Turn 6 of 8

Go back to the shop and press Aldous to name the promise he took

The walk back is four doors and you count every one of them. The mist has thickened so that the shop's window is a blurred amber square, and when you open the door the bell sounds different than it did an hour ago — thinner, like something has taken the edge off it. Aldous is where you left him, on the stool, but he has turned it to face the back window. The treeline of the Underwood is a dark band against a sky that holds no stars, and he is watching it the way a man watches a door he expects to open.

You hang your coat and do not sit. Standing puts you between him and the window, and that feels right, though you couldn't say for whom. You tell him what Bett told you — that the Underwood deals in promises, that the thing behind him is the shape his debt makes when it walks, that it will not stop until the promise is returned or fulfilled. He listens with his head slightly bowed, and when you finish, he nods once, slowly, the way someone nods when they have been told something they already knew but needed to hear in someone else's voice.

"I went in to find my grandfather's promise," he says. "Edric Morley. He went into the Underwood sixty years ago and came out changed — wouldn't speak of it, wouldn't go near the treeline, spent the rest of his life as though he was waiting for something to arrive. When he died, the waiting didn't stop. It passed to my mother, and then to me. I thought if I could find what he promised, I could end it."

You ask him what he found, and his hands tighten on his knees again.

"I found it," he says. "A promise, sitting in the root of an old oak like a stone in a well. Not written — felt. The wood had kept it. I could feel what it was — a promise to return, to bring something back to the wood that Edric had taken out. I took the promise out of the root so I could carry it. So I could see what was owed and pay it."

He looks up at you, and the exhaustion in his face has shifted into something rawer.

"But I didn't put it back. And taking a promise out of the Underwood is the same as making one. The wood sent something to walk behind me because now I owe the return — not just of the promise, but of whatever Edric took. And I don't know what that was." The lamp gutters, then steadies. Through the back window, the treeline has not moved, but the space between the shop and the trees feels shorter than it did when you left. You think of the ledger, the torn page, and of Iris leaving offerings at the edge of something that remembers.