It was close to midnight and Cyrus stood just inside the barn door, listening for the staccato cry of a newborn lamb. The barn held many sounds tonight, but not that one: the only real anomalies were two rising and falling human breaths. The first of them would be Sheila’s, his niece. He was not surprised that she had fallen asleep; she was fourteen, probably too young to stay up with a ewe in labor, but no one else from the farm staff could be allowed to work an entire night this close to the Migration. He did not know who the second breathing body was, but it was almost certainly a child. Children out of bed were a constant problem.
Leaving his flashlight off, Cyrus walked around the corner and stopped at the rail of the birthing pen. This ewe was delivering well out of season, which was a good predictor of complications. Sheila was sitting against a post, doing a credible impersonation of someone awake. He could tell from the breathing that the other sleeper lay almost directly above him, up in the hayloft.
Cyrus turned his flashlight on, and Sheila woke up.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said.
The light roused the other animals—the horses, the Border collie in the box with her litter, the barn cats, and insects—and the wave of shifts and exhalations took some time to settle. Cyrus picked up a broom hanging on the post between two stalls.
“Anything gone bump in the night?” Cyrus said.
“Like how?” Sheila said.
Cyrus rammed the hayloft overhead with the broom handle, and for a few seconds there was total silence. The animals all held their breath. The rhythmic breathing also stopped up above, but there was no thud, or scrambling. That was impressive in a child. Someone historical, Cyrus thought, had said something about the rarity of courage at three o’clock in the morning.
“No,” his niece said, laughing. “Nothing like that.”
“On my way down here,” Cyrus said in a theatrically loud voice, for the benefit of the unseen presence in the hayloft, “Lila Hillsinger was outside, talking about going down to the Cottage to check on her kids. I told her you were here, so she might well stick her head in.”
Whoever it is up there, he thought, that piece of information should send them running back to bed.
3
The broom handle struck the hayloft floor six inches from the dreaming head of Catta Hillsinger, Jim and Lila Hillsinger’s younger son.
The barn had been dark when Catta climbed up the outside rope to the loft. Sheila had not used her flashlight at all, which made it impossible to see her through the small gap he had found in the loft floor. Instead, Catta had listened for her breathing. With all the other night sounds, it was hard to tell just which was hers and which were the horses’ or the pregnant ewe’s, but then when Sheila fell asleep it was easier to tell. It was so good, in fact, to lie there, breathing along with the sleeping Sheila, that Catta fell asleep, too.
Cyrus’s broom woke him suddenly and he froze, and then he heard Cyrus say that Mrs. Hillsinger—his mother—was headed down to the Cottage, where he and all the other children were meant to be in bed. When the boys played the Indian Game, they posted a lookout to watch for adults, and if any showed, the alarm was passed onward via repeated birdcalls. Catta had not heard those calls tonight, but as he walked back to the rope along the loft’s one firm, noncreaking floorboard, he figured it was possible he’d missed them from here inside the barn.
4
John Wilkie stood just down the slope from the Hill House, smoking a cigarette after dinner. The harbor lay beneath him, and the wind tonight was so mild that the water was entirely flat. He had hoped to see cormorants or loons tonight, but out on the water nothing moved. Wilkie tried to capture this particular stillness in his mind, almost as if he were painting it, as a counterweight to the unstillness of his everyday world, but it was impossible. There was too much to see and hear. The fireflies were out, and the night-sounds rose up and fell. He would never remember it all.
When Wilkie returned to the Hill House living room, Jim Hillsinger’s father asked him if he had seen anything interesting outside. The Old Man was not obviously playing a trick, and Wilkie, hoping to be bland but not stupid, said he was surprised not to see any birds. He did not mention owls for the simple reason that he had not seen any, or even thought of them. Wilkie also did not mention snow leopards, marzipan, a taxicab, or anything else from the world’s vast catalog of unseen things. Apparently, however, the idea that any birds at all were not present was anathema here—and his hosts began an argument that seemed to turn, obscurely, on a fantasia delivered by the Old Man on the theme of owls.
“There are in fact no owls on any part of the Seven archipelago,” the Old Man said, “and there never have been.”
“None that you’ve seen,” Jim Hillsinger said to his father.
“Not even owl feathers, Wilkie, have ever been found here,” the Old Man said.
“As far as you know,” Jim said.
“Cyrus confirms this.”
“He knows you want it to be true.”
“Wilkie, what I am telling you is not controversial.”
John Wilkie nodded and tried to catch Lila’s eye, but her back was turned.
“Nothing is controversial when you make it up,” Jim said.
The Old Man lifted his vacant martini to the light. “Where have all the olives gone?”
“The owls eat them,” Jim said.
“Owls have enormously sharp vision,” the Old Man continued, unperturbed. “Especially at night—for movement rather than detail—and as you would expect they instinctively prefer freshwater in motion, which means rivers or, in limited cases, strongly flowing springs. Here on Seven we have no rivers, only shallow creeks, and all of our known springs run underground to feed the ponds, which—and this may shock you—are in fact not stagnant, but rather circulate in geological time, so slowly as to be imperceptible from the air. So the owl in transit assumes all water here is inhospitable, and he moves on.”
“What we know for sure,” Jim Hillsinger said, “is that most owls are built for shorter flights than getting here from the mainland.”