Scarecrow

The first one came on a Thursday, in the mess, at breakfast.

I was looking at my porridge. That’s all. Gray, in a gray bowl, with a spoon in it. And I wasn’t looking into it. I wasn’t trying to see anything. I was just eating, and thinking about the hydrogen on the moon, and whether Luna would like the question as much as Genny said.

And the porridge went deeper.

That’s the only way I can say it. It didn’t change. I didn’t change it. But I was looking at it, the ordinary way, the way you look at breakfast, and all at once I could see into it without trying. The oats. The water in the oats. The little long chains in the oats that make them oats. And then, without my asking, under those, smaller ones. And under those, smaller. Down and down and down, like falling, like the floor going out from under you on the lift to the hangar.

I’d never gone that far down. Not without meaning to. Not in porridge.

And then the light hit.

The lamps over the long tables. White. Ordinary. I’d been eating under them every morning for five months. And they came in through my eyes like two thin hot needles, straight through, all the way to the back of my head, and stayed there.

I put my spoon down.

I closed my eyes.

The needles went away. Not all at once. Slowly. Like something sliding back into its hole.

”You all right?” said Liam, through a mouthful of toast.

”Fine.”

”You’ve gone white.”

”I’m fine.” I opened my eyes. Carefully. Just a little. The lamps were lamps again. The porridge was porridge. ”Bright in here.”

Liam looked up at the lamps. Then at me.

”It’s the same as always,” he said.

It came back at lunch. And again on the field, in the afternoon, when the big lamps came up full over field two for the Town. And again that night in the reading room, under the lamp on our table, so badly that I had to put my hand over my eyes and sit very still with my elbows on the cell biology book while Luna watched me across the table and didn’t say anything at all.

Every time, it was the same.

First the falling. The going-deeper. Looking at something ordinary and seeing further into it than I’d asked to. The grain under the grain. The little bricks under the little bricks. Like a door I’d always known was there, at the bottom of everything, had come off its hinges.

Then the light.

Then the needles.

By Saturday, I was squinting all the time. Not much. Just a little. Just enough to keep the lamps from getting all the way in. I found myself standing in the shadow at the edge of the field instead of in the middle. Sitting at the end of the table where the lamp was furthest away. Reading with the book tipped away from the light.

I didn’t tell anyone.

I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Because I knew what it was. Or I thought I did. Because I’d seen notebook thirteen through a screen, held up by a nine-year-old with a dictionary.

After that, he could see smaller.

On Saturday morning, before laps, I went to find Sigmund.

I’d been putting it off for six days. Ever since the call. Every morning I’d thought, today, and every morning I’d gone to the gym instead and stood in the dark watching for sparks that didn’t come. Because Mother had said with nobody else there. And Sigmund was never anywhere with nobody else there. He was always with Squad Two, or at the board, or in the mess, at the head of the table, very straight.

Except at five o’clock in the morning.

I knew where he’d be. Brock had told me, without meaning to, the day he sat down by the fern. He runs it in his head a thousand times. And at five o’clock, before the lamps came up, before anyone was awake except Toby practicing in the Town and me at the fern, Sigmund Friese stood at the noticeboard outside the mess on his own and read the times.

He was there.

Very straight. Hands behind his back. Reading the board in the gray half-light. Squad Two’s time from Friday. 4:58. Slow. Steady. Under five minutes for the first time, and nobody in the infirmary.

He heard me coming. He didn’t turn round.

”Dask,” he said.

I stopped a few meters away.

I’d thought about what to say for six days. I’d thought about it in the gym, and at the fern, and in the dark in the barracks. I’d thought of a hundred things. I’m sorry. I saw her hand and I didn’t think. I know you were trying. I know your father. I know the list. I’d thought of a way to say all of it so that it would be all right.

And then I’d thought about Mother. About Father, standing in front of a man in the war, with nobody else there.

Not but. Not I thought. Not you have to understand.

”I was wrong,” I said.

Sigmund didn’t move.

He stood at the noticeboard with his back to me, perfectly still, in the gray light, for a long time. I could see the back of his neck. His very neat hair. His hands, behind his back, holding each other.

I didn’t say anything else.

It was the hardest thing I’d done in five months. Harder than the locker room. Harder than the steel ball. Standing in a corridor with three words out in the air between us and every other word I had pressing up behind my teeth wanting to follow them. Because. But. You have to.

I didn’t let them.

The rest wasn’t mine.

After a very long time, Sigmund said, without turning round:

”Noted.”

That was all.

I went to the fern.

At the fern, I looked at the tenth frond, the dark one. And it went deeper.

I hadn’t meant it to. I’d only been looking. But the leaf opened under my eyes like a book falling open, and I was in it, and through it, and under the cells, and under the things inside the cells, and under those, falling, falling—

And the lamp on its chain over the fern swung, and the light caught my eyes.

I came out of it on the floor. On my side. With my hands over my face and the needles so deep in the back of my head I could hear them. A high thin whine, like a wire stretched too tight.

When I opened my eyes, Toby was kneeling beside me.

He’d come round the corner from the Town, from his practice, the way he did every morning at half past five. He had his tuning fork in one hand. His face was white.

”Your breathing went,” he said. ”I heard it. From the Town. Through two walls. It went—” He made a shape with his hand. Jagged. ”Like that.”

”I’m all right.”

”You’re on the floor, Lucas.”

”I know.” I sat up. Slowly. The whine in the back of my head was going. Not gone. Going. ”It’s the light. It’s just the light.”

Toby looked at me. Then at the lamp swinging on its chain over the fern. Ordinary. Yellow. Dim. The same lamp it had always been.

”That light?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

Toby didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he put his tuning fork in his pocket, and reached up, very carefully, and caught the lamp on its chain, and held it still. And turned it, just a little, so the light fell away from me and onto the wall.

”Better?” he said.

It was.

”Don’t tell anyone,” I said.

Toby looked at me for a long time. With his big ears, and his white face, and his father’s tuning fork in his pocket.

”I won’t tell anyone,” he said. ”But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear it.”

Okafor watched me squint for six days.

I didn’t know it was six days. Not then. I found out later. She told me. She said she’d noticed on the Thursday, at breakfast, from the door of the mess, when I put my spoon down and closed my eyes. And that she’d watched every day after that. On the field. In the Town. In the sim, through the observation glass, where the lights were brightest of all, and I’d gone through the whole red jungle behind Luna with my eyes screwed nearly shut and nobody in Squad Eight had said a word about it, because Luna had told them not to.

She didn’t say anything for six days.

On the seventh, at the end of the afternoon, when the big lamps over field two came up to full for the evening run and I turned my face away from them without thinking, she said, from behind me:

”Dask. My office.”

She didn’t turn the lamp on.

That was the first thing. She walked into her office ahead of me, and the lamp on her desk was off, and she didn’t reach for it. She sat down behind her desk in the half-dark, with only the light from the corridor coming in round the edges of the door, and the photograph on the wall behind her nothing but a gray square.

”Shut the door,” she said.

I shut it.

The office went dark. Not black. Gray. Soft. The kind of dark that lets your eyes rest. I felt the needles in the back of my head, which had been there all afternoon, very faint, slide back into their holes.

I hadn’t known how tight my face had been until it let go.

”Sit.”

I sat.

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Slow. Steady. In the gray dark, I could just see her shape, sitting very straight behind the desk with her hands folded in front of her.

”How long?” she said.

”A week.”

”Light?”

”Yes.”

”All light? Or white light?”

I thought about it. ”White’s worse. The field lamps. The sim. The white room on Level 2.” I thought about the lamp at the fern. ”But all of it. When it’s bad.”

”When is it bad?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

”When I look,” I said. ”When I’m looking at something, and it—” I didn’t know how to say it. ”It goes deeper. On its own. Further down than I’ve asked it to. Like falling. Like the floor’s gone. And then the light comes in, and it’s like—”

”Needles,” said Okafor.

I stopped.

”Behind the eyes,” said Okafor. ”Both of them. Going in from the front and coming out at the back. And a sound. High. Like a wire.” Her voice in the dark was very quiet. ”And it’s worse at the end of the day. And worse when you’re tired. And worse when you’re frightened. And when it’s very bad, you go down. Wherever you are. And you can’t see anything at all until you close your eyes and wait.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

”Your father had those,” said Sergeant Okafor.

She told me in the dark.

I think that was on purpose. I think she’d turned the lamp off for my eyes, and then left it off for hers.

”The last spring of the program,” she said. ”Before they let any of them out. Before the war took them. He was sixteen. I was fourteen, and I wasn’t in the program, I was a cadet in the ordinary school on the floor below, and I used to carry messages up the stairs to the infirmary because it got me out of drill.” She was quiet for a moment. ”That’s how I met him. Carrying a message up the stairs. He was sitting on the bottom step outside the infirmary door with a towel over his head. In the middle of the afternoon. Because the light in the corridor was too bright.”

The gray dark. The faint line of light round the door.

”I asked him if he was sick,” said Okafor. ”He said no. He said he was seeing. He said it like it was an apology. Sorry. I’m seeing.” She almost laughed. Not quite. ”I didn’t know what he meant. I thought he was mad. I sat down on the step next to him anyway, because he looked like he needed somebody to, and I didn’t go back to drill, and I got a week of punishment for it, and I did it again the next day.”

”How long did it last?”

”Six weeks.”

”And then?”

Okafor didn’t answer straight away.

”And then it stopped,” she said. ”All at once. One morning. He came down to the yard and stood in the sun and didn’t squint. And I looked at him.” A pause. ”And his eyes were black.”

I sat very still in the dark.

”I know,” said Okafor. ”You’ve asked me twice. What came after. And I told you, one number a night, and then I told you, a reason that isn’t fear.” She shifted in her chair. I heard it creak. ”You’ve still not got a reason that isn’t fear, forty-one. I can hear it from here. Your breathing’s gone the way Marsh says it goes.”

”Toby told you.”

”Marsh didn’t tell me anything. Marsh came to my office on Monday morning and stood in the doorway for five minutes and didn’t say anything, and then said Sergeant, have you ever noticed the lamps at the fern are very bright, and went away again.” She was quiet for a moment. ”I have very loyal cadets. They’re very bad at it.”

I almost laughed. It came out as a breath.

”I’m not going to tell you what came after,” said Okafor. ”Not tonight. But I’m going to tell you three things. And you’re going to listen to all three, and not ask me for a fourth.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”One,” said Okafor. ”It didn’t kill him. Whatever you’ve been lying in the dark thinking all week. It didn’t kill him, and it didn’t make him mad, and it didn’t make him into anything he wasn’t. He was the same man after. The same exact man. He just saw more.” A pause. ”That’s one.”

I breathed out.

I hadn’t known I’d been thinking it. Until she said it. Lying in the dark all week, between Liam and Toby, with notebook thirteen in my head.

”Two,” said Okafor. ”You don’t go to Halloway.”

”Why not?”

”Because Halloway’s a good doctor. The best I know. And she writes everything down.” Okafor’s voice went very flat. ”And everything she writes goes to the Director. And the Director will be very interested in this. Very excited. He’ll want scans, and tests, and measurements, and a room on Level 2 with no shadows in it.” A pause. ”You’ve been in that room.”

”Yes.”

”Then you know.” Her voice didn’t change. ”When it’s bad, you come here. Not the infirmary. Here. I’ll keep the lamp off.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

”And three?”

Okafor got up.

I heard her chair go back. I heard her walk across the dark office, to the shelf beside the photograph. The shelf with the old books on it, the ones with their spines cracked white. I heard her take something down. Something small. And come back. And put it on the desk in front of me.

”Three,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”These were his.”

I put my hand out in the dark and found it.

Spectacles.

Old ones. Small and round, with thin wire frames, bent a little at one hinge and straightened again by somebody who’d been careful. And the lenses weren’t clear. I could tell even in the dark. They were dark. Smoked. Like glass held over a candle.

”He made them,” said Okafor. ”On the bottom step. Out of a pair of the infirmary’s reading glasses and the soot off a lamp. He looked at the glass and made it dark all the way through, the way you’d do it, and wore them for six weeks, every day, inside and out. The other cadets laughed at him. Called him the mole.” She sat back down. ”When his eyes went black, he didn’t need them anymore. He gave them to me. On the step. He said keep these for whoever’s next.” She was quiet for a long moment. ”I’ve had them in that drawer for twenty-four years. Waiting for whoever was next.”

I held them in my hand in the dark. Small and light. The wire warm from her hand.

Father’s.

He’d sat on a step outside a door with a towel over his head, sixteen years old, and made these out of a pair of borrowed glasses and the soot off a lamp. He’d looked at the glass and changed it, the way he’d change a field. The way I’d change anything. And worn them for six weeks while people laughed.

And then he’d given them to a girl on the step who’d sat down next to him when nobody else would.

Keep these for whoever’s next.

”Put them on,” said Okafor.

I put them on.

The wire was cold against my ears for a moment, then not. They were a little small. My face was wider than his had been at sixteen.

”Now look at the door,” said Okafor.

I looked at the door. At the thin bright line of corridor light round its edge, which had been sitting on the edge of my eyes like a blade since I sat down.

Through the smoked glass, it was soft. Brown. Gentle. Like light through a jar of honey.

No needles.

Nothing at all.

I sat in the dark in Okafor’s office with my father’s spectacles on, looking at the light round the door, and I didn’t say anything for a very long time. I couldn’t.

”Wear them,” said Okafor. ”Everywhere. Field, mess, sim, reading room. If anybody asks, they’re from me, for an eye strain, by order. Nobody’ll argue with by order.” A pause. ”And when somebody laughs, you tell them what they’re called.”

”What?”

”They called him the mole,” said Okafor. ”He called them his dusk. He said they made everything look like the end of a long day in a field.” Her voice was very quiet. ”He said it was the only time of day he’d ever been able to see properly anyway.”

I walked into the mess at dinner wearing them.

The long room went quiet. Then loud. Then quiet again, the way it did.

Liam stared at me with his mouth open. Seraphina raised one eyebrow, very high. Toby looked at the spectacles, and then at my face, and then, very slightly, he nodded, as if something had been settled.

At the far end of the Windsors’ table, Luna Windsor looked up from her plate. She looked at the smoked lenses for a long time. Then she looked down again, and went on eating. But the water in the glass by her elbow, which had been frozen solid when I came in, went slowly, quietly, back to water.

Sigmund Friese, at the head of the Squad Two table, looked at me once, and then away.

At the end of the Squad Six table, a small dark-haired girl with both hands bandaged looked at me for longer.

She didn’t laugh.

Somebody at the Squad Four table did. A boy. Loudly. ”Look, it’s the mole—”

I sat down at the end of the Calders’ table, under the furthest lamp, and picked up my spoon. The light came down on me soft and brown and gentle, like the end of a long day.

”They’re called dusk,” I said, to nobody in particular.

And ate my dinner.

Day 147. Headaches. A week. Light like needles. It goes deeper on its own.

Okafor: ”Your father had those.” Six weeks. Then they stopped. Then his eyes were black.

It didn’t kill him. It didn’t make him mad. He was the same man. He just saw more.

Don’t go to Halloway.

He made these on a step, out of borrowed glasses and lamp soot. ”Keep these for whoever’s next.”

I’m whoever’s next.

And under it, smaller, the last thing before I put the notebook back on the shelf. I didn’t write it so much as let it fall out of the pen.

Six weeks. Then black.