Turn 3 of 8

Ask him what 'rest' means to him, and what he thinks it needs

He doesn't answer right away. His hands move from his knees to the edge of the stool, gripping it as though the question has a physical weight he needs to brace against. The rain has eased to a thin patter, and in the quieter room you can hear his breathing — shallow, deliberate, the breathing of a man who has been listening to someone else's for so long that he no longer trusts his own.

"I thought about killing it," he says. "I thought about it a great deal. I bought a gun in Aylesford. I sat in a field with the gun across my lap for an entire night, waiting for it to come close enough." He looks at the window, not through it but at the glass, at his own reflection floating there against the dark.

"It didn't come. It knew. Or it didn't need to, because I couldn't have done it anyway."

You ask him what changed his mind, and he lets out a breath that shakes on the way out.

"The breathing. When I heard it — three nights ago, in that room — it didn't sound like hunting. It sounded tired." His voice drops, not for drama but because he is trying to be precise, to give you the truest version of what he heard.

"Like something that has been walking for a very long time and can't find the place to stop. I know what that sounds like. I've been making it myself for weeks."

You turn this over. Rest, for a thing from the Underwood, is not the same as rest for a man. Your great-grandmother's ledger has entries on binding, on warding, on driving back — but the word 'rest' appears only twice, in contexts you never fully understood, written in a hand that was shakier than her usual. You would need to look. You would need to think. And you would need to know what Aldous did to bring this on himself, because a remedy given without understanding the wound is just a poison you haven't met yet.

He seems to read some of this in your face.

"I know what you're going to ask," he says. "And I'll tell you. I went into the wood for a reason, and I brought something out, and I think it followed because I didn't put it back." His hands release the stool and settle in his lap, open and empty.

"But I need you to understand — I didn't go in to take. I went in to find. There is a difference. It just may not be a difference that matters to the thing behind me."