The Never Happy Ending Chronicle

Chapter the First

_

It was the autumn of his eighth year when the rain began, and it did not stop for thirty-one days. The drops fell as if the heavens had grown weary of holding them — slow, deliberate, each one with a private grievance to deliver against the windowpane. The boy, whose name in this chronicle shall remain unspoken, sat at the sill and counted them, though counting raindrops is the work of the lonely and the doomed.

His mother had vanished in the spring. Not died — vanished. The distinction matters in a chronicle of this kind, for death has the small mercy of an ending, while vanishing leaves the door ajar. The boy left the door ajar for years afterward, even when the wind blew through the house and rattled the candle-flames in their pewter cups.

The house itself was a creature of the moor — slate-roofed, gable-eyed, exhaling chimney-smoke like a sigh that had grown tired of being held. It had been a parsonage once, then a mill-keeper's residence, then a place where strangers came to write letters they would never send. By the time the boy lived there, the walls had absorbed so many sorrows that they had begun to leak them back out, faintly, in the quiet hours.

He learned, before he could read, that endings are merely pauses in which the next sorrow gathers its breath. — from the editor's foreword

There was a clock in the hall — a tall thing of black walnut, its face the colour of old teeth, its pendulum a slow brass heart. The boy was forbidden to wind it, for the clock had stopped the night his mother left, and his father had decided that the silence of its dial was the only honest measure of time remaining to them. So the hands sat still at seven minutes past eleven, and the boy grew up beneath them.

Of his father, less can be said than ought to be. He was a man of few words and many silences, and the silences were of three kinds: the silence after a question, which was a kind of refusal; the silence before sleep, which was a kind of prayer; and the silence at the dinner table, which was a kind of grief that had forgotten what it was grieving for. The boy learned to recognise each by the shape of the air.

On the seventh day of the rain, a letter arrived. It was sealed with black wax, and the wax had been pressed with no signet — a flat blank disc, as if the sender had wished to be both anonymous and ceremonial. The boy's father took the letter into the study and closed the door, and did not emerge until the candles had burned down to their stubs. When he did emerge, his eyes had the look of a man who has just been told the sequel to his own story, and has not liked it.

The chronicle, dear reader, does not promise consolation. It promises only that the rain will continue, and that you will be kept dry company by the telling.

That night, the boy crept down the stairs in his stocking feet, the boards groaning beneath him like reluctant witnesses. He found the letter on the desk, half-burned. He read what remained: …and so the debt, which is older than either of us, must now be paid by the child. Bring him to the place we both remember, on the night the rain ceases, or… The rest was ash. He took the ash between his fingers and pressed it into a small glass vial, which he hid beneath the floorboard of his room, where it remains, the chronicle insists, to this day.

He returned to bed and did not sleep, and the rain — which had been a voice all his short life — became, for the first time, a question.

An Interlude, Found Loose Between Pages

found tucked
inside the spine —
the same hand?

I write this not as the chronicler but as the one who annotated his pages and could not stop. I was once a reader of this book. Now I am a part of it.

Whoever you are, you should know: the chronicle is not finished, and it is not, strictly, fiction. The boy in Chapter I is real, or was. The rain is also real. The debt is real, though its currency is not coin.

If you are reading this in a quiet room, glance at the window. If the rain is falling, do not put the book down. If it is not, the rain has come for you elsewhere, and you have only mistaken it for something else.

a previous reader's
warning — left in
graphite, smudged

— a reader, no longer

Chapter the Second

_

The rain ceased on the thirty-first day, and in its place came a silence so complete that the boy mistook it, at first, for a deeper kind of rain. He stood at the window and listened to the absence. It rang in his ears like a bell that had been struck inside a sealed room.

His father was gone. Not vanished — gone, in the more pedestrian sense. There was a note on the kitchen table, weighted by the brass candlestick, written in the angular hand the boy had only ever seen on the spines of ledger-books: I have gone ahead. Wait for the carriage. Wind the clock if you must. The boy read it three times, folded it twice, and put it inside his shirt against his chest.

He went into the hall. The clock stood as it had always stood — silent, vast, walnut-skinned. He opened the glass door. The pendulum hung motionless. He took the small brass key from the hook beside it and, with the patience of a child who has been waiting for permission for half a lifetime, he wound the clock.

Time, once given permission, does not ask twice.

The pendulum swung. The hands trembled. And from somewhere — the chimney, perhaps, or the rafters of the parlour, or, the boy thought afterwards, from inside the clock itself — a crow stepped into the hall. Not flew. Stepped. Its claws made a small dry sound on the parquet, like a quill being drawn across paper. It looked at the boy with one eye, and then the other, and then it spoke a word that the chronicle declines, on principle, to record.

The boy understood the word, although he had never heard it before, in the way that one sometimes understands a name in a dream. It was the name his mother had used to call him at bedtime, the secret one, the one no other living creature should have known. He sat down on the floor of the hall, and the clock kept time, and the crow watched, and outside the long rain that had not stopped for thirty-one days resumed, although the chronicle is careful to note that no clouds had returned.

He had been promised a carriage. Instead, a bird had been sent. The chronicle insists that there is no contradiction in this.

He lit a candle, though it was still afternoon. He did so because the crow's eye reminded him of a candle's flame seen through dark water, and he wished to compare them honestly. The candle flickered. The crow did not. The boy understood, then, that the carriage would not come, and that there had never been one promised — only mentioned, which is a colder thing.

He took his coat from the hook and put on his boots. He took the vial of ash from beneath the floorboard. He took the half-burned letter, and the brass key, and the small portrait of his mother that he had once stolen from his father's bureau and never returned. The crow walked ahead of him to the door. The clock kept time. The rain — though no clouds — continued.

He stepped out onto the moor. The chronicle, here, draws a long breath, and turns its page, and continues.

Set in Playfair Display, Lora, Cinzel, and Caveat.
Composed at midnight in an unmarked house,
by a chronicler who insists upon anonymity.
Bound in vellum the colour of old rain.

First impression · Volume I · Of an indeterminate number
No happy ending is promised, contracted, or implied.
The chronicle continues.

FINIS — for now