Chapter 36 Forty-Six

On the sixth of May Sella Quillets counted forty-six. She had been counting since the sixth of December, twice a night for the last fortnight — once going up and once coming down, which was her own innovation and which Pippa had allowed — and she came into the kitchen at half past four on the sixth of May with her stocking off one foot and said: "Six. It's six." "Six what?" "Six more than the number." * * * Pippa put down the cloth. "Forty-six," she said. "Forty-six. And I counted it twice more after tea and I got forty-six again and I did not tell anybody because I promised you I'd tell you first and I'm telling you first." She stood in the middle of the kitchen and her hands were quite steady, which was the extraordinary part. "It isn't a new stair. I know that now. It's the one under the mat and there's fourteen more under that, and if you count those it's sixty, and I counted sixty and I did not tell Aunt Tibb either, and I have decided I am going to stop telling people things I count and start telling them things I know." "That's the whole of being a keeper," said Pippa. * * * They went down at five o'clock with a candle and a lamp and Sella went first and counted the fourteen out loud, which she had not done since January because Pippa had said she was not to go down there alone, and had not said she was not to count them alone. The door was where it was. The room was where it was. And the lamps on the floor — the three brass lamps that had stood on the flags since January with their wicks trimmed and their glass clean — were cold. Cold as the stone under them. Cold as the walls. There was frost on the inside of the glass on the middle one, which was a thing Pippa had not seen since the second of January and did not much care to see now. "May we light them?" "You may light the first one. Only the first, and I'll light the other two, and if nothing happens we go up and that is the whole of it." * * * Sella lit the first one. It took. It took the way a lamp takes, a small blue flame standing up off a wick that had not been trimmed since some time in March. Pippa lit the second. And the third. And then the hearth-stone came up. Not all at once, and not in the eleven. It came up slowly from the far side of the slab, the way it came up in January, and it went across, and Pippa counted it because she had never once stopped counting, and it came eleven times in nine minutes, and then it stopped, and there was nothing. "Two o'clock," said Sella. "It's stopped." "I know. It does that." "I know it does that," said Sella. "I've been counting since December and I've only been down here twice and I know what it does, and the reason I'm not frightened is that it stopped in the right place, and you asked it a question in front of Tibb in the room and it waited eleven minutes and answered you. So it's not broken. It's finished." * * * "Is it finished?" "I don't know," said Sella. "That's the honest answer and I'll give it to you because you never mind me when I don't know. I'm eleven and I've been counting since December and there's a thing under this house and I've got a good way of thinking about it and no proof whatever, and I thought I'd better come and say that instead of saying it's a machine." * * * Pippa sat down on the step of the hearth-stone, which she had not done in four months. "Sit down," she said. "Have you eaten?" "I've had bread." "Have bread here. There's a whole loaf down here, which I know because I put it down here in February, and if a thing down here has been eating my flour then I've had four months of notice and never once looked." * * * They sat on the step of a hearth-stone in a warm room twenty feet under a mountain with a candle and a lamp and forty-six stairs above their heads. "I am going to tell you everything I know," said Pippa, "because it is the third of May and you go home on the third of June, and you are the last person in this house who will ever be told anything by anybody who was here in the winter, unless I say it now." "Yes, miss — Pippa." "There is a thing under this floor. It has been here longer than the inn. It has never crossed the line and it has never gone into anybody's house. It came up out of the ground through a ring of iron filings in 1829 and it went back down in April, and it stood up nine times in 1961 for four nights and one woman sat up with a lamp and got it down again, and nothing has happened since." She pulled her knees up. "Everything else is a story the village told itself about that. The lamps are real brass and oil. The line is real posts and a real ring of iron. The covenant is eleven lights in an order and a true sentence from everybody who comes through the door, and that is in the rule book in the front, in my great-aunt's aunt's hand, dated 1864." "And the writing?" "I do not know what the writing is," said Pippa. "It is not my aunt's and it is not mine. It has been in the register since at least 1961 and it comes at four in the morning and it asks me things, and I have answered four of them out loud and I have never once got a yes." "Has it ever lied?" "It said a thing in January that was about a sack of flour with a mark on it and it was right," said Pippa. "That is four months of evidence and I am not going to build a religion out of four months of a thing that writes at four in the morning." * * * "And what do you think it is?" And Pippa Danby sat on the step of a hearth-stone and thought about it for a long time, because it mattered, because she was going to be forty-nine one day and the girl was going to be forty too, and somebody had to write it down honestly and there was nobody else in the house who would. "I think it is the sound the ground makes when it is held," she said. "The same way a floor sounds when you put a hand on it in the dark and it's warm. That's all. And it has been happening here since before the inn and there is nothing in it anybody has ever wanted, and it is extremely bad at writing sentences and extremely good at knowing when somebody's about to leave." "Do you think it's alive?" "I think it is not asleep either," said Pippa. "Which is worse and is not frightening, and I can see that you don't find those two things different, and you're eleven, and I was told once by a woman of ninety-one that the difference is ninety years and nothing at all." * * * Sella thought about that for a bit, and then she said, "Then what's it for?" "That's what I asked in April and I got an answer from a cook downstairs and I'll give it to you exactly as she gave it to me." Pippa got up. "It's not fed by the lamps or the iron or the ring. It's fed by what we do. The lights in the order, so that nobody in the house is left in the dark. A true sentence a day out of every person who comes through the door. The line kept and the boundary walked and the road marked so that a man can't get lost in a whiteout. The doctor got to Bredon's with a lamp in his coat. The shepherd got his supper. A sister got home off a mountain at half past one in the morning." "And after the thaw?" "It'll be hungry," said Pippa. "And we go on." * * * Sella put her boot back on. "Are you frightened of it going?" "Yes," said Pippa. "Then you can have my counting." "Your counting?" "You said I was the first one in the house who ever told you anything true about it, and I didn't, because I was eleven and I thought I knew, and I turned out to be guessing, and I had to come and tell you that I'd been guessing." She was standing up, in front of the candle, with her arms at her sides. "So if you want somebody to count, I'll count. And I'll bring it up here on a Monday and a Friday and I'll write it in the back of the book in pencil, and I'll tell you when I'm guessing and I'll tell you when I'm guessing better than I did, and one day you'll be a woman of forty with a lamp in your hand and I'll be a woman of forty with a pencil, and one of us will have got it right, and it won't matter which." * * * Then she said, "Are you going to tell Aunt Tibb?" "Tibb has been down here in 1973 sitting on that step for three hours." "She never said." "She never said," agreed Pippa, "and I have written it in the register, and Tibb read it in April and has not mentioned it to me since, which is her way, and which is also, I have noticed, exactly how the two of you treat each other, and I want it entered in this book that I have noticed." * * * They went up the fourteen steps and Sella put the mat back over the tread and pressed it flat with her heel, which she had been doing since January. At the top she said, "Forty-six is a good number." "Why?" "Because forty-four is the stairs and forty-six is the stairs and two more, and the two more are the ones under the mat and down," said Sella. "So it isn't a mistake. It's a key. It's the number of the whole house." And she went off down the passage to do the seventh lamp at half past six, and Pippa Danby stood at the top of the stair in the passage of her great-aunt's inn and looked at the back of a girl of eleven going down to do a job she had been given in January because she had counted the stairs correctly on the first night and had not been frightened of the answer on the fortieth. ---