Page 84 of The Quiet
The bright, yellow color drew her to the window and she watched it evenly as the wind moved through it. Her hands lifted up to the glass, fingers pressing against it, and she watched them as if any moment her hand might move right through it.
As time passed, she turned to leave, looking down a small hall this one connected to. There was a single door at the end, unique from all of the others in that it had a yellow doorknob.
Ella paused.
Yellow.
This hallway hadn’t existed before. She was certain of it.
She approached the door, her fingers grazing the doorknob. She turned it slowly and opened it to find a staircase with a yellow banister.
She glanced back down the hall to find it empty, descending below and closing the door behind her.
The descent felt infinite, with little light to guard her path. Every step on the wooden stairs echoed through a dark room, Ella reaching the end of it to see a large window. Light filtered through even though they were underground, cast over a single white table with a chair on either side.
This white table was not a hallucination. Sitting in the center of this room it looked how she’d always imagined it. Much like she’d been drawn into Amiel’s tunnel, she felt a string inside her chest, tugging her toward the seat. There was something unusual about the truth, that when it finally called, there was no bargaining with it. The time had come, and as she eased down into the nearest seat, she looked across at the emptiness of the other chair. This was in both ways the culmination of the past and future, curving into one another to form a point in time that she knew would furthermore reveal herself.
Her hands folded in her lap as she stared across the room, thinking that perhaps the empty chair was her answer when she heard footfalls from behind her. A door she hadn’t seen clicked closed at the back of the room, and one by one each step carried toward her. She held her breath as the person passed, fingertips trailing across the table’s surface before landing on the back of the chair in front of her. At last, he sat, and with eyes that embodied the strength of a hurricane and a smile as light as the spring sun, he simply said, “Hello.”
It was much like the first time they’d met, the time he’d greeted a helpless young girl at the edge of despair as she’d looked on a corpse that, in some ways, she’d pitied and envied. She couldn’t speak for a moment, digesting the truth as it unraveled wordlessly between them.
This was all Peter’s illusion, after all. He had built up every detail. How had she not guessed?
He might be living in it too.
What could she say? She felt like that child again, fighting for the right phrases, but the thoughts blew through her mind like a torrential downpour of noise and chaos, and all she could do was utter the loaded greeting.
“Hello.”
CHAPTER 24
GOODBYE
“I’VE BEEN WAITING a long time,” Peter replied. “I wasn’t convinced you’d be able to sit at this table, to see me again. I left you signs,” he said.
Ella absorbed the easiness of his words, trying to grapple with his apparent calm. She was unsure of where the conversation would lead, but settled in the moment of it, she was unafraid now that she was finally here.
He looked like a statue in front of her, beautifully crafted with a sculpted face and hair like waves of sunlit wheat. She saw the forest in his green eyes and remembered walking through it with him. She remembered as he’d named the trees.
“I always hated them,” Ella replied, “the people out at the gate, never wanting to experience any pain, but I ended up just like them, forgetting everything.”
She’d called them rats, and he told her she’d be humbled by her own words one day. He’d been right.
Even now, she could not forget all of those people who she’d never had the courage to thank. Every day in the illusion, she tried to thank them in her own way. In so many ways, they’d all been given a second chance.
“Why did you create this illusion?” Ella asked.
“Illusion?” he asked, as if puzzled by the word. “Everything that can happen is truth. I simply created another truth to protect my people from the world. All I ever wanted was to spare them pain,” he said, giving answers easily like he always had.
“But it isn’t real,” she said.
“People call madness, madness because it bends their perceived laws, but true madness is only made in the making sense of things. We did not evolve to understand the world, only to live in it. Understanding it is just as hedonistic a pleasure as anything else, as hedonistic as stopping the Burning of the Strike.”
She tried to trace the full meaning of his words, caught on the potency of the final sentence. “What do you mean?”
Peter tilted his head in the slightest way, for as he explained these things it was as if he were also admiring her in front of him, pleased perhaps to see her after all this time, and yet intent to share these truths with her.
“Baker,” he said, “this you may forget again, because human beings always forget. The Burning of the Strike has happened before. Strike are born, people offer them pain, they feed and grow, and are eliminated through the only weakness they have, which is people again. This is a cycle. Strike come from the North and the North is always there,” he said, resurrecting the chant she remembered from Valentine, “frostbitten fingers play the chords. This song has repeated a thousand times. I’ve seen many cities burned, many versions of the ROSE rise and fall. The people move south. The Strike follow.”
