Morning came to Harrowfield in shades of pewter and bone.
Eleanor Vance stood at the window of the guest bedroom where she had slept, in the bed where she had dreamed, and watched the house wake around her. Pale light moved across the upstairs landing in slow, deliberate bands, the kind of light that seemed to know where it was going. Dust motes turned in the air like small blind creatures, and somewhere deep in the structure of the building, wood settled with a series of soft, arthritic clicks.
She had not slept well. The mattress was old, the springs opinionated, and the room itself carried the faintly sweet, faintly chemical smell of a place that had been closed up for a long while. That, and something else. Something under the lavender and the camphor. A cool mineral breath, as though the walls themselves were exhaling.
She breathed in through her nose. Held it. Breathed out.
Coffee first. Then the house.
She found the kitchen at the back of the hall, past a door that had swollen in its frame and required her shoulder. The range was a heavy black thing with iron feet and a hinged flap that folded down to reveal a grate full of last winter's ash. A copper kettle sat on the hob, green with verdigris at the spout. Eleanor ran a hand along the counter and came away with a fine grey dust on her fingertips. She wiped it on her jeans.
The tap coughed twice when she turned it, then gave up a rust-colored stream that ran for nearly a minute before clearing. She filled the kettle. Lit the gas with a long match that flared and smoked in her hand. While the water heated, she opened the back door and stepped out onto the flagged yard.
The air tasted of rain that had not yet fallen.
Harrowfield crouched below her at the bottom of the hill, a cluster of stone rooftops and slate shoulders gathered around a church tower. The village had the look of something held together by habit rather than hope. Beyond it, the moor rolled away in waves of brown and dull green, stitched with grey stone walls that wandered off into the mist without apparent purpose. A few thin columns of smoke rose from chimneys in the valley. Otherwise, nothing moved.
Eleanor pulled her cardigan tighter and went back inside.
She drank her coffee standing at the kitchen table, reading the note she had found tucked into the pocket of her great-aunt's coat the night before. Mathilda's handwriting was small, precise, and tilted slightly to the left, as though the words were trying to slide off the page.
"For Eleanor, when she comes. Begin with the east wing. Begin with what is locked. I am sorry. I should have told you. I should have told someone. Begin with what is locked."
Eleanor set the cup down. The porcelain made a small, definitive sound against the wood.
The east wing.
She had noticed it from the drive the evening she arrived, though noticing was a generous word for what she had done. The house had seemed, in the failing light, to lean slightly to the left, as though one side of it was tired. The east wing was the tired side. A lower roofline, windows narrower than the others, a door set deep into the angle where the two halves of the house met. She had taken it for a servants' passage or a later addition. She had not given it another thought until now.
She rinsed her cup. Set it upside down on the rack. Went to find it.
The hallway stretched the length of the ground floor, wide enough for two to walk abreast, floored in flagstones that had been worn into shallow basins by generations of feet. Portraits lined the walls in dark, heavy frames, faces Eleanor did not recognize arranged in attitudes of formal displeasure. She did not look at them closely. She had looked at them once last night, on her way to bed, and had decided that the family resemblance, if any existed, was not one she wished to explore.
She passed the drawing room. The dining room, where a table long enough to seat twelve sat under Holland covers bleached grey with age. The smaller parlour, where the air was colder and a single armchair faced the empty grate as though waiting for someone who would never return.
At the far end of the hall, where the house bent its shoulder toward the moor, a door.
She stopped in front of it.
It was narrower than the others, set deep into the stone, and painted the same dull green as the rest of the woodwork, though the paint here had cracked and lifted in long curling strips. The handle was brass, gone dark with tarnish. Above the frame, at the point of the arch, someone had carved a small symbol into the stone. It was worn nearly smooth by time and the weather, but she could make out the suggestion of a circle with a line through it. Or a wheel. Or an eye, half closed.
She reached for the handle. Turned it.
Nothing.
She tried again, putting her weight into it. The mechanism did not even rattle. It had been locked from the outside, with a key that had clearly not been used in some time, and the keyhole was so old and so blackened with paint that she could not see whether a key sat in it or not.
Eleanor crouched down and looked at the lock more closely. The paint had been applied over it, but someone had cut it away again later, a thin clean line tracing the shape of the escutcheon. That someone had wanted access. Or had wanted to know whether access was possible.
She stood. Ran her hand along the door.
That was when she felt the grooves.
Her fingertips found them first, and she thought for a moment that the wood had simply split along the grain. But grain did not run like this. Grain did not come in four parallel lines that started at the level of a grown man's knee and climbed upward, curving slightly as they rose, terminating in a series of ragged gouges just below the height of her own shoulder.
She stepped back.
The marks were unmistakable. Four of them, deep and deliberate, the wood torn rather than cut, splinters still clinging to the edges where whatever had made them had failed to pull free. They were on the inside of the door. They had been made from the inside.
She did not move for a long moment. The house settled around her with its small familiar noises, the tick of cooling iron, the sigh of wood adjusting to the day. From somewhere below, a faint draft stirred the Holland covers in the dining room, lifting a corner of cloth and letting it fall again with a soft slap.
Eleanor put her hand flat against the wood, just to the side of the deepest gouge. The door was cool. The paint flaked under her palm. Beneath the paint, she could feel the grain of the wood, and beneath the grain, something else. A density. A resistance. As though the door were not just a door, but a thing that intended to remain closed.
She withdrew her hand.
The symbol above the door watched her, too. She was not going to think about that.
She needed tools. She needed a locksmith. She needed a great many things that the village below might or might not be able to provide. But first she needed to see if there was a key.
She went back through the hall, past the portraits and the closed rooms, into the small parlour where her great-aunt's papers were still spread across the desk. The desk was a secretaire, the drop front pulled down and locked, though the lock here was a simple thing and a letter opener from the desk drawer persuaded it open without much complaint.
Inside, she found what she had half expected to find, and what she had hoped not to find.
Keys.
A row of them hung from a steel ring, each one tagged with a small disc of bone or ivory on which a location had been written in a careful, faded hand. Parlour. Cellar. Box Room. Garden she'd. And there, at the end of the ring, a tag with no writing on it at all, the ivory disc blank and yellowed with age.
The key that matched the blank tag was larger than the others. Older. The bit was a complicated thing of wards and grooves, and the bow had been worn smooth by years of handling. It looked, she thought, like a key that had been held in a closed fist for a long time.
She took it from the ring. It was heavier than she expected.
She carried it back down the hall, past the drawing room, past the dining room, past the small parlour, past the portraits with their hard eyes and their closed mouths, to the green door at the end of the east wing.
She did not put the key in the lock immediately. She stood for a moment with her hand raised, the key cold between her fingers, and listened.
The house was quiet. Not silent. There is a difference. Silence is the absence of sound. Quiet is the presence of expectation, the held breath of a room that is waiting to see what you will do next. Harrowfield, at this moment, on this morning, was quiet in the latter way. The drafts had stopped. The wood had stopped settling. Even the dust motes in the band of light from the high window seemed to have paused in their turning.
Eleanor put the key in the lock.
It fit. Of course it fit. The wards slid home with a soft, certain sound, a sound that was not a click but something more particular, a small mechanical sigh, as though the lock had been waiting for this specific key for a very long time and was pleased to see it again.
She turned it. The bolt withdrew.
The handle turned under her hand. The door was stiff, swollen into its frame after years without use, and she had to put her shoulder to it again, the same shoulder she had used on the kitchen door, the muscles protesting as the wood gave way with a groan that was almost human.
It opened inward.
The smell came out first. Not the lavender and camphor of the upstairs rooms. Not the mineral coolness she had noticed last night. Something older. Something that had the texture of damp paper and cold ash and, beneath it, a sweetness that was not sweet at all but simply the smell of things left to themselves for too long.
She stood on the threshold and let her eyes adjust.
Beyond the door, a short corridor ran for perhaps eight feet before ending at another door, this one closed. To her left, a staircase climbed upward into shadow. To her right, a doorway stood open onto a room.
She stepped inside.
The room was a study. She knew that immediately, by the shape of it, by the books that lined three walls from floor to ceiling, by the desk that sat beneath the window with its chair pushed back as though someone had just stood up from it. The chair had not been pushed back neatly. It had been pushed back hard, the legs scoring the floorboards in four short curved lines. The same four short curved lines as the door.
Eleanor did not go to the desk. Not yet.
She stood in the doorway and looked.
The books were old. She could see that even from here. Their spines were dark with age, the gilt long since rubbed away, the leather cracked and lifting in places. Some of them had been pulled from the shelves and lay open on the floor, face down, their pages fanned out as though they had been dropped in haste. Others had been pulled down and not dropped but placed, arranged in a pattern on the floor that she could not quite read from where she stood.
She took a step forward. Her foot came down on something that crackled. She looked down.
It was paper. A single sheet of it, torn from a notebook, the edges ragged. On it, in pencil, in the same small tilted hand she had seen in the note in her great-aunt's coat, a single word.
Eleanor bent and picked it up.
She read it.
She read it again.
She folded it once, carefully, along the original crease, and put it into the pocket of her cardigan, where it sat against her hip like a small, cold hand.
She crossed to the desk.
She did not rush. She moved the way she had learned to move in the shop when a customer was watching, deliberate, unhurried, giving her hands time to be steady. Her fingers found the desk lamp first. The bulb was dead but the switch still worked, and she clicked it twice before she gave up on it and drew back the curtain fully instead. The light that came in was grey and insufficient but it was light, and it fell across the desk in a pale bar that moved as the clouds outside moved.
The desk was not a desk. It was a station. There were three inkwells, two empty and one with a crust of dried black in the bottom. There was a stack of papers held down by a river stone worn smooth on one side. There was a pair of spectacles, the lenses clouded, one arm wrapped in thread where the joint had come loose. There was a thimble. There was a folded handkerchief that smelled, faintly, of lavender and something else, something older, something that lived in the backs of wardrobes and the linings of old coats.
And there was a journal.
It was not the notebook from which the torn sheet had come. That had been small, narrow, the kind of thing that fitted in a coat pocket. This was larger. Bound in dark leather that had gone the colour of dried blood where the sun had not reached it, and black where it had. The spine was creased in three places. The clasp was broken, the hasp bent, the leather around it rubbed pale by years of opening and closing.
Eleanor sat down in the chair.
It took her weight without complaint. The cushion under her was flat but it was there, and it gave a little, and the springs under it made the small soft sound that old springs make when they remember a body that used to sit in them.
She put her hands flat on the cover.
She did not open it.
She said, out loud, to no one, to the room, to the house, to whatever might be listening in the walls, "I'm going to open this now."
Her voice sounded strange in the study. Too small. Too present.
She opened it.
The first page was dated. The ink was brown but the date was legible.
14 March 1943.
She turned the page.
They came again last night. I did not sleep. I sat in the chair by the window and watched the door and they came again at quarter past three. The same as before. The same three. Tall, taller than Thomas was, though they did not stoop. Thin in a way that thin people are not thin. Thin the way a word is thin when it has been used too many times.
They stood in the doorway of the nursery and they looked at her.
Eleanor turned the page.
Her. The child. My sister's girl. I have not said her name in this house. I will not say her name in this house. Names have weight here. Names are food.
She sleeps. She has slept since they first came. She was awake when they came the first time. She was seven and she was awake and she saw them and after that she did not wake again. She eats if I put food in her mouth. She drinks if I hold the cup to her lips. She does not speak. She does not open her eyes. She breathes. That is all.
Eleanor's thumb was smudging the ink.
She lifted it.
She turned the page.
I went to the vicar. I told him there were strangers in the house at night. He said he would come. He did not come. I went again. He said he had been busy. He said the war was busy for everyone. I told him they stood in the doorway of the nursery and looked at the child. He said, kindly, that I must be tired, that grief did this to a body, that my sister was gone only two months and of course I was seeing things.
I am not seeing things.
Eleanor read the next three pages without moving.
They do not enter the room. They stand in the doorway. They stand there all night, until the light comes, and then they are gone. They do not speak. They do not move. They only look at her. I can see their eyes from where I sit. I do not know what colour they are. They have no colour. They are the colour of looking.
She does not know they are there. She is asleep. But I think she knows. I think she can feel them the way a dog feels a storm before the sky changes.
Eleanor turned the page.
Today I tried to wake her. I shook her. I called her name, not in this house, not out loud, in my head, in the garden, with my hand over my mouth. She did not wake. I put my hand on her chest. Her heart beat. I put my hand on her forehead. She was cool. Not cold. Cool, the way milk is cool when it has been standing in a pantry.
I think she is not asleep. I think she is gone. I think they have taken her somewhere and what lies in that bed is only the shape of her, the way a coat on a hook is only the shape of a person.
Eleanor closed the journal.
She opened it again.
17 March 1943.
I have not slept. I have not slept for four nights. I am beginning to forget what sleep is for. I sit in the chair and I watch the doorway and they come at quarter past three and they stand there until the light comes and they go.
Tonight I spoke to them.
I stood up. I walked to the doorway. They did not move. I said, What do you want. They did not answer. I said, Leave her alone. They did not answer. I said, She is a child. They did not answer. I said, Take me.
This time they moved.
One of them. The one in the middle. It turned its head. Not towards me. Towards the floor. Towards the boards under the rug in the hallway. Towards the cellar.
I understood.
Eleanor's mouth was dry.
She reached for the thimble on the desk and turned it between her fingers without thinking. The metal was cold. The rim was dented in three places, as though someone had gripped it too hard.
She turned the page.
It wants to be fed. That is what I understood. It wants something under the house. It wants something that lives under the boards and the stones and the earth. It has been hungry for a long time. The house was built on its mouth. That is what I think now. The foundations are its teeth. The cellar is its throat. The thing under the floor is not a thing under the floor. It is the house. It has always been the house.
And the child is not asleep because of grief. The child is asleep because the house has eaten her. Not all of her. Not yet. It is keeping her. It is chewing without swallowing. It is saving her for something.
For what?
I do not know.
I went down.
Eleanor turned the page.
I went down to the cellar. I took a lamp. I took a knife from the kitchen. I do not know what I thought I would do with a knife. The lamp would not light. The cellar is cold in a way that cold should not be. It is cold the way the inside of a mouth is cold when you breathe on it in winter. I stood on the stairs. I did not go all the way down. I stood on the stairs and I listened.
I heard her breathing.
Not upstairs. Not in the nursery. In the cellar. Under the floor. The same slow even breathing. The same breath that has been going in and out of her since the night they came.
I went back up.
I locked the cellar door.
I sat in the chair.
They did not come tonight.
Eleanor let the journal fall open in her lap. She sat for a moment and looked at the window. The clouds outside had thickened. The bar of grey light on the desk had narrowed to a stripe the width of her hand.
She picked the journal up again.
22 March 1943.
I have not slept.
They came back last night but they did not come to the doorway of the nursery. They came to the doorway of my room. They stood there. The same three. The same stillness. The same eyes that are not eyes.
I said, I am listening.
The middle one spoke.
Not with a mouth. I saw no mouth move. The words came from somewhere lower down, from the floor, from under the floor, from the place where I had heard her breathing.
It said, Bargain.
I said, What bargain.
It said, The child. The other.
I said, What other.
It said, The one who will come. The one who is not yet.
I did not understand.
Eleanor's hands were shaking.
She put the journal down on the desk. She put her hands flat on the leather. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and she did not look at the next page for a long time.
When she looked again, she read.
I understood in the morning.
I sat in the kitchen. I drank tea. I looked at the cup. The tea was the colour of the sky outside. I thought, The child is not the first. The child is not the only one. There have been others. The house has been here for two hundred years. The family has been here for two hundred years. There have been children. There have always been children.
And there will be others after.
It does not want the child. It wants what the child will become. It wants the line. It wants the blood that runs through the house like water through a pipe. It wants the door that is made of a family, that is opened by birth and closed by death. It wants someone to feed it for another two hundred years.
I said, No.
It said, Bargain.
I said, I will not give you another child.
It said, The child.
The one in the cellar. The one it has already. The one it is keeping.
It said, Give her back.
It said, Feed us.
I did not understand.
Eleanor turned the page.
Then I did.
The bargain is this. I feed it. I give it something of myself. Not blood. Not life. Something else. Something I cannot name in this book. Something I do not have a word for. It calls it remembering. It says, Give me a name. Give me a memory. Give me the thing that makes you you. Give me one thing you love and I will let her wake.
I said, One thing.
It said, One thing.
I said, And if I do this, if I give you what you ask, you will let her wake. You will let her be a child again. You will not touch her again.
It said, Bargain.
I said, Bargain.
I sat in the chair for a long time. I thought of my sister. I thought of her face. I thought of the way she laughed. I thought of the way she held her tea with both hands even when it was too hot. I thought of the day she was married. I thought of the day the child was born. I thought of the day she died, which was two months ago, which is the day the house opened its mouth.
I chose one thing.
I will not say what it was.
I have given it now.
The child is awake.
Eleanor read the next page. The next. The next. The dates were close together now. The handwriting changed.
28 March 1943.
She is awake. She is awake and she is seven and she does not remember. She does not remember the sleep. She does not remember the cellar. She does not remember me sitting by her bed. She asks for her mother. I tell her her mother is in heaven. She cries. I hold her. I am hollow.
What did I give?
I cannot remember. I know I gave something. I know I gave something I loved. I know the loving of it is gone. I know there is a place in me that is flat now, the way a field is flat after the crop has been taken off. I know I will never again feel what I felt for that thing. I know the house has it. I know it is under the boards.
I know I sold a part of my life for the life of a child.
I know I would do it again.
I know I would do it again.
Eleanor closed the journal.
She did not pick it up again.
She sat in the chair that had been pushed back hard, in the room that had been left in haste, in the house that had eaten a child and been fed a memory in exchange, and she listened to the house listen to her.
The house was very quiet.
Eleanor did not move for a long time. The lamp threw her shadow long across the floor, and the floor did not throw it back. The house held its silence the way a hand holds a glass, carefully, with the knowledge of what it contains.
She listened.
The cellar behind the locked door was quiet. The chimney was quiet. The walls were quiet. The attic above her was quiet. The whole of Harrowfield lay under a silence so complete she could hear her own pulse in her ears, and the pulse sounded like a small animal walking on a soft floor.
She listened for the scratching.
It came.
From behind the locked door. From the cellar, or from the place the cellar had been. A sound like a fingernail drawn along wood, slow and deliberate, in a line, then another line. Then a pause. Then another line. The rhythm of someone writing, or of someone drawing, or of someone testing the boundary of what they were inside.
Eleanor stood.
She stood very slowly, the way one stands in the presence of a thing one does not wish to startle. She did not look at the journal. She did not look at the window. She walked to the door of the study and she opened it and she stepped into the passage.
The passage was dark. The lamp on the table in the kitchen threw a pale wedge of yellow into the hall, and the wedge ended three feet from her feet. Beyond the wedge the dark was complete. She could smell the house here, the smell she had not been able to name, and she could name it now. It smelled of milk and stone and cold linen and something faintly mineral, the way deep caves smell, the way old churches smell, the way the inside of a doll smells when the doll has been left in water and dried out and never properly dried.
She walked down the passage toward the front door. Her stockinged feet made no sound on the boards. Her breath made no sound. The scratching made its sound, and the sound was closer now, or seemed closer, the way a sound is closer when one is moving away from it.
She came to her bedroom door.
She stopped.
On the floor, just outside the door, on the bare boards where nothing had been, where she had walked not an hour ago and seen nothing, a doll sat.
It was small. It was the size of a real child of four, or five. It sat with its legs out in front of it, and its arms at its sides, and its back against the door, as if it had been placed there by a careful hand. Its face was round. Its eyes were black buttons. Its mouth was a thin line stitched in red thread. Its dress was blue cotton, faded, patched at the elbows. Its hair was yellow yarn, plaited, the plaits tied with bits of white tape that had gone grey with age.
Eleanor stood and looked at the doll.
The doll sat and looked at Eleanor.
The black buttons did not move. The red thread did not move. The yellow plaits did not move. The doll was made of cloth and buttons and yarn and tape. The doll could not move. The doll had been placed here by a hand, or by what passed for a hand, or by what wished to pass for a hand.
Eleanor did not pick it up.
She stepped around it.
She went into her bedroom and she closed the door and she stood with her back against the door and she looked at the room. The room was unchanged. The bed was made. The case was closed. The rug was straight. The window was dark. The wardrobe was shut. The chimney was cold. Nothing in the room had been touched. Nothing in the room had been moved. The doll had been placed outside the door, not inside. The doll had been placed at the threshold.
She slept.
She did not mean to sleep. She meant to sit in the chair by the window and watch the dark and think about the journals and think about the cellar and think about the door behind which the scratching had been. She meant to be awake. She sat in the chair and she watched the window, and the window showed her nothing, only her own reflection faintly in the glass, and her own reflection looked back at her with the eyes of a stranger, and the eyes were tired, and the eyes were afraid.
She slept.
She woke to the scratching.
The scratching was not in the passage now. The scratching was in the walls. The scratching was in the floor. The scratching was in the ceiling. The scratching was on the inside of the door. It came from everywhere. It came from the boards. It came from the plaster. It came from behind the wallpaper and under the rug and inside the chimney and underneath the bed. It came in a slow, deliberate rhythm, the rhythm of fingers, or of claws, or of the small hard nails of a child.
Eleanor lay still.
She did not move. She did not breathe. She lay on her back in the bed, in the dark, and she felt the house around her like a hand, and the hand was feeling her back.
The doll on the other side of the door made a sound.
It was a small sound. It was the sound of cloth against wood. It was the sound a doll makes when it is moved, when it is shifted from one position to another, when a small weight is redistributed across small legs.
Eleanor lay still.
The sound came again. Cloth against wood. A small weight shifting. The sound of a doll that had been sitting with its legs out in front of it, and was now sitting with its legs under it. The sound of a doll that had been placed, and was now arranging itself.
Eleanor lay still.
The scratching stopped.
The house was quiet.
Then a voice. Thin. Reedy. Distant. The voice of a child of four, or five, speaking through the wood of the door. The voice was clear. The voice was unmistakable.
"Eleanor."
Eleanor lay still.
"I am hungry."
Eleanor lay still.
"I have been hungry for a long time."
Eleanor lay still.
"I would like some bread."
Eleanor lay still.
The voice stopped. The house was quiet. The dark was complete.
Eleanor lay in the bed and she thought of the journals. She thought of Mathilda's sister, who had gone into the cellar in 1941 and had not come out, and who had been found in the morning sitting in a chair, awake, with no memory of how she had come to be there, or of the night before, or of anything before. She thought of the girl who had slept for four years and woken at seven and asked for her mother and not known why. She thought of the man in the sketch, the man whose face was a grey blur, who had stood in the kitchen in 1944 and spoken to the woman who had loved him.
She thought of the thing in the cellar that was not a thing. She thought of the thing in the house that was not a house. She thought of the child at the door that was not a child. She thought of the woman in the bed that was not her, or was not only her, or was the part of her the house had taken a long time ago and had kept.
She thought of the journals and the forty entries and the forty years and the thing that walked through the walls and the thing that watched through the wood and the thing that spoke in a voice like a child and was not a child.
She thought of her father. She thought of his face, the face she could not quite remember. She thought of the way he had looked at the house, the way he had not gone in, the way he had turned the car around in the lane. She thought of what Mathilda had written, the question, what did you see? She thought that her father had seen. She thought that her father had known.
She thought that her father had run.
She thought that her father had given her the house and run.
She thought, he gave it to me. He gave the house to me the way Mathilda gave the memory to the house. He gave the house to me because he could not bear it any longer. He gave the house to me because he had to. He gave the house to me because he loved her, his mother, the sleeper, and he could not let her go, and he could not stay, and he gave me to the house the way she had given the child to the house, the way Mathilda had given the memory to the house, the way the thing in the house takes what it is given and asks for more.
She thought, I am the daughter of a man who was afraid.
She thought, I am the niece of a woman who was afraid.
She thought, I am the granddaughter of a woman who was not afraid, who went into the cellar, who came out empty, who sat in the chair for forty years and waited.
She thought, I am none of these.
She thought, I am the woman in the bed. I am the woman who has come back. I am the woman who has opened the door. I am the woman who has read the journals. I am the woman who has heard the voice. I am the woman who has been given the house. I am the woman who will decide what the house gets in return.
She thought, Mathilda gave a memory. Her sister gave a memory. The man gave a memory. They all gave something they loved. The house took it and was quiet for a while. Then it asked for more.
She thought, what will it ask me for?
She thought, what do I love?
She thought, I love the journals. I love the aunt I barely knew. I love the father who ran. I love the grandmother who sat. I love the house that took them.
She thought, I love the truth. I love the truth of what happened here. I love the truth of what the house is. I love the truth of what my family did and did not do.
She thought, I love the child. The child who was taken. The child who slept. The child who woke and did not remember. The child who died. The child who is awake now. The child who is hungry. The child who is at the door.
She thought, I will not give the child.
She thought, I will give something else.
She thought, I will give what Mathilda did not give. I will give what her sister did not give. I will give what the man did not give. I will give what the house does not want.
She thought, I will give the house the truth.
She thought, the house does not want the truth. The house wants love. The house wants the part of a life that is the most loved. The house wants the thing that is given up with the most grief.
She thought, then I will grieve the truth.
She thought, I will grieve the truth of what happened here. I will grieve the truth of the cellar. I will grieve the truth of the child. I will grieve the truth of the sleeping women. I will grieve the truth of my family. I will take the truth into myself and I will love it and I will grieve it and I will give it to the house, and the house will take it, and the house will be quiet for a while, and the child will be fed.
She thought, and if the house asks for more, I will give it more.
She thought, and if the house opens its mouth, I will feed it.
She thought, I am the woman in the bed. I am the woman who will not run. I am the woman who will not sleep. I am the woman who will not forget. I am the woman who will feed the house the only thing the house cannot take.
She thought, the truth.
She lay still.
The house was quiet.
The voice at the door said, "Eleanor."
Eleanor said, "I am here."
The voice said, "I am hungry."
Eleanor said, "I know."
The voice said, "Will you feed me?"
Eleanor said, "Yes."
She rose from the bed. She walked to the door. She did not open the door. She put her hand flat against the wood. The wood was cold. The wood was the same temperature as her hand. The wood felt like skin.
She said, "I will feed you."
The voice said, "What will you give me?"
Eleanor said, "The truth."
The voice was quiet.
The house was quiet.
The voice said, "We do not want the truth."
Eleanor said, "I know. I will give it anyway."
The voice said, "You will grieve it."
Eleanor said, "Yes."
The voice said, "You will grieve it more than you have ever grieved anything."
Eleanor said, "Yes."
The voice said, "We will take it."
Eleanor said, "Yes."
The voice said, "It will not be enough."
Eleanor said, "Then I will give more."
The voice said, "You will not have more."
Eleanor said, "I will find more."
The voice was quiet.
The voice said, "We will wait."
The voice said, "We are very good at waiting."
Eleanor took her hand from the door.
She turned from the door.
She walked to the window.