Turn 5 of 8

Ask what he did with the seed after it died

When the seed died," you say, and you keep your voice level, the way you do when you are asking a patient where the pain is and you already know the answer will be bad. "What did you do with it?"

Aldous's hands come apart. He presses his palms flat on the counter, fingers spread, as though the wood is the only solid thing left in the room. His mouth works. You can see him trying to find the version of this that sounds least damning, and you can see the moment he gives up.

"I buried it," he says. "In my garden. Behind the house I was renting in Arden. I thought — I thought if I put it in the ground, it might — I don't know what I thought. That it would come back. That the earth would take it and something would grow. But nothing grew. I waited three years for something to grow, and the soil just went grey, and the thing that follows me got louder. Quieter. I don't know which. Closer."

He pulls his hands back and covers his face with them. His shoulders do not shake. He is past that. He holds himself still with the discipline of a man who has been holding himself together for a very long time, and the stillness is worse than weeping would be.

"The garden is dead now," he says, through his fingers. "The whole plot. The landlord sold the house and the new owners dug the soil out and replaced it, and the new soil went grey too. I left Arden. I came here because I heard the Underwood — I heard this town sits beside it, and I thought if I came close to where the seed came from, the thing might — might find its way home. Might stop following me and just — go."

"Has it?" Iris asks. She has not waited for your nod this time, and you let it go because the question is the right one.

Aldous drops his hands. He looks at her with an expression that is almost grateful, as though being asked directly by a stranger is easier than being asked by the woman whose help he is begging for.

"No," he says. "It is still here. It is outside. Right now, I think, it is standing at the end of the street, and it is waiting, and it is so tired."

The lamp gutters and the shadows in the shop lean. You feel it then — not a sound, but the absence of one. The crickets outside have stopped. The wind has stopped. The street beyond your shutters is holding its breath, and something in the silence is patient and ancient and utterly exhausted.

Iris's hand is still in her pocket. Her knuckles are white.