PROLOGUE
You have just opened this book. But if a thousand children opened it on the very same evening, something strange would happen: they would read a thousand different books.
One would see an adventure in it, and would spend the whole time wondering, more than anything, whether the children would make it in time. Another would mostly remember the sad man who sells little boxes, and would keep thinking about him for a long while afterwards. A third would notice that the little town looked suspiciously like their own.
And all three would be right, because nobody in the world can look through somebody else's eyes.
That is why I am not offering you a lesson. A lesson is the sort of thing someone hands you already finished. You nod, you put it away, and within a week you have no idea where it is. I am offering you a story — and one place you can push off from when you set out in life in your own direction.
* * *
Before we begin, try something. Really, do try it. You need nothing for it but your two hands.
Hold them up in front of you, as far apart as your head is wide. Now look between them.
What is there?
If you asked anyone around you, they would tell you: nothing. Air. Emptiness. They would say there can't possibly be anything there, because it is only the gap between two hands.
This book says something different. It says that the very place that looks the emptiest of all is really the most important place in the world. We just never look at it, because we are used to looking at things and not between them.
You don't have to believe me. In fact, it would be better if you didn't believe me straight away. The children in this story didn't believe it either, and they had to try it out for themselves, twenty times, and each time a little differently.
* * *
The story that begins on the next page takes place in a little town where, one autumn, something began to get lost. For a long time nobody noticed. And when they finally did, there was very little of it left.
No bridge fell down. No flood came. Nobody robbed anybody.
They were perfectly ordinary, perfectly decent people, and that is exactly why this story is worth telling. If thieves and rascals had lived in that little town, it would have been simple. We would have known who was to blame, and what had to be done about it. But they didn't live there.
And there were two children who were the only ones to notice what was going on. One had very clever hands and the other very sharp eyes, and at first they both thought that was plenty.
It wasn't.
* * *
One more thing, and then we really will begin.
The book is called Between Us, and that is no accident. It is both a question and an answer, only you can't see it yet — just as you can't see the place between your hands.
You will find the answer at the end of the book.
But if you pay attention while you read, you will work it out much sooner.
1. The Town That Lies Between
I. The Spark Lights Up
If you ever set out to find Betweenhills, look for two hills first.
The one on the left is taller, bald on top, and called Falcon Peak, because from spring to autumn falcons circle above it, and they do it with such dignity that you would think they were being paid for it. The one on the right is lower, covered all over in beech forest, and called the Crag, which is a much uglier name than it deserves.
And right between them, in the valley that slopes down to the stream, lies a handful of houses, as if someone had tipped them out of their hand and then couldn't be bothered to straighten them.
That is Betweenhills.
It got its name quite simply — it lies between the hills. Nobody in the little town had ever given it a thought, just as nobody wonders why a pencil is called a pencil. The word was there, people used it, and that was that.
But something quite different was hidden in that name too, and the people of Betweenhills only found out that autumn, the autumn this book is about.
* * *
In the middle of the little town is the square, and in the middle of the square stands the well.
It is made of stone, low, and rubbed so smooth by hands that you can sit on its rim without anything digging into you. Above it hangs a wooden arm with a pulley, on the pulley a rope, and on the rope a tin bucket. The bucket has one proper dent in its side, from the time someone threw a stone into it fourteen years ago. The culprit has never owned up.
That well had one quality that Betweenhills quietly boasted about, even to strangers at the fair. You never had to wait for it to fill. You lowered the bucket, counted to seven, pulled — and up it came, full to the brim. The water was so cold it made your teeth ache, and so sweet that people came for it from the villages round about, even though they had wells of their own.
It had been a long time since anyone thought to ask why the well was bottomless. After all, why would anyone ask about something that had always worked?
* * *
Around the square stood everything the little town needed.
There was the bakery, where from two o'clock in the morning the smell of warm bread drifted down the whole street. As a result, the children on the upper street had their dreams slightly ruined for the rest of their lives: they dreamed of bread rolls. There was the butcher's, ruled by Mr Pearson the butcher, a man whose laugh was so mighty that the windows rattled, and who had the unfortunate habit of always laughing first and only then asking what the joke was. There was a pumpkin stall, which was really a stall for everything; it was just that in October, everything happened to be pumpkins. And there was the old lime tree by the wall, with a chimney poking out of the roof above it and a swallows' nest on the chimney. The swallows had nested there for three summers now.
People there mowed one another's lawns when someone was ill. They knew how much sugar the next person took in their tea. When somebody's stove broke down, they slept at the neighbours' that night, and nobody made a fuss about it.
In short, Betweenhills was a good little town.
* * *
But since the beginning of September something in Betweenhills had been changing, and changing so slowly that nobody noticed.
It was as if the little town were losing its colours — not all at once, but the way a photograph goes grey when it has been forgotten on a windowsill. If you had come in September and again in October, you would have seen the difference at a glance. But when you lived there every day, you only ever saw yesterday's shade, and it differed from today's by such a tiny sliver that it wasn't worth mentioning.
And three things were lost.
The first: people stopped singing at the well. The women used to sing there while they waited for the bucket, even though there was never any need to wait for it. Nobody had forbidden the singing. It was just that one day nobody started.
The second: the bench outside the butcher's, where the old men used to sit of an evening arguing about the weather, had stood empty since the end of September. The men were still in town. It was only that now each of them sat at home.
And the third thing was the strangest of all: things stopped getting lost. In the old days something was always going missing in Betweenhills and then turning up at the neighbours' — a rake, a cake tin, a pair of wellies. That was because people borrowed things from one another. That autumn nothing went missing. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.
* * *
This is the story of what was lost in one little town before anybody had time to notice. And of two children who did notice.
The first of them was crossing the square at that very moment, covered in grease, hugging a pump that had been taken to pieces, and wearing the look of someone who is quite sure they know what they are doing.
2. The Boy Who Doesn't Ask
George was nine years old and had hands that couldn't sit idle even through lunch.
In the kitchen drawer, the very bottom one, which the family had handed over to him with the remark for the sake of peace and quiet, he kept a coil of wire, three springs, two rubber bands, a flat spanner that fitted nothing at all, and one screw whose origins were a mystery to the whole family. George left it there on purpose. He claimed that one day that very screw would be missing, and then everyone would see who had been right.
His workshop was really a corner of the woodshed, between the chopping block and the brooms. There stood an old table with one leg propped up on a brick, and above it, on a nail, hung a picture George had drawn himself: a little wind-powered windmill thing that was meant to turn a merry-go-round for the neighbour's cats. In the end he never built the merry-go-round. The cats, by the way, were very frightened of the whole idea.
But the picture stayed on its nail, because George had one rule, which he had worked out for himself and which nobody had ever needed to tell him:
First you have to see it in your head. Only then can you build it on the table.
He had worked it out the time he tried to knock together a little cart without drawing it first. What came out could only go left. From then on he always drew first, and the more detailed the drawing, the less wood he wasted.
* * *
That Friday afternoon the pump by the trough just outside the little town stopped working.
It was an old thing with a long handle and a bent spout, and it had been squeaking since before George started school. That day it only gave a rattling cough and did not produce a single drop.
George happened to be there. He didn't hesitate for even a second.
"I'll fix it," he said, and it was the most sincere sentence anyone in Betweenhills spoke that day. He truly wanted to fix it. Not so that anybody would praise him, but because his fingers itched whenever he saw something broken.
Granny Dora, who was standing there with two buckets, looked at him and opened her mouth.
"You know, there's a thing about that pump —"
"I know, I know," said George, and he was already bending over the bolts.
And that was the whole mistake. It was no bigger than half a sentence.
* * *
He worked on it for four hours, and it was beautiful work.
He took it apart down to the very last nut and laid all the pieces out on newspaper in exactly the order he had taken them off, so that he would know how to put them back. Then he carried the parts carefully across the square to the woodshed, where he had everything he needed for the job. He scrubbed the piston with sand and soap until it began to shine. He discovered that the leather seal was cracked like the heel of an old loaf, so he cut a new one from a strip of old leather and rubbed it with grease. He cleaned the strainer, where fifteen years' worth of sand had settled. He oiled the pivot.
And when he had carried it all back to the trough and put it together, the handle moved as smoothly as butter on warm bread.
George pumped.
He pumped a second time, and out of the spout shot a thick, clean, positively festive jet of water, the kind that pump hadn't managed for perhaps ten years.
It was the best feeling of the whole month. It lasted about four seconds.
Because then George looked down.
The water was landing half a metre to one side of the trough, straight into the grass, where it soon washed out a nice muddy hollow.
* * *
The spout, you see, hadn't been bent because it was broken. It was bent because, a long time ago, somebody had bent it — on purpose, by hand, perhaps with a hammer — so that the water would fall right into the middle of the trough, where the horses had always drunk.
While cleaning it, George had straightened it out beautifully. He had even felt proud of that.
He stood by the muddy hollow with his head completely empty, except for one sentence that kept running round and round in it: But it was fixed correctly.
Granny Dora did not come to scold him. She didn't laugh, either.
She simply, slowly, with a bucket in each hand, scooped the water up from the hollow in the grass and carried it over to the trough. Then she did it again. And again. Meanwhile the horses drank, and nobody had to explain anything to them.
It was worse than any telling-off in the world.
* * *
On the way home, George admitted to himself what he hadn't wanted to admit.
He never asked. Anybody, ever, about anything. And it wasn't because he was full of himself — George was not full of himself. It was because asking always felt like admitting something was missing. Like opening a cupboard and showing everybody that there was an empty space inside.
He would rather get something wrong twice over, so long as he could then put it right himself.
He did not sit down to supper. He went outside, even though it was already getting dark, and set off towards Falcon Peak — and he did not take the comfortable path past the shepherd's hut, the one every sensible person takes.
He had so much anger in him that the comfortable path would have choked him.
3. The Girl Who Sees Far
That same evening, two houses further down from George's, eight-year-old Luna was carrying three wooden legs up from the cellar and out into the garden.
Onto those three legs went a black metal tube, which had once been part of an entirely different instrument, and which Luna's uncle had brought her from a flea market as a joke. The joke didn't work, because Luna glued a lens into the tube, then a second one, then swapped them both for better ones, and in the end it turned into something you could actually look through.
She named it when she was six, and ever since it had been called Peekaboo, a name no grown-up could say without smiling. Luna never changed it. She maintained that an instrument with a serious name starts to take itself seriously, and that is the last thing anyone needs when looking at the stars.
* * *
In Betweenhills they said that Luna was slightly odd. Not in a bad way. Just the way people talk about someone who does something nobody else does.
She went out at night, you see. On her own, into the garden or up Falcon Peak, in her purple hoodie with the hood pulled right up over her ears, and she would stand there in the dark for as long as two hours. The neighbours were a little uneasy about it, though not one of them could have said why.
If anyone had asked her, she would have told them this:
That the light from the star you are looking at right now has been travelling towards you for so long that a whole forest has grown up in the meantime. That you are therefore not looking at what the star is like, but at what it was like. That the whole night sky is really one enormous album of old photographs, every picture from a different year, all stuck down side by side so cleverly that they look like a single picture.
Nobody asked her. So Luna never told anyone.
* * *
But there was one more thing about this girl, and Luna knew it well, though she didn't like to admit it.
She could find Jupiter's four moons in twelve seconds. Yet every morning she spent up to ten minutes looking for her own shoes, and usually found them somewhere she had quite definitely not left them the night before.
On the cellar steps there was one step that was lower than the rest. It had been there forever, her whole life, and that evening Luna tripped over it twice — once going down and once coming up — because the first time she was thinking about what she would see in an hour, and the second time about how on earth she had managed to trip the first time.
That is the other side of being able to look far. Someone who spends all their time looking far away easily gets used to living in yesterday or in tomorrow. And in the place where they are actually standing, only their body is left — and on its own, it trips over the first step that comes its way.
Her mum was always telling her to watch her step. She said it kindly, and Luna nodded, and both of them knew it would change nothing.
* * *
On the windowsill in her room Luna kept a notebook, and that notebook was her greatest secret, though nobody would have found anything interesting in it.
In it were three stars over the Crag, the same three, month after month, drawn in pencil. Beside each one was a number from one to five, depending on how brightly that star shone. Five meant the brightest light. Luna had been doing it for two years. Not because anything would come of it. Simply because she liked it.
And that autumn something began to happen in the notebook that hadn't happened in twenty-four months.
The numbers were going down.
In July all three stars had been fours. In September there were two threes and a two. In the first week of October she couldn't find the middle one at all, though she knew exactly where it ought to be, and though the sky was completely clear of clouds.
At first Luna blamed Peekaboo and gave its lenses a really good clean. It didn't help. Then she blamed herself, and spent three evenings testing her eyes to see whether she could still see properly. She could.
Only then did she work out the thing that frightened her so much that she didn't write it in the notebook.
The stars weren't growing weaker. Something was growing weaker between her and the stars. The air over Betweenhills had thickened, as if it had become harder to get through — not for her, but for the light. As if over the last few weeks the valley had been slowly closing up, letting less and less light through.
She told nobody. Anyone who is in the square four days later, when George blurts out what he has seen, will understand why.
* * *
So on that Friday evening Luna took Peekaboo and its three legs, pulled up her hood and went up Falcon Peak, because the air there was the clearest in the whole valley.
She set it up, focused, and found Jupiter, which that evening had all four of its moons lined up nicely, like buttons on a coat.
And then she heard someone scrambling up the steep slope through the raspberry bushes — noisily, angrily, and with no regard whatsoever for the fact that, at that hour, nobody had any business coming that way.
4. The First Listening
The steep slope of Falcon Peak is overgrown with raspberry bushes that scratch your calves, and twice on the way up you get lost in the bracken. George knew all that and went that way anyway.
He trudged up the hill with four hours of work still aching in his shoulders, and in his head he kept repeating the very same sentence: But it was fixed correctly.
Up on the ridge, somebody was there.
It was a girl in a big purple hoodie with the hood up, and in front of her, on three legs, stood a black tube pointing somewhere up among the stars. George knew the girl by sight, the way everybody in a little town knows everybody. Her name was Luna, and she went out at night, which in Betweenhills was considered slightly odd.
"Is that a telescope?" he asked, though it was perfectly obvious.
"That's Peekaboo," said Luna, without taking her eye from the eyepiece. "And right now I'm looking at Jupiter. Its light takes over half an hour to reach us — and it's only our next-door neighbour."
George sat down on a stone beside her. He had wanted to tell somebody about the pump. What he did not want to hear about was light flying off somewhere, because light had never yet nudged a trough half a metre to the left for anybody.
"And what's the use of that?" he asked, and it came out sounding nasty.
Luna finally lifted her head. "Pardon?"
"I mean, what's the use of looking? Looking never fixed anything." George held up his palms, which had been black with grease since the afternoon. "These fix things. Not eyes."
And that was when it started.
Luna said that hands without eyes were just two blind mice bumping into the furniture. George said that eyes without hands were just two windows for watching everything fall apart in comfort. Luna said that anyone who doesn't look doesn't even know what they're fixing. George said that anyone who only looks has nothing fixed by the end of the day and goes to bed with clean hands. Luna said something about a step she had tripped over twice, and George said something about a trough, and then they were both talking at once, and neither of them heard a single word the other said.
In the end they both ran out of breath. Arguing, you see, is hard work, and nobody can keep it up for long.
George stood up, brushed off his trousers and got ready to leave by the comfortable path, because the steep one is no fun to climb in the dark. He took three steps. On the fourth, he stopped.
He didn't stop because he was sorry. He stopped because something was gnawing at him, and it was plain, ordinary curiosity — only a small one at that. He wanted to know what was in that black tube.
He went back and said just two words: "Show me."
Luna looked at him for a moment, the way you look at a door you thought was locked. Then, without a word, she stepped aside and raised Peekaboo a little, because George was half a head taller than she was.
George put his eye to the eyepiece — and was lost for words. There was no darkness in that black tube. There was a big bright ball with stripes like a layer cake, and around it four small dots lined up in a row like buttons on a coat.
"Those are moons," Luna said quietly. "Not ours. Somebody else's. They're not in the same place tonight as they were yesterday, because they go round and round."
George didn't say oh, I see, and he didn't say all right, then. He looked and said nothing for so long that his eye began to ache.
And then the second thing happened, which was even harder than the first. Luna sat down on the stone, rested her chin on her knees and said:
"Right. Now tell me about that pump. The whole thing. From the beginning."
George talked. He talked about the piston, and about the leather seal that had been cracked like the heel of an old loaf, and about how he hadn't asked — and above all about why he hadn't asked, because asking always felt like admitting something was missing. Luna did not interrupt him once. She nodded only once, and it came at exactly the place where George needed it.
And at that very moment, in the dark air between their two faces, a tiny light the size of a cherry stone lit up.
It wasn't coming from George. It wasn't coming from Luna. It hung in exactly that empty place between them, where there had been nothing at all before, and it swayed gently, the way a drop sways at the tip of a pine needle when it has made up its mind to fall but is still putting it off.
George and Luna didn't move. They both felt that if they moved, the little light would take fright and go out.
But the little light did not take fright. It opened two tiny eyes and looked around, first left at George, then right at Luna, then left again, and then right again — and it spoke for the very first time.
What it said was a question.
"And which of you two am I?"
George opened his mouth. Luna opened her mouth. And neither of them, though one had clever hands and the other sharp eyes, knew how to answer.
* * *
In the end it was Luna who spoke first, very quietly, as if she were afraid a louder word might blow the little light out.
"You're like a spark."
The little light said nothing for a moment. Then it tried the word out quietly, to itself, carefully, the way you try on new shoes to see whether they pinch anywhere.
"Spark," it said.
And from that moment on, nobody ever called her anything else.
5. The Great Web
Luna had given her a name, but Spark still had no answer to her question about which of the two of them she was. Spark didn't mind in the least. She put the question aside somewhere, the way you put aside something you don't have room for yet, settled into George's open palm, and asked about something else.
And then something else.
And then another four hundred things, because Spark had been in the world for only a few hours and didn't know anything about it yet.
She asked all the way down from Falcon Peak, until the children stopped on the slope just above the first roofs.
She wanted to know why a stone was cold and George's palm was warm, when both of them lay under the very same sky. She wanted to know what shoes were for. She wanted to know what happens to the wind when it stops blowing, and whether it hurts. When Luna explained that the wind doesn't just disappear, it only moves somewhere else, Spark thought about it so hard that her light turned blue for a moment.
She learned incredibly fast. A word only had to be said once and it stayed with her. But some things wouldn't sink in even the fifth time — and they were exactly the ones that seemed simplest to the children.
"This is my hoodie," said Luna.
"Why yours?"
"Because I'm wearing it."
"And if you gave it to George, whose would it be then?"
Luna opened her mouth, closed it again, and decided to think about it tomorrow.
Worst of all was the phrase somebody else's. Spark had heard it from George, who had mentioned somebody else's dog, and ever since then she had kept coming back to it, the way a tongue keeps going back to a broken tooth.
"You keep saying me and the others," she said at last. "What are the others?"
"Well... everyone else. The other people."
"Other than what?"
George scratched his head and discovered that he had neither a screw nor a scrap of wire to answer that with. And then Spark rose from his palm, floated up in front of the children's faces, and said something that changed the whole night.
"I'd rather show you. Close your eyes."
* * *
The children closed their eyes. Through their eyelids they felt the tiniest touch, as light as the dust from a butterfly's wing settling on a cheek.
"Now open them."
They opened their eyes, and Betweenhills was gone.
Well, not gone. It was there, exactly where it had always been, with all its roofs and chimneys and fences. Only now, all across the little town, up and down, criss-cross, from window to window, ran threads of light.
Most of them were as thin as a hair, and they glowed warm and honey-coloured, the way the wick of a paraffin lamp glows just before you turn it up. They were not stretched straight like strings. They sagged slightly, exactly the way a spider's web sags when the dew settles on it at dawn. Some were almost as thick as a rope, and those were the brightest of all. Others were no more than a sort of shimmer in the air, the kind you only notice once you stop looking straight at it.
And they moved. Every so often a little bead of light ran along a thread, from one end to the other, the way a child lets a bead slide down a slanting string.
George forgot to breathe.
From the bakery window a thread ran to the house opposite, and it was as thick as a thumb. From the pumpkin stall in the square, threads fanned out in seven directions at once. One thread went from the roots of the old lime tree up the wall and ended in the swallows' nest on the chimney. One stretched from the stone well away towards the Crag and vanished into the dark. And one — very thin, but alive — hung in the air exactly between George and Luna, and it didn't begin in either of them.
"It... doesn't start anywhere," said George hoarsely.
"It doesn't," Spark agreed. "A thread never belongs to just one person. That's why one person on their own can never see it."
Luna turned right round, then once more, and asked the question that she, of all people, had to ask.
"How far does it go? Beyond the valley? Beyond the hills? Beyond the horizon?"
Spark was silent for a moment.
"I don't know," she said. "I haven't found the end anywhere yet."
* * *
Below them, down at the start of the street, Mr Sparrow the baker came out of the bakery. It was half past two in the morning, which is a perfectly ordinary moment for a baker to step outside for some air.
The children raced down the hill so fast and so carelessly that George fell over twice.
"Mr Sparrow! Look! Look up, between the lime tree and the chimney!"
The baker obediently looked up, screwed up his eyes, and had a good, honest look for a while. Then he shrugged, smiled the way tired, kind people smile at half past two in the morning, and said that he could see a lime tree and a chimney, and that the children should have been asleep long ago.
When the door had closed behind him, George turned to Spark.
"Why couldn't he see it?"
"Only children can see me," said Spark. She didn't say it sadly. She said it the way you say things that are simply true. "And they can see the threads too, when I show them. I don't know why. Do you?"
George didn't know. Neither did Luna. But somewhere at the back of both their heads a strange, uneasy feeling had settled, and for the rest of that night they couldn't shake it off.
* * *
Because when the children stopped looking at what was shining and began to look at what wasn't, they saw the other half of the truth too.
The threads were broken here and there. The ends dangled in the air, lifeless and grey, like the ropes left hanging from a broken swing. Above some streets there were only wisps of emptiness. And three houses at the upper end — perfectly ordinary houses with perfectly ordinary people inside — weren't shining at all. Not one thread. Not even the thinnest.
Nobody had snapped them. That was the worst part. The threads had simply, slowly, over years and years, worn thinner and thinner all by themselves, until there was nothing left of them.
George looked for a long time at the darkness between the houses. And then he said something he wouldn't have said six hours earlier for love or money.
"This has to be fixed. Not just me. Us."
Luna looked at him and said nothing, because she had noticed the word.
From then on, George never said me and the others. He said us — and it sounded different.
6. Spark's Rule
There are two ways to believe something strange. The first is that somebody tells you and you nod. The second is that you try it out yourself, properly, twenty times, and each time a little differently, until there isn't so much as a fingernail's worth of doubt left.
George was a boy who believed things only the second way. So first thing on Saturday morning he went to his room, took out his science notebook, opened it from the back at a clean page, and wrote across the top in big capital letters: EXPERIMENTS WITH SPARK.
Luna rolled her eyes at the heading and then sat down beside him, because the truth was that she was every bit as interested.
* * *
Experiment number one. George stood by the window, Luna by the door, and Spark in the middle of the room. Distance: four steps. Spark shone nicely, like a candle behind glass.
Experiment number two. George went out into the hall and shut the door behind him. Out there he stopped paying attention to what Luna was doing and started getting ready for the next experiment. Luna, meanwhile, was thinking about what they would try after that. Spark at once faded to a wavering little line, as thin as an ant's hair.
"So it's only about distance," George wrote down, quite pleased with himself. He was sure of it for exactly eighteen minutes.
Because experiment number three smashed that conclusion to bits. They were sitting on the same bed, shoulder to shoulder, as close as two people can sit — and arguing about whether the dog on Little Street was called Biscuit or Biscuits. They argued foolishly and stubbornly, each of them listening only to their own sentence.
Spark faded just as if George were out in the hall again.
"That doesn't make sense," said George. "We're right next to each other."
"Our bodies are next to each other," said Luna slowly, the way people speak when they say a thought out loud and only at the last word find out that it was a good one. "But nothing else is."
* * *
From Saturday to Monday they wrote everything down.
They found out that Spark didn't need them to talk. When they mended an old bicycle together without a word — one holding, the other tightening the screws — she glowed quite calmly. They found out that she didn't care whether they agreed: when Luna and George honestly and politely disagreed about whether the universe has an end, Spark was brighter than ever before.
And they found out the most important thing of all. George wrote it in capital letters right across the page, so that it wouldn't get lost among the other notes:
SHE DOESN'T SHINE BECAUSE WE'RE CLOSE. SHE SHINES BECAUSE WE LISTEN.
It was enough for one of them to truly listen to what the other was saying — not just wait for them to finish, but really listen — and Spark blazed up until you could feel her in your palm, as warm as a pebble that has lain in the sun all day.
"Why are you writing it down?" asked Spark.
"So that it isn't just a feeling," said George. "A feeling changes by the next day, and you don't even notice. But when you've got it written down and it works twenty times in a row, then you know for certain. And that's a completely different thing."
Spark thought about that for a long time. Then she asked something that got George properly tangled up: "And if you hadn't written it down, would it stop being true?"
By supper he still hadn't found an answer.
* * *
On Monday they tried once more, this time with a grown-up.
Luna chose her mum, because Mum always listens right to the end, and to Luna that seemed the very best thing you could hope for. She sat down with her at the table, and George pulled a chair up next to Luna. He laid his notes on the table. Luna told her mum about the threads, about Spark and about Mr Sparrow the baker. When she got to the experiments, George showed Mum what they had written down and what they had tried more than once.
Mum really did listen right to the end. Then she brushed the hair back from Luna's forehead, smiled, and said she wished she had an imagination like that. And that the soup was ready.
She didn't laugh. But she didn't believe it either. And Luna discovered that between not laughing and believing there is still a good long way to go, and that her mum had stopped right at the start of it. Some grown-up would have to go the whole way one day. So far, not one had.
On the way up the stairs Luna said one sentence to George that sounded perfectly ordinary and yet decided everything that came afterwards.
"Let's keep it between us for now."
And at the words between us Spark blazed up so brightly that the shadow of the banisters flew across the wall. She didn't know why herself. She only knew that the sentence tasted like home.
* * *
On Tuesday morning the sky over Betweenhills was the greyest the children could remember. When Spark showed them the threads, the ones over the upper street were a little thinner than they had been on Saturday.
Along the road from the ford came a cart, pulled by a tired brown horse.
7. The Grey Boxes
The cart came into Betweenhills on Tuesday, a little before noon, and there was nothing about it worth noticing. It was pulled by a tired brown horse, a load was heaped on the back under a tarpaulin, and at the front sat a gentleman in a grey coat, with his hands folded in his lap and a look on his face as if he were apologising in advance for something.
He stopped in the square, took off his hat and introduced himself so quietly that people had to ask him to say it again.
"Shelley. Sorry. I know nobody asked me to come."
Then he lifted just one thing down from the cart, set it beside the well and stepped back three paces, the way you step back from a painting in a gallery.
It was a box.
From the outside it looked dull — plain grey boards, nothing worth a second glance. But Mr Shelley lifted the lid, and the people who had gathered round by then all made the same sound at once, something between an ooh and a gasp.
Inside, it was lined with something soft and warm that smelled of freshly washed linen. A pillow lay in one corner. On one wall a window had been painted, and in the window was painted the sea — a real, proper sea, with three white birds and the kind of light on the water that nobody in Betweenhills could remember seeing in October. And beneath the painted window was a small, real window with a wooden shutter held shut by a peg, just big enough for a hand to pass through.
"I don't want to trouble anyone," said Mr Shelley. "If you'll allow me, I'll say just one sentence, and then I'll be quiet."
Nobody objected.
"Inside, nobody laughs at you."
* * *
George and Luna pushed their way to the front, and Spark floated above their heads like a tiny star that none of the grown-ups had noticed. She showed them the threads weaving back and forth across the square.
George looked at the box, and something about it didn't add up, though at first he couldn't say what. Then, after a moment, it dawned on him — and it was worse than he had expected.
Through those grey walls there ran not a single thread. Not a snapped one. Not a thin one. None at all. All around the box the air was as smooth and empty as glass.
And George did what every nine-year-old boy does when he has just discovered something important. He blurted it out.
"Don't buy it! That box cuts the threads! They run from house to house, and some have already gone, and if you sit inside that, then—"
He didn't finish.
Mr Pearson the butcher laughed first, because Mr Pearson always laughed first. Then two men from the pumpkin stall joined in, and finally a few more people who hadn't properly heard what they were laughing at — because laughter is catching, like yawning, and it doesn't ask for a reason. Somebody said that Georgie reads too many books. Somebody else asked whether he could see the threads after supper too.
It lasted perhaps fifteen seconds.
Luna saw George's ears turn red, and she saw something worse: three threads that ran from the boy to the people in the square had thinned, while the laughing went on, to a single hair. Above them Spark dimmed so suddenly that Luna raised her hand without thinking, as if to catch her.
And then Mr Shelley spoke.
"Sorry," he said, and he said it quite loudly, which for him meant an ordinary voice. "Sorry, but I don't laugh at people."
The square went quiet.
Mr Shelley turned his hat round in his hands three times. It looked as if it cost him an enormous effort to speak in front of so many people at once.
"I never laugh at anyone. Not at children, not at grown-ups, not at anything strange. Sorry if that sounds odd." He turned to George and bowed his head slightly, the way an older person greets a younger one he is taking seriously. "You said threads, didn't you? You needn't explain it to me if you'd rather not."
George opened his mouth and nothing came out. The one listening to him now was the very man who was selling exactly what George had wanted to warn everyone about.
It was the most tangled feeling he had ever had.
* * *
The first box was bought by Mrs Rowan from the upper street, and nobody could blame her.
Eleven months earlier, Mrs Rowan had fallen out with her neighbour over a plum tree that grew exactly on the line between their two gardens, and since that quarrel they hadn't said so much as good morning to each other. For eleven months she had walked past the same gate, and for eleven months she had looked at the ground as she did it. And that is a very long time to spend looking at the ground.
Mr Shelley helped her carry the box home, and on the way he apologised twice for how heavy it was.
By evening, nine of them stood by people's doors. By morning, seventeen.
And here one thing needs saying, one that is often forgotten in stories like this: those people were not stupid. They were the very same people who mowed one another's lawns when someone was ill, and who knew how much sugar the next person took in their tea. It was only that it had been grey outside since September, that drawing water from the well was harder work than it used to be, that everyone had something left unsaid with everyone else — and then, all of a sudden, somebody turned up with a place that was warm and quiet and had a painted sea in it.
If Betweenhills had been a cheerful place, Mr Shelley wouldn't have sold a single box.
* * *
That night, between Tuesday and Wednesday, George couldn't sleep, and he went out to the square.
The grey boxes stood by the doors like nine silent dogs. The moon shone on them, and they didn't gleam, which was somehow unpleasant in itself.
George crossed the square, and that was when he heard it.
It was the sound of his own shoe. It struck the cobbles — and a moment later the sound came back, a little quieter, from somewhere between the houses.
An echo.
In all of George's life, there had never been an echo in the square in Betweenhills. Sound there had always been swallowed up — by plaster, by the awnings over the stalls, by open windows, by people. Now there was something for it to bounce off.
George took one more step, just to check. The echo came again.
He held out his hand and Spark sank into his palm. She glowed so faintly that his hand cast no shadow on the cobbles. Luna, meanwhile, was asleep at home.
"Did you hear that?" he whispered.
"Yes," said Spark. "What is it?"
George searched for an answer for a long time, and in the end he found one that gave him goosebumps right up to his elbows.
"It's a sound that had nobody to pass itself on to. So it came back."
8. The Well Falls Silent
The stone well in the square in Betweenhills had one quality that the little town quietly boasted about, even to people who had only come for the fair: you never had to wait for it to fill. You lowered the bucket, counted to seven, pulled — and up it came, full to the brim, with water so cold it made your teeth ache and so sweet that people came for it from the villages round about.
The following evening, Granny Dora counted to seven. Then to ten. Then to twenty, though she had known for ages that it wouldn't help.
The bucket came back half empty, and at the bottom you could see a few grains of sand.
Six people stood around the well, and not one of them said a word. That was the strangest thing about the whole business. If they had started grumbling, or at least wondering out loud, it would only have been bad news and nothing more. But they silently picked up their buckets and went home as if nothing had happened — and some of them went straight to the grey boxes that had been standing by their doors since morning.
Just then George and Luna came running across the square.
* * *
The children had been running about Betweenhills since morning. They had knocked on doors, stopped people in the street, tried everything they could think of — and with every hour it grew clearer that this was getting them nowhere. All the while, Spark glowed on George's palm about as brightly as a glow-worm in the rain. When the two of them stopped for a moment and truly listened to each other, she came back to life. When each of them began thinking only about their own plan, she faded again.
"Granny," Luna blurted out, "you have to look at something. Please."
George opened his hand.
Granny Dora leaned in, screwed up her eyes, and looked for a long, long time at the boy's empty palm. The children held their breath.
"I can't see anything," she said at last.
And then she did the thing that made her, at that moment, the most important grown-up in the whole little town. She didn't laugh. She didn't say oh, go on with you, she didn't say what an imagination you have, she didn't even say that's quite enough now. She only wiped her hands on her apron and added:
"Just because I can't see something doesn't mean there's nothing there. I can't see a single musical note, and yet I can hear the song."
At those words Spark glowed so brightly that George felt a warm tickle in his palm. It was the first time she had ever lit up because of something a grown-up said.
"Only children can see me," said Spark quietly. "I don't know why. Do you?"
Granny Dora, of course, didn't hear it. Luna repeated the question out loud, and Granny just shrugged, which from her was the most honest answer in the world.
* * *
"How many threads still lead on from Betweenhills into the valley?" George asked.
Spark gazed out over the rooftops, up towards the two hills, and counted for a moment.
"Four," she said. "There used to be hundreds. Now four are holding, and they're getting thinner. When the last one snaps, the little town will be on its own."
George would have loved to dash off somewhere that very moment, though he had no idea where. Luna knew that feeling, so she put a hand on his shoulder and turned to Granny Dora.
"Granny. Tell us everything you know about this well."
Granny Dora sat down on the stone rim, the way a person sits who is about to talk for a long time, and began the way she always began — with somebody else.
"My grandmother used to say that this well has no bottom. And she would add straight away that this only holds for whoever draws water for the whole street. For anyone who draws it only for themselves, it's as shallow as a puddle after rain. I never once put it to the test in all my life, because in Betweenhills water was always drawn for the whole street. This autumn is the first that has really tested that saying."
Granny Dora did not say so draw water for the others. She said nothing at all that could be written up on a blackboard. She simply went on talking.
"And she used to say something else, too: that this valley once rested on four things, which people here did as naturally as we now wash our hands. Down by the ford, where the village of Three Words is now, every single thing was called by its proper name, out loud, because without that, they said, you can't even build a fence. Up at Fogmound, people learned to wait with their heads right here and not somewhere else. In Smokeby, every house had its own bucket and kept watch over exactly the patch it could see from its doorstep. And once a year people climbed Falcon Peak, to look properly far away and then, straight afterwards, properly close, because anyone who sees only one of the two, they said, sees only half."
She grew thoughtful, and her next sentence was the saddest in the whole story.
"And then people simply stopped doing it. Not all at once. The way you stop singing while you work — nobody forbids it, you just find out one day that you've been living in silence for years."
Luna looked at Spark, and Spark nodded. Four places. Four threads. It fitted.
* * *
"And Mr Shelley?" asked George, and you could hear in his voice who he would most have liked to blame.
Granny Dora gave a faint smile.
"I once knew a man who sold umbrellas. People grumbled that he brought them the rain. He didn't. He just turned up exactly when it was already raining, and that's why he sold so many."
George thought for a moment about whether that ought to be enough for him. It wasn't — and at the same time it was perfectly clear to him that this was quite a normal feeling after one of Granny Dora's stories.
* * *
They decided that same evening, and they decided quickly, because by then Spark had grown so pale that George had to cup both hands around her just to be able to see her at all.
All four places lay in one valley. From the ford to Fogmound was an hour's walk, from Fogmound to Smokeby another, and from just below Smokeby an old path led up Falcon Peak that everybody in Betweenhills who had ever gone mushroom-picking knew. It could all be done in a single night. One long, windy October night.
Granny Dora fetched a coil of wire from her house, and Luna's Peekaboo too, which Luna had left with her that morning so she wouldn't have to carry it all over town.
Granny Dora didn't say don't go, and she didn't say go either. She said this:
"I'm not going anywhere till morning. I'll light my lantern and set it on the rim of the well. As long as it burns, you'll know the way back. And when the five o'clock bell rings, I want to hear two pairs of shoes on the cobbles."
Luna slung Peekaboo over her shoulder. George stuffed the coil of wire into his pocket, because boys like George never set off anywhere without a coil of wire. Spark rose into the air exactly midway between George and Luna, and she was a little brighter than she had been an hour before.
When they were already at the edge of the square, Granny Dora called after them. She didn't call out any advice. She called out a question.
"Children! Do you even know what a knot is?"
Both of them stopped. George was already opening his mouth, but Granny Dora carried on.
"A knot," said Granny, bending over the lantern, "is a place where two different things hold on to each other. One thing alone can't make a knot. No matter how strong it is."
And then she struck a match, and in the square in Betweenhills a light began to glow — the only light that night that the grown-ups could see too.
9. The Village That Lost Its Words
II. Four Knots
From Betweenhills it's half an hour's walk down to the ford, and that night it took forty minutes, because the wind was blowing.
They walked shoulder to shoulder, like two people carrying one heavy bag. Spark flew between them. Whenever both of them sank into their own thoughts, she grew so pale that the path under their feet went dark.
Behind them, up in the valley, a single light was burning in the square. Granny Dora's lantern.
* * *
In Betweenhills, the village by the ford was called Three Words, and nobody remembered any more what it had been called before.
The name hadn't started out as a joke. It came about the way all exact names come about — people simply described what they saw.
The children had expected a dark, sleeping village. Instead, from the stream they saw the light of some twenty lanterns, and heard a racket that has no business being made anywhere in the world at night.
They ran down.
* * *
Across the stream there had once been a wooden footbridge. Now two broken beams stuck out of the water, and the rest had been carried off somewhere downstream.
On the bank lay wood, all ready — fine, straight wood, enough for three footbridges. Twenty people stood there, men and women, with saws and hammers. All of them had been up since the afternoon, and all of them wanted very badly to build that footbridge.
And they couldn't.
George watched two men lift a thick beam and carry it towards the water. A third man waved at them and shouted something. The men put the beam down. The third man pointed somewhere off to the left. The men lifted the beam, carried it four steps, and put it down again. Then the woman with the lantern came running over and pointed to the right, then up, then right again. The men looked at each other.
And then they set the beam back on the pile, exactly where they had picked it up five minutes before.
"Why are they doing that?" asked Spark.
Luna didn't answer. Luna was listening.
* * *
Because those people had been talking the whole time. They only had three words to do it with.
"Yeah," said the man at the saw.
"That," said the second man, pointing at the wood.
"That!" said the man at the saw, more firmly, pointing at some other wood.
"No," said the woman with the lantern.
"Yeah, yeah. That," said the man at the saw, and he jabbed a finger into the air, as if he wanted to pin the word down in the right place.
Nobody laughed, and nobody got cross. It was just that for five hours now, that footbridge had refused to get built.
Yeah. No. That. Three words that fit in your pocket and can say almost anything — and at the same time can't say a single thing that has any shape to it.
* * *
Spark rose higher and looked for a while over the people's heads. Then she showed the children the threads and said something that sent a shiver down George's back.
"The threads are here. They're quite thick. But nothing travels along them."
And it was true. Over Three Words hung a lovely, thick web — these people were fond of one another, they were close, they had been working hard side by side for five hours — only not a single little bead of light was running along those threads. They were empty roads. Roads with no carts on them.
"What's the use of a bridge," said Luna quietly, "if nothing ever crosses it?"
* * *
How had it happened?
Nobody had forbidden anything. Nobody had taken the words away from those people. They had put them aside themselves, one by one, over many years, and always for a sensible reason.
The word ravine was a mouthful, when you could just say there. The word overhang was only known to carpenters, so why teach it to children? Nobody liked the word difference, because it sounded as if it set somebody apart. And words like first and only then slipped away almost unnoticed, because surely everybody knows what comes first.
Year after year the pocket got lighter and lighter. It felt like a relief.
Until one October day the water took the footbridge, and twenty clever people with twenty lanterns found that they had wood, they had hands, they had the will — and they had no way of telling each other which beam goes where.
* * *
George had been watching all this go round in circles, and his fingers had been itching for ages.
He could see the whole thing. He could see that the thick beam belonged across, not along. He could see that those two boards had to be nailed together first, and only then carried to the water. It was finished in his head, exact and clear, like the picture hanging on its nail in the woodshed.
All they needed was to be told.
But how, when they only used three words? George rolled up his sleeves, walked in among the people and began to point.
10. That, Yeah and No
In fairness to George, it started off wonderfully.
He stood in the middle of the bank, clapped his hands to make everybody look at him, and began to point. With one finger, with both hands, with his whole body. He pointed at a thick beam, then at a spot by the water, then bent his back into the shape that was supposed to mean across, and when nobody understood that, he lay down on the grass and showed them with his own body.
And the villagers of Three Words, who had been up since the afternoon and would by then have obeyed a goat, if the goat had a plan, began to do what he wanted.
"Yeah!" they called to one another as they carried the wood.
Within twenty minutes four beams lay across the stream. It looked like a footbridge. George stood on the bank, covered in mud, so proud of himself that he felt warm even in the wind.
* * *
And then it all fell in.
It didn't fall in because the beams were bad, or because George had put them in the wrong places. It fell in because one man at the far end let go of his end before the others had nailed on the first board — and he didn't let go out of spite or laziness. He let go because nobody had told him first and only then.
Fingers can say there. They can't say only then.
There was a loud crack, the four beams slid slowly and almost with dignity into the stream, and the water carried them a little way downstream, where they caught in the bushes. Nobody was hurt. That was perhaps the only thing that had gone well.
George stood on the bank and stared at the empty place where, a moment ago, there had been an almost finished footbridge.
The villagers weren't cross. That was worse than if they had been. They got to their feet, dusted off their knees, and one by one sat down on the pile of wood. They had more than five hours behind them and were at the end of their strength. Nobody said they were giving up. It was just that nobody picked anything up any more.
"No," said the woman with the lantern, very quietly, and it wasn't clear whether she was saying it to George, to the bridge or to the night.
Spark, between the children, faded to a grey smudge.
* * *
George sat down on the pile of wood and said nothing.
Luna didn't sit down beside him, and she didn't tell him she had seen it coming, although she had. She did something else entirely.
She bent down, picked a board off the pile, walked right across the bank to the man at the saw and held it out to him.
The man took the board, because he was used to taking whatever he was handed.
"Timber," said Luna.
The man looked up.
"Tim-ber," Luna repeated, and patted it with her palm.
And then something happened in that man's face that George never forgot for the rest of his life. It wasn't surprise. It was recognition — exactly the look of someone who opens an old box and finds a thing he thought for years was lost for ever, and it had been lying there all the time, under the things on top.
"Timber," said the man.
Spark leapt like a flame in a draught.
* * *
Because those words had never been lost.
Many of the people in Three Words still had them inside, packed away somewhere at the back like dishes that never get used. For years they hadn't taken them out, until they forgot they still had them. And the ones who had never heard them were learning them now.
Luna handed them over one at a time. And always tied to the thing they happened to be holding at that moment, because a word you can't get hold of soon gets lost a second time.
"Notch," said Luna, and pointed at the notch.
"Notch," said the man at the saw, and George saw him grip the wood more firmly at that word.
"Across. Along." Luna laid one stick on the bank along the stream, and another one crossways over it. "This is along. This is across."
"Across," said the woman with the lantern. She walked round the cross of sticks and looked at it again from the other side, to be sure. "Along."
* * *
"Why does it work for you, when it didn't for me?" George asked from the pile of wood. He didn't ask it crossly. He really wanted to know, and that was the best sentence he said all evening.
Luna thought about it, and answered the way someone answers who is only just working it out.
"Because a finger can only point at one thing, and only for one second. When you put your hand down, there's nothing left. But a word goes home with the person. They put it away, and take it out again tomorrow, when you're not standing there any more."
Spark turned a full circle above them and asked the question that had just occurred to George too: "So a word is a tool?"
"It's the best tool anyone ever invented," said George slowly. "And I left it in my pocket all evening."
Then he got up, brushed off his trousers and went to fetch another piece of timber.
* * *
Dawn was still many hours away.
It was still two hours until all thirty words had been given back.
11. A Bridge of Thirty Words
The second time, it went more slowly, and it turned out better.
George no longer pointed. George talked. And since the people of Three Words understood only the words Luna had managed to hand back to them, he had to put every sentence together out of what they had. It was like building with blocks that come in only three colours. You couldn't grumble, you couldn't hurry, and you couldn't skip anything.
"First the notch. Only then the timber."
"Beam across. Not along. Across."
"You hold. Don't let go. I'll say when."
That last word — when — Luna had given back to them a quarter of an hour before, and of all thirty words they had got back, it was the most useful. Suddenly it was possible to agree on what should happen later, and that is something a finger can't do, not even by accident.
* * *
And then came the very thing they had really come for, though neither of them had known it beforehand.
The man at the saw bent over a beam, looked at it for a moment, and said, all by himself: "Crooked."
Luna lifted her head. She hadn't given him that word.
"Crooked," the man repeated, and pointed at the beam, which really was a little bit crooked, and which would otherwise have ended up in the bridge. "Crooked. No."
From that moment on, the children no longer had to drag the words out of them. The people of Three Words began to search for words themselves — they rummaged in their own heads as if in an old trunk, took the words out one by one, dusted them off and tried them to see whether they would still hold. Some words came back at once. Others took a lot longer to dig out.
The young woman with the plait remembered how to say too short, and she was so happy about it that she said it three times in a row.
* * *
When they finished the bridge, it was still night.
It wasn't beautiful. It was a seven-metre stretch of wood, solidly nailed together, with handrails of trimmed tree trunks on both sides. When George stepped onto it for the first time, the wood creaked so loudly under him that the whole bank held its breath.
It held.
And then twenty people laughed all at once with relief.
The man at the saw walked across it. The young woman with the plait walked across. Two boys went across — boys who until then had just stood about for hours, because nobody had been able to tell them what to do.
And Spark, who had been floating above the children's heads the whole time, suddenly grew so bright that George and Luna could see the bridge even without the lanterns.
"Look," she said.
* * *
The threads above Three Words hadn't changed. They were just as thick as before, just as dense, and they ran between the very same people.
Only now something moved along them.
A little bead of light ran out from the man at the saw, raced along a thread to the woman with the lantern, and vanished somewhere near her shoulder. A moment later another ran out, then three at once, then so many that they couldn't be counted, and the whole village by the stream began to look like a town where all the streets had lit up at the same moment.
"The roads aren't empty any more," said Luna, and she stopped short at her own sentence, because it sounded grander than she had meant it to.
Spark sank down onto George's palm, and he noticed that her light was once again throwing the shadow of his hand onto the boards.
"First knot," said Spark. "It holds." And then she added the thing George stored away in his head that night, the way he used to write his experiments down in his notebook: "The more exactly you can say it, the more beautifully you can build it."
* * *
When the children were getting ready to leave, the woman with the lantern stepped into their path.
She wanted to tell them something, and you could see her searching inside herself — her lips moved without a sound, twice she began and twice she stopped. Luna didn't hurry her. She waited.
"I… am…" The woman frowned, turned the lantern round in her hand, and tried again. "My name is Hannah."
She said it carefully, the way you say something you haven't said out loud for a long time. Then she said it again, more surely this time, and there was something in her eyes that Luna couldn't put a name to, and which she only understood later, in the square in Betweenhills.
Because nobody had called her by her name for years. A name is only a word too — and in Three Words they had been putting words aside for so long that they had stopped using them. And so they had stopped calling one another by their names as well.
* * *
"Hannah," said Luna. "I'm Luna. He's George."
Hannah nodded. Then she said something else. This time she wanted to help the children.
"There's fog up there. Don't go into it alone."
George looked at Luna and Luna looked at George, and the same thing went through both their heads: but we're not going alone.
Then they crossed the bridge that hadn't existed an hour before, and set off up towards Fogmound.
Behind them, twenty lanterns were shining in the village, and not one of the villagers went to bed.
12. The Always-Later Bird
From the ford, an old road leads uphill. It was important once; nobody walks it now.
For the first twenty minutes everything was fine. Then the air began to turn white. At first it only made the edges of things a little blurry. Then George couldn't see his own shoes. And in the end, when he held out his hand, it only appeared out of the white right in front of his nose.
They kept going up the road. By the time they reached the flat stone, they had been walking for an hour from the ford.
Fogmound.
It isn't a village. It never was. It is a flat, overgrown hump between two slopes, where the fog has stayed for a thousand years, even when the whole valley is bright.
In the middle of it stands a big flat stone with a hollow worn into it, and beside it what is left of a wall that once held up a roof. This was where people used to wait. Traders, shepherds, people on their way to town — they all sat down here and waited for the fog to lift, because walking into it was foolish, and everybody knew it.
And they say that people here also learned how to wait. Just sitting down wasn't enough; waiting could be done well or badly.
Granny Dora had told them that when you wait, you must wait with your head here, not somewhere else. How you actually did that, they hadn't tried yet.
* * *
"I can't see ahead," said George.
"Neither can I," said Spark, and there was something like fear in her voice. "The threads are here, but I can't see along them any further than two steps."
Without thinking, George edged closer to Luna.
"What time do you think it is?" he asked. "We have to be back by five, Granny Dora said five, and if this takes us two hours, then we'll hardly have any time left for Smokeby—"
He didn't finish, because Luna caught him by the sleeve.
"Stop it," she said. "Look."
While George had been counting the hours, the fog around them had grown so thick that they couldn't even see the flat stone they had been standing beside a moment ago.
Neither of them worked out, just then, what that meant. It was too strange, and too soon.
* * *
And then it came.
It was a single note, but so clear that it caught in the children's throats. They had never heard anything like it in their lives — not a little bell, not a flute, not water. It was as if someone had opened a window in all that whiteness, just for a moment, onto a place where it was very warm and very good.
Then the note faded, and a voice spoke, thin and polite.
"Do excuse me. I'm not quite warmed up yet."
Out of the fog came the outline of a branch not far from the stone, a little above the children's heads. On it sat a bird the size of a thrush. It was grey all over and perfectly ordinary — except for its throat, which was white and soft as down, and quivered with every breath.
"Just a moment," said the bird. "It won't be long. As soon as my breath has settled, I'll sing you the whole song. It will be the most beautiful thing you will ever hear."
The children waited.
"Any minute now," said the bird after a while. "Truly, any minute now. Only let me catch my breath."
* * *
They waited by that stone for twenty minutes, and in that time the bird promised them its song eleven times.
Every time it sounded sincere. Every time it had a good reason. Once its throat felt a little chilly. Once the moment didn't seem quite right. Once it said it would rather not begin until it could be truly perfect, because a song like that simply mustn't go wrong.
"And why can't you sing it now?" asked Spark.
"It can't be done now," said the bird kindly. "Not now. But later."
George noticed two things, and he couldn't explain either of them.
The first was that in all that time the bird had not once moved from its branch — it only breathed in, got ready, and put things off.
And the second was worse: with every one of its *laters*, there was more fog around them. Not a little more. Clearly more, every time. As if the word had a weight of its own and came falling into the air around them like ash.
* * *
"Come on," said George, and he took Luna by the sleeve. "That bird will never sing."
But Luna didn't move.
She stood there, looking up at the bird, and on her face was a look George knew — exactly the look she had had on Falcon Peak when she talked about the light that is flying to us from Jupiter. It was the look of someone gazing at something wonderful that is still to come.
Of all the people in the world, you see, Luna was exactly the one the Always-Later Bird was bound to catch first.
"Just a little longer," she said. "I'll wait for it. It will come."
And she took three steps into the fog, past the branch.
* * *
"Luna!" George shouted, and reached out after her.
He caught nothing. The fog there was as thick as milk, and Luna's hoodie vanished into it as completely as if a door had been shut.
Luna didn't hear him calling. She was thinking only of the song that was about to come.
And between him and her, Spark stretched tight.
She was stretching out long and thin. Now she was only a very thin, glowing thread, long and trembling. Her nearer end lay right across George's palm — the hand he had just reached out after Luna. Her other end disappeared somewhere ahead, into the white, where George could no longer see. She had grown so weak that in the fog she didn't shine at all — you could only feel her on your palm, and even that only just, like the last warmth in the embers.
"Don't let go of me," said Spark, very quietly. "Please. Don't let go."
And for the first time in his life, George didn't know what to do with his hands.
13. Luna Gets Lost
It had been three steps.
Luna told herself so again as she looked round: three steps, maybe four, and she was quite sure she knew the way back. She turned halfway round, or so she thought, took three steps back and stretched out her hand to where George ought to be standing.
Her hand found only fog.
"George?"
The word left her mouth and seemed to lose itself in the white. Luna called four more times. No answer came, and each time her own voice sounded as if she were shouting into cotton wool.
She set off towards where she thought the stone was. When she didn't find it, she changed direction and tried again. She hadn't even noticed how far she had already gone.
The Always-Later Bird said nothing. It had done its job.
* * *
And then it really sank in.
She didn't know the way she had come. She didn't know where the stone was. She didn't even know which way the valley lay, and when she tried to remember which way she had last turned, she realised she had turned round three more times since.
Her heart began to thump somewhere up in her ears.
If only I'd stayed beside him, she thought. If only I'd listened to him. Why did I have to go after that silly bird? George told me, it was obvious—
And the fog around her grew thicker.
Not by a little. Luna saw it quite clearly, because right in front of her a dry bush stuck up out of the ground, and at that very moment it disappeared, even though it was within arm's reach.
When I get out of here, she thought desperately, I'll never, ever go anywhere on my own again, and when I tell Mum, then—
The fog grew thicker again.
* * *
Luna stopped.
And because she was a girl who had spent two years writing three stars into a notebook every month, even now she did what she did best of all.
She started to experiment.
On purpose, she thought about Monday, and how her mum had said she'd love to have an imagination like that. She counted slowly to ten while she did it.
The fog grew thicker.
On purpose, she pictured tomorrow: herself at home, warm and cosy, telling the whole story. She counted to ten.
The fog grew thicker still. She couldn't even see her own knees any more.
She tried thinking about nothing at all, which is a thing that has never in the whole of history worked for anybody, and it didn't work for her either. The fog stayed just the same, thick and patient, waiting for Luna to feed it again.
"Right, then," said Luna out loud, though nobody could hear her. "Now I know what I've been feeding you."
* * *
She took one step forward, and the ground under her front foot simply wasn't there.
She didn't fall. She caught herself on her heel, rocked sharply back, and stood there for a moment, just breathing. Where exactly the edge was and what lay below it, she never found out, and that was just as well.
But she did find out something else, in that very second of fright.
When her foot went into nothing, she wasn't thinking about yesterday or tomorrow. She wasn't thinking at all. She was completely there, head and body together.
And in that second the fog drew back. Only for a moment, but quite clearly, about two metres all the way round.
* * *
Luna knelt down on the ground and began to speak out loud.
She didn't talk about the bird. She didn't talk about George. She talked about what was right there with her at that moment, and she said it properly, slowly, and by its proper name, the way she had learned in Three Words.
"Cold, wet stone. Under my right palm."
The fog drew back a step.
"Moss. Damp. I can feel it all over my palm."
Another step.
"A smell. Damp pine needles and something rotting, probably old stumps. The wind is on my left ear."
The fog kept backing away.
"A scratch on the back of my hand. From the raspberry bushes. It still stings."
It kept backing away.
"My own breathing. I can hear it. It's faster than it should be."
It backed away so far that, for the first time since she had got lost, Luna could see four metres ahead.
And she understood that the fog had never wanted to hurt her. It simply thickens wherever a person isn't really present — wherever they are standing there in body, but with their head somewhere else.
* * *
She stood up and slowly turned all the way round.
And then she saw it.
In the air, about as high as her shoulders, ran a thin, glowing thread. It was as faint as a cobweb at dusk, and it trembled, but it led somewhere, and it led in exactly one direction: back and to the left, into the white.
It wasn't that her eyes had suddenly got sharper.
She could see it because she was now noticing what was really around her.
"Spark," she whispered. She didn't dare touch the thread. "I'm coming. I'm on my way."
And just as she moved, she heard a chirping close to the ground.
14. A Cricket Called Now
On a stone close to the ground sat a perfectly ordinary chirping cricket.
It didn't have a white throat. It didn't have a beautiful voice. Its sound was dry and scratchy, the sort you hear in every garden from July to September, and if Luna had heard it at home in her own garden, she wouldn't even have turned her head.
Here, though, she bent so low over it that she got the whole front of her hoodie muddy.
The cricket chirped.
"Do you know the way down?" Luna asked it.
The cricket carried on chirping, because it had work to do.
"Hello? Please. I'm asking you."
The cricket didn't answer. It didn't answer the second time, or the fifth, and all the while Luna was slowly working out what was strange about it — and it wasn't anything it did.
It was what it didn't do.
It didn't make promises.
The Always-Later Bird had the most beautiful voice in the world, and it had never once sung them the song it promised. This one had an ordinary voice, and it used it all the time. It wasn't getting ready for anything, putting anything off, or waiting for anything, and it didn't mind in the least whether anyone was listening.
"You are Now," said Luna.
The cricket chirped.
Luna held out her palm. The cricket hopped onto it.
* * *
She walked slowly, following the glowing thread and listening to the cricket on her palm. After a while the familiar flat stone loomed out of the fog ahead of her. She knelt down and let the cricket hop off into the grass.
George had stayed by the stone. He was sitting on the ground with his back against what was left of the old wall, both hands cupped together like a bowl. When he saw her, he said nothing. He only stood up, took her by the hand, and didn't let go for a good long while.
Between them, Spark grew. From a wisp of thread she became a little glow that warmed their faces.
* * *
But the fog hadn't gone. It had drawn back four or five metres and no further, and all around them Fogmound was still the same — white, flat, and without a single path.
George wanted to try all four directions, one after another.
"No," said Luna. "We're going to wait."
"Wait?! But it's nearly—"
"Not waiting for it to pass. Waiting the way it used to be done here — with your head here, not somewhere else. That's when the fog pulls back." Luna sat down on the flat stone with the hollow in it, in exactly the place where traders and shepherds had sat for a thousand years. "Sit down. And stop counting the hours."
George sat down. It took him about a minute to stop counting.
* * *
They sat on the stone and named out loud what was next to them.
"Stone. Cold. Under us."
"Wall. Old, crumbling. Behind us."
"Wind. Coming from the left. Gentle."
"Cricket. Down on the right. Doesn't stop."
And then they fell quiet, because they had run out of things. All they could hear now was the cricket and the gentle wind.
In that quiet, an idea came.
It didn't come slowly, and it didn't come from remembering. It came all at once, complete, like opening your hand and finding something already in it — and it came to George, who until that moment had had nothing in his head but the five o'clock bell.
"I know how we'll get out of here," he said.
* * *
"We don't have to get through this fog," said George, already getting to his feet. "We have to push it ahead of us. It pulls back wherever we're really present. So we'll walk, and the whole time we'll say out loud what's under our feet. Not where we're going. What's under our feet and around us right now."
Luna looked at him, and on her face was a look he knew extremely well. It was exactly the one he himself had when he saw a finished bridge in his head.
"Where did you get that from?" she asked.
"I don't know," said George honestly. "It wasn't mine. It was just there."
Spark spun round above them and said something that both of them carried with them right to the end of the whole story:
"When you're completely present, you're connected. And then you draw from the Great Web exactly what you need right now."
* * *
They came out of Fogmound in thirty minutes, saying only ordinary things out loud the whole way.
"Mud. Soft. Left foot."
"Root. Thick. I nearly stepped on it."
"Puddle. Cold. I've got a wet sock."
And the fog drew back ahead of them, step by step, like a curtain being pulled aside.
Somewhere behind them the Always-Later Bird stayed sitting on its branch, getting ready. It is still getting ready to sing there today.
* * *
When George and Luna reached the edge of the mound, the fog closed behind them, and at that very moment Spark blazed up above their heads so brightly that you could see the grass three steps all around.
"Second knot," she said. "It holds. Look."
Out of the fog behind them, from the flat stone, a new thread ran down into the valley — thick, bright, quite fresh, the first in a very long time.
The children followed it with their eyes all the way to its other end.
And there, far below them, they saw a valley full of smoke, where dozens of lights were running about, and from which shouting carried all the way up to them.
Smokeby.
15. All Hands to One Fire
Smokeby lies in a ravine below Fogmound, and it is a village that was built very sensibly. The houses stand in two rows on either side of one long street, and in the middle of it there is an open space with a well.
That night, people were running up and down the street.
Not two or three. A whole crowd.
They ran from the top end to the bottom, and then somewhere ahead a shout went up and they ran from the bottom end to the top. By the time George and Luna came down the hill to the first fences, a crowd of about forty people thundered past them so fast that the children had to jump into the ditch.
Not one of them even glanced at the children. They had no time for that.
* * *
Fires were burning in four places at once, but none of them was big.
This must be said straight away, or nothing else makes sense. At the top end, the thatch on a roof was smouldering. By the well, a heap of brushwood was burning. Halfway down the street, a wooden fence had caught, and in one garden a haystack was smoking, because a glowing ember had flown into it from a chimney. It was October, and dry, and windy.
While those fires were small, one person with a bucket would have been enough for each of them, as long as that person saw to it straight away.
And yet all four were burning.
* * *
The children joined the crowd and ran with it to the top end.
By the time they got there, the thatch was no longer smoking. It was burning.
The men formed a chain to the well in the middle of the village, passed the buckets along from hand to hand, and in a quarter of an hour they had put it out. It was a proper job, too, and nobody could have found fault with it.
But just then a shout went up somewhere at the back. The shed at the bottom end had caught fire, the very one the whole crowd had run past a quarter of an hour earlier, when it hadn't been smouldering at all.
And forty people turned round and ran back.
Luna noticed that some of them were already limping quite badly.
* * *
In the middle of the village, on the open space by the well, the people kept their shared buckets. There were perhaps sixty of them. A few were being passed along at the fire just then, and the rest stood stacked in a pyramid.
Above them, on a post, hung a wooden board with lettering carved into it. The children read it twice before they could believe that somebody meant it seriously:
SHARED BUCKETS. HERE, NOBODY PUTS OUT A FIRE ALONE.
* * *
That sign hadn't been thought up by a villain.
It was thought up long ago by a man with a kind heart and one truly lovely idea. He had noticed that in Smokeby every house kept its own bucket by the doorstep, and it seemed selfish to him. Why should everybody stand at their own door, guarding their own little patch, when we are one village? After all, when your neighbour's house catches fire, it isn't only him it's burning. It's burning all of us.
So he called the people together and suggested carrying all the buckets to one place, right in the middle, where they would belong to everyone and where anyone could take one.
The people clapped. It was beautiful. And it really worked: if somebody's house was burning, the whole village came to help.
But as time went on, people got used to the idea that you only ever go to a fire together. When someone cried out, everybody rushed after the cry, even those whose own house had just begun to smoulder.
And nobody ever thought of one little thing: that when your bucket is in the middle of the village, it isn't with you.
* * *
"Spark," said Luna. "What does it look like here?"
Spark rose above the roofs and was silent for a moment.
"Strange," she said at last. "There are long threads here. Very long ones. Everyone is connected to everyone else, and every thread runs through the middle, through those buckets. But..."
"But?"
"But nobody here is connected to the people right next to them. They have no short threads. Not one. Look."
And so it was. Above Smokeby there stretched a huge, thick, beautiful web that joined everyone to everyone right across the village, and in all of it nobody was joined directly to the neighbour over the fence.
* * *
Just then the crowd came pounding back, and George and Luna had to jump aside again.
And as he jumped, George noticed something that he never forgot for the rest of his life.
On the doorstep of the third house from the left stood a boy, perhaps six years old, in pyjamas and wellies. Heat was coming from the window behind him, and a thin trickle of smoke was creeping out from under the eaves.
He wasn't shouting. He wasn't crying. He just stood there, watching the crowd going away to the other end of the village.
His hands were empty. No bucket, no pot, no jug. Every bucket, pot and jug had been carried to the middle of the village, and not one had been left by his house.
* * *
George stopped in the middle of the street.
And to him, the boy who took alarm clocks apart and saw finished bridges in his head, it all clicked into place at once. He saw the answer as clearly as the picture hanging on its nail in the woodshed. It was simple. It was stupidly simple, and it could be done in ten minutes.
But even after everything in Three Words and in Fogmound, George still hadn't shaken off the idea that the quickest way was to do it himself.
He ran to the pyramid by the well, lifted a bucket off it and swung it over his shoulder.
"I'll put it out!" he shouted over his shoulder. "I can manage this!"
16. George Wants to Put It Out Alone
Spark stayed with Luna, not far from the well.
George filled his bucket. He was thinking about the boy at the third house, too. But the brushwood was burning right beside the well, and it seemed to him that he would be done with it in no time.
He put out the first fire in four minutes.
It was the heap of brushwood by the well, and George poured three buckets over it, one after another. The water hissed, the smoke rolled away to one side, and the burning pile turned into a wet black heap that wasn't going to spread anywhere.
It was wonderful. It was exactly the way he had imagined it.
"See?" he shouted to Luna, who was standing by the pyramid of buckets. "It's working!"
And he ran off to the second fire.
* * *
The second fire was a hundred and twenty steps further on, and it was a burning fence.
George filled his bucket, ran, poured. The fence hissed, but it didn't go out. He ran back to the well, filled the bucket, ran, poured. The fence was burning down, but it was still standing.
By the third bucket he was no longer running, only walking fast, and at every step the water slopped over the rim onto his trousers.
By the fourth, his throat had begun to burn.
The fence went out at the fifth bucket, and George had to bend over it for a moment, with his hands on his knees, and wait until the street stopped spinning.
Two fires. Eight buckets. Nineteen minutes.
* * *
That was when the haystack at the bottom end, which until then had only been smoking, burst fully into flames.
George straightened up and did what he used to do over an alarm clock in pieces. He began to count.
From the well to the haystack was two hundred and fifty steps. There with a full bucket and back with an empty one: three minutes at the very least. And by George's reckoning, the haystack needed at least twelve buckets. That made thirty-six minutes at the very least, and that was before counting the time to fill them.
By then, other things could catch fire.
The number came out perfectly clear, and what it said was that it couldn't be done. That it couldn't possibly be done. That no boy with one bucket would ever put out a whole village, not even if he ran until morning.
And there was still the house of the boy in wellies. He wanted to get there in time as well.
George pushed the number aside and ran to the well.
Because stopping, at that moment, would have meant admitting that something was missing. And that was exactly what he did not want to admit just now.
* * *
"George!" Luna was calling somewhere behind him. "George, wait!"
He didn't wait.
George had stopped paying attention to Luna, and Spark was growing weaker beside her. When he got back to the well, he saw that all that was left of Spark's light was a faint glow. For a moment he lifted his head towards Luna and listened. Spark grew a little stronger. Then George went back to thinking only about how he would manage everything by himself, and Spark's light dimmed again.
George saw it. He saw it quite plainly.
And still he ran on, because he had only one sentence in his head, and that sentence was I can still make it.
* * *
He didn't make it.
He was standing at the well with a full bucket when, on the other side of the street, about forty steps away, there came the sound a dry roof makes at the moment it turns from smouldering to burning. It is not a loud sound. It is more of a sigh.
It was the third house from the left, the one where the boy in wellies had been standing on the doorstep.
The boy's mum ran out of the house, caught the boy under the arms and carried him to the other side of the road. There she stood him on the grass, crouched down beside him, and held his head against her shoulder with her hand, so that he wouldn't have to look. The boy wasn't hurt. Neither of them was.
But the roof was burning.
And George stood forty steps away from it with a full bucket in his hand, close enough to see everything. But the roof was already burning, and his one bucket was not enough for it.
* * *
He set the bucket down on the cobbles.
Then he sat down beside it, right in the middle of the street, in the ash and the wet mud, and for a while his shoulders shook.
He wasn't crying. He had simply reached the end of his strength and couldn't go on.
The crowd ran past him towards the top end. Nobody stopped. Nobody noticed him. In a village like Smokeby, nobody had noticed anybody for a long time.
* * *
Luna came about a minute later. Spark floated beside her.
Luna didn't tell him that he could never put out a whole village by himself. He knew that already.
She only sat down next to him, in the very same mud he was sitting in, and for a while the two of them sat there in silence and watched the roof burn.
Spark came to life between them. Not much. But once again you could feel the warmth.
"I can't manage," said George.
Those were three words, and George had not said them once in all his nine years.
* * *
Luna was silent for a long time.
And then she asked him just one thing. It wasn't advice, only a question, exactly the kind that Granny Dora would have asked at that moment.
"How many buckets would you need?"
"Sixty," said George without stopping to think, because he'd had that number in his head for a long time.
And then he fell silent, because he had heard what he'd just said.
17. Each Their Own Corner
George got up out of the mud so suddenly that Luna was startled.
But he didn't go to the fire. He went to the pyramid.
He grabbed several empty buckets and set them down in the middle of the street, exactly where the crowd ran past each time it turned back. One he kept in his hand.
Luna didn't need to ask anything. She took more buckets and stood twenty steps further along.
* * *
The crowd came rolling down from the top end.
George didn't move aside. He held out his arm with the bucket, and to the first man who almost tripped over him, he said seven words:
"Guard your corner. The one you see."
The man went round him and ran on.
The woman behind him knocked the bucket out of his hand.
The third man didn't even hear him.
The fourth one stopped.
He was an older man in overalls, and he stopped because George happened to be standing right in front of his gate. And from behind that gate, from under the roof of his shed, a thin, brand-new trickle of smoke was creeping up, one that nobody had seen yet, because everyone had been up at the other end.
The man looked at the smoke. Then at the bucket. Then at George.
"But... here nobody puts out a fire alone," he said, and he said it quite sincerely, the way you say something you have heard a thousand times.
And George answered him with a sentence he had put together that night out of Three Words, out of Fogmound, and out of one full bucket that he hadn't managed to pour.
"You won't be putting it out alone. We'll each put out the fire in our own corner — all of us at once."
The man stood there for a moment. Then he took the bucket and went in through his own gate.
The shed was out within two minutes, and nobody but him even knew.
* * *
From that moment it went quickly.
The fifth person took a bucket because they'd seen the fourth. The sixth took one because they'd seen the fifth. The crowd, which until then had been sloshing up and down like water in a tilted bath, began to melt away. Each time it ran down the street, five people dropped out of it, then eight, then fifteen, and turned in at their own gates.
Meanwhile, Luna was knocking on doors.
There was something even worse than running about in a crowd, you see: sitting at home and being afraid. Behind three doors she found people who didn't dare come out at all. She handed each of them a bucket, said the same thing, and took them by the sleeve as she said it, so that it would really sink in.
* * *
The children kept going back for more buckets, until there wasn't a single one left by the well. The people filled them with water and carried them to their own houses. Even those who already had buckets stopped moving about with the crowd and helped in their own neighbourhood, wherever it was needed.
Every fire in Smokeby was out in ten minutes.
It happened so quietly that at first nobody noticed. There was no great final burst of water, no victory. One place after another simply stopped burning, then the smoke stopped rising, and then all that could be heard in the whole village was the hiss of wet wood, and somewhere a dog barking.
The people stood, each in their own garden. They were covered in ash, they were soaking wet, and from where they stood, they could see one another over the fence.
* * *
Someone brought a small bucket to the third house from the left, for the six-year-old boy in wellies.
Only part of the roof over the porch had burned, which, compared with the whole house, is really very little. The boy was given a bucket of water and allowed to pour it over a charred beam that had stopped burning long ago.
He poured it about forty times. He was incredibly important while he did it.
* * *
Something needs to be said here, or someone might take it the wrong way round.
Perhaps you know the proverb: Don't put out a fire that isn't burning you. In this story, though, it does not mean don't care. It does not mean shutting your door, letting your neighbour's house burn and telling yourself it's none of your business.
It means something quite different, and much harder: look after the place you can see from your doorstep, because that is where you can notice what needs doing, and help straight away.
When everybody does that, every fire in the village gets put out.
When nobody does, everybody can run about all night, and by morning they will have nothing left.
And there was one more thing that George only worked out that night, standing in somebody else's village, covered in mud: you can only be all right if everything around you is all right too. However perfectly you guard your own corner, if the street burns down, your corner burns with it.
That is why it's worth everyone having a bucket.
* * *
"George," said Spark. "Look up."
Above Smokeby, something had happened that, according to Spark, had not happened there for decades.
Those enormous long threads that ran across the whole village and through the middle were still there. They hadn't vanished. They were just as beautiful as before. But underneath them, quite low, just above the fences, short threads had begun to appear. Neighbour with neighbour. Garden with garden. Doorstep with doorstep.
Thin and new, and suddenly there were an awful lot of them.
"Third knot," said Spark, and she was so bright that George had to screw up his eyes. "It holds."
* * *
On the open space by the well, there was an empty spot where the pyramid had been, and it looked better without it.
Sixty buckets stood on sixty doorsteps.
The children turned towards Falcon Peak. It rose above them, black and silent, and the sky behind it was already a shade lighter than it ought to be.
"The last thread is up there," said Spark. "And it's the thinnest of them all."
18. How Much Dark Is in the Sack
There are two ways to get to the top of Falcon Peak.
The first is comfortable and winds all the way round the hill. It takes an hour.
The second goes through the Blind Passage, a crack in the rock covered by one enormous flat slab of stone that fell there long before people ever came to the valley. It is a narrow hole a hundred steps long, open at both ends, and in the middle so dark that it's as if someone had poured the dark in there.
It takes ten minutes.
The sky above the Crag was a shade lighter than it should have been, and so the children didn't even need to talk. Both of them already knew which way they would go, and neither of them liked it.
* * *
At the entrance they could smell cold, wet stone, and the air gently pulled them in, as if the passage were taking a breath.
"I'm afraid of tight places," said Luna. She said it as if she were announcing the weather, and George noticed how much it must have cost her.
"Me too," he said.
It was the only sentence he knew that could help her, and it was quite a good one.
They went in.
* * *
For the first thirty steps they could still see.
Then the passage curved, and the light from the entrance vanished behind the rock. All that was left was Spark, floating a little way in front of them and lighting up the rock for about two steps ahead.
And that was when it started.
George stopped talking, because he was listening for anything falling from above. Luna stopped talking, because she was counting how much rock there was over her head. Each of them drew inwards, into their own fear, the way a snail draws into its shell.
And Spark, between them, grew weaker.
Two steps ahead became one. One step became half.
And the less they could see, the greater their fear, and the greater their fear, the deeper each of them crept into themselves, and the less there was to see.
It is a circle that, once it starts spinning, goes on spinning by itself: fear takes away the light, and the dark adds fear. And it makes no difference whether a person is sitting inside a rock, or at home in bed under the duvet.
* * *
"Spark," said George, and his voice sounded strange in that hole. "How much dark is there in here?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know? But you can see everything."
"I can't see the dark," said Spark. "I can tell how much light there is somewhere. The dark I can't measure. Not even a little bit."
George got cross, because when you're afraid, the person you most like to be cross with is whoever is nearest.
"Then guess! There's a lot of it, isn't there? The whole passage is full of it!"
Spark's head was full of questions, and now she asked the most important one.
"And how much dark fits in a sack?"
* * *
George opened his mouth and left it open.
He pictured it quite seriously, because he was a boy who pictured things down to the last detail. He would take a sack. He would untie it here, in the darkest place in the Blind Passage, scoop the dark into it, tie it up and carry it outside.
And then he would open it in the sun.
And there would be nothing in it. Not a gram. Not a drop.
"It can't be done," he said slowly. "You can't carry the dark anywhere."
"No," said Spark. "Because the dark isn't a thing. Dark is just a place the light hasn't reached yet."
* * *
Luna leaned back against the cold rock, and for a while the only sound was dripping somewhere deep inside the rock.
Then she said the sentence that George had needed to hear back in the square, though he hadn't known it until now.
"George. Mr Shelley isn't the dark."
"What?"
"You want to defeat him. I know you do, I saw it in your eyes in the square. But he isn't a thing to be defeated. He's a person who's missing something."
George was silent for a while, and his hands, those clever hands that could mend an alarm clock and build a bridge, had nothing to do again. Because you can't fight the dark. You can't hit it. You can't take it apart, scrub it with sand and put it back together.
All you can bring into the dark is light. Nothing else in the world will shift the dark.
"So I've got no one to fight," he said at last.
"No," said Luna. "And that's the good news."
* * *
And once George finally understood that, something practical happened.
He stopped listening for things falling from above. He took Luna by the hand and began to name things aloud, exactly as he had in Fogmound.
"Rock. Wet. On my right."
"Dripping. Somewhere ahead, down low."
"Draught. Blowing that way. So that's where the exit is."
And Spark, between them, grew stronger, until they could see three steps ahead again. For suddenly they were both present in the passage, instead of each being alone in their own head. And the fear that both of them still had in their stomachs was just ordinary fear, and not the kind that feeds itself.
They went on like that for a few more steps.
And then the Blind Passage grew so narrow that only one of them could get through at a time.
19. Spark Almost Goes Out
George went first, because he was narrower in the shoulders and because he didn't want to ask whether he could.
He got through the tight part in twenty seconds, turned round, and found that through the crack he could see only Luna's elbow and a bit of her shoulder.
"Come on," he said. "You can get through."
George was already thinking about the exit. Luna was staring at the tight crack, thinking only of the rock all around her. Spark, between them, grew weaker.
* * *
Luna got stuck about halfway.
It wasn't dangerous. Peekaboo, hanging from her shoulder, had slid round onto her back and wedged against the rock just where she couldn't reach. She couldn't go forward and she couldn't go back, and when she realised that, she held her breath for a moment.
"George."
"I'm here."
"I can't move."
All that was left of Spark was a single hair of light, so faint that George could only see it when he didn't look straight at it. He held his open palm under Spark. On the rock he couldn't make out even the shadow of his hand.
George lowered his hand and concentrated on Luna. He couldn't reach round her back through the crack, so he asked:
"What's holding you?"
"The strap," said Luna, and her voice wobbled as she said it. "Peekaboo's caught behind me."
"Is your left hand free?"
"Yes."
"Then slide the strap off your shoulder. Don't pull it, just slide it off. And then pass Peekaboo to me through the crack. First Peekaboo. Only then you."
First. Only then. When they built the bridge in Three Words, he had found out how much those words mattered.
Luna slid the strap off her shoulder. She eased Peekaboo round past her side to the front and pushed it through the crack until George caught it by the end of the tube. Then she squeezed through herself.
She was through.
* * *
They sat for a while side by side on the stone floor, backs against the wall, and both of them were trembling, though neither would have admitted it.
Spark was already shining a little brighter. But George kept thinking about the moment when only a hair of Spark's light had been left.
* * *
"Spark," said George. "Tell me the truth."
"Always."
"Were you going out?"
Spark didn't answer for a moment, and her light didn't flicker the slightest bit.
"Yes."
George swallowed. His hands lay on his knees, completely useless, which was a feeling he ought to have been getting used to by now.
"And when you go out," he asked, and he had to say it twice, because the first time no sound came out, "will you be gone?"
* * *
And Spark answered calmly. Not sadly. Not bravely. The way you say things that are simply true, and there is nothing a person can do about them.
"I won't go out. I'll just stop being here."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't." Spark's light trembled, as if someone were smiling. "Light is never lost, George. Not ever. It only moves to where it's needed right now."
"And where's that?"
"I don't know. I haven't found the end anywhere yet, remember?"
* * *
Luna rested her head against the rock and was silent for a long time.
Then she said something that didn't help George at all, and helped Luna very much.
"You're the same light that's in those threads above Smokeby. Aren't you?"
"Yes."
"And those threads will stay there, even when you're not here."
"Yes."
"Then it's all right," said Luna, though her chin was trembling as she said it.
"It isn't," said George stubbornly. "It doesn't feel all right to me."
And George was right too. They were both right at once, which happens in moments like these more often than you would think.
* * *
"And will the fourth knot help you?" asked George.
"I think so," said Spark.
George stood up so fast that he banged his shoulder on the rock.
"Then let's go."
"George," Spark said once more. "Don't run. Please. When you hurry, you stop noticing Luna. Listen to her on the way, too."
It was the most practical sentence Spark had ever said to anyone, and George remembered it all his life.
* * *
So they went side by side, slowly, along the dark stone floor.
A little further on, a hole opened up ahead of them onto the night, and through it they could see stars.
They climbed out onto the ridge of Falcon Peak, into a cold wind, covered in mud and ash.
And there, thirty steps away, on a stone base, stood a round building with a dome. Luna knew it from every map of the valley, and she knew it from below, from her own garden. But she had never been inside it in her life.
The old observatory.
20. The Observatory on Falcon Peak
The observatory door wouldn't open.
It wasn't locked. It had simply been shut for thirty years, which, for a door, is almost the same thing. Luna pushed it with her shoulder, then with both hands, then grazed her wrist on it without a word.
"Let me," said George.
He knelt down, examined the lower hinge, took the coil of wire out of his pocket and fiddled with the hinge pin for a while. Then he lifted the whole door up two centimetres, pulled, and the door opened with a sigh, as if it had been waiting for this for ages and ages.
George had needed to feel that his hands could still do something.
* * *
Inside it was cold and dry, and dust lay everywhere, thick as felt.
In the middle of the round room, on a metal stand, stood the big telescope: enormous, twice as tall as George, with a tube as thick as a chimney. Luna walked up to it in quiet awe.
It was broken. The front lens had a crack right across it, shaped like a bolt of lightning, and the dome above it wouldn't move by so much as a millimetre.
"How long has it been standing like this?" asked Spark.
"Since people stopped coming up here," said Luna. "My grandmother used to come up once a year, they say. Mum doesn't any more. And tonight is the first time in my life I've been here."
Meanwhile George was already lying on his back under the toothed wheel that turned the dome. He cleared out a nest that a mouse had built between the teeth years ago, greased the axle with a bit of fat from Luna's little pouch, and braced his feet against the wall.
The dome moved with a screech that could be heard all the way to Smokeby.
And in the roof a slit opened, and through it you could see the sky.
* * *
The big telescope stayed broken, and they didn't need it.
Under that slit Luna set up Peekaboo: three wooden legs, a black tube from a flea market, and two lenses Luna had glued in herself. She aimed it upwards.
Then for a long time she didn't move.
"Come and look," she said at last, hoarsely. "But take a breath first."
George took a breath and put his eye to the eyepiece.
* * *
He didn't see one star. He saw hundreds of them, crammed into a small round picture like poppy seeds spilled on a plate, and all of them were arranged in a ball.
"That's a star cluster," said Luna behind him. "Those stars are circling a common centre. All of them. All at once."
Then she turned Peekaboo a little and found something else, which George at first took for a smudge on the glass.
It wasn't a smudge. It was a faint, pale spiral with a thicker middle, misty, as if someone had drawn it with their breath.
"That's a galaxy," said Luna. "And those are stars too. There are just so many that you can't tell one from another. And they go round and round, in exactly the same way."
Circles inside circles. Spirals inside spirals. Small around big, big around bigger, and nowhere anything that stood on its own.
* * *
And then Luna did the thing people used to come up to Falcon Peak for.
She unscrewed the eyepiece from Peekaboo, the little lens you look through, and carried it to the window on the far side of the room.
On the stone sill, left over from the night's fog, sat a single drop of water.
Luna knelt, held the eyepiece right up to the drop, and for a while the observatory was silent.
Then she said a single word: "George."
* * *
The whole sky was in that drop.
The round surface of the water reflected everything above it: the whole open slit, the whole band of sky with all the stars at once, turned upside down and squeezed into something smaller than George's fingernail.
Nothing was missing from it. It wasn't just a piece of the sky. It wasn't half of it.
There was the whole sky in a single drop of water on a windowsill.
"We've been looking up all night," said George very quietly, "and the very same thing was lying right here the whole time."
* * *
Spark rose between their two faces, just as on the night she was born, and said the sentence that George and Luna would carry with them into adulthood.
"You're not a drop in the sea. You're the sea in a single drop."
And then it happened.
Spark blazed up so brightly that the whole round room lit up as if it were day. The dust in the air turned into golden grains. On the walls they could suddenly see old maps that nobody had seen there for thirty years, and names written in chalk by people who had come up here long, long ago.
"Fourth knot," said Spark. "It holds."
* * *
George and Luna ran outside onto the ridge, because they wanted to see all of it.
And they saw.
From Falcon Peak, threads were spreading out into the valley: thick, bright, alive, full of running little beads of light. One went down to the flat stone in Fogmound. Another went to the sheds and doorsteps of Smokeby, where there were suddenly so many threads that the village looked like a glowing net. A third led all the way to the ford, where twenty lanterns were still shining.
The whole valley was alive.
The whole valley, except for one single place.
* * *
Down there, exactly in the middle, between Falcon Peak and the Crag, lay a black, empty patch.
Not one thread. Not one light. Not one little bead.
It was as if someone had cut a piece out of that beautiful glowing net with scissors and left a hole.
Betweenhills.
And in its square, at the place where Granny Dora's lantern was supposed to burn until morning, nothing was shining at all.
21. A Town in Boxes
III. Between Us
It took twenty minutes to get down from Falcon Peak, and the children ran the whole way almost without a word.
Behind them, the sky above the Crag was slowly growing paler. It wasn't dawn yet, but it was no longer the same black it had been all night — and if they had looked back, they would have seen the whole valley glowing below them, from the ford all the way to Smokeby.
They didn't look back. They ran down into that black, empty patch.
* * *
The first thing that was wrong couldn't be seen. You could hear it — or, to be exact, you couldn't.
The five o'clock bell didn't ring.
In Betweenhills the bell had rung every morning at five for as long as anyone could remember. It had rung in gales. It had rung when Mr Jacobs, the bell-ringer, had a swollen foot. It had even rung the year so much snow fell that people climbed into the bell tower through the window.
The children stood at the edge of the little town, both of them out of breath, waiting with their heads tilted to one side.
Nothing.
* * *
There was nobody in the streets.
It was half past five in the morning, which in a little town like Betweenhills is the time when the first bucket has been clattering for ages, when Mr Sparrow the baker is opening his shutters, and when somebody somewhere is grumbling at a cat.
Instead, grey boxes stood in front of the houses.
One outside every second door. In some places, two. Outside Mrs Rowan's house, three, although Mrs Rowan lived alone.
They were closed. They stood silently in the first morning light, grey and smooth, and they didn't gleam at all. Not in the least.
By some of them, the little wooden shutter under the painted window was open a crack, about two fingers wide, and out of that crack came warmth and the smell of freshly washed linen.
* * *
George took five steps across the cobbles, and the square sent them back to him five times.
The echo that had first appeared there on Tuesday night was no longer something strange. The whole square now sounded like an empty stone hall. Every sound bounced off seven, eight, ten grey walls at once, put itself back together and returned to the children's ears as something that belonged to nobody.
Luna put her hands over her ears, and it was the only thing she could do at that moment.
* * *
"Spark?" said George.
Spark didn't answer at once, and that was dreadful.
Spark was still there, between them, right in front of their eyes — but she had grown weaker. Not down to a single hair of light, as in the Blind Passage, but clearly, visibly weaker. It made George break out in a cold sweat, because this time none of the things that always weakened her had happened.
He hadn't run off. They hadn't quarrelled. They stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and listened to each other better than ever before.
"Why?" he asked. "We're here. Both of us."
"You are," said Spark. "But nobody else is."
And for the first time since she was born, Spark asked something that sounded almost like a complaint:
"What good is one thread to me when all the others around me have gone out? I wasn't born just for the two of you."
* * *
The well stood in the square exactly where it had always stood, and the bucket beside it lay on its side.
George hooked the bucket onto the rope, lowered it down and listened.
The bucket didn't land on water. It landed on the bottom, and it made a dry, shallow, earthy sound, the kind nobody in Betweenhills had ever heard.
He pulled it up.
In the bottom of the bucket lay about two fingers of damp sand and one earthworm, which had got there from somewhere in the side wall and was clearly just as surprised as he was.
* * *
Only then did they notice the heap on the stone rim of the well.
It was Granny Dora.
She sat there with her back against the side of the well and her head dropped to one side, wrapped in three blankets, sleeping as soundly as only people who have refused to go to sleep can sleep.
At her feet stood the lantern.
It hadn't gone out because somebody had blown it out. It had gone out because it ran out of paraffin at half past four. The tin sides had a black ring of soot round the top, and the wick was burnt down to charcoal.
Granny Dora had stayed awake the whole night, exactly as she had promised, and the lantern at her feet had burned exactly as long as it had anything left to burn.
* * *
She woke when Luna took her by the hand, and at first she said nothing. She simply looked at both children for a long, careful time, from the mud on their knees to the ash in their hair, and counted their shoes as she did it.
There were two pairs.
"Well," she said at last, hoarsely. "That's good."
Then she pointed with her chin at the square and told them about the night, the way she told everything.
"I once knew a man who kept an inn by the road. For years nobody stopped there. And then one day, a flood swept away the bridge a little way up the road, and by evening the inn was full and he had to fetch chairs up from the cellar." She shrugged. "Not because his beer had suddenly got better."
George understood it faster than he would have liked.
Towards evening the well was giving only half a bucket. People stood around it with emptier and emptier buckets, and not one of them knew what to do. By nightfall there wasn't a single box left on Mr Shelley's cart. And during the night the well dried up completely.
* * *
"And you?" asked Luna. "Didn't he offer you a box?"
"He did," said Granny Dora. "Very nicely, too. He apologised about four times and carried it all the way here to the well for me."
"And you said...?"
"That I'd spent my whole life drawing water for the whole street, and I didn't feel like sitting in a box now." Granny Dora straightened her blanket. "He raised his hat and said he understood perfectly. That man is so polite it hurts."
* * *
George looked at the grey things by the doors, and his head did what it always did whenever he saw something broken. He counted. He measured. He looked for a gap in those grey boards where he could wedge in a bar of iron.
He was a boy with clever hands, but at the sight of those closed boxes, everything they had managed to do that night seemed useless.
"Where does Mr Sparrow keep his blacksmith's tools?" he asked.
And Luna, who already knew what was coming, tried to talk him out of it — and was too late.
22. What Force Can't Break
The bakery was open, and it was cold.
George went in and stood there for a moment, because never once in George's whole life had Mr Sparrow's oven been cold. In the wooden kneading tub the dough had risen too far, sunk in the middle and smelled sour.
The blacksmith's tools hung on the wall by the back door.
George took a crowbar from among them — long, hardened, with a curved end, just heavy enough — and went out onto the square with it.
And here something unpleasant has to be said.
George knew perfectly well at that moment what Luna had told him in the Blind Passage only a few hours before. He remembered all of it, down to the last word, including the part about the dark and the sack. And he went and did it anyway.
Because knowing something and acting on it are two quite different things, and because by then Spark had grown so faint that her light no longer showed on the cobbles.
* * *
Mrs Rowan's box came first.
George slid the curved end of the crowbar under the lid, braced his foot against a board and heaved.
The wood creaked. The lid lifted the width of a finger, and out from inside came warmth, light and the smell of freshly washed linen.
"Mrs Rowan!" shouted George, and heaved again. "Come out! That isn't a real sea, it's painted! Come on—"
And the lid shut.
It didn't shut by itself. It shut from the inside. Through the crack George glimpsed, for a moment, two fingers digging into the edge of the board and pulling it down, and then he heard someone inside lean their back against the lid.
It was the worst sound of that morning, and it was hardly a sound at all.
* * *
He tried five more times, and each time it went worse than the time before.
At the third box — the one outside the house of Mr Jacobs, the bell-ringer — he managed to lift the lid almost all the way.
Inside sat Mr Jacobs, a man who had pulled the bell rope at five o'clock every morning for forty years, and when the morning light fell on him, he did what anyone does when someone forces their way in.
He flinched. He raised a hand in front of his eyes. And with the other hand he pulled the lid back down so suddenly that George was jolted backwards and sat down hard on the cobbles.
Through the grey boards came one single sentence, and it was said not angrily, but in fright:
"Go away. Please."
* * *
George stayed sitting on the cobbles with the crowbar in his lap.
Around him stood seventeen boxes, and not one of them was any more open after his visit than before it. On the contrary. Three of those little shutters that had been open two fingers wide had since shut tight.
"I've made it worse," he said.
Luna nodded. She let him say it himself, though she had seen it from the start.
"The harder you push, the tighter they hold their lids shut," she said. "I'd do exactly the same in their place."
* * *
Granny Dora sat by the well with her hands in her lap and hadn't said a word about any of it. Only when George laid the crowbar down on the cobbles beside the rim did she speak.
"I had a great-grandfather who had a horse, and that horse was afraid of bridges. For thirty years my great-grandfather tried to pull him across by the bridle, and every time the horse dug his hooves in. Until one day, when my great-grandfather was tired, he sat down on the bank and began to talk out loud to himself about what was on the other side."
She fell silent.
"And?" Luna couldn't help herself.
"And the horse crossed," said Granny Dora. "Not at once. Two days later."
* * *
"Try a word instead of a crowbar," said Luna.
George got up without a word, went to the first box and did it. Properly, with his whole heart.
"Please," he said to the grey board. "It isn't so bad outside now. We were in Three Words, and we built a bridge. In Smokeby everyone got a bucket. The well can be mended, you only need to—"
Nothing.
He tried it louder. He tried it quietly. He tried it at the shutter, at the lid, down by the ground.
Nothing. Not one movement. Not one of those seventeen boxes stirred by so much as a hair.
* * *
"Why won't it work?" he asked, completely desperate by now. "I'm telling the truth!"
Luna looked at the grey walls and for a long time didn't answer.
"Because you're talking to a box," she said at last. "And a box can't hear you. Inside is a person — and you know nothing about that person. You don't know why they climbed in. You don't know what they're afraid of. You're just telling them from outside that they're wrong."
George leaned his forehead against the board, and it was clear to him that she was right, and that made him feel awful.
"And how do I find out?"
"We have to ask someone who knows," said Luna.
* * *
Between them, Spark was by now as pale as the moon in the daytime.
"Hurry up," she said. She didn't say it in despair. She said it the way you say what time it is.
Luna turned to Granny Dora.
"Granny. Where does Mr Shelley live?"
And Granny Dora raised her hand and pointed across the square, to where, by the wall, stood the biggest and by far the most beautiful box of them all — made of polished boards, with brass hinges and a painted window so big that the whole sea fitted into it, three white birds and all.
It was closed.
23. Mr Shelley and the Painted Window
They didn't need to knock.
A few minutes past seven, the lid of the big polished box lifted from the inside, came to rest against the wall, and out climbed Mr Shelley.
He looked exactly as he had on Tuesday. A grey coat, hat in hand, hands folded, the face of a man apologising in advance for something. Only now there were dark circles under his eyes, and he moved like someone who hadn't slept all night, even though he had been lying down.
He took out a pocket watch, opened it, looked at it and closed it with a click.
Then he took a jug of water and a tin mug from the cart and began his rounds.
* * *
The children stood by the well and watched all of it.
Mr Shelley went up to the first box and knelt down beside it on the cobbles. He was an old man, and kneeling on cold stone clearly hurt him, but he didn't say a word about it. Then he drew the peg out of the little wooden shutter under the painted window.
He opened it all the way. Not two fingers. All of it.
Real morning light poured into the grey box, and real cold air, which smelled of wet leaves and, faintly, of cold embers from somewhere over towards Smokeby.
"Good morning," he said quietly. "Sorry it's so early."
From inside came Mrs Rowan's voice, and that voice was happy.
* * *
Then he passed a mug of water in to her through the little window. He waited while she drank. He took the mug back.
He looked at his watch.
And after one minute he closed the shutter again and slid the peg in.
"A little longer," said a voice from inside. "Please. Just a tiny bit more."
"Tomorrow again," said Mr Shelley. "I promise. Sorry."
And he moved on to the next one.
* * *
It took him seventeen minutes.
Seventeen boxes, seventeen opened shutters, seventeen mugs of water, seventeen times exactly one minute by the pocket watch. And seventeen times somebody inside said thank you.
They didn't say it for show. They didn't say it out of politeness. The children could hear it, and it was a real, warm, honest thank you — the kind a person says when someone has truly been good to them.
George moved forward, and Luna caught him by the sleeve so firmly that he stopped.
* * *
Something needs explaining here, because it is the sneakiest thing in the whole book, and it is sneaky precisely because it looks like kindness.
When a person has a whole day, they can do what they like with it. They can be bored, they can be cross, they can go out even when it's raining, and it doesn't feel like anything special. Air is just air then.
But when a person has one minute out of the whole day, that minute becomes the best thing that happens to them all day. They look forward to it from the morning. They remember it until the evening. And they are truly grateful to whoever gave it to them.
And it won't even cross their mind to ask who took away the remaining one thousand four hundred and thirty-nine minutes.
* * *
When Mr Shelley had closed the last shutter, he straightened up, holding his back, and noticed the children.
He didn't take fright. He didn't look away. He bowed his head.
"You're the boy with the threads," he said to George. "I've been thinking about you. Really. In the night, too."
George had about twenty sentences ready, and every one of them was sharp. The first one came out.
"You're keeping them in there."
"I'm not," said Mr Shelley mildly. "The lids aren't locked. They never have been. They can come out whenever they like."
And that was true, and it was worse than if he had lied.
* * *
So George launched into the second thing he had ready, and he spoke fast and angrily. That the well had dried up. That the threads were gone. That the sea was painted. That out here you could really breathe.
And Mr Shelley agreed with him the whole time.
"You're right."
"Yes, it is only painted. I never said otherwise."
"What you say about the well is true, too. Sorry to say it, but I didn't dry it up."
"And yes, you can breathe outside. I know that."
George stopped in the middle of a sentence, because he realised that there was nothing in this man to push against. It was like fighting a duvet. Mr Shelley agreed with him about everything, and nothing changed at all.
* * *
Between the children, Spark was weaker at that moment than she had ever been, and George didn't dare look at Spark.
Luna hadn't said a word the whole time.
She said nothing now, either. Instead she crossed the square to Mr Shelley, stopped in front of him as close as you stand to someone you aren't afraid of, and looked up at him.
And then she asked.
She didn't ask about the boxes. She didn't ask about the water, the shutters or the minute. She asked the one thing she had been longing to ask all night, and which would never have occurred to George, not even in a dream.
"Mr Shelley. Why did you make the first box?"
* * *
And then something happened that Mr Shelley hadn't planned — and nothing like that had happened to him for a very, very long time.
He stopped turning his hat in his hands.
He stood in the square in Betweenhills with his arms hanging at his sides, and for a while he said nothing at all. The wind turned his collar over, and he didn't straighten it.
"Nobody has ever asked me that," he said at last.
24. The Boy They Laughed At
Mr Shelley sat down on the stone rim of the well.
He did not take out his pocket watch. All the time he was talking, he never once looked at it — and it was the first time Luna had ever seen him do anything without measuring it in minutes.
"I was born here," he said.
George opened his mouth and closed it again.
* * *
"I was nine," said Mr Shelley, looking down at the cobbles as he spoke. "And I was very interested in this well, because it never ran low. I used to come here to fetch water for my mother, and every single time I counted. Properly counted. I even wrote it down in charcoal on a board."
He took a breath.
"And one day I worked it out. That when you draw water for the whole street, the well is bottomless. And when someone draws it only for themselves, it's shallow. It was true. I know it was true, because ever since then I've heard it from every grandmother in this valley. But back then I had never heard anyone say it out loud."
"And you said it," said Luna quietly.
"I said it," said Mr Shelley, nodding. "I waited for the fair, so that there would be a lot of people here. I climbed up on this rim, the very one I'm sitting on now, and I said it out loud."
* * *
"And what happened?" asked George.
Mr Shelley shrugged.
"Nothing happened. That's just it. Nobody argued with me. Nobody asked how I'd worked it out. Nobody said I was wrong, or that I was right."
He raised his head.
"They started to laugh."
* * *
And here the child who is holding this book needs to be told one thing very clearly, because it is the most powerful weapon in the world, and almost nobody calls it by its proper name.
When somebody wants to silence an idea, they don't have to ban it. A ban is heavy and loud, and people notice when it's happening. All it takes is a laugh.
A laugh does two things at once. First, nobody needs to answer the idea any more — it's funny, so why bother. And second, which is worse: everybody standing around quietly steps one pace away from it. Not because they disagree with it. Just so that nobody starts laughing at them too.
Nothing has been forbidden. On the outside, nobody has hurt anybody. And the idea is gone.
* * *
"It lasted maybe half a minute," said Mr Shelley. "It wasn't spiteful. I know that. I don't hold it against them. They simply laughed at a boy who had climbed up on a well and made a speech about how deep the well went."
He passed his hat from one hand to the other.
"But I was nine years old. And from that moment on, not once in my whole life did I say out loud anything I truly thought."
* * *
"That evening, in the garden at home, I knocked a box together out of a broken cart," he went on. "The first one. It was terribly ugly. It was full of splinters, and it smelled of manure. I climbed into it, pulled a board over my head like a lid, and in there it was quiet."
He paused, and he said the next part without any complaint at all, the way you say an ordinary thing.
"Inside, nobody laughs at you. In that box, for the first time in a whole week, I wasn't afraid."
The first morning wind came up from the valley, and for a while nobody said anything.
"I left here when I was seventeen, and I only came back on Tuesday. All that time I went from little town to little town, making boxes, one after another, my whole life. I learned to line them with something soft, so that it would be warm inside. I learned to paint windows on them, so that it wouldn't be sad inside. And I learned to carry water, so that nobody inside would suffer."
* * *
"And why did you come back here?" asked Luna. "Why here, of all places?"
Mr Shelley looked at her for a long time.
"Because I wanted to give them something," he said at last, and you could hear in his voice that he was saying it out loud for the first time. "I wanted to come to Betweenhills, where they had laughed at me, and bring the people something they would be grateful for. And I got it. Just this morning they thanked me seventeen times."
Luna was exactly as old as Granny Dora had been back then, at the pot stall. She looked at him, and suddenly she felt so very, very sad.
* * *
And then Granny Dora stood up.
She stood by the well with a blanket round her shoulders and looked at the old gentleman the way you look at a face you've seen somewhere before and can't think where.
"You're the youngest of the Shelleys," she said. "The one with the wart on his hand, who was ashamed of it."
Mr Shelley put his right hand into his pocket. He did it quite automatically, even after sixty years.
"I was there that day," said Granny Dora. "I was eight. I was standing at the front, by the pot stall."
"I know," said Mr Shelley.
* * *
"I didn't laugh," said Granny Dora, and her voice cracked a little as she said it. "I want you to know that. I didn't laugh."
"I know," said Mr Shelley again. "You were looking at the ground."
For a moment the square was silent.
"I didn't laugh," said Granny Dora, "and I didn't say a word either. Back then I thought that was enough. For sixty years since, I've drawn water for the whole street, and for sixty years I've been telling myself that this pays back that one moment in the square." She shook her head. "I never paid it back, lad. Not once."
* * *
And George, who was standing by the well with the crowbar at his feet, finally understood what Luna had told him in the dark under Falcon Peak.
He wasn't standing in front of a villain.
He was standing in front of a nine-year-old boy who had once told the truth, and nobody had answered him. And ever since, for sixty years, that boy had been putting up boards around himself and teaching others to do the same, because nobody had ever taught him anything better.
And you can't prise something like that open. You can't hit it, take it apart or pull it off with pliers. All you can bring into a place like that is light. And you have to leave it there long enough for the eyes to get used to it.
* * *
"Spark," whispered Luna. "Look."
In the air above the square, between Granny Dora and Mr Shelley, hung a thin, trembling, brand-new thread.
It was the first one in Betweenhills for three days.
And one single little bead of light ran along it.
25. The Last Spark
It was half past seven in the morning, and over Betweenhills lay perfectly ordinary October light.
That was exactly why Spark could hardly be seen any more.
George sat on the kerb a few steps from the well, with his hands cupped together like a little bowl, and in that bowl lay something like a glint on glass. When he raised his thumbs to let in a little more air, Spark vanished completely for a moment, and George got such a fright that his heart leapt right up into his throat.
"I'm here," said Spark. "I'm still here."
* * *
George tried the only thing he could think of.
"Children," he said. "We have to find the other children. They'll be able to see you. Maybe they'll listen to us, and that will make you stronger."
For a moment it was quiet, and then Luna answered him, and she didn't want to say it.
"George. Those children are inside."
And that was the worst thing that was said all that morning. In every one of those seventeen boxes sat people, and in some of them sat their children too, tucked into a warm, soft corner beneath the painted sea, and none of them could see anything at all.
* * *
"Spark," said George. "How much have you got left? And tell me the truth."
"Enough for one thing," said Spark.
"What do you mean?"
"I have the last of my light inside me. It's enough for exactly one single thing, and you have to choose which."
She took a breath, though she didn't breathe.
"You can keep me in your hands. Then I'll last until evening, perhaps until tomorrow. I'll be with you, we'll talk, and it will be lovely."
"And what else can I do?"
"You can put me into this well," said Spark.
* * *
Spark rose from George's palm and floated over the stone rim — slowly, the way a bit of fluff floats.
"It's the only thing in Betweenhills that everybody has touched," she said. "Every single person in this little town has drawn water from it. Children and old people alike. Even the ones who are sitting in those boxes now."
She turned towards Mr Shelley, although he couldn't see her.
"And him too. He said so himself just now — he carried a bucket here for his mother when he was nine."
"And what would happen?" asked Luna.
"I don't know exactly," Spark admitted. "But if I go into it, I won't be just one little light any more. I'll be in the water, and in the bucket, and in every hand that takes hold of that bucket."
She fell silent.
"And I won't be yours any more."
Then she sank back down and settled in George's palm, because the flying had cost her more than she let on.
* * *
George closed his hands.
He closed them quickly and tightly, the way hands close around a butterfly, and then he pulled them in against his chest and said one word.
"No."
"George—"
"No." His voice broke somewhere in the middle. "I've been giving all night. In Three Words we gave away words. In Smokeby I gave away sixty buckets. I nearly lost Spark in the fog and in the rock. All night I've done nothing but give and give, but I'm keeping you."
He sat on the kerb, covered in mud and ash, with his hands clenched shut, and he was the most honest person in that whole square.
* * *
Nobody said anything to him.
Luna said nothing. Granny Dora said nothing. And Spark certainly didn't — she just glowed quietly in the dark between his fingers.
And then the person who needed to speak spoke up.
"Sorry," said Mr Shelley.
George looked up at him, ready to be angry.
But Mr Shelley wasn't looking at George. He was looking at George's hands — at those two palms clenched tightly around something bright, to keep it warm, to keep it safe, so that nothing would happen to it.
"I know what that is," he said very quietly. "That is exactly what I've been doing for sixty years."
* * *
George didn't move.
"It's not the same."
"No, it isn't," agreed Mr Shelley, as he agreed with everything. "You love Spark, and back then I only had fear. But the shape is the same, lad. Boards on the outside, the best thing a person has on the inside. And warmth. And quiet."
He passed his hat from one hand to the other.
"I would never try to talk you out of it. I sell these boxes, after all. I only want to tell you that I know how it ends, because I sat in mine exactly like this my whole life. Nothing in there goes wrong. That's true. But nothing grows, either."
* * *
George looked at his hands for a long time.
They were clever hands. They could mend an alarm clock, build a bridge, open a door that had been shut for thirty years and set the dome of the observatory moving. That night they had learned something much harder, too — they could lay a crowbar down on the cobbles and leave it lying there, even though it was within reach the whole time.
But never yet had they opened when it hurt.
"Spark," he said. "And what do you want?"
"I wasn't born just for the two of you," said Spark. She said it without reproach, very quietly, the way you say something that is simply true. "But you decide. I'm between you, and that means there's nobody to carry me except the two of you."
* * *
It took about another minute.
And then George opened his fingers.
He did it slowly, one by one, and when his palms were wide open, he turned them upwards and laid them on his knees. Not to send Spark away. Just so that he couldn't close them again.
Spark rose from his palm and hung in the air between him and Luna, where Spark had been from the start.
"Come on," said George, and you could hear what it cost him. "I'll walk you to the well."
26. The Bottomless Well
They stopped at the well, and for a moment nobody knew what to do next.
It was strange. All night they had had something to do — walking, building, putting out fires, climbing — and now they stood over the stone rim with nothing left to hold on to.
"So how am I supposed to do it?" asked George. "Am I supposed to... throw you in?"
"I don't know," admitted Spark.
* * *
Luna was looking into that dark hole, and one single sentence kept going round in her head. She had heard it for the first time the evening before, from Granny Dora, and for the second time from the old gentleman in the grey coat.
Bottomless for whoever draws water for the whole street. Shallow for whoever draws it only for themselves.
"You can't go in there on your own," she said slowly. "That would be like throwing you in and waiting to see what we get out of it. It wouldn't work."
She lifted her head.
"We have to put you in there for everyone. And that means we have to hold hands and not let go, the whole time you're down there."
* * *
Granny Dora got up from the stone rim, let her blanket fall onto the cobbles and held out her hand to Luna.
It was an old, thick, cracked hand that had pulled the well rope for sixty years, and Luna took hold of it without a moment's hesitation.
George took Granny Dora's other hand. And he laid his free palm flat on the cold stone of the well.
That made a chain. A short one, ridiculously short — just three people long — but it was a chain, and one end of it touched the well.
Then all three of them turned to Mr Shelley.
* * *
He stood about eight steps away, with his hat in his hand.
"Come on," said Luna.
Mr Shelley looked at those three hands, and you could see on his face that he wanted to. He really did want to. He even took half a step forward.
And then he stopped.
"Sorry," he said. "Not me."
"Mr Shelley—"
"Sorry," he repeated, and his voice was thin. "I'd only spoil it for you. You don't know what it's like from the inside. I've belonged in there for sixty years."
He raised his hat, the way a polite man says goodbye, walked across the square to his big polished box, climbed into it and pulled the lid shut behind him.
It clicked softly, and it was the saddest sound George had ever heard.
* * *
"Come on, then," said George, and his voice shook. "Spark. Come on."
Spark rose from his hand, passed over the hands of all three of them — she touched Luna's head, Granny Dora's head and George's wrist — and then she sank down into the well.
She sank slowly, the way a feather sinks. Six metres, seven, eight.
And then she went dark.
* * *
A silence fell that has no name.
George stood with his palm on the stone, and in the well there was nothing. No light, no sound, only that dry, earthy dark down at the bottom, where two fingers of damp sand lay.
"Spark?" he said.
Nothing.
"Spark!"
He knelt down at the rim. He did not let go of Granny Dora's hand, and he left his other palm on the stone. He shouted the name into that hole, the name they had thought up five days ago, high on Falcon Peak, and he didn't care who heard.
Luna was crying.
And Granny Dora, who couldn't see Spark, or the threads, or the little beads of light, held Luna and George by the hands and did not let go.
* * *
And then the stone grew warm.
Not suddenly. The way a paving stone warms in the sun — slowly, from underneath, from the middle outwards.
George felt it under his fingers and forgot to breathe.
From the depths of the well, a light began to rise. It wasn't one little light. There were lots of them, tiny and golden, and they climbed up through the moss on the stones like bubbles in a glass, and when they reached the edge, they didn't stop.
They ran along the rope. Along the pulley. Along the wooden arm. Along George's wrist, along Granny Dora's hand, along Luna's hand, and everywhere that two palms were holding on to each other, one of the lights stayed and shone out brightly.
Spark wasn't lost.
Spark had divided — exactly the way a flame divides when you light a second candle from the first one. Nothing is lost. Nothing is used up. And all at once there is twice as much light.
* * *
"Come on," said Granny Dora, and let go of Luna.
She picked up the bucket, hooked it onto the rope and lowered it into the well, and the children listened to it going down.
There was a splash.
Granny Dora pulled — and up came a full bucket of water, right to the brim, so cold that it made your teeth ache.
Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.
* * *
"And now the hardest part," said Granny Dora, setting the bucket down on the rim. "Come with me."
She crossed the square to the first grey box, the one George had tried to prise open that morning, and George caught himself looking about on the ground for the crowbar.
He left it lying there.
Granny Dora knelt down by that box — an old woman, on the cobbles, exactly as he had done an hour ago — and she didn't say come out.
She said a name.
"Anna Rowan. Annie."
Silence.
"Annie, who for three weeks after my husband's funeral brought me pears and never once knocked, only left them on the doorstep so as not to bother me."
* * *
The lid moved.
It didn't lift. It only moved, by a hair's breadth, the way someone stirs when they hear their name called from another room.
"It's cold out there," came a voice from inside, and it was a perfectly ordinary, slightly frightened voice.
"It is," said Granny Dora. "And the water is cold. I drew a full bucket. Come and see, because nobody will believe me anyway."
And the lid opened.
* * *
Mrs Rowan climbed out slowly, screwing up her eyes, and for a while she had to shade them with her hand, because after two days in the dark even an ordinary October morning felt to her like a flash of lightning.
It took quite a long time for her eyes to get used to it.
That is the one unpleasant thing about light. It has to be brought, and then it has to be left there, long enough for the eyes to bear it.
Meanwhile, in the air above her, one tiny spark began to glow, and Mrs Rowan of course couldn't see it.
George and Luna could.
* * *
After that they went from box to box, and at each one Granny Dora said a name and one thing.
About Mr Jacobs the bell-ringer, that he rings the bell even when his foot is swollen. About Mr Sparrow the baker, that from two o'clock in the morning his bakery makes the whole upper street smell of bread. About Mr Pearson the butcher, that he is always laughing first and only then asking what the joke was — and from inside his box Mr Pearson burst out laughing so hard that his lid rattled.
The children knew what was coming at every box. And at every box it was a surprise all the same, because those sentences weren't grand ones. They were small, ordinary and true, and they were proof that out here there was somebody who knew something about the person inside.
It took an hour and a quarter.
* * *
By ten o'clock in the morning there were seventeen open, empty boxes standing in the square in Betweenhills, and one that was closed.
The closed one was made of polished boards, with brass hinges and a painted window so big that the whole sea fitted into it, three white birds and all.
27. Between Us
By half past ten the whole of Betweenhills was in the square, and everyone was blinking.
A great many more people had climbed out of the seventeen open boxes than you would have expected, because most of the boxes had held whole families, and some had held children too.
It looked funny and it was beautiful. All of Betweenhills stood outside in the October light, shading their eyes with their hands, looking slightly guilty, and nobody quite knew what to say first.
Mr Sparrow the baker had already lit his oven. Mr Jacobs the bell-ringer was ringing the bell, though there was no reason to, and you could hear it all the way to Smokeby. Mrs Rowan stood by her neighbour's fence, the two of them silent and both red in the face, until at last the neighbour said something about plums, and that was that.
Above all of this, among the people, the threads were lighting up one after another, like a town when the electricity comes back after a power cut.
Only one box in the square was still closed.
* * *
"How do we make sure it doesn't dry up again?" somebody by the well asked.
It was an ordinary, practical question, but nobody answered it at once. People looked at one another. Somebody said it had always sorted itself out somehow, and heard at once how silly that sounded.
And then Luna climbed up onto the rim of the well.
She was an eight-year-old girl in a purple hoodie and muddy jeans, with Peekaboo over her shoulder, and the whole square went quiet, which was one more piece of good news that day.
"One person worked it out when he was nine years old," said Luna. "And back then, nobody listened to him."
* * *
She turned to the polished box.
"Mr Shelley. Please come and say it."
Silence.
"Mr Shelley."
At last, from inside, came a voice, very thin and very polite:
"Sorry. I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because they'll laugh."
* * *
And then George did what, sixty years ago, nobody in that square had done.
He climbed up onto the rim beside Luna, turned to the whole square and said it as loudly as he could:
"If anyone laughs, then laugh at me too. I'll be standing up here with him."
For a moment all you could hear was the wind.
Then Granny Dora raised her hand. "And at me."
Then Mr Sparrow the baker, who didn't properly know what it was all about, but remembered the boy well. "And at me."
And then Mr Pearson the butcher, the one who always laughed first, and he said it a little hoarsely. "And at me."
* * *
The lid lifted.
Mr Shelley climbed out, slowly, with his hat in his hand, and when he straightened up, he blinked exactly like everyone else. He crossed the square, and you could see it in every step — that man was walking back along the very same path he had run away down sixty years before.
The children held out their hands to him, and he climbed up onto the stone rim.
He stood in the very same spot.
* * *
"I... I kept count back then," he began, and his voice cracked like a boy's. "Sorry. I kept count on a board, in charcoal."
Nobody laughed.
"This well has no bottom for anyone who draws water for the whole street. And it does have a bottom for anyone who draws it only for themselves. I don't know why that is. I only know that it is."
He fell silent and gripped his hat with both hands.
"And I said it when I was nine, and ever since then, for sixty years, I haven't said out loud a single thing that I really thought."
* * *
The square was silent.
It wasn't the silence that had been there in the morning. This one was different — full, thick and attentive, the kind that a whole square of people makes when they are truly listening.
And then Mr Pearson spoke.
The very same Mr Pearson who always laughed first and only then asked what the joke was. He raised his hand like a boy at school and asked the first question that anyone had asked about this matter in sixty years.
"Excuse me... how exactly did you keep count?"
Mr Shelley opened his mouth, and for a moment nothing came out.
Then he leaned against the arm of the well and began to explain it, and he spoke about it for a whole quarter of an hour, and nobody left.
* * *
Behind his back, meanwhile, there was a dry crack.
The big polished box split along its whole length, from the lid to the ground.
Nobody had touched it.
It cracked from the inside, the way shells have always cracked, because something inside them has moved and no longer fits inside.
* * *
George looked at the split box, and then up, over the heads of the people, to where the sky was full of threads.
"Spark?" he said quietly, so that only Luna would hear. "Where are you?"
The answer didn't come from just one place.
It came from Granny Dora's hand, as she passed someone a bucket. It came from the hands of Mrs Rowan and her neighbour, joined over the fence. It came from Mr Pearson and from the old gentleman on the rim of the well, between whom, at that very moment, a quite new, thick, bright thread had grown.
It came from everywhere at once, and you could hear a smile in it.
"Between you."
"I'll hide the web from you again now," said Spark, in that same voice from many places at once. "It's beautiful, but if you could see every single thread all the time, it would make your heads spin. If it's ever needed, I'll show it to you again. Close your eyes for a moment."
George and Luna did as she asked. Through their eyelids they felt the same light touch as on that first night.
When they opened their eyes, there was an ordinary sky above the square again. The web had stayed in its place; it had only vanished from their sight. But they could still see the sparks between the people.
* * *
Since that autumn there has been a curious saying in Betweenhills, and no outsider quite understands it.
When someone there wants to say that something is really important, they don't say listen to me. They don't say I'm right either.
They say "between us" — and by that they mean exactly the place where the light holds.
Children say it in the garden when they are promising each other something. The men say it at the bench outside the butcher's. And at the well people sing again, though nobody has to wait for a bucket.
Mr Shelley stayed in Betweenhills. Out of the boards of his boxes he built a shelter over the bench in the square, so that people could sit there even when it rained. The painted sea was set into the wall up by the roof, and the children keep asking him whether he has ever seen the real one.
He hasn't. He says he's getting ready to.
* * *
A week later, when the valley had gone completely quiet and all three stars over the Crag were shining at five out of five, Luna went out with Peekaboo.
She set it up on its three legs, focused it and for a while just looked at the places she knew.
And then she noticed something that had never been there before.
A very, very long way off, in a place where there had been nothing at all before, a tiny new point of light had appeared. It was thin, trembling and completely new.
Luna knew at once what it was. Somewhere a very long way away, in a quite different place, two people had just, for the first time, really listened to each other — and in the space between them, their very own spark had lit up.
Luna smiled, put her eye back to the eyepiece and left it there for a very long time.
The universe is getting bigger. It does it quietly, and it does it all the time.
Juraj Tušš
