Fracture

The cold comes early this winter. I keep to the apartment, a few rooms above the street in a house that has been falling down politely for as long as I have known it. Cracks run through the brick. Ivy has got into the mortar. The windows have gone milky with age, and the curtains are heavy enough to hold off the draught, mostly. One oil lamp. A chair I have worn into my own shape. I sit with my coat still on and watch the flame lean whenever the wind finds a gap.

Outside, the wind keeps up its noise. Inside there is no noise at all, and that is worse. It is the quiet of a church after everyone has gone home. I tell myself I like it. I tell myself this is a rest, that I have earned a season away from other people and their small demands, and that I will go back down into the street when I am ready. I am not ready. I have not been ready for some time.

I watch the street from the window. They come past with their umbrellas up, shoulders hunched, all moving at the same speed in the same direction, and not one of them looks up. The rain flattens everything. I can stand here an hour and never see a face.

I used to wonder where they were all going. Now I wonder why they bother. Every one of them is alone in exactly the way I am alone. They simply have not worked it out yet.

The room has begun to feel close. Not cold. Close. The damp comes in at the window frames and settles in the wallpaper, and the whole place smells of wet wood and old paper and something underneath I would rather not name. These walls were solid once. Lately they seem to be listening.

There is a pendulum clock in the next room. I have never seen it. Through the wall it is only a sound, and the sound does not stop. Tick. Tick. I try to listen past it to the rain and I cannot. It gets into the back of my skull and stays there, counting off what is left.

So I walk. To the window and back again, and the floorboards complain the whole way. The hours have stopped behaving. An afternoon will last three days and then a week will go missing. The corners of the room look sharper than they did. The shadow the wardrobe throws is not quite the shape of the wardrobe.

I try to read. The books on the shelf are older than I am and the pages come away at the edges, and the words slide off them before I reach the end of a line.

The voices start in the gaps, when the rain eases and the wind drops. Never loud enough to make out. They rise and fall like people talking in another room, and I catch myself leaning at the wall with my head tilted, holding my breath, certain the next word will be the one that explains all of this. It never is. The harder I listen, the further off they go.

Day and night have stopped being different from one another. I know every sound this house makes now. The floor. The wind in the chimney. That clock. Each tick takes a little more off me. The mirror on the landing has gone black with tarnish and I have started going the long way round, because the man in it looks like he knows something.

It begins at the edge of my sight. A flicker, like a match struck somewhere behind me. The wall breathes in.

Then the sound. Low, and then not low. A wire humming, climbing until it fills my head and leaves no room for anything else. The ticking is inside my skull now, and every tick arrives as a white flash. My hands are shaking and the shaking is not mine.

The floor tips. I reach for something solid and find air. My throat shuts. Every muscle locks at once, hard as wood, and the room comes apart into pieces of light and dark that arrive too fast to read.

I am on the floor. My cheek is against the boards. My fists are closed so tight the nails have broken the skin. Sight narrows to a single point, and in the dark around it they are standing, near enough to touch, watching with what I can only call patience. The voices are not whispering any more.

Then it lets go. I lie there getting my breath back, tasting blood, the cold of the floor coming up through me. The clock is still going. Nothing in the room has changed. I have.

The next day is kind, which frightens me more than anything that has happened yet.

Sun comes through the curtains and lies across the floor in a long warm bar. The city is quiet. Not silent, only far off, the way it sounds on a Sunday. The shadows stay where they are put. Even the clock seems to have slowed. I sit in the chair and let it happen and do not trust a second of it.

By evening it has gone. The lamps come on in the street and throw everything about, and the air in the room thickens, and whatever has been leaning against the day finally puts its weight down. It will pass, I tell myself. Stay where you are. It will pass.

But the world outside is restless.

A scream. One, short and high, then another, then the sound of a crowd understanding something all at once. I take hold of the arms of the chair. This is not mine. I have nothing to do with it. If I sit still it will go away, the way everything goes away if you refuse it long enough.

It does not go away. It gets louder. I shut my eyes and it is still there, coming through the wall, asking to be looked at.

I stand. My legs are poor. I cross to the window and stop with my hand on the curtain, because I know that once I move it I cannot put the day back the way it was.

I move it.

Chaos greets me.

A carriage is coming down the street far too fast, wheels sliding on the wet stone, nobody holding the reins. The horses have panicked and cannot get clear of what they are pulling. It leaves the road at the corner, goes up over the kerb and straight into the people standing there, and they fold under it the way paper folds.

I do not move. I should go down, and I do not move. The room behind me has gone cold. The city I spent all winter refusing has come up to the glass and made me look.

The noise from below and the noise inside the house arrive together. The screaming, the shouting, the clock, climbing over one another until there is nothing else, until the walls are keeping time with it, until there is no part of me it has not got into.

So I open the window. The cold strikes my face and for one clean second I can think again. The street looks a long way down and not entirely real. I get up onto the sill and I go, and the falling takes far longer than it should.

The ground takes me more gently than I deserve, soft with rain and giving underfoot. I lie still a moment, waiting for the rest of it. The crowd, the horses, the wrecked carriage.

None of it comes. The street is empty. Not cleared, not hushed after something. Empty, as though none of it ever happened. I get up. My hands work. I appear to be alive.

The wind, when it comes, is wrong. Cold in a way that has nothing to do with winter, and carrying a charge. My skin prickles with it, the hair lifts on my arms, and beneath it runs a hum so low I feel it in my teeth rather than hear it.

It builds. The wind turns in circles around me and pulls at my coat, and the hum comes up through my boots into my chest, and the ground, solid and cobbled, the same ground I have walked on all my life, no longer feels as though it intends to stay.

I look for something that will explain it. The street is lit by nothing I can find. The buildings lean a degree or two out of true, and then lean back. And the voices, the ones that have followed me through every hour of this winter, have stopped.

Then I look up.

The cloud has been torn open. There are no stars behind it. There is a rock the size of a county coming down, lit from within, burning as it comes, dragging fire behind it across the whole width of the sky. The hum reaches its pitch and holds there. The clock has stopped. Everything has stopped.

And I understand, far too late, what I spent the winter hiding from. Not the walls. Not the ticking. Not the voices in the plaster. This. It was always going to be this, and all I have done by going out of that window is meet it a few minutes early. Every horror I built in that room was a small rehearsal for the one that was coming anyway.

It fills the sky now. The air shakes. The ground shakes.

As the world holds its breath, so do I.