The Glass Hours

The end of the world did not come with trumpets. It came the way a bad headache comes: a pressure behind the eyes, a feeling that the sky had been lowered a few inches, and then every sound I had ever relied on went out, one by one, like lamps in a house where someone is going from room to room.

I was a typist. I want that on the record, since there is no record. I sat on the ninth floor of Haldane & Pryce Mutual taking down other people's letters about other people's deaths, sixty words a minute, and I was very good, and I was very tired, and I had not tasted anything properly since March. People said I was the sort of girl who had everything in front of her. It never occurred to them to ask what it was in front of, or whether I was meant to walk into it.

Then the Grey came, and I stopped needing to be asked.

I will say what I know. It arrived as a fog and it did not lift. It sat in the streets like a held breath. Those who walked into it did not come back, and this I could have borne, since the world was already full of people who did not come back. It was what did come back that I could not bear.

Count the tins. Count the candles. Count the days since you last heard a human sound that wasn't your own.

Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer.

The Palm House stands at the edge of the old botanic gardens, a long cathedral of glass with a dome at the centre like an upturned bowl. I came to it on the ninth day with a rucksack and a cough, and I stayed because it was the only building in the district whose walls I could see through.

You will think that a strange reason. But I had learned that the Grey does not come through glass. It stands against it. It presses its pale face to the panes, and the panes hold, and by the second month I had come to love the glass the way you love a bad doctor who is at least there: its thin high ringing in the wind, its cold, the long green light that came through it in the mornings, as if I lived at the bottom of a pond.

I had the dome, the long arms of the glasshouse, a cistern, a stove, and in the potting sheds behind the ferns eleven hundred tins of peaches, pears and condensed milk that someone had laid down for a harder winter than they got. I had a ledger, a ruled one, from the gardener's office. Each evening I wrote the day in it. Day 40. Rain. Two tins. Coughed less.The words were small and straight in my good typist's hand. I took a kind of perverse comfort from the discipline of it. A person with a ledger has not entirely stopped.

I also had the Rules, which I had written on the inside of the cover and which I will set down here for whoever finds this:

Keep the door bolted.

Keep the lamp low.

If it calls you by your name, count to nine and keep your mouth shut.

It took me a long time to understand why the third was the only one that mattered.

The first night after the Grey came I heard the Callers, though I did not yet know to call them that. I was lying in the warm room behind the palms with my coat over me, and from the other side of the glass came a man's voice.

"Hello? Hello, is anybody in there? Please. I can see the light."

I went to the pane at once. I am ashamed of how quickly. I put my palm on the glass and he was there, a shape in the fog, hand raised against the cold, and I began to turn for the bolt.

He said, "Marian."

I had not told him my name.

I count that the first mercy of my life: that I stood very still, with my hand on the bolt, with the whole slow animal of my instinct dragging me towards the door, and thought, he does not have a mouth. I do not know how I saw it. The face against the glass was a good face, a tired kind face, a man of forty with a stubble of grey. But the speech came from beside it, I thought, rather than from within, like a gramophone placed carefully at the side of a stage. The mouth did not move.

He said it again. Marian. Marian. I counted to nine. I held my breath until the room swam. Somewhere past six I began to cry without sound, and at nine, when I opened my mouth to say go away, I forced my teeth together and said nothing at all.

He went on until dawn. Then he stopped, as if a hand had been laid over a bell, and in the morning the fog was empty at the panes.

That was how I learned it. A voice may take any shape, but it may not enter a house unless it is answered. I do not know why. I only know that the Callers wait, and imitate, and ask; and that the moment you say yes, or come in, or even who's there, the glass has no more argument with them.

Dennis was the second. He had been a plumber, he told me, in the early days when I still believed that things talked sense, and he had walked out into the Grey at the end of the first month with a lantern, to find his brother. That night he came back to the glass with his own voice, his own plumber's chest-laugh, saying, "Marian, it's me, it's Dennis, it's all right, I found him." And then in his brother's voice, wet and young:

"Marian, we're so cold."

I counted. I counted until I could no longer feel my hands.

I will tell you how it began, the thing that I did not recognise as the end.

On Day 187 I woke in the small hours to the sound of the glass ringing. Not wind. Wind has a pitch; this was a pitch with intent. I lay with my eyes open. I had learned to listen with my whole skin.

From the far side of the dome a woman's voice said, "Marian."

I counted. One. Two. It said my name in a soft, level, rather bored tone, the way you might speak to a dog that has been lying too long by the door. Three. Four. I felt, with a small drop of something that was almost relief, that I knew the voice from somewhere. Five. Six. It was the voice of a woman who typed sixty words a minute and had not tasted anything since March.

Seven. Eight.

Nine.

It was my own.

I had not heard it for so long that I did not know it at first. It is a peculiar thing, to hear yourself from outside: all the hollow in the vowels, all the small dry apologies. I lay in the dark and listened to myself ask, kindly, to be let in. I had a ridiculous thought. She sounds so tired.

On the sixth night it began to tell me what I had done that day.

"You ate the peaches," it said. "The third tin from the left. You stood a long time with the lid in your hand. You thought about the girl at the next desk, with the red nails, and whether she'd be hungry too." A pause, a breath that was not a breath. "You didn't write that in the ledger."

I had not. I had not said it aloud. I lay with my fists against my mouth and my heart beating like something shut in a drawer.

On the ninth night it told me what I was going to do.

"Tomorrow you'll open the pears," it said. "You'll hesitate, and then you'll open the pears. You'll sit by the stove and it will be raining. You'll say, this is not so bad. You always say that. It's the thing you say just before you stop."

In the morning it rained. I did not open the pears. I made a point of it. I sat on the cold floor of the dome all day with my arms around my knees and stared at the tins like an enemy across a table, and at dusk, hungry to the point of tears, I pulled the lid back from the pears, because there is no mutiny so complete that the body cannot be made to sign it.

I sat by the stove. I listened to the rain.

I said, aloud, to nobody, "This is not so bad."

From the other side of the glass, very gently, my own voice said, "There you are."

I had always thought of the ledger as a kind of rope. You knot a day and you climb it. You knot another.

On Day 203 I opened it to the day's page and found that the page was already written.

Not in some unfamiliar hand. That was the horror of it. It was my own: the small straight typist's hand with the long tails on the ys, the good blue-black ink I had been rationing since September. Day 203. Rain. Two tins. I am so much better than I was. I sleep through the night now.

I had not written it.

I turned the page, my fingers wet and not entirely mine, and found Day 204. Cold. A little snow. I stopped counting. And Day 205, and Day 206, an orderly little staircase of days in my own handwriting, each cheerful, each shorter than the last, each in the voice of a woman I could very nearly recognise. I read them standing, and the ledger shook in my hands like a bird.

Day 209: I let the light go out. It is easier to see without it.

Day 210: Someone has been very patient with me.

Day 211: I let her in.

The pages after that were blank. I stood a very long time with the ledger open on the table and the green light going out of the glass, and I understood with a terrible tidy clarity what the hours of a haunting are made of. They are not made of sounds. They are made of appointments. All night she had been telling me a thing already arranged.

Do not answer. Do not answer.

But what do you do, when the thing you are asked to refuse is the sound of your own name in your own mouth?

There is a Roman kind of fatigue that comes at the end of long sieges. You stop defending the wall. You only stand on it. I stood on mine through the evening of Day 211, with my back against the stove and the ledger on my knee, and watched the lamp go small and yellow, and thought of nothing but the girl with the red nails.

The glass began to ring at midnight.

"Marian," said the voice. It was closer than it had been. It sounded very nearly warm. "Marian, you can stop now. I've done all of it. I've counted to nine every night for two hundred and eleven days."

I sat very still.

"I've stood out here and been so cold. You keep a good house. You've kept it so well. But somebody has to be the glass, and it's been me, and I'm tired." A small sound, a laugh almost. "It's your turn."

I looked up. The pane over the sink was white with fog, and I saw my own face pressed to it, from the other side: the dark hair, the dry mouth, a little paler than I remembered. Her breath had made a small bloom on the glass. She lifted one hand. I lifted mine. I watched her lips as she said come in, and felt the shape of the words in my own throat, and understood that the mouth is not a place where a voice begins. It is only the door.

I had said it. I felt it leave. The two syllables stood in the room between us, small and wet and perfectly pronounced.

Behind me, the bolt went back.

I did not turn around. I did not need to. The air in the dome had changed: a long soft pressure, a held breath released, a lamp going out in a distant room. I heard the door swing wide on its good oiled hinge, and I felt the cold come in around my ankles, kind as a hand.

Something crossed the floor towards me. It was not hurrying. It had the patience of a thing that has already been invited.

It stopped just behind my chair.

"Thank you," it said, in my voice, so close and so gentle that I felt the words move the hair at my neck. "You can put the pen down, now. I'll do the rest."

My hand picked up the pen.

I watched it open the ledger to the clean page. I watched it write, in a small straight hand with long tails on the ys, the way I always did, the way I had practised for years at a desk on the ninth floor:

Day 212. Fine. I am so much better now. I sleep through the night.

The glass rings softly in the wind. Outside, it is very quiet.

Somewhere in the long cold hall, a woman is pressing her face against a pane, and calling, calling, in a small tired voice no one will answer, to be let in.