第2章 The Patient

Her first week in Brannel brought her twelve patients, which was more than she had expected and fewer than Mrs. Kroll had implied. They came to the consultation room one at a time, in a queue that formed outside the green door each morning at nine and dissolved by noon. They were mostly ailments of age and weather — joints stiffened by damp, lungs irritated by peat smoke, a persistent rash on one woman's forearms that Rhea diagnosed as contact dermatitis from the lye used in the village soap. They were polite in the way of people who have decided to tolerate a newcomer, and they answered her questions carefully, and several of them looked at the shutters on her windows while they talked, as though checking that she had understood. Tomas the shepherd came on the fourth day. He did not stand in the queue. He came at half past seven, before Rhea had finished boiling water for tea, and knocked on the side door of the cottage with a hand that was blackened at the knuckles and rough as bark. He was tall and thin, with a face the colour and texture of the peat itself, and he wore a coat of thick woven wool that smelled of sheep and woodsmoke and the open hill. "I've got a cough," he said. "It's been at me since the equinox." "Come in." He lowered himself into the chair by the examination table with the slow economy of a man who measured every movement against the reserve of strength he might need later. His cough was deep and wet, and when Rhea listened to his chest she heard the coarse rattle of fluid in the lower lobes. Bronchitis, she thought, possibly developing into pneumonia if the damp continued. "You need rest," she said. "And I'll give you a course of antibiotics. How long have you been out on the hill?" "Since August. The sheep don't mind the rain. They've got more sense than I have — they go under the rocks when it's worst. I stand in it like a fool." He coughed again, turning his head to the side, and the sound filled the small room. "I'll take the medicine. I'll not stop working." "I can't make you stop, but I can tell you what happens if you don't." "You can tell me. I'll listen politely and then I'll go back to the hill." But he smiled when he said it, a small creasing of the skin around his eyes that softened the severity of his face. "You're staying, then? For more than a season?" "That's the intention." "The last one stayed eleven years. Then he left." Tomas looked at the shutters. "The same as the one before him, and the one before that. They come, they stay a while, and they go." "What made them leave?" Tomas was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "They saw the moths." Rhea had heard the word from Mrs. Kroll but had not yet pressed anyone for an explanation, because in her experience, the stories a village told about itself were best uncovered slowly, the way you uncovered a fracture — by touch, by careful pressure, by listening for the catch in the patient's breathing. "What do the moths do?" she asked. "Nothing. That's the trouble with them. They come to the windows and they press against the glass and they wait. And if you leave the shutters open, they come inside, and then you have to deal with what follows." "What follows?" Tomas looked at her directly. "You'll see. It's October now. You'll see." He took the prescription and left, and Rhea watched him walk down the wet street toward the hill track that led up past the peat burn, his coat trailing behind him like a sail. The boy came that afternoon. His mother brought him — a thin woman named Hild, with the same dark, rain-weathered look as everyone in Brannel but with something extra behind it, a tightness around the eyes that Rhea recognised from years of paediatric work as the particular exhaustion of a parent who has stopped sleeping through the night. The boy was perhaps seven, with dark hair that fell across his forehead and eyes so pale they were nearly colourless, the pale grey of lake ice. "This is Petter," Hild said. "He won't sleep." "Since when?" "Since the equinox. Three weeks now. I've tried everything. Warm milk, cold milk, the chamomile Mrs. Kroll sends down. Nothing works. He lies in bed and stares at the ceiling and when I go to check on him he's sitting up, looking at the window." Rhea looked at Petter. Petter looked at Rhea with the flat, assessing gaze of a child who has been examined by many adults and found them all insufficient. "Can I talk to him?" Rhea asked. Hild nodded and sat back in the chair by the wall, her hands clasped in her lap, the knuckles white. Rhea crouched beside the examination table so she was level with Petter's eyes. "What do you see when you look at the window, Petter?" "Moths." "In the daytime?" "All the time. Even when the shutters are closed. I can see the shadows of them. They sit on the glass and their wings are like paper and they don't move." "Are they scary?" Petter considered this with great seriousness. "They're waiting for something," he said. "I can hear them. They make a sound like breathing." Rhea glanced at Hild. Hild's face was very still. "Has he always been able to hear them?" Rhea asked. "Not always. Just since this autumn. Just since the light started." "What light?" Hild stood up abruptly. "The autumn light. The thing in the village. You'll learn about it soon enough, Doctor. Everyone does." She took Petter's hand and pulled him gently off the table. "Can you give him something to help him sleep? Anything. I don't care what it is." Rhea could give him something — a mild sedative, carefully dosed for his weight — but what she really wanted was to understand what was happening to the boy's sleep cycle and why the entire village seemed to share a vocabulary of fear about a phenomenon none of them would explain directly. She wrote the prescription and handed it to Hild, and while the woman counted out coins from a small purse, Petter reached into his coat pocket and produced a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it on the examination table. It was a drawing in charcoal — heavy, earnest strokes made by a hand not yet fully trained. The drawing showed a window. The shutters were open. And pressed against the glass from the outside were shapes that were not quite moths, or rather were moths drawn by someone who had seen what moths become when the light falls wrong. Their wings were too long. Their bodies were too narrow. And in the centre of each shape was a dot, perfectly round, that Petter had pressed so hard with the charcoal that it had torn through the paper. "The one in the middle is the biggest," Petter said. "It has the longest wings. It's been here before." "Here before?" "Before the village. Before the people. It was here when there was just the bog and the stones." Rhea looked at the drawing for a long time. Then she folded it carefully and handed it back to Petter, who folded it again and put it in his pocket with the careful reverence of a child who keeps a secret collection of important things. "Thank you, Petter," she said. After they had gone, Rhea stood in the consultation room and looked at the shutters and the iron latches and the old examination table with its surface scarred by decades of use, and she thought about the word that Mrs. Kroll had used — old enough. Old enough that it amounts to the same thing. She thought about the moths that were not like summer moths and the boy who could hear them breathing and the shepherd who said they had been here before the village and the church bell that rang once each day at an hour that did not correspond to any prayer time she knew. The rain continued. The light outside the window thinned toward dusk, and Rhea Alder reached up and closed the shutters and fastened the iron latch and sat in the dark consultation room listening to the sound of the rain on the slate above and wondering what she had come to. ---