Chapter 41 The Pilgrims

The first pilgrims came in the spring, and Anna had been expecting them for months. She had sung the song — the Deep's song, the song that was older than language and newer than the moment — and the song had gone out from Blackwood Manor across the hill and the valley and the country, and people had heard it. Not with their ears. Most of them had been asleep. They had heard it in dreams, in the space between waking and sleeping, in the quiet that comes just before a thought forms — and they had known, the way you know a thing in a dream, that there was a place where the sound came from, and that the place had a door, and that the door was open. They came on foot and by bus and by cars that were older than some of their drivers, and they came with backpacks and suitcases and children in arms and dogs on leashes, and they stood at the bottom of the hill and looked up at the manor with the expression Anna had learned to recognise — the expression of someone who has been listening to a voice for a long time and has only just found the mouth that speaks it. She met them at the gate. She showed them the house. She let them sit in the hall where the whispers were loudest, and she taught them, the way her grandmother had taught her, the way her grandmother's grandmother had taught her, that a sound is not a thing to be feared but a thing to be heard, that every whisper has a shape and every shape has a name, and that the first duty of a listener is to keep listening. Some of them left changed. That was the word Anna used, because it was the truest word she had: they came in heavy and went out light, carrying something new in their chests that they could not name and did not need to. Some of them left hollow. That was the word she used for those, too, though she hated it: they came in light and went out heavy, and there was something missing from their eyes that no one who had not seen it before would know to look for. The Deep was a mirror, and a mirror shows what is brought to it, and not everyone who came to the house brought the same thing. Renshaw came in the third week. He was a journalist — an audio journalist, he said, as if there were any other kind that mattered — and he came with a recorder the size of a paperback book and a manner that was friendly in the way of someone who has learned that friendliness opens doors. He had heard the song, he said, like everyone else. He had heard it in his sleep, and he had not been able to forget it, and he had spent three weeks trying to find its source before someone had told him about the house on the hill. He wanted to record it. He wanted to understand it. He wanted, he said, to write the first accurate account of the strangest phenomenon of the age, and he was willing to sit as long as it took. Anna let him sit. She let him sit in the hall, and in the basement, and in the room where the reels were kept, and she watched the way his recorder listened, and the way he listened through it, and she saw what she had learned to see in the first hour: that Renshaw heard everything and understood nothing, that he was a man who had spent his life capturing sounds and had never once asked a sound what it wanted. Tess came in the fourth week, and she was different. She was nineteen, and she had driven three hundred miles alone in a car that had no working heater, and she had arrived at the foot of the hill at dusk with a bag that held a notebook, a pair of headphones, and almost nothing else. She had heard the song, she said, in the winter, in the week after it went out — and she had heard it every night since, not in dreams but clearly, the way you hear a bell that has been struck in the next room. It was not frightening her. That was the thing she wanted Anna to understand. It was not frightening her, and it had not ever frightened her. It was more like — she searched for the word, standing in the doorway of the hall with the evening light behind her — it was more like being remembered. Anna looked at her for a long moment, and then she said, "Sit down, Tess. Tell me what it sounds like when it is not being sung." Tess sat. And she told her. The Deep sang to the others, and they heard a song. It sang to Tess, and she heard a room — a room she had never been in, with walls that were not walls and a silence that was not silence, and in the room, underneath the song, underneath the whisper of the Archive, underneath everything, there was another voice. A voice that was not in the Archive. A voice that had never been recorded. A voice that was listening to her the way she was listening to it. Anna went very still. "Describe it," she said. "As carefully as you can." "It is not a voice," Tess said. "Not exactly. It is more like — the shape a voice would leave behind, if the voice were taken away. Like the print of a foot in mud, after the foot is gone. It is always there, underneath the song. It has always been there. I think it is why the song was given to us — no. I think it is why the song was given to me. So that I would hear it, underneath, and come." The house was very quiet. The whispers had stopped. Anna stood in the middle of the hall, and she understood, with the cold certainty of a woman who had spent her life listening to things that could not be heard, that the song she had sung had gone out into the world, and that the world had not been the only thing listening. "Tess," she said. "I need you to tell me one more thing. When you hear the voice underneath — the shape of the voice — does it ever say your name?" Tess looked at her. And in the lamplight of the hall, for just a moment, her eyes were not quite her own. "Not yet," she said. ---