The Longest Night

The shortest day of the year does not feel short while you are living it. It feels like a thing rationed out by a hand that hates you, a grey coin of light passed under a door. The sun came up that morning somewhere behind the weather and was gone again before I had drunk my tea, and what I had instead of a day was four hours of the sky being a paler kind of dark, and then the long return of the real one. The solstice. The night the keepers feared above all the others, the log had said, the night the dark is widest and the watch matters most, and I had read those words a week ago and not understood that I would be the one keeping it, alone, with nothing left to keep it by.

The fuel was gone. I will say it plainly, the way I say everything that frightens me, because plain words are the only railing I have ever trusted. The generator had died for good, the diesel in the shed drunk down faster than any engine should drink it, the way the torches had been drunk, the way the hurricane lamp had gone out on a full reservoir of paraffin. I had counted my light the way my mother taught me to, my whole life, and the count had come that afternoon to almost nothing. One box of candles, started. A wind-up torch whose dynamo I could turn by hand, the only light on the rock that did not run on something the dark could drink, because it ran on my own arm. And matches, in three places, because matches are the one thing you do not ration.

I had a plan. Or I call it a plan; I have wondered since whether I really had one, or only a direction I could no longer keep myself from walking. The plan was to go down. The cellar was the thin place, the thinnest part of the thin place, the log said so and Calum's drowned eyes had said so and Effie Aonghas had said it on the radio in her dry psalm-leading voice that did not shake, that is where the watch is truly kept or lost. And Priya was down there. Priya with her photometer and her flat refusal to believe anything her meters did not log, who had stood in an unlit corridor one moment too long, looking too hard for the light she expected to find, and had walked off into the black saying it was alright, there was a light here after all. I had clawed after her and my hands had closed on nothing, exactly as they had closed on nothing on a stair in Handsworth when I was nine. I could not stand in the light and let the dark keep one more person while I watched.

So I tied the line. A length of the boat rope to the iron ring beside the cottage door, the other end round my own waist, three turns and a bowline, the knot my father taught me on the Handsworth canal when I was small enough to sit on his knee, and I tested it with my weight until it held. A line to the light. A way home. I told myself that. I wound the torch until the dynamo screamed, and I opened the cellar door, and the cold came up the steps onto my face, the green underwater cold of a place the sun has never found, and I went down into Maren Skerry with the rope paying out behind me and my own beam dying a yard in front of my feet against the surface of the dark.

The descent was not far. A flight of stone steps turning once, a low chamber at the bottom the size of a small ward, and that is all. I had seen it once, for the second and a half a bulb had bought me before the dark drank it, and I held that picture in front of me going down the way you hold a candle. The picture did not help. Because the dark down there did not keep to the shape of any room. The black gave way before the beam exactly as far as the beam reached and not an inch further, and where the beam ended the room ended, not in a wall but in a surface, the clean wet edge I had written about in my nurse's pad, and beyond the stopping there was no room, there was the other thing, the occupied thing, the place I had carried a coin of in my own eye for eight years without once being afraid of it until I came here.

The cold went into the long bones of my legs and stayed. My breath had gone shallow without my deciding it. The hairs stood along my good left side, the side I trust, the side that always knows before the rest of me catches up. And then the thought came, late as it always comes, small and clinical, you are at the bottom now, Imani, do what you came to do, and I lifted the torch and turned the small bright circle of it around the chamber, and the chamber was empty, wet stone and the long grind of the sea through the rock and the words scratched at a child's height into the streaming wall, IS THAT YOU, over and over, the way I had seen them once before in the second of light before a bulb died.

And then the patch of nothing in my right eye began to grow.

I have lived eight years with that patch. A soft grey coin of no-information dead centre of the right field, mine, harmless, a thing I had carried across nineteen years of operating lists and never feared, because it was small, because it held still, because a known absence is not the dark. But standing at the bottom of the cellar I felt it move. It crept at the edges the way the retina had crept eight years ago, the way wallpaper lifts off a damp wall, and the grey nothing spread out from the centre of my looking and ate the scratched words and the wet stone, and I turned my head hard to put the room into my good eye and the good eye was going too, the dark coming in from the sides of it, the world shrinking to a coin of failing torchlight and then to less, and I understood with the flat animal certainty that lives under all my knowing that this was not my retina. This was the dark reaching into the one window I had always carried for it, the piece of itself I had brought down the stair in my own face, and it was opening that window wide.

I should have wound the torch. The dynamo was right there under my thumb. But the beam was already only a coin, and then a thread, and then the dark drank it too, the way it had drunk the diesel and the paraffin and Priya's batteries, and I was standing at the bottom of Maren Skerry in the most complete dark I had been in since I was nine years old, holding a dead light in a cold hand, with a rope round my waist running up to a door I could no longer see.

And then, ahead of me, in the black, there was a light.

It came on the way dawn comes through a curtain, a square of warm yellow at no distance I could measure, a kitchen with the lamp on and the kettle going, the exact colour of safety, and my whole body turned toward it before my mind had a word for it, because that is the cruelty of the thing, the body goes to the light, since before there were people to be afraid. And in front of the warm square there was a hand. A small hand, a child's hand, pale, the fingers slightly curled, holding up a paraffin lamp, and this time the lamp gave light, this time the flame stood in the glass and threw its little ring, and behind the lamp was a face.

My own face. Nine years old.

"You came," Esther said.

The feeling came first, the way it always does, and it was not fear. That is the thing I have not been able to make anyone understand since. It was the lifting of a weight I had carried so long I had stopped knowing it was a weight, and my eyes flooded and my throat closed and a sound came out of me that I have only ever made once before, on a stair in Handsworth, over a thing at the bottom of it. My hand came up. My hand, the one that went slack, the hand I have hated for thirty-five years, came up on its own toward the small hand holding the lamp.

"There is a light down here," she said, in the voice from thirty-five years of dreams, the clear high voice that had sung the song on the landing. "I found it. I have been looking such a long time and I found it, and it is warm, and you do not have to be afraid of the dark anymore. Take my hand. This time hold on. Hold on and do not let go and we will not be in the dark ever again."

I took a step toward her.

And as I took it, all around me in the black, I heard the others.

Not screaming. I had braced for screaming and there was none. There was whispering, low and dry and patient, coming from everywhere and no direction, the way sound comes in true dark, two hundred years of voices saying the same small things over and over, is that a light, is that you, are you coming, I think I see it, just a little further. Priya's voice was among them, close, saying she was alright, there was a light here after all. A man's voice that had to be Donald asking, gentle, exhausted, is it morning yet. And Esther's, ahead of me, holding out the warm lamp, saying come to the light, take my hand.

And I understood.

I understood it all at once, standing in the dark with my hand half raised and my sister smiling at me out of a window that was not there. They had all been told there was a light. Every one of them. Donald three winters and Priya three days and Esther thirty-five long years, they had all been shown a warm square just ahead and a beloved hand holding a lamp, and they had all done what the body does, they had gone to it, and the light had gone back as they went, deeper in, always one step further, and they were going still, whispering into a dark that answered only by keeping them, straining toward a lamp that was never there and had never once, in two hundred years, become morning. The looking does not end. That was the thing the log would not say and the worst of me had always known. Being taken did not mean dying. It meant this. It meant walking toward a light forever, eyes open, never reaching it, never sure you are alone, and it meant my sister had been doing it since the night I let go of her hand.

There was no light down here. There never had been. The warm square was the bait and the lamp was the bait and the face, the face I would die for, was the dark wearing the one face that would make me stop being careful, and I had nearly walked into it the way they all had, the way I was meant to.

I took the step anyway. God forgive me, I took it, because she was right there and she was smiling and I am only an animal that wants the light. And as my weight went forward I felt my certainty go slack inside me, the exact slackness of a hand opening on a stair, the loosening I have hated and dreamed of for thirty-five years, the give, the letting-go, the same one, happening again, in the dark, where no one could see.

And something deeper than the bait, deeper than the body that wants the light, deeper than thirty-five years of being trained toward a lamp, reached up out of the bottom of me and shut my eyes.

I did not decide it. My lids came down the way they came up when I was born, before thought, the oldest reflex there is, and in the shut-eyed dark the warm square went out. The lamp went out. Esther's face went out. Not gone, I could still hear her, still hear all of them, but no longer ahead of me, no longer a place to walk to, because with my eyes shut there was no ahead, there was only the dark I was already standing in, the same on every side, and the light I had been about to step into stopped receding for the simple reason that I had stopped chasing it.

And in the new black behind my own closed eyes, with the whispering faltering all around me, I understood, far too late and not too late at all, what the looking had been doing. On the stair. Every night of my life. To everyone the dark has ever kept.

The dark does not want to kill you.

It wants you to keep looking.