The Everlasting by Tim Lebbon

was not a part of what he was doing. Down here there were only the empty rooms, and their familiar shadows, and those other things outside perhaps straining to get in even now.
    He stood at the bottom of the staircase for a long time, alternately breathing softly and holding hisbreath completely in an attempt to hear anything amiss. Other than the usual sounds of the night—the unknown ticks and creaks of the house, a breeze playing around the eaves—there was nothing.
    He wished he’d checked the time before leaving the bedroom. It suddenly seemed very important.
    â€œPapa, make me strong.” The blinds beside the front door felt heavy, sodden with darkness. Scott pulled them aside, and a face stared in at him.
    Somehow, he did not scream. He dropped the blinds and stepped back quickly, tripping over the bottom stair and falling onto his rump. Moaning softly, hands clasping his face as if to hold in his sanity, Scott stared at the blinds where they had fallen back into place.
    It had been a young boy. Something was wrong with his head, his skull, its shape all deformed.
    His face had almost been touching the glass. Almost.
    â€œPapa,” Scott whined. “Papa.”
    And then a memory, shocking in its suddenness and intensity, equally startling because of its brevity.
    Papa is swishing at a hedge with his walking stick. Scott has a stick as well, and he flicks the heads off stinging nettles as though it is a sword. It is a hot day, one of those long-ago summer days that seem to go on forever, still existing and continuing in some childish, forgotten corner of his mind. They have done more than is possible to fit in one day already, and lunchtime has only just passed. It’s a time full of potential.
    â€œSo how far
does
space go?” Scott asks again.
    Papa shrugs. “Who knows? No one’s ever been that far.”
    â€œBut somebody must have a clue. Scientists or something.”
    â€œThey say it’s forever.”
    Scott stands for a few seconds, frowning at the road but not really seeing it. “I don’t understand,” he says.
    â€œYou’re not meant to.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Papa is staring at him now, all levity exhaled with his last breath. “If we understand everything, what is there left to look for?”
    â€œPapa?” Scott is only eight years old. His grandfather is scaring him.
    Papa leans down toward his grandson. His face is stern; laughter lines are worry lines now, and his whole image has shifted. “Sometimes it’s sensible not to go looking for things you shouldn’t know.”
    Scott steps back, trips over his own heel, and falls onto his behind.
    Papa laughs. He waves his walking stick at the sky, leans back, and roars, and when he looks back down at Scott he has tears in his eyes. Scott smiles, then laughs as well.
    â€œBut that,” Papa says, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
    Later, Papa sits by a stream while Scott dams it, and when it’s time to go home Scott breaks the dam and they watch the water find its natural level once more.
    Scott sat on the bottom stair and stared at the blinds across the front door. “I can’t know you,” hesaid. “I can’t
see
you. You’re not to be seen or known. Fuck off.” He stood, stumbled into the living room, and picked up the single chair by the fire-place. It just fit through the doorway—he scraped his fingers but barely registered the pain—and he pushed it hard against the front door, wedging it beneath the handle.
    He went back to the living room and made sure all the curtains were fully drawn. He could look outside and see them again, he knew, but he had no desire to do that. Perhaps he was imagining things, or maybe he truly was seeing them. It was the latter that seemed more likely to him. He had always believed, because Papa had instilled that belief. He had always known that there was much more to things than he