Netwrck
Folk horror.
The Windows of Elsewhere
At dawn the observatory was the color of a bruise. It stood beyond the salt flats, a low stone building with a copper dome and seven narrow windows facing east, and on the mornings when Mira Vell opened the furnace the shadows inside it came out wrong, as though the building had been swallowing light and only just remembered how to give it back.
She made windows for rooms in other worlds. Not palaces. Rooms where someone had once lain ill, or eaten breakfast, or stood at a counter counting the seconds until a child came home. A window had to hold the weather of that place. Frost gathered in its corners when the room remembered winter. Iron streaked down from the top edge when its walls had been struck. Soft cyan shone through when dawn existed somewhere past that place’s horizon.
Her hands were scarred by heat and her ears had never stopped ringing since the fire, a thin note she had stopped hearing except when she was alone, which was always. She worked fast, before the desert sun climbed onto the dome and the copper went from pink to angry. Sand in the batch, sand in her sleeves, sand in the corners of her mouth. When she was worried she counted her breaths, and when she was more worried she stopped counting and let the glass tell her.
Her mother had died of fever in the middle of that winter, in the low room behind the kitchen, with the frost coming in from the inside of the window because Mira had glazed it wrong and then had not had the heart to replace it. Two weeks after the burial her brother Tomas had gone down to the furnace room, where a door had appeared one night in the annealing wall: no hinges, no handle, no shadow, and cold breathing out of it like a cellar in summer. He had gone through to bring her back. He had not come back. And Mira, alone in the lantern house with the furnace banked too hot because she could not think straight, had let it go.
That was the story she had given the village, and it was not the true one. The true one was smaller and worse: her mother had died alone, and Tomas had walked into a door, and Mira had known all night that the lantern house was going up.
So she said the fire took them both. It was a kinder arithmetic. The village preferred it. They had walked up from the flats in the cold and stood at the ash line and nodded at her, and their nodding had felt like a floor under her feet, and she had let it hold her up for three winters.
The Book of Arrangements
Every morning the observatory recorded what the stars had sent. Mira wrote it in a leather book with a bone clasp, in a hand that got worse as the light failed.
The messages were not words. They were arrangements of light, appearing on the page as though a lamp had been held beneath the paper for exactly as long as it needed: a bowl. A hand, palm up. A thread tied into a knot. A door drawn small and left off its hinges. She had never seen a star do this, and she had looked, every clear night for nineteen years, with an eye trained by her mother to count rather than to wish.
On the forty-ninth morning the book showed a blue thread.
She knew it at once and she was already reaching for her jacket before she had finished understanding. Blue was the color of the oldest glass. It was the color used for messages that could not be spoken in the room where they arrived.
She had made four blue windows in her life. She remembered all of them, and she thought, unwisely, that the door had to be the fifth.
The Unmarked Door
The trail began below the eastern wall, where the observatory kept its sand and its broken lenses in cages of half-buried glass. It ran out across the salt, which crunched like something eating, to a low ridge with a cairn on it and nothing else for a mile.
Mira went with a lantern and a length of blue thread tied round her wrist. The thread was the glassblower’s thread, the sign of a piece not yet set, and it pulled gently forward, the way a dog pulls at the edge of a scent. At the ridge it stopped beside a door standing upright in the sand with no frame around it.
No hinges. No handle. No shadow, though the sun was low and long behind her. She had seen this door once before, and only once: in the workshop of a woman called Sen, who was losing her name a piece at a time and had hired Mira to glaze a window for the room she still lived in. Sen had stood beside the glass and asked her not to tell the truth about the frost.
The trail is safer when we lie.
Mira had thought then that it meant the frost was a lie, that the room was not cold, that a woman who could not remember her own name did not also have to accept that the cold was real. She had glazed the window anyway, and left quickly, and been relieved to be gone.
Now she put her palm flat against the door. Cold went through her hand and up the two bones of her forearm and sat there like a swallowed word.
Behind it she heard a kettle coming to the boil, a chair leg scraping a floor, somebody drawing breath in the next room with the particular care of a person trying not to be heard. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of a household waking up.
She pushed.
The door opened onto a kitchen washed in a cyan that had no sun behind it. A young man sat at the table eating porridge and looked up and smiled at her the way you smile at someone who has come home.
Good morning, Mira.
She knew him by the shape before she knew him by the face. His hands were whole. He had lost two fingers on his left hand at eleven, holding a hot rod wrong because she had been laughing at him.
You were told not to come, he said.
I was told you died.
Yes, he said. He pushed the bowl a little way across the table, an offer, the way he used to. That was the part that broke her. Not the face. The bowl.
The blue thread tightened around her wrist.
Then the room changed its mind. Frost spread out along the shelves. Iron came off the ceiling in long dark threads and fell into the porridge. The kitchen took a breath, and Mira understood the door’s bargain, and understood it as a craftsperson understands a flaw: it was not a bargain about the living or the dead. It was a bargain about sentences.
Say my brother is dead and the kitchen goes. Say he is alive and the trail stops being safe. Both sentences were true. That was the entire mechanism, and it was patient, and it had been waiting three winters for a woman with a book in which a blue thread had appeared.
What the Village Softened
She went back up the ridge with frost in her eyelashes and did not look at the door again, and it stayed the same size the whole walk.
That night the stars sent a blue thread crossing a field of iron, under a small cyan sun. She copied it into the book, and while she was copying it she became aware that her hand was not steady, and that the tremor was not in her hand.
Before sunrise, three people came up from the flats. The keeper, Ost Vey, who had held the ash line together with both hands. His daughter Lissa, who was seventeen and angry in a way Mira recognized. And a boy of about nine, Tam, carrying a dead bird in both hands as though it were a cup he had been asked to bring to the table.
They said the trail had shortened.
Yesterday it was a day’s walk, Ost said. Now it is an hour.
There was no water between here and the southern farms. There had not been for two years, and the village had survived on the lie that the well was deep. You could not dig a well on a hope, but you could dig it on a shared certainty, and so the whole village had agreed, out loud, at the wellhead, in front of witnesses, that the water was there at forty feet. It was there at nineteen. It had been there at nineteen for a long time.
We lied about the fire, Lissa said. Her chin was up. We said it took all of you at once, in one minute, like a door closing.
We lied about you, Tam said. He held the bird out. This one was a lie too. She did not hit the glass. She flew into it.
Mira looked at the book.
The trail had not shortened. It had become easier to walk. Everywhere they had softened the truth the ground had stopped pushing back, and she thought of the nineteen feet and the forty, and of two hundred people drinking sweet water out of a shared delusion, and she understood that she was not the author of this. She had only been the first one to lie at the biggest fire.
The door was not out on the ridge. It was standing just beyond the eastern wall, close enough that the wall’s shadow cut across it.
Through it came the clink of a spoon against a bowl.
If we keep lying, Mira said, everyone survives.
Until morning, Ost said.
He pointed out across the salt. A pale line had come up on the horizon, too early and too bright, the color of the inside of a shell.
The Argument on the Wall
What happened next was the part nobody forgave her for. Ost asked her to shut the observatory and let the lie stand, and he was not being cruel. He laid it out plainly, the way he laid out water rationing, with his hands flat on the stone.
My wife is buried under a lie of mine, he said. She did not die in the flood. She went out in the night to look for the goat and she did not come back, and I have said for six years that the flood took her because the flood is a thing that takes people and a man who loses a goat in the dark is a fool. You know which one of us is the fool.
I know, Mira said.
Then do not take the floor out from under me before breakfast.
He went down. Lissa went with him, and did not look back, and Mira understood that Lissa had come up here hoping to be told she was the liar, and had been refused.
Tam stayed. He set the bird on the sill, gently, on its side, the way you would set a sleeping child.
My mother says the thread on your wrist is the worst thing about you, he said. She says you could take it off and put the window in someone else’s house and go and be a person with a trade.
He waited, to see if she would agree, and she did not, and he nodded as though this had been a test she had nearly failed, and went down after the others.
The Window She Shaped
The impossible sun climbed while Mira worked.
She made it small and ordinary. Clear glass, a narrow border of blue at the head, one iron-colored hinge set into the sash so that the whole thing could be opened and closed by a hand. It was not a good window. It was the kind of window a mason would put in a shed, the kind you do not notice until you try to shut it.
A room was waiting for it. She knew that the way you know a room is waiting, by the tremble: the batch would not settle, the gather kept coming off the punty too hot, and the glass kept leaning. It wanted to be a window for somewhere. She was simply arguing with it about which somewhere.
She had promised to save one ordinary morning. Not the village’s. Not her brother’s. The morning when her mother had found frost on the inside of the kitchen window and laughed out loud, actually laughed, the way you laugh at a joke you have decided is about yourself, and said, we live in a country with no frost, Mira, what is it doing here. That morning had come before the fever, before the annealing wall, before Tomas put his whole hand into a cold that should not have been there, before Mira had stood in a doorway with a hot rod in her hand and let the lantern house go up because a small hot room was easier than a large empty one.
She had thought, for three winters, that if she could get that morning back she would pay for it. She had not specified the price, because a person who specifies the price is a merchant, and she had wanted to be a daughter.
At sunrise she set the window into the eastern wall, into the gap she had cut in July and pretended to have filled.
The false dawn poured through it. Soft cyan, coming the wrong way, from a room instead of a sky. The glass filled with her mother’s face, close, in the way of someone leaning to look at a bird on a sill.
Mira, her mother said. You forgot the bread.
The blue thread burned against Mira’s wrist. Behind her the unmarked door swung the width of a hand and frost crawled out across the floor and iron came down off the rafters in long soft threads, unhurried, like weather.
Are you alive, Mira asked.
Her mother smiled. Not today.
Are you my mother.
The glass began to sing, a high thin note she had never heard from her own work and did not want to hear from anyone’s.
No, her mother said. But you still have bread.
Mira put her hand over the cold blue mouth of the window. The singing went on under her palm, quieter, the way a kettle goes on after you have lifted the lid.
And she understood, finally, that she had been bargaining with the wrong party all along. The door had not been keeping the dead away. The door had been keeping the lies in, because a lie is a load-bearing thing, and if you take it out the wall it was holding up comes down, and the dead are inside the wall.
The Truth in Order
She took the blue thread off her wrist. It left a blue line across the skin that stayed for a week.
She tied it around the frame of the new window, which is what you do with a thread at the end of a piece, and then she turned and pushed the door the rest of the way open.
What followed was not a rescue. There was no thunder, no judgment, no reunion waiting past the threshold with its arms already open. There was a kitchen, bright with a dawn that belonged to no sky at all, and her brother was there, and her mother was there, and the village was there, all of it, awake and frightened, each of them carrying a different version of the night like a different broken dish.
Mira spoke, and she spoke in the order she had learned it, which was the order she had learned to keep herself from burning.
My brother died in the lantern house. My mother died of fever, alone, in the low room behind the kitchen, two weeks before him. He went through a door in the annealing wall and he did not come back. I was holding the furnace open. I let it go.
The room shook. Names came off the walls, the way frost comes off a window when the sun finds it, and every lie in the valley loosened at once like sand. Somewhere below her she heard Ost make a sound, once, and then be quiet, and she knew that six years of flood had just walked off the edge of his mouth and he was going to have to be a different man by noon.
I am making this window, she said, for a room that has never existed.
The blue thread on the frame pulled once, hard, and she felt it go, and she did not hear it break, which she decided later to take as a kindness.
I want one ordinary morning back.
The false dawn reached the horizon. For a moment the whole desert was frost and iron and soft cyan, and she could see, impossibly, the shape of the salt flats from above, white and endless and about as large as a room. Then the light narrowed, all of it, into a single square.
A Window Left Open
Mira’s window remained.
Beyond it there was no room. There was only dawn, ordinary and pale, moving across the ceiling of a kitchen in which a woman she had buried three winters ago had once found frost on the wrong side of the glass and laughed at it, and was not finding it now, and would not find it again.
The unmarked door stood open behind her for the rest of that morning and all through the heat. Nothing came through it. At noon the heat came up off the salt and the cold came out of the door, and they met in the middle of the observatory floor and made a thin fog, and the fog did not move, and by evening the door was only a door frame in a ruined wall with the paint gone off it, and by the next spring there was a nest in it.
She went down to the village, because there was nothing else to do and because she was the one who had made the floor move.
Ost was at the wellhead with a rope in his hands, and he had been down nineteen feet twice and was going down a third time, and he asked her, without looking up, how deep the water actually was, and she said she did not know, and he said right, and kept going, and that was the whole of their conversation for a year. What came up at forty-one feet was sand. What came up at nineteen was not sand, and they drank it, and one of the old women died of it in the autumn, and Mira carried the water for three households that winter and never once said out loud what it was, and was not praised for it, which was correct.
Lissa did not speak to her for a season. When she did, it was to tell her that the thing she had wanted most, the room with her mother in it, had been in the wall the whole time, and that Mira had handed it over without being asked. Mira said yes, that was true. Lissa said she had known it would be true and had come anyway. Mira said that was also true. They left it there, which was more than either of them had offered anybody that year.
Tam buried the bird under the window, on the theory that a thing that had died by a lie should be put somewhere true, and the two of them went every morning after that to check that the ground was still ground.
The observatory she fixed. The lantern house she did not rebuild; she glazed the ruin instead, four small blue windows set high in the blackened wall, and left them empty, and no one ever suggested it was strange. The copper dome she kept, and it is green now, and it is the only thing visible for eleven miles in every direction.
And there is the part no one asks her about. Twice a year, in the hour before the sun, Mira hears a spoon against a bowl somewhere east of the wall, in the room she glazed years ago, that has no room behind it. Once it was a kettle. Once it was her brother saying her name in the voice he used when he had lost something and did not want her to help.
She does not go and look. She is not certain what she is protecting, and she has noticed that a person who cannot name what they are protecting is usually protecting their own convenience, and she lets that stand, because it is true, and because the thread is off her wrist, and because the door is a nest now, and because one of the two of them has to be able to sleep.
Each morning she records what the stars have sent. The arrangements have changed since the fire, and she has stopped trying to keep them in categories. A bowl, a hand palm up, a thread tied into a knot, a door drawn small and left off its hinges, a well drawn deep, a bird drawn flying.
And on ordinary mornings, when there is nothing to report, the book shows her a plain square of light with nothing arranged inside it, which she has decided to take as good news.
