We were somehow no longer walking the shore, but had entered a different space, a wood: I thought a Beech-wood, though the light was hardly sufficient to tell. As in all Beech forests, the understory was sparse, the ground bare except for Beech leaves. Silent.
Dar Oakley flew past overhead, black against the gray trees, and seeing him made me feel certain that we were growing closer to where we were destined to go. Then he pulled up, sank, and settled on the forest floor amid the leaves, waiting.
There’s no one, I said to him when I reached the place where he stood, stirring the leaves up in hope of nuts, perhaps. We haven’t seen anyone else. Where are they all?
He looked up and around as though he himself had not noticed that. What I had most feared: a blank place without light or movement, an eternity alone with my two unchanging fellows.
We’re not there yet, he said. It’s all farther in.
He didn’t seem as certain of this as he had before. He rose from the leaves, which flew away rustling from his wing beats, and took a low branch. He doesn’t much like looking upward at me: it’s an old instinct.
Let’s go on, he said.
I can’t say how long we wandered in search of where we were supposed to go or be, but I have one reason, now, to believe it was long and not short. Barbara, aware of (or merely remembering) how hard it was for her to walk, asked us often to stop so she could rest, and we did, but it didn’t seem that she was truly tired, and nor was I. Now and then from behind me I heard her whispering to the child, pausing as though to hear his answers. Times when we walked side by side I told her about Dar Oakley, stories I’d never dared tell her before: like Debra she dislikes Crows, she’d made that clear, and to tell her stories of him—stories I’d claim were his—would have seemed like cruel teasing, or mild madness.
Here, though, she listened; sometimes she laughed, a sound that seemed to displease the place and the trees.
I told her of Dar Oakley’s search for Nothing in the lands of her ancestors (if he had really been there, and they were hers). I told her how he’d crossed the sea with the Terns and she nodded, though she said she had never seen the sea except on TV. I told her how Dar Oakley had tried to bring back his dead mate from the Crow land of death, and she said she thought she’d heard a story like that before, but about a different creature. And all the time Dar Oakley went above and before us, or settled on the fruitless ground to peck, or walked with his Crow head bobbing with each step and pointing his eyes this way and that. Whether he heard or understood I don’t know. I think he had already begun to depart from us. Which seemed right, for he alone (so I thought) was still among the living.
However long it was, we came at length to a final place, for there is one; or there was one for us.
The forest itself hadn’t changed, had changed so little that we might well have been walking all along in great circles, and Dar Oakley couldn’t point us daywise or darkwise here. It had grown more . . . remote, though, and at the same time more familiar, as though we wandered at once from and toward a place we remembered. I don’t know how to say it better. The trees were fewer, stood farther apart, aged and failing. The grass was close-cropped, the tiny saplings nipped off in a way I recognized. Then for a moment a wind of some kind blew through the big trees and lifted their branches—in this place it was as though they gestured softly in many ways with a million palsied hands, and made the wind themselves by their waving.
Deer, Barbara said.
And there were Deer: many Deer, or one Deer repeated many times. They stood at varying distances from us. They weren’t different from the Deer in my backyard and in the field beyond, raising their heads one by one to regard us; great eyes at once mild and alert, musing whether to flee.
The ones we killed, Barbara said. She crossed herself. We shouldn’t of, she said.
I didn’t know whether she meant she and I—I haven’t killed a Deer ever—or we People, or her own kind back through centuries and centuries. The Deer didn’t seem reproachful to me. They looked on us with some intent or expectation, though. And—how was it? We’d turned no new way or taken a new path—there it was before us, the place or point we’d sought, not far off.
It was a door.
Not a space or opening on a path, or the entrance to a farther country; not a gateway, a door. As we came closer to it, it grew larger: a huge, obdurate double door, a portal of the made world, somehow Egyptian in its monumental plainness; tall and rooted in stonework at the base. There was no wall that it made a passage through; it stood all alone, the silent woods all around.
What door is it? Barbara asked.
Yours, I guess, Dar Oakley said.
It was ours. It was the way in, which we had brought forth by our coming to it. It was the door that Anna Kuhn went through as Dar Oakley watched, though this one was not hers. It was the deep well that the Singer and later the Brother had gone down into, the barrow that Fox Cap had sat on to tell her story. But though it was ours—though it was for us—I knew even before I went to it that I couldn’t open it. I went up the shallow steps, which strangely seemed worn away by the passage of feet over a great length of time. There was no handle, knob, or keyhole; the door could only be pushed open or shut. I put my hand on the door on the right side and pressed, and then on the left side, and I couldn’t feel the pressure of my hand on it. I turned away.
Dar Oakley flew to the lintel and settled there. He hopped from jamb to jamb along it, looking down, studying, pondering. For a moment he disappeared, dropping down beyond it, and then appeared again, walking around it. He hopped up the threshold and rapped on the door, rat-tat-tat. For a moment the door seemed to bridle, then became again what it was. Dar Oakley turned to us.
All around it, it’s all the same, he said.
Yes, I said. I thought it would be.
It was pointless to go around it. There was no way to the far land but through it. Barbara went to it and touched it too, and for a moment I hoped, and thought of how the door that Anna Kuhn had gone to had opened wider at her touch; but nothing happened. Barbara thumped the door with her fist. She turned away then and sat down on the wide steps of the sill, and put her elbow on her knee and her cheek in her hand. I thought of saying that if we waited long enough perhaps it would open for us, but I knew it wasn’t so, and it would be no help to say so. Hope had no place here: that’s well known.
We had been refused.
Was it us, something we had not done, some prayer left unsaid? Or was there no room for more, after so many deaths in Ymr, no more souls wanted? We couldn’t know. The dead themselves might no longer be there in that land, might have died a further death and were no more, and even if we had been allowed to enter it, we would have seen only barrenness and Deer.
Who shut this door? Barbara said. Was it them in there who shut it, or was it shut on them?
I didn’t know. I sat down there on the stair too, by the other doorpost. Perhaps the doors hadn’t been shut by those within but by those on this side of it: shut by the pressure of the generality of the living, who nowadays don’t imagine it’s possible to pass through such a door, or no longer need to claim the right of entrance. Alive or dead, you can’t go to heaven or the Isle of the Blessed or any other of the lands of the shades unless you believe that they await you, that the gates are open—or will open for you to pass through in your time.