IX. Time

IX. Time

The answer came in the morning, and it was not the one Flinch had asked for.

He had put the question to Master at breakfast, plainly and once, as he did with anything he would not say twice: whether a man might come to live in the house, a man who had done what Mister Percy had done, and had said so, and was sorry for it, and had no place that was his.

UG had set down his toast. He had looked at it for a long time.

"I won't say yes today," he said. "I won't say no. I'd like to hear him say the thing about the gnomes to me, not to you. I'd like to see what he does with his face."

"He's not got a face for it, Master. Not the way you mean."

"Then I shall have to read his hand." He picked up the pencil, reluctantly, as though it were a debt. "Ask him to come to the door and knock. I shall decide when I have seen what he does when it opens."

It was, Flinch understood, as near to yes as Master could get with his hat on. He took it to the study.

The Journal was cold.

It had never been cold. It had been warm, or neutral as a shut cupboard, but it had never taken the heat out of his hand. He opened it. The left page was blank. The right page was blank. Then the ink began to arrive, not in lines but in grains, like iron filings finding a magnet.

—Mister F—

—room—candle—not—

—can you—

And then nothing, for the space of a held breath.

He wrote: I am here. Can you read me?

He watched it go. The words did not fade, as they used to. They stayed where he had put them, perfectly clear, and a fine grey static rose under them and stopped at the line.

---

It was not Percy's doing. That was the thing Flinch would have liked to be able to say, and could not.

At the other end of the line, in a room above a tavern with the candle guttered to a stub, Percy sat very straight with the book open flat under both hands, as if he were holding down a sheet in a gale. Mezzlos stood against the wall.

"It is not you," said Mezzlos, after a while.

"I had gathered."

"It is the route. It is being made smaller." The voidwalker turned his head. "I have felt this before. It is how a thing is closed that is not meant to look closed."

"Then it is a door." Percy did not look up. "And it has a latch on one side only, and we are on the wrong one."

The Journal ticked. It had a new sound now. It was the sound of a watch being checked by someone who already knew the time.

---

They spent the day on it, though neither of them would have put it that way.

Flinch wrote a sentence and waited for it to settle. Percy wrote one back, and a third of it would arrive, and the rest would come an hour later in the wrong order, so that Flinch learned to read a page the way one reads a letter that has been in the rain: for the words that had survived, and for the shape of the ones that had not.

—you have—the door—knock—

I will tell Master. He says knock and he will see what you do when it opens.

—that is fair—

It is.

—I would—

And a smear, long enough that Flinch simply sat, with the lamp on and his hand on the cover, until it passed.

He was not a man who said things. He had been born into a trade where saying things was an expense. But he had spent three weeks learning, one page at a time, what it was like to say something to someone who wrote it down.

He wrote at the foot of the page, while the grey crept up it:

Mister Percy. Whatever it does after this, I want you to have the last of it from me, and not from the book.

You said once you would assume everyone could read this. I would like to say it to everyone, then. Mister Percy asked to come to the house, and I said yes in my heart before I had asked, and I would say it again.

He stopped. The ink on the right-hand page, which had been grey, went black and clear for the first time that day. As if it had been waiting.

Dear Mister Flinch,

I have the whole of this one. I believe it is the last I shall have whole, and I would rather it were the longest.

I asked you, a fortnight ago, whether anyone else read these. You did not know, and I said I would assume everyone. I was wrong to say it. I assumed it because it was safer than hoping that it was only you.

I do not have a house. I have not had one for some time. I did not say so because you would have been kind about it, and I am not certain what I should have done with kind.

I would like to knock on your door. I would like to see it open. If it does not, I would like you to know that I would have knocked.

Tell your Master the number is not the point and I know that it is not. Tell him I counted so that I should never be able to say that I had not.

Tell Mezzlos I said he was right about the list.

Thank you for the kettle.

Percy.

Flinch read it in the cold lamplight with both hands pressed flat to the desk, so that he should not be seen to shake.

He did not write back at once. He could not think of anything of his own that was the right size. At last he wrote:

The kettle is on. It will be on when you come.

The page took it. The ink dried at the end of the sentence, tidy and black, and under it, on Percy's side, a single line appeared, in the small upright hand of a man who had never learned to say less than he meant.

Then I shall hurry.

The grey came up from the edge and covered it, gently, like a hand over a flame.

---

In the study, UG had come to the door. He had been standing there for some time and Flinch had not heard him.

"Is it gone?" he said.

"It's thin, Master. It ain't gone. He's coming to the door."

"When?"

"He said he'd hurry."

UG looked at the Journal, and at the lamp, and at his own hand with the pencil in it. He had spent his life seeing things that would work, and the sensation of seeing one that might not was, to him, so foreign that he did not at first know the name of it.

"I'll put the kettle on," he said. "And I'll get the good chair out of the loft."

"Master?"

"The one with the arms. A man who has walked a long way wants arms." He turned in the doorway. "And, Flinch. Leave the Journal open on the desk tonight. If it's going to say anything, I want it to have somewhere to say it."

He went out. Flinch sat in the lamplight, with the grey rising and falling on the right-hand page as slowly as breathing.

He looked once at the door of the study, which was only a door. He thought of the pipe in the cellar, the long dark one, and of how he had never shouted down it, and of how a shout was a thing you did not do until you had to. And he thought that perhaps this was the day on which you did.

He did not shout. He wrote, in a clear small hand, the one question he had left.

Are you still there?

The Journal ticked, once, softly, and went on ticking.

Somewhere above a tavern, in a room with a candle and a voidwalker, a man with a hand like a clerk's put on his coat and went out to find a road.