Half Waking

The hut found him first.

Not all of him. Not at once. He came back to it the way light comes back to a room after a power cut: in pieces, uncertain of its own edges, willing to believe for a while that the dark had been the real place and this was merely the interruption.

Damp timber. The cot. The weight of bandages gone wrong with seepage. The metallic taste seated so deep in the back of his throat it might have been his own blood or might have been something his blood had learned to make. The swamp breathing through the gaps in the walls, patient and enormous, the way it had always breathed.

Home. If the word still applied.

He lay still and listened to himself breathe.

That was different.

In the chamber, and in whatever had happened after the chamber at the foot of a cliff he could not yet remember clearly, the bright thing under his skin had been a filament. A thread. A fine bright line worked through the worst of the damage and no further. He remembered that much. He remembered the way it had tightened on him like a grip. He remembered, distantly and without detail, the sense of being attended in his own dying.

What he felt now was not a filament.

It was everywhere.

Not on him. Through him. Seated so deep in the architecture of the body that he could not find an edge to it, could not locate the place where his own tissue ended and the bright thing began. It held him the way a frame holds a wall: not pressing, not hurting in any immediate sense, but present in every part, load-bearing, structural. He understood, with a calm that should have frightened him more than it did, that the body he was lying in was no longer wholly his to lie in.

He tried to lift his hand.

The hand considered the instruction. Then it declined. Not in refusal. There was no resistance in it, no fight. Only the particular way a limb declines when it is being used by something else at that moment and cannot spare the attention.

He lay still and let the hand be.

Outside, the swamp went on with its war.

He had heard it before, in the earlier surfacings: the concussive blows against the walls, the scrape of something along the timbers, the shadows crossing the window slits too fast and at angles no single body should have been able to manage. He had mistaken it once for artillery. He no longer made that mistake. But neither did he understand it.

There was the hunter.

The pale thing that had opened him in the marsh. The one that had stalked him for days before it came for him through the black water with the impossible silence of something that did not need to hurry. It was out there now. He could feel its attendance the way he felt weather, a pressure against the inside of the skull rather than against the skin.

And there was something else.

More than one something else. He had carried part of it back with him from the north, that much he knew without knowing how he knew, and what he had carried was no longer willing to keep quiet in the background of him. The attention that had found him in the dying was here too. Closer than it had been in the arctic. Braided through the bright structural thing that held his body level. He could not see it. He could not hear it. But he could feel it the way one feels a room is occupied before one has turned to look: a thickness in the attention, a second quality to the dark behind his eyes.

He did not name it. Naming would have given it a shape he was not ready to give.

The hut shuddered.

A heavy blow struck the outer wall hard enough to loose dust from the rafters. Then came the scrape, long and slow, the sound of something large dragging itself along the timbers with the patience of an animal that had decided the building was not going anywhere and neither was it. A shadow crossed the window slit. Then another. Then a third that moved wrong, bending where a body should have broken and continuing where a body should have stopped.

He watched the shadows and could not decide how many things were making them.

One. Two. More. The count refused to settle.

The bright thing in him tightened once, a brief interior contraction that ran from chest to fingertips and back, and for half a heartbeat the shadows at the window seemed to clarify. To resolve into cleaner edges, sharper postures, as though the metal in him wanted him to see what was outside and was willing, briefly, to lend him the use of better eyes.

He did not want better eyes.

He closed his own and the clarity went away.

When he opened them again the shadows had thinned and the scraping had moved round to the far wall, and the hut stood where it had always stood, mean and narrow and stubbornly upright above the black water on its pilings.

He tried to rise.

The body answered this time, but only barely. He got one shoulder off the cot and the bright thing shifted inside him to accommodate the new posture, a smooth interior adjustment that should have been agony and was instead merely a deep wrong warmth. His head swam. The hut tilted. He gained no further than the shoulder before the effort ran out and he sank back.

Not yet.

The thought arrived without a clear owner. It might have been his. It might have been theirs. He could no longer tell the two apart cleanly, and that, more than the wounds or the hunter or the shapes at the window, was the true measure of what had changed.

Not yet. The circle was still open.

He did not have the word for what had happened to him, nor for the shape of his own remembering, but some part of him understood that the return to the hut was not the end of the passage. He had surfaced, but only to the shallows. Below him the rest of it still waited: the north, the ruins, the cliff, the long bright ordeal at the foot of it, and behind all of that the older shapes, the flat and the boy and the railing, the promises made to a pair of green eyes in a world that no longer properly existed. The memory had not finished with him. It would pull him down again before it let him wake in earnest.

He let it.

There would be time to surface later. Time to rise properly, and to learn the new shape of the body, and to find out what the bright thing wanted in exchange for keeping him alive. Time, even, to face whatever moved in the swamp and decide whether it was hunting the hut or hunting something the hut now contained.

But not yet.

For now the cot held him, and the bandages held the cot, and the bright thing held them both, and the swamp breathed its long patient breath through the gaps in the walls.

His last clear thought before the dark took him back was not of the hunter, and not of the presence inside him, and not of the ruins.

Green eyes.

A railing.

A skid that would, against every reasonable thing, come back.

Promise, he thought, or remembered thinking.

Then the dark closed over him again, kindly this time, the way deep water closes over a diver who has not yet finished the dive.