What We Do on the Night

He didn't tell Hannah that night. He let his children go to sleep not knowing, because there was no reason yet for them to lie awake afraid, and one more night of their ordinary lives felt suddenly like the most precious thing he could give them.

But Hannah knew him too well, and when he came up to bed she took one look at his face in the lamplight and sat up. "What's wrong," she said. Not a question. She had married into this family knowing the story the way you know a thing you don't quite believe, a grim old tale her husband's people told, the kind every farming family had, about the bad luck that ran in the blood. She had nodded along at it for ten years. She had never once seen the clock stop.

"It's stopped," Cal said. "The clock. Downstairs. It stopped tonight."

He watched her understand. He watched the old tale stop being a tale and become a thing in her house, in the dark, with her children sleeping down the hall, and her face went white and then very fierce, the way it did when something threatened the kids.

"No," she said. "No. That's a story, Cal. A clock is a clock. It's old, it finally wore out..."

"It doesn't wear out. It's only stopped once before in my whole life, and you know when." He sat on the edge of the bed. "It took my brother, Hannah. I was there. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it isn't real, because I watched it be real."

So he told her what his father had told him, the night before the night, the way it had been passed down: what the Mercers did when the Collector came.

You bar every door and shutter every window, not because they keep it out (nothing keeps it out) but because it is better not to see it come. You put out the lamps. You gather everyone into the one inner room, the old root cellar under the house, and you sit together in the dark, and you wait. You do not speak. You do not run. The ones who run, it takes anyway, and worse, and it takes others for the insult. You do not look at it when it comes down the stairs, because looking at it is a thing you do not come back from whole. You sit, and you hold each other, and you let it walk among you in the dark, and it lays its hand on one of you, and that one goes quiet, and in the morning they are simply gone, and the rest of you have bought another generation.

"And it... chooses?" Hannah's voice was almost nothing. "It just... chooses one of us?"

And there it was, the thing Cal had been circling since the clock stopped, the arithmetic that had been making him sick all evening. He made himself say it out loud.

"Sometimes the family chose," he said. "To keep it from choosing. An old one, near the end anyway. Or the sick one. My grandmother's brother gave himself, they say, so it wouldn't take a baby that winter." He looked at his wife. "And when there was no one to give, it took who it wanted. It likes the young ones best, Hannah. The strong ones. The ones with the most life left in them to take."

The strong ones. The young ones. He did not have to say their names. They were both already looking at the wall, toward the small room down the hall where Will and Nell were sleeping, where his son was eight years old and strong as a colt and his daughter was five and so full of life she sang to her dolls in the dark.

The old way meant this: he would put his two children in a black cellar and sit between them and wait to find out which one a thing from the woods decided to carry off. And whichever one it left would grow up knowing the dark had come for them and taken their brother or their sister instead, and would carry that the rest of their life, the way Cal carried Eli, and would one day sit in this same room and do the same terrible math with their own children.

That was the inheritance. A hundred and fifty years of it. Sit in the dark, and endure, and pay, and pass it on.

"I'm not doing it," Cal said.

Hannah looked at him. "Then what do we do?"

"I don't know yet." He took her hand. His own was steady, which surprised him. "But I'm not barring a single door. I'm not putting our kids in that cellar to be chosen between. My whole family has spent a hundred and fifty years surviving this thing one child at a time, and I'm done surviving it. I'm going to end it."

"You can't end it, Cal. Your brother... your grandfather... nobody ever..."

"Nobody ever tried to," he said. "They tried to live through it. That's different." He stood, and looked out the window toward the black line of the woods, where somewhere a thing was already walking, slow, taking its time, the way it always did. "Get the kids ready in the morning. Pack a bag. I'm sending the three of you to your sister's in town before the next dark."

"And you?"

He didn't answer that. He couldn't, not yet, because the answer was already forming in him and it was a thing a wife should not have to hear before he was sure of it.

"In the morning," he said instead, "I'm going to go see my mother. If anybody alive knows what this thing really is, it's her. And you can't end something until you know what it is."