Silence After Midnight

In Vellemar, night is not something that falls.

It is something the town does.

The bell rings at nine fifteen.

At half past, two thousand people open a cabinet, take a small white pill, and drink a full glass of water while somebody watches.

By ten o'clock, the town makes no sound at all.

No dogs. No radios. No voices carrying up from the harbour.

Nothing.

They call the pill a still.

Every child in Vellemar learns what it is for before they learn to swim.

If you dream, something finds you.

Dreamers do not wake up. Their eyes are ruined in the sockets. Their ears have bled through onto the pillow. They are cold long before anyone thinks to knock.

Some of them are found screaming.

Some of them are found smiling.

The smiling ones are worse.

Rovan Teale is seventeen, and he has never once questioned any of it.

Then, on an ordinary night, at the end of an ordinary day, he forgets to take his still.

And in the morning, he wakes up.

Sleep will not come, so he walks out into a town of black windows.

Past his sleeping family. Past his best friend's house, where nothing he throws at the glass wakes anybody at all.

And at the bottom of the hill, in a half-lit pub called The Drowned Lamp, he finds the only other person awake in Vellemar.

She is at the counter. She is extremely drunk. She is not remotely worried about any of this.

Her name is Elli.

They drink. They laugh at each other. They walk down to the rocks at the water's edge at one in the morning.

And somewhere on that cold stone, with the tide coming in and the whole town silent behind them, they both fall asleep.

Everything Rove has been told about what happens next is a lie.

He is about to find out which part.

Close the window, close the door,

count your breaths and count no more.

Salt the sill and say goodnight -

never dream, and wake to light.