The Knife of Never Letting Go

Spackle buildings, leaning out towards you from shadow, looking like melting blobs of tan-coloured ice cream except hut-sized. No one knows or can remember what they were ever sposed to be but best guess by Ben, who’s a best guess kinda guy, is that they had something to do with burying their dead. Maybe even some kind of church, even tho the spacks didn’t have no kind of religion anyone from Prentisstown could reckernize.

I keep a wide distance from them and go into the little grove of wild apple trees. The apples are ripe, nearly black, almost edible, as Cillian would say. I pick one off the trunk and take a bite, the juice dribbling down my chin.

“Todd?”

“What, Manchee?” I take out the plastic bag I’ve got folded in my back pocket and start filling it with apples.

“Todd?” he barks again and this time I notice how he’s barking it and I turn and he’s pointed at the Spackle buildings and his fur’s all ridged up on his back and his ears are flicking all over the place.

I stand up straight. “What is it, boy?”

He’s growling now, his lips pulled back over his teeth. I feel the charge in my blood again. “Is it a croc?” I say.

“Quiet, Todd,” Manchee growls.

“But what is it?”

“Is quiet, Todd.” He lets out a little bark and it’s a real bark, a real dog bark that means nothing but “Bark!” and my body electricity goes up a bit, like charges are going to start leaping outta my skin. “Listen,” he growls.

And so I listen.

And I listen.

And I turn my head a little and I listen some more.

There’s a hole in the Noise.

Which can’t be.

It’s weird, it is, out there, hiding somewhere, in the trees or somewhere outta sight, a spot where your ears and your mind are telling you there’s no Noise. It’s like a shape you can’t see except by how everything else around it is touching it. Like water in the shape of a cup, but with no cup. It’s a hole and everything that falls into it stops being Noise, stops being anything, just stops altogether. It’s not like the quiet of the swamp, which is never quiet obviously, just less Noisy. But this, this is a shape, a shape of nothing, a hole where all Noise stops.

Which is impossible.

There ain’t nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you, ever since the spacks released the Noise germ during the war, the germ that killed half the men and every single woman, my ma not excepted, the germ that drove the rest of the men mad, the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men’s madness picked up a gun.

“Todd?” Manchee’s spooked, I can hear it. “What, Todd? What’s it, Todd?”

“Can you smell anything?”

“Just smell quiet, Todd,” he barks, then he starts barking louder, “Quiet! Quiet!”

And then, somewhere around the spack buildings, the quiet moves.

My blood-charge leaps so hard it about knocks me over. Manchee yelps in a circle around me, barking and barking, making me double-spooked, and so I smack him on the rump again (“Ow, Todd?”) to make myself calm down.

“There’s no such thing as holes,” I say. “No such thing as nothing. So it’s gotta be a something, don’t it?”

“Something, Todd,” Manchee barks.

“Can you hear where it went?”

“It’s quiet, Todd.”

“You know what I mean.”

Manchee sniffs the air and takes one step, two, then more towards the Spackle buildings. I guess we’re looking for it, then. I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway. Manchee’s sniffing at the door frame but he’s not growling so I take a deep breath and I look inside.

It’s dead empty. The ceiling rises up to a point about another length of me above my head. Floor’s dirt, swamp plants growing in it now, vines and suchlike, but nothing else. Which is to say no real nothing, no hole, and no telling what mighta been here before.

It’s stupid but I gotta say it.

I’m wondering if the Spackle are back.

But that’s impossible.

But a hole in the Noise is impossible.

So something impossible has to be true.

I can hear Manchee snuffling around again outside so I creep out and I go to the second scoop. There’s writing on the outside of this one, the only written words anyone’s ever seen in the spack language. The only words they ever saw fit to write down, I guess. The letters are spack letters, but Ben says they make the sound es’Paqili or suchlike, es’Paqili, the Spackle, “spacks” if you wanna spit it, which since what happened happened is what everyone does. Means “The People”.

There’s nothing in the second scoop neither. I step back out into the swamp and I listen again. I put my head down and I listen and I reach with the hearing parts of my brain and I listen there, too, and I listen and listen.

I listen.

“Quiet! Quiet!” Manchee barks, twice real fast and peels off running again, towards the last scoop. I take off after him, running myself, my blood charging, cuz that’s where it is, that’s where the hole in the Noise is.

I can hear it.

Well, I can’t hear it, that’s the whole point, but when I run towards it the emptiness of it is touching my chest and the stillness of it pulls at me and there’s so much quiet in it, no, not quiet, silence, so much unbelievable silence that I start to feel really torn up, like I’m about to lose the most valuable thing ever, like there it is, a death, and I’m running and my eyes are watering and my chest is just crushing and there’s no one to see but I still mind and my eyes start crying, they start crying, they start effing crying, and I stop for a minute and I bend over and Jesus H Dammit, you can just shut up right now, but I waste a whole stupid minute, just a whole stinking, stupid minute bent over there, by which time, of course, the hole is moving away, it’s moved away, it’s gone.

Manchee’s torn twixt racing after it and coming back to me but he finally comes back to me.

“Crying, Todd?”

“Shut up,” I say and aim a kick at him. It misses on purpose.

2. PRENTISSTOWN

We get ourselves outta the swamp and head back towards town and the world feels all black and grey no matter what the sun is saying. Even Manchee barely says nothing as we make our way back up thru the fields. My Noise churns and bubbles like a stew on the boil till finally I have to stop for a minute to calm myself down a little.

There’s just no such thing as silence. Not here, not nowhere. Not when yer asleep, not when yer by yerself, never.

I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month’s time