LITMIR.BIZ

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it to the kitchen table. When her browser was up she hesitated, hands over the keyboard.

      She felt driven to do something, but… what?

      She had thousands of words saved onto her hard disk, innumerable pdfs, two hundred bookmarked sites. The problem was none of the creators of these sites knew they were relevant. They were like people wandering the streets, blithely observing that portions of the sidewalk seemed to become white once in a while, without having the faintest understanding of snow. You needed to comprehend the system to place these reports in context. She did understand, had glimpsed it, at least. She was smart, too, though it seemed to her now that she'd never really capitalized on this.

      There had been times when she'd experienced a glimpse of freedom, especially during the last couple of months. When it had occurred to her that the whole thing could be nonsense, a cloud on her vision that had never been more than a speck of dust in her eye. It didn't matter how many metaphors she conjured, however – and English had been one of her best subjects in high school; in the end, she knew she believed. Her faith was dark and unshakable. The knowledge did not make her feel better, and her faith didn't make her feel anything except afraid.

      Faith/afraid: funny how similar the two words are. When we make ourselves believe things, how often is it just an attempt to hold back the fear?

      She refocused on the screen, checking the sites with RSS feeds that automatically alerted her to additions, edits, new blog entries. Nothing. So she went for a trawl through some of her other bookmarks instead. Sites on mythology, folklore, local ephemera, anomalies. Still nothing.

      Which made perfect sense. Her emotions didn't betoken a disturbance in the ether. She was not the micro-to the world's macrocosm, one half of a pathetic fallacy (God, high school English again!). It was personal. Each time she went looking and found nothing new, it diminished the comfort she'd once found there. What had previously made her feel that she was not alone, now increasingly confirmed that she was. So what next? When you know something's wrong, but not how or why, what exactly can you do?

      Not panic. That's all.

      * * *

      Some time later she was roused by a knocking sound.

      She blinked, realized the sound was someone knocking on the front door. Of course. She hauled herself up from the chair and trudged out of the kitchen. She was disquieted to realize that she'd spent at least some of the time in thoughts she believed had left her: the idea of killing herself.

      She opened the front door to see Rona smiling at her, looking teenage and wholesome as all get-out.

      ‘Mommmeeeee!’ a voice shrieked from below, and she squatted down to let Tyler give her a hug. He gave good hugs. She straightened up with her son in her arms, and smiled broadly at his occasional sitter.

      ‘Thanks, honey,’ she said, as the four year old in her grasp wriggled for the door catch. Locks and light switches were catnip to this kid. Pockets of the world on which he could exert an influence, Carol supposed, first steps in controlling the chaos. She hoped he never learned how they could turn on you.

      ‘Oh, he's a peach,’ Rona said.

      Her cheer was unassailable. Tyler's mother knew that, on occasion, her son was perfectly capable of not being a peach, but you'd never know it from Rona's reports. ‘So, Friday morning next, right?’

      ‘Yep,’ Carol said, her attention caught by the lock her son was manhandling. Thinking: I'll be seeing you later.

      ‘You … okay, Mrs Ransom?’

      Carol looked round to see her neighbour's daughter looking at her curiously. ‘I'm great,’ she said with a big fake smile, and shut the door.

      While she fixed him a small holding snack in the kitchen she submitted her son to a forensic interrogation as to how he had spent his day. You needed to extract this information quickly. What had happened at kindergarten seemed to become unreal or uninteresting within a couple of hours, as if events were ephemeral, and the past lost its charge like a battery. Carol envied this a great deal.

      It appeared that he had ‘done things’ and that it had been ‘fine’.

      They sat on the sofa together with a children's book – one perk of working at the library was an inexhaustible supply of these – and within fifteen minutes Carol felt herself relaxing. They could do that to you, sometimes, children. They were so much themselves that if you let yourself be pulled fully into their orbit, you could forget your own world for a time.

      Then the phone rang. They looked up at it together. Their phone rang very seldom.

      ‘Someone's calling,’ Tyler said.

      ‘I know, sweetie.’ She got up and went over to the table, picked up the handset. ‘Yes?’

      ‘Hello, my dear.’

      It was a woman's voice.

      Carol knew immediately who it was. It was a moment before she could say anything in reply, and it came out as a brittle whisper.

      ‘How did you get this number?’

      ‘A little bird told me. Time to come home,’ the woman said. ‘We can help.’

      Carol put down the phone.

      ‘Who was that?’ her son asked.

      ‘Nobody, honey.’

      ‘Can nobody talk, then?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’

      She asked him to count up the number of cows on the page of the book in front of him, and managed to walk to the bathroom and close the door before she threw up.

      That night she checked the bolt thirty-two times when she went to bed, though she knew it was too late. Nobody was already inside the gates, and that's what panic actually was, she realized. It was the noise of the world whispering in your ear, when your life was ruled by something that wasn't there.

      It was the sound of nobody talking, all the time.

       Chapter 5

      It was a busy night in the restaurant. I didn't give Ted a heads-up that we wouldn't be seeing his pizza guy, as he'd have wondered where I'd got my information, but waited until he came asking for me to fill in – and acted like it was business as usual. I alternated between the oven, the floor and the bar as we went through two half-full sets of covers. Unusually good for that time of year, and you could see Ted relax a little as he realized it was all going to help cover part of the day's costs and appease the dark gods of cash flow.

      I was the last member of staff to leave the restaurant, and on hand when Ted gave the outside door a final looking-over before locking it for the night. He grunted approvingly.

      ‘Nice job,’ he said. ‘I should really give you something for all that work.’

      ‘You already do,’ I said.

      He looked at me for a moment. ‘Want a lift?’

      ‘I'm good,’ I said. ‘Looking forward to the walk.’

      ‘You're a weird guy,’ he said. When he got to his truck he looked back. ‘Thanks, John.’

      ‘All part of the service.’

      He shook his head and got in the pickup, a man looking forward to a beer on his home turf and putting his feet up in front of late-night television with no idea that – for reasons of which he was entirely ignorant – his world stood a little more fragile tonight. But I guess none of us ever do know that, until after the fact.

      I waited until he'd driven away, then got a chair down from the stacks. I'd told myself I'd wait half an hour, forty minutes tops, but it was only twenty before I heard a vehicle turn into the access road.

      I

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