Come In, Come In

The hall was a hundred yards long and perhaps twelve feet wide, and every inch of it was begging.

Isolde understood that on the second step. She stood just inside the glass door with her notebook open and Wick's hand in hers, and the plaster walls rose on either side in tall pale sheets, written over and over in thousands of tiny hands. Come in. Come in. It is only a hall. The words had been scratched with pins and nails and burnt sticks and, in one place at about the height of her knee, with something dark and brown that she decided not to think about. They were not neat. They crowded and sloped and ran into one another. Whoever had written them had written them for a long time, in the dark, alone, and had needed very badly to be believed.

"It's a lot of effort for a hall," said Brannoc.

"Don't speak yet."

"I wasn't going to say anything clever."

"I know. Don't." She had gone to the first panel and was reading with her finger. She read it in the Old Tongue, then in her head, and then, for the third time, aloud, in a whisper, because a rhyme sometimes shows its bones when it is made to move. It was not hidden. It was repeated every few feet, in a hundred different hands, as if the Door wished to make sure that nobody missed it.

Come in, come in, it is only a hall,

With a voice for each, and a place for all.

Answer none that you cannot see;

What calls in the dark is not for thee.

Look for the lamp in the loved one's hand;

Lanterns lead to the proper land.

Leave by the door that you did not call;

The last of the voices is least of all.

She looked at the capital letters. Her mouth went dry.

"C. A. L. L."

"Call," said Valerian.

He was standing at her shoulder. She had not heard him come. In the pale light his face was composed, but his gloved fingers were curled hard against his thigh, and when she looked at them he opened them one by one, deliberately, like a man putting down tools.

She wrote it under the sentence, in her small square hand. WHAT IS LOCKED AWAY CANNOT HEAL UNTIL SOMEONE STAYS TO CALL.

Stays to call.

It sat on the page like a dropped stitch. It meant something. It was nearly a thing she could say. But it was the kind of nearly that goes away if you look straight at it, and she shut the notebook over it and drew a breath.

"So that's the rule. Don't answer a voice you can't see."

"And look for the lamp," said Valerian. "I imagine that is how one tells the real from the false. The people who love you will carry a light."

"How do you tell a lamp from a Lantern?"

"I suspect," said Valerian, "that the Door is going to take an interest in that."

…

The first voice came at the thirtieth step.

It was a woman's, low and warm, from somewhere to the left, just beyond the corner of her sight. It did not say anything frightening. It was singing. It was a wordless tune in three notes, a lullaby with the kind of tired, patient tune that mothers hum over a cradle, and it came from the far side of the wall as if the plaster were thin as a curtain.

Wick stopped dead.

"Wick," said Isolde.

He did not answer. He had turned his face toward the sound, and his eyes were enormous, and his mouth had begun to shape something. She felt his fingers go slack in hers.

"Wick. Look at me."

"It's her."

"Wick—"

"It's her, it's the lady at the house, the one who— She used to sing that, when I was little. When it was cold. I thought I made it up." His voice cracked. He was shaking. "She's calling me. She's saying Wick, Wick, come here. She's so—"

"It's not her."

"How do you know?"

"I don't," said Isolde. "But the Door told us not to answer. So I'm not going to let you." She went down on one knee in front of him and took his face in both hands. She felt his skin was damp and very cold. "Listen. Look at me. Not at the wall. At me. Do you see a lamp?"

"No."

"Do you see anybody?"

"No. I just— I hear—"

"Then it's not for you. It's for whoever's standing there. It's a trap, Wick. It's lovely and it's a trap, and it's been laid out for you since the moment you came in." Her voice shook. She steadied it. "If she really wanted you, she'd come to the door. She'd come with a light. She'd say your name where you could see her."

The singing stopped.

"Wick," said the voice, very quietly, in a tone of such mild puzzled sorrow that she thought her heart would break for it. "Wick, love. Don't you know me?"

"Don't," Isolde whispered. "Don't, don't, don't."

He put his hands over his ears.

He stood there for a long moment, with his face screwed up and the tears running down it, a small ragged boy in a hall of whispering walls. Then Brannoc, without a word, bent down and picked him up and tucked him under one arm like a parcel, and walked on, with his one eye fixed straight ahead and his shoulders hunched against the plaster.

"I'll carry him," said the old man. "He's no weight."

"I'm not a baby," said Wick, into his coat.

"No. You're a lad who's heard his mam. I've heard mine, down here, more than once." He did not look down. "It doesn't get easier. It gets so you know what it is."

…

They did not walk together for long.

It was not a thing she saw happen. There was no moment; no door slammed. She was only conscious, after a time, of a great quietness around her, and an absence in the air like a missing tooth. She turned.

The hall behind her was empty.

The glass door was gone. The way back was a smooth plaster wall, and on it, in the same tiny hand, Come in, come in. There was no Brannoc. There was no Wick. There was no tall figure in a black coat, with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes fixed on the middle distance. There was only herself, with a notebook in one hand and a dented pot lid on her hip, standing in a hundred yards of whispering light.

"Valerian?" said Isolde.

The hall took her voice and handed it to the plaster, and the plaster passed it from wall to wall, down the long corridor, fainter and fainter, until it was only a thread.

Valerian? Valerian? Valerian?

Nobody answered.

She stood very still. Her heartbeat was in her ears. She told herself: He is here. He is in this hall. He did not leave me. The Door has simply moved us. It does that. She took out the notebook. She took out the pencil. She put them away again. And then, because she was a coward and a scholar and it was the only thing she knew, she pulled up her sleeve and looked at her wrist.

The black thread lay round the bone, thin as a hair.

It was taut.

It was drawn out straight across the floor, ahead of her, into the shadow at the far end of the hall, as though somebody held the other end and was pulling very gently. It did not tug. It simply lay there, patient and certain, and pointed.

He's alive, she thought. He's alive. He's got hold of it too.

She followed.

…

The next voice was her own.

It came in the middle of the hall, where the walls bent in a long slow curve, and for a moment she thought it was an echo. She had said something aloud; she had murmured a name; the plaster had returned it. But the voice was not saying her name. It was saying a sentence she had not spoken.

I should have come home when I said.

She stopped.

It was her own voice. It was small, level, and dry. It was a voice that she used at the Institute for reading marginalia aloud, quick and precise and slightly flat; but under it, as if she were hearing it through a wall, ran a thread of weeping.

I should have come home. I was reading about a dead man's marginalia. I should have come home.

"Stop," said Isolde.

She was on the floor. She had been there for hours.

"Stop it."

It was a Tuesday. It was a Tuesday, and I stayed, and she fell, and nobody came.

She put her hands over her ears. It made no difference. The voice was inside her head. It was inside the plaster. It was in the thread at her wrist and the stone under her boots. It rose and fell, soft and reasonable, as gentle as a nurse at a bedside. It said all the things that she had said to Valerian in the Aviary, every word, in the same order. It said them quite kindly. And then it said something new.

It's all right, Izzy.

Her breath stopped.

Izzy. It was not her voice any more. It had a lilt in it, a husk, a rough sweet cracked edge, a way of swallowing the second syllable. It was a voice from a narrow bed in a ward of the dying, with a chipped tooth and a freckled nose and a book in its lap with the cover coming off. It was a girl of sixteen who had once, at twelve, put a frog in her sister's boot, and been very sorry afterward, and had made a little speech about it.

Izzy, come on. I'm over here.

She turned.

…

Linnet was standing at the end of the hall.

She was too far for Isolde to see her face. She was only a small straight figure in a white nightgown, at the very edge of the light, with her hair coming down in a heavy plait over one shoulder and her bare feet on the stone. She was holding out her hand.

I've been waiting, said Linnet. You took ages.

"Linnet."

I'm so tired of being in bed. I want to come home. Come on, Izzy, you're nearly there.

Isolde took one step.

She did not decide to. Her foot moved; her body followed it; the whole of her, every nerve, every tendon, every hour of twelve years of reading in the dark, leaned toward the white figure at the end of the hall. She had the notebook clasped to her chest like a shield. She had her mouth open. She had a word in it, one single word, shaped and ready, and it was the only word in the world.

Linnet.

The pot lid knocked against her hip.

It was only a small sound. It was a dull, flat, tinny little clank. It was nothing. But it went through her like a bell, and into her mind, quite clear and cold, there came a picture: a round freckled face, wet with tears and set like a child's, and a dented tin disc held up in two small hands. If you're not a doll, I've got a pot lid, and I'm not afraid to use it.

She did not say the word.

She stood there, shaking, with her mouth still open, and her hand flat over it. She felt the beat of her pulse in her palm. She looked at the figure at the end of the hall, and she made herself look at it, the way you look at a wound, with attention and without mercy.

Answer none that you cannot see.

She could see her. That was the trouble. She could see her perfectly. She could see the plait, the nightgown, the thin pale arm outstretched. But she could not see the face.

And Linnet's hand was empty.

Look for the lamp in the loved one's hand.

"You haven't got a light," said Isolde.

Izzy—

"You'd have a light. If it were you. If you were really coming, you'd have brought one. You're afraid of the dark." Her voice came out thin and hard. "You've always been afraid of the dark. You pretend you're not. You make me leave the candle when I go. And you'd never, ever have walked into a hall like this without something to hold."

The figure stood quite still.

Izzy, it said, and the lilt had gone out of the voice, and the warmth. It was flat and dry and old, and very faintly amused. You're cleverer than the last one.

"What last one?"

Oh, said the voice, and the white figure took one step back, into the dark. You'll find out.

It was gone.

…

She leaned against the wall and shook.

It was a long time before she could stand. She slid down the plaster, with the pot lid digging into her hip, and sat on the cold floor with her knees drawn up, and put her forehead against them. She said nothing. She had nothing to say. She only breathed. In, out, in, out, the way she had in the dark of the cottage, with a thousand bells overhead.

I almost did.

I almost said it.

And what would have happened?

She knew. She had seen the dead man in the garden, with the flowers coming out of his eyes. She had seen the wax saints. She had a very clear picture of a Stray who answered the wrong voice, and her mind slid away from it like a hand from a hot pan.

The thread lay across her wrist.

It was still taut. It pointed down the hall.

"All right," she said, to nobody.

She got up.

…

She found the gloves first.

They lay on the floor at the end of the hall, side by side, black and scorched and quite empty, like a pair of hands that had been let go. She knew them at once. She picked them up. They were still faintly warm. Beside them, folded very small and tucked into the toe of one, was a scrap of paper torn from a notebook, in handwriting she had seen on contracts and curses: tall, narrow, upright, a little crabbed.

I heard my name. I did not answer. It was not a voice I could see. But there was a door, and I think it was the one I did not call. I am going in. Do not follow me. I will come back.

I am not lying.

She read it three times.

Do not follow me.

She folded it very small, and put it in her bodice against her heart, and looked up.

The end of the hall was a wall of dark glass, flecked with gold. Set in it, quite plain, stood a narrow black door. It was not like the others. It had no lintel and no frame. It had no handle. It was simply a rectangle of absolute dark, a hand's breadth from the floor, cut into the glass as if with a knife.

There was a name on it.

It was written in gold, in tiny elegant letters, at the height of a man's eyes. She had seen that hand before. She had seen it on a wooden board in a city of bells, with a long diagonal scar through the middle.

VALERIAN.

Behind her, a long way off, a boy's voice cried out. "Isolde!" it called. "Isolde, we've found a lamp!"

She did not turn round.

She looked at the black door, and at the tiny golden name, and at the thread on her wrist, which ran straight and taut into the dark, and she thought: Do not follow me.

And she thought: Eight of them. Eight, and every one of them did what he asked.

"I'm sorry," said Isolde, and put her hand to the door.