The Open Door

He found it the way you find anything in a town of one street: by walking it. The sun went down behind the mill hill while Cole moved house to house along the fenced yards, and as the light failed he watched Haldane Creek seal itself. It was not panic. It was procedure, and that was what stayed with him afterward — the unhurried, practiced quality of it. A man on a porch took down a wind chime and carried it inside. A woman drew a bolt Cole heard from the road. Curtains that had been merely closed were now backed with something darker, blankets maybe, so that not a thread of lamplight showed. One by one the houses went blind and dumb, and the town became a row of shut boxes with the forest standing black behind them, and the only sound was Cole's own boots and, far up the hill, the wind moving in the dead mill. Every house was shut. Every house but one. It stood near the end of the street, a little apart, a narrow two-storey place with a deep porch. Its front door stood wide open. Warm light spilled out of it down the steps and across the yard, the only light on the street now, and it looked — that was the obscene thing — it looked welcoming. It looked like the one house in town that wanted him. There was a card nailed to the gatepost. Cole struck a match to read it. It was handwritten, in a careful old-fashioned hand, and it was not a warning or a curse. It was, he realised, a contract. We the undersigned of this household agree to the keeping of the door this season, that the town be stilled and our neighbours spared, in accordance with the understanding. Below it, four signatures. And a line, added in different ink, more recent: and we ask that the town honour us after, as is owed. The fourth signature was small and cramped and Cole had seen it ten thousand times on the bottom of birthday cards and the back of photographs. It was his brother's name. Tomas had signed the contract. Tomas had agreed, in his own hand, to keep the door. Cole stood at the gatepost with the match burning down to his fingers and made himself think. His brother's phone had died here eleven days ago — and yet the card said this season, and the warm light still poured from the open door, and Reyna had said tonight's the Quieting as though it were tonight. It did not add up, unless the Quieting was not one night. Unless the open house kept its door open not until first light but until the thing was satisfied, however many nights that took, and Tomas had signed himself into a vigil that eleven days had not yet ended. Up on the hill, in the black shell of the mill, something shifted its weight. Cole felt it more than heard it — a low settling, the groan of a great deal of wood taking the strain of motion. The warm doorway at the end of the street waited for him, patient, open, his brother's signature drying on the gate. He shook out the match. He had come forty miles to find Tomas, and the door was open, and every instinct he owned as a man who worked the wild places told him that an open door at the bottom of a hill is a mouth. He went through the gate anyway. Behind him, all down the dark street, he heard the soft sounds of two hundred people in two hundred shut houses beginning, very quietly, to pray.