The Hallway

"I'd braced for it the whole way up that hill. It waited for the one moment I forgot to."

My boot came down on the hallway floor inside, and the cold of the house closed over me. "The kitchen's just down the end of the hallway and to the left," Luke said, easy, like he was walking a mate through his own place and not a stranger through somebody else's.

The floorboards spoke under my boots the way old boards do, that dry announcing creak, and in the narrow run of the hall it seemed loud enough to carry. The house was dead still and colder than a cottage has any right to be with no fire and no heater going, and it held that shut-up smell of old timber and stone, a hundred-odd years of it soaked into the walls.

Framed photos ran along the plaster, white gone yellow with age, and I knew the faces in them. The two of them younger, a wedding somewhere back in the nineties; the pair of them out in that garden of theirs; her with a case of something held up to the camera, pleased as anything. The people whose coffee I'd drunk and whose fence I'd stood, four winters back. Where are they? Why aren't they here? The question went round and stayed unasked, because I was in it now, following Luke down the hall to the plans that were meant to make sense of the lot of it.

My ears were open without my deciding it — Luke's breath ahead of me, quick and shallow; the house ticking and settling round us; my own pulse going in my neck.

Then the thing on the wall to my left took hold of my eye and stopped me dead.

It ran floor to ceiling and a good few metres along, and I couldn't work out how I'd come in and not seen it. Colours turning over inside it — blues and greens with gold and purple run through — and they moved while I looked, the way oil moves on water, so the whole of it seemed to breathe. My eye went in and couldn't find the edge of a single thing. Every part of it had the whole of it inside it, over and over, smaller and smaller and bigger and bigger at once, and it had a depth in it no flat wall should hold, like I could push my hand past the face of it and there'd be room in there for my arm.

How did the artist get that much movement into it? That was where my head went — to the how of it, the trade of it — because a thing made that well was a thing somebody had built, and I wanted to know how they'd done it. It was beautiful. Strange, and it put the wind up me a little, but beautiful — the sort of work you could stand in front of for an hour and keep finding more in.

"That's a remarkable piece of work," I said, and heard the plain awe in my own voice. And the strangest thing happened with it: the fear went out of my shoulders for a second. This was ordinary. This was what you did in a man's house — you clocked the art, you said your piece about it. For a breath I was just a bloke admiring a painting.

"I know. I've seen it a dozen times now and I still think it's spectacular," Luke said, and for that breath we were two blokes in a hallway looking at a painting, and nothing more to it than that.

I let it drop — the guard, the low hum of wrong I'd carried up the hill and in through the door. I leaned in to work out the trick of the colours, my breath easing off, and for a couple of seconds I was nothing but a man looking at a thing he admired.

Which is when he hit me.

No wind-up. No change in his voice, no shift of his feet to read off. One second we stood side by side; the next his shoulder went into my ribs with the whole of his weight behind it, and the pain was white and instant, and I was already going.

"Fuck!" It tore out of me. My feet came off the floor and the hall tipped hard, and the reach was pure instinct — a hand out for anything solid, the way you grab for the rail when a ladder kicks out from under you.

My hand went for the wall — for the painting, for the edge of it, for whatever was there to be caught — and there was nothing there. No canvas. No plaster. No wall. My arm went straight into it, into the colours, past the elbow with nothing to meet it, and nothing on the far side to stop me.

Then the cold was gone. All of it at once — the wall, the hall, the grey light, Luke at my shoulder — gone, and sun on me instead, and warm air, and the falling his shove had put in me carrying me on through into it. I got half a breath to shout with and nothing came of it.

Welcome to Clivilius, Nial Triffett.

Not in my ears. Under them — in the bone, in the blood. Not spoken, not heard. Just known, the way you know your own name.

Then warm dust came up and the falling stopped.