China Mieville - This Census-Taker

“What if it breaks on the rocks?” He shook his head and tapped it on the rock to show me it was tough.

“But you won’t turn it on unless you hear someone?” he said.

I promised.

He took his glasses off and cleaned them and put them on again. He wound the strap of his flashlight around his wrist.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Well now.”

Spooling out the line, the man stepped over the lip into the hole.

He moved fast, keeping the line taut with one arm while he braced himself expertly against outcroppings and in nooks with the other and with his legs, and scuttled down the stone.

The dark took him. I watched the line tremble and stretch.

I watched his glow go down.

I couldn’t hear him any more but for a minute his light switched back and forth in the pit, once shining right up out of it and into my eyes. Then he turned it off or passed below an overhang.

The cord thrummed.

In my mind I saw him, a tiny figure suspended and sinking in a great chamber toward the pile. I imagined him shining his light down at it.

I thought there might be sounds from the hill path outside. I was afraid. That my father was returning.

And I imagined the man touching down on the dreadful hill inside the hill and I thought of what I would do if my father came and found me now, waiting there, and of what he might do. I started to shake as if I was frozen cold. I didn’t know whether because of the thought of what the man would find or of the thought of my father finding me.

If my father said something, what would I say back?

I’d try hard not to look at the line stretching down. I’d keep my eyes from the hole. But that wouldn’t distract him. He would see the line. He’d look straight at it and a terrible expression would come over him, not the calm he wore when killing but anger that there was an intruder and a great determination not to let the man have the knowledge for which he was searching, and my father would pull a knife from his pocket and go toward the cord to cut it.

So would I struggle with him? He would throw me down into the gap if I did, killing me in a new rageful way. I resolved that I would struggle with him, that I’d try to stop his knife and give the man time to come up again. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be brave enough.

I stood alone and held the tube, ready to make it glow, ready to drop it.

There were animals close by and I could hear the sounds of the hillside but, though I thought I did, many times, I didn’t hear my father returning. I stood in the cave for minutes, for an hour, for more than an hour. I watched the daylight change outside.

Down in the ground, perhaps the man climbed. Or did he dig?

I stared at nothing in the shadow in the hill. I was racked by scenes, moments that I didn’t want to imagine, the man’s story now, his under-hill investigations. I wanted not to imagine anything like the whispering and snarling dead who filled my head, dead people clotting in a great pile, sliding over the house trash like a band of murdered animals gone blind and stupid with rage in the darkness, furious with anyone still alive, a familiar figure at their head.

The stretched cord’s noises, its creaks and snaps, changed. It vibrated more quickly. The man was ascending.

I pictured him bracing. Climbing.

“Quick,” I struggled to whisper, into the hole. I spoke in a tiny voice. “I think my father’s coming. I keep hearing noises. You have to hurry.”

No light came up. The man had been in darkness down there, and he was ascending in darkness.

The man was ascending, I thought, and then I thought, What if the man isn’t ascending?

What if it isn’t him rising?

How long might they have been waiting down there? Waiting to overpower whoever brought a way out, ingrate escapees. Little sounds welled out of my throat and the black welled up out of the gap. The light-tube shook in my grip.

I knew who would climb first, who would be at the front of the mass, whose ruined fingers and nails it would be slapping onto the sharp flint at the edges of the crack, who would rise out of the under-hill to meet my eye, whose cold grave-stained face full of disappointment.

But it was the foreign man who came into my view like a fish below a boat. I saw him when he was already close to me. He turned his face up and I saw it paler than the shadow.

He gathered the cord and gripped the rock and found handholds. I couldn’t believe that he was returning.

The man hauled himself at last out of the ground, lying at the cut’s edge, panting and staring around him and blinking quickly. I could smell no miasma on him.

After a while he pulled a cloth from his pocket and wiped his hands very carefully, then his face. He took off his glasses and cleaned them again and wouldn’t look at me. His clothes were coated in dust from under the world.

He gathered himself and shrugged out of his harness. I couldn’t speak and he said nothing. His face was set. He worked his jaw.

“I heard what you said to me,” he said at last. “When I was on my way up. Your father will come home soon, I think.”

He put everything back in his sack.

“I think you shouldn’t go back to the house,” he said. He still didn’t look at me. “You know I have to do this job. I want to speak to your father now. I think it would be better if we could speak alone.”

—

“You can’t go in,” I whispered. “It’s not allowed.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll wait for him outside. I promise I’ll stay on the step.” He kept looking at the cave mouth. “I’ll wait for him and ask him if he’ll let me come inside. And if he won’t I’ll talk to him right there. But I want you to stay here, now. All right?”

He looked across the hole at the dark of the hollow beyond, and back at me at last, at my little limbs.

“Well,” he said. “Is there somewhere you can go? Quiet? Out of sight? Just to make sure your father doesn’t…” He put his finger to his lips. “I want you to stay quiet. Keep your ears open, I can call you after I’ve asked your father those questions.”

“I’ll find somewhere.” I was wondering about the crook of a tree, some bough.

“Where you can’t be seen?” he said. “Make sure it’s not too close.”

His insistence frightened me. I couldn’t sit anywhere in the dusk for my father to see me watching. “I don’t know,” I said. But he was distracted, so I said, “I’ll find a place.”

“Good.” He nodded. He picked up his pack and walked into the last of the afternoon. I followed, screwing up my eyes. But as I watched him stride out of sight down the hill I stopped, still within the cave mouth.

These felt very much like last moments. And I was very tired and I didn’t want the light on me.

Had I been in the house I would have gone into the parlor and closed the door. Or I would have wrapped old sheets around me in the base of a wardrobe. I couldn’t go back to the house.

The hole watched me, above its discards and the insides of the hill. Despite what it contained, I took a step back toward it.

It wasn’t my friend or my enemy. It was only a rip full of stone and old things. Even with a particular thing. I didn’t want it but I didn’t need to run from it, not then, and I was afraid of it but no more than I was afraid of everything. Just then, before the conversation between the stranger and my father, I was less afraid of it than of stepping out into the light.

I walked back toward the blackness. I whispered into it, in case my mother was listening.

If he came in here my father would see me and reach for me. I threw a stone across the wide split to the ridge beyond.