What Eli Sees – Chapter 24
“The Last Night”
On the last night in the Harwick house — December eleventh, the moving truck coming at eight in the morning — Eli could not sleep. Not because of anything present and threatening. Because of the strangeness of leaving a place that had been terrible and had also been, in some way he was still working out, necessary. The place where he had learned what he was.
He got up at midnight and walked the house.
Not all of it — he avoided the northeast corner, which was still cold despite the reduced Pale Woman, which would always be cold, which was simply the character of that air now. He walked the rest. Through the rooms that would tomorrow be empty boxes again, bare floors and blank walls, ready for Dr. Hooper’s research equipment and academic photographs and careful documentation of exactly the things Eli had spent two months simply living inside.
He stood in the parlour with the botanical wallpaper — still there, still dark green, still faintly damp in the lower corner where the teacher’s grief had pressed through the plaster. He looked at it and thought about all the stories pressed into the walls of this house, all the generations of human darkness and human love and human loss that had accumulated over a hundred and twenty-seven years.
The house was a record. Like his notebook but older and deeper and written in a language that most people couldn’t read.
He thought: I can read it. That’s what I do. I read the language that most people can’t.
He thought about his brother Michael who had lived six weeks. Who was also in this world, somewhere, in whatever form the dead took. Who he might someday see and recognise.
He went to the front door and opened it and stood on the porch in the December cold and looked at Cemetery Road for the last time. The elms bare and black against a sky thick with stars. The frost on the ground glittering. The barn quiet and dark at the back of the property.
From inside the house, very softly, he heard the voice from the northeast corner. Not his mother’s name, not anyone’s name. Just the voice, speaking something he couldn’t quite resolve into words. It sounded, he thought — he would always think this and would never say it to anyone because it was too strange — it sounded less angry than it had. It sounded less like a predator marking territory and more like something very old and very alone.
He felt sorry for it.
Not enough to stay. Not enough to override everything else. But the pity was there, alongside the fear, alongside the relief of leaving, the ordinary complex mixture of feelings that turned out to apply to ancient malevolent supernatural forces as well as to everything else.
“I’ll come back,” he said to the house. To the thing in the corner. To the three remaining dead in the walls and the one in the barn and the cold under the ground that had been cold since before anyone alive could remember. He said it quietly, in the December midnight, with the certainty of a child who does not yet know what the future holds and is therefore not afraid to make promises about it. “I’ll come back when I know more. I’ll finish it properly.” A long silence. Then from the northeast corner, through the walls and the door and the cold December air: the voice. Speaking, at last, something he could clearly make out. Two words, in that ancient hollow resonance. Two words that were not a threat and not a welcome but something that was simply, plainly true: “WE KNOW.”
He closed the front door.
He went back to bed.
He slept.