The Man Who Watched

The first sound was the sound of wood on wood.

It was a dry, patient clatter, like a hundred shutters being opened by a hundred careful hands, and it went all the way round the green. Isolde had once heard a carpenter's apprentice drop a bundle of kindling down a stair. This was the same sound, and not at all the same, because kindling does not decide to stand.

The dolls climbed down from the windowsills. They did it badly. Their joints were pegged at the knee and the elbow, and each step was a jerk and a stagger, with the head wobbling on its stick of a neck. Straw hair stood out from the seams of their caps. They dropped to the doorsteps one after another, small as cats, in their little aprons, and the candles in the lanterns beside them bent flat in the draft. None of them ran. They simply came on, in ranks, across the cobbles, with their painted faces tipped up and their bead eyes bright.

And they had begun to hum.

She knew the tune. It was a children's skipping tune, the kind that is chanted rather than sung, with a lilt that falls on the last syllable of each line like a small hand patting a shoulder. She did not catch the words. She caught only that the dolls had the same voice, hundreds of times over, thin and tuneless and sweet, and that it came from somewhere deep inside the painted wood.

The woman in the nightdress had not moved.

She stood alone in the middle of the common, in the brown light, with her hand still pressed to her mouth. And she was still smiling. Isolde saw it, with a horrible clarity, from forty feet away. The woman did not want to smile. Her eyes were wide with terror. But the smile had gone on, unchecked, the way a sneeze or a sob will go on, and her fingers were digging into her own cheek in a frantic effort to drag it down.

"Stop it," the woman whispered. "Stop. Oh, stop, please, I can't—"

The first doll reached her ankle.

It did not bite. It did not claw. It put up both small wooden hands and took hold of the hem of her nightdress, as a child will, and tugged. The woman looked down. In the same moment, ten more dolls took hold, and ten more, and the weight of them pulled her sideways and she went down on her knees in the mud with a single short cry.

Isolde turned away.

She was not proud of it. She was a person who looked at things; it was the whole of her trade. But she turned, and ran, and the cry behind her went on for much longer than she had thought it could.

…

The nearest cottage had a green door.

It stood open. She went through it so fast that she struck her shoulder on the frame, and spun, and nearly knocked down someone small and shivering. It was one of the girls in mourning black. She had her sister by both wrists, and they were both crying without a sound, with their mouths wide and their faces gray.

"Shut it," said Isolde. "Shut it, shut it—"

The sisters stared.

She slammed the door herself. There was an iron bar leaning in the corner, rusted, thick as her wrist, and she dropped it into the brackets and stood with both palms flat against the planks, panting. The wood was warm. It was warm, she noticed, as a living thing is warm. Something knocked against it from the outside, lightly, once, and then again, in the rhythm of a skipping rope.

Tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap-tap.

"They're humming," whispered the younger girl.

"I know."

"They're humming. Why are they humming?"

"Be quiet," said Isolde. "Please. Be quiet and be still."

She was surprised at how steady she sounded. It was a teaching voice, the one she had used at the Institute when a first-year panicked over a conjugation, and it had come out of her by itself. The girls obeyed it as the first-years had. They crouched side by side against the wall, holding each other, and Isolde looked around the room.

It was a farmhouse kitchen: a table, a dresser, a hearth with a black kettle. A child's cradle stood by the fire. It was empty. A loaf of bread had been left on a board, half sliced, with the knife still in it, and on every flat surface there was a candle burning in a jar. The window over the table was shuttered, but there was a crack between the slats, and she went to it on tiptoe and put her eye to the gap.

The green lay in front of her, striped with long copper light.

She counted six people still alive. The broad man in the quilted jacket had reached the well and wedged himself behind it, with his face pressed into the stone. A boy in a stable apron had climbed a hay cart. A man in a clerk's coat stood in the doorway of the chapel, shaking his head over and over. The rest were dead, or hidden, or gone.

The dolls were everywhere. They moved across the common in neat, awful, rocking lines, pausing now and then to tilt their heads, like hens in a yard. They were looking for something.

Not for us, thought Isolde. Not exactly. For something we're doing.

She did not know why she knew it. She put the thought away to be examined, as she put away every stray idea, and kept watching.

…

The broad man broke first.

He had been behind the well for three minutes. She had watched him, and she had watched the dolls pass within a stone's throw of him, humming, without a glance; and she had seen him let out a long, shaking breath, and slide down against the masonry, and begin to laugh.

It was not the laugh of a happy man. It was a helpless wheezing giggle, a hysterical sob in the shape of a laugh, and she saw him put both hands over his mouth to smother it. He could not. It leaked out between his fingers. His shoulders shook. Tears ran into his beard.

"No," Isolde breathed. "No, no, don't—"

Every doll on the green stopped.

They did it together, all at once, with a soft hollow knock. A hundred painted heads came round. A hundred red crescent mouths turned toward the well.

The broad man stopped laughing.

He did it too late. He looked at them, and at his own shaking hands, and the last gasp of it went out of him in a thin wet hah. He started to crawl. He went on hands and knees across the cobbles, in the dust, in front of the whole of the dolls' patient army, and he was saying something; she could not hear what; and he turned his head, and for a moment his eyes went past the dolls and past the chapel and rested on the roof of the barn.

"Please," he said. She heard that one. "Please. You can. Please."

The man on the roof did not move.

…

She had forgotten him.

It was extraordinary that she had. He was the only still thing in the whole of the village. He stood on the ridge of the barn, thirty feet up, with his arms folded across his chest and his feet planted a little apart, and the light came from behind him so that he was only a long black shape with an edge of fire. The wind lifted the hem of his coat. Nothing else about him stirred.

Through the crack in the shutters, in the last good light, she could see his face.

It was young. That was the first surprise. He was perhaps twenty-six, with black hair that had not seen a barber in some weeks and a hard, narrow, handsome face that would have been beautiful if it had expressed anything at all. A scar ran through the left eyebrow. His eyes were the gray of a sky before a storm. They were fixed on the broad man crawling across the common, and they held no pity and no pleasure. They did not even hold interest. They held the flat, courteous attention of a man watching a clock he has wound himself.

"Please," the broad man begged.

The dolls moved.

They went over him like water. Isolde made herself watch. She thought, afterwards, that she had done it not out of courage but out of a kind of grim honesty; if she was going to remember it, she would remember it accurately. The dolls took hold of his coat and his hands and his hair, and they dragged him down, and for a second his face was visible in the swarm, bare and bewildered and very young. He was looking at the barn.

Then it was over.

The girls were crying against her back. She had not noticed them coming to stand behind her. She put an arm around the younger one without looking, and kept her eye to the gap, and watched the man on the roof.

He had not moved.

He had not moved at all. He had watched a man die, three yards from his own boots, and had not so much as shifted his weight. There was no cruelty in it. That was what she could not get past. There was no satisfaction in his face, and no distress. He stood with his arms crossed as a man stands who has watched the same performance a hundred times and knows precisely where it will end.

He isn't surprised, she thought.

Her mouth had gone dry.

He's not even surprised.

…

It took the dolls a quarter of an hour to finish.

They found the boy on the hay cart. They found the clerk, who had not laughed, but who had said, very quietly, "Thank God," when the first row passed him by, and who was dead a moment later, though Isolde could not tell what he had done. She did not watch those. She shut her eyes. She listened to the girls breathe, and to the knocking on the door, which had come and gone and come back, and which sounded now as if a very small child were asking to be let in.

Tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap-tap.

"What are they saying?" whispered the younger sister.

Isolde opened her eyes.

She had heard it too. The humming under the door had a shape. It had words in it, children's words, flat and fast, rattled off in the breathless manner of a skipping game; and she had not been able to make them out, because she had been trying not to listen. She made herself listen now.

—count the corn and look away—

—wooden children, straw-stuffed, thin—

—wake to hunt the ones who grin.

Her skin prickled from scalp to heel.

"It's a rhyme," she said.

"What?"

"It's a rhyme. They're chanting a rhyme." She turned from the shutters. "It's a counting song. A skipping song. It's got a rule in it."

"How do you know?"

"Because that's what it's for." She said it too fast, and heard the shake in her voice, and made it slower. "Because every one of those old stories ends the same way. Nobody tells you the rule. They sing it to you, in a game, as a child, and you grow up and forget it, and then one day you walk into the wood and you wish you hadn't."

The older sister had stopped crying. She stared at Isolde with the stunned, wet, attentive face of a person who has been handed a rope.

"A rule," she said. "What rule?"

"I don't know yet. I need to hear it." Isolde swallowed. "I need to hear it all the way through, and I need to write it down."

"They'll kill us."

"Yes, if we open the door. They won't if we don't."

"How do you know?"

She did not. She had no idea. She had a feeling in the bones, as she did when a text was about to give up its grammar, and she had two frightened girls and a bar across the door and the whole of a long dusk before her. It was not enough. It was all she had.

"Because they've been pounding on it for twenty minutes," said Isolde, "and it's still there."

…

The barn was empty.

She saw it when she looked again. It was almost dark. The sky had gone the color of plum skin, with a single livid streak along the western edge, and the lanterns on the doorsteps had burned down to blue beads. The dolls were gone from the green. They had gone back where they came from, one by one, up onto the sills, and sat there in their rows with their painted faces turned to the road, as they had been when she arrived. They looked as innocent as toys.

There was no one on the roof.

Isolde put her hand flat to the shutter. For a moment she felt something loosen in her chest, and a shiver of pure relief ran down her spine. Then the green door creaked.

It was not the knocking. It was the sound of something heavy and calm leaning on the other side.

She turned her head.

The bar was still in its brackets. The latch was still down. But there was a shadow along the crack at the bottom of the door, a long dark smear of it, where the last of the light was blocked by someone standing very close. She heard a boot shift on the step. She heard breath, slow and level, that was not a doll's.

The girls had stopped breathing altogether.

"Don't open it," whispered the younger one.

Isolde did not intend to. She had her hand on the iron bar, and her weight on her heels, and every instinct she owned told her to put the furniture in front of the door. But she was a scholar, and she was twenty-one, and her sister was dying under a hill; and she heard herself say, in a very clear, dry voice, to the dark on the other side of the planks:

"I know you're standing there."

Nothing.

"I saw you on the roof. I saw you watch a man beg you for his life." She was shaking. She did not let it into her voice. "I'm not going to beg. I want you to know that. I would like to be told, if you have a moment, whether you are going to kill me."

A long pause. The shadow under the door did not change.

Then, from the other side, low and level and dry, a voice said:

"Not tonight."

It was a man's voice. It was not cruel and it was not kind. It was the voice of someone who had not spoken for a very long time and had forgotten what one did with it. It fell on the room like a coin on a stone floor.

"Tonight," said the man on the step, "you will not need me."

The shadow lifted. A boot went down the step, and another, and she heard him walk away across the cobbles, unhurried, through a village full of painted eyes that did not so much as turn.

She stood with her palm on the bar.

Tonight. The word hung in the air like smoke. He had said it as a man says a thing he knows to be a fact. And she understood, standing in the dark with a pair of strangers weeping behind her, what he had really told her. He was not going to save her. He was not going to kill her. He was only going to watch.

If she wanted to live, she would have to do it herself.