The Stranger at the Gate

They ran.

Not because they understood what was happening, but because every instinct either of them owned said move, and for once the instincts agreed. Elias snatched the coin off the floor and hissed as it scorched his palm. Noah hauled the rear door open with his shoulder. They burst out behind the science block, past the bins and the bicycle racks, over a low fence that Noah cleared with a grace he would deny ever afterward, and into the back lanes of the town.

Nobody shouted after them. That was the unnerving part. Behind them the school went on with its Tuesday, bells and fractions and the thin sour smell of floor polish, as though two students had not just vanished through a wall of ordinary air. Elias kept expecting a teacher's voice, a siren, anything that belonged to the world he knew.

Instead, the only sound was their own feet and the coin, which hummed against his leg through the fabric of his pocket like a wasp caught in a jar.

They crossed three streets before Noah finally stopped.

He bent double with his hands on his knees. His face had gone the color of old porridge. "Okay," he gasped. "Okay. I'm not a runner. I want that on the record. My whole family is built for sitting."

"Noah."

"I'm just saying, if we're going to be chased by whatever that was, I'd like it known I contribute in other ways."

"Noah." Elias looked back along the lane. It was empty. A pigeon walked in a small affronted circle on a wall. "Where are we going?"

"No idea."

"You're lying."

A pause.

"Yes," said Noah miserably.

"Where?"

"My granddad said if it ever got bad, to go to the corner behind the old tannery. I don't know why. I thought it was an old man thing. He says lots of things. He told me once that the moon was a hole in the sky and we were getting a good look at the other side." Noah straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I only half listen to him. Which I'm now pretty sure was a mistake."

The old tannery had been closed since before either of them was born. Its brick chimney still stood over the lane like a blackened finger, and the alley beside it ran narrow and damp between two blank walls, ending in a dead end of soot-stained stone.

Someone was standing at the end of it.

She looked about seventeen. She had dark hair cut bluntly at the jaw and a gray coat buttoned to the throat, too heavy for June. She was thin in the way of people who walk a great deal. And her eyes were wrong. Elias could not have said why at first. They were an ordinary dark brown, but they seemed to catch light that was not there, as if she were looking at them from the inside of a lit room.

She was watching them the way you watch a door that has just opened.

"Elias Vale," she said.

Noah stepped in front of him so fast he nearly tripped over his own feet.

"Who are you?"

"Mara."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I'm giving."

"How do you know his name?"

Mara looked past Noah's shoulder. For the first time, something moved in her face. It was not warmth, exactly. It was nearer to the expression of a person confronting a photograph of someone they used to know.

"Because your mother told me," she said.

The lane went silent.

It was a very particular silence. Elias had heard it once before, at six years old, in a kitchen where something large and invisible had just happened and nobody could say what. It was the silence of the world holding still to make room for a sentence.

He stepped around Noah. His legs seemed to be working on their own.

"You knew my mother?"

"I knew the woman she was before she became the woman you remember."

"What does that mean?"

"It means she had a life before you." Mara said it without cruelty, as a plain fact, and it still landed like a slap. "A long one. She would have wanted you to hear that from someone who loved her, and I'm what's available."

"Where is she?"

Mara's expression changed.

It happened quickly. A door in her face closed, and what was behind it was gone before Elias could see it. "Not here," she said.

"That's not an answer either," said Noah.

"No. It's not."

"I've had a bad morning," Noah went on, with the high bright desperation of a person talking so he doesn't scream. "I've been given a haunted coin by my cold granddad, my best friend has had some kind of fit, and a hand came out of a window. I'd like a real answer from someone. Anyone. I'd take a fraudulent one."

Mara regarded him with something that might, in better circumstances, have become amusement.

"You're Samuel's grandson."

Noah's mouth stayed open.

"He said you'd talk," said Mara. "I didn't believe him about how much."

"You know my granddad?"

"Everyone who matters knows your granddad." She said it carefully, the way one steps across thin ice, and glanced at the brick wall behind her as though listening. "We don't have time. The thing you saw at the window isn't the only one. It will follow the coin."

She pointed at the dead end.

Elias stared at it. It was a blank brick wall, streaked with soot and old rain, a place where nothing had ever happened.

"There's nothing there."

"No," said Mara. "There isn't."

She stepped up to the wall and laid two fingers against a spot between the bricks, so slight that Elias would have sworn the mortar there was ordinary. She pressed. Something answered under her hand with a tiny, definite click, like a key turning in a lock the size of a mountain.

The wall opened.

Not physically. Nothing slid, nothing swung. Reality folded. It was the only word Elias would ever find for it. The air along one edge of the brickwork wrinkled like a page being turned, and the bricks seemed to fall away from one another without moving, and where a wall had been there was now a doorway. It had never been built. It had never been needed, until now. Beyond it stretched a stone corridor lit by cold blue fire that burned without smoke.

Noah whispered, "That is not possible."

Mara looked at him.

"Neither are you, apparently."

She said it lightly. But when Elias glanced at her he saw that her hand, still raised, was trembling very slightly, and that she had set her jaw to hide it. She had done this before. It had never become easy.

Elias looked at the corridor. He looked back at the empty lane, the gray town, the thin ordinary sky.

He thought of his father coming home to a cold house and a single unwashed plate. He thought of the note he had not left. He thought: I could turn around. It was an honest thought, and it deserved an honest hearing. He could walk home. He could tell himself it was a strange dream and a cruel prank, and in a week he would almost believe it. That version of his life waited behind him, warm and small and safe.

And ahead, a woman who had known his mother.

He stepped through.

Behind him the street vanished. There was no sound as it went, no rush of air. One moment the grey light of the town lay across his shoulders; the next there was only cold stone, and the smell of old water, and the blue fire reflected in the damp walls. The doorway sealed itself behind them with a soft inward sigh, like a held breath finally released.

Noah, who had followed him through with his eyes squeezed shut, opened them one at a time.

"Is it too late to say I want to go home?"

"Yes," said Mara.

"Right. Just checking."

She walked a few steps ahead and then turned, the blue flame making her face harder and older than it had been in the alley. She spoke three words, and Elias would remember them all his life, not because they were grand, but because of how quietly she said them. It was how you say them to a guest in a house you are not sure is still safe.

"Welcome to the Gates."

Then, from somewhere deep underground, something answered with a roar.