The Girl Who Waited for the Dark

The flashlight died forty steps into the tunnel.

Maya shook it. Nothing. She shook it again, harder, the way you do when you already know it won't help. The dark came down over her like water closing over a dropped stone.

She couldn't see her own hand. She held it up in front of her face and there was just nothing where it should be, warm and close and gone.

Her heart went fast. She made herself stand still and breathe. The tunnel smelled of wet brick and cold iron and something green growing where it shouldn't. Somewhere ahead, water ticked off the ceiling. She had come in here for the owl. A barn owl hunted this tunnel at dusk, she'd heard it three nights running, a sound like a torn sheet, and she wanted to see how a bird found mice in the black.

Now she was the one in the black.

She waited. She counted her breaths. And after a while something strange happened, so slowly she almost missed it.

The mouth of the tunnel, way back behind her, had gone from nothing to a faint grey coin. She hadn't turned around and found it. It had arrived. It got there by getting brighter, and it hadn't gotten brighter, because the evening outside was only getting darker.

So it was her.

Maya turned back to the deep end, where the owl would come from, and made herself patient. She had a list in her head of things that didn't make sense yet, and she added this one and left it open.

Her eyes were doing something. Right now. She could almost feel it, not as feeling exactly, more like a room being slowly turned up.

The fast part came first. In the first minute the grey coin behind her sharpened at its edges, and a shape she hadn't known was there resolved into a fallen beam. That was quick. That was the easy part, and then it stopped, like a machine reaching the end of what it could do and handing the job to a second machine that worked slower.

After that the changing went underground. She stopped being able to notice it happening. She could only notice that it had happened. She looked at the ceiling and saw nothing, and she looked away, and she looked back, and now there were streaks of pale mineral running down the brick like frozen tears, and she was sure they had been invisible before.

The green smell grew a source. Along the bottom of the wall, moss. She hadn't decided to see it. It had simply crossed over from the country of things-that-aren't to the country of things-that-are, and she had been standing right there and missed the border.

That was the thing that got her. Not that she could see in the dark. That she couldn't catch herself starting to.

She tried a test. She stared straight at the grey coin, hard, right at the center of it. And the center went dim and grainy, like it was hiding from her. She slid her eyes a little to the side, aimed at the wall next to it, and the coin flared brighter at the edge of her looking. Bright when she didn't look at it. Dim when she did.

She did it again. Look straight, it fades. Look beside, it blazes.

Six times she did it, sliding her gaze on and off, and six times the dark answered the same way, and by the sixth time she believed it all the way down.

The middle of her eye had quit. The middle had given up in the dark and gone to sleep, and the edges had taken over, the edges were the part that worked now, the part that caught the faint and the grey. In the dark she had to look at things sideways to see them at all.

Which meant the owl.

Which meant the whole tunnel was a machine for this, and she was the machine, and she had walked in with a flashlight like an idiot and drowned the whole thing in light and seen nothing. The flashlight had been blinding her. Dying was the best thing it had ever done.

She stood in the turned-up dark and understood that she had two different sets of eyes stacked inside one pair, and one of them only came out when the other one couldn't cope, and it took its slow time arriving, minutes and minutes, unhurried, patient, a second self waking behind her face.

The torn-sheet sound came from the deep end.

Maya did not look at it. She had learned. She aimed her eyes a hand's width to the left of where the sound was and let the edges do the work.

And there, at the corner of her looking, pale against the black, the owl came down the tunnel without a single sound, low and flat and white, a face like a dish turned toward the floor, wings held out and utterly still, gliding on nothing.

She held her gaze off to the side and it stayed bright, ghost-coloured, so close she could have named the dark bars on its wing.

The instant she turned her eyes to look at it straight, to really look, it dimmed. It smudged into the dark at the exact center of her wanting to see it.

So she looked away again, on purpose, and gave it back to the edges, and there it was, whole and burning white, hunting the tunnel she was standing in the middle of.

The owl dropped, struck the floor, rose again with something in its feet, and beat once, twice, past her shoulder and out into the grey coin, which had become, without her noticing, a doorway full of stars.