Chapter 2
House Rules
The parcel was on the mat at ten past seven.
It was a plain brown padded envelope, with no stamp, and his name typed on a label. He took it to the kitchen table and opened it with a butter knife. Inside, wrapped in tissue, lay three things.
The first was a key. It was brass, old and worn, about the length of his finger, tied to a loop of red string. Stamped on the head, very small, was a number: 14. There was a fleck of green paint in the groove of the bow, as if it had come off a door. He put it to his nose, without meaning to, and under the smell of metal and oil there was something dry and black and sour, like the inside of a chimney. He put it down quickly. It's been in a drawer, he told himself. Anything smells of something.
The second was a playing card, a joker with a cracked blue face and a little gray hat. In the corner, in black pen, somebody had written a number: 5.
The third was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds.
PAGE ONE. THE TERMS.
1. The game runs for twenty-four hours, from 22:00 on Friday to 22:00 on Saturday.
2. You will be taken to a controlled area. You will be given a phone, a bag, a map, and a pair of boots. You must stay inside the boundary, which is marked in blue.
3. Your phone must be switched on for ninety seconds at every even hour: 22:00, 00:00, 02:00, and so on. If you miss one, your game ends.
4. You may not contact the police, call anyone for help, or tell anyone about the game. You may not bring anyone. This applies during the game and for forty-eight hours after it. A breach will end your game.
5. If you are still free at 22:00 on Saturday, you will be paid five million dollars.
6. Your phone is how you will receive instructions. Read all of them. Instructions may change.
7. Keep the key with you. You will need it at the end.
It was signed, at the bottom, in blue ink: The House.
He read it three times, with his finger under the lines, like a man reading a menu in another language. It was polite and short, and it said nothing at all about who would be looking for him. Not be caught. It was the nicest way he'd ever heard of putting it. He folded it up, and put it in his back pocket, and hung the key round his neck on its red string, and did not know why he'd done either. Then he went to work.
On Thursday he fixed four things, and none of them was the thing that was wrong with him.
He fixed a fridge that had been making a clicking noise, which turned out to be a cat toy under the compressor. He fixed a washer with a bad door seal. He fixed Mrs. Dolan's dryer, with two rollers and a belt, exactly as he had said, and she came in at four and stood at the counter with her purse in both hands and said, "It's quiet. It's never been quiet. It's been shouting for years." Bill took her money. Ethan stayed at the bench with his back to them, wiping a screwdriver that was already clean.
He had slept for about an hour. He had lain on his back in the dark with the white card under the pillow, and a little after three he'd got up and checked the bank again, in case it had been a dream. It hadn't. It said what it had said. He'd stood at the window with the phone in his hand and watched the street, an empty orange street with a cat on a trash can, and thought: Somebody is looking at this number right now. Somebody's got a chair and a coffee, and they're looking at it like I'm looking at it, and they're waiting to see what I'll do.
He did not say anything to Bill. It was the one rule he'd been given that he found he could keep. He had never been a talker. He had known Bill six years and never once told him anything he couldn't have told a stranger on a bus. But at five, as he was putting his coat on, Bill said, without turning from the till, "You'd tell me, wouldn't you? If you were in trouble."
"I'm not in trouble."
"That's not what I asked."
"I'd tell you."
"No, you wouldn't." Bill shut the drawer. He was still looking at the register. "You'd say it was fine and then you'd come in with a black eye. I've seen you do it. You did it with the divorce."
"I didn't get a black eye with the divorce."
"You got something." Bill turned, at last, and took the glasses off his nose and rubbed the bridge of it. His eyes without them were smaller and kinder. "I'm sixty-five, son. I've got a bad hip and a worse accountant. I can't fix much. But I can lend you two hundred dollars, and I'll do it without a speech."
It was such a plain thing to say that Ethan did not know where to look.
"I'm all right," he said. "Honestly. Something came through."
"What kind of something?"
"A, a family thing. An old debt. Somebody paid it."
Bill looked at him for a long time.
"Good," he said, in the end. "I'm glad." He put the glasses back. "Don't let it be a trick."
"What?"
"Money that turns up. It's always a trick." He picked up the cold coffee, looked at it with distaste, and drank it. "Go home, Ethan. Eat something that isn't from a machine."
Thursdays were Maya's.
It was in the court papers, the old ones, the ones from before: Thursday 5:30 to 8:00, and alternate Saturdays. He had never missed one. He had missed things, God knew. He had missed a birthday cake and a school play and the whole of one long wet summer. But he had never missed a Thursday, and he went to the house on Birch Close with a pizza box in one hand and a bunch of supermarket tulips in the other, which was ridiculous, because they were for Claire, and he had no idea why. He just knew that he could not arrive empty-handed. He had learned that about himself in the worst year.
Claire opened the door.
She was thirty-three, and thin, and tired, in a gray cardigan, with her dark hair tied back and a pencil pushed through it. She had a way of looking at him that he'd once taken for coldness and now understood was just the face of a woman who had been braced for ten years. She looked at the pizza, and the tulips, and him.
"You called in sick last night," she said.
"I didn't call in sick. I just didn't call."
"That's worse."
"I know. I'm sorry. Something came up."
"I was going to say."
"I know." He held out the tulips. "They're not for anything. They were three dollars."
She took them. She held them against her chest for a second like a person holding something that might leave. Then she stood aside.
"Come in. She's been at the window for an hour."
Maya was not at the window. Maya was at the kitchen table, in a purple sweater with a hole in the elbow, with her tongue between her teeth and a fat pencil in her fist, and she did not look up until she had finished whatever it was. This was a thing she did, a thing he loved with his whole stupid chest. He stood in the door of the kitchen and waited, and she went on drawing, and the clock over the stove ticked, and she said, without turning, "Don't say anything yet."
"I'm not."
"You're breathing loud."
"I'll breathe quieter."
"Okay." She did a last stroke, a long one, with great care. She sat back and looked at it. "Now you can."
"Hi, Em."
"Hi, Dad." She turned. She was eight. She had Claire's dark hair and his own gray eyes, and a gap where a front tooth had been and a new one was coming, a white edge like a grain of rice. She looked at him with total, unselfconscious pleasure, as if the sight of him were a small piece of luck she hadn't expected today. "Did you bring pepperoni?"
"Half pepperoni. Half the green kind."
"The green kind's gross."
"It's for your mother."
"It's still gross."
"I'm in the room," said Claire.
"I know," said Maya, very politely.
They ate at the table, the three of them, and it was almost easy. It was not easy, not really, but there was a moment about halfway through when Maya told a long and complicated story about a girl called Priya who had put a worm in the teacher's coffee, and Claire laughed, a short bright surprised laugh that she covered with her hand, and Ethan caught her eye. For a second they looked at each other like two people at a party who have both noticed the same stupid thing. Then it was gone, and Claire was reaching for the water jug.
"What did the teacher do?" said Ethan.
"She didn't notice. She drank it." Maya's eyes went round. "She said it was crunchy."
"That's a bad word to say about coffee."
"She didn't say it was bad. She said it was interesting."
"Teachers say that when they mean bad," said Claire.
"I know. That's why it's funny."
He loved her so much it was like being hit.
He thought of the rules sheet, folded in his back pocket, and the joker, and the key on the string against his chest, where he had hung it that morning without deciding to. Tell Maya the blue horse is very good. It had been in his head all day. It had been going round and round like a coin in a washing machine, a small hard clatter at the edge of everything. He looked at his daughter across a pizza box and tried to feel afraid of the right thing, and couldn't tell what it was.
"Dad."
"Yes?"
"You're doing the face."
"What face?"
"The one where you're in a different room."
"Sorry."
"It's okay." She put a crust on her plate. She picked up her pencil and started, quite calmly, to draw on the back of the pizza box. "I made you another one. I was going to give it to you at the end. But you can have it now."
"Another what?"
"Horse."
She slid it across.
It was on a sheet of lined paper, torn out of an exercise book. This time the horse was gold. It had a long white face and a black mane, and, for no reason he could see, a small red hat. Beneath it she had written, in careful pencil, CAPTAIN. Beside the name, in brackets, she had added (he is a captain).
"He's the boss of all the other horses," said Maya. "That's why he's got a hat."
"Horses don't wear hats."
"This one does, because he's special."
"Is he a good boss?"
"He's very fair. He doesn't let anyone get left behind." She said it with the great flat certainty of a child who has thought about a thing for a long time. "That's the main rule in the horse army. You don't leave anyone."
Ethan looked at the paper.
He was aware that he was holding it a little too tightly. A thumbprint had gone into the corner. He loosened his fingers one by one and smoothed the crease flat with the side of his hand. He said, "It's great, Em. It's really great. I'll put him up next to the blue one."
"He's better than the blue one."
"Don't tell the blue one."
"I won't," said Maya, and grinned.
Claire, on the other side of the table, had stopped eating.
She was looking at him with a small line between her eyebrows. She said nothing. She picked up her fork and put it down again, and when Maya got down to find a felt pen, Claire waited until the small feet had gone off along the hall, and then she said, in a low even voice, "Nine thousand six hundred dollars."
He kept his face still.
"It came through this morning. They sent me a notice. Arrears cleared in full. I thought it was a mistake. I rang the office." She laid both hands flat on the table. "They said it was a bank transfer. From you."
"Yes."
"Where did you get it?"
"I told you. Something came through."
"That's not an answer."
"It's, a thing at work. Bill had a, there was a customer. An old account." He heard how it sounded, and went on anyway, which was worse. "A guy owed me for a job, from years back. He finally paid. I didn't want to say until it was definite."
"Nine thousand dollars."
"It was a big job."
"You fix toasters, Ethan."
"It was a very big toaster."
She did not laugh. She looked at him across the table with her tired pointed face. For a moment he thought she was going to say something unkind, and he would have understood, he would have been grateful, because it would have been so much easier than what she did say.
"If it's from somebody dangerous," she said, "I'd rather know."
"It isn't."
"If it's one of those loan people. One of the ones with a car outside."
"It isn't. I swear."
"If you've done something, I'm not going to be angry. I'm going to be frightened. That's all. I just need to know whether to be frightened."
"I haven't done anything."
"All right."
"Claire."
"I said all right." She picked up the tulips from where they lay on the counter and stood looking at them, and then, quite suddenly, put her face down into them, in the green and white, and left it there for a second. When she looked up, her eyes were bright. "They smell of nothing. Did you know? You pay three dollars for a bunch of flowers, and they've been bred so they don't smell."
"I didn't know that."
"I just found out. I read it somewhere." She laughed, a small watery one. "I've been so cross at you. For about a year. And this morning I got a letter that said you'd paid, and I sat on the stairs and cried, and I don't even know why."
He did not know what to say.
He stood up, and went round the table, and stood in front of her with his hands hanging, and it was Claire who put her arms round him first. It was short. It was brisk, like a hug between two people who have agreed it won't mean anything. She smelled of washing powder and pencil shavings. Her cheek was cold against his neck. Over her shoulder he could see the kitchen, the fridge covered in magnets and school letters, the window with the garden gone blue, the calendar on the wall with a photo of a horse.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For what?"
"I don't know. All of it."
"You don't have to be sorry for all of it," said Claire into his shoulder. "Just some."
He did the thing he'd been dreading at eight, in the hall, with his coat on.
"I'm going to miss Saturday."
Maya, in her pajamas, with her hair damp from the bath, stood on the stairs with her hands on the banister and looked down at him.
"Why?"
"Work. Bill's got a big job. A, a warehouse thing. They need me all day. I can't get out of it."
"On Saturday?"
"I know. It's rubbish. I'll make it up on Sunday. We'll go to the pond. We'll bring bread."
"The ducks don't like bread. Mom says it makes their tummies bad."
"We'll bring something else."
"Like what?"
"Peas."
She considered. "Peas are okay."
"See? It's a plan."
"But Saturday's yours." It was said with perfect flat grief. "It's the day you come. It's not even a work day. Everyone's at home on Saturday."
"I know."
"You said you'd never miss one."
"I said I'd never miss a Thursday."
"You said Saturday, too."
He crouched, so his face was level with hers, and put a hand on the banister next to hers. It was a small hand, with a bandage on one thumb. He could see the line of her baby teeth, and the damp hair on her forehead, and the spot where the pencil had left a gray smudge on her cheek.
"Maya," he said. "Listen."
"I'm listening."
"I'm going to do something. A work thing. It's a long one, and it's important, and I can't tell you what. But when it's done, I'm going to have a lot of, things will be better. Do you understand? I'm going to be able to do all the things I've been promising for ages."
"Like a bike?"
"Like a bike."
"A red one?"
"Any color you want."
"And ponies?"
"I can't promise a pony."
"You said any color."
"A pony isn't a color."
"It could be," said Maya.
He laughed. It broke in the middle.
She put out one finger and touched the side of his face, quite gently, below the eye, where the skin was tight. "You look sad."
"I'm not."
"You look sad when you smile. Mom says it's because you're tired." She patted his cheek twice, with great seriousness, the way you pat a dog. "Go to sleep tonight. Okay? Properly. Don't just lie there."
"I'll try."
"Don't try. Do."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Dad."
"Yes?"
"Sunday," said Maya. "Promise."
He did not hesitate. It was the one thing in the whole world he did not have to think about. "I promise," he said.
Claire had come out into the hall. She stood with her arms folded and her head on one side, in the yellow light, and watched them, and did not say anything. As he went down the path, with his hands in his pockets and the wind in his hair, he heard the door close behind him, very softly, and then the sound of a small voice saying something, and a larger voice answering. And a bolt.
On Friday morning he rang the number again.
He did it from the car, in the lot behind the shop, at ten to eight, before Bill had arrived. The sky was white. A man in a safety jacket was hosing down the forecourt of the garage next door, and the water ran in a gray stream toward the drain. Ethan sat with the engine off and the phone to his ear.
"Mr. Cole," said the House.
"I've got questions."
"Of course you have."
"Where is it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The, the area. You said a controlled area. Where is it? How big? I'm not going to say yes to a place I can't see."
"It's on the east side of Calder," said the House. "A place called Mercer Yard."
Ethan did not say anything.
He sat very still in the driver's seat. The man with the hose looked up, and looked at the sky, and went on. Ethan watched the water. It ran along the gutter, and gathered, and went down the grate with a small clean gulp, and was gone.
"Mr. Cole?"
"I know it."
"I thought you might."
"It's a dump. It's an old industrial estate. They closed it years ago. Nobody goes there."
"That's the idea."
"Why there?"
"It's big and it's empty. It's about a couple of square miles of old streets, factories, warehouses, a few houses that never got pulled down. It has a river on one side and a railway on the other. It has a market on the edge on Saturday morning, which you'll find interesting. It's a real place, with real corners. I thought it was more honest than a, than a set."
"I used to work near there."
"Did you?" The voice was easy. It did not change at all. "Then you'll have an advantage."
"That's what you're hoping."
"It's what I'm hoping for you."
Ethan put the back of his free hand against his mouth. He pressed it, hard, and held it there, until the small sharp discomfort of teeth against skin told him he was still in his body.
"Who am I hiding from?"
"People."
"How many?"
"I can't say. That's one of the things you'll find out."
"Are they ordinary? Like me?"
"Some of them." A pause. "Not all."
"What happens if they catch me?"
"Then the game ends."
"Ends how?"
"Ends for you." The voice was light. "So I'd try not to let them. It's the whole idea."
"Do I get anything? To, I don't know. To defend myself?"
"A multi-tool. A very small one. For opening cans." There was a dry little sound, almost a laugh. "I'm sorry. You're not meant to fight. You're meant to be clever."
"That's a lot of faith."
"I think you're clever, Mr. Cole."
"I fix washing machines."
"That's what I mean."
He shut his eyes.
He sat for a long time with the phone against his ear, and the engine ticking as it cooled, and the white morning pressing on the glass. He could hear the House breathing. It was a quiet, even, patient sound. It was the breathing of a man who had all day.
"Can I still say no?" he said.
"You said yes on Wednesday night," said the House. "At twenty-two forty-one. With nine thousand six hundred dollars. I'm sorry, Ethan. I did tell you the money was a deposit."
"I paid my child support."
"I know. It was a very good use of it." The voice was almost gentle. "It makes it harder to be sorry."
"And if I don't come?"
"I'd rather you did."
"If I don't."
"Then the game comes to you." A short pause. "I'm not going to say how. You're an imaginative man. I think you've already thought of three ways, and I think they're all worse than the one I'm offering." The voice softened. "Don't be frightened. It's a game. It has a start, and it has an end, and in between it's only twenty-four hours. You'll get through the first by getting through the second. That's the only way I know."
"What about after?"
"After, you may do as you like. I'd ask for forty-eight hours of silence, if you can manage it. It's a courtesy, mostly."
"And during? If something goes wrong? Who do I ring?"
"Nobody," said the House. "That's rather the point."
He opened his eyes.
Through the windshield, over the roof of the garage, he could see the top of a crane, red and white, far off against the sky. A bird sat on the arm of it. As he watched, it opened its wings, and let go, and dropped, and caught the wind, and was a small black speck over the roofs, going east.
"Pick me up at eight," said Ethan.
"Lovely."
"From the corner of Linden Court. I'll be on the bench."
"The bench nobody uses?"
"That one."
"I'll see you there," said the House.
He wrote two letters that afternoon, in the back room at the shop, when Bill was out getting the lunch.
He wrote them on a pad of invoice paper, with a ballpoint that kept skipping. The first was to Claire. It said, If I'm not at court on Monday, open the second envelope in the kitchen drawer. There's an account number and a name. I did it for Maya. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of it, not just some. He read it, and crossed out not just some, and wrote it back in. He folded it into an envelope and sealed it with the end of his tongue.
The second was shorter. He sat over it for twenty minutes.
Dear Maya,
I'm going to try to be here on Sunday. If I'm not, it's not because I didn't want to. I want you to know that. Every time I ever missed something, I wanted to be there.
The blue horse is the best horse. But Captain's good too. Look after him. Remember the rule.
You don't leave anyone.
Love, Dad.
He looked at it for a while. Then he took it, and folded it very small, and put it in the back of the little plastic frame on the shelf above the bench, behind a photograph of her at four, on a swing. He put the frame back. He wiped his hands down his pants, though there was nothing on them.
Bill came back with two sandwiches and a bag of chips.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Thanks."
"I mean it kindly."
"I know."
"Go home early."
"I'm going to."
"That's not what I—" Bill stopped. He put the sandwiches on the bench, and stood with his hands hanging, and looked at Ethan with the half-moon glasses sliding down his nose. "Hey. Son."
"What?"
"Whatever it is."
"Yes?"
"Don't be an idiot."
It was such a Bill thing to say, so plain and so ruined by kindness, that Ethan nearly laughed. He picked up a sandwich. He looked at it. "I'll do my best," he said.
The car was gray, and clean, and had no markings.
It stopped at the curb outside Linden Court at eight exactly. He had been on the bench for eleven minutes, in the new boots he hadn't got yet, in his old jacket, with nothing in his pockets but his keys and a ten-dollar note. He had been told to bring nothing. He'd looked at the apartment for a long time before he left. He'd looked at the kettle, and the key rack, and the dent in the fridge. He had left the lamp on in Maya's room. He didn't know why. It was just the kind of thing you did.
A man got out of the front.
He was fifty or so, bald, in a plain dark suit, with a smooth pink face and a pair of rimless glasses, and he had the manner of a man who ran the front desk of a very good hotel. He opened the back door and stood beside it with his hands folded.
"Mr. Cole," he said. "My name's Pierce. I'll be driving."
"Do I call you Mr. Pierce?"
"Pierce is fine."
"Are you one of the, the hunters?"
"I'm a driver." He said it with great patience. "I don't hunt. I don't carry a weapon. I take the gentleman from the door to the gate, and then I go home. I have a wife and two cats, and I'd like to keep it that way."
"That's reassuring."
"It's meant to be."
Ethan got into the back.
The seat was soft. The car smelled of mint. There was a bottle of water in the door pocket and a small paper bag on the seat beside him, and Pierce said, "Your telephone, please, sir. And your wallet. They'll be here when you come back." He held out a thin gray box with a lid, like a shoebox. Ethan put his phone in it. The wallet. The ten-dollar note. His keys. He looked at them lying in a row on the felt, small and ordinary, like things in a lost-property tray.
"What if I don't come back?"
"They'll be here."
"For who?"
"For whoever comes for them." Pierce closed the lid. "I find people usually do."
They pulled away from the curb.
It was a smooth drive. He had not expected that. He had expected something rougher, a van with no windows, a bag over the head. Instead there was a quiet engine and a heater and a faint scent of lemon polish, and the lights of Calder going past in long gold smears, a bus, a pizza place, a church with a floodlit spire. Pierce drove carefully, with both hands on the wheel, and did not play the radio.
"Is it far?"
"Forty minutes."
"Is there anything I should know?"
"Not from me." A glance in the mirror. "I can tell you the boots are your size. I checked with your landlord's records. And I can tell you that the jacket's warm, and the bag's not as heavy as it looks, and that if you're thinking of eating the bars all at once, you should eat them slowly. That's all. I'm not supposed to give advice."
"But you're giving it."
"It's not advice. It's laundry." He almost smiled. "I'm only a driver. I just see a great many people in the back of this car."
"What are they like?"
"Frightened." Pierce paused. "Mostly in the first ten minutes. After that it's different. After that they go quiet."
"What kind of quiet?"
"The kind where they've decided something."
"What have they decided?"
"I've never asked," said Pierce. "I'd rather not know."
They drove on.
The town thinned out. The shops went, and then the houses, and then there was a long dull stretch of road between warehouses and car dealerships and fenced-off yards where trucks stood in rows with their lights off. The sky was a deep clear blue, darkening at the edges, with a single bright star over the roofs. A train went by on an embankment, lit from inside, and he saw faces in the windows, a man reading, a girl asleep, a woman with her hand over her mouth in a yawn. They went by in a blink. He watched them go.
They're going home, he thought.
The signs began to change.
He saw one with a number and a name. Mercer Road. He had known he would. He had been waiting for it, in the gut, for forty minutes, the way you wait for a step on a stair in the dark. It came, and it was a green sign, with a white edge, one of the ones the council put up, with the paint a little chipped.
He looked at his knees.
He did not look at the sign again. He did not look at the left side of the road, where the sidewalk went up in a long bank and the trees stood back in a black line. He did not look at the half-seen gate, or the chain, or the notice with a skull on it that said DANGER. KEEP OUT. UNSAFE STRUCTURE. He looked at his knees. They were a pair of old jeans knees, with a frayed patch on one of them. He counted the threads.
"Mr. Cole?"
"Yes?"
"Are you all right?"
"Fine."
"You've gone white."
"It's the light."
"Of course," said Pierce. He did not look in the mirror. "It does that."
They went through a gate.
It was a wide steel one, on rollers, with a lamp on a pole beside it, and a man in a gray uniform who stood back to let them pass and did not raise his eyes. Then a track, rutted and wet, between two walls of black bramble. Then a clearing. The headlights swung across a high chain-link fence and a concrete post and a patch of rough gravel where a van stood with its back doors open. Pierce stopped the car. He turned off the engine.
For a second, neither of them moved.
"This is as far as I go," said Pierce.
Ethan looked out of the window.
There was nothing to see. A fence. A track going down into the dark, with a few puddles gleaming in it. At the end of the track, a long way off, a row of low roofs and chimneys, black against the paler black of the sky. A smell came in through the vent: wet earth, rust, a rotten sweet smell of river. There were no lights anywhere.
He did not see the tall brick chimney on the right. He did not look for it. But he knew, with the whole of the skin on the back of his neck, that it was there, a quarter of a mile off, standing against the stars, with its name in white letters going gray.
"Right," he said.
His voice was almost steady.
Pierce got out. He opened the back door. There was a table by the gravel, a plain folding one, with a lamp, and a woman in a gray coat behind it, who looked at Ethan for exactly as long as she needed to and then looked at her clipboard. On the table lay a pair of black boots. A brown jacket. A small gray backpack. A folded map. A plastic whistle on a cord.
"Put those on, please," said the woman. "The old ones go in the bag. Your size is nine and a half."
"It's nine."
"It's nine and a half in this make."
He sat on a folding chair and took off his shoes. His socks had a hole in one heel. He had not noticed. He put the boots on, one at a time, and laced them, and they fitted perfectly. Then he stood, and shrugged on the jacket, and the woman, without a word, held the backpack open, and he looked in.
Two bottles of water. Four cereal bars. A flashlight no longer than his hand. A thick gray phone in a rubber case, heavier than it looked. A small tool with a knife, a screwdriver, a can opener, and a file, folded up like a fish. He took the phone out and turned it over. It had one button on the side, and a small dark screen, and nothing else.
"It's off," said the woman. "Keep it off. Hold the button for three seconds at every even hour. Ten o'clock tonight, midnight, two in the morning. Ninety seconds on, then switch it off again. If it isn't on within five minutes of the hour, you're out." She said it flatly, like a person reading a bus timetable. "You can't call out. You'll get a message when there's something you need to know. Don't expect many."
"Why ninety seconds?"
"So they know you're alive."
"Who's they?"
"What if I need to call someone?" she said, as if he had asked. "You don't call anyone. Nobody does." She nodded at the cord in his hand. "There's a whistle. Hold on to it." She looked at him for the first time. She had a small, closed, careful face. "Mr. Cole. I'll give you a piece of advice. It's not on the sheet."
"All right."
"Don't hide in the first place you find. It's the first place they look."
"Thank you."
"I mean it. I've watched twenty of you do it."
"What happened?"
"Most of them didn't last long." She turned a page. "The ones who did go on."
She stepped back.
Pierce had gone round to the driver's door. He stood with his hand on the roof, in the light of the lamp, a small bald man in a suit that was a little too big in the shoulders. He didn't smile. He said, "Mr. Cole. One thing."
"Yes."
"I've been driving this car for eleven months. I've taken forty-two people to this gate. I've never said this to anyone." He looked down at his hand. "I'm obliged to tell you there's no going back."
"I know."
"I'm obliged to tell you, and I'd tell you anyway. A man tried it, in the spring. He turned round, there, by that post. The two gentlemen in the van got out of the van." Pierce's voice was perfectly steady. "I'd rather not say the rest."
Ethan looked at him.
He looked at the car, with its warm yellow dome light, and the back seat with its mint-colored smell, and the long road going back through the bramble toward the world. He looked at the gate, and the man in the gray uniform, who stood with his hands behind him and did not look at anyone. Beyond it, small and bright and impossible, the glow of Calder lay across the horizon like a spilled drink. It looked about a hundred miles off.
He thought of Maya, in her pajamas, on the stairs.
"Can I change my mind?" he said.
"No, sir."
"Then I'd better stay."
"Very good," said Pierce. He stood quite still for a moment. Then he opened the door, and got in, and sat with both hands on the wheel, and did not start the engine. Through the windshield his face was only a pale oval. "Good luck, Mr. Cole," he said, through the glass. "I hope you're wrong about yourself."
The car pulled away.
Ethan stood in the light of the lamp and watched it go. Its taillights shrank, and dipped, and turned a corner. A moment later, the man in the gray uniform folded the table and the lamp into the van, and the woman climbed in beside him, and the doors shut, and the engine started. They went too. The gate rolled shut behind them with a long hard rattle, like a drawer.
Then there was no light.
He stood in the gravel with a bag on his back and a whistle round his neck and a key under his shirt. The dark was not complete. There was a little gray in the sky, a faint paleness over the roofs, and a patch of moon behind a cloud. He could see the track. He could see the long low line of the old houses. He could see, if he turned his head to the right, which he did not, the shape of something very tall.
The phone buzzed in the bag.
He took it out. It was lit. He had not touched it. A line of white type had come up on the dark screen, and under it a small number counting down.
22:00. CHECK-IN. 01:29. 01:28.
He pressed and held the button, as the woman had said. It gave a little shiver. The type changed.
The House wishes you luck.
He read it twice. When the number reached zero, the screen went black on its own, and he stood with the heavy thing in his hand and the key under his shirt and the night all round him, thinking: They'll know I'm here. It seemed a sensible thing to want, a company that wanted to know where you were, in a big empty place, in the dark. He put the phone away, and tightened the straps of the bag, and set off down the track, with the gravel loud under the new boots, not toward the tall thing, not toward the river, but straight into the nearest set of streets, where there were doors, and corners, and places to be.