Whose Turn

Cole did not leave. He had not driven forty miles up a dead-end road to be turned around by a cup of coffee and a warning, and the woman behind the counter — her name was Reyna, one of the men called her that — seemed to understand it, and seemed sorrier for understanding it. He asked about the Quieting. Reyna's mouth went flat and she found something to do at the far end of the counter. It was one of the three men who answered, the oldest of them, a man with a logger's ruined hands and a face the colour of the road. "It's a town thing," the man said. "Goes back to the mill days. You wouldn't follow it and there's no good telling it." He turned his mug a quarter-turn. "Folk get superstitious, up a road like this. Long winters. The forest right there at the yard fence. You make your arrangements with a place like this or the place doesn't let you stay." "My brother," Cole said. "Was he here for it? Eleven days ago — that's a Tuesday. Was the Quieting eleven days ago?" The man didn't answer. But the youngest of the three, a kid really, not much past twenty, made a small sound, and the old man's hand came down on his forearm, not hard, just final, the way you'd quiet a dog. And in that small silence Cole learned more than any of them had said out loud. The Quieting was not a yearly thing. It happened when it needed to happen. And it had happened, or nearly happened, the night his brother's phone went dark. "Whose turn is it," Cole said. He didn't fully know what he meant by it. The words had assembled themselves out of the shape of the room — the drawn curtains, the careful mugs, the way Reyna had said tonight's the Quieting as though it were a duty rota. But the effect of the words was immediate and total. The young man went white. The old man closed his eyes. Reyna, at the end of the counter, stopped moving altogether, and the diner held very still around the question the way the whole town had been holding still all afternoon. "You shouldn't have come on a Quieting day," the old man said at last, and there was no menace in it, only a deep and genuine grief, and that frightened Cole more than menace would have. "It chooses a house. Always has. One house keeps its door open all night, from sundown to first light, and the rest of us keep ours shut, and in the morning the town is quiet again for another while. That's the whole of it. That's all I'll say and it's already too much." "Keeps its door open for what?" "For what comes down out of the mill," the young man whispered, before the old hand could stop him. "For what the timber woke up, back when there was still timber to cut. It comes down the hill on a Quieting night and it goes house to house, and it can't come in if your door's shut, but it gets so loud, mister, it gets so loud against the walls — and the open house, the open house is what quiets it. Somebody has to let it be quieted at." "Enough," the old man said. And then, to Cole, almost pleading: "Whose turn it is this year is not a thing we will tell you. Not because we're cruel. Because if you knew, you'd go there. And you have the look of a man who'd go there." He stood, stiffly, and dropped coins on the counter. "Reyna's right. Get on the road. The dark's the danger, but the town tonight is worse than the dark." The light outside was the deep amber of the last hour. Cole looked at it, and thought about his brother's signal ending here at 9:14 on a Tuesday, well after a sundown, and he understood with a cold and total certainty that Tomas had been in an open house, and that he was not going to leave Haldane Creek until he found out which one.