The Music Of The Unwanted

Suitable for: 12+. Contains bereavement, violence, mild horror, child neglect

We Three

There are three of us left to tell it, and none of us should be the ones telling.

The girl who has never owned a colour. The boy who has never owned a word. The little one who owned a coat and went back for it, and so kept everything except the only thing worth keeping. We are the wrong mouths for this story. We are the leftovers, the ones the music could not finish carrying, the broken remainder that the great sum of that autumn left behind to gather dust on the town's grey shelf. If there were any justice in the telling, it would come to you in the voices of the ones who went, sharp and strange and far away by now, changed past their mothers' knowing. But the ones who went cannot be reached, and would not lower themselves to speak to a town that named them broken, and so the telling falls to us, who stayed, who could not help but stay, who have had a lifetime of grey in which to learn the words for what we lost.

Listen anyway. The town would rather you did not, and that alone should be reason enough.

They have their own version, of course. Everyone has heard their version. It is carved into the church and folded into the bedtime stories and pressed flat into the very cobbles of the high street, where they have hung their proud and shameful sign. In their version a demon came. In their version they were the wronged and the godly, and the children were stolen by a devil who hated the light. They have told it so often, and so well, and with such a fine show of grief on the anniversary, that it has become the only truth this town can taste. But a thing repeated is not a thing that happened. It is only a thing repeated. We were there. We saw the colour come into the grey and we heard the music open the door, and we know, the way you know the shape of your own hand in the dark, exactly who the monsters were.

We are old now, or old enough. The little one keeps his coat still, folded on its peg, neither worn nor thrown away, and that coat is its own kind of moor that he walks the length of every day of his life. The silent boy crouches in the alleys where the difficult children used to gather, and looks at the empty places, because looking is the only speech he has and the empty places are the only thing left worth saying. And I, who was blind from birth and have therefore never been fooled by the surfaces this town is so proud of, I listen. I put my ear to the cold ground in the alley behind the wool exchange and I hear the old thing turning over in its long sleep, and I keep the count of the years, and I wait for someone to ask.

You have asked. So I will begin where it began, which is not with the Stranger and not with the music, but with the rot, and with the three of us small and unwanted in the middle of it, in a grey town in the grey north of a grey country, where the rain falls clean and the slate makes it filthy, and where being different was the one sin the place could never forgive and never stopped committing against its own.

ACT ONE: The Colour of Not Being Noticed

The girl who was blind from birth

I have never seen the town, so I will tell you how it sounds.

It sounds like a throat being cleared and cleared and never quite emptied. It sounds like rain on slate, which is a clean sound that the slate makes filthy by being slate. It sounds like the mills, long dead, still groaning in their bones when the wind comes down off the moor, the way an old dog groans in its sleep, dreaming of a hunt its legs can no longer run. There is a beck that runs under the lower streets in a culvert the town laid over it a hundred years ago, ashamed of its own water, and on still nights I can hear it down there in the dark, talking to itself, the only honest voice in the place because it has never learned to lie.

My mother said the town was grey. I asked her what grey was, because a colour is a thing I have to be told the way you have to be told the name of a god you will never meet, and she was quiet for a while, the way she went quiet when she was choosing a true answer over an easy one. Then she said that grey was the colour of not being noticed. And I understood that at once, completely, the way I have rarely understood anything since, because not being noticed is the warm dark I have lived inside my whole life, and I had not known until that moment that other people called it a colour and were afraid of it. To me the dark is not absence. The dark is full. The dark is where I keep everything. It frightened me to learn that the people with eyes had taken my whole world and painted the town in it and called it the colour of being nothing.

Let me tell you the discipline of the cobbles, because I know them better than any sighted person ever will, having read the high street with my stick ten thousand times. They are laid so straight you could weep at it. Tap and tap, every stone set true, every joint level, by hands that believed God lived in the right angle and the plumb line and would smite a man whose wall leaned. The town is proud of its straightness. It speaks of itself as hard-working and decent and clean, and it means by clean not the absence of dirt but the appearance of its absence, which is a different thing and a colder one. The houses sit shoulder to shoulder up the hills, sour and respectable, breathing coal smoke through their chimneys like men breathing through clenched teeth. There is a church at the top with a clock, and the clock strikes the hours, and it means every one of them as a threat. There is a high street where the shopkeepers stand in their doorways with their arms folded and watch you go by the way crows watch a thing that is not yet, but is nearly, dead.

And underneath all of it, the seep.

That is the part they do not know I hear. Under the straightness and the striking clock and the folded arms, there is a wet sound, a slow patient seep, like water finding the one soft place in a wall and working at it, year on year, with no hurry at all. The town is rotting from the inside the way fruit rots, which is to say it is sweetest at the very edge of spoiled, all that respectability gone heavy and fragrant and a single thumb's pressure from collapse. And down in the seep, pressed thin as a held breath between this grey world and the bloody one behind it, the old magic lives. The magic of the country before the town, before the mills, before the straight cobbles and the right angles and the clock that strikes its threats. It is starved down there. It has been starved a long time. Nobody feeds it, because nobody believes in it, and a thing you refuse to believe in does not stop being real. It only stops being kind.

I have put my ear to the ground in the alley behind the wool exchange, where the cobbles give way to old packed earth, and I have heard it turning in its sleep, vast and slow and hungry, and I have come away with the cold of it in my cheek and told no one, because there was no one to tell who would not have said I was simple. They say that, in the town. They say I am simple because my eyes are spoiled, and they say it slowly and loudly, as though the slowness were a mercy and the loudness a gift. The woman at the dairy says good morning to me as though good and morning were two heavy stones she is setting down one at a time in front of a child. The verger pats my head. I let them. I have learned that a person who believes you are stupid will tell you everything, will speak across you and around you and through you as though you were a chair, and the town has told me, in this careless way, every secret it has, and not one of those secrets is good.

My mother was the only one who spoke to me as though there were a whole person behind my spoiled eyes. She had been a weaver before the mills closed and her hands never lost the memory of it; she would take my fingers and walk them across the things of the world and name them by their texture, which is the only honest way to name a thing. This is bread. This is wool, this is the same wool spun fine and this is it spun coarse. This is your father's coat, which he is not coming back for. This is the grain of the table, follow it, this is how you find which way the world was made to lie. She taught me that everything has a true shape under the shape the town agrees to see, and that the blind are not the ones who cannot find it.

She coughed for two winters and went quiet in the third. The town has a workhouse for the ones who cough and cannot pay to cough in private, and they came for her with a kind word and a closed cart, and they took her up the hill, and I heard the cart go and I heard the gate, and that was the last of her texture I was ever given to hold. I was nine. After that I lived on the parish, which means I lived on the leavings of people who wished I would have the decency to be grateful and quiet and, ideally, gone.

So when I tell you what the music told me, later, on the grey evening when everything ended, you must understand that I had been told the opposite my whole life by everyone but my mother, and that the opposite had a taste, and the taste was the taste of being a chair.

The boy who never spoke

I have never said a word, so I will tell you what I saw, because looking is the only speech I have ever been given and I have made it eloquent.

I was not born without a voice. The town likes to believe I was, because a thing born wrong is simpler to dismiss than a thing made wrong, and the town is fond of the simple version of every cruelty. But I had words once, when I was very small. I lost them the way you lose anything in a house where the wrong word is answered with the back of a hand, and after enough wrong words the safest number of words is none, and after enough years of none the door closes over from the inside and the words live on behind it, pressed flat, like flowers in a book nobody opens. I have a great deal to say. I have always had a great deal to say. I say it with my eyes, by looking longer than is comfortable, by looking at the thing everyone else has agreed not to look at, and the town finds this so unbearable that it has decided I am an idiot, which suits me, because an idiot is permitted to be present at things a clever boy would be sent away from.

I want to tell you about the rats, but first I have to take the word away from you, because the word will betray me.

When I say rats you will see a small grey thing, a thing of pantries and traps and a quick flick into a hole, a thing you can be cleanly afraid of and cleanly rid of. Put that away. That is not what came up out of the drains that autumn. What came up was the town turned inside out, and held up to the light, and made to walk about on four legs in the open street.

The first one I found in the gutter outside the butcher's, on a morning so ordinary that its ordinariness is the thing I remember best, the cold and the wet and the smell of sawdust and old blood from the shop, and the bells of the church doing their hourly threat. I crouched over the thing in the gutter the way I crouch over everything, since crouching and looking is how I have my conversations with the world. It was the size of a cat and the wrong shape for any animal that has a right to exist. The belly was swollen, taut and shining, as though it had swallowed something that was still in there and still arguing. The fur lay in greasy strakes, parted, showing the skin, and the skin was not the colour skin is allowed to be: it was the yellow-green-going-to-black of a bruise three days old, and it pulsed, slow, in time with nothing. It had too many teeth, and it had arranged those teeth into a thing that was almost trying to be a face, a person's face, and that is the detail that has never let me go, that I will carry to whatever the silent are given instead of a grave. It had a mouth that knew how to be ashamed. I have seen that exact mouth on men in good coats. I had simply never before seen it on something honest enough to wear it on the outside.

The butcher came out and shooed me off, flapping his bloody apron, calling me the names the town keeps for boys like me, and I went, but I had already understood. Crouched there in the cold I had understood the whole of it, the way I understand things, all at once and wordlessly and completely. These were not vermin. They were confessions. Every cruel thing the town had ever swallowed and called good manners, every child sent up the hill to the workhouse with a kind word and a closed cart, every debt called in on a widow, every drifter run off the green with stones, every difference punished and every kindness withheld; all of it had been pressed down, year on year, into the dark under the straight cobbles, until the dark could hold no more, and now it was coming back up, wearing fur and too many teeth and that small ashamed terrible mouth, to walk about the high street in the daylight and be, at last, looked at.

I was the one who looked at it. I think that is why, in the end, the Stranger looked at me.

They came up faster after that, and bigger. By the second week you could not cross the market square at dusk without the cobbles seeming to shift and ripple at the edges of sight, the gutters alive, the sound of them everywhere, a sound I can only describe as rain falling upward, a soft relentless patter going the wrong way against the laws that are supposed to hold. They got into the granary and the dairy and the back rooms of the good houses, and the good houses did not say so, because to have them was to be seen to deserve them, and being seen to deserve a thing is the one terror this town organises its whole life around.

The council met. They always meet. I learned long ago that there is a low window at the back of the council room, beside the coal store, where a boy who is thought to be an idiot can sit on an upturned crate and hear everything, because the men inside have never once imagined that the idiot might be the only person in the room who is listening properly. I sat there through the whole of it. They spoke of the rats as a problem of hygiene, which is to say a problem of being seen to be clean. They voted money for poison. They set a bounty, a penny a tail, and for a fortnight the boys of the town went about with sacks and clubs and came back to claim their pennies, and the clerk counted the tails into a ledger as though a ledger could hold back the dark, and the rats only grew, ate the poison and grew, took the clubs and grew, because you cannot kill a confession by hitting it; you can only make it angrier and more numerous and more exactly the shape of the thing you will not say.

A man in a very good coat stood up at that meeting, a man who owned three of the dead mills and most of the living rents, and he said the word infestation the way you would say the name of a foreign country you intended one day to take, with his lip curled around it. He did not say the true word. None of them had a true word left in them to say. They had spent their true words long ago and replaced them all with manners, which is what manners are for. I went home through the dark streets with the patter going the wrong way all around me, and I lay in my bed in the cold house and I heard them moving in the walls, that rain falling upward, hundreds of them now, and I did not make the sound I cannot make, and I lay still, and I waited. Because I had understood. The rot was up at last, and out, and on its feet. Something would have to come for it. I did not yet know that the something would come wearing colour, and would look at me, and would find the wound in me beautiful.

The youngest one who turned back

I am the little one. They have put me last because they think I am the one who broke it, and they are right, and I will not hide behind the others the way I hid behind the silent boy's shoulder the day the Stranger looked at us. If you are going to know what we lost, you should know it from the one who lost it for everybody, and that is me, and I have spent my whole life since learning to say so without flinching.

I was the smallest of all the difficult children, and the youngest, and the one most given to crying, which in our town is a worse fault in a boy than any number of broken windows. I cried easily and at the wrong things. I cried at the rats, not from fear but because the ashamed little faces of them broke my heart, which I could not have explained to anyone and did not try. I cried when the bigger boys drowned a litter of kittens in the beck for sport, and they held me back and made me watch and called me a girl and worse, and the thing they could not forgive was not that I cried but that I would not stop, that I had no governor on my grief, that I felt the full size of a thing instead of the manageable agreed-upon portion. The town has a portion it permits you to feel. Feel less and you are cold. Feel more and you are soft, or simple, or touched, and the words come out, and after the words the hands.

My mother made me a coat. I should tell you about the coat now, because the coat is the whole of my crime and you should be able to see it coming the way I never did. She was a seamstress when there was seamstressing to be had, and when there was not she took in mending, and one winter when I had outgrown everything and we had nothing, she made me a coat out of the good parts of three old ones, a coat of patched and mismatched cloth that any proper child would have been ashamed of, and I loved it past all sense because she had made it with her hands in the firelight while I watched, and into the lining she had stitched, where no one would see, a small square of red flannel, the only bright thing she could find, so that I would have a secret colour against my heart in a town that had no colour to spare. She said, this is so you remember you are warm. She said it the way you say a charm. And then the next winter she coughed, and the cart came up our street too, the same closed cart, and the gate at the top of the hill took her the way it took the blind girl's mother, and I was left with the coat and the secret square of red and a guilt I did not yet have a use for.

That is the three of us. We found each other the way the unwanted always find each other, drawn together at the edges of things, in the lee of the wool exchange, behind the chapel, in the half-hour after the good children had been called in and the streets belonged to the leftovers. The blind girl heard me crying one evening and came and sat by me and did not tell me to stop. The silent boy was simply there one day, looking at us, looking the long uncomfortable look that we learned was not rudeness but his whole heart held out in the only hand he had. We did not need to explain ourselves to one another. That is the thing I want you to understand before I tell you what came. We had nothing, and the town agreed we were nothing, and we had found in each other the one place where we were something, and we did not know that this small warm something was, all along, exactly the thing the music had been looking for, calling to, across the years and the moor and the thin wet wall between the worlds. We thought we were hiding. We were not hiding. We were waiting, the way the old thing under the cobbles was waiting, and we did not know it any more than it did.

The rats grew. The town grew frightened and would not say so. The clock struck its threats. And somewhere out past the moor, on a road none of us could see, in a coat the colour of blood still in love with the body it was leaving, the Stranger turned toward the smell of our rot, and began, unhurried, the long walk in.

ACT TWO: The Stranger and the Drowning

The boy who never spoke

He came on a Thursday, into the middle of all that grey, and the first thing I will tell you about him is that he hurt to look at, and I am a boy who has made a life of looking at the things that hurt.

I mean it exactly, the way I mean everything. The town is the colour of not being noticed, the blind girl says, and into the very middle of the colour of not being noticed there walked a man who was only colour. He came up the high street from the south road at the dimming of a wet afternoon, and the grey of the town arranged itself around him the way water arranges itself around a wound, drawing back and then closing in, dark and uncertain and unable to look away. His coat was red. I have to be careful with the word red, because you will think you know it, and you do not. It was not the brown-red of dried blood that the butcher wears down his apron, the red the town is comfortable with, the red of meat and labour and Sunday joints. It was the red of blood while it is still in love with the body it is leaving, wet and arterial and singing, a red that did not belong to this country and had never apologised for it. And around his throat, a scarf of green. A green so saturated, so deliberate, so unrepentantly alive, that the green of nettles and the green of moss and the green of the churchyard yews all went grey beside it, ashamed, like servants caught in their working clothes by a visiting lord.

He moved through the high street and the shopkeepers came out into their doorways, arms unfolding, faces going slack and then tight, because a crow knows another crow and these people had spent their whole hard decent lives never once meeting a thing they could not name. They could name a vagrant. They could name a tinker, a gypsy, a pedlar, a Jew, a fool; they had a drawer of small grey names for everyone who was not exactly themselves, and they reached for the drawer, and the drawer was empty, and you could see the panic of that emptiness move down the street ahead of him like a draught.

He was beautiful the way a wound is beautiful when you are young enough to still be honest about it. His body had the proportions they paint on the ceilings of churches you are not allowed to be poor inside of, the long clean lines of a saint or a martyr, the kind of body the town's God is supposed to have had before the town got hold of him and made him respectable. But over those clean saint's lines, written into the skin where his collar fell open at the throat and the wrist, were the scars. Not the scars of accident, not the puckered ugly luck of the mill or the cart. These were raised and deliberate and old, laid in patterns, ridge upon fine ridge, a writing in flesh that I had no word for and would not have spoken if I had. He had let something cut him, many times, on purpose, in a shape that meant something, and afterwards he had thanked it, and you could read the thanking in the way he carried the scars, not hidden, not flaunted, simply worn, the way another man wears the years.

And his eyes were gold.

Not brown that catches a low sun and pretends for a moment. Gold all the way through, the flat strange gold of a goat's eye or an owl's, the gold of a thing that does its work in the last failing light of the day and sees you better than you see yourself. He came level with the three of us where we stood apart from the proper children, in the lee of the wool exchange where the leftovers stood, and he did the thing that no grown person in that town had ever once done to any of us. He looked. Not over us. Not slowly and loudly, the way the dairy woman looked at the blind girl, the looking that is really a way of not seeing. He stopped, and he turned those gold eyes on us, one at a time, unhurried, and he held the look. He held it past the point of comfort, past the point where a town person would have flinched and called it rudeness, into the long open country beyond, where I have always lived alone, and there, in that country, without a single word, he said to each of us in turn the thing I have waited my whole life to hear and heard only once: I see exactly what they did to you. I see the shape of the wound. I find it lovely.

The little one beside me began to cry. He did not know why; he never knows why, he only feels the full size of the thing. I knew why. It is a terrible business to be seen when you have spent the whole of your short life learning to be the colour of not being noticed, learning it so well that you have half come to believe the town is right and there is nothing there to see. And it is more terrible still, and more dangerous, when the being seen feels warm. When it feels like the first warm thing that has ever happened to you. A boy who has been cold his whole life will follow warmth anywhere. The Stranger knew that. I understand now that the looking was the first note of his music, played silently, days before he ever raised the whistle, and that the rats were never the point of him at all. The rats were the excuse. We were the point. He had come a long way, out of a starving country, to find the children a town had thrown away, because the thrown-away still believe, and belief is the one food his kind cannot grow for themselves.

The girl who was blind from birth

I did not see the colour, so I was not fooled by it, and I have always thought that is why he spoke to me last and longest, and why what he said to me was different.

While the others were drowning in his red and his green, I was listening to his feet. A person tells you everything in how they walk. The town walks defended, heel-heavy, braced against the cobbles as against an enemy. The Stranger walked the way the beck runs under the culvert, easy and certain and entirely without fear, a walk that has nowhere it is afraid to put itself down. When he stopped in front of us I heard him crouch, the soft articulation of him folding down to my height, and I heard the breath of him close, and it did not smell of the town. It smelled of rained-on heather and cold river stone and something underneath that I knew at once, that I had been hearing in the ground behind the wool exchange my whole life: the smell of the old starving thing, the seep, the magic pressed thin between the worlds. He smelled of the place under the town. He had come up out of it, or near enough.

He said, only to me, very low: You are the one who hears it.

I did not pretend not to understand him, because there was no point pretending to a man who smelled of the thing itself. I said that I heard it every night, turning over, hungry. He was quiet a moment, and then he said something I have turned over every night since, the way the old thing turns. He said: They starved it. They starved it the same way they starved you, by deciding it was not there. He told me that his kind and the old thing under the cobbles were close cousins, that they ran on the same food, and that the food was not bread and not blood, whatever the town would later say, but something simpler and rarer and harder to forge. He would not name it then. He let me find it later, on the grey evening, in the music. But he put his hand for a moment over my spoiled eyes, light as a moth, neither pity nor cure, and he said, You see the true shape of things. Do not let them tell you the dark is empty. And then he stood, and the warmth of him went away up the high street toward the council, and I have never in my life felt so seen and so frightened by the seeing, because to be seen is to be, for the first time, something that can be lost.

The youngest one who turned back

I want to tell the part with the council, because the silent boy heard it through his low window and the blind girl heard the shape of it from the square, but I was the one who saw their faces, having crept up to the council steps in my patched coat where a small crying boy is invisible, and a face will tell you what a window and a wisdom cannot.

The men in the good coats received him standing, which they did to no one, a courtesy that was really a defence, the way you stand when a strange dog comes into the yard. The man who owned the dead mills did the talking. He had a voice like a ledger, all the warmth ruled out of it into neat columns, and he asked the Stranger his business and his price, and the Stranger named the rats and then he named a price, and the price was so small that I saw the laughter go round the room behind the hands, a current of it, quick and ugly. It was a pauper's price. A few coins. The price a man names who does not know what he is worth, or, I think now, the price a man names on purpose, to see what a town will do with a bargain, because the size of a soul shows clearest in how it treats a thing it has got cheap. They thought they were measuring him. He was measuring them. The mill man wiped his palm down his trouser leg after they shook on it, when he thought no one was looking, as though the Stranger's hand had left something on his that the wiping could remove. I have thought about that wipe my whole life. I think it was the truth, coming off on him, and I think the wiping was the most honest thing the mill man ever did, and I think it did no good at all, because you cannot wipe the truth off; you can only smear it about until it is everywhere and you have stopped being able to see it.

The girl who was blind from birth

You will want to know about the whistle, because everyone always wants to know about the whistle, and I am the only one who can truly tell you, because I am the only one who did not waste the moment looking.

He had carved it himself. I knew it the instant he raised it, because the carving was still in it, the small living ghost of the knife that had made it, the way my mother's mending was always still in any cloth she touched. It was wood, dark river wood, the kind that has drowned and dried and drowned again over years until it has forgotten how to rot and remembers only how to sing, the way a grief held long enough goes hard and clear and becomes a kind of music you can carry. He stood in the market square at the cold blue hour and he raised the wood to his mouth, and the whole town held its breath, and the wet seep under the cobbles held its breath, and I, who hold my breath for a living, held mine. And then he played, and I learned that I had been wrong my entire life about what music is.

I had thought music was a thing a person makes. It is not. Music is a door, and the player is only the hand that opens it, and on the far side of the door is everything you were ever told to forget. The first note he played was the smell of my mother's hair when she bent over my fingers to teach them the world. The second note was the warm full dark from before I learned the dark was a thing I was meant to be ashamed of. And the third note went down, down, past my ears, past the cobbles, down into the seep and into the great starved patient thing that has slept under this town since before the town was an idea, and the old thing woke. I felt it wake. The ground itself changed its grain. It turned its vast hungry face up toward the sound the way a flower turns, slow and helpless and glad, and through it, riding it, came the rats. They came up out of everything: the drains, the cellars, the soft worked-at places behind the walls, the granary, the dairy, the good back rooms that had never admitted to having them. They poured into the square, a river of them, that rain-falling-upward sound made flesh and multiplied past counting, and the people screamed and shut their doors and bolted them. But the rats had no interest now in the people, none at all. They had a master, and his music had named them at last with the one true word the council could not bring itself to say, and a confession that has finally been named will follow the namer anywhere, even down to the water, even down into the dark.

The boy who never spoke

He led them to the river, and I followed, because following the things the town flees from is the whole of my education, and I will tell you what the drowning was, since the town has spent two hundred years lying about it and someone alive should hold the truth.

It was not peaceful. The storytellers make it peaceful, a gentle wading-in, a quiet sinking, rats lulled to a soft sleep beneath the kind water, and it is a lie, and it is the particular kind of lie the town loves best, the lie that makes a violence look like a tidiness. What I saw at the river's edge in the last of the blue light was a fury. It was the most alive thing I have ever seen, before or since. The rats hit the black water in their thousands and the water did not accept them gently; it churned, it boiled, the whole confession of the town thrashing and snapping and climbing over itself and going under and clawing up and going under again, all those ashamed terrible little faces biting at the air and at the current and at one another, the river a single heaving body of teeth and froth and that bruise-coloured flesh, and over the top of it, calm, calm, unbearably calm, the music. The Stranger stood on the bank and played a lullaby to a thing he was killing and he meant every drop of the love in it. That is the part the town could never forgive and never understood: that it was done with love. Not mercy, which is a thing you do to feel clean. Love, which is a thing you do because you have looked at a creature long enough to see it whole, even a creature made of shame, even a thing the world made wrong, and having seen it whole you cannot send it under without a song.

The grown people who had crept down to watch from a safe distance were sick into the gutter at the sound of it. I marked who. The mill man. The verger. The dairy woman who set good and morning down like stones. They were sick because they could not bear the sound of a thing being killed with love, having only ever killed things with contempt, and the difference between those two sounds is the whole difference between the Stranger and the town, and they heard it, in their bodies, and it turned their stomachs because their stomachs were the last honest part of them.

The three of us were not sick. We stood at the very edge of that black and furious and tender music and we felt, for the first time in our lives, that we were standing on the right side of something. When it was done the river smoothed itself flat and innocent and the town was clean, truly clean, clean in the deep way for the first time in living memory, the rot drawn off and drowned and sung to its rest. And the Stranger turned and walked back up the bank, and he passed close by us in the dark, and I felt the gold of his eyes go over the three of us like the warmth of a low sun across a closed lid, and he said one thing, very low, meant only for us, before he went up into the town to be cheated.

He said: Now we shall see what they are.

I did not understand it then. I thought he meant the town, that the cleaning had been a test of them. I understand now that he meant all of it, the town and the children both, that the whole of it from the first silent look to the last drowned rat had been the asking of a single question, and that the answer, when it came, would not be spoken by him at all. It would be spoken by the town, in what it did next, and by us, in what we did after. The rats had only ever been the tuning of the strings.

ACT THREE: The Betrayal and the Starving of the God

The boy who never spoke

The town did not pay him, and I was under the low window for the whole of it, and I have kept it perfect in me all these years, every word, because it was the truest thing the town ever made, the one moment it took off its Sunday coat and let me see the bone.

He came back the next morning for his price, the small pauper's price they had laughed at and agreed to, and he came without flourish, in the dark-red coat and the poison-green scarf, and he stood in the council room among the standing men and he asked for what was owed. And the mill man, the ledger-voiced man, did the thing I want you never to forget, because it is the engine of everything that came after, and it is not a small grey sin, though they dressed it as a small grey prudence. He did not simply refuse. A simple refusal would have been a coin-sized wrong, a meanness, the sort of thing one mean man does to another and the world goes on. What he did was larger, and he wrapped it in virtue, which is how this town has always committed its worst, in its best clothes, with a clean collar and a clear conscience and a reason ready for the asking.

He said that the agreement, on reflection, could not be considered binding. A verbal thing, he said, with a person of no fixed abode. He said the word person the way you handle a thing with tongs. He said that to reward such a display, such a spectacle, such pagan business with music and rivers and God knew what unholy art, would be to set a precedent, would be to encourage it, and he said encourage as though the Stranger were a stray that the council had been foolish to feed at the back door and that now, having been fed, would have to be discouraged before it brought its whole kind round. He offered, in the end, a fraction of the small price already agreed, and he offered it the way you drop a coin for a beggar you wish would move along, so that the coin and the contempt arrive in the same motion and the beggar cannot tell you which one was meant as the gift. Around the room the other good coats nodded. The verger said something about not setting the young a bad example, about the dangers of rewarding the irregular. They had talked themselves, in the space of a single morning, out of a debt and into a kindness; they had made the cheating of a stranger into a civic duty; and the most frightening thing I have ever witnessed, more frightening than any rat, was how easy it was for them, how practised, how the lie went on like a well-worn coat.

And the Stranger took it into himself, and it wounded him.

I want you to understand that I am not speaking in a figure. I saw it happen in the body. He did not rage. He did not threaten, did not curse, did not raise his lovely scarred hands. He stood and received the insult the way the river received the rats, and it went into him, and it did him harm, there in front of me, before my eyes that have no other gift but seeing. The red of the coat lost a shade, the way a wound loses its colour at the lip a moment before it darkens. The bright impossible green of the scarf dimmed toward the grey of the room, as though the room were drinking it. And his hand, his right hand, which the little one and I had watched move upon the carved whistle the night before like something out of a finer and older world than ours, all those long articulate joints working in ways that human joints do not quite manage, that hand came to rest on the back of a chair to steady himself, and it trembled. Once. Briefly. But I saw it, and in the trembling of that hand I understood the rule of him, the rule of all the old starving things, the rule the blind girl had been hearing in the ground her whole life without a name for it.

They do not run on cruelty, and they do not run on kindness. They run on respect, the way a fire runs on air, the plain animal respect of one living thing acknowledging the reality of another. And this town had built itself, stone by straight stone, over two hundred years, on the single principle that respect is a thing you pay only upward, to money and to the appearance of money and to the offices that money keeps, and never sideways, never downward, never to a drifter or a widow or a difficult child or a blind girl or a silent boy or an old god sleeping under the cobbles. They had starved their own. They had starved the thing in the ground. And now, without even knowing the size of what they did, they were starving a god to death in their council room and calling it good business, and the god was letting them. That is the part that broke my heart, that has stayed broken in the exact shape of it ever since. He let them. He could have taken the town apart stone from stone that morning, and instead he let them wound him, because a god who begs for his bread is no longer a god worth the fearing, and he would sooner go hungry and hurt out of that grey room than lower himself to demand from such people the one thing they had proven, past any further asking, that they did not have it in them to give.

He bowed to them.

That was the worst of it, worse than the trembling hand. He bowed, low and slow and perfectly graceful, the bow of a man accepting a wager he fully intends to win at a later hour, and the good coats took the bow for a surrender, and when the door had shut behind him they laughed again, easier this time, the laugh of men who believe they have got a thing cheap and outwitted a cleverer man than themselves. They are the only people I have ever known who could not tell the difference between a man giving up and a man, very quietly, taking the measure of exactly how much you owe.

The girl who was blind from birth

I felt him come out of the council, and I will tell you that a wounded god sounds nothing like a wounded man. A wounded man gets loud, or gets silent in a way that is loud underneath. The Stranger came down the steps quieter than he had gone up, lighter, as though something had been taken out of him that had weight, and his easy riverine walk had a hitch in it now, the smallest catch, like the beck when something has half blocked the culvert and the water has to think for a moment about how to go on. He passed near me and the smell of the old country was fainter on him, the heather and the cold stone gone thin, and under it I could smell, for the first time, something I never thought to smell on him: the smell of the town, getting in. The grey, working at his edges the way the seep works at a wall. They had not killed him. You cannot kill that kind of thing with a broken promise. But they had let the grey in, and a little grey is all it takes; the rest follows on its own, given time, the way rot follows the first soft spot in the fruit.

He stopped by me a last time before he left the town that day, and he did not put his hand over my eyes again. I think he had not the strength to spare for tenderness. He only said, so quietly I felt it more than heard it, the way you feel the beck through the soles of your feet: Remember that I came when you called, even though you did not know you were calling. Remember it when they tell you I came to do you harm. And then he went out by the south road, the way he had come, and the town did not watch him go, because the town had already decided he had never really been there, had been a tinker, a trick of the wet light, a story the difficult children told. And the difficult children said nothing, because no one had ever once believed a difficult child about anything, and we had learned long ago to keep the true things behind our teeth, where the town could not get at them to call them lies.

The youngest one who turned back

Then the months. I have to tell you about the months, because the town leaves them out, and the months are where the town earned what was coming, earned it slowly, in small daily instalments, the way it does everything.

Through the back end of that autumn and the long grey gut of the winter, the town grew fat on its own story. At the dinner tables of the good houses and over the counters of the shops and in the pews on Sundays they decided, and then agreed, and then knew, that they had cleared the rats themselves. With good poison and good sense and good honest Christian effort. The Stranger, in the story they built that winter, became a charlatan who had happened to arrive at the lucky hour, a fraud whose tricks had coincided with the working of the council's own wise measures, a swindler the council had been clever and careful to see through before he could fleece them. They said it so often that the saying of it became the truth, which is the only way this town has ever made a truth: by repetition, by the worn groove, by everyone agreeing not to remember it differently. The blind girl told me the saying of it had a taste, and the taste was the taste of milk a single day past turning, when it is still white and still looks like milk and you do not know until it is in your mouth.

And here is the part that matters, the part that is the hinge of everything. Flush with that false triumph, sure of itself, certain it had faced down a devil and won, the town grew crueller to us, not kinder. You would think a town that had just been frightened might soften toward its weakest. It does not work that way. A town that has frightened itself and then talked itself brave needs somewhere to put the leftover fear, and it puts it, always, on the ones who cannot put it anywhere else. The beatings came easier that winter. The kind words got shorter and the closed doors got faster. The mill man's own boys ran the silent boy into the beck and held his head under, for sport, for the look of his looking, and only let him up because a carter came by; and the town, hearing of it, decided the silent boy must have provoked them somehow, by his staring, by his strangeness, by being the sort of thing that gets itself drowned. They took my coat off me twice that winter and threw it in the midden and laughed, and twice I dug it out and cleaned the red square in the lining with my own spit and my own sleeve, and told no one why I wept over a rag. We three drew tighter. The cold drew tighter. And out past the moor, in his dimmed coat, the wounded god grew quietly stronger again, the way the old thing in the ground always does once it has been reminded it is hungry, and he chose his hour, and he let the town have the whole of its smug grey winter, every last self-satisfied day of it, before he came back to ask his second question, the one that did not want coins for an answer.

ACT FOUR: The Anthem and the Leaving

The youngest one who turned back

He came back on a grey evening at the very dimming of the day, in the soft hour when the town pulls its curtains and the difficult children have the streets to themselves, and I was the first of us to know, because I had been sitting on the chapel step with my coat pulled round me, and I felt the cobbles change.

That is the only way I can say it. I am not the blind girl; I do not hear the seep. But I felt the cobbles change under me the way you feel a held breath in a room before anyone has spoken, and I looked up, and he was there at the foot of the high street where the stones run straightest, and he was alone, and he was not as he had been. No scarf this time. The coat had gone dark, dark as old meat, dark as the bruise-flesh of the rats, the singing arterial red all soaked down into something the colour of a thing that has bled a long while and stopped expecting help. But the eyes were still gold. He had kept the gold alight through the whole grey winter, and I understand now what that cost him, that the gold was the last of him, the part he would spend himself down to nothing to keep, because the gold was the seeing, and the seeing was the only gift he had ever truly come to give us.

I ran for the others. I found the blind girl by the wool exchange with her ear already to the ground, gone very still. I found the silent boy in the alley, already risen, already turned toward the high street, already looking. And we came together to the edge of the square, the three of us, the leftovers, the way we always came together, and the Stranger raised the carved whistle to his mouth, and he played.

The girl who was blind from birth

It was not the lullaby. I want that understood before anything else. The night of the rats he had played a door that opened backward, into the warm dark, into the smell of a mother's hair, into all the soft things stolen and forgotten. This was a door that opened forward, and I had no word for what was on the far side of it, and I am the one who keeps all the words for sound, so let me try, and let me fail honestly, because an honest failure is closer to the truth than the town's tidy lie.

It came up out of the ground first, out of the seep, out of the great old starved thing, and the thing was not patient any more. All those years of turning slow and hungry in its sleep, and now it was awake and it was loud and it had stopped asking. It was a drum that the bones answered before the ears did. It was a string struck so hard it bent, a string out of some instrument that has not been built yet and may never be allowed to be, in this country, by this kind of town. It was a shout shaped into a shape, a refusal made into a melody, a music with teeth in it, a music that did not request your attention and did not wait for your permission and did not care in the slightest whether you found it seemly. The proper people came to their windows, and I heard their faces curdle, I heard the held breath of their disgust, and they did the only thing the town has ever known to do with a truth too large for it. They covered their children's ears. They pulled the good children back from the glass and bolted the doors and drew the curtains against the noise, and they were right to, in their way, because the music was not for the good children, and a good child who heard it whole might not have stayed good, might have remembered something the town had spent twelve careful years making it forget.

It was for us. And under the drum and the bent string and the shout of it, woven all through it so that even the little one understood, who has the fewest words of any of us, it said one thing, over and over, in every register at once. It said: You were never broken. You were told you were broken by a broken place, so that the place could go on feeling whole at your expense. There is nothing wrong with the shape of you. There is everything wrong with the room they built you to stand wrong in. I had waited the whole of my life to be told one true thing by something other than my dead mother, and there it was, played on a drowned-wood whistle by a wounded god in a coat the colour of old blood, and I felt the floor of the world I had been given come loose at its straight true edges and begin, gently, to lift.

The boy who never spoke

The path opened, and I am the one who saw it, so I will be the one to set it down.

Across the high street, where there has only ever been the blank wall of the chandler's and the narrow mouth of the alley to the back yards, the air folded. That is the only honest word. It folded back, slow, like a heavy curtain drawn aside by a hand you cannot see, and behind it was the moor. But not the moor as the town keeps it, grey and wet and minding its manners under the rule of the road and the wall and the grazing right. The moor as it truly is, underneath, the old moor, the one the town has spent two hundred years pretending it had fenced and tamed and prayed into submission. And there was colour out there. After a whole life of the colour of not being noticed, after a winter of grey on grey on grey, there was colour, pouring through the fold in the air into the dim square, and it was not kind colour, I will not lie to you and call it kind. It was bruise and it was ember and it was the deep wet living green of a place that takes back into itself everything that dies on it, the green the Stranger's scarf had been before the council drank it grey. It was terrible and it was the most beautiful thing any of us had ever been shown, and the two facts did not argue with each other; they were the same fact, seen close enough.

And the children came.

Not the good ones, bolted safe behind their drawn curtains with their parents' hands clamped over their ears. The others. The leftovers. They came out of the cottages and the back rooms and the yard of the workhouse up the hill, whose gate I saw stand open that night though no hand opened it; they came in their hundreds, out of every grey corner the town had swept them into. I knew them. I had spent my life among them at the edges of things, and I will give them to you the way they came, because the town has worked very hard to make them a number, a crowd, a tragedy with no faces, and they had faces, every one, and I looked at all of them, because looking is the only farewell I have ever been able to give.

The girl who counted came, who counted everything, the cobbles and the railings and her own steps and the hairs on her own arm, who counted to keep the world from coming apart, and the town had called her mad for it and she walked toward the fold counting, and I watched her reach a number and stop counting, the first time in her life, and walk on into the colour with her hands open and empty and still. The boy whose hands never stopped came, the boy whose hands flew about him like birds the town kept trying to cage at his sides, and out there in the fold his hands were not wrong, his hands were a language the place spoke back to him, and he went toward it talking with his whole body. The two who finished each other's silences came, holding on. The boy who could not bear the church bells came, who had screamed every Sunday of his life at the threat in them, and the music had no threat in it and he walked into it calm as I had never seen him. The girl who had stopped eating came, thin as a held breath, who the town said was wicked and vain and difficult, who I think had simply been trying to take up less and less room in a place that had told her every day there was no room for her, and out there she would not have to be smaller; out there she could be exactly her own size, whatever brutal size that was. They came and they came, all the unwanted, all the difficult, all the wrong-shaped children of a town built for one shape only, and they walked toward the fold in the air, and they were not afraid, because for the first time in the whole of their lives a thing had told them the truth, and the truth, it turns out, has a door in it.

The girl who was blind from birth

I could not see the path. I want you to hold that, because it is the small hinge on which my whole life turned. I could not see the fold in the air, the colour, the moor laid bare. I could only hear what was beyond it, and what I heard stopped me at the very edge of the leaving with the music still ringing in my teeth.

I heard that it was dying out there too.

Older, and freer, and truer, and dying. The colour the silent boy wept to see was the colour of a great wound, and the wildness was the wildness of a thing in its last seasons, and the freedom on the far side of that fold was not the freedom of a paradise. It was the freedom of a country with no walls because it has nothing left worth walling, a country running out, a country that would not feed you or warm you or tell you it was sorry. And I heard, underneath, what the children would have to become to live in it. I heard the older ones who had gone first, who were already through, already changing, and the changing had a sound, a sound like a soft animal learning, very fast, to be a hard one. They were going lean and quick and feral at the edges. They were picking up the old freedom the way you pick up a knife by the blade, gripping it where it cuts, bleeding for it gladly, because a knife held by the blade is still a knife and out there a child would need to be a knife or be nothing. I heard one of them laugh, and it was a true laugh, a free laugh, and it had blood in it, and it was the most alive and the most frightening sound I have ever heard, and it is the sound I would choose, if I were given the choosing again, which I never will be.

The little one was beside me at the edge, and I caught his sleeve, the patched sleeve of his coat, and I told him what I heard. I did not soften it. We had never softened things for each other; that was the whole of what we were to one another, the one place where the true size of a thing was allowed. I said: It is dying out there, and they will have to become things with teeth, and it will hurt, and there is no one out there to call them broken and no one out there to call them home. I said it so that he could choose with the truth in his hand, the way the music had let me choose with the truth in mine. And I felt him take it in, the full size of it, the way he takes the full size of everything, and I felt him decide, and I felt, with a sick lurch under my heart, that he had not decided the way I had.

The youngest one who turned back

This is mine to tell. The others have led you to the door of it as kindly as they could, and now I will take you the rest of the way, because it is my crime and no one should carry it but me.

I was nine years old. I had the music in my teeth and the colour I could not see but could feel pouring warm through the fold, and the blind girl's truth in one hand, the dying and the teeth and the no-one-to-call-you-home, and I had weighed it the way she meant me to, and I had chosen. I had chosen to go. I want that written down, because the town's version, and even the soft version the kind ones tell, makes me a coward who chose the warm prison over the cold freedom, and that is not what happened. I chose the freedom. I was halfway across the square with the others, my feet on the straight cobbles, the fold in the air close enough now that the not-kind colour was on my face like the heat off a fire, and I had chosen, fully, the dying brutal beautiful free thing over the clean grey lie, and I would have walked through, and I would be out there now, lean and quick and bleeding and laughing, one of the knives, one of the ones too busy living to be called anything at all.

And I thought of the coat.

It was on its peg in the cold back room of the house I would never see again, the coat my mother made with her hands in the firelight out of the good parts of three old ones, with the square of red flannel stitched into the lining where no one would see, against the heart, so that I would remember I was warm. This is so you remember you are warm. She had said it like a charm, and she was gone up the hill behind the workhouse gate, and the coat was the last of her hands left anywhere in the world, the last thing in all the grey that had ever been only mine and only made of love, and I could not, I could not, walk into a whole new world and leave the last of my mother hanging on a peg in the old one. I was nine. Try to be nine again, just for the length of this sentence, and tell me you would have walked on. I turned back. I let go of the blind girl's truth and I let go of the silent boy's sleeve and I ran back through the thinning crowd of the leaving children, against the current of them, the only one in all that town running the wrong way, back to the cold house, and I took the coat off its peg, and I held it to my face for one breath to find my mother's hands in it.

And the music stopped.

I did not hear it stop, being indoors, my face in the wool. I felt the after of it, the silence rushing in where the drum had been, the floor of the world settling back down onto its straight true edges and locking there. I came out into the street with the coat in my arms and the high street was empty. Empty of children. Full of grey, only grey, the curtains drawn and the doors bolted and the clock at the top of the hill striking the hour like a threat made good. The fold in the air was gone, sealed, the wall of the chandler's blank and innocent as if it had never opened, the colour gone, the moor put back behind its fences. And at the edge of the square stood the blind girl, exactly where she had stood, because the path had never been a thing she could find, only a thing she could hear, and the hearing is not a door you can walk through. And beside her stood the silent boy, because he had stood at the very lip of the fold with the others streaming past him and he could not call out to stop them and he could not call out to ask them to wait for the little one and he could not call out at all, ever, and so he had stood in the prison of his own shut throat while the one door that would have heard him without a single word closed itself forever a hand's breadth from his face.

We three. The wrong three. The blind girl who could not see the path. The silent boy who could not call across it. The little one who turned back for a coat. Left standing in the colour of not being noticed, while the only colour any of us had ever wanted, or ever will, folded itself quietly shut, and was gone, and took with it every difficult child in the town but us, out into a dying country to become the bright fierce bleeding things the town had told them all their lives they already were, in the worst of its grey words, never once guessing it was a prophecy and not an insult.

I still had the coat. I have it yet. I have never once been warm in it.

ACT FIVE: The Real Monsters

The boy who never spoke

You will have heard their version. Everyone has heard their version. We are telling you ours now, the three of us, at the end of our long grey lives, because someone should set the true thing down before the last of us is too old to hold it, and the looking I have done all these years has shown me one thing past any doubting: the town never once grieved.

Understand that, because it is the whole of the matter. When the town woke the morning after the leaving to find every difficult child gone, I watched for the grief. I crouched in the alleys and I looked into the faces at the doors and the windows and the council steps, the way I have always looked, and there was no grief in any of them. There was fear. But the fear was not for the children. I want to be exact, because exactness is the only justice I have ever been able to do. The fear was for what the children's going might say about the town. A town that loses its difficult children has to ask itself why they went, and that is the one question this town has never been able to survive asking, and so it did, that very morning, the thing it has always done with a truth it cannot bear to be seen beside. It renamed it.

The man in red, the wounded god they had called when they did not know they were calling, who came up out of the starving dark and drowned their rot with love and asked a pauper's price and was cheated and bowed and went away hurt; that man they made, between the morning and the evening of a single day, into a demon. They built him in the pulpit on the Sunday and in the parlours all week long. A beast. A child-stealer. A devil come up from hell to punish a godly town for no reason a godly town could be expected to understand, which is the most comfortable kind of punishment there is, the kind you did nothing to earn. Never once a creditor. Never once a debt collected. Never once the plain word for a man who does the work and is not paid and takes, in the end, what he is owed. They told it and told it until the milk-turned taste of it was the only taste in the town, and the children at the new firesides grew up knowing the story the way they knew the catechism, by heart and without understanding, and that is how a lie becomes a wall, brick by repeated brick, until the people inside it have forgotten there was ever anything on the other side worth seeing.

The youngest one who turned back

And then, to be safe, to be properly and visibly and respectably safe, they banned the music.

I was there for the council that did it; I was grown by then, or grown enough, and I sat at the back where the leftovers sit, and I heard the mill man's son, the mill man being dead by then and the son being worse, propose it in the ledger voice he had inherited along with the rents. He said the town had learned a hard lesson about the dangers of music, of unregulated sound, of melodies that stirred the young to wildness and the weak to discontent. He said it as though music were a kind of weather you could legislate. And they voted for it, every good coat in the room, and they took the high street where the Stranger had played his two great questions, the lullaby that drowned the rot and the anthem that opened the fold, and they hung a sign at each end of it. The sign is still there. You will have walked under it if you have come into the town from either road. It says NO MUSIC STREET, in straight true letters, and the town says it proudly, points it out to visitors, tells the story of the demon and the stolen children and the wise hard prohibition, as though the silence were a virtue and a victory, and not what it truly is, which is the sound of a whole town standing for two hundred years with its own hands clamped over its own ears, terrified of hearing, ever again, a single note of the truth.

The girl who was blind from birth

I hear it still. That is my portion, to go on hearing.

The seep under the cobbles is quieter now. The old thing fed on what it took, on all those children, on the belief in them and the wildness in them, and having fed it went down deeper to sleep it off, and the town above it grows neater and greyer and surer of itself with every passing year, more certain than ever that it was, throughout, entirely in the right. I put my ear to the ground in the alley behind the wool exchange, an old blind woman now where there was once a girl, and I can still just hear it, far down, slow, sated, dreaming. And further down still, fainter, almost gone, I can sometimes hear the other thing, the wild dying country on the far side of the fold, and once, only once, on a night near the anniversary, I am almost sure I heard a laugh come up through the ground, a true free laugh with blood in it, one of ours, grown now, out there, alive in the only way that country lets a thing be alive. I have kept that laugh. It is the warmest thing I own. It is warmer than the little one's coat, which has never warmed him, and which he cannot wear and cannot throw away, and which he folds and refolds on its peg, walking the length of his own small private moor of it every single day, never crossing.

The silent boy crouches in the alleys yet, an old silent man, and looks at the empty places where the difficult children used to gather in the half-hour after the good children were called in, when the streets belonged to the leftovers. The places are still empty. He looks at them because looking is the only speech he was ever given, and the empty places are the only thing left in this town worth saying, and he says them, every day, with his whole shut heart, to no one, because no one in this town has ever once stopped to read what the silent are spelling out in the long uncomfortable language of their looking.

And people expect me, when I tell it this far, to call it a tragedy. The children gone into a dying bloody country to become things with teeth. They want me to mourn it as a stealing, the way the town mourns it, with the demon and the grief and the wise hard sign. And I will not, and here is the one true thing I have left to give you, the thing the town hangs its sign to keep you from hearing, the thing I would walk through any fold in the air to say to the ones who went, if any door would ever open for me again.

They are free out there. They are bleeding and they are hunting and they are changed past their dead mothers' knowing, and not one of them, not one, is broken, because there is no one left out there with the cruelty or the leisure to tell them so. They traded a clean grey lie for a bloody green truth. They traded a town that called them broken every day of their lives for a country that is too busy dying to call them anything at all, and in the gap between those two, in that one wild dying ungoverned country where a wrong-shaped child can be exactly its own wrong size and live, there is more freedom than this whole straight true respectable town has held in the whole of its grey existence.

And given the door again, given the fold in the air and the not-kind colour pouring through and the music in my teeth and the dying truth in my own hand, I would not stand still at the edge this time, listening, frightened of the loss of a thing I had only just been given. I would walk into the dark that loves me wrong over the light that only ever called me wrong. I would not turn back for a coat. I would not turn back for a mother. I would not turn back for the whole proper weeping self-satisfied town, sign and clock and council and all.

The monsters were never out there on the moor. We three have had a lifetime of grey to be sure of it, and we are sure.

The monsters live on No Music Street. They sleep very well. And they have taught their children, and their children's children, to call the silence peace.