第5章 The Churchyard

The churchyard lay behind the church, on the side of the hill where the slope steepened and the ground gave way to the raw, uncut face of the bog. The graves were old — older than the church, which was itself older than any denomination Rhea could identify. The stones were slate, not granite, and they bore no crosses. Instead, each one was carved with the same image she had seen at the peat burn: a moth with spread wings, its antennae reaching upward, its body a simple line. Some of the stones had dates, carved in a numerals system she did not immediately recognise. Others had names she could not parse — not names in any language she knew, but shapes that might have been names, might have been invocations, might have been warnings. Rhea came to the churchyard on a Wednesday morning, after the queue had dispersed and the village had returned to its silent, self-contained routine. She had told herself she was going to check the condition of the stone wall that bordered the churchyard, because Mrs. Kroll had mentioned that the council was considering repairs. But the real reason was the figure she had seen from the peat burn — Mrs. Kroll standing among the graves, watching — and the need to understand what drew the village elder to this place. The churchyard gate was iron, rusted to the colour of dried blood, and it swung open without protest, which suggested it was used often enough to keep the hinges from seizing. The path inside was paved with the same dark stone as the village streets, worn smooth by centuries of feet, and it led between the graves toward a low wall at the far end where the ground dropped away into the bog. She walked the rows. The graves were arranged in concentric semicircles around a central point that was not a grave at all but a depression in the ground, a shallow bowl perhaps six feet across, lined with stones that were darker than the rest — not the grey of wet granite but the black of peat, of earth that had been compressed for millennia in the dark. The depression was empty, but the stones that lined it were carved more densely than any others in the churchyard, their surfaces covered in moth shapes so small and numerous they resembled the wing patterns of the insects themselves. She knelt beside the depression and looked at the stones. In the flat, diffuse light of the overcast sky, she could see that the carving went deeper than she had first thought — the moths were not merely incised but relief-carved, their wings raised from the surface of the stone, and between the moths were smaller shapes that she had to lean close to identify. They were hands. Tiny, open hands, with the palms facing upward, and in the centre of each palm was a circle — the same circle Petter had drawn in charcoal, the same circle that appeared on the marks on her window. A sound behind her. She turned. Petter was standing at the gate. He was alone, which was unusual — his mother Hild had not brought him, and no one in Brannel sent a seven-year-old out without supervision. He wore a coat too large for him, the sleeves rolled back at the wrists, and his pale eyes were wide and fixed on Rhea with the intensity of a child who has found exactly what he was looking for. "Petter. How did you get here?" "I followed the moths." He pointed toward the bog. "They're in the trees. They sit on the branches and they don't move and if you look at them from the right angle they look like leaves." Rhea stood. The bog was fifty feet beyond the churchyard wall, a flat expanse of brown and grey, studded with the dark shapes of stunted trees whose branches grew sideways in the permanent wind. She could see what Petter meant — the branches were dense with shapes that might have been leaves in autumn, or might have been moths, or might have been something that used the shapes of leaves and moths to look like something harmless. "You shouldn't be here alone," Rhea said. "Where is your mother?" "She's sleeping. Everyone sleeps in the morning. I don't." He walked toward the depression and looked down at it with the frank curiosity of a child examining a new specimen. "This is where they put them." "Put who?" "The ones who take the light. The ones who go into the houses where the shutters are open. After they take the light, they come here, and they sit in the circle, and they don't get up for a long time." He pointed to the stones. "The marks on the rocks are from their hands. They press their hands on the stones and the stones keep the marks." Rhea looked at the stones again. He was right. Between the carved moths and the carved palms, there were impressions in the stone that were not carvings at all — they were handprints, worn smooth by time but still recognisable as the impressions of human hands pressed into something soft and left to harden. The hands were small, like children's hands, though they could not have been — the stone was too old, the impressions too deep. "How do you know this, Petter?" "The moths told me." He said it without hesitation, without the defensive tone a child adopts when an adult challenges a fantasy. He said it the way he might have said that his mother told him, or that he read it in a book. "They speak when the shutters are open. They speak in the breathing. If you listen, they tell you everything about the village." "What do they say?" Petter looked at her, and for a moment his face was not the face of a child but the face of something much older, something that had been watching from behind the glass for a very long time. Then the moment passed and he was seven again, and he kicked at a stone on the path, and he said, "They say the light is going out." "What does that mean?" "They say the bargain is broken. They say the doctor who left broke it and no one fixed it. They say this autumn is different." He looked at the bog. "They say they're coming." Rhea went to the gate and looked down the track toward the village. From the churchyard, she could see the roofs of the houses, the columns of smoke, the closed shutters, the wet streets empty of people. The village looked exactly as it had when she arrived — self-contained, weathered, enduring — but there was a quality to the silence that had changed, a thinness to it, as though the sound of the village had been subtracted from the air and what remained was merely the absence of noise rather than the presence of peace. She walked Petter back to his house. Hild was asleep, as Petter had said, lying on a chair by the hearth with her face turned to the wall. Rhea woke her gently and explained that she had found Petter in the churchyard, and Hild's face went through several colours in quick succession — white, red, and then a grey so deep it matched the stone of the village walls. "He goes where he wants," Hild said. "I can't stop him. The moths — they call him, Doctor. I've bolted his window, I've nailed the shutters, I've done everything Mrs. Kroll told me. He goes where the moths are. He says they speak to him." "Has he always been like this?" "Since the equinox. Since the light started. Before that, he was a normal boy. He played with the other children. He slept through the night. Now the other children won't play with him because he says things they don't understand. And he won't sleep because the moths won't let him." Rhea wanted to say that moths do not let or forbid, that they are insects with simple nervous systems and simpler behaviours, that the boy was suffering from a stress response exacerbated by the isolation and superstition of the village. She wanted to say this because it was what she had been trained to say, what the evidence and the literature and the accumulated weight of medical science supported. But she had heard the breathing at her window, and she had seen the scratches on the glass, and she had stood in the churchyard among the handprints of people who had taken the light, and she could not say it. She prescribed a mild sedative for Petter and a tonic for Hild and left the house and walked back to the medical cottage in the rain, and on the way she passed Mrs. Kroll, who was standing in a doorway watching her with the same expression she had worn in the churchyard — concern, assessment, and something else that Rhea could not name but that felt, in the wet air of the October afternoon, very much like the beginning of a test. That evening, Rhea opened Dr. Fenn's notes again and searched for Edda Moss. She found the entries — three years of them, each in late October, each describing the same symptoms: visual disturbances in lamplight, hearing a rhythmic sound that the patient described as "breathing," and a persistent drawing of moth shapes that the patient produced without conscious effort, filling page after page of a notebook that Dr. Fenn had attached to her file. The drawings were identical to Petter's — moths with wings too long and circles in their centres — and the final entry in Edda Moss's file was dated October the thirteenth, one year ago, and read simply: "Patient discharged. Condition stable. Recommend continued monitoring by village elder." The handwriting was Dr. Fenn's, but it was shaky, uneven, written by a hand that was not steady, and below the entry someone had written a single word in a different hand — a hand Rhea did not recognise — and the word was "SOON." ---