After Ned Crane, Tom began to count not days but what remained.
Not aloud.
And not with any real precision.
Simply — everything around him had begun to feel like a last time: the last time he would sleep this long in this room, the last time he would mend the fence with Jack, the last time his mother would call to him from the porch as if there were still an endless stretch of ordinary days ahead.
That was the worst of it.
The house knew nothing.
It lived as usual.
Tom did not.
The canonical day was drawing nearer. He could not name it by number, but he felt it more and more plainly: the road to the Spook was no longer somewhere far off in the future, but within a few ordinary family suppers.
Because of that he worked more and spoke less.
Training did not stop — it only became drier. Less fury, fewer breakdowns, less desire at any cost to recapture the old form. Now Tom moved as though packing for a long journey: not trying to take what was surplus, but checking what he could not do without.
He reinforced the hiding place by the barn.
Changed the board for one that fitted more tightly.
Wrapped the tinderbox in a dry rag.
Divided the rope into two lengths: kept one, hid the other under an old trough behind the wall.
Even the charcoal for the marks he had moved into a small tin box found in a heap of rubbish by the shed.
Small things.
But his new life held together by small things.
During the day he caught himself more and more often looking at the house the way a person looks at something they are about to leave.
Not as a farewell on display.
Something quieter.
He was memorising.
The sound the back kitchen door made if you didn't open it all the way.
How the loft smelled after rain.
Where Ellie usually put the crock.
How his father cleared his throat before saying something disagreeable.
How his mother sometimes paused at the hearth for a moment longer than was needed, as if listening not to the fire but to something below it.
He would not have noticed any of this before. Or not thought it worth noticing.
Now he noticed everything.
And still was not ready.
One evening, when the others had gone to their various tasks, he sat against the wall mending the strap of an old bag. The bag wasn't the Spook's — just a solid, plain farm one — but Tom had long been keeping it in mind as something he might take on the road, if his father was willing.
Jack stopped beside him.
— You've got older lately, he said, without mockery.
Tom looked up.
Jack was leaning against the doorpost, not staring, but looking puzzled.
— What makes you say that?
Jack shrugged.
— Don't know. You go quiet more. You look different.
Tom dropped his eyes back to the strap.
— More to do, maybe.
— Maybe.
Jack didn't move for a second longer.
Then he did say:
— You were wrong to go at that thing by the ditch on your own.
Tom nodded.
— I know.
— But you were right not to let it go.
Tom hadn't expected that.
He looked up again.
Jack was already turning away.
— Just next time you shout first, then be a hero, he muttered, and went out into the yard.
Tom sat a few more seconds with the needle in his fingers, not moving.
Strange, how little it sometimes took to make your chest hurt worse.
The next morning his mother sent him to the pantry to sort through the bags of dried herbs. Ellie needed room on the shelf, and part of the old stock had long needed throwing out.
It was her work, not his.
But Tom was not surprised when she told him to do it.
The pantry smelled of dryness, wormwood and old boards. Light fell in a narrow strip through the high little window. Tom sat on a low stool, untying strings, tipping leaves from palm to palm, setting aside what had lost its virtue.
His mother came in almost silently.
Only the door tapped softly behind her.
— Don't mix up the right shelf with the left, she said. — What can still be kept is on the left.
— I understand.
She did not leave.
Tom felt it through his back.
Then he heard her pull the second stool over and sit down facing him.
— You're preparing, she said.
Not a question.
Just the sound of a thought she had been working toward for some time.
Tom did not raise his head at once.
— For what?
His mother picked up a bag from the shelf, smelled it, set it aside.
— Not for me.
That was all.
In those two words she had said more than most people would have said in a long conversation.
Tom looked at her.
The light from the little window fell on her hands, on the edge of her shawl, on her calm face. There was nothing of the ancient dread about her just now, or the hidden lamia power. Only a mother in a pantry, sorting herbs.
And yet beneath that plainness the other thing had always lain.
— I have to be ready, he said at last.
She nodded, as if she had expected no other answer.
— For the road?
Tom hesitated slightly.
— That too.
His mother took up a bag again, untied it, poured the dried flowers into her palm, and slowly closed her fingers.
— Don't mistake readiness for flight.
He frowned.
— I'm not running.
— Not yet.
Tom wanted to ask what she meant, but did not.
She had already said enough.
Instead he carefully set an empty bag to one side.
— Do you know someone will come for me soon?
His mother raised her eyes.
— I know that some roads begin to ring before you set foot on them.
That was close to poetry for her.
And therefore more troubling.
Tom held back a sigh.
— Is that what you always say when you don't want to answer plainly?
At that she nearly smiled.
— No. Sometimes I simply keep quiet.
For a few seconds they sat in silence, sorting through the herbs. Tom found himself thinking, with sudden clarity: he could sit like this all day, if it would only stop time from moving him toward the leaving that had already begun to pull at him.
But time, of course, did not ask.
By dinner his father sent him and William to the mill with a sack of grain. The road was ordinary, the weather ordinary too, and yet Tom remembered it with particular clearness: the puddles at the bend, the grey clouds, the mill sail turning in jerks, the heavy sack on the barrow, William's funny curses when he stepped in mud.
He was not memorising because any of it mattered in itself.
But because soon there would be fewer of these days.
And that could not be undone.
In the evening he took out his store from the hiding place, counted everything again, and added one more thing he had long been reluctant to remove from the house: a small reel of strong dark thread from an old box of Ellie's. Not a theft in any proper sense, but not something worth mentioning either.
Then he put a fifth mark on the inside of the board.
The creature.
The name.
The debt.
The preparing.
The shrinking of time.
He no longer needed the headings. He knew what stood behind each line.
Late that evening, when the house had nearly fallen silent, his father called him to the table.
— You'll come with me to the upper field tomorrow morning, he said. — I want to look at the north fence.
— Right.
His father scratched his beard.
Then added, almost as an afterthought:
— Not much longer you'll be running about these fields.
Tom went still.
There it was.
Said almost in passing, almost without weight — and still like a blow.
— What do you mean? he asked, though he knew perfectly well.
His father looked at the table, not at him.
— Because it's coming to that time.
And said nothing more.
Nothing needed saying.
Tom nodded.
His father seemed to want to say something else, but simply waved a hand.
— Go to bed.
Tom got up and walked out, feeling every step across the boards sound too clearly.
In his room he didn't lie down for a long time. He stood at the window and looked out at the yard, where nothing was happening: the dark barn, a pale puddle at the gate, a faint light from the gap under the kitchen door.
The house was in its place.
His mother — below.
His father — beyond the wall.
His brothers — each on his bench or his cot.
All of it was slowly becoming the past, though it had not moved a step.
Tom pressed his forehead against the cold glass.
In his previous life he had left for the Spook as a boy who hadn't understood the price of parting.
Now he understood.
And it did not get easier for that.
But perhaps it became more honest.
He lay down only when the house had gone entirely quiet. Sleep was a while coming.
Just before he dropped into the dark he managed to think that a road has one cruel property: the more clearly you understand its price, the more surely you still have to walk it.