and the children of Briarwood, and the smith's dog.

He drew a long wet street. A neon sign that flickered. A man behind a bar with a dishcloth over his arm, and a red pencil laid on the polished wood.

He drew a gray corridor in a ship in the sky, and a broken man at a table with a tomato in his hand.

He drew a Tree.

He drew it twice, and thrice, and four times, in pencil, in ink, in the sharp black stroke of a cartographer. It stood over the pages with its roots in the dark and its branches spreading, and under it, always, there were figures. Four, and sometimes five. A woman with green hands. A girl with a bow. The same four, and the same four, and the same.

The pages filled. He turned them. They did not run out.

Somewhere, he noticed, there had been a change. He did not know when. His hand had begun to ache, dully, and the ache was a comfort; it was the first thing he had felt in the hallway. He flexed it, and looked at the book, and saw that it was nearly full.

He turned to the last page.

It was white. He looked at it for a long time with the pencil resting against his lip. There was nothing left to draw. He had drawn everyone. He had drawn everything he had ever loved, and many things he had not known he did. He had drawn a rain that fell on a window in a city of ink. He had drawn the sky of a dead mirror-world, flat as a screen.

The hallway pressed in, white and silent and endless.

He closed the book.

He sat for a moment with it on his knee, listening to the silence. There was nothing in it. No footsteps. No breath. No voice calling his name from the end of a long corridor. He did not mind. He had thought he would. It was not unpleasant. It was only very large, and very quiet, and entirely free of anything that could be lost.

Then, because there was nothing else to do, he opened the book again at the first page.

It was blank.

Every page was blank.

He looked at it, and a small dry sound came out of him that was not quite a laugh. Then he lifted the pencil, and set it to the paper, and began a girl with short dark hair, and a wide mouth caught in the middle of a laugh.

…

Outside, in the world that went on, a great many things happened.

In a lab in New Hampshire, a red-haired man named Otis sat down at a console, at four in the morning, and pulled up a signal that had been flickering on the edge of his monitor for three days. It was faint and thin and regular. It did not look like a mind. It looked like a hand, moving across a page.

In a dim apartment in New York, a woman with Parkinson's looked out at the river and said, to nobody, "He's still there, isn't he?" and her daughter, who was not in the room, did not hear.

In a gray square, a boy in a blue coat sat on a stool beside a thread of light.

And in a long white hallway that had no beginning and no end, a man with square pale hands drew a laughing girl, and a small neat man in spectacles, and a young man with a hammer and a grin, and a Tree, and a Tree, and a Tree. He drew them carefully. He drew them well. He drew them over and over, one after another, without hurry, without weariness, without any pain at all.

He had all the time in the world.

He drew, and he drew, and he went on drawing.